The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession

by Charlie Lovett

  “It sounds fascinating,” said Peter. “Positively Shakespearean.”

  “It’s sad what’s happened,” said the vicar. “Neighbors shouldn’t act like that.”

  “You’ll not see any of them darken the door of this church,” said Alan. “And they certainly won’t be inviting you to tea, vicar. So they won’t be learning your lessons on neighborly behavior.” This brought another outburst of laughter from the circle, and somehow was also the signal that the weekly socializing was over. Coffee cups clattered back onto the tray that was whisked away and the parishioners headed for the door, wrapping scarves around their heads against the morning wind sweeping across the fields from Churchill.

  The vicar followed his modest flock to bestow his official good-byes, and Peter found himself alone, or so he thought. “Come back for a slice of cake and Louisa will tell you all about it,” said a voice. Peter looked down to see Martha standing beside him, pulling on her gloves. He glanced at his watch. It was 9:30. He would have liked to get on the road, but the chance to delve a little deeper into the history of the Aldersons and their neighbors was too great a temptation.

  “Cake would be lovely,” he said, as he offered his arm to Martha and led her out the door.

  Martha and her sister lived in a three-room cottage a hundred yards down the lane from the church. Within a minute of their arrival, Martha had piled fresh wood on the fire in the grate, served Peter a thick slab of ginger cake, and disappeared into the bedroom to retrieve her sister. Louisa was even shorter and more hunched over than Martha. She reminded Peter of Alice of Wonderland when her chin is pressed against her shoes. From his chair by the fire, Peter looked down on her as he said hello, giving him the feeling of addressing an extremely wrinkled eight-year-old. After Martha settled her sister in a chair she disappeared again, returning a moment later with a tray of tea. She poured a cup for each of them, then turned to Louisa, who had not yet spoken a word.

  “Mr. Byerly wants to know all about the Aldersons and the Gardners,” she said. A smile of delight crept across Louisa’s face, as if her sole purpose at this late stage of life was to share the gossip of centuries past with whomever might listen.

  “That’s a story, that is,” she said, and she paused to sip her tea before plunging into her tale.

  “Grandfather worked for the Gardners at Evenlode House starting in the eighteen seventies, when he was just a boy. He used to tell me stories about the family when I was a little girl and we would go walking on the grounds. They was a kind and peaceful family, my old granddad always said.” These were not the adjectives that came to Peter’s mind as he recalled his encounter with the current Mr. Gardner.

  “On only one subject did my granddad ever hear a Gardner raise his voice, and that was the Aldersons. There was real hatred there, I tell you.”

  “Why?” asked Peter.

  “I don’t know how far back it went. Story is they were both royalists in the Civil War, supposed to have hidden two hundred troops between them, but I’ve no idea where. The houses weren’t so large then. But somewhere along the way they stopped agreeing. I do know they both wanted to build a mill on the Evenlode at least two hundred years ago. You see, the Gardners owned all the land south of the river, and the Aldersons owned the land to the north, but nobody could decide who owned the river. But even before that I’m not sure they got along. By the time my granddad was working there, Mr. Phillip Gardner was the head of the house. Oh, the tales Granddad used to spin about Mr. Phillip. Fancied himself a painter, he did.”

  Peter nearly choked on his tea at this revelation. Could Phillip Gardner have been B.B.? Was that the reason the Cornish man had been asking questions around Kingham? “What sort of painter?” Peter asked.

  “Not a very good one, I suppose,” said Louisa. “Granddad said Mr. Phillip tried and tried to get into the Royal Academy or the Watercolour Society, but he never could. Said he always blamed it on Mr. Alderson. Of course by then the Gardners blamed anything that went wrong on the Aldersons. Granddad says they blamed the Aldersons for the flood that came roaring through the valley and killed all those sheep in the eighteen sixties. Not sure how the Aldersons could control the weather.”

  “But this Phillip Gardner was a painter?” asked Peter, eager to get back to that subject.

  “Well,” said Louisa, “he painted. Whether that makes him I painter, I couldn’t say. Truth is he found a more reliable way to support the estate. Married a rich widow from down Witney. Not that that worked out so well either.”

  “Tell him about the mistress,” said Martha.

  “Now we never knew about that for sure,” said Louisa, “but there were certainly mutterings among the servants that Mr. Phillip took a mistress after he was married. But this I can tell you. Four years after he marries the widow, she disappears and he dies under mysterious circumstances.”

  “It was ruled an accident,” said Martha.

  “It weren’t no accident,” said Louisa. “At least Granddad didn’t think so. Either way, once Mr. Phillip was dead and buried at the family chapel, no one seemed to take much interest in the house. That’s when the place just started falling down.”

  “I hear the mistress is buried with him,” whispered Martha.

  “Don’t believe a word of it,” said Louisa.

  “But how would you know? Even Granddad never set foot in that chapel.”

  “I wonder if it’s even there anymore,” said Louisa. “When I was a girl, Granddad would point it out to me, and even then it was covered with vines and crumbling.”

  “Where was it?” asked Peter, wondering if uncovering the scandal of Phillip Gardner’s marriage might give him some further clue about B.B.

  “Down the hill past the house,” said Martha. “Though I doubt Thomas would be offering to take you for a tour.”

  “Thomas? Is he the one who lives in Evenlode House now?”

  “Lives in a caravan in the garden, from what I hear,” said Martha.

  “Yes, that’s him,” said Louisa. “Mr. Phillip’s great-great-nephew.”

  “So,” said Peter, “this Phillip Gardner was a frustrated painter, he married a rich widow, and four years later he died mysteriously?”

  “That’s right,” said Louisa. “No one ever accused the wife of murder, but they buried him awfully quick, from what Granddad said.”

  “Was Phillip the one who collected all those papers and things?” asked Martha.

  “Oh, yes, I nearly forgot about that.”

  “What sort of papers?” asked Peter, trying to contain his excitement as another piece of evidence seemed about to fit into place.

  “Once he had the widow’s money, Mr. Phillip thought he’d show off a bit, you see. Now he knew that Mr. Alderson fancied himself a collector—furniture, artwork, and he had a special weakness for . . . what would you call them? Letters and autographs of kings and that sort of thing.”

  “Historical documents,” prompted Peter, picturing the cache at Evenlode Manor.

  “I suppose that’s what they were,” said Louisa. “Anyway, Mr. Phillip took to collecting them sorts of things himself. Used to show them off to Granddad. It only went on for a couple of years.”

  “He just did it to annoy Mr. Alderson,” said Martha.

  “He certainly did that,” said Louisa with a laugh.

  “So what happened to the collection?” asked Peter, almost certain he knew the answer.

  “I’ve no idea,” said Louisa.

  â€
œDo you think they might have sold it to the Aldersons?” asked Peter.

  “A Gardner would sooner burn them in the grate, no matter what they were worth,” said Louisa.

  “And you told all this to the man from Cornwall?” asked Peter, now almost certain he had stumbled into the scandal that Liz Sutcliffe was so eager to spring on the Victorian art world.

  “Oh, yes,” said Louisa. “Older gentleman, but still young from my point of view.” Louisa and Martha laughed and Peter joined in as best he could, for his mind was pulling at the strands of Louisa’s story and trying to unravel them into a narrative that fit all the evidence.

  “You don’t happen to remember the gentleman’s name, do you?” asked Peter.

  “Oh yes,” said Louisa. “His name was Graham. Had a big white beard.”

  “And his surname?” asked Peter.

  “His surname,” said Louisa, suddenly scowling. “Oh, I’ve no idea.”

  “Nor have I,” said Martha.

  London, 1856

  Phillip Gardner stepped out of the Oxford train into the glass-and-steel cavern of the recently completed Paddington station. He was twenty-four years old and it was the first time he had visited London alone. Under his arm he carried a portfolio of paintings, which he hoped would launch his career. He strode down the platform to the station entrance and hailed a hansom cab.

  “Royal Academy of Arts,” he told the driver, and with a crack of the whip, the cab clattered away, bearing Phillip toward his future.

  —

  Benjamin Mayhew arrived at Paddington ten minutes before his train was due to depart. He was bound for a book auction at Oxford’s Holywell Music Room—the dispersal of the library of a recently departed don. Benjamin knew from a contact in Oxford that there would be a substantial number of important books under the hammer, but when one of his fellow booksellers had come in to Benjamin’s shop yesterday, asking if the sale was worth the trip to Oxford, Benjamin had claimed the library was nothing more than a collection of dull religious tracts—no point in having more competition than necessary.

  With a few minutes to spare before his departure, Benjamin strolled over to W H Smith, one of a chain of bookstalls that had become ubiquitous in England’s railway termini. Benjamin perused the racks of newspapers and books, and his eye happened to fall on a small pamphlet written by William Henry Smith himself. It was not this coincidence but the title—Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare’s Plays?—that caught his eye. Benjamin Mayhew had never come across the notion that someone other than William Shakespeare had written the plays attributed to that name. Curious to see what the kingdom’s most successful newsagent had to say on the topic, Benjamin bought a copy of the pamphlet, along with the Times, and was soon ensconced comfortably in a first-class carriage bound for Oxford.

  In Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare’s Plays? Benjamin read Smith’s argument for Francis Bacon as the author of the Shakespeare canon. Smith called Shakespeare “a man of limited education, careless of fame, intent upon money-getting, and actively engaged in the management of a theater,” but said that this was not enough for us to suppose “from the simple circumstance of his name being associated with these plays, that he was the author of them.” Of Bacon, however, Smith wrote, “His history is just such as we should have drawn of Shakespeare, if we had been required to depict him from the internal evidence of his works.” Smith conjectured why Bacon would have wanted to disassociate his name from the theater and how his training as a lawyer could explain the obviously extensive legal knowledge of the author of Shakespeare’s plays.

  By the time the train steamed into Oxford, Benjamin had read the pamphlet over three times. A wealthy merchant with an interest in literary controversy might make an excellent client for an antiquarian bookseller, he thought. That afternoon he bought heavily at the sale in the Holywell Music Room. He paid more than he wanted for a first edition of Malone’s An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers, in which Malone exposed the great Shakespeare forger William Henry Ireland. It seemed a good book, he thought, to offer to Smith at a low price—and in Benjamin Mayhew’s experience there was no better way to hook a regular customer than by tantalizing him with an underpriced copy of a book closely related to his passion.

  Hay-on-Wye, Wales, Sunday, February 19, 1995

  Peter’s mind was aswirl as he headed out of Kingham toward Hay-on-Wye, the Pandosto nestled in an acid-free envelope inside his leather satchel on the backseat. Phillip Gardner had been a frustrated painter who blamed his failure on his neighbor Reginald Alderson. Gardner married a rich widow and took up document collecting to annoy Alderson. Four years later he was dead, with rumors of a mistress and murder circulating around the neighborhood. Somewhere in this mysterious narrative Peter felt sure was the key to both the stolen watercolor and the authenticity of the Pandosto. Might Reginald Alderson have murdered Phillip Gardner in order to get his hands on the collection of documents? Or was Alderson in cahoots with the mistress? And what secrets lay in that family chapel?

  Of one thing Peter was nearly certain. Somehow Phillip Gardner’s collection of rare documents had ended up in the hands of his enemy. After Peter left Martha and Louise’s cottage, as he was walking down the lane, he suddenly remembered the interlacing initials E.H. penciled on the corner of each of the documents at Evenlode Manor. He had thought it had been the monogram of a previous owner; now he realized that E.H. stood for Evenlode House. And the Pandosto resting securely in his satchel bore the same initials.

  —

  Peter loitered in front of the window of Church Street Books in Hay-on-Wye, feigning interest in the same display he had stared at just four days earlier and hoping for someone to enter the shop and distract the shopkeeper. He had no interest in being subjected to an unnecessary conversation beginning with, Aren’t you the fellow who stole that watercolor?

  Five minutes later a customer went into the shop and attracted the book dealer’s attention. Edmond Malone’s book was still where Peter had reshelved it four days ago. Next to it were two volumes by William Henry Ireland detailing his forging of Shakespeare manuscripts and a copy of Ireland’s play Vortigen, which he had tried to pass off as Shakespeare’s. All four books had the interlacing E.H. on the front endpaper.

  The next two books on the shelf were by another famous Shakespeare forger, John Payne Collier. Again, both books were marked with the monogram of Evenlode House. Peter was detecting an unsettling pattern. In all likelihood, Julia Alderson had removed this collection of books by and about Shakespeare forgers from the library of Evenlode Manor to avoid casting suspicion on the authenticity of the Pandosto. These books had all the hallmarks of the library of a forger in training, a forger whose greatest achievement was in the satchel next to Peter’s feet.

  The next book on the shelf only increased Peter’s suspicions: Notes and Emendations of the Text of Shakespeare’s Plays—the book that Collier based on his boldest forgery, which bore a strong resemblance to the Pandosto. In 1852, Collier had announced a remarkable discovery. He had obtained a copy of the Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, printed in 1632. In the margins of this volume were thousands of notes and textual annotations. Collier claimed these annotations came from “purer manuscripts” of Shakespeare’s plays. The folio promised fodder for generations of Shakespeare scholars. Collier, however, refused to submit the volume to scrutiny, hiding it away in the library of the Duke of Devonshire. When the old duke died, his son allowed the British Museum to make a careful examination of the volume. The marginalia were clearly forged, and all evidence pointed to Collier as the perpetrator.

  Peter now held a copy of Collier’s notorious book, lushly rebound in green morocco. In a corner of the inside back cover was a small stamp in the shape of a butterfly—the binder’s mark. On the front endpaper was the familiar E.H. monogram and something that cast the g
reatest doubt yet on the marginalia in the Pandosto. At the top of the page, in an uneven script, was the inscription, JOHN PAYNE COLLIER TO PHILLIP GARDNER, 1877. Collier, the notorious forger of Shakespearean marginalia, had known Phillip Gardner, Peter’s most likely candidate for the painter B.B. and onetime owner of the Pandosto. Was the Pandosto another forgery by Collier, hidden among Gardner’s documents as he had hidden the Second Folio in the Duke of Devonshire’s library? Did Collier never “discover” the Pandosto because he had, long before 1877, been unmasked as a forger?

  Peter still hoped the Pandosto might be authentic, but he had already begun to adjust his expectations. Discovering an unrecorded Shakespeare forgery by Collier, especially one of this audacity, would make a small ripple in the pond of Shakespeare studies, rather than the tsunami that the marginalia would cause if genuine, but it would be a discovery nonetheless, worthy of an article in a scholarly journal. The book might still attract spirited bidding, especially if it was, in fact, a complete first edition. Even without the priceless Shakespearean marginalia it would be a unique copy of an important book.

  The collection of books on Shakespeare forgeries formerly of Evenlode House, and presumably most recently of Evenlode Manor, numbered ten. The final three titles were the books that had unmasked Collier and revealed his forgeries. Peter carried all ten books in a neat stack to the front room and set them on the counter.

  “Ah, come back then, have you?” said the shopkeeper.

  Peter kept his head down as he pulled out his checkbook. “Yes, I have a new customer who’s interested in literary forgery and I remembered seeing these. I’ll take the lot.”

  “Yes, quite a nice little collection that is. Funny couple brought it in about two months ago. Not exactly literary types. But I don’t imagine they’re stolen. Titles are a bit obscure for a book thief.”