The Book of the Lion

by Thomas Perry

  Hallkyn rushed home, swerving into his driveway too fast and nearly hitting the line of privet hedge beside the pavement and then coming too close to the side of the garage door opening. Then had to squeeze out of the driver’s seat with the car door too close to the garage wall to open far enough. He hurried into his house, picked up his phone, and listened to the messages.

  Nothing. Well, something, but not the call he had been hoping for. First were just a few more undergraduates who had dire symptoms that made paper-writing impossible. Next, that graduate student wanted his oral exam the Tuesday afternoon after the written. Fine. Why prolong the ordeal? Next, his friend Norman Sammons had called inviting him to contribute an article for a collection on Gawain and the Green Knight. He would say yes to that, of course. It would give him an excuse to rework the article he’d done ten years ago for the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. Anybody who remembered the JEGP article would be delighted to see how much he’d learned since then.

  Hallkyn hit on a new idea. He would change his phone message. He punched in the code and said in his best professorial tones, “This is Dominic Hallkyn. You may leave a message at the tone, or you may call me on my cell phone. The number is,” and then he recited the number and hung up. Then he called himself and listened. Perfect. Now he would not have to live in torment, thinking that he might be missing the crucial call from the possessor of The Book of the Lion.

  Hallkyn spent four full days and nights enslaved by his cell phone. He tested its ring repeatedly to be sure he would hear it over any of the sorts of noise he might encounter in his mostly quiet life. He kept the vibration on too so if the call came, he would feel it, and then kept checking the messages to see if he had missed the call anyway.

  And then, like a fever breaking, his worry passed. The call must have been a silly prank. If someone had a treasure like that, he would hardly neglect to do something with it. And no matter what he wanted to do, he would need to have an expert authoritatively authenticate the manuscript. He would have to get somebody like Hallkyn to say “Yes, this is the real thing.” The caller had never even mentioned that.

  Hallkyn let himself settle back into a normal frame of mind. Normal was restful. He didn’t have any responsibility for this supposed manuscript. There was no crisis. He went on with his life.

  He had only one problem, which was that his cell phone number was now too easy to get. Undergraduates were calling him past midnight with their excuses and brown-nosing questions, as though his phone were a twenty-four hour emergency literature help line. The department chair had started using his cell number to invite him to her damned cheese and sherry gatherings, making him invent his alibis on the spot.

  Hallkyn recorded a new message, left out his cell number, and substituted, “If your business is urgent, you may leave a message after the tone.” He was pleased, because the message signaled a more restrictive policy than before the Chaucer hoax.

  Still, he didn’t call Spanner immediately. It was one thing to change his message to institute a new regime of sanity in his personal life, and another to say good-bye to a glittering possibility by telling Spanner it was a hoax. For about a week he was able to put it off, but then he called.

  Spanner answered, and then said, “I was just thinking of calling you. Is it all right to tie up your phone line?”

  “Sure. It won’t matter.”

  “I’ve done it,” said Spanner.

  “Done what?”

  “I’ve lined up the financing,” Spanner said.

  “Eighteen million dollars?” Hallkyn felt sick.

  “I used some properties I own in Europe and one in Virginia as collateral for letters of credit. I also spoke with a few friends in hedge funds and banks who were willing to invest a bit of money without knowing what it is I’m buying. They’ve all agreed to have the money available instantly if we need it.”v“I’m so sorry, T.M.” said Hallkyn. “I’ve heard nothing. I should have known the whole thing was too good to be true. I’m almost certain I’ve been duped.”

  “Almost certain,” Spanner simply repeated it.

  Hallkyn was quiet for a moment. “I’m pretty sure. And it was so unlikely to begin with. Over six hundred years have passed, without even a rumor that the book still existed.”

  “I respect your telling me, and I thank you for your apology, Dom. But if you don’t mind—and even if you do—I’m going to keep the money available for the moment. No money has actually been borrowed, nobody has had to sell anything. We’ve only agreed to keep some assets liquid for a while.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Hallkyn. “I feel pretty stupid about this, and I don’t want you to risk your reputation on a hoax.”

  “No harm done,” he said. “We won’t worry about this for now. Just be aware that the money is going to be available.”

  The call came seventeen hours later. Hallkyn was on his way to the university in his car, and when his cell phone rang and vibrated it startled him. He pulled his car over to the curb and answered. “Yes?”

  “Hello, Professor Hallkyn.” The voice was unmistakable—a bit nasal, pitched a tiny bit higher than the ear liked to hear, the diction formal. Hallkyn had listened to the message so many times that he recognized every tone, every inflection. “Is this a good time for us to speak?”

  “I’ve pulled over to the side of the road,” said Hallkyn.

  “I assume you got my message.”

  “I got a message,” said Hallkyn.

  “Yes. I only called once. And then I gave you some time to think about it, and then to prepare to talk in specific terms. I have what I believe is the only remaining copy of The Book of the Leoun.” This time he pronounced it using Middle English vowels. “For all we know, it might be the only one ever made for public use after Chaucer’s personal draft.”

  “What makes you think it’s genuine, or that it’s the The Book of the Lion, by Chaucer? There were plenty of lion images throughout medieval literature, and plenty of people with that nickname—Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, for instance.”

  “It says it’s The Book of the Lion by Geoffrey Chaucer on the first page. I had a snip of the vellum carbon-dated, and it dates to the mid- 1390’s. The poetry is, like everything else Chaucer wrote, flawless, earthy, brilliant, spiritual, funny, dirty.”

  Hallkyn tried to sound less enticed than he was. “When can I see it?”

  “Now. I’ve sent you a précis and some sample pages already.”

  “How?”

  “It’s an email attachment. You can look any time you want.”

  “Are you expecting me to authenticate a manuscript, particularly one of this importance, to risk my reputation and credibility without so much as inspecting it in person?”

  “I’m not expecting you to do anything. I’m just giving you the opportunity to look.” And then the man hung up.

  Dominic Hallkyn sat in his car by the side of the road, watching the windshield wipers sweeping back and forth to clear the water away, bock-bock, bock-bock. While he hadn’t been paying attention, the rain had picked up. The wipers’ speed was now too slow, so every time the wipers passed, the rain gained back all the territory that had been cleared before the blades swept back.

  Hallkyn realized that he hated the man with the book. He was arrogant, Hallkyn could tell, and he was enjoying holding the prize and making the world wait and drool like starving dogs—making Dominic Hallyn wait and drool like a starving dog, actually. He’d implied Hallkyn was the only one who knew so far, but there was no way to determine whether even that was true. It took Hallkyn five minutes of sitting in the car, letting every other vehicle speed through the puddle beside him and throw a big splash against the window beside his face, to get through the moment of hatred.

  Hallkyn watched his mirrors and found an opening, then pulled out onto the road and drove to the university to his assigned parking space, number 364. He had chosen it himself as an Assistant Professor and waited years for it to become availa
ble. It was just a few feet from an arbor, so in the summer it was partially shaded, and in winter it gave him shelter from rain. He got out of his car, snatched his briefcase, ran to the arbor, walked with calm and dignity to the end of the covered sidewalk, then launched himself into a full sprint to the alcove where the door to Bacon Hall waited.

  He went directly to his undergraduate lecture and performed brilliantly, acting out the lines his memory presented for recitation, varying tone and pitch to portray each character who spoke, his Middle English pronunciation natural and unhalting. Then he gave a concise and fascinating talk about what the works meant, leaving his listeners in a state far beyond the mere enthusiasm he generally aimed to arouse in them.

  Hallkyn had achieved a small victory, and that helped. He had spent an hour resisting the temptation to cancel the class and go look at his email. The loathsome man who had sent the email would undoubtedly have a way of knowing when Dominic Hallkyn opened it. This way he would at least have spent an hour wondering if Hallkyn was even going to bother to look.

  And then he was in his office. The room was a sanctuary and a workshop, and after thirty years of use, it felt like it belonged to him and not the university. The dark wood paneling and matching bookcases pre-dated his era by three generations, but all of the books were his. The collection of treasures— small fragments of illuminated manuscripts, a few pages from medieval church registers and government lists, were on loan from the university’s collection. But by long tenure here they felt like his.

  He closed the shade and locked the door. Then he turned on his computer and scanned the list of emails until he found one that said it was “B of L.” As he clicked on it he had an instant to hate the man again, and then he forgot about the man.

  He could see a page on the screen and he enlarged the image of the first letter at the top left. It was an inhabited initial in the style that had originated with the St. Petersburg Bede of 746, with a picture of a lion in gold leaf inside the frame of the letter I. There were demivinet borders along the left margin like the ones beside the columns of calligraphy on the Ellesmere Chaucer. He enlarged the picture as much as he could, with a bit of both pages together. He could tell the difference between the first page, made of the inner side of the calfskin, which was slightly lighter and much smoother, and the other page, made of the outer side of the hide. It had pores and a couple of places where he could detect imperfections. He looked more closely at the script. It looked very much like the work of the scribe whom Chaucer referred to as “Adam Scriveyn,” identified by most scholars as Adam Pinkhurst. And then he looked again at the letter I, done not by the scribe but by a painter. “In,” the poem began.

  In th’olde dayes of the King Richard,

  Ther nas but hevinesse and much rue,

  For the King, that was goode and Trewe

  As fare as any man in Engelond

  Was in the German Henry’s honds.

  And then he was lost. He had begun to read, and the parts that he could see drew him in. He read the two pages of text that he could enlarge enough to see clearly. He compared each letter to the style of the Ellesmere. He studied the specifications the man had supplied, the descriptions of the sections, the physical measurements and specifications.

  When he looked up again, he saw that the narrow margins of light around his window shade had gone dark. He stood up and realized he was stiff in the hips and knees. His spine had been bent forward for hours. A headache announced itself, and he realized it had been building behind his eyes for some time.

  Hallkyn saved what he had been reading for the eighth time, then emailed it to his laptop at home, to his second university email address, to Iron Mountain for safekeeping, and then to T.M. Spanner.

  Next he dialed the telephone, and heard it ring five times before he heard Spanner say, “Hello, Dominic.”

  “Spanner,” Hallkyn began.

  “Glad to hear from you, Dom,” said Spanner. “Do you think this can keep for a little while? I’m entertaining a dear friend right now.”

  Hallkyn heard a woman’s laugh, a musical sound that made him feel several unrelated emotions. Of course Spanner, being the wellknown T.M. Spanner, would have a woman with a voice like that with him at this hour. He controlled his envy. Everything about T.M. Spanner’s life was better than anybody else’s. Spanner’s good fortune was part of the order of the universe. But what was this hour? Nearly one a.m., damn it. This was humiliating.

  “T.M., I’m so sorry. I’ve been working all this time, and I paid no attention to the clock until this second. I’ll call you again tomorrow.”

  “Just tell me this much now,” said Spanner. “Are we going to need the money?”

  “Yes, I believe we are.”

  “Great.”

  Eight hours later Hallkyn’s cell phone rang, and he said, “Hallkyn.”

  “You sound as though you were waiting by the phone, Dom.”

  “I was,” said Hallkyn.

  “It’s that big a deal to you?”

  “It’s that big a deal. Period.”

  “Tell me what you’ve learned.”

  “He sent me a teaser, a sample. There’s a photograph of the first two pages of the manuscript, and a set of specifications. The book is six thousand, nine hundred and nineteen lines of verse.” His voice fell to just above a whisper. “It’s exactly what we were hoping for, T.M. It’s the actual Book of the Lion, the last major work that Chaucer wrote, begun just before, and finished just after, The Canterbury Tales.”

  “What is it like? I mean the words, not the physical manuscript.”

  “It’s beautiful. I could only read two pages of actual lines in the photograph, just enough to be sure it’s Chaucer. The frame tale is the story of Richard Coeur de Lion. It’s about him and his awful brothers, primarily John, quarreling over the throne of England and the family possessions in France, and takes place during Richard’s captivity by the German Emperor Henry VI. By then he was already Richard the Lionheart, having been in several wars, fought against Saladin in the crusade, and so on. While he’s locked in a German dungeon, the ghost of Aesop comes and tells him the story of the Lion and the Mouse— how the weak can free the strong, as ordinary Englishmen eventually did by a tithe to pay his ransom—and then tells him about Androcles and the Lion, the recurring value of good deeds. Then Daniel appears and tells him his story of being thrown into the lions’ den. You remember the lions left Daniel alone and ate the bad advisors of the king. It’s a treatise on politics, alliances, wise government, rewards and punishments. What’s the use? It’s about everything.”

  Spanner said, “What did happen to Richard I, anyway? I always had the impression he never did much governing.”

  “That’s right. He was killed by a crossbow bolt from a young boy during a siege in 1199. That’s the tragedy in the work, the grim twist of fortune. His brother, John Lackland, the bad guy in the Robin Hood story, lost wars, faced a revolt of his nobles, and was forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. People in the 1390s still thought Richard would have been a great king and made everything better for everyone forever. This book is in that vein. Richard is being taught how to be a good king, first by a classical, then by a Biblical, teacher. He’d had a taste of greatness, and now he was brought low, sitting in a dungeon. But they’re preparing him for another rise, if he’ll change his ways, stop warring and start governing. He didn’t, and fortune’s wheel brought him down for good. The wheel of fortune was a classical theme everybody knew, mostly from Boethius. Chaucer translated Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, remember.”

  “But is this thing real? Are we about to get our hands on the real lost masterpiece?”

  “I think so.”

  “When?”

  “He said he’d call me again.”

  “When he does, call me. I don’t care what time it is, or where I am, call me.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as a person who will donate the manuscript to a library. He seems to enjoy hold
ing it over everyone’s head too much.”

  “So we’ll negotiate with him.”

  “Should I make him an offer?”

  “Only if he asks for one.”

  “How much?”

  “Say you have five million on hand, and can make the deal right away, no waiting or speculating.”

  “And if he refuses the offer?”

  “Then tell him you have to talk to your backers, and then call me.”

  “All right.”

  When the next call came he felt ready.

  “Professor Hallkyn,” said the voice. Hallkyn once again thought that the speech was foreign, but he couldn’t identify it with a region, or even a country. For the first time, he began to think it might be an idiosyncratic accent, which would be a very bad sign. The man might be mentally ill. “Have you examined what I sent you?”

  “Yes.” There was no longer any point in pretending to be unimpressed or uncaring. “How did you come by it?”

  “Are we really going to be reduced to that kind of discussion?” the man said. “I’m sure you could have guessed. Or did you guess and feel reluctant to take the risk of being wrong, and looking foolish?”

  “I suspect it was in the library of some ancient noble family, probably in an area other than London. A family seat in the north of England, probably.”

  “Why not London?”

  “Too much change. There hasn’t been much London real estate that has sat idle for six hundred years. And there was the blitz in World War II—lots of residences blown up, but this wasn’t in any of them. The owner of this manuscript was undoubtedly very rich, and possibly even royal. That would lead me to think it was John of Gaunt. He was Chaucer’s patron and close friend, and they were married to a pair of sisters. The manuscript could have been lost in one of John of Gaunt’s estates. Maybe in Lancaster.”