The Book of the Lion

by Thomas Perry

  The Book of the Lion

  Thomas Perry

  Dominic Hallkyn played back the voicemail on his telephone while he took off his sport coat and hung it up to dry in the laundry room. The smell of rain on tweed was one that he knew some people might say was his smell, the smell of an English professor. The coats—tweed or finer-spun wool in the winter and seersucker or summer-weight fabrics in the late spring and early fall—were his work uniform, no different from a mechanic’s coveralls. He wore them to repel the skepticism of the young.

  The first couple of calls were routine: a girl in his undergraduate medieval lit course had been sick, so could she please hand her paper in tomorrow? Of course. He had plenty of others to deaden his soul until that one arrived. Meg Stanley, the Department Chair, wanted him to serve on a Ph.D. oral exam committee. Unfortunately, he would. Reading the frantically scribbled preliminary exam and then asking probing questions in the oral would be torment to him and the student, both of them joined in a ritual of distaste and humiliation, all of it designed to punish them both for their love of literature, but it was part of his job.

  The last call was not routine. “Professor Hallkyn. I know you are considered one of the two or three best living experts on medieval English literature.” In spite of Hallkyn’s contempt for academics who fancied themselves the best or the most famous, he was irritated at the “two or three.” The two were Hallkyn, and Bethune, who was at Harvard. Who did this man think was the third? So when he heard the next sentence, he was already in a bad humor. “I have The Book of the Lion. It’s written in a fine court hand on thin vellum, legible in its entirety. I will be in touch.”

  Hallkyn could feel his heart pounding in his chest, and yet he felt light-headed, as though he were being strangled. He realized after a moment that he had forgotten to breathe, and he placed both palms on the table to hold himself up while he corrected the oversight, taking a few deep breaths while he thought. Of course it was a hoax. Nobody could have The Book of the Lion.

  The book didn’t exist except as a reference in Chaucer’s Retraction at the end of The Parson’s Tale, where he listed all of his greatest works by name: “The Book of Troilus; also The Book of Fame; The Book of the Five and Twenty Ladies; The Book of the Duchesse; The Book of Seint Valentynes Day of the Parlement of Briddes; The Tales of Canterbury (thilke that sownen into synne); The Book of the Leoun; and many another book (if they were in my remembrance) and many a song and many a leccherous lay—that Crist for his grete mercy foryeve me the synne.”

  Those colleagues who took the retraction seriously had always amused Dominic Hallkyn. He couldn’t fathom how they could profess to know Chaucer and not notice that he had a wicked sense of irony. The Retraction wasn’t a confession. It was an advertisement.

  The thought brought him back to the tantalizing nature of what he had just heard. In his Retraction, Chaucer did not list everything he had written. He listed only masterworks. He listed only those poems that six centuries later still made up a fair portion of the reason that anyone cared about Middle English literature. He listed them in an order ascending to his sublime achievement, The Canterbury Tales. And then, after that, he listed one more work by name, and only one—The Book of the Lion.

  Chaucer, first of the big three of English— the one from whom Shakespeare learned his true trade, not plays but deep understanding of human beings, and from whom Milton learned to write poetic narrative—was the one who wrote when the language itself was still in its childhood and could be exercised by one writer to grow into its mature strength. And what if, contrary to what everyone had thought for over half a millennium, a copy of The Book of the Lion had survived?

  Dominic Hallkyn thought, and like any thinking man, he drank. He sat in his library on the leather couch near the 18th-century writing desk, staring past it at the wall of bookshelves. And because he was in a place that was the physical embodiment of his mind, his eyes knew where to focus. He looked at the fifth shelf, where Geoffrey Chaucer resided. There was the familiar Donaldson edition of 1975; the Blake edition including the corrections from the fragmentary Hengwrt Manuscript; the Fisher, with its generous supporting materials and critical essays. And a special purchase from his own graduate school days, the seven-volume Skeat edition of 1899. And because Hallkyn loved the twenty-three painted pictures, including the one of Chaucer the pilgrim, he kept the facsimile of the Ellesmere Manuscript at the end of the row.

  Hallkyn drank a single malt scotch that tasted to him like the breath of the British Isles, its rich peat and wet moss and damp air and time. He considered the slim likelihood that there was going to be a second chapter to this experience, and then he made a telephone call.

  The call was to the private number of a man named T.M. Spanner. Spanner’s personal number was sought-after, a number that powerful men carried in their wallets on small pieces of paper with no notations written beside it. Spanner’s wealth was old and hard to trace—it was reputed to have come originally from one of his ancestors inventing the tool that Americans perversely called a wrench, although its true name in English was spanner. But even when Hallkyn had met T.M. Spanner as an undergraduate at Yale, he was already the sort of man who stimulated curiosity. The imagination was always ready to supply speculation and wild stories.

  Hallkyn heard the answer, “T.M. Spanner,” and the voice impressed him again. He had an accent that retained a trace of the south, a slower Virginia tidewater cadence that had somehow survived the years of northeastern prep schools and universities. The voice conveyed the conviction that the man had the ownership papers in his back pocket to the ground beneath his feet, the air he breathed, and all the things he could see from where he stood.

  “T.M.,” said Hallkyn. “It’s Dominic.”

  “Herr Doktor Professor,” said Spanner. “It’s always a pleasure to hear your voice.”

  Hallkyn hoped that it was a pleasure. If so, it could only be because, unlike most people who called Spanner, Hallkyn was not in any business, and didn’t want Spanner’s advice, his help, or his endorsement. What he and Spanner always talked about was what had drawn them together thirty years ago—books. “You too, T.M. I hope I’m not bothering you.”

  “Not at all. I’m sitting at home looking at a television show. I hesitate to say watching, because that implies that I’m actually following along. I have the sound off and I’m gazing at a pretty moving picture of the Alps. What’s new with you, Dom?”

  “Until a few minutes ago, not much. I’ve got to tell you, I got a message on my phone that set off a lot of emotions.”

  “What? You’re not sick or something, are you?” There was genuine concern in Spanner’s voice.

  “No, nothing like that. This isn’t even personal. It’s intellectual. Literary and historical. A man who didn’t identify himself called and said he has The Book of the Lion.”

  “The Book of the Lion,” Spanner repeated. “The Retraction.”

  “Yes,” said Hallkyn. “That’s right. When Chaucer apologizes for the sin of writing his greatest works, it’s the last one in the list.”

  “Hold on a second, Dom. I think I see my old Canterbury Tales on a shelf right now. Hold on. It’s not more than fifty feet away.”

  Hallkyn heard the phone click on a hard surface. He was experiencing again who T.M. Spanner was. He was a man of the financial world, and that meant politics and manufacturing and trade and the shrewd application of power, but he had also studied literature with a sincere appreciation and humility. He was at once a man who could own a library where “only fifty feet away” was nearby, and a man who would own a library that size, and know where everything was. Hallkyn heard him pick up the phone again. Hallkyn said, “It’s at the end, after The Parso
n’s Tale.”

  “Got it,” said Spanner. “Oh, yes. ‘The Tales of Canterbury thilke that sownen into synne; The Book of the Leoun, and many another book … and many a song and many a leccherous lay.’ And The Book of the Lion has never been found, right?”

  “Right. This person who called me claims to have a copy on thin vellum in a fine court hand, legible throughout.”

  “Do you think it’s possible?” said Spanner.

  “I doubt it,” he said. Then he added, “But it’s happened before. People find things, incredible things.”

  “What is it that you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hallkyn.

  “That sounds a little disingenuous,” Spanner said. “You called an old friend who is probably also the richest man you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Hallkyn. “I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I want help of some kind, but I don’t know what I need yet. I haven’t known about this for more than a few minutes. I had to tell somebody, and this isn’t the kind of thing you can tell just anybody. I need an old friend who understands the problem to puzzle this out with me—one who has lived a different sort of life, who can probably smell a fraud coming better than I can. This man— this voice—called me, and said he had the book. Maybe he’s crazy or a hoaxer or a dupe. But maybe he has the most precious lost manuscript in history.”

  “You got this voice on a phone message?”

  “Yes. He said he had it, but not who he is, or where he is, or what he plans to do with it. Part of me wishes he’d call someone else— and maybe he already has. He might have called Gerald Bethune, and that pompous bastard is scratching his head now.” He paused. “I guess what I really wish is that this man really has the genuine ‘Book of the Leoun,’ in a fair court hand on the finest thin vellum, legible in its entirety. That’s what he says he has. And I hope he called me because he wants to know which institution I think he ought to donate it to.”

  Spanner said, “I take it that’s not what you believe is going to happen.”

  Dominic Hallkyn swirled his glass, and watched the amber liquid move around, staring into its deep glow. “Libraries and museums all over the world are full of things that people gave them,” he said. “I’ve seen great acts of generosity, not the least of them from you. I’ve also seen acts of selfishness and deceit that I would not at one time have imagined. I don’t know which this is.”

  “Or something in between?” said Spanner. “A simple sale?”

  “Yes. That too,” said Hallkyn. “Or an undergraduate prank. It might be fun to hire some old bar character to call your professor. For the price of a drink you could talk forever about how the mere mention of a long-lost Chaucer poem made the professor’s hands shake.”

  “Maybe,” Spanner said. “So let’s get practical. How should we handle this?”

  “We should think it through, so we’re prepared for the next stage before anything happens. We should expect to wait a long time for the next call, and then when it doesn’t come, to forget the whole thing. That way, we won’t be pining forever for something that was never possible.”

  “And if the call comes?” said Spanner.

  “Then we must be fully ready to guide events in the direction we want them to go.”

  And in what direction do we want to push?” Spanner asked.

  “Maybe I can talk him into giving it to a university, or to a trust, or to the British government, or to the Huntington Library in California. They have the Ellesmere manuscript.”

  “If he’s wealthy, he would be able to write the value of it off against his income for tax purposes,” Spanner said. “It might be worth more than he could get for it on the market.”

  “We could agree to have the manuscript called the Whatever-his-name-is manuscript of Chaucer’s Book of the Lion. Like the Ellesmere manuscript.”

  “Or the Elgin Marbles,” Spanner said. “But maybe he hasn’t got a hungry ego, and maybe he isn’t wealthy enough to care about tax breaks.”

  “We still have to come up with some way to get control of the manuscript. The last major work of Geoffrey Chaucer—what would that be worth in dollars? We have to be sure the manuscript doesn’t get to auction, or there will be a bidding war with a bunch of Oxford-educated Arab princes, three software companies, and an Australian billionaire or two. This would be like what happened in the art world—Van Goghs going for the price of a medium-sized company.”

  “You want me to offer to buy it.” Spanner said.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Hallkyn said. “But it’s too much to buy alone, even for you. What we should probably do is put together enough money for a pre-emptive bid. But I don’t want to offer him any money. I just think we should have it waiting, in reserve.”

  Spanner said, “That seems wise. Let’s come up with an estimate. What do we need? What do things like this go for?”

  “There is nothing like this. In 2001 a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio was sold at Christie’s for about six million dollars. But the First Folio is only a printed book. There are forty surviving copies, and hundreds of millions of reprints. The Book of the Lion is vellum— each sheet a sheepskin cured and hand-rubbed with stone to make it smooth, and then covered with calligraphy and paintings— one of a kind. A work of art.”

  “Okay, so what is the physical manuscript worth? What’s the most it could be worth?”

  “We’d have to see what the object looks like. In 1983, a group of Germans paid nearly twelve million dollars for a Romanesque gospel. It was beautiful. But nobody ever spent twelve million because he was wondering what a Bible was going to say, or six million because he didn’t know what was in Shakespeare.”

  “We need a number.”

  “I don’t know,” Hallkyn said. “Or maybe I’m afraid to think it through.”

  “Try.”

  “All right,” said Hallkyn. “Figure that the physical book is, in today’s dollars, worth at least five million. It’s probably not going to be as pretty as the Ellesmere, but it’s much rarer, because there are other manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. Assume this is the last major missing work of the first great writer in English, like finding the last living dinosaur there is or will ever be. Are you with me?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “Also, the contents of The Book of the Lion are utterly unknown. The first thing a responsible owner would do is publish three editions of it. First would be a facsimile; second, a popular reader’s edition; third, a scholarly edition with footnotes, a historical introduction, and a critical introduction. Possibly there would also be articles by major experts. We don’t know the length of the book. It could be just 1,300 lines of poetry, like The Book of the Duchess. But Troilus and Criseyde is over 8,000 lines, in five sections. If The Book of the Lion isn’t as good as the other works, it will still be of equal importance to scholars.”

  “I’m starting to see a way of recouping some of the price,” Spanner said. “The publishing rights might help.”

  “It probably wouldn’t be a crowd-pleaser,” said Hallkyn. “But it would sell to scholars in every English speaking country. The United States, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland—”

  “I’m familiar with the English-speaking countries.”

  “And it would keep selling modestly forever. Every student who studies Chaucer would read it. And not every student of English literature is from an English-speaking country. Two thirds of Germany and Switzerland speak English, eighty-five percent of Sweden and the Netherlands, twenty percent of India.”

  “All right,” said Spanner. “We can estimate that whoever owns the manuscript would be able to defray a tiny part of what he paid for it from sales.”

  “There might also be grants from foundations or even the government,” said Hallkyn. “But that all takes time, and they might not add up to much.”

  “We still have to come up with an idea of what the manuscript is worth if we want to deal with this
man,” Spanner said. “Suppose we add the twelve million paid by the German cartel for the old gospel in 1983 and the six million paid for the Shakespeare folio in 2001. That’s eighteen. I think eighteen million is our number. At least it’s based on something real. And it’s a number that shows we’re serious.”

  “I think so,” Hallkyn said. “Is it possible to get that much?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Spanner said. “We’ll need investors. It’s going to be tricky. We can’t tell anybody what the investment is, or we’ll be turning our allies into competitors. They’ll have to be willing to put up money without knowing what I want to buy with it.”

  “Are there people like that?”

  “We’ll see whether my reputation is good enough to make some. Have another scotch, put your feet up, and remain calm. I’m going to start making some calls tonight. The more money we have lined up before this person calls again the better.”

  Hallkyn slept fitfully that night. Whenever he woke up, he would go over the whole topic in his mind, separating dream from memory until he had them clear, but then couldn’t get back to sleep for a time.

  He waited for the second call. A day passed, and Hallkyn could hardly bear it. Then a second night passed, and he began to feel unsure of himself. He played back the voicemail from the caller a dozen times, trying to be sure he hadn’t misunderstood or missed any part of it—a phone number, a name. Then he called the phone company to be reassured that the messages could not have been cut short by the company’s equipment. Yes, they were sure. The plan that Mr. Hallkyn had been paying for would have allowed a message several minutes long. Everything was digital, and so there was not a question of a tape running out. There was no tape. And the caller’s number was blocked.

  The day after that Hallkyn had to go to the university and teach his classes—a morning medieval survey that the undergraduates had decided to call “Beowulf to the Bowel Shift.” That was quick and simple. His goal was mostly to infect the little cynics with the enthusiasm he felt for the early period, and once again the literature itself was doing the job for him. The graduate seminar had been a tedious business—John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, a perfectly fine and masterful work, but today he kept thinking that Gower was no Chaucer. Nobody else was Chaucer either. Not even the Pearl poet or the Gawain poet had been capable of the breadth of vision, the fascination with humanity, the sheer ambition of Chaucer.