The Bookman's Tale

by Charlie Lovett

  Of his life, all that we positively know is the period of his death.

  We do not know when he was born, nor when, nor where, he was educated.

  We do not know when, or where, he was married, nor when he came to London.

  We do not know when, where, or in what order, his plays were written or performed; nor when he left London.

  He died April 23rd, 1616.

  “Is that the whole chapter?” Benjamin had asked, laughing.

  “Well,” said Smith, “It’s all we know for sure, so it’s all I need say.”

  —

  Phillip Gardner had first approached Benjamin several months earlier because of his neighbor. “I should like to begin collecting historical documents,” he had told Benjamin on the floor of his shop.

  “What sort of documents?” asked Benjamin.

  “Any that might be of interest to Mr. Reginald Alderson,” said Gardner.

  Thus Phillip Gardner became the best sort of client—one motivated not by intellectual curiosity or literary passion but by hatred. Reginald Alderson was a passionate collector of historical documents, Phillip Gardner was bound by birth to hate Reginald Alderson, therefore Phillip would use his wife’s money to pay any price to outbid Alderson at auction and go to any lengths to outfox him in other means of acquisition. All this he told Benjamin at their first meeting. Since then, Benjamin had been Phillip Gardner’s primary supplier of material. Gardner paid his bills promptly and had no objections to providing Benjamin with a substantial premium on items bought from under the nose of his rival.

  That afternoon Benjamin would make just such a purchase in the salesrooms of Sotheby’s—a manuscript stanza of poetry by the Elizabethan writer Robert Greene. Benjamin knew, from his informant at Sotheby’s, that Alderson had registered as a bidder for the sale, and the only item on the block that could possibly interest him was the Greene poem. Benjamin had expected to dine in the city with Phillip Gardner and then make their usual jaunt to the sales-room where they would publicly humiliate Reginald Alderson as they had done so many times before. Benjamin sometimes wondered why Alderson kept showing up rather than bidding through an agent, for the results were always the same. As the bidding went up, Phillip Gardner nodded to Benjamin; Benjamin nodded to the auctioneer; eventually the lot was hammered down to Phillip; and Reginald Alderson stormed from the room, to the suppressed snickers of those regulars who knew what was happening.

  Usually Gardner took Benjamin to his club following an auction, but when the time came for Benjamin to leave for Sotheby’s and his client had still not arrived, he resigned himself to the fact that today he would celebrate his victory in solitude. No matter—the Greene fragment would fetch a high price, especially with Reginald Alderson driving up the bidding, and a high price meant a high commission. Benjamin was perfectly happy to be friends with Phillip Gardner, but what he liked most about the man was his wife’s money.

  Ridgefield, 1985

  “I think it’s time,” said Amanda to Peter as they lay entwined on the carpet of the Devereaux Room, their pulses and breathing returning to normal after their lovemaking. It had been five weeks since Halloween. Five wonderful Saturday nights of passion—for Amanda was as organized about her sex life as she was about everything else. Not that Peter minded. There were no awkward attempts on his part to initiate, no fumbling fondling in the back of a car wondering how far it might go. There was only the keen edge of anticipation as they made their way through the dark halls of the library to the Devereux Room just after eleven o’clock every Saturday. After their first time, there had been no more costumes, and the past five weeks had been a gradual unfolding of each to the other, leading to this perfect moment—Amanda’s damp body pressed against Peter’s own, her arm draped across his stomach, her still erect nipple grazing his chest as she whispered to him, “I think it’s time.”

  “You might have to give me a few more minutes,” said Peter. Usually Amanda drifted off to sleep after sex, and Peter would wake her an hour or two later with a kiss, a caress, and a whisper of desire.

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Amanda, giving him a teasing swat on his flank. She propped herself up on one elbow and fixed him with a serious look. “I mean I think it’s time for you to meet my family.”

  “I was kind of hoping I could just meet them when our kids graduate from high school,” said Peter, a nervousness rising in his gut that he had never felt in the safe confines of the Devereaux Room.

  “They’re not that bad,” said Amanda. “In fact, they’re actually pretty nice.”

  “But they’re the Ridgefields,” said Peter. “You know I have a hard enough time meeting people who aren’t royalty with a daughter I’m in love with.”

  “Say that again,” said Amanda, kissing him lightly on the chest.

  “What, the part about their being royalty?”

  “No, the other part.”

  “About how I’m totally head over heels in love with their precious daughter Amanda?”

  “Yeah,” said Amanda, kissing her way down his abdomen. “That part.” As her lips flitted across his skin, Peter forgot about the Ridgefields, forgot about being nervous, and thought only of Amanda—her lips and her tongue and her mouth and her flesh and how much he loved her.

  As they walked across campus toward Amanda’s dorm in the hours after the last Saturday night party had ended but before the first obsessive premed student had arisen to study for an approaching biochemistry final, Peter squeezed Amanda’s hand and said what he knew she wanted to hear, and what, at that moment of peace and darkness when the night air had taken on a tinge of winter cold, he almost believed himself.

  “I would love to meet your family.”

  —

  On Monday night, as they sat in their usual booth at the snack bar, Amanda officially invited Peter to her parents’ house for dinner the following Saturday.

  “Saturday night?” asked Peter. It would be hard enough to meet her family, he thought, but to meet them on a Saturday night, when all he could think of was Amanda wrapped around him on the floor of the Devereaux Room, just might be unbearable.

  “We’ll just have to visit the library on Friday,” said Amanda, running her foot up his leg. “I wouldn’t want you to be . . . tense.”

  “Trust me, there is nothing you can do that will keep me from being tense,” said Peter, adding hastily, “not that you shouldn’t try.”

  “It’s just Mom and Dad,” said Amanda. “They’ll like you, and you’ll like them. They don’t bite, except my dad a little.”

  “What’ll we talk about?” said Peter. “I mean, I’m from a family who couldn’t even keep a general store open in a town where there was no competition, and they’re the Ridgefields—only the most successful businesspeople in the South. We have nothing in common.”

  “Well, first of all, you all love me. And there’s something else you and my mom can talk about. You probably know as much about her mother as anyone.”

  “Her mother?” said Peter.

  “Yeah, you know, Amanda Devereaux.”

  “Amanda Devereaux was your mother’s mother?” said Peter. “But then why are you named Ridgefield?”

  “The Ridgefields couldn’t die out,” said Amanda. “My mom was the last of the line. Her dad was Robert Ridgefield, and before he died he made her promise to name her children Ridgefield. My dad was a Middleton, but he changed his name—I think it gave him clout.” Peter wondered what it would be like to be named Peter Ridgefield, if Amanda’s parents insisted on her carrying on the family name.

  “How old was your mom when her mother died?” asked Peter. In his nervousness about meeting the Ridgefields he had completely forgotten he would be meeting someone who had known Amanda Devereaux, and known her well.

  “Eighteen,” said Amanda. “She was halfway through her first semester at Wellesley when they c
alled her to come home. She transferred to Ridgefield so she could look after her father. He died three years later. I think he stayed alive to see Gran’s book collection installed in the new library and then just gave up.”

  “So she must remember her mother well.”

  “I think so,” said Amanda. “She doesn’t talk about her much. Mom has always been one of those ‘live in the present’ sort of people. I guess losing two parents so quickly when you’re so young will do that to you.”

  “So I shouldn’t ask her about the other Amanda?” asked Peter.

  “No, you should. She’s really proud of what Gran accomplished. She always reads the Friends of the Ridgefield Library magazine from cover to cover, and once in a while she even buys a book to add to the collection—you know, something that Francis finds that she thinks Gran would have been especially happy about. Just let her see how much you love Gran’s books, and I’ll bet you can get her to tell some stories.”

  “And should I let her see how much I love you?” asked Peter.

  “As if you could hide it,” said Amanda, slipping her fingers around his hand.

  —

  The next day Peter entered the Devereaux Room to find Francis Leland and Hank Christiansen poring over a single piece of paper.

  “What’s so fascinating?” said Peter.

  “It’s a handwritten poem by Emily Dickinson,” said Francis.

  “Previously unpublished,” said Hank.

  “We’ve had that for a while,” said Peter, looking over Hank’s shoulder at the familiar paper. “I used it when I was writing a paper for my nineteenth-century poetry class.”

  “Do you know where it came from?” said Francis.

  “No,” said Peter.

  “We bought it a couple of years ago with a little help from Sarah Ridgefield,” said Francis. “It came from Mark Hofmann.”

  “The guy who found ‘Oath of a Freeman’?” asked Peter.

  “One and the same,” said Hank. “Only now with these bombings in Salt Lake City there are whispers in the business that not everything he sold may be what it claims to be.”

  “You think the poem could be a forgery?” said Peter.

  “It seems unlikely,” said Francis.

  “The paper checks out,” said Hank. “The ink is nineteenth century as far as I can tell, and the handwriting certainly matches Dickinson’s.”

  “If this is a forgery,” said Francis, “then Hofmann is one of the most brilliant forgers of all time.”

  Cornwall, Southwestern England, Monday, February 20, 1995

  By the time Peter had been driving an hour it was nearly dark—the early winter sunset aided by the increasing cloud cover. He did not usually drive on motorways; he felt he missed too much and he was rarely in a hurry, but tonight was an exception. The drive to Cornwall would take about four and a half hours, and then he would have to follow Liz’s intricate directions to Graham Sykes’s house in the total darkness of sunken Cornish lanes.

  As he flew along at seventy miles an hour, Peter glanced to his left and saw Amanda seated quietly in the passenger seat, the map perched on her lap. She had loved to navigate when they traveled the British countryside. Peter recalled the first time he had gotten up the nerve to rent a car. The pound was cheap and they had come to England on a book-buying trip.

  They kept to two-lane roads, stopping in every town and hunting through the local bookshops. They had gone to provincial book fairs in town halls every Sunday afternoon. They had spent entire days in book towns like Oxford and Cambridge and Bath, but Peter had especially enjoyed those days spent in smaller towns where the single bookseller would welcome the young American couple, often even closing up shop for an hour or two to take them out to lunch. Always comfortable when Amanda was by his side, Peter even enjoyed conversations with these relative strangers.

  Peter had made his first visit to Hay-on-Wye during that trip. Amanda had navigated via what she called “the scenic route,” and they had crossed the River Wye on an ancient toll bridge, where an old man came out of a booth to accept their coins and raise the barrier so they could pass. The entire journey had been suffused with a sense of adventure that Amanda especially had relished.

  “I love not knowing what tomorrow will bring,” she had said. One day began in Bath and ended on the beach at Southhampton at sunset. In Salisbury and Winchester they found themselves at Evensong in the local cathedrals after the bookshops had closed. Another day they finished the bookshops of York more quickly than anticipated and took a long drive across the moors, ending with dinner at a fish-and-chips shop overlooking the bay at Whitby.

  Peter smiled at the memory and turned to ask Amanda what she had liked best about that trip, which now seemed like a journey of such innocence. But Amanda was gone and the road map lay on the passenger seat alone.

  The roads became narrower and narrower as Peter skirted the edge of Bodmin Moor, until he found himself jouncing down a steep, rutted lane, overhung by gnarled trees. He hoped he had followed Liz’s directions properly, because he had little hope of getting the underpowered Vauxhall back up the lane in darkness. He wondered if he’d even be able to do it in daylight. At the bottom of the hill, the lane ended in front of a gate giving on to a small pasture in which Peter’s headlights illuminated a few sheep. Across this pasture he saw the lights of a small stone cottage—the home of Graham Sykes, he hoped. Peter swallowed a lump of panic. He couldn’t imagine that anyone who lived in such an isolated place was likely to welcome nighttime visitors—especially when Graham was concerned he might be in danger.

  Peter pulled his satchel from the car, climbed a stile, and set off toward the cottage. The overcast sky obscured any moonlight, and in the near pitch darkness he picked his way slowly across the field, feeling the dampness from the grass wetting his trouser legs.

  By the time he reached the door of the cottage his shoes were covered in mud. When his first timid knock went unanswered, he banged more loudly.

  “Be off!” said a voice from within. “Ya can’t be up to any good this time of night.”

  “Mr. Sykes,” said Peter, trying to match the volume of the voice from within, “my name is Peter Byerly. I’m a friend of Liz Sutcliffe’s. She sent me here because she’s worried about you.”

  “A likely story,” retorted the voice.

  “It’s true, sir. I’ve driven down from London. I could use a hot cup of tea,” said Peter, hoping that the British inability to refuse tea to visitors might soften the old man.

  “They got no tea in London?” said the voice. “Be off.”

  “There’s something else,” said Peter, for whom the most pressing something else was that it had now begun to rain and he didn’t relish the idea of spending the night in his car, soaked to the skin. “I have a book with me. Something that used to belong to B.B. I was hoping you might help me figure out whether or not it’s a forgery.”

  There was silence within for a long minute, as the rain continued to pelt Peter. Finally the voice returned, its belligerent tone replaced with something approaching curiosity. “What do ya know about B.B.?” it asked.

  “Not much, to be honest,” said Peter. After another long pause, he added, “I found a watercolor that he painted, but I think Liz told you about that. This other item could be something a lot more valuable. Unless this rain starts soaking into my bag, that is.”

  After another pause, there was a sound of locks being undone and at last the heavy wooden door swung open. In the doorway, framed by yellow lamplight, stood a man who looked well able to protect himself. Over six feet tall and broad shouldered, Graham Sykes had thick arms that strained at the seams of his flannel work shirt. His upper body leaned forward slightly, like a bird of prey. In one hand he clasped an iron poker. His deep-set eyes glared intently out at Peter from a sea of white hair that covered his head and his face and stretched across his brow i
n a single unbroken line. His wide body completely blocked the door as he appraised Peter, now dripping wet on the doorstep, and clutching his satchel under his topcoat, hoping to keep the contents dry.

  Finally Graham growled, “Well, don’t be standing there in the rain, then. I’ll put the kettle on.” He stepped aside and Peter came through the door, which opened directly into a small sitting room. A fire was dying in the grate, but the room was warm and bright. His reluctant host shut the door and disappeared through another doorway, leaving Peter dripping on the stone floor. He took off his coat and hung it with several others on the wall by the door, ascertained that his satchel had remained dry, and then stepped toward the fire, warming his hands over the glowing embers.

  Graham Sykes returned from the kitchen with two mugs of tea—no frilly china cups for him. Though he usually drank his black, Peter took the mug of heavily milked and sugared tea without complaint and drank deeply as Sykes did the same.

  “Sit,” said Sykes, pointing to a sagging armchair under the window. Peter sat and found himself sinking into the depths of the chair. Sitting on the sofa, Sykes towered over him. “Now what have you to tell me?” said Sykes.

  Peter started slowly, fixing his stare at his mug rather than daring to look at the intimidating figure of his host. He told of how he had discovered the watercolor of a woman who resembled his late wife, though he knew Liz had already explained this. He told of how he had been chased off the Evenlode House estate and how he had been led by Julia Alderson to discover a cache of documents at Evenlode Manor. Finally he reached for his satchel and withdrew the Pandosto, laying it on the coffee table.

  Sykes donned a pair of reading glasses pulled from his shirt pocket and opened the book. His face remained impassive for several minutes as he pored over the volume, slowly turning pages and frequently returning to the list of owners on the front endpaper.

  Peter felt panic rising within him as he saw his precious Pandosto in the hands of this rough and, it seemed, potentially violent man. He tried to calm himself with the thought that Sykes was a scholar, but he could feel the cold sweat on the back of his neck.