The Bookman's Tale (24 page)

B
y the time his son was born, Phillip Gardner had finally persuaded Isabel to be reasonable, though it had not been easy. The first several times he had visited her following the meeting at Fortnum’s, she had insisted that she did not want money from him but affection and a father for her child. He had explained that these were the only two things he could not provide. It was Miss Prickett, in the end, who helped Isabel to see the hopelessness of her situation, and for that Phillip had been grateful.

When the child was old enough to travel, it was decided that Isabel would return to America. The child would be presented as a foundling whom Isabel had discovered outside her art school and from whom no power of Miss Prickett could part her. Isabel conceded that her parents would willingly adopt the child and raise it as part of her family. In the meantime, Phillip would be available for whatever Isabel might need, within reason. He would arrange for a doctor, should that prove necessary, and he agreed to pay a small stipend not to Isabel, who would not accept it, but to Miss Prickett, who would use it to buy clothes and such for the baby.

Isabel could continue to contact him through Benjamin Mayhew, but Phillip had directed Mayhew not to forward messages to Kingham. Phillip could find an excuse to come up to London and check in with his bookseller at least once a week—for anything that required more expedient attention, Miss Prickett would have to do.

Since their conversation in Fortnum’s, Phillip and Isabel had continued to meet on a regular basis, though those meetings were entirely chaste. As Isabel reached the last months of her confinement, Phillip’s visits to her lodgings were generally limited to a short conversation with Miss Prickett confirming Isabel’s health. As for the needs of the flesh, Phillip had felt curiously uninterested in such activities since his discovery of Isabel’s condition. He avoided Covent Garden.

The child, known to his father only as Phillip, was born on a cold morning in late November. Miss Prickett dispatched a letter to Benjamin Mayhew at once, but Phillip had accompanied Mrs. Gardner on a trip to Yorkshire to visit her niece and did not arrive in London until just before Christmas. The first time he laid eyes on his only son, the boy was three weeks old. Isabel had expressed, in Phillip’s prolonged absence, an intense desire not to see her son’s father, so Miss Prickett carried the sleeping child into the sitting room, where she offered the bundle to Phillip.

“I think it’s best that you hold him, Miss Prickett,” Phillip had said. He was appalled at the thought that such a young child should be offered by its de facto nurse to what amounted to a total stranger.

“I suppose you’re right about that, Mr. Gardner.” She sat with the child in her arms for a few minutes, then returned to the nursery. In her absence, Phillip showed himself out.

Walking the cold and dim streets of London, up to Hyde Park where he had once strolled so innocently with Isabel under the summer sun, then on the long walk to Trafalgar Square and up Fleet Street to Benjamin Mayhew’s office, Phillip decided that he must not see his son again. He had barely glimpsed the boy’s face, but seeing the child, coming face-to-face with the reality of what had happened, had left him torn. This evidence of his sins engendered in Phillip the most horrific feeling of shame and disgust he had ever experienced. At the same time, he was overcome by the sense of connection he felt with that peaceful infant. This was his son, his rightful heir, whom he must never know. Phillip could not bear the thought of returning to the emotional blackness that lay in that narrow space between love and shame. In a few months Isabel and the boy would be gone forever. Until then, he would avoid London.

—

T
he wind blowing down from Churchill howled around the eaves of Evenlode House on a March afternoon, as the sun hung low in the pale blue Cotswold sky. Phillip did not envy the workmen who were laying stone high up on the top floor of the new west wing. Mrs. Gardner was once again in Yorkshire visiting her niece, who was not well. Phillip had stayed behind to supervise the work, though today it needed little supervising, and he had remained in his study all day, answering correspondence and reading. He had just put another log on the fire and had settled into his favorite chair when the housekeeper—she was new and Phillip
would
keep forgetting her name—appeared in the doorway, silent as a ghost.

“Yes, what is it?” said Phillip, not pleased at the disturbance.

“A young woman and her companion to see you,” she said. “Not knowing the young lady or your wishes, I asked she stay at the door. She’s got a . . . well, I was not sure you’d be wanting her in the parlor, sir.”

—

F
rom an upper window of Evenlode Manor, Reginald Alderson squinted into the eyepiece of a long brass telescope, trained on his neighbor’s front door a mile and a half away. It had proved useful to pay the stationmaster a few pounds to inform him whenever Mrs. Gardner left the village, but he did wish that she might have left sooner. Nonetheless, Reginald was a patient man. He had been patient all the days he had followed Phillip Gardner through the streets of London, and had been rewarded by seeing him speaking with a young American in the Royal Academy. He had been patient in following the girl and discovering her lodgings. He had been patient in waiting for the girl’s companion to take a day off—a day when he had placed himself next to Miss Prickett on the train to Brixton and had the first of several useful conversations.

“It’s quite a coincidence,” he had said, “that I travel to Brixton by this route every Thursday as well.”

He had been patient in waiting for Mrs. Gardner to take an extended journey without her husband, but once she had departed, the final phase of his plan had swung into action. Phillip Gardner had written Reginald a taunting letter two years ago, not long after he had married Mrs. Gardner, offering to purchase Reginald’s collection of historical documents. Thankfully, Reginald had saved this obscenity, and he had little trouble copying the script in writing the letter that now summoned Isabel, Miss Prickett, and the child to Evenlode House. When Gardner had turned them out, knowing as he must that Mrs. Gardner was due to return that evening, Reginald would conveniently meet them just outside the gate and offer his dear friend Miss Prickett and her young charges lodgings for the night. Once the trio were ensconced in Evenlode Manor, the rest would be easy.

E
arly in the fall of his senior year at Ridgefield, Peter was reading an assignment for his medieval history class in the Devereaux Room when Francis Leland dropped a dusty cardboard box on the table in front of him.

“How would you feel about getting some extra hours this year?” asked Francis.

“Are there any more hours in the day?” asked Peter. He was already spending most of his waking time either in class or in the library. Francis had him working fifteen hours a week in Special Collections, and he worked with Hank in Conservation when he could. His time had become more limited as he worked to fulfill his academic requirements. The dean had grown tired of Peter’s inventing classes—this semester he was taking a full load of courses in English, history, and economics.

“Well, there are six more boxes where this came from, and I think it’s time we got this stuff cataloged,” said Francis. “Given your . . . personal circumstances and your cataloging talents, you’re the perfect man for the job.”

“What is it?” Peter asked, his curiosity piqued.

“The personal letters and papers of Ms. Amanda Devereaux,” said Francis.

“Are you serious?” said Peter, lunging for the box. “Why didn’t you tell me about these before?”

“To be honest,” said Francis, “they’re not a high priority. Researchers are more interested in Ms. Devereaux’s collection than in the lady herself. But now that you’re marrying into the family, I thought you might like to learn about manuscript cataloging and Amanda Devereaux at the same time.”

“You bet I would,” said Peter, pulling open the box while his history text lay on the table, forgotten.

Over the next several months, Peter worked with the Devereaux papers, carefully sorting through correspondence with book collectors and dealers. Every day he told Amanda something new about her grandmother, and Amanda quietly indulged his passion, despite the fact that she could not keep straight the maze of collectors and dealers with whom her grandmother had interacted. On Saturdays, when he and Amanda spent the afternoon at the Ridgefields’ house, Peter would sit by the pool or in the sunroom regaling Sarah Ridgefield with tales of her mother’s collecting. Sarah showed a genuine interest in what Peter discovered.

“By the time I was old enough to understand what book collecting was, she had slowed down a bit,” said Sarah. “I remember that one trip to the auction house in New York, but other than that she didn’t share that part of her world with me.”

“But didn’t you ever look through the papers?” asked Peter.

“It wouldn’t have done any good without you to explain who Rosenbach was or Huntington or any of the others. You’re an excellent tour guide, Peter,” said Sarah, kissing him gently on the cheek.

“I was reading her correspondence with Henry Folger this morning,” said Peter.

“You mean the founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library?” asked Sarah.

“Exactly. Folger was
the
Shakespeare collector. They seemed to be pretty good friends. I guess Folger could be a nasty rival when it came to book collecting, but his letters to your mother are really kind.”

Amanda Devereaux, Peter discovered, never bid on a Shakespeare First Folio while Folger was alive—a courtesy to her friend who collected dozens of First Folios, by far the largest assemblage in the world. A letter to Amanda from Emily Jordan Folger, written two weeks after her husband’s death, read, in part, “He valued your friendship, and will no doubt rejoice in your finally acquiring a First Folio.” It was more than fifteen years later that Amanda bought the First Folio from which Peter had so often read.

“So many of the big collectors were kind to her,” said Peter, “and treated her like an equal—even though book collecting in those days was pretty much a boys’ club. Of course she couldn’t join the Grolier Club. She was pretty angry about that.”

“What’s the Grolier Club?” asked Amanda, who had just come into the room with a look on her face that told Peter she was determined not to let Sarah monopolize her fiancé’s conversation.

“It’s a club for book collectors in New York,” said Peter. “The oldest book-collecting club in America, and it was all boys until the nineteen seventies.”

“That must have pissed her off,” said Amanda, slipping onto the couch next to Peter.

“Amanda!” said Sarah. “Your language.” Peter had noticed that Amanda’s speech had become more colorful around her mother lately. When he’d asked her about it, she had shrugged and said she was only trying to see if her mother would notice, but Peter thought there was more to it than that. Since Amanda’s parents hadn’t been shocked by her choice of a socially unsuitable husband, she was determined to shock them some other way. Peter saw it as part of a plan Amanda seemed to have implemented since her illness to put herself into Peter’s world, rather than that of her parents, at every opportunity. He supposed that was what engagements were for—to allow the bride time to move from the world of her parents to the world of her groom—and, of course, Peter was not surprised that his friendship with Sarah Ridgefield, which threatened to make those two worlds one, still annoyed Amanda at times.

“Sorry, Mother,” she said, taking Peter’s hand and giving him a gentle squeeze. “Do go on, Peter.”

“Well, she was so pissed off about the Grolier Club,” said Peter, squeezing Amanda’s hand back to let her know where his ultimate loyalties lay, “that she became a founding member of the Hroswitha Club.”

“The what?” said Sarah.

“The Hroswitha Club,” said Peter. “It was a club for lady book collectors founded in nineteen forty-four.”

“Ladies?” said Amanda, with a hint of politically correct scorn in her voice.

“That’s what women called themselves in nineteen forty-four, dear,” said Sarah.

“They met at your mother’s apartment in New York one time,” Peter continued. “Apparently the Hroswitha Club was suitably impressed.”

“The ladies in my family have always known what to do in a roomful of rare books,” said Amanda, surreptitiously pinching Peter.

“Whatever can you mean by that, dear?” asked Sarah, but Peter was spared the embarrassment of Amanda’s answer by Charlie’s call to dinner.