But the fact that he’d written to Professor Child pushed against that assumption. If Granville had been in England, or anywhere in Europe for that matter, it would not only have been easier and quicker to contact a British professor, but also downright unnatural to skim a letter clear across the pond, to Child. Especially if Granville himself were British. He must have done his finding in this hemisphere.
I racked my brains. There had to be other clues lurking in that letter. But they would be softer, more indirect. I’d only read the damn thing through twice, and quickly at that. More like skimming.
I needed that letter. Where was Ben?
At the far end of the Shakespeare shelf, I stopped. Under my hand, a large paperback sagged under its own weight. A facsimile of the First Folio. The same edition I’d found in Roz’s office—and which had then gone missing. As the Widener and Globe copies were missing.
I eased it out and flipped through the pages; every margin was clean.
“Back to the Jacobean magnum opus?”
I whirled. Ben stood before me, grinning like the goddamn Cheshire cat, the volume of Chambers and my pad of yellow paper in his hand.
“The letter,” I said. “Do you have it?”
He handed me the yellow pad. I looked down.
It was blank.
15
I GLANCED BACK up, frustration swelling into anger. “You said—”
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” He reached over and riffled through the pages, and a piece of paper floated free. I grabbed at it.
The page was white, not yellow, with spidery writing in faded blue ink. I blinked, processing this in slow motion. “But this is the original.”
He grinned. “I borrowed it.”
“Are you crazy?” I said in a shrill whisper. “Houghton’s not a lending library.” Harvard was strict about its libraries. One night a decade or so before the Revolutionary War, when the college still possessed only one library and strictly forbade any borrowing at all, an ember breaking from an untrimmed wick, or maybe sparks from coals collapsing in a grate—nobody knew for sure—had fallen on a stray paper, or a curtain, or a carpet, setting it alight. What they did know was that the screaming winds of a nor’easter soon whipped that small flame into a mighty conflagration that raged unchecked through the library until the storm blew itself out and, as a parting gift, dumped enough wet snow on the fire to drown it.
In the blue light of an icy morning, the Reverend Edward Holyoke, president of the college, stood in his greatcoat, hands behind his back, pondering the calamity with the patience of Job: The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. As legend had it, an undergraduate had sloshed forward through melting snow, gray with ash, to cheer up the old man by returning a book he had smuggled from the library the night before, for a bit of last-minute cramming. By a stroke of harsh luck, it was now the only volume remaining of all those John Harvard had bestowed upon the college, along with his name, a century or so before.
Under no obligation to extend to undergraduates the same patience he afforded fires from heaven, President Holyoke had accepted the book, thanked the young man, and promptly expelled him for theft.
“You want me to take it back?” asked Ben.
Glaring at him, I plucked the letter from his hand, huddling over the copperplate script as I skimmed through it again. Phrases flared out as I read, as if traced in fire. New World rendition… yes, I was right. North America. Probably the States. This rough edge of civilization… Out West, I thought, and bit my lip. That didn’t help much: the American West was a big place.
Combed for clues, Granville’s prose proved deliberately coy, even obfuscating. Still, if Roz could work her way through this puzzle, so could I.
One of the boys. Gambling man. Here in the camps. If he’d been a cowboy, wouldn’t he have written “on the range” or “out on the trail,” or “in the bunkhouse,” or some such phrase? Not “here in the camps.”
What camps? Army camps sprang to mind, but a glance at Granville’s signature indicated no rank. Nor had he mentioned officers, orders, weapons, enemies, or fighting. It did not read like a military letter.
Camps. I closed my eyes and saw a tent city among aspens. Picks and shovels. Pits and shafts. Mines. I opened my eyes. “He was out West,” I said. “In the mining camps.”
But which camps? The early gold rushes, or the later silver booms? California? Colorado? Arizona? Alaska? I reached for the letter. There it was, right at the top. All that’s gold does not always glitter, Granville had written. “Gold,” I said, pointing out the phrase.
“You think he was a gold miner?”
“I think he was looking for gold, but he found something else. That phrase is an offhand inversion of the proverb ‘All that glitters is not gold,’ which shows up at the heart of The Merchant of Venice. Tossed out casually, maybe even unconsciously. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that Granville was a miner, and he knew his Shakespeare.”
“Are you sure?” Ben asked. “Seems like pretty highfalutin prose for an old prospector.”
“They weren’t all illiterate hicks,” I retorted. “One of his fellows seems to have been a Harvard graduate. Or at least a student of Child’s. Granville might not have been far behind. And even if he was illiterate, it wouldn’t have mattered much. Shakespeare was popular in the old West, the way movies are now—a language everyone shared. Kind of like ‘Go ahead. Make my day.’ Except that mountain men could spout Romeo and Juliet or Julius Caesar, whole, over campfires. Cowboys taught themselves to read by inching their way through the collected works. And the greatest actors of the day would take ship around the Horn to California and jolt up into the mountains in wagons to play Hamlet in the forty-niner camps, where the miners tossed nuggets and bags of gold dust onto the stages. A good actor could make in a month ten times what he earned in a whole season in New York or London—”
“Fine, Professor—” began Ben.
“Don’t—”
“If you don’t want the nickname, don’t live up to it. Could I just point out that knowing your Shakespeare doesn’t make you write like him?” Taking the letter back, he scanned down through it. “‘You have an aspect, Sir, of wondrous wisdom….’ You really think some old forty-niner wrote that?”
“What makes you think he was old?” I demanded. “Other than the Hollywood stereotype of a grizzled geezer with a limp?” The more I thought about it, the more certain I was about the mining. “Besides, do you have any better suggestions?”
“I just don’t see where this takes us.”
“It takes us to Utah,” I said.
“Utah? Not the first place you think of when you think Shakespeare. Or gold either.”
“You haven’t been to the Utah Shakespearean Festival.” I ran my fingers along the shelf. “You think the Globe looks surreal in London, wait till you see it in Cedar City, in red rock country.”
“You’re joking.”
I shook my head.
“You think he played there?”
“The theater wasn’t built till the 1970s. And like I told you, I think Granville was prospecting for gold. What I want is next door: the Utah Shakespeare Archive.”
Archive was a misnomer. It was more like a clearinghouse, a database in the old-fashioned way, cards that cross-referenced every known name, performance, place, person, and event that had ever had anything to do with Shakespeare west of the Mississippi. It did have a good collection of smaller items, but westerners had loved Shakespeare on a scale to suit the vast wilderness they’d thought it their duty to conquer. As a result, many of his namesakes—mines, towns, reservoirs, even rivers and mountains—weren’t exactly collectible. What the archive couldn’t collect or copy, it mapped.
“Roz’s favorite private research collection in North America.” I bent to scan through the Shakespeare criticism on the lower shelves. Finding the one I wanted, I pulled it out and set it in Ben’s hands. The cover showed a hand-t
inted photograph of an actor in doublet and cowboy hat, holding a skull in the classic Hamlet pose, inset as a cameo atop a modern photograph of Big Sky country. The Wild Shakespearean West, it was titled. By Rosalind Howard.
“Her latest—her last book,” I said. “She researched it there. I was her assistant, at least at first. Before we parted ways.”
For one glorious summer, I’d driven miles across prairies, up mountains, and through canyons for her, scouting out promising stories and long-forgotten performances. It had changed my life, that summer, though not in any way Roz had intended. Standing on the dusty stage of a faded gilt-and-scarlet theater in Leadville, Colorado—a once rowdy silver boomtown now much shrunken and tamed—I’d spoken Juliet’s words, whispered, at first, and then growing stronger, until they echoed in the darkness around me. In a sudden flare of enlightenment, I’d realized how different Shakespeare was onstage from Shakespeare pinned to the page. It was the difference between hot experience and sweet, lingering memory, between protean life and hallowed death.
That fall, when students from my sections of Roz’s big Shakespeare lecture course had asked me to help out with a production of Romeo and Juliet, I’d jumped at the chance. In the spring, I’d agreed to direct them in Twelfth Night.
I had never looked back.
Still, in some ways that summer shone in memory like Eden before the fall. “I need your help,” Roz had said two days ago, at the Globe. Then, it had been for what I knew. But four years earlier, she’d said the same thing, and that time it had been for who I was. Her quick, clipped New England style wasn’t doing her any favors among ranchers and small-town folk in the West. If I wasn’t quite one of them, at least I knew the basics of ranch etiquette. I was comfortable kicking back and having a beer or a glass of milk and some cake before pressing questions and asking for favors. And I wasn’t afraid to get my hands dirty. If someone needed a hand moving cattle from one watering tank to another, I could sit a horse well enough to help out. As a result, I could get people to open up who’d eyed Roz with silent suspicion.
So I’d become her eyes and ears in the field, heading out across the wide landscape in all directions, checking out leads. Meanwhile, Roz had used the archive as a command center, parking herself among its neatly alphabetized and categorized lists, devouring all the information I sent back. It was a division of labor that had suited us both. The ponderer and the wanderer, we’d joked.
Aloud I said, “If Roz suspected that Granville had anything to do with Shakespeare in the old West, the Utah Shakespeare Archive would be the first place she’d have gone to check. We might be able to pick up her trail—or his—from there.”
“Might,” emphasized Ben. He opened the book. “Is he in here?”
“I’ve never read it.”
Ben looked up once, shook his head, and bent back to the book. “He’s not in the index.”
“She could have held him back for later use,” I said. “Or she could have found out about him after this book went to press.”
He closed the book. “What happens if you’re wrong?”
“We could be two days and three thousand miles off track. But I’m not.”
He nodded. “And if you’re right? If we find this thing, and it turns out to be what you think it is, what would it be worth?”
I ran a hand back through my hair. I hadn’t stopped to think about that. Maybe Christie’s could tell, but so far as I knew, auction houses divined value by comparisons. And for what Granville claimed he’d found, there were none. No other copy of Cardenio, and no contemporary manuscript of any play certainly by Shakespeare, much less a manuscript he’d written himself. Nothing but six signatures, and all those were in the possession of British governmental bureaucracies and had never come up for sale.
If a First Folio—one of 230-something copies—had fetched six million dollars at auction a few years ago, as Sir Henry had told me, then a unique manuscript of a lost play could fetch…what? I shook my head. The mind boggled at the mere thought of a figure.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Nobody knows. But it won’t be worth anything unless we find it.”
“Seems to me someone’s already put a price on it,” said Ben. “A pretty high one.”
I flinched, as I realized what he meant. Murder. The price of a life. For a fleeting instant, I saw Roz’s eyes staring up from under the bench in the Globe. But the killer had not stopped there. Again, I saw the Folio page, the hand drawn in blue ink pointing at bloody words: Enter Lavinia, hands cut off, tongue torn out, and ravished…
“The price of my life,” I said quietly.
“Just so we’re clear about that,” said Ben.
Outside, sirens flared. Through the front windows, we saw three patrol cars skid to a stop across the street, blocking the gates to the Yard. Instinctively, I slipped the page back into the middle of the yellow pad.
“Utah?” asked Ben. This time, it was a question of direction, not disbelief.
I nodded.
“Sit tight,” he said. “Back with a cab in five minutes.” As he walked out the door, he was already pulling out his phone.
16
I HAD FIVE minutes. I could either panic, or use them.
With one more glance at the cop cars lining the street, I crouched down between the shelves, stacked everything else on the floor beside me, and opened The Elizabethan Stage. According to Chambers, Cardenio was a collaboration between Shakespeare and his handpicked successor as playwright for the King’s Men, John Fletcher. How much Mr. Fletcher had contributed, and which parts, was anybody’s guess.
In the absence of the play, such guessing was more or less futile. But the mere fact of collaboration did tell one tale: The play was probably a late one, since the other two plays that Shakespeare had allowed Fletcher to pitch in on—Two Noble Kinsmen and King Henry VIII—were among his last.
Gingerly, I turned the page. It seemed I was right about the date of its making:
Cardenio is presumably the play given as “Cardenno” and “Cardenna” by the King’s Men at Court in 1612–13 and again on 8 June 1613. Its theme, from Don Quixote—
The book nearly fell from my hands; idiocy screeched silently around me. So that was why Roz had stocked so many Quixote volumes on her shelves. And that was why it sounded familiar. I’d read Quixote. Though in my defense, I had not read it for years.
Time to crack it again. Stepping around to the fiction shelves, I scanned the C’s till I came to Miguel de Cervantes. Here was Don Quixote in familiar Penguin form, a squat black-spined book, its cover sprawling with the gaunt knight imagined through the pen of Gustave Doré. Gathering it atop Roz’s book and the Folio facsimile, I hurried to the front counter. The credit card went through just as a taxi pulled to the front door. Dashing off my signature, I grabbed the books and slipped out.
Even as I slid in beside Ben, I saw a flurry of movement across the street. A posse of men appeared at the gates of the Yard. At its head was DCI Sinclair, followed by the Dark Suits.
“Logan Airport,” said Ben, and the cab began to pull out and then stopped.
Across the street, the cop cars leapt to life, sirens blaring. For a moment, I thought they were headed straight at us, but they pulled into sharp U’s and sped off the wrong way up Mass. Ave., where sirens seemed to be converging from all different directions.
I sank as far down on the seat as I could; there was nowhere else to go.
Sinclair stepped off the curb, but not toward us. Peeping back through the rearview window, I saw where he was headed. A block or two up, patrol cars swarmed like black-and-white ants around an arched brick building that appeared to be perched in bright gardens in the middle of the street. The Inn at Harvard.
Our taxi pulled out into traffic. Two short blocks up, we turned off toward the river.
“Did you happen to tell anyone where you were staying?” asked Ben after a few minutes.
I nodded guiltily. “On my way out of the library, I ran into a
man I know. Literally.”
“Stocky guy? Baseball cap?”
“The only way I could get rid of him was to promise to meet him for a drink.”
“He made a beeline for your British copper.”
“He’s a detective chief inspector. The cop, I mean. His name’s Sinclair.”
“And your confidant?”
I bit my lip. “He’s another Shakespeare professor.”
“Jesus, Kate.” Ben’s disapproval was stinging; that I deserved it only sharpened the sting. “Did you consider standing in the road and waving a red flag?”
I figured the taxi driver couldn’t hear me, what with the Plexiglas divider between the seats and the Haitian pop bouncing from the radio. “Matthew—the professor—says that the First Folios are missing. Both the Globe’s and Widener’s.”
I was about to say more, but Ben shook his head, glancing briefly at the driver. There was no way the man could hear anything through his music, even if he weren’t humming along about four and a half tones flat and tapping out his own rhythm section to boot. But I remembered the shadow in the window of my flat and shut my mouth.
As we pulled out onto Soldier’s Field Road, my phone jangled in my purse. I dug it out and read the display: Matthew Morris.
“Is that him?” Ben asked.
I nodded, about to flip the phone open, but Ben shook his head. Slipping the phone from my grasp, he powered it off. He offered no explanation, but just sat there with the phone resting lightly in his hand as Boston slid by out the window.
It annoyed me to find myself watching his hands.
We rode the rest of the way in silence.
At the airport, Ben plunged into a crowd milling about around the skycaps outside the terminal. Swearing under my breath and clutching my bag of books, I followed. I’d gone no more than a few feet when a handle was shoved into my free hand. I looked down. It was attached to a black rolling bag. I looked closer. My bag.