“Check to see that all doors and windows are closed and locked, if you please, Barnes,” Sir Henry said smoothly. “And arm the alarm. Then we’ll have cognac—the Hine Antique, I think—and a fire in the library.”
The library was upstairs, thick with burgundy velvet and the wild green meadows of William Morris designs. Light skated off the polish of marble busts, oak shelves, and leather bindings, and glinted in the gilt tooling of the books. Two deep armchairs stood before the fire; Barnes had laid out the cognac and snifters on a table between them.
I went straight to the fire. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
Sir Henry eased himself into one of the armchairs. “It was no ghost come from the grave, my dear, that pricked Roz with a needle. Or paid that cabby to keep tabs on you.”
I turned in surprise. “Is that why we changed cars at Claridge’s?”
“Omniscience,” said Sir Henry, pouring out the brandy, “is an excellent quality in God, but suspect in everyone else. You told that cabby neither your street nor your house number. Nor did I. But he knew them both.”
Feeling my way backward, I perched on the edge of the other chair. The cabby had known my street—had slowed and nearly stopped at my front door. His voice, tense with—what? disappointment? anxiety? fear?—slid once again through my mind. So you do not wish to go home? And I’d been so preoccupied that I hadn’t noticed. I shuddered. “There was someone in my flat.”
Sir Henry handed me a snifter. “Was there? It wouldn’t surprise me. The cabby was a delivery boy, my dear. Not a kingpin. And he was most unhappy to find his package refusing to be delivered as ordered. Which suggests that there is a kingpin. Or at least a petty tyrant he knew he must answer to.” Cupping his glass in both hands, he slowly swirled the amber liquid. “You’re in danger, Kate. That’s real enough.” He inhaled deeply and then took a small sip; his whole body sighed with pleasure. “Claret is the liquor for boys, port for men: but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy. Samuel Johnson wrote that, wise old tramp that he was…. Let’s have another look at that brooch.”
I pulled it out. It lay demurely in its box. “It’s not exactly a yellow brick road, is it? How do you think I’m supposed to follow where it leads?”
Sir Henry smiled. “The ruby slippers might make a better analogy. Perhaps you should start by wearing it. May I?” As he lifted the brooch from the box, a card fluttered out, turning end over end, sailing toward the fire. Sir Henry shot forward, plucking it from danger and setting it in my hands.
It was a small rectangular card of thick cream-colored paper, with one hole punched in the bottom. Above that ran a few lines of loose, flowing script. With a pang, I recognized Roz’s handwriting. As Sir Henry pinned the brooch to my lapel, I read it aloud:
Congratulations, Quicksilver Kate, on wiping away dull piety to lay bare bright truths long buried within our favorite Jacobean magnum opus. I trust the public will soon be equally filled with admiration.
Sweets to the Sweet,
R.
“Jacobean?” Sir Henry asked sharply.
“That’s what it says.” Jacobean from Jacobus, I thought. Latin for James. As in King James, sovereign of England for the second half of Shakespeare’s career. All fine, except that the play Roz was supposedly talking about was Hamlet, and while Hamlet has impeccable credentials as a magnum opus, it isn’t Jacobean. It’s Elizabethan—the last and greatest of all Elizabethan plays, written while the obstinate old spinster queen slipped fretfully toward death, refusing to name her young cousin James—or anyone else—as her heir. To most people, Elizabethan versus Jacobean no doubt seems a fine point of distinction, damn near invisible. But to Roz, it had been a chasm, a divide as fundamental as the difference between sun and moon, male and female. She would not mistake one for the other any more than she’d mistake her brother for her sister, or her own head for her hand.
Sir Henry began reeling off Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays. “Macbeth, Othello, The Tempest, Lear…Did she have a favorite?”
“Not that I know of.”
“She goes back to Hamlet in the end, at least,” he mused. “Sweets to the sweet. Gertrude, scattering flowers on Ophelia’s grave. Fits neatly with her gift, at any rate.”
“There’s more,” I said, holding it up to the light. At the bottom, she’d scrawled a sort of poetic p.s. in the form of four lines of verse in faint blue pencil, separated into pairs by a dash:
But wherefore do you not a mightier way
Make war upon this bloody tyrant time?
—
O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast.
Sir Henry started. “That’s it,” he said hoarsely. “Your Jacobean magnum opus.”
I frowned, riffling through my memory for those lines. “They’re Shakespeare. I’m sure of it. But from where? Not Hamlet.”
Sir Henry leapt up and crossed to a tall shelf presided over by a bust of Shakespeare. “No, ridiculous child, not Hamlet,” he cried. Running a finger along the books, he muttered, “Third shelf down. Fourth book in, I should think. Yes—here we are.” He drew out a slim volume in dark brown leather tooled with gilt. Returning to the fire, he set it in my lap with a flourish.
There was no title on the cover. Setting the card down on the table between us, I opened the book to the first page, smoothing out paper that was thick and supple, the color of coffee ice cream. In a design at the top, cherubs were riding flowers that seemed also to be dragons. I read the first two words aloud: “SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.”
“I’d have titled it An Autobiography in Riddles,” said Sir Henry. “But nobody asked.”
I looked back at the page:
Never before Imprinted.
At London
by G. Eld for T.T. and are
to be solde by William Aspley.
1609.
I glanced up in astonishment. “But this is an original.”
“A Jacobean original,” said Sir Henry with a wicked twinkle in his eyes. “And a magnum opus, too, some would say. One hundred and fifty-four poems usually viewed as separate small jewels—Roz has quoted from two of them—but their true magnificence only appears when they’re strung together into a single story. Such a fantastic dark tale flickering between the lines: the Golden Youth, the Dark Lady, and the Poet. Shakespeare was the poet, of course, but who was the youth, and how’d he wind up in the arms of Shakespeare’s dark-haired, darker-hearted mistress?” The whole house seemed to lean inward to hear him. “Why did the poet beg the young man to beget children—and why did the young man refuse?”
He shook his head. “Full of love, jealousy, and betrayal, the sonnets are—all the deep, doom-ridden stuff of myth. All the more gripping because they’re true.”
A log collapsed in the grate. “Filled, also, with a certain pathos for an aging queen of the stage,” quipped Sir Henry in sudden self-mockery. “But wherefore do you not a mightier way make war upon this bloody tyrant time? Did Roz ever feel that way about you?”
I nearly spit out my brandy. “What, that I should marry and bear many small carrot-topped Kates?”
Sir Henry leaned forward. “That you should take a lover and re-create yourself, forever young. That’s what this first quote is about, you know. Making war on time by making children.” He took the book back, riffling through the first few pages. “From—where is it? Here.” He stabbed a finger at the poem on the page. “Sonnet Sixteen.”
He flipped a few pages on and stopped. “That’s bad enough, but the second quote—that’s enough to make you weep, if you think about it. What sort of man could toss off Romeo and Juliet but fear to say I love you to his own beloved? So much, that his only defense from some honey-tongued bastard of a rival is to plead, Read my books?—
O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast.
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue th
at more hath more expressed.”
His voice filled the room with longing that sharpened to a point just shy of unbearable, and slowly faded.
In its place drifted a fine silting of doubt. The brooch was a gift, no more. I contemplated the small card facing away from me on the table between us.
“Now, that’s tragedy, trimmed to the length of a sonnet,” said Sir Henry. “Only twenty-three poems in, and he’s already drawn—”
The brandy burned in my throat. “What did you say?”
“He’s already drawn—?”
“No. The number.”
“Twenty-three. Here.” He held out the book.
“It’s not the words that matter,” I said, suddenly jittery. “However wonderful they are. It’s the numbers. The numbers of the sonnets.”
“Sixteen and twenty-three?”
I reversed Roz’s card so he could see it upside down and pointed to the postscript. “See her scribble at the bottom?”
He frowned as he saw what I’d seen: The incomprehensible squiggle that we both supposed to be the s of p.s. revealed itself as a neat a, followed by a d.
“A.D.” he read aloud. “Anno Domini. In the year of Our Lord…I’m still not sure where we’re going with this.”
“Back in time,” I said shortly. “Run those numbers together as a date.”
“Sixteen twenty-three…But where does that get us? Besides six—no—seven years after Shakespeare’s death? We are still talking Shakespeare, aren’t we?”
“His Jacobean book of books,” I nodded. “The magnum opus that contains all his others. Dated 1623.”
“My God,” Sir Henry said. “The First Folio.”
8
WE STARED AT each other. The First Folio was the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works, published posthumously in 1623 by his old friends and patrons. To them, it had been a monument more precious than marble, and they had lavished money, care, and time on it. The book that had rolled from the presses at last was a beautiful thing—a blatant bid to shift the author from the rowdy, disreputable world of the theater to the eternal truths of poetry. To Shakespeare’s enemies—all those who’d taunted him during his life as an upstart crow, not fit to pick the crumbs from their tables—it had been a sharp stroke of revenge.
“Motive and cue enough for murder, all right,” said Sir Henry. “The Folio’s one of the most valuable and coveted books in the world. You know that a torn and water-stained copy, missing pages, fetched a hundred sixty thousand pounds at auction a while back?” He shook his head in disbelief. “When Sotheby’s put an exceptionally fine copy on the block last year, it went for five million dollars. Sir Paul Getty is rumored to have spent six. Think about that: one old book bringing in ten times the average price of a house in London. No offense, Kate, but if Roz found a First Folio, why not just run straight to Sotheby’s or Christie’s, auction it off, and retire to a villa in Provence? Why come running to you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, wading through a tangle of thoughts as I spoke. “Unless it wasn’t a Folio that she found—a new copy, I mean—but something in it. Unless what she wanted was information.”
“Information that you’d have, and she wouldn’t?”
If he’d been talking about anyone but Roz, his incredulousness might have seemed insulting. Roz had been famous for her encyclopedic knowledge of how Shakespeare’s plays and poems had woven through speeches in the U.S. Congress, for instance, and sprouted up as Soviet ballets and Nazi propaganda. Because of Roz, the world knew that Shakespeare was equally at home in Japanese Kabuki theater and around campfires in the East African bush. Her last book—which I’d helped research in its earliest stages—had gleefully detailed the popularity of Shakespeare in the wild American West, among illiterate mountain men and miners, cowboys and whores, even the occasional Indian tribe. Her expertise and advice had been sought out by scholars, museums, and theater companies all over the world.
But she had sought advice from me. “I need help, Kate,” she’d said that afternoon. “Your help.” Now, as then, I could think of only one reason why: my dissertation. I’d modeled my work on hers, except that I’d chosen to sift the past for murkier stuff.
“Occult Shakespeare,” I said aloud. “Secret, not magical,” I added, launching into the old, familiar defense. “It’s the one Shakespearean subject I know in more depth than Roz—the long, strange history of attempts to recover forbidden wisdom thought to be scattered through his works. The vast majority of it supposedly hidden in the First Folio.”
Sir Henry scrutinized me. “Forbidden wisdom?”
“Prophecy or history. Take your choice.” I gave him a wry smile. “Those who believe in Shakespeare the prophet treat the Folio like the oracles of Nostradamus: as a riddling prediction of the future, foretelling the rise of Hitler, the landing on the moon, the date of the Apocalypse, what you’ll have for dinner next Tuesday. The ‘historians,’ on the other hand, spend most of their time digging up the old love story between Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Leicester—”
“Hardly a secret,” said Sir Henry. “Not a decade goes by without a bestselling bodice-ripper on that old affaire de coeur. Hollywood’s been in on the act for the last hundred years.”
“True. But the histories I’m talking about claim a marriage between the queen and the earl, not an affair, and the birth of a legitimate heir, to boot. A son bundled off into hiding at birth, like King Arthur—and also, like King Arthur, promised to come again.”
Sir Henry said something that sounded suspiciously like “Harrumph.” When he managed words, he sounded annoyed. “And just how is a lowly playwright from Stratford supposed to have had access to such information?”
A gust of wind moaned around the corner of the house and rattled the French doors to the balcony behind us. I took a sip of cognac. “Because he was the hidden boy.”
For a moment, the only sound was the hiss of the flames. Then Sir Henry burst out laughing. “You can’t possibly believe such poppycock,” he chortled, pouring more brandy into my glass.
I smiled. “No. Neither did Roz. We used to laugh at most of it—though one or two of the stories were tragic.” I stood up, walking toward the fireplace. “I don’t believe she would’ve chased after any of it without some solid, scholarly reason. But it doesn’t matter if it’s true, does it? She might have been killed because someone thought she’d found something.”
“Or feared she would.”
I set my glass down on the mantel. “But what? And where? Something like two hundred thirty copies of the Folio survive, scattered all over the world. Even if I knew which one—or she proves to have found something present in all of them—it’s a big book. What am I supposed to look for?”
Sir Henry was poring over the card on the table. “Hear me out,” he said. “She had to pick lines from sonnets sixteen and twenty-three, to make up the date. But she had fourteen lines to choose from in each sonnet. Why these particular lines?” He tapped his finger on the card.
I crossed to look at lines he was pointing at:
O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast.
Revelation crept through me in a flush of heat. “She meant her books, didn’t she? Not just Shakespeare’s. That’s brilliant, Sir Henry.”
“Still a bit of a needle in a haystack for a learned professor.”
“We have a head start, though,” I said with a grin. “Turn it over.”
On the other side, in the uneven, pocked lettering of manual typewriters, was an old card-catalog entry:
Chambers, E. K. (Edmund Kerchever). 1866–1954.
The Elizabethan Stage.
Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1923.
“Marvelous tome,” said Sir Henry.
“Tomes, you mean. Four fat volumes.” Chambers had been one of the last of an old breed of scholars who collected facts the way that Victorian botanists once collected beetles and butterflies—indiscriminately
and in depth, displaying them with wit and exuberance. At the time of its publication, The Elizabethan Stage had held every known scrap of evidence relating to the theater in Shakespeare’s day. A few had been unearthed since, but not many. For scholars, it remained a sort of pirate’s chest of forgotten theater trivia.
“Better than the Folio, at any rate,” he said, pushing himself up from his chair. “Because I happen to have a copy.” He strode across the room.
“Wait,” I said. “Not your books. Her books. This is her card.”
He turned back. “Roz put her own books in a card catalog?”
“No. When it came to books, she didn’t distinguish too clearly between hers and Harvard’s. See this?” I pointed to a number at the top: Thr 390.160. “That’s a call number from the old system used in Widener—Harvard’s main library—before Dewey dreamed up his decimals.”
“She took a card from Harvard’s catalog?”
“Hers now. The university put its catalog online a few years back, and in a fit of techno-hubris the library’s powers-that-be deemed the card catalog obsolete. To save space, they decided to toss the old cards—all eleven million of them, some dating from the eighteenth century. They’ve been using them for scrap paper ever since. The minute Roz saw that, she had a fit—and kept having it.”
“Eloquently, no doubt,” said Sir Henry, tongue firmly in cheek.
I smiled. “She wrote pieces for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, TLS, all lambasting the library. In the end, she kicked up such a ruckus that the university offered to give her all the cards pertaining to the English Renaissance and Shakespeare, just to shut her up. All she had to do was sort them out from the others. The library staff probably figured that would send her running for the hills, but they figured wrong. She employed three research assistants for a year and a half just to pick through that mountain of paper…. One of those researchers was me.” I looked ruefully at the card. “She keeps—kept them in one of the library’s old cabinets, in her study. I don’t think she’d have used this as a calling card lightly.” I ran my finger across it. “In fact, I’d be willing to bet that something in her copy of Chambers will tell us which Folio she meant, and where.”