“Good gracious me, yes,” said Bohun. “Of course, I remember now. The house was burned to a shell. And the Shermans with it.”
“He was in bed. They doubt if he ever woke up. She was in the dining room, what was left of her, when they got the fire out. At some stage in the proceedings I must have been found by the firemen, or the police, and packed off to hospital. Anyway, I had plenty of time to think things out, and I said that I had been in my bedroom, but not undressed, when the fire caught me. It was too late for the stairs, so I dropped from my bedroom window. Which happened to be just above where they found me. Nobody questioned my story. The fire had obviously started in the library and, as Mrs. Sherman was the only one downstairs, it was assumed that she had started it, by accident, when putting the lamps out. The insurance company paid up, and the cousins got what was left after the mortgages had been paid off.”
“But,” said Bohun, in a rather desperate voice, “didn’t you—did you—did anyone—I mean, was there nothing left of the library?”
“Not a scrap,” said Mr. Tucker cheerfully. “The brigade said it was one of the fiercest fires they had seen. An absolute furnace. The old woodwork burned like tinder.”
“‘Not a wrack’,” said Bohun. “‘Leave not a wrack behind.’ ‘Such stuff as dreams are made of.’”
He said all this to himself, as he walked slowly along the north side of the Common. He was trying to believe something.
To believe that it was possible that the one, complete, lost play of William Shakespeare, the one that all scholars know about but none had been able to find, the one that fear of the Queen had confined to a single version in the poet’s own hand, that even after the Queen’s death could not be put on any stage while the Leicester faction had power to stop it, the original of Kenilworth and a dozen stories and legends beside, the tragedy of Amy Robsart; lost to sight after Shakespeare’s death, lighted on and transcribed by that eccentric but knowledgeable bibliophile, ‘Mercy’ Martensen, standing unremarked on the Wapentake library shelves through five generations of port-drinking, pheasant-shooting Martensens; that this unimaginable treasure, as rich as Antony, more lurid than Hamlet, part of the birthright of the civilised world, had been revealed at the last to Mr. Tucker, who had read it carefully, through one long autumn evening, and had found it a good yarn, and nicely expressed.
Bohun looked back at the front of Mr. Tucker’s house, winking in the sun; at the neat lawn and at the plaster dwarf beside the plaster mushroom.
“What Time has swallowed comes not forth again.”
He shook his head angrily and jumped on the bus that would take him back to Lincoln’s Inn.
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