The Bookman's Tale (17 page)

“You mean Graham?” said Peter.

“How did you know his name?” said Liz.

“Like I said, a lot has happened since Friday,” said Peter, smiling over the rim of his wineglass.

“There’s more than one Graham in Cornwall,” said Liz, returning Peter’s smile.

Graham’s manuscript may not be a big deal to the world at large, thought Peter,
but a book filled with Shakespearean marginalia would be front-page news. And if the book Liz was about to publish somehow threatened that news, it might be worth . . . well, making strange noises over
. “Look,” he said. “I’ll make a deal with you. If you’ll tell me how to find this Graham, I’ll go and check on him. I’ll ask him what I have to ask him, but I’ll also do my best to be sure he’s not in any danger. And I promise you, as soon as I think it’s safe, I’ll tell you about what I found. You’ll be the first to know, and I guarantee it’s a really good story.”

“You’ll go to Cornwall today?”

“My car’s at Heathrow—it’ll be evening by the time I get down there, but yes, I’ll leave as soon as we finish lunch.”

“And if you think he’s in danger, you’ll get him to come up to London?”

“Of course,” said Peter.

“It won’t be easy. He’s a stubborn son of a bitch.”

“Just tell me his surname and how to get there and leave the rest to me,” said Peter, confident that one look at the
Pandosto
together with hearing the account of Thomas Gardner’s temper would convince anyone to move someplace safer than rural Cornwall.

“After lunch,” said Liz, as the waiter set two bowls of pasta in front of them. “I’ll tell you after lunch.”

“Really?” said Peter, who had expected more resistance.

“Let’s get back to your other problem, shall we, Peter?” she said.

“My other problem?”

“You know, the fact that you . . . how did you put it, that you might like me.”

“Oh, that,” said Peter, twirling pasta on his fork as his appetite evaporated once more.

“You obviously haven’t gotten over Amanda.” Peter nodded his head. “And since this is a lunch between friends, you can talk to me about her. So tell me something about the late Mrs. Byerly.”

Peter saw Amanda standing across the restaurant smiling at him. She wore a full-length black dress with a tight-fitting sequined bodice. Peter had forgotten that dress. He supposed the Italian opera music playing in the background must have resurrected it. “Tell her about the opera,” Amanda mouthed to him, before fading away.

“I’d never been to the theater before I met Amanda,” Peter began, still looking over Liz’s shoulder at the spot where Amanda had appeared. “My junior year she took me to a student production of
The Mikado
—she loved her Victorians. And it was fun. About halfway through the second act, I actually noticed I was having a good time, which is unusual for me in a roomful of people. So we started going to the theater. First it was just student shows at Ridgefield, then once in a while a trip into Raleigh to see a professional touring production. I remember our first Shakespeare. I was already infatuated with the plays, but I’d never seen one on the stage. It was
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. I’d never laughed so hard in my life. It just put me in even greater awe of Shakespeare that he could write jokes that would make me laugh four hundred years later.

“Anyway, we were planning a summer visit to London about three years after we were married, and Amanda read that the English National Opera was performing
The Marriage of Figaro
. Now Amanda had always loved Mozart and
Figaro
, but she’d never been to the opera. When she found out that they were doing her favorite opera in London, she called up and got tickets, and then she went to her mom’s and borrowed her grandmother’s old records of
Figaro
with the libretto, which she must have listened to every night for a month. She wanted to learn all the Italian, she said, so she could enjoy the performance the way the composer intended.

“So we get to London, and Amanda can’t wait to go to the opera. She’s bought this beautiful full-length gown and she’s rented me a white-tie outfit. We’re way overdressed, but Amanda doesn’t care. We’re sitting in a box and she’s so excited and the lights go down and the overture plays and Amanda is gripping my hand with anticipation. Then the curtain opens and there they are—Figaro and Suzanna—and Figaro is measuring the room for his marriage bed and he sings. ‘Five, ten, twenty, thirty . . .’

“Well, Amanda’s hand just goes slack. I glance over and there’s this look of horror on her face. She’s been learning Italian for the past month and they’re singing the opera in English. Now I’m trying hard not to laugh because I love her so much, but there’s also something genuinely hilarious about this moment. And then I start to watch the opera—which I have to say I was more or less dragged to. And I can understand what’s going on because it’s in English. And I start to get into it and pretty soon I’m laughing at the jokes and having a really good time.

“When it’s over, before I even know it I’m on my feet clapping, and I feel Amanda sort of reluctantly standing up giving a perfunctory ovation, but I just can’t help myself. I shout ‘Bravo’ with everybody else and I’m feeling great in my white tie—like I was born to be a gentleman in an opera box. When the curtain calls are over, I look and Amanda is sitting down again and she’s crying. So I sit down and take her hand, and I tell her I’m so sorry they ruined her favorite opera and maybe we can go to Milan sometime and see a proper production. And she looks at me and she says—and I’ll never forget this—she says, ‘It’s not that at all. I’m just so happy that you had a good time.’ She had spent hundreds of hours getting ready for this night and from her point of view Mozart had been butchered, but what she felt when it was all over was happiness that her reluctant husband had actually enjoyed himself. That’s love.” Peter swept away a tear with the back of his hand as he looked at Amanda’s glistening cheeks across the room. As she faded away again, he realized he had never told anyone that story—not even Dr. Strayer.

“God dammit,” said Liz, yanking Peter back to the present. “You made me cry. That wasn’t supposed to happen.” She wiped her eyes with her napkin. “It must be hard without her,” she said.

“Yes,” said Peter. “It is.” It felt good to admit—not to pretend that everything was okay. He reached across the table and grasped Liz’s hand. “Thanks for listening,” he said.

Peter’s pasta remained uneaten in his bowl when he signaled for the bill. Liz wrote out elaborate directions and drew a map to help him navigate his way to the home of Graham Sykes on the fringes of Bodmin Moor.

As they walked toward Russell Square, Peter suddenly remembered that in his haste to leave the British Museum, he had forgotten to look up William H. Smith.

“Do you know anything about W. H. Smith?” he asked Liz.

“Well, they don’t carry the sort of books we publish, I know that much,” said Liz.

It took Peter a moment to realize that she was talking about the chain of newsagents. Funny that he should have posed the question that way instead of saying William H. Smith.

“Actually I was talking about a person,” said Peter. “William H. Smith. I think he may have been a Victorian.”

“The monarch of the sea,” said Liz.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I think his father started the family business—selling newspapers in train stations. But it was the son who made W H Smith a household name. He was a member of Parliament and became First Lord of the Admiralty, I think under Disraeli. I guess he was generally seen as a wealthy landlubber who didn’t deserve the appointment, so Gilbert and Sullivan made him into Sir Joseph Porter in
H.M.S. Pinafore
. You know, ‘I am the monarch of the sea, the ruler of the Queen’s Navee,’” Liz sang. “We had a talk about him at the Victorian Theatre Society a few months ago.”

“How many societies do you belong to?” said Peter.

“Several,” said Liz, laughing.

“I wonder if it’s the same William H. Smith. The one I’m looking for was probably interested in Shakespeare.”

“I’ll ask Lawrence for you,” said Liz. “Lawrence Smith—he’s the one who gave the talk. I think he’s a great-nephew or something.” They were now standing outside the Russell Square tube station, and Liz went over the directions to Graham Sykes’s house once more.

“He’s a night owl,” she told Peter, “so go see him when you arrive no matter how late it is.”

“I will,” said Peter. Without realizing it had happened or knowing who had initiated it, he found himself in a hug with Liz.

“And call me,” she whispered in his ear. Then she turned and disappeared around the corner, leaving Peter to descend into the windy depths of the tube alone.

I
n a sumptuously appointed office above his retail premises just around the corner from St. Paul’s, Benjamin Mayhew sat at a wide desk composing correspondence. He had expected a visit from Phillip Gardner, his most profitable client, but one o’clock had come and gone and there had been no sign of the collector. Perhaps, thought Benjamin, his train had been delayed.

Benjamin had worked in the book business for over twenty years now, and had built a wealthy clientele who made him a very good living. He well remembered his first encounter with his favorite client, William Henry Smith—the businessman who now served as secretary to the treasury under Benjamin Disraeli. Smith had indeed been intrigued by the book on Ireland’s Shakespeare forgeries and had, over the years, been a steady customer. Though he was by no means a collector, Smith was an intelligent and ambitious man with a level of intellectual curiosity that made good books an essential part of his life. He had become more than a client to Benjamin; he had become a friend and a man for whom the bookseller bore the utmost respect. Benjamin had provided several volumes of source material for Smith’s 1857 book,
Bacon and Shakespeare
, an expansion of the ideas set forth in the pamphlet that Benjamin had read all those years ago on the train to Oxford. Benjamin had a copy of this book, presented to him by the author, on an honored shelf in his office. The two men had enjoyed a good laugh together when, at Smith’s club, the author had read aloud the second chapter of the book, titled “A Brief History of Shakespeare.”

William Shakespeare’s is indeed a negative history.

Of his life, all that we positively know is the period of his death.

We do not know when he was born, nor when, nor where, he was educated.

We do not know when, or where, he was married, nor when he came to London.

We do not know when, where, or in what order, his plays were written or performed; nor when he left London.

He died April 23rd, 1616.

“Is that the whole chapter?” Benjamin had asked, laughing.

“Well,” said Smith, “It’s all we know for sure, so it’s all I need say.”

—

P
hillip Gardner had first approached Benjamin several months earlier because of his neighbor. “I should like to begin collecting historical documents,” he had told Benjamin on the floor of his shop.

“What sort of documents?” asked Benjamin.

“Any that might be of interest to Mr. Reginald Alderson,” said Gardner.

Thus Phillip Gardner became the best sort of client—one motivated not by intellectual curiosity or literary passion but by hatred. Reginald Alderson was a passionate collector of historical documents, Phillip Gardner was bound by birth to hate Reginald Alderson, therefore Phillip would use his wife’s money to pay any price to outbid Alderson at auction and go to any lengths to outfox him in other means of acquisition. All this he told Benjamin at their first meeting. Since then, Benjamin had been Phillip Gardner’s primary supplier of material. Gardner paid his bills promptly and had no objections to providing Benjamin with a substantial premium on items bought from under the nose of his rival.

That afternoon Benjamin would make just such a purchase in the salesrooms of Sotheby’s—a manuscript stanza of poetry by the Elizabethan writer Robert Greene. Benjamin knew, from his informant at Sotheby’s, that Alderson had registered as a bidder for the sale, and the only item on the block that could possibly interest him was the Greene poem. Benjamin had expected to dine in the city with Phillip Gardner and then make their usual jaunt to the sales-room where they would publicly humiliate Reginald Alderson as they had done so many times before. Benjamin sometimes wondered why Alderson kept showing up rather than bidding through an agent, for the results were always the same. As the bidding went up, Phillip Gardner nodded to Benjamin; Benjamin nodded to the auctioneer; eventually the lot was hammered down to Phillip; and Reginald Alderson stormed from the room, to the suppressed snickers of those regulars who knew what was happening.

Usually Gardner took Benjamin to his club following an auction, but when the time came for Benjamin to leave for Sotheby’s and his client had still not arrived, he resigned himself to the fact that today he would celebrate his victory in solitude. No matter—the Greene fragment would fetch a high price, especially with Reginald Alderson driving up the bidding, and a high price meant a high commission. Benjamin was perfectly happy to be friends with Phillip Gardner, but what he liked most about the man was his wife’s money.