The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession

by Charlie Lovett

  “I guess we start reading gravestones,” he said.

  Peter stepped toward the largest of the three standing tombs and was just about to read the inscription when a loud scraping noise from the back of the chapel was followed by a sickening thud.

  “The door!” cried Liz, running past Peter, who followed her. The heavy wooden door, which they had left ajar, was now firmly shut. “There wasn’t much wind tonight,” said Liz.

  “The wind couldn’t have moved this door anyway,” said Peter. He tried to turn the iron ring but it would not move, nor did the door budge when they pulled on it. Leaning against the door of what was now, effectively, their prison cell, the two said nothing for a minute. Peter expected to feel the onset of a panic attack, and even slipped his hand into his pocket to feel the bag of pills nestled there, but instead he felt strangely calm. More calm than he had since Sykes’s murder.

  “It will take them a while to get the police here this time of night,” he said. “We’d better get to work.”

  Kingham, 1878

  Phillip dipped his quill into a pot of ink he had mixed from an old recipe in the ragged leather notebook that lay open on his table. The pen glided easily over the paper as he followed the contours of the script propped in front of him. Forgery, as it turned out, was a job for which Phillip Gardner was uniquely suited. For his entire career as an artist he had been accused of being derivative and unoriginal—little better than a copyist. But as a copyist he not only excelled, he was a master. Marks on a page seemed to flow directly through his eyes and out the tip of his pen. And with guidance from the notebook, he had solved the problems of obtaining pens, paper, parchment, and ink from the period of whatever document he happened to be forging. This morning it was a letter from Lord Nelson to his mistress, Lady Emma Hamilton.

  The light from his candles glowed steadily—there was no air moving in this forgotten chamber, and Phillip had discovered that candlelight was sufficient for his work. As an artist he had occupied a wide room at the top of the house with windows facing in three directions. An artist requires light, but a forger is more in need of secrecy, and in the gloomy chamber Phillip had honed his craft.

  It had been nearly a year since Phillip had received the blackmail letter from Reginald Alderson threatening to reveal both his mistress and his bastard child to Mrs. Gardner. Phillip had lain awake all that night, wondering what to do. He seemed to be caught between two unacceptable options—handing his collection over to his family’s worst enemy, or losing Mrs. Gardner, and with her the financial ability to maintain Evenlode House. Either option would make him reviled in the annals of the Gardner family. Not until the predawn light pressed its way through the mist and into his window did Phillip consider a possible solution. If he was no better than a copyist, as the elitist establishment of the Royal Academy claimed, then why should he not use that talent as a way out of this predicament?

  Handbooks on forgery were not easy to come by, but Phillip had read about the Shakespearean forgery of John Payne Collier years ago. Collier had eventually been unmasked by experts, but Reginald Alderson was hardly an expert. So Phillip had presented himself to Collier as a sympathetic scholar working on a history of nineteenth-century forgeries.

  “I’m sure you were just the victim of someone else’s deceit,” Phillip had said to the aging Collier. “But I thought perhaps you might provide me with some insights into the world of forgery.” His insincere flattery had netted much more than insights. Collier had presented Phillip with several of his books and, more important, with several minutes alone in his study while he went out to wash the tea things. In a lower desk drawer Phillip had discovered an old leather-bound notebook filled with notes on forgery techniques—how to make period writing instruments, obtain old paper and parchment, mix ink from different periods, and make new documents look old. It had been a simple matter to abscond with this volume. Whether it was written by Collier or someone else he neither knew nor cared; the important thing was that it worked.

  —

  Benjamin Mayhew sat in a corner of the drawing room of an exclusive club with a cigar in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other. His host, William Henry Smith, had been holding forth for some time now on his theory that Francis Bacon wrote the works of William Shakespeare—a theory to which he had given no public voice in many years but which, when prodded by Benjamin, he was happy to explicate. On the shelf of Benjamin’s office, barely a mile distant, stood a book that could shatter Smith’s theory. Smith was not only one of Benjamin’s oldest clients, he was by far the most highly placed. Benjamin had come to enjoy his occasional evenings as a guest in a club he could never hope to join on his own merits. As a servant refilled his brandy snifter, he thought he might do more than just hide the Pandosto to protect the reputation of his old friend.

  —

  “Did you ever catch up with Mr. Collier?” Benjamin asked Phillip Gardner as the two sat in the room above Benjamin’s bookshop.

  “I did,” said Gardner. “Interesting old man. He gave me copies of some of his books for my collection. Of course I told him I believed he was just an innocent victim. I think he was senile enough to believe me.”

  “Probably believes it himself,” said Benjamin. “Still, he was a brilliant man in his day.”

  “You think forgery is brilliant?” said Gardner.

  “It’s an art form, isn’t it?”

  “If you can call fraud an art form,” said Gardner.

  “What if I told you,” said Benjamin, “that one of these documents is a forgery?” He indicated with a sweep of his hand four items spread across the table—items that Benjamin had gone to great pains to obtain in order to pose this question to Gardner. There were two parchment court documents from the fifteenth century and two letters from the eighteenth. None of them concerned anyone of importance, thus Benjamin could trust that Gardner would look at them without an acquisitive eye, a condition that, he knew all too well, could lead to blindness.

  Gardner examined the documents for several minutes, holding each one up to the light at various angles before laying it down and picking up the next. Finally he picked up a letter dated 1756, ran a finger across the surface of the paper, and almost immediately produced a short snort.

  “Well, it’s clearly this one,” he said. “And I must say it’s a pretty poor job.”

  “What makes you say that?” said Benjamin, convinced already that his suspicions about Gardner were correct.

  “Feel the way the pen has scraped the paper,” said Gardner. “That doesn’t happen with a quill. This was written with a metal-nib pen and those weren’t mass-produced until the eighteen twenties. It’s an ordinary household letter, so I think you can safely assume it would have been written with something that was widely available, and in seventeen fifty-six metal-nib pens were anything but.” Gardner tossed the letter back on the table dismissively.

  “You sound like an expert,” said Benjamin.

  “As I told you, I’ve been collecting books on forgery. One has to protect oneself, you know.”

  “Yes, but books on forgery can’t show you what paper feels like when it’s been written on with a metal nib,” said Benjamin. “But don’t worry, your secret is safe with me.”

  “What secret?”

  “There are only two sorts of people who could have detected this forgery so quickly,” said Benjamin, holding the letter up. “Someone with extensive experience in the field of forensic detection or an experienced forger. You are not the former; I can only assume you are the latter.”

  “Are you accusing me of being a forger?” said Gardner.

  “I wouldn’t call it an accusation exactly,” said Benjamin, “more of a compliment.” Ever since the day when Reginald Alderson had first failed to bid against Phillip Gardner, Benjamin had suspected something odd was going on. Gardner’s sudden interest in forgery had further aroused his suspicion. The only explanation
he could imagine was that Gardner was passing off forged copies of documents to Alderson—for what reason he could not imagine.

  “See here,” said Gardner. “What are you playing at? Are you the one who told Alderson about Isabel?”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Benjamin, who could see no connection between the young American whose letters he had been asked to hold for Gardner and the present conversation about forgery.

  “He’s blackmailing me, you know,” said Gardner angrily. “Reginald Alderson’s threatened to tell Mrs. Gardner. I need hardly tell you that if she found out, you would lose a very good customer.”

  “My dear fellow,” said Benjamin, smiling. “I’ve no intention of telling Mrs. Gardner anything. And frankly I had forgotten all about your young female friend. I’m simply in the market for a good forger—a better forger than the man who wrote the letter you so quickly unmasked.”

  “I see,” said Gardner, calming down. He picked up the forged letter from the table and chuckled quietly before wadding it up and tossing it onto the fire. “In that case,” he said, “you’ve come to the right man. It just so happens that I am a superb forger.”

  Ridgefield, 1988

  Within a few months of their return from the honeymoon, Peter had agreed with Amanda’s proposal that, so long as they lived modestly, they could spend some of what she delicately referred to as her “independent income.” His business was growing slowly, and Amanda was beginning to get work as an interior decorator, but a little extra income meant that after a year in an apartment they could move into a small house in an older neighborhood not far from campus. The house needed work, and Peter spent his weekends learning how to scrape paint, refinish floors, and hang drywall. “It’s like binding a book,” he said to Amanda one day when he came in for lunch covered with paint. “Only bigger.” The summer before they bought the house they had traveled to England again. It was the first of what would become semiannual book-buying trips. They flew economy class and stayed in bed-and-breakfasts where the bathroom was usually down the hall. Amanda never complained.

  —

  In the spring of 1993, when Peter saw that their next trip to England would coincide with their fifth anniversary, he thought maybe the time was right to travel a little less frugally.

  “You’ve got some new clients,” he said to Amanda in bed one night, “and so do I. Why don’t we stay in hotels this time?”

  “I kind of like those little places in the country,” said Amanda, “but we should definitely spend our anniversary night at The Ritz.” And so they had. Peter had forgotten how good those sheets felt.

  A week later, wandering the Cotswolds in search of bookshops, Peter and Amanda happened upon the village of Kingham and decided to have a picnic lunch on the village green.

  “It’s just a perfect village, isn’t it?” said Amanda, as they lounged in the grass after lunch.

  “It’s peaceful,” said Peter. “We should stay here a couple of days.”

  “Do you think there’s any place to stay?” said Amanda.

  And so they had wandered around the village looking for accommodation and had found a FOR SALE sign in front of a terraced cottage. Afterward they couldn’t remember who had first suggested it, but standing in the cool May breeze in front of that empty cottage they suddenly saw themselves inside.

  “It needs work,” said Peter.

  “We come to England all the time,” said Amanda. “It would be nice to have a home base.”

  “It would,” said Peter. And he had an intense vision of a crackling fire in the grate, a cup of tea in his hand, and Amanda reading a good book on a damp winter day. It was as seductive as anything he had ever imagined.

  “Why not?” said Amanda. “We can afford it.”

  “You can afford it,” said Peter.

  “I haven’t given you an anniversary present yet,” said Amanda.

  And without further discussion it had been decided. They hadn’t set foot in the cottage, they had been in Kingham for a little over an hour, but it felt right. Three months later Peter and Amanda owned a cottage in England; two months after that the slow process of renovation began.

  —

  “Thank you,” said Peter to Amanda as they lay in their bed in Ridgefield on the night the sale became final.

  “For what?” said Amanda.

  “For the cottage,” said Peter.

  “You’re welcome,” said Amanda, spooning herself around him.

  “It makes me feel like a real bookseller, to have a cottage in England.”

  “Do all booksellers have cottages in England?” said Amanda.

  “Actually I don’t know any who do,” said Peter, “but it lends a . . . I don’t know, a legitimacy to my putting myself out there as an expert on English books.”

  “Darling, you are an expert on English books,” said Amanda.

  “It’s going to be great, isn’t it?” said Peter.

  “It’ll take some work,” said Amanda, “but yes.”

  “How long do you think the renovations will take?”

  “Well, if British contractors are anything like the ones here, I’d be surprised if it takes less than a year,” said Amanda. “Maybe next year we can go for Christmas.”

  “That sounds nice,” said Peter. Amanda was running her hand up and down his chest and he lay quietly for several minutes, enjoying the slow arousal that came with the promise of lovemaking.

  “These sheets seem awfully soft,” she murmured, as Peter moved his hand up her side and across her breast.

  “I was hoping you’d notice,” said Peter. “They’re a little present for you. They’re eight hundred thread count.”

  Kingham, Tuesday, February 21, 1995

  Peter and Liz had been trapped in the Gardner chapel for nearly an hour and were no closer to discovering any secrets than they had been when the door slammed shut on them. They had examined every memorial on the walls as well as the three stone effigies, but other than tracing the Gardner family tree from the sixteenth century they had accomplished nothing. They had found no sign of Phillip Gardner.

  They were sitting on the cold stone floor, their backs against the immovable door when Peter saw, as he played the flashlight around the chapel’s interior, a discernable pattern in the scratches on parts of the floor.

  “I think there are graves in the floor,” he said, crawling forward and running his fingers along the fine lines.

  “I can’t tell what it says,” said Liz, “the words are almost worn away.”

  “I doubt our friend Phillip has been dead long enough for his stone to be worn so smooth,” said Peter.

  “Here’s another one,” said Liz, and soon they were crisscrossing the chapel on their hands and knees, occasionally making out part of a name or date. They were in front of the chancel steps, Peter holding his flashlight close to a stone trying to read what came after the date 1705, when Liz dropped the lug wrench just outside the light’s beam and the two froze as they heard a hollow clonk, which seemed to echo below them.

  “What was that?” said Peter.

  “Sorry, I dropped the . . .”

  “Do it again,” said Peter.

  Liz picked up the wrench and dropped it onto the stone and again the eerie sound of hollowness hung in the air for a second. “There’s something under there,” said Liz.

  “Or more to the point, there’s nothing under there,” said Peter. “Nothing solid at least. Let me see your wrench.”

  Liz handed him the lug wrench and he tried to fit the flat end into the floor at the edge of the stone, but the joints with the abutting stones were hairline—there was no room for the prying end of a lug wrench. “How are we going to get the stone up?” said Peter.

  “Give me the wrench,” said Liz.

  “It’s no use,” said Peter. “There’s no space for . . .â�
�� But before he could finish his sentence, Liz brought the wrench down hard in the center of the stone and a splintering, crashing sound echoed throughout the chapel. The stone shattered and the pieces fell away into darkness.

  “That worked,” said Liz.

  Peter and Liz knelt at the edge of a hole less than two feet square. The darkness seemed to devour the beam of Peter’s flashlight when he shone it into the hole, but he thought he glimpsed a floor far below.

  “I’ll go first,” said Peter.

  “Are you crazy?” said Liz. “You’ve no idea what’s down there.”

  “That’s why I’m going,” said Peter. He was rather surprised at his own courage—it was not a feeling he had experienced since he lost Amanda. He dropped his feet into the hole and gradually lowered the rest of his body, wriggling to squeeze through the narrow opening. He managed to maneuver his arms above his head and found himself holding on to the floor of the chapel with his fingertips, dangling in space. Above him he could still see the concerned face of Liz Sutcliffe illuminated by the glow of the flashlight, but just as his fingers began to ache, her face was replaced with Amanda’s, who blew him a kiss and whispered, “Trust me; let go.”

  Peter let his fingers slip from the stone and felt a rush of cold air as he plunged through the darkness and thudded onto a rough stone floor. He felt a sharp pain in his ankle as his legs buckled beneath him, but after lying in the darkness for a moment and panting, he stood up, feeling relatively undamaged.

  “Are you all right?” said Liz, her voice edged with panic. Peter looked up at the surprisingly small square of light in the ceiling, perhaps ten feet overhead, and saw Liz’s concerned face.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Toss me my bag and the flashlight and I’ll be able to see to help you down.”