What Time Devours (11 page)

“That it has been or could be?”

“Either.”

“It’s possible,” she said.

“But do we even know it existed?”

“Debatable,” she said, shedding her playfulness and turning professorial. “But almost certainly, yes.”

“But it wasn’t one of the plays published in the 1623 folio.”

The First Folio was the first “collected” Shakespeare, compiled seven years after his death by members of the theater company for whom Shakespeare had worked. It contained thirty-six plays, half of which had not appeared in print before.

“No, it wasn’t in the Folio,” said McBride. “But then neither was
Pericles
, even though it had been published in quarto several times by then.”

Quartos were small, cheap single-play editions.

“And it wasn’t published in quarto either, right?” said Thomas.

“Well there’s the rub,” she said. “You’ve heard of Francis Meres?”

Thomas was about to say that he had never heard of him and then something came to him, something he remembered.

“A list,” he said. “He wrote a list of which playwrights were famous and what for, right?” said Thomas.

“Meres wrote a book called
Palladis Tamia,
or
Wits Treasury
, in 1598,” said the Shakespearean. “A tedious ramble through Meres’s views on art, poetry, and pretty much everything else. 1598 was the midpoint of Shakespeare’s career, pretty much. Meres lists six of his comedies, thereby providing good evidence for their dates of composition. They are
The Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Love’s Labour’s Lost
, and . . .”

“
Love’s Labour’s Won
,” Thomas completed for her, propping himself on his left elbow and wincing as he did so. “But . . . some of the plays have alternate titles, right? Like
Twelfth Night
, which is also called
What You Will
. So isn’t it possible that Meres was just using a different name for one of the other plays that Shakespeare had written by 1598 but that isn’t on the list? A play we already know?”

“Like
The Taming of the Shrew
?” she said. “A nasty, masculinist assumption, Mr. Knight. You surprise me.”

“What do you mean?”

“
Shrew
should be on the list. It was definitely written by 1598, but Meres doesn’t mention it. Some people think
Shrew
is
Love’s Labour’s Won
.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
is about men being deprived of their romantic conquests by death and politics.
The Taming of the Shrew
is about beating your wife into submission . . .”

“Well, I’m not sure I’d agree . . .”

“From a certain perspective,” she inserted, amused, “it’s about winning a woman by breaking her spirit. If that’s
Love’s Labour’s Won,
then we’re all in trouble. Anyway, your scholarship is out of date, Mr. Knight.”

Thomas, who wasn’t aware that anything he’d said so far could be called
scholarship
of any period, listened.

“In 1953, a fragment of manuscript was found inside the binding of a book. Turns out to be part of an inventory from a stationer’s shop in Exeter. It listed what they were selling between the ninth and the seventeenth of August 1603. It included both
The Taming of a Shrew
and
Love’s Labour’s Won
. You can quibble over the
A Shrew/ The Shrew
discrepancy, if you like, but I think it pretty clear that
Love’s Labour’s Won
was a different play. And—more to the point—Mr. Knight, it was published.”

“Then how could it get lost?”

“There are probably others,” she said. “
Two Noble Kins-men
was also left out of the first folio. By then, Shakespeare was dead and the Globe had burned down. Who knows how many other manuscripts were lost?”

“But you aren’t talking about a handwritten manuscript,” Thomas insisted. “You are talking about a play that was published in quarto, which means there must have been hundreds floating around. How could it get lost?”

“You know how many extant copies of the first quarto of
Titus Andronicus
there are?” said McBride. “One. Plays were penny-a-piece throwaways. They weren’t high art, they weren’t even poetry. We know that there’s at least one other play Shakespeare wrote—
Cardenio
—that we don’t have, though a manuscript might have survived till 1808 when the Covent Garden Theatre library burned.

“In the early seventeenth century Shakespeare wasn’t the literary icon he is today. He was just a writer, a populist writer at that, who wrote entertainments for the stage. He was good at it and made a ton of money doing it, but the finest writer the world has ever seen, an artist whose every scribbling should be preserved like a sacred relic? Hardly.”

“Then how could it have survived at all?” said Thomas, switching tack.

“There, Mr. Knight,” she said, and the flirtation was back so that he thought she might be reclining, chocolate martini in hand, “you have me.”

CHAPTER 20

Thomas spent two more days in his hospital bed, flipping through TV channels and periodically screaming at the stupidity of what he saw there till the pain in his shoulder made him sit back and shut up, and then he announced he was going home. The presiding physician, a hawkish, middle-aged man with keen eyes and a nasal voice, said he’d rather keep him in for a couple more days, but that going home now wouldn’t kill him.

“Good enough,” said Thomas. “There’s only so much daytime TV a man can take.”

“You could read a book,” said the doctor. “People still do.”

“My hordes of friends and well-wishers forgot to bring me one,” said Thomas.

Other than the police he had had only one visitor, Peter the Principal from school, who had poked his head around the door looking embarrassed behind flowers and a large card signed by the kids. Thomas didn’t have a lot of friends, but considering where he had been a little over a year ago, the drink, the loss of his job, and other, darker moments, he thought he was doing pretty well. He read through the names scribbled on the card and grinned.

He had called Kumi to say hello the previous day and had, somehow, and for reasons he couldn’t clearly identify, said nothing about what had happened.

Don’t want to worry her
, he decided.

He had made the
Chicago Tribune
again—inevitable given his past notoriety—but she wouldn’t see that, and no one else had thought to call her. So far as the police knew, he was still separated and had no next of kin.

On the phone, Kumi had talked about her ongoing struggle not to be overly aggressive in her karate class and the need for similar restraint at work.

“I feel like I’m stuck in the middle somehow,” she said. “Of everything. Not Japanese, but not quite American either. People don’t quite know what to do with me. And I’m still tiptoeing around cultural protocols I don’t completely get. Sometimes it feels like I’m trying to do my job in a space suit, or one of those diving helmets, which would be okay if the job had anything to do with space. Or diving. I’m getting better at it, but I’ll never truly belong.”

He smiled. It helped to hear her voice.

“So come home,” he said. “Take a vacation. Apply for a stateside position.”

“Let me master my sushi first,” she said, referring to her cooking class. “I’m still too scared of preparing raw fish for anyone other than me. Let me get some
maguro maki
under my belt and then we’ll see.”

“Soon, I hope,” he said. He put his left hand to his right shoulder and rubbed at the ache that wouldn’t go away.

Why aren’t you telling her?
he wondered
. Why not just say it: Listen, Kumi, sorry about the sushi and all but I got shot . . .

But he didn’t. He didn’t lie, but he dodged, and afterward he asked himself again. Why hadn’t he told her?

Because,
he decided
, if you told her and she didn’t come, then that would mean she wasn’t ready to throw out her job—however much she complains about it—to be with you, that she doesn’t love you enough . . .

Sometimes a little uncertainty was preferable to knowing for sure.

He thought of Julia McBride, the attractive Shakespearean who was also on the list of people he had not told about the shooting. He had not told her either, but he was aware that he hadn’t, and that bothered him.

Careful there, Thomas
, he reminded himself.

When he had been shot he’d been wearing a bathrobe that they had cut away to get at his wound, so he had nothing of his own but a pair of shorts the hospital had given him. He had asked Peter the Principal to bring him some jeans and a shirt from home, a request his boss seemed to find mortifying and baffling. Peter had shown up the following day with some clothes Thomas hadn’t worn for years, which he must have gotten from the very back of his closet. Thomas concealed his exasperation and thanked him, but protested when the principal concurred with the police.

“No, Thomas,” he said, patting his blanketed legs awkwardly. “We have all your classes covered. Rest up. Enjoy the summer.”

After days in bed, Thomas fumed at the prospect of nothing to do even after he got out of the hospital, but for ten minutes after Peter left, he lay where he was, eyeing the ill-fitting clothes draped over the end of the bed. He snapped on the TV to distract himself and scrolled around till he found a
West Wing
rerun. He was watching it, still thinking vaguely about getting up, when the door opened again and a woman walked in. She was dressed in a businesslike gray pantsuit and her hair was quite unlike the way it had been when he saw her last, but there was no mistaking that unself-conscious giraffe gait. She strode in and put her hands on her hips, looming over him and staring like he’d just cut her off in traffic.

“You’re just never happy unless you’re getting shot at, are you?” said Deborah Miller.

CHAPTER 21

“Hello, Deborah,” said Thomas. “What are you doing here?”

“In town for a meeting,” she said. “Thought I’d look you up. Say hi, you know? Thought we might have a beer and reminisce about past near-death experiences. But you just keep right on having them, don’t you? The school said you were here.”

“They were right.”

“If you were anyone else,” she said, still scowling, “I’d assume you were involved in a mugging or were a bystander at some drive-by, but since it’s you, I figure you’ve been sticking your nose where it isn’t wanted.”

He told her everything, partly because she was just the kind of person who didn’t take evasion politely, and partly because their relationship—such as it was—had always been surrounded by intrigue, conspiracy, and men who wanted them dead. He hadn’t spoken to her for six months, but it felt like they were picking up where they left off.

Deborah was a museum curator in Atlanta. Thomas had met her briefly in Italy, and they had been thrown together when their shared interest in archaeology had put them at the center of a particularly unpleasant murder case, a case tied to the death of Thomas’s brother and to bigger, stranger things. After she had returned to the States, she had pressed her connections at the FBI in ways that had, he was sure, saved his life.

“A lost Shakespeare play, huh?” she said. “That’s why you’re full of holes?”

She had settled into the one armchair, her legs stretched out straight in front of her and crossed at the ankles. She seemed to fill the room, and made the chair look like it was made for a child.

Thomas nodded.

“One hole,” he said. “One bullet.”

“Because someone wants the play,” she said, not even dignifying his remark with a nod, “or because they want to keep it secret?”

He shrugged.

“Maybe it contains Secret Knowledge about the Author,” she said, grinning. “I think I read a book like that in college. It was about whether Shakespeare really wrote all those plays or whether it was someone else. The authorship question, they call it, right?”

“Right,” said Thomas. He remembered it only dimly, but he had never met an academic who took the issue seriously, so he had never given it much thought.

“I took it to my English professor,” she said, smiling at her own naïveté. “I think I was showing off a bit, trying to engage him in a discussion about Serious Things. He was pretty cute.”

“And what did he say?”

“Let’s just say that it did nothing for my credibility as a student. And I am now as sure as I can be that the plays of Shakespeare were written by a guy from Stratford called Shakespeare. Imagine that.”

Thomas laughed.

On the TV Martin Sheen as President Bartlett was holding a press conference.

“This is a good episode,” said Deborah, nodding toward it.

“Always nice to find something literate on the idiot’s lantern,” Thomas agreed.

“I think that guys who can’t go a full year without getting shot at should be cautious with words like
idiot
.”

“Maybe so,” said Thomas. “So what’s this meeting you’re here for?”

“What are meetings always for?” she replied. “Money. The economy is faltering and when money’s tight, all those high cultural bits and pieces that people think of as luxuries take it in the teeth. The museum, like every other museum in the country, is struggling, and we’re forming a sort of consortium with a couple of others to share resources. The main one is the Archaeological Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, but we’re meeting here to discuss logistics and initiatives. Neutral ground.”

“Not at the Drake?”

“The Drake?”

“It’s a hotel.”

“Oh,” she said. “No. Nothing so grand. Back to Atlanta tomorrow, then frantic preparation for a trip to Mexico.”

“Nice.”

“Should be,” she agreed, “but it’s work. Fieldwork though—actual digging—not meetings with suits who want to
optimize earnings
by filling my museum with electronic dinosaurs.”