Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  O’Hill stood, as if to give Fallon the full impact of his height in the little space. “Why do I have the feeling that this is some kind of interrogation?”

  “Relax,” said Fallon. “I’m trying to find a commonplace book, too. And I’m hoping that those lines of iambic pentameter in John Wedge’s diary might help.”

  “‘Man is but a speck of dust,’ et cetera, et cetera?” O’Hill was here-and-gone with the smile again, and he was sitting, and his feet were back on the desk, and his heels were clicking. “I haven’t got the foggiest idea where that came from or what it means.”

  Altogether much too cool, thought Peter. Maybe he could melt it. “One more question.”

  “What?”

  “Do you like to fish?” Fallon watched for some flicker on O’Hill’s face.

  “What?”

  “Fish? I hear that Ridley Royce invited you to go fishing.”

  And O’Hill’s feet stopped tapping. “Where would you hear that?”

  “Ridley and I talked a lot.”

  And the feet started tapping again. “I never baited a hook in my life.” O’Hill looked at his watch. “I have a student coming in two minutes. I think we’re done.”

  For now, thought Peter Fallon as he rode the elevator.

  From the steps of Widener, Peter looked across the Yard. The space before him was called Tercentenary Theater, the outdoor arena formed by Widener on the south, Memorial Church on the north, Sever on the east, and University Hall on the west. In 1936, they had held the Tercentenary celebrations here, hence the name.

  It could have been called Masterpiece Theater, too. There were masterpieces everywhere, and one of them was moving. She wasn’t moving fast. She had just walked past University Hall and was coming toward the steps of Widener. She had one hand in the crook of her granddaughter’s arm and the other wrapped around her cane. And she was older than Widener itself.

  Peter Fallon bounded down the steps, and he heard her say, “There’s that boy.”

  “Katherine! Nobody’s called me a boy in a long time.”

  “You’ll always be a boy to me, coming to my door, asking to see the papers of old Horace Taylor Pratt.”

  “And what fun that turned into,” said Evangeline.

  “Oh, be quiet, you,” said Katherine, a strong voice rising from a frail body. “Peter was the best young man you ever met. It’s a shame you didn’t stay together.”

  Peter and Evangeline glanced at each other. But no regrets. That had always been the rule, whether they were married to other people or not.

  “Let’s go to lunch,” said Peter.

  “No,” said Katherine. “Let’s stand here for a bit and soak it up.”

  “You must remember a lot about Harvard Yard,” said Evangeline.

  “I remember when the library looked like a Gothic church with towers and arched windows—”

  “Gore Hall?” asked Evangeline.

  “Yes . . . yes . . . ,” she said with a touch of annoyance. “Stop acting as though my memory were fading and you had to prod it along.”

  “Yeah,” said Peter. “Sharp as a tack.”

  “Indeed I am.” Katherine started to walk. “Now, what was I saying? Oh, yes, back in the day, I remember when there was no Widener Library . . . why, I can remember meeting Harry Elkins Widener himself on the Titanic. . . . The library was finished by the time I got to Radcliffe . . . of course, Radcliffe girls didn’t come into the Yard much. They didn’t even let us into the classrooms . . . into their daydreams maybe, but . . .”

  Soon they were seated in the oak-and-crimson embrace of the Faculty Club dining room, and Katherine was still talking. “I never thought I’d live to see this . . . women as well as men. Are they all on the faculty?”

  “I’m sure some of them are,” said Evangeline.

  “Times change,” said Peter.

  “What brain power . . . what brilliance. Now”—Katherine took a sip of Chablis, leveled her gaze at Fallon—“you didn’t invite an old grandmother to lunch just to look at another pretty face. What are you after?”

  Fallon laughed. “What do you know about Ridley Wedge Royce?”

  “You mean the one who fell off the boat?” Katherine looked down at her meal, picked a bit at her salad. “I . . . I don’t know . . .”

  Was she wandering? Peter looked at Evangeline, who said, “Grandmother—”

  Katherine’s head snapped up. “I told you about questions, dear. I was just trying to sort things out. The first Wedge I knew was Victor . . . met him on a boat. The Titanic. Widener, too. That might be a little early—”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “Did Ridley Royce ever try to contact you . . . or anybody else?”

  “No . . . why would they?”

  Evangeline said, “Grandmother, as I told you, Peter hasn’t grown up much in twenty years. He’s still chasing treasures.”

  “And he finds them once in a while, from what I hear.” Katherine took another sip of her wine. Her hand did not shake, though the ancient skin hung from it in pliable folds. “As for not growing up, I’d say that makes him a lucky man.”

  Just then, Peter’s cell phone rang in his pocket. Half a dozen heads turned.

  Peter excused himself and stepped outside.

  It was Danny. “You wanted to know when we meet the owner of the Bleen House. Today, two-thirty. And Orson says this is one giant good news/bad news joke.”

  “Which do I want first?”

  “The good news: this is a beautiful property. The bad news: the house was built on the foundation of its predecessor, which burned to the ground in 1754.”

  After lunch, Fallon drove out the Boston Post Road and turned on Route 126 for Sudbury, as he had a few nights earlier. In daylight, he noted the small graveyard where the village of Sudbury had once been. He passed the Wayland Golf Club, where you could slice drives into a marsh that once had fed Colonial cattle. Crossing the Sudbury River, he imagined this world as it would have looked to Isaac Wedge, a place of cleared fields and few trees. Now Isaac’s house and the neighboring Haynes garrison were dents in the ground grown over with trees and shrubs.

  He didn’t expect that too many people thought about the world the way he did. To him, the past had once been the present . . . and the future. And if you looked at it like that, not only did it keep the past alive, it made the present more comprehensible and gave contour to the future’s flat horizon.

  The Bleen-Currier-Whitney House was another mile up the road, just before the center of Sudbury. In the daylight, it looked smaller, less dramatic.

  Danny Fallon’s van was parked next to a Ford Navigator.

  Danny was in the foyer, talking with a young guy in a camel-hair sport coat and slicked-back hair, who was giving orders . . . talking fast, not listening, not even looking, so he didn’t notice Danny Fallon not listening right back. Danny was looking . . . at the guy’s wife. She was straightening up the living room while their baby napped on the sofa.

  The guy’s name was Shipley, and he was going on about Internet connections, extra outlets, and how he didn’t care what they ripped out, because none of it was worth saving.

  Finally he took a breath, and Danny presented him with a copy of the contract. “Signed, sealed, and delivered. This lets us begin rehabilitation. We reserve the right to salvage and resell any material removed based on architectural plans, and—”

  “Agreed,” said Shipley. “All agreed a month ago.”

  “Right,” said Danny, “but I like to go over things on the day the job starts. We’ll be using steel lallys and steel carrying beams downstairs—”

  “Just get it done fast and be clean. My wife and baby can’t—” Shipley noticed Peter Fallon, looked him over, from tasseled loafers to blue blazer, and said, “I assume that this is not your crew.”

  “I’m the expert on antiques,” said Peter. “Your house is one marvelous antique.”

  “Thanks.” Shipley sounded unconvinced and unimpressed.

 
“I’m also the expert on competitors in the business,” said Peter. “Since our contract was signed, have you been approached by anyone who offered to buy doors or old fixtures or anything like that?”

  “Are you a lawyer, too?” said Shipley. “That’s a lawyer question.”

  “No,” said Peter pleasantly. “We just like to know who the competition is.”

  “Well, no one has approached us,” said Shipley.

  “We did have a prowler a few nights ago,” said his young wife, coming into the foyer. “But Rufus started barking. He’s our dog. He’s outside.”

  “You thought we had a prowler,” said her husband.

  “I put the light on and looked out. I saw someone sneaking out of the barn.”

  This intrigued Peter more than it did the husband. “Did you call the police?”

  “We made a report, but we couldn’t give them much,” she said. “We moved out here because we wanted to get away from that sort of thing.”

  Shipley looked at his watch. Time for him to get back to business.

  Peter turned to his brother. “Did you ask the Shipleys about the barn?”

  “Tear it down. . . . Haul it off. . . . It’s in the contract,” said the husband as he hurried out and climbed into his Navigator and drove off.

  “He’s under a lot of pressure just now,” said his wife with a wan smile.

  “We all are,” said Peter. “Now, if you’ll excuse us . . .” He and Danny went out into the backyard.

  “The guy wants a real garage,” said Danny, looking up at the barn. “He has a permit for a thirty-foot addition that reaches from the house to the garage, on the footprint of the barn.”

  Peter looked up at the ancient structure, which still stood foursquare and solid. “Does he know how valuable old New England barns are?”

  “I don’t think so. But the town gave him a permit, so . . .”

  Peter looked at the barn, then at the house, then at the barn again. “Orson said the house burned in 1754. Did he find anything out about the barn?”

  “No. He thinks it’s original.”

  “Take it down, piece by piece, and number the pieces,” said Peter. “I think we can find a buyer. One of those New York City lawyers who buys a weekend house in Columbia County. They’ll pay plenty for a picturesque barn. But be careful. There may be something hidden there that’s worth more money than the barn.”

  “Peter, it’s just rough-framed board.”

  Fallon went inside and looked up into the rafters. “It’s post-and-beam framing.”

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “I see it.”

  “You never know what you might find under some post or beam. But be fast, because if there are prowlers around here, they may be after something we’re after.”

  It was late the next afternoon that Peter got the call from his brother. They had found an old bottle of ink under one of the beam notches. “We think there’s something else stuffed in there, too. I’ll let you know once we lift the beam off.”

  By eight o’clock, the book was in the back room at Fallon Salvage and Restoration.

  Danny and his son were watching the outside doors. They hadn’t seen Jackie Pucks in a few days, but now that they had the book, they were taking precautions.

  Peter and Orson went into the machine shop, which also served as their workshop, and put on white gloves to protect the pages from the oil on their fingers, as well as surgical masks to protect from the blue mold growing on the binding and page tops.

  “This mold will cost a bundle to clean,” said Peter.

  “Let’s see if there’s anything here worth preserving before we worry about that.”

  Orson clicked on a lamp, opened the book, and then took a pair of long tweezers to separate the endpaper from the first page.

  The mold spores puffed in the light, then settled back onto the table.

  “Make sure you change your clothes before you go back to the office,” Orson reminded Peter. “One spore could ruin—”

  “I know the drill,” said Peter. They’d done this with old books dozens of times. He was focused on a dirty little water-stained volume that might answer the Ridley Riddles.

  On the first page were the handwritten words Ex Libris: Benjamin Wedge.

  “Quality ink,” said Orson. “Didn’t run or smudge.”

  They turned the page with the tweezers.

  “Good paper, too,” said Peter.

  “Amazing the mice didn’t get it,” said Orson.

  On August 20, 1722, was the entry from the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was God. Followed by Benjamin’s comment: We do well to remember this. For words of all sorts can express God, not only the words that man says are God’s.

  “I think,” said Orson, “that we are in the presence of a rebel.”

  There was not another entry until the middle of September.

  “A rebel,” said Peter, “but not a very serious student. He didn’t seem to be reading much in August.”

  Orson read the next quote: “‘I am that merry wanderer of the night / I jest to Oberon, and make him smile.’ One thing is for certain. We’re in the presence of a very brave young man. That’s a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A line for Puck.”

  “Puck the fairy?”

  “The son of a witch-trial judge showed great bravery to be quoting Shakespeare,” said Orson. “Especially a Shakespearean fairy.”

  Peter flipped ahead. “He quotes kings and lovers and clowns, too.”

  Orson was reading over Peter’s shoulder. “He must have worn out the spine of that 1709 Shakespeare in the Harvard library.”

  The lines were all rendered as blank verse, carefully entered and spaced, page after page. “‘All the world’s a stage’ . . . ‘Once more into the breach, dear friends’ . . . ‘What a piece of work is man’ . . . Shakespeare . . . Shakespeare . . . Shakespeare . . .”

  Then Peter flipped to the last few entries. And there was a passage of prose, right next to September 12, 1723:

  I break off writing. I have been rusticated to Reverend Bleen’s. I go for the sake of my father. But I go, too, for the sake of the truth. If I carry out my sentence, I resolve to come back and commit my transgressions even more openly. My brother may study to be a minister and tell Bible stories for the betterment of man. Why may I not study to be an actor and tell stories that do the same?

  On the next page was a passage expressing Benjamin’s yearning for a play, for a glimpse of the far towers of Araby or an insight into the human heart. Then there was a poem. Orson read it aloud:

  “In Harvard Hall, the play is kept, all hidden from the world.

  ’Tis written in the Bard’s own hand, so every word’s a pearl.

  Will makes us laugh at masquerade, at love, at lies, and fun.

  And when ’tis done, and all songs sung,

  We cry, ‘Love’s Labours Won.’”

  After a moment, Peter said, “Wasn’t it Love’s Labours Lost?”

  “It was,” whispered Orson.

  After a longer moment, Peter said, “So . . . a lost play?”

  “Written in the Bard’s own hand.”

  After an even longer moment, Orson said, “Twenty million?”

  Without another moment’s hesitation, Peter said, “Thirty.”

  “If it’s really a lost play.”

  “Maybe I should ask an expert.”

  Professor Tom Benedict whispered, “Love’s Labours Won.”

  It was eight-thirty the next morning. Benedict sat in his Barker Center office and sipped from the cup of Starbucks Peter had brought him.

  Peter took the cover off his coffee, a small physical thing to calm himself. “I thought it was Love’s Labours Lost.”

  “Actually,” said Benedict, “we think it was both.”

  “Both?”

  “There’s a book,” said Benedict, “by an Englishman named Francis Meres. Wits Treasury, published in 1598. It compares
the English poets with the Romans. Meres writes that young Will Shakespeare is as good as Plautus. Then he lists some of Shakespeare’s plays, including Love’s Labours, both Lost and Won.”

  “So you’re saying that Love’s Labours Won . . . is lost?”

  “It’s one of two or three plays that didn’t survive to the First Folio.”

  “Why?”

  “Fire, flood, famine . . . maybe it was a flop. Who knows? One thing is certain. Ridley knew that the first man in four centuries to produce it would make a fortune.”

  “Produce it? How about own it?” said Peter. “There are only seven Shakespeare signatures known to exist. If another one—just a signature—came on the market, it would be worth two million. A whole play could be—”

  “Priceless.” Benedict leaned across his desk. “Peter, if we had a handwritten draft of a Shakespeare play, there’s no end to all we could learn . . . how he worked, how he thought, who he was. Why, we could solve the authorship question once and for all.”

  “And the scholar who did the editing would never be forgotten.”

  “Neither would the man who found it.”

  Peter looked into his coffee cup. “I think the caffeine is getting to us.”

  “Peter, we’re all like Ridley. We all dream of doing one great thing.”

  “There’s one bad thing that bothers me. That business about the book burning in Harvard Yard. Could the Mathers have been burning a play?”

  “Look at the context of Benjamin’s poem. It suggests the play was being read in 1723. It isn’t the Mathers’ fire I’d be worried about. It’s the fire in 1764. Go over to the archives, look at the list of John Harvard’s books, and see which ones survived.”

  This was why he loved his work.

  It was possible that he was onto one of the great intellectual discoveries of the age. It was also possible he was heading toward a dead end. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want to find out that Ridley had been killed for nothing, which would be worse than if he died taking a piss. And he didn’t want to discover that he’d been wasting his time, because one of the things he’d learned was that time grew more precious every day.