“Hello, Ms. Preston? Professor Maxine Tom here, from the archive.”
The voice on the other side sounded shrill, but I couldn’t make out what it was saying, especially since Maxine covered the receiver and made a face. Then she snapped to.
“Yes, ma’am, I apologize for calling so late, but I’ve got someone here to see the Granville collection. Mrs. Jiménez says she sold it to you three days ago—I can vouch for her; we were in graduate school together. Her name is Katharine Stanley—Yes, ma’am. She’s here. Standing right in front of me. No, ma’am. Of course. I’ll let her know. Thank you very much. You have a good evening.”
Maxine banged down the phone. “I hope you appreciate the fang marks on my ear.” She looked at me quizzically. “She was raging mad till she heard your name. Said she knew your work and to have you come down. But you’ll have to be there by seven a.m. She’s leaving at nine.”
“Where is she?”
“She owns her own town. A ghost town, but still, she owns the whole damned town. In New Mexico, outside beautiful Lordsburg. By the name of Shakespeare.”
My head jerked up.
“All that time driving around for Roz, and you didn’t know about that?”
“It was only a month. We’d barely scratched the surface of things by the time I left.”
“It’s in the book.”
I looked at her blankly.
“You haven’t read it, have you?” Reaching across the desk, she opened the book in my hands once more, this time turning just past the title page, to a page almost empty.
For Kate, I read. And just below that, one more line, italicized. All the daughters of my house.
I stared at it, breathless.
Maxine watched me with pity. “Anger or regret?”
“Both,” I whispered.
“Let it go, Kate. Let Roz go.”
I met Maxine’s eyes. “I can’t. Not yet.”
She shook her head. “You want to see Mrs. Preston, you’d better get a move on. Shakespeare’s an eleven-hour drive from here, if you keep to the legal limit, and you’re already down to nine and a half—a discrepancy I’m sure Mrs. Preston’s aware of. I reckon it’s a test to see how badly you want whatever it is that you’re after.”
She pulled out a map and showed me the route: a long, deep backward J slashing down through Arizona and curving eastward at Tucson to head over into New Mexico. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going home. I have a young son who likes bedtime stories.”
I did a double take. “Of course. I didn’t know.”
“It’s been a while,” she said softly.
I glanced at my watch. Ben was due back at any moment. I’d probably meet him on the way to the car. Reluctantly, I gathered my copies. Maxine wouldn’t take payment, so I went to the door. “Thanks,” I said awkwardly.
“Take care, Katie,” said Maxine.
Outside, I plunged into the dark little dell, heading back toward the theater and the parking lot beyond it. I reached the path that led around the theater toward the parking lot and stopped for a moment, listening, but all I could hear was a quiet murmur. Romeo and Juliet were waking to find that they must part, maybe. Or Juliet was swallowing the poison that feigned death.
I’d walked three steps down the path when I heard something rustle in the trees down in the dell behind me. I looked back. The library windows were dark; high, wispy clouds drifting across the moon made the diamond panes glitter and writhe like snakeskin. Beneath its willow, the pond was a pool of blackness. I went still, trying to sense where the sound had come from.
Somewhere in that dell, I felt cruel eyes watching me. I turned back on the path toward the car, hoping to see Ben headed back for me. And then I heard the same sound that had terrified me on the river steps of the Thames: that of a blade drawn from its sheath.
I ran, tearing through the spruce grove until I broke through into the light of the parking lot. Ben was nowhere to be seen. I raced toward the car, but it was locked.
I looked back. The silhouette of a man crossed into the light and broke into a run, heading right for me.
I slid around the car, putting it between us. And then the car’s lights flashed, and I heard the doors unlock—and I realized the man running was Ben, carrying a bag and two tall paper cups.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“I’ll drive,” I gasped, opening the door. “Just get in.”
21
“I HEARD IT,” I said as we drove eastward out of town. “Heard him. He drew a knife.”
Ben looked up from unwrapping the sandwiches. “Are you sure? They were fighting with swords up onstage, Kate.”
“He was there,” I said tightly. “At the archive.”
He offered me a sandwich, but I shook my head. Maybe food was like sleep, to him—catch it when you can—but it was the last thing I wanted. We drove in silence as he ate.
The road curved up into the mountains. Squat juniper and piñon gave way to billowing pine, and the pines in turn gave way to the dark arrows of spruce. The forest grew taller and thicker, crowding the road, and still the black ribbon of the highway snaked higher. The stars edged the tops of the trees with thin silver light, but the road seemed a tunnel through darkness. All around us, the world seemed still and eerily empty, save for the whispering trees, but I could not shake the feeling of being watched.
“I think he might be following,” I said quietly.
Crumpling up his sandwich wrapping, Ben turned to look through the rear window. “Have you seen anything?”
“No.” I shook my head. “But I feel it.”
His eyes rested on me for a moment, and then he reached over and turned off the headlights. “Jesus,” I said, taking my foot off the gas.
“Keep up your speed,” he said tersely. “Follow the center line.” Unclasping his seat belt, he rolled down his window and hoisted his upper body right through it. He stood on the seat, his head up among the trees. Then he ducked back inside. The sharp, wintry scent of spruce cut through the warmer scent of the coffee.
“Nothing out there but trees.”
“He’s out there,” I insisted.
“Maybe.” He picked up his coffee, warming his hands. “Gut instincts have saved my life more than once.”
I had braced for dismissal or a needling joke; his seriousness caught me off balance. Glancing out the rearview mirror, I nearly missed a curve in the road; the tires squealed a little as I pulled the car through the turn.
“How about you drive and I watch?” he suggested. Draining his coffee, he shoved the cup into a paper bag. “You hungry yet?”
When I shook my head, he picked up Chambers’s book and switched on a small flashlight. “Tell me more about Cardenio. Chambers says that someone revised and adapted it.”
“Double Falsehood,” I said with a nod, grateful to be handed something else to think about. “In 1700 or thereabouts.”
“Seventeen twenty-eight,” he said, checking the date. “What do you know about it?”
“Not much.” I took a sip of my coffee. “It was the brainchild of a man named Lewis Theobald, who was mostly famous for clashing with the poet Alexander Pope. Theobald said Pope’s edition of Shakespeare was full of errors—which was true—and Pope shot back something to the effect that Theobald was a pedantic bore who wouldn’t recognize a good story in his vicinity even if he’d lived through all ten years of the Trojan War himself—which was also true. Pope wrote a whole mock epic, the Dunciad, crowning Theobald as King of Dunces.”
Ben laughed. “Pen mightier than the sword?”
“In Pope’s case, mightier than an entire armored brigade. With a warship or two thrown in for good measure.”
“Not a wise choice of enemy, Mr. Pope. You’ve never read the play?”
“No. It’s rare. I wish I’d known to hunt it up when we were still at Harvard. Though we might find it on the Internet. The eighteenth-century crowd was one of the first to start feeding everything it could
lay its hands on into the Web. And the Shakespeare crowd wasn’t far behind.”
Ben reached into the backseat and pulled out a laptop.
“You think this metropolis is wired?” We had come through a pass, and the road had shrunk to a narrow ledge clinging high on a mountainside. On our left, the forest sloped steeply down toward us from a high, barren peak. On the right, the trees fell away in a near vertical drop. We were still driving with the headlights off; across the whole tilted expanse of the earth no twinkle of either electricity or fire was visible. Other than the road, there was no evidence that human beings had ever passed this way.
“By satellite it is.” Ben punched a few keys, and the laptop sang a little tune and woke up, filling the car with a blue glow. I heard the tap of a few more keys, and the glow shifted from blue to white to peach as a new page sprang up. “Look what we have here,” said Ben. “Double Falsehood, or the Distressed Lovers.” He hit a few more keys. “What do you want first? The play, or all the stuff that comes before it? Dedication, Preface of the Editor, Prologue?”
“The preface,” I said, my hands tightening on the wheel, my eyes glued to the faint glimmer of the center line.
“Looks like King Theobald was on the defensive right out of the gate. Listen to this: It has been alleged as incredible that such a curiosity should be stifled and lost to the world for above a century.”
“Almost four centuries, now,” I said.
Ben skimmed on. “Hey!” he said, so suddenly that I jumped. “Did you know that Shakespeare had a bastard daughter?”
I frowned.
“I’ll take that as a no,” said Ben.
“She’s not in the record.”
“Unless you count this a record.”
I shook my head. I’d spent years around Shakespeare, and I had never heard it counted.
“There is a tradition,” he read, “(which I have from the noble person who supplied me with one of my copies)—”
“One?” I said in disbelief. “One of his copies, plural?”
“He claims to have had three.”
Weak laughter spread through me as Ben started over. “There is atradition (which I have from the noble person who supplied me with one of my copies) that this play was given by our author, as a present of value, to a natural daughter of his, for whose sake he wrote it, in the time of his retirement from the stage. What makes illegitimate children ‘natural’? Doesn’t that suggest that legit children are unnatural? And what is so bloody funny over on that side of the car?”
I shook my head. “It’s just that beyond the facts that Shakespeare was born and that he died, there aren’t too many more hard-and-fast facts we know about him. And you’ve just made hash of about half of them.” I reeled them off: “Cardenio’s a lost play, there are no Shakespearean manuscripts, and though he doesn’t seem to have visited the old marriage bed very often, when he did, he was fruitful and multiplied: He had three children, all legitimate…and suddenly we’re talking about three manuscripts of Cardenio and a bastard to boot.”
Ben was eyeing the screen as if he hoped it might talk. “Do you think Granville’s manuscript started out as one of Theobald’s? Maybe he got hold of one of them and brought it west.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “But Granville says he thought the manuscript had been wherever he found it since soon after its making.”
“Does that make sense to you?”
“No. But then, none of this does.”
Ben moved on from the preface to the play, and the first thing I noticed was that he had a good reading voice, easily translating the rhythms of poetry into the cadences of natural speech. The second thing I noticed was that the play was a wreck. Sir Henry, in an extravagant moment, might have called it a noble ruin; Roz would have dismissed it out of hand as a disgrace.
Quixote and Sancho Panza were nowhere to be found. The other characters were recognizable, though Theobald’s had changed all their names. It was so confusing that Ben soon reverted back to Cervantes’s names. But he couldn’t fix the holes in the plot.
It was as if moths had been at it since 1728. Or maybe crocodiles. The sin had been sliced out wholesale, but that wasn’t all—so had most of the action of any sort, which just left people standing around talking about events that the audience was left to surmise: a rape, a bruising battle in the midst of a wedding, an abduction from a nunnery. If Theobald had been adapting the story of Genesis, I thought grumpily, he would have kept the conversation between Eve and the Serpent but cut the eating of the apple, the wearing of fig leaves, and the exile from the garden. For that matter, he probably would have reduced Eve’s two conversations, first with the Serpent and then with God, into one, figuring he could save both time and the cost of an actor. The story would have made no sense in the end, but that didn’t seem to be a consideration to faze Theobald.
“More shit than Shakespeare,” observed Ben. And for the most part, he was right. Still, there were passages that drifted across the ear with a loveliness almost too sweet to bear:
Have you e’er seen the phoenix of the earth,
The bird of Paradise?
I have: and known her haunts, and where she built
Her spicy nest: till, like a credulous fool,
I showed the treasure to a friend in trust,
And he hath robbed me of her.
I could almost see the gleam of red and gold feathers through the dark lace of the branches, scent jasmine and sandalwood on the wind, hear the terrible cracking of a heart. Ben must have sensed it, too, for he fell silent.
“The thing is,” he said after a while, “it’s not just pretty poetry. Put these lines in a play, and they’d be funny too. I read it as a soliloquy, but it’s not. Cardenio’s talking to a shepherd. The poor sod’s probably never seen anything more exotic in his entire life than a speckled sheep, and now he’s faced with some lunatic babbling on about phoenixes and spicy nests…. Look, let’s try it. You read the shepherd.”
“I thought you wanted me to drive.”
“All you have to do is look confused, and when I give you the sign, say, In troth, sir, not I. Can you manage that?”
“In troth, sir, not I.”
“Bravo. Honest shepherd…I like this directing business. Very good for one’s sense of lordship and mastery. What do I say to start things rolling?”
“Ladies and gents, whenever you’re ready.” It came out automatically, and I realized with a pang how much I missed the theater.
“Right, then…. ladies and gents, whenever you’re ready.” Taking the cue from himself, he launched into the scene.
You have an aspect, Sir, of wondrous wisdom,
And, as it seems, are traveled deep in knowledge;
Have you e’er seen the phoenix—
Some door in my memory banged open in a gust of recognition. “What did you say?”
“That’s not your line.”
“Screw my line. Read yours again.”
You have an aspect, Sir, of wondrous wisdom—
I braked so quickly that we fishtailed a little as we came to a halt in the middle of a crescent-shaped pullout. “The letter,” I barked. “Granville’s letter. Where is it?” I turned around and started pawing through stuff in the back.
Ben pulled my book bag out from behind his seat and produced Granville’s letter. I skimmed through it till I found what I was looking for, and held out the page to him, pointing.
“You have an aspect, Sir, of wondrous wisdom,” he read.
“You were right, back in the bookstore. My old forty-niner didn’t write that.”
Ben glanced up. “You think Granville knew Theobald’s play?”
Blood was pounding in my temples. “Not likely.” Theobald’s adaptation had been long forgotten by the time Granville was born. And Granville had no Internet on which to find rare scripts.
“But if he didn’t know Double Falsehood,” said Ben slowly, “then the only place he could have found that line was in his
manuscript. Which means…”
“That these words aren’t Theobald’s.”
Neither of us could finish that thought aloud: They’re Shakespeare’s.
I got out of the car and walked to the edge of the cliff. The pullout must have been made to let drivers stop for the view. We stood on a high ledge like a natural loggia overlooking a wide, deep valley ringed on every side by distant peaks darker than the night sky. A thousand feet below, trees thickly carpeted the valley floor. Far to the south, the cliffs of Zion shone white under the moon, shimmering like curtains veiling the door to some other world.
“It might be Fletcher,” said Ben gruffly. “Chambers says the play was a collaboration.”
“It might be,” I acknowledged. “But you’re the one who pointed out that the poetry’s undercut by comedy—and that’s a favorite Shakespearean trick. There’s hardly a passage of high-flying poetry in all his works that isn’t encased in some ironclad pentangle of comedy or irony. As if he didn’t trust beauty.”
“Theobald had the play,” said Ben. He shook his head. “Think of that. He had gold, and he spun it to straw.”
“And then he lost what was left,” I said with derision. “His manuscripts are all missing. Presumed lost in the fire that destroyed his theater.”
“That makes for a lot of fires messing with Shakespeare,” said Ben.
But my mind was too busy whirling around Granville to spare much thought for Theobald. If Granville could read the phrase that he’d quoted, then he could read the complex tangles of Secretary Hand. And if he could read Secretary Hand, what I’d begun to suspect back at the archive must be true. He knew exactly what he had when he wrote to Professor Child.
Who was he, this gambling prospector who knew his way around obscure corners of Renaissance English literature? And why pretend ignorance?
I turned to Ben, but he was frowning back in the direction we’d come. A few seconds later, I caught what he was looking at. A flicker of light, half a mile back.
“What is it?”
“A car,” he said quietly, his whole body tense.