In the living room, I found the TV flickering on mute, Vivaldi shimmering quietly on the stereo, and the scents of bacon and cinnamon curling from the table. Ben stood at the bank of windows, staring out toward the Charles River.
“Cranberry French toast or eggs Benedict,” he said. “If it’s the creamed chipped beef on a biscuit you were hoping for, we’ll have to reorder.”
“You’re kidding me.” I grimaced. “The Charles actually has shit on a shingle on its menu?”
He turned. “Even the army refrains from that unappetizing label when ladies are present.”
“Were you in the army?”
“Not exactly.”
I waited to see if he’d offer any other information. He didn’t. “In that case,” I said, “how about we split the eggs and the French toast?”
“Admirably diplomatic.” He slipped one of the eggs Benedict onto my plate. “I also had your luggage delivered.”
Sure enough, the small black wheelie bag Sir Henry had commissioned Mrs. Barnes to purchase and fill sat by the door. “You said I couldn’t go back.”
“You couldn’t. Doesn’t mean there aren’t others who couldn’t slip in and out, unseen.”
“You stole my luggage?” I asked, a forkful of eggs halfway to my mouth.
“I called in an old favor. We could send it back, if you don’t approve.”
“No,” I spluttered through a mouth full of hollandaise and eggs. “Clean clothes are an end whose means I’m willing to overlook.”
“Speaking of shady activities, we made the morning news. Not just the locals. The big boys: CNN. The Today show. Good Morning America.”
“They tell us anything new?”
“They haven’t even told us what we already know—apart from what was obvious to everyone in a nine-mile radius.” He looked at me quizzically. “You sure you want to keep this up? It’s hot and it’ll only get hotter.”
“Dangerous, you mean.”
“Sounds cooler if you say ‘hot.’” A smile flicked across his face. “Means pretty much the same thing.” He pushed his plate away. “It’s only a matter of time, Kate, before someone besides us connects the Harvard fire to the fire at the Globe, and when they do, every news outlet in the world will be on your tail, along with the cops from two countries.”
I carried my cup of coffee to the window. What I meant to do was clear, tail or no tail. To me, the more interesting question, shrouded with dubious answers, was why? Vengeance, the old king had cried in my dream. But vengeance for whom?
For Roz, of course. She was the king; I knew that the way you know, in dreams, that a total stranger is your mother or your lover or your best beloved dog from childhood. You just know, with the bedrock faith of a saint, or maybe a zealot. But it was my throat that had been cut. And in the library, it was my throat to which the killer had raised a very real blade.
I had no illusions about tracking the killer down to deliver rough justice by my own hand. Or even of delivering him to justice, in the form of the law. I meant, even so, to have revenge.
He was willing to burn and even to kill to keep whatever Roz had found from coming to light. I would just have to make sure that it did.
But vengeance was not the whole story. I took another sip of coffee, watching a seagull wheeling and diving over the river. That golden gift Roz had handed me might as well have been Pandora’s box. For Roz’s sake, it was true, I wanted revenge. For my own, I wanted something simpler and more selfish. I wanted to know. I wanted to know what she’d found.
To Ben, she’d chattered on about Beauty and Truth. To me, she’d said, If you open it, you must follow where it leads. I drank the last sip of coffee and turned. “I made a promise. You don’t have to come.”
“But I do.” He gave me a smile. “I also made a promise.”
We took turns at the shower. I had to admit, once again, that it was nice to pull on the clean clothes Mrs. Barnes had packed, though she’d filled the bag—no doubt at Sir Henry’s insistence—with things I would never have imagined myself wearing. I settled on a pair of beige Capri pants and a jaguar-print blouse, sleeveless, with a deep V-neck. Waiting for Ben, I transferred the brooch to a new lightweight blazer.
He emerged wearing an olive-green crew-neck shirt and khaki trousers.
“Ready?” I asked, stashing the book in my bag, along with some paper.
He strapped on a shoulder holster and slid his pistol into it, pulling a suede jacket over the whole contraption. “Ready.”
We went out the door and headed for Houghton.
13
WIDENER WAS STILL ringed by police and fire vehicles. People were craning over the barricades to see inside, but it was too murky to see much through the doors. Ben and I drifted through the crowd and around to the smaller, more graceful brick palace next door: the Houghton Library.
The only concession to Widener’s misfortune the night before was a doubling of the guard, from one to two. Nodding cheerfully, they looked up from their newspapers at the sound of our footsteps. One assigned me a locker, the other looked carefully through my bag. “Mind you don’t actually lock your locker,” said the first. “Not allowed, these days.”
In a cramped vestibule, I stowed away everything but a pad of yellow paper and the volume of Chambers. There was no way I was leaving that anywhere, especially an unlocked locker. With Ben, I crossed to colonial-blue doors at the end of the hall and rang the bell.
Two seconds later, we were buzzed inside.
The reading room was a grand airy rectangle, the walls slit by tall windows that let in the bright summer-blue of the sky. Ranks of vast polished tables strutted across the floor, supporting a small hunched company of scholars and their scattered papers. I crossed to an empty table and set down my paper. Ben took the seat beside me. At the next table over, a man whose face sagged in a basset-hound droop looked up with disappointment, as if we’d spoiled his view. Filling out my call slip—MS Am 1922. Francis J. Child. Correspondence—I handed it in to a dour man at the main desk, picked up a pencil, and sat back down to wait. In the past, this place had felt like a warm cocoon; now I felt exposed. For all I knew, the killer was already here in the room.
Ben got up and wandered the perimeter, glancing now and again at the reference books. Noticing, I thought, every detail about the room and the people it held. Looking for trouble, and no doubt for escape. I forced my thoughts back to my own problem. What was I looking for? What had Roz been doing, ferreting through Child’s stuff? Would I recognize my quarry when I saw it?
Ben disappeared into the bridge corridor that connected Houghton to Widener, its walls lined with the cabinets and computers that held Houghton’s catalogs, old and new. To my surprise, he came back out with a call slip of his own. Turning it in at the front desk, he sat down next to me.
Fifteen nerve-wracking minutes later, two librarians, silent and sober as the footmen of dead kings, wheeled out a cart stacked high with four large archival boxes and one flimsy pair of white cotton gloves. At the next table, Basset Hound sighed, as if all the weight of those unsearched boxes had been piled upon his chest. For a moment, I wondered if he could be spying. But that was ridiculous—no, paranoid: he’d been here first.
I pulled on the gloves, removed the top from the first box, and went to work.
The letters had all been cataloged and numbered, but in the matter of research, Roz believed in both thoroughness and serendipity. She had not deigned to provide any such precise directions as the number to whatever letter held her secret. The bulk of fine scholarship, she liked to say, moves at the slow and stately pace of a royal procession or the evolution of a new species, but I did not have the luxury of fine scholarship. Page by page, I skimmed as fast as I dared through the tangles and triumphs of another man’s life, aware with the flip of every page that I had no idea what I was looking for. If I went too fast, I could easily miss it.
None of the letters had been written by Child; they were all letters he’d re
ceived from colleagues and contributors to his tireless work as a collector of folk ballads: the poets Longfellow and Lowell, one of the brothers Grimm, the philosopher William James. Winding through these was an unending stream of cheerful chatter from his wife, Elizabeth. None of it was an obvious candidate for Roz’s Eureka!
At the next table, Basset Hound was stretching in a crackle of joints. On the wall beyond him, the clock had already spun through two hours. I bent back to my work.
Near the bottom of the third box, I was pressing through yet another forcefully merry record of Elizabeth’s summer in Maine with the children, when I came to a page that did not follow its predecessor.
The little ones toddled about, picking black-, finished one page. But when I turned to the next, it read, I have found something. Roz’s words.
I sat up and glanced over at Ben, but he was deep in what looked to be a small weather-beaten diary.
I laid the two pages side by side. The second page was not from Elizabeth Child. The spidery hand was peculiarly similar to hers, and so was the paper and faded blue ink. Similar enough to pass as part of the same missive, at least on a quick skim. But not on closer inspection.
I have found something I believe may be of interest to a scholar such as yourself, and since, as I firmly believe, all that’s gold does not always glitter, it may possibly even be of value.
I ran my tongue around dry lips, hearing Roz: I’ve found something. And I need your help. I looked back at the letter.
It is a manuscript. I believe it to be written in English—at least words here and there are certainly English, and the antique volume of Don Quixote into which I found it tucked is an English translation. But the writing—alas—is for the most part illegible, even where it is not blotted and lined out beyond decipherment. I have, however, worked out the title with what I believe to be reasonably fair accuracy—except for the first letter, I confess, which I have never before seen. A sort of spiral with a line through it, something like this—. I should have thought it Greek perhaps, except that the letters that follow are of our Roman alphabet.
–ardeno, I think. Or perhaps–ardonia?
I frowned. The odd letter wasn’t Greek, it was English: a capital C in the cramped Elizabethan cursive called Secretary Hand. Which made the title Cardeno or Cardonia.
I’d seen that word before, I was sure of it. Read it somewhere…. It was a name. But of what? A person, or a place? The more I pressed my memory, the deeper that vague shape sank into a soft gray fog of forgetting. Maybe the letter would explain it. I raced through to the end.
I have left it in a safe place. The very home where it has survived unseen and undisturbed, as I believe, since it first was lost, not long after its making. Here is my quandary. I should like to extract it and bring it to an expert for appraisal. I do not, however, know the name or whereabouts of any such authority at this rough edge of civilization. I am equally ignorant as to how to dislodge the thing from its present surroundings with the least risk of destroying it—It is fragile, and I fear that a hard journey by horseback and rail would be its utter undoing. Still more a sea voyage.
One of the boys here claims to have been—“once upon a time”—an ardent student of yours, and he tells me that you have an aspect, Sir, of wondrous wisdom, especially when bent upon conundrums of a literary nature. I would be forever grateful for any advice you may be able to dispense upon this matter. If, in addition, you would care to offer odds whether the bother would, in the end, stand a gambling man’s chance of paying off, I would be, as they say, “all ears.”
But perhaps you are not a gambling man.
As a token of my appreciation for the time I have already taken, I append a ballad. A New World rendition of an old Scottish tune, I believe. I had the devil of a time sorting through those that are popular here in the camps to come up with even one that would not make paper and ink blush, but I hope this will do the trick.
I have the honour, etc., of being Yours Truly, Jeremy Granville
The salutation and signature, all squeezed on one line at the bottom of the page, looked like just another line of text. I glanced at the next page.
-berries, scribbled Elizabeth. While I fretted, as you may well imagine, about bears!!!
No wonder Professor Child collected ballads. I turned back to Granville’s letter. Was this what Roz had found?
It had to be.
I sifted quickly through to the end of the box, but nothing else out of the ordinary popped up. Furthermore, the rest of Jeremy Granville’s letter was missing. I checked the catalog list and found no mention of its existence at all. The single page, it seemed, had slipped between the pages of Elizabeth’s letter by mistake, possibly in Professor Child’s own study. The cataloging librarian, at any rate, had not caught the error.
The lone page had no date, no clear mention of place—nothing but a signature and its location among Child’s papers to stitch it to its spot in history. Except the mention of an old edition of Don Quixote. With a jolt I remembered that I’d found a whole section of Don Quixote books on Roz’s shelves last night. But what did that prove? Being interested in Don Quixote was like being interested in The Iliad or War and Peace. It marked you as intellectual in your pleasures, but it wasn’t exactly unique.
The reference might be of some use for dating Granville’s find, though. Don Quixote had first appeared in Spanish at the beginning of the seventeenth century, right around the time of Queen Elizabeth’s death. Within a decade, it had been translated to English. So Granville’s “antique volume of Don Quixote”—and the hoard he’d found it in—couldn’t date earlier than that. At the other end, it couldn’t date later than Professor Child’s death—at the end of the nineteenth century, if I remembered it right. I groaned inwardly. Big help that was: Those two dates bookended a span of almost three hundred years.
I caught sight of Chambers’s volume, sitting demurely on the desk in front of me. At least the early part of that span was covered by Chambers, who wrote about a lot more than just plays. I slid the book toward me, opening it to the back, and sighed. No index. Then I remembered. The index for all four volumes was in the last one—and I’d left that on Roz’s shelf. I turned to the page Roz had marked and read it again.
Suddenly, the light from the lamps lengthened and leapt high as I realized the import of Granville’s words. I turned back to the letter. Maybe I’d dreamed it. No, it read exactly as I remembered.
As quickly as possible, I pulled over my yellow pad and began copying the letter, my hand flying over the page. Basset Hound looked up wistfully, as if jealous at the discovery of something worth copying. I could feel Ben’s interest burning on my skin, though he had not so much as moved. “…a sort of spiral with a line through it, something like this—. I should have thought it Greek…” I scribbled, adding a note of my own: “Not Greek. English. An Elizabethan capital C.”
I pushed the page across to Ben. He read it and looked up, bewildered. In answer, I pushed across the book, tapping on the key paragraph.
It was open to the same page I’d read last night, listing Shakespeare’s Jacobean magnum opuses one by one, each with its own descriptive paragraph. But at the bottom of the page was another section I’d always passed over before. I felt Ben’s intake of breath beside me as he came to it, and I saw it in my mind’s eye again, even as he sped through it.
“Lost Plays,” it read. Underneath it were two titles. The first was Love’s Labour’s Won. The second was The History of Cardenio.
He looked up quickly. “Lost?”
“We have their titles, and mentions of performances in court calendars. We know they once existed. But no one’s seen a shred of either story—not so much as two words strung together—for centuries.” My voice tightened. “Except Jeremy Granville.”
His eyes widened. “Where?”
I shook my head. The first page of the letter was missing. In what was left, he’d been noticeably sparse with identifying information. “I don??
?t know.”
But Roz had known, of that I was suddenly sure. “I’ve found something, sweetheart,” she’d said. “Something big.” Bigger than Hamlet at the Globe, she’d insisted, her green eyes gleaming. And I had scoffed at her in smug derision.
The door buzzed, and I jumped.
As it opened, a voice that I recognized twined through it with strange clarity.
DCI Sinclair.
INTERLUDE
Spring 1598
AT A DOORWAY hung with a tapestry at the top of a narrow secret stair, the woman stopped, smoothing the green silk gown that set off her dark hair and eyes so well. With one hand, she pulled the curtain back just enough to peer inside. Across the room, a young man knelt in fervent prayer before an altar, unaware of her presence.
She paused. Watching him had become a need, like watching fire. Golden hair like a halo floated above a body of feral grace. She shivered. She would have to stop calling him “the boy.” If he wasn’t yet fully a man, at least he was a youth. Will, she told herself firmly.
It had been her other lover who’d suggested that she call the youth by the name they shared.
“What then will I call you?” she’d asked.
“My other name,” he’d answered with a smile. “Shakespeare.” And then he’d suggested something else, which had made its way into poetry a little later. “Will” will fulfill the treasure of thy love, he’d written. Thou hast thy “Will,” and “Will” to boot, and “Will” in overplus.
It had been his idea, several months ago, for her to seduce the boy. He had begged her to. The request had taken her so aback that she’d sat in silence, letting the man pace before her, working himself up from asking to cajoling, peaking in a brief tirade of bullying before subsiding back down to pleading.