The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession

by Charlie Lovett

  As he read the words of Miss Prickett’s letter again and again, his course of action gradually became clear. Gathering together a few papers and books, he left the house by the kitchen door and made one last trek to the lair in which he had plied his craft as a forger. As he was entering the chapel, Mrs. Gardner was stepping into the trap that would bear her to the railway station. They would never see each other again.

  —

  In the waning light of a short November day, Benjamin Mayhew strode down Piccadilly toward St. James’s Street and dinner with William Smith at his club. He had disposed of the Pandosto, and though he knew it could have brought him fame, it might equally have brought him ruin and notoriety—he had, after all, stolen the book to begin with. It was technically not even his book anymore; he had provided Phillip Gardner with a bill of sale.

  Only he and Gardner knew the truth about the Pandosto, and Benjamin thought perhaps he ought to write down the whole story of the book and what it really did reveal, just in case anything were to happen to him. If he did, he would of course contrive for the secret to be kept until after the death of William Smith.

  Thus preoccupied with his thoughts, Mayhew stepped off the curb into Haymarket imagining the surprise of some future scholar’s discovering that the famous Pandosto forgery was copied from a genuine relic. The image was strong enough in his mind to blot out the sound of approaching hooves, and it might rightly be said of Benjamin Mayhew that as he was struck down by the cab, he had no idea what had hit him.

  —

  As Benjamin Mayhew breathed his last on the stones of Haymarket, Phillip Gardner hoisted himself up through the hole in the floor of the family chapel, using the rope he had lowered into the darkness a few hours earlier. He had made his final preparations. He was proud of the way he had applied his artistic abilities to the job of carving an appropriate inscription on his tomb in the crypt. He had then sealed his collection of documents, along with his confession and letters from Isabel and Miss Prickett, in that vault. His tomb would remain otherwise empty. Let it be a monument to foolishness, he thought, an empty tribute to what happens to a man who places money over love, rivalry over integrity, forgery over reality.

  It had taken him only an hour to put the finishing touches on the Pandosto. At the bottom of the list of owners’ names, he made two additions. The first, he saw as an insurance policy. Should the Pandosto come to the attention of scholars, he wanted to direct them toward Mayhew, in hopes that the bookseller might admit that, but for Phillip’s lone addition, the marginalia were copied from Shakespeare’s own hand. So he added the inscription, “B. Mayhew for William H. Smith.” Under this, he wrote in pencil and in his own hand, “B.B. / E.H.” Though it would be meaningless to most people, to Reginald Alderson it would serve as a reminder of who had tricked whom.

  Phillip hoped Mayhew would forgive him for the change of plans, but he knew from experience that private anguish could be more painful than public humiliation, and he wanted Alderson to know the extent to which he had been duped. Alderson would have one night of joy, when he found the Pandosto on his library table; tomorrow morning that would all be shattered with the delivery of Phillip’s final letter. Should Alderson ever be foolish enough to reveal the Pandosto to the public, Smith would still get to have his laugh at the Stratfordians, but Phillip no longer cared about making Mayhew or Smith happy.

  —

  Before he made his surreptitious deliveries to Evenlode Manor, Phillip had returned to his only true loves—painting and Isabel. In only one hour he had created what he now knew to be his second masterpiece, and his only truly original work. He painted her as he remembered her best, brushing her hair before the mirror after they had made love. As he thought back on that glorious afternoon, it seemed to Phillip that that had been the only time in his life he had been truly happy. In summoning Isabel’s face once more and letting it flow from his memory through the brush and onto the paper, he felt, for the first and last time, what it meant to be an artist.

  For more than an hour after the paint was dry he stared at Isabel—the only face that had ever looked upon him with unconditional love, the face he had betrayed and banished.

  Even after he slipped the painting inside the book in which it would remain hidden in Alderson’s library, after he slid the false grave marker that hid the entrance to the crypt back into place, Phillip still saw that face. He hoped his painting might eventually see the light of day—not so he would be remembered, but so his blessed Isabel might once again smile upon some lucky soul years hence.

  The house was silent when he returned, the servants gone with their mistress, for they knew who paid their wages. Rain had just begun to fall as Phillip climbed from a window of the main house onto the top of a wall of the unfinished west wing. Three stories below, through the mist, he could see stacks of freshly quarried limestone—the final delivery of construction materials that had arrived just a few days earlier. Phillip wondered if Mrs. Gardner had paid the bill.

  Ridgefield, 1994

  Sitting in the waiting room at the hospital hour after hour while Amanda underwent a battery of tests, Peter felt more alone than ever. True, Sarah and Charlie Ridgefield were there, sitting together on the other side of the room, one of them occasionally standing and crossing to look out the window, but they did not speak—to each other or to Peter—and Peter felt that they blamed him in some way for whatever had happened to Amanda. He knew rationally that this could not be true, that the idea of speaking before hearing the doctor’s verdict was as abhorrent to them as it was to him, but reason was not likely to win a battle against emotion today, and as time slowed to a glacial pace, Peter wracked his memory for what he could have done to make Amanda sick. He could not even look at Sarah and Charlie and so did not see when Amanda’s mother stood up and walked across the room. She slipped onto the sofa next to Peter and took his hand in hers without speaking. He still could not look at her, but he felt hot tears on his cheek as his emotions finally admitted what his reason had known all along—he was not alone.

  Sarah’s gesture of inclusion finally gave Peter the strength to do more than simply wait. From a pay phone in the corridor he called Cynthia.

  “I’ll be right there,” Amanda’s friend had said, and there was such sympathy and support and shared agony in those few words that Peter began to cry again.

  “Would you do one thing for me first?” he said.

  “Anything,” said Cynthia.

  “Would you stop by the house and bring me something?”

  An hour later a doctor finally emerged to speak with them. “We’re looking over the results of her MRI,” he said. “We won’t know anything conclusive for a little longer.”

  “What do you know that’s not conclusive?” said Charlie Ridgefield. “What do you suspect? What’s likely?”

  “I’d rather not speculate until we get the results back,” the doctor said.

  “If you think you’re sparing our feelings by not telling us what you’re afraid of, you’re not,” said Charlie, a hint of anger creeping into his voice. “We can’t possibly be more afraid than we are right now.”

  “She’s had quite a bit of pain medication and sedatives,” said the doctor, “so she’s a bit groggy. But I think it would be okay if one of you came back to see her.”

  Sarah reached for her purse, but Charlie laid a hand on her shoulder. “It should be Peter,” he said, and Peter knew then that his father-in-law didn’t blame him, hadn’t been trying to shut him out.

  “Come with me,” said the doctor.

  She was beautiful, Peter thought when he saw his wife lying in the hospital bed. She had been so pale that morning when Charlie had carried her into the emergency room, but her color had returned, and though he knew she would say her hair was a mess, Peter didn’t care. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He sat beside her and it took a moment for her to focus on him and to whisper, “Peter,” and in those two syllables and in those eyes Peter saw i
t all—the girl sitting upright in the library reading room; the late-night talks in the snack bar; the tender lovemaking in the Devereaux Room; the trips to England, holding hands when the plane took off—in this beautiful woman he saw all that was good and right about his life.

  “You saved me, you know,” he said. “I never told you that before, but you saved me.”

  He was afraid she wouldn’t understand what he was talking about, but she smiled and whispered, “I know.” She slid a warm hand out from underneath the covers and said, “Hold my hand while I sleep.”

  Peter took her hand and watched her eyes close. Her breathing slowed and he leaned his head against her chest and listened to the sound of her heartbeat and prayed that the doctor would never come. He did not want to hear test results and a diagnosis and a survival rate, he wanted only to hold Amanda’s hand forever and listen to her heartbeat go on and on.

  —

  “We can’t make any promises about the surgery,” said Dr. Owen, “but there is some reason to be optimistic.” Peter was standing in a small consulting room with Sarah and Charlie and the neurosurgeon, who was pointing to a series of MRI images. They looked like modern art, was all Peter could think. Amanda would hate them.

  “With a tumor of this type, there are cases of complete recovery, but I have to warn you the five-year survival rate is only about ten percent.”

  “She’ll be in the ten percent,” said Charlie, pulling his wife into his embrace.

  “And of course there are risks of complications developing as a result of the surgery. Any time you cut into the brain you’re taking a chance.”

  For the second time in his life Peter steeled himself to deliver a diagnosis to Amanda, this time to tell her that she had brain cancer, that she would need to undergo several hours of surgery and several months of radiation, and that even then her chances of survival were not good. She was awake when he entered her room, looking more alert than she had on his last visit.

  “I have something for you,” he said. “Cynthia brought it.” He held out the copy of At the Back of the North Wind that he had bound for her eight years ago. Amanda always kept the book by her bedside, even when they traveled.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “I think you won me with this book.”

  “Hank says I never did as good a job on a binding as I did on that one.”

  “That’s because this one was bound with so much love, you know that, Peter.” She clutched the book to her breast and Peter bit hard on his tongue to keep from crying. She had always been the strong one, but now he knew he would have to be her pillar of strength and he wasn’t sure he was up to the job.

  “I’ve got some news from the doctor,” he said.

  —

  Peter stayed in Amanda’s room that night, sleeping fitfully in the chair by the bed. Deep in the night he felt her touching his hand and he sat forward to look into her eyes in the dim light.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Make love to me,” she said.

  “Are you crazy?” said Peter, stifling a laugh. “We’re in a hospital room.”

  “I know,” she said, pulling him toward her so hard that he had no choice but to rise out of his chair and lie on the edge of the bed. “But tomorrow they’re going to shave my head and cut a hole in my skull and then they’re going to spend six months shooting poison radiation at me, so I may not feel sexy for a while.”

  “But we can’t here,” said Peter, as she began to unbutton his shirt.

  She slipped her hands around his neck and drew him to her, kissing him long and deep. “And I’m scared,” she whispered into his ear. “I’m so scared and I need you inside me because when you’re making love to me everything else goes away.” And so Peter slipped under the covers with her and for an hour everything did go away and they were back on the floor of the Devereaux Room, crazy in love, giggly and hoping they wouldn’t get caught, and they cried when they came and neither could decide, as they lay in each other’s arms afterward, whether those had been tears of joy or love or fear or sadness or all those emotions together.

  —

  “It happened quickly,” the doctor told them, “when she was in the recovery room after the operation. She was still under the anesthetic. She didn’t feel a thing. Strokes are not an uncommon side effect with this type of condition. We did everything we could to revive her, but the patient expired.”

  Like a subscription to a magazine, thought Peter. The period during which I am allowed to be happy has expired.

  Peter walked through the next week in a daze. He may have spoken to Sarah and Charlie Ridgefield, to Cynthia and Amanda’s other friends who came to the visitation and the funeral, but if so, his body carried on these conversations without the consent or cooperation of his mind or his heart. Those parts of him were frozen—permanently frozen, he thought, and what was frozen could avoid facing the magnitude of the loss.

  At the burial, Peter feared that permafrost might start to thaw, as he lay on Amanda’s coffin a blue leather-bound book—her cherished copy of At the Back of the North Wind into which he had poured so much love. When he stood back up, Cynthia reached out for him, but he brushed her off and hurried down the hill to the waiting cars. Before anyone could catch up with him he locked himself in the back of a town car and gave the driver his home address. There he closed the curtains, unplugged the phone, and tried to find a way to live that didn’t involve . . . well, anything.

  There was no question of forgetting Amanda. Everything in the house reminded him of her—not just the furniture and the carpets and the colors of the walls, all of which she had picked out—but the glass from which she had drunk her daily orange juice, and the microwave popcorn she had bought for him to eat when they watched movies together. Amanda was everywhere, and she was nowhere.

  And then she started visiting him. At first she would just watch him as he read a book or poured cereal in a bowl, but soon she started talking. He rarely talked back, but he listened. And when she told him to please go see Dr. Strayer, he washed some clothes and stepped outside for the first time in nearly a month. He had lost twenty pounds, his skin was pale, and he squinted in the unfamiliar light of the sun, but he drove the three miles to keep the appointment that he had made with Dr. Strayer the previous day.

  Peter refused to use the word recovery—to say that he was beginning his recovery would be to admit that Amanda was gone. And so because Peter was not ready to take the steps necessary to deal with his grief, Dr. Strayer, who feared his patient might retreat back into his darkened house for good, made him a list. Ten things Peter needed to do to save his own life.

  Peter had taped the list to the refrigerator, but three months after Amanda’s death he still paid it little heed. His curtains stayed drawn, his phone remained unplugged, and he ventured out only to see Dr. Strayer and on late-night trips to the grocery. He had seen Sarah and Charlie only once since the funeral, when he had been summoned to a lawyer’s office to sign the papers relating to the distribution of Amanda’s estate. Despite their obvious concern he spoke to them curtly and left the office before the ink was dry. No one who saw the hollow man hurrying across the parking lot would have guessed that he had just inherited slightly over fourteen million dollars.

  Just after Labor Day, when undergraduates were settling back onto the Ridgefield campus, Peter went through the daily motions of opening his mail and discovered a bill from the contractor who had been renovating the cottage in England. “Final statement,” the invoice said. The work was complete. Leaving Ridgefield suddenly struck Peter as an obvious thing to do. Three days later he had packed up his reference books and arranged for them to be shipped to Oxfordshire, and a taxi was waiting outside to take him to the airport. He stood in the kitchen next to his suitcase and took one last look around before turning out the light. As the taxi honked impatiently, he glanced at the refrigerator and saw Dr. Strayer’s list. He ripped it off the door and stuffed it into his jacket pocket.
r />   Kingham, 1879

  As the rain streaked down the tall library windows, Reginald Alderson reread the extraordinary collection of marginalia in the copy of Pandosto that had appeared on his library table the previous evening. The parcel had not been posted; he assumed Phillip Gardner must have delivered it by hand, though he’d not had a chance to ask the butler about this. He shuddered to think that he was now the guardian of such a treasure, for he had read enough about Shakespeare to know how truly spectacular a document the Pandosto was. He had never imagined that his blackmailing of Gardner would be so fruitful.

  He was so distracted by the book, and its potential to make him the most famous collector in the land—the “Alderson Pandosto” the press would call it—that he did not notice a row of ten books on a lower shelf of his library that had not been there the previous day. He was just imagining delivering a lecture in a packed Egyptian Hall when the butler arrived with the morning post.

  Reginald was used to seeing the slanting script of Phillip Gardner on the parcels that contained documents from Gardner’s collection. Today’s packet was thick with what Reginald supposed were new treasures, and he slit open the envelope and withdrew the contents. When a dozen mediocre watercolors spilled out onto the table, Reginald felt a sense of foreboding. He picked up the letter on top of the pile of paintings and read. Gardner’s words brought a pain to his chest that did not abate when he began to breathe again. All thought of presenting his precious Pandosto to an adoring public evaporated. He was on the verge of dropping the worthless book into the fire when the butler returned, this time leading the local constable into the library.

  “Sorry to disturb you, sir,” said the constable, “but there’s been a death over at Evenlode House. Mr. Phillip Gardner.” Among his many responsibilities in the parish, Reginald Alderson had served for the past three years as coroner, a largely ceremonial post, as there had not in all that time been a single suspicious death in the parish.