Phyllis Wong and the Return of the Conjuror

by Geoffrey McSkimming

  It’s like people seeing things from different angles, and coming to different conclusions. A bit like what W.W. was trying to explain; about people witnessing events from different distances, and how those events appeared to be happening at differing times.

  Maybe the world isn’t such a black-and-white place, Phyllis decided. Maybe right and wrong aren’t that easy to work out.

  Maybe she needed some chocolate . . .

  She was having breakfast with her dad the next day when she was jolted by a headline.

  Harvey Wong was sitting opposite her and Daisy at the kitchen table, half-hidden behind his morning newspaper. Phyllis was layering her toast with chocolate-hazelnut spread when she looked up and saw the headline facing her.

  She dropped her knife and it clattered off her plate and onto the table.

  ‘Careful, love,’ said her dad without looking around from behind his paper.

  ‘Rfff,’ said Daisy, waiting on the floor next to Phyllis’s chair for any stray crumbs or bits of crust that Phyllis might feed her.

  Phyllis said nothing. Her mouth was open as she read the front-page headline for the second time—it was almost as if the words just weren’t sinking in to her head:

  LOST SHAKESPEARE FOUND

  ORIGINAL HANDWRITTEN SCRIPT

  OF SHAKESPEARE’S MISSING PLAY

  Cardenio TO BE AUCTIONED

  The Greatest Literary Discovery of the Last 400 Years—Written in Shakespeare’s Own Hand—Experts Predict Astronomical Result

  Immediately, Phyllis was filled with a huge, rolling ball of suspicion. This wasn’t a coincidence—this was surely the work of the Colley woman.

  ‘Dad? May I have the front page please?’

  ‘Sure.’ Without distracting himself from the paper—he was checking the stock reports, and this always took his full attention—he slid the front sheet of his newspaper out and handed it across the table.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Phyllis. She folded it over so she could read the article beneath the headline:

  Exclusive report by E. Phillips Herrick

  A play written by William Shakespeare, thought to have been lost since it was first performed in 1613, has reportedly been discovered and will be offered for sale next month at The House of Wendlebury’s fine arts auctioneers.

  The play, Cardenio, has long been presumed lost after it was staged by the theatre company The King’s Men in London 400 years ago. Despite many efforts to find a copy of this legendary work, no trace of it—no fragments or scenes—have ever been located.

  The discovery of any missing play penned by Shakespeare, widely regarded as the greatest writer ever to have lived, is a ground-breaking event. But this is doubly ground-breaking: the manuscript copy of Cardenio being offered for sale is reportedly handwritten by Shakespeare himself. To find a lost Shakespeare play that has been written by the playwright’s own hand is extraordinary.

  It is the only time that anything of this nature has been discovered. Before this, there have only been six words written by Shakespeare’s own hand thought to be still in existence. They are his name, written as his signature, on three separate wills.

  Fine arts experts are confidently predicting that the handwritten manuscript will fetch a world-record price, because of its rarity and state of preservation. It is reputed to be in near mint condition.

  It is expected that interest will be fierce, and buyers will be bidding from around the globe. Estimates are, according to a spokesperson from The House of Wendlebury’s, impossible to make.

  Whatever price the manuscript fetches, one thing is for certain: the auction world will be ablaze with excitement next month.

  When Phyllis had finished reading the article, her hands were sweaty. This changed things. The handwritten manuscript of Cardenio couldn’t have been bought and paid for at Isaac Jaggard’s shop. Cardenio had been stolen!

  Carefully she folded the paper along the borders of the article, using her thumbnail to make the folds scissor-sharp. Then she neatly tore the article out and folded it over.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  Harvey’s newspaper rustled as he checked his watch. ‘A little before eight.’

  Good, thought Phyllis. He’ll still be here.

  ‘I’ve gotta go,’ she said.

  Harvey looked over the paper at her. ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘Downstairs.’

  He gave her a where exactly downstairs look with his eyebrows.

  ‘To the café,’ she answered.

  ‘Okay. Make sure you’re back before I head off to the office, all right?’

  ‘Sure.’ She pocketed the newspaper article, tore off a crust from her toast, popped it down into Daisy’s grateful mouth, and hurried out of the kitchen.

  As soon as Phyllis went into The Délicieux Café, she was almost pounced upon by Pascaline Ravissant’s husband, Pierre.

  ‘Ah bonjour, my favourite conjuror! Eet ’as been too lerng zince I ’ave been seeing you!’

  ‘Bonjour, Pierre,’ Phyllis greeted him as she scanned the café.

  ‘Whert would you like zis merning?’ he asked, addressing her over his shoulder as he always did with his customers.

  ‘Um . . .’

  ‘I know! Ze pain au chocolat, oui? Zat erlways teeckles yer tastebuds, you leetle chocaholeec.’ He smiled and wiggled his moustache at her.

  Phyllis saw who she was looking for. ‘Oh! Yes please, that’d be peachy, Pierre. Thank you.’

  ‘Peachy ees whert I do,’ he said. ‘Cerming right erp.’

  He winked at her and sped off to the counter. She hurried over to the corner table, where Barry Inglis was half-slumped across his newspaper. He had the look of a man who had just been told that he had to work for the next fortnight without any break at all.

  ‘Hey, Chief Inspector! You all right?’

  He looked up, his eyes clouded. ‘Miss Wong. How good to see you. Please, have a seat.’

  She pulled out the chair opposite him and plonked herself onto it. ‘I’ve seen the headline,’ she said quickly, pulling it out of her pocket and showing it to him.

  ‘As have I, Miss Wong. As have I.’ He displayed the front page of his newspaper to her. ‘Good lord, this is getting fishier and fishier.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  He sighed, and had a slow sip of his double espresso. ‘As you know, for some time I’ve had my doubts about all these Shakespeare Folios turning up one after the other,’ he told her. ‘They’ve been popping up too frequently to be . . .’ he thought for a moment, ‘. . . to be real. But, real they seem. Heavens above, the experts have tested them and every time they find that they’re all genuine books from 1623. They haven’t been faked. And now, this!’

  ‘A lost play,’ said Phyllis.

  ‘In the Bard’s own hand,’ Barry added, in a hopeless sort of voice. ‘You can’t imagine how much extra work this means for the Squad. We got the heads-up about this Cardenio business yesterday from Wendlebury’s—they came to us before they went to the press—and to say I’ve had a sleepless night, Miss Wong, would be the understatement of the century.’

  Pierre appeared by Phyllis’s elbow and placed her chocolate croissant on the table, along with a big glass of water. ‘Zere, you breelliernt girl. Enjoy!’

  ‘Another double espresso, s’il vous plaît, Pierre,’ said Barry. ‘Oh, merciful heavens, make that a quadruple! I’m gonna need all the help I can get today.’

  ‘Bert erf curse, Chief Inspecteur!’ And, with another wiggle of his moustache, Pierre was off again.

  ‘No,’ Barry continued, ‘I’ve been on the net all night, finding out anything I can about Cardenio and its history. Humph. That’s the one good thing about the internet, I suppose—at least I can work from home, and in my pyjamas.’

  Phyllis smirked and tried not to giggle—somehow she couldn’t imagine Chief Inspector Barry Inglis in anything but his dark blue suit or his tenn
is whites, which he wore whenever he played on Sunday mornings. She wondered whether he had a teddy bear for company.

  ‘So did you discover any ground-breaking facts?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Not much, apart from what we’ve both read in this morning’s paper. Cardenio’s been the Holy Grail, if you like, of the theatrical and the literary worlds for centuries. People have been hoping and searching for it. And now . . . here it is! Or soon will be.’

  ‘I bet it’ll go for a fortune,’ said Phyllis.

  ‘Without a doubt, Miss Wong. We’re sure that every government of every country that has a serious interest in English literature and the written word will be making a bid. Why, to have the original handwritten copy of a Shakespeare play in its national library would do any nation proud. And then there are the private collectors to think about as well. There are some mighty rich people out there, some people who have so much moolah that they could buy a small country if they wanted to. I well imagine that some of those individuals will be in on the bidding action, come next month.’

  He ran a hand through his sandy hair, pushing it back off his forehead.

  ‘How much do you think it might fetch?’ asked Phyllis, taking a bite of her croissant.

  ‘Ah. We have no real idea. It’s almost impossible to guesstimate, because nothing like it has ever appeared on the market before. But just between you and me—’ he leant towards her—‘we’re thinking it could go for as much as five hundred million dollars!’

  Phyllis did a spit-take, sending a small shower of moistened crumbs into Barry’s face.

  Politely, without making any fuss, he took out his white handkerchief and wiped them away. ‘I don’t blame you for that reaction one little bit, Miss Wong. I almost did the same thing when I realised it myself.’

  Phyllis started feeling a small knot of anger somewhere deep inside her. ‘Chief Inspector?’

  ‘Yes? Ah, merci, Pierre.’

  ‘De rien, Chief Inspecteur,’ said Pierre, depositing the quadruple espresso in front of Barry and hurrying away.

  ‘Well,’ said Phyllis, ‘you know how this Cardenio is Shakespeare’s actual foul papers?’

  Barry gave her a sudden look. ‘You never fail to impress me, Miss Wong. How do you know about foul papers? I only just learnt the term last night, while I was researching . . .’

  ‘Oh, I found out about it just recently too,’ she told him.

  ‘Hmm,’ hmmed Barry Inglis.

  ‘I also found out that Shakespeare himself never let his foul papers out of his sight. He protected them and guarded them and no one was ever allowed to have them but him.’

  ‘Yes? Your point being?’

  ‘So what if the foul papers of Cardenio have been stolen?’

  ‘Stolen?’

  ‘Stolen. That’d be a crime, wouldn’t it?’

  He frowned. ‘Of course it would be. But we’d have to prove that they’d been stolen. We’d have to establish that a theft had taken place. And if a theft has taken place, then it must’ve happened a long time ago. According to all the reports I’ve read, Cardenio was lost just after it was performed in 1613. So if the foul papers were stolen around that time, it’d be very difficult—no, I dare say impossible—to go back and reconstruct the crime and find the perpetrator.’

  ‘Impossible?’

  ‘Of course. Not even your magic could work it out, Miss Wong.’

  She gave him her inscrutable smile and said nothing.

  Barry sipped his espresso and pulled a face as though he had just sat in a bucket of custard. ‘Good lord, that’s strong!’ He put the cup down. ‘And furthermore, Miss Wong, if we did establish that the foul papers were stolen, it would also be next to impossible to go back through history and trace the path of the manuscript. Who owned it, who sold it to whom, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I see,’ Phyllis said.

  ‘Unless the foul papers had been kept in a secret private collection somewhere, and this was a recent theft, well—’ Just then, Barry’s phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket. ‘Inglis speaking. Morning, Chatterton.’

  Phyllis listened as Barry listened.

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Next week? And we can examine it then? . . . Uh-huh. Okay . . . Is that a fact? I can’t say that that surprises me, I sort of thought it’d be the case . . . Strange, though, don’t you think? . . . Of course you would . . . Okay, thanks for the update, Pinkie.’ And he rang off.

  ‘That was one of my men, on the case,’ Barry told Phyllis. He sipped his coffee and pulled his bucket-of-custard face again. ‘Not that we’ve really got a case; more like a bag full of suspicions.’

  ‘What did he say?’ Phyllis asked.

  Barry regarded her closely. ‘This isn’t to go any further, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  Barry lowered his voice. ‘He told me that The House of Wendlebury’s don’t actually have the foul papers yet. They won’t have them until late next week. So their experts—and my Squad—can’t inspect or do any testing on the manuscript until then.’

  ‘Why haven’t they got it?’ asked Phyllis, her eyes narrowing.

  ‘The seller has to travel with it. Seems she won’t send it on before she arrives—she wants to be with it at all times. And who could blame her? If it were mine, I wouldn’t let it out of my sight for a split second. That’s all it takes for something to go missing, Miss Wong, believe you me. A split second can make all the difference and change everything . . .’

  ‘Where’s she travelling from?’

  ‘Now that, I do not know,’ replied Barry Inglis.

  ‘Ah-ha,’ murmured Phyllis, as she realised. She hasn’t got it yet. She’s only promised it to the auctioneers, but she still has to steal it! ‘Did you say next week they’ll have the foul papers?’

  ‘I did. That’s when Wendlebury’s will see Cardenio.’

  Phyllis stood. ‘Thanks for talking to me. I have to go now. Bye!’

  ‘Go carefully,’ Barry Inglis said.

  She smiled and waved at him, and waved at Pierre too as she left the café. She would go carefully. She had to be careful, and she had to go now. She knew exactly what she had to do.

  She had to visit Mr Shakespeare himself!

  PART THREE

  Now you see it . . .

  Frustrations

  Mistress Vesta Colley looked at her reflection in the mirror on her dressing table in her lavish suite at the Millennium Hotel. She was tired, and it showed, especially in her one droopy eye. She frowned as she dabbed at her dark lipstick with the corner of a fine linen handkerchief.

  She was not happy.

  It shouldn’t be taking this long, she thought as she threw down the handkerchief and picked up her gold-plated hairbrush. It has never taken this long in the past.

  With annoyed strokes, she began brushing her curls, letting the fine bristles of the brush pull through them as though they were trying to unknot the problem facing her. Behind her, on top of one of the antique tables, her red-eyed rodent companion, Glory, was creeping back and forth, watching her in the mirror.

  ‘I can’t understand it, my dear Glory,’ muttered Vesta Colley as she drew the brush through her hair. ‘It’s never taken me this amount of time to find a set of stairs upon which to Transit.’

  ‘Squeeeetch-squeeeetch-squeeeetch,’ squeaked Glory. She stopped creeping and sat there, still as a stone.

  ‘It is peculiar,’ Vesta Colley said to her reflection. ‘I have been searching for days. But to no avail. Every staircase I come to—every staircase upon which I sense that there will be a Pocket, that there should be a Pocket—is empty. I am sure that there are people in this city who see me and who think that I am a madwoman, the way I have been constantly rushing up and down stairs. And, when I do find some stairs with a Pocket on them, the Pocket isn’t strong enough. Three times now, Glory, three times, I have Transited through these minor Pockets, only to find myself back in Time just a week or a few days before I have left thi
s place, not back to the Time I need. The Pockets are weak, my ratty friend. I need a strong Pocket, a powerful transporter . . .’

  ‘Squeeeetch-squeeeetch-squeeeetch,’ squeaked the rat.

  Vesta Colley finished with her hair and banged the brush down. ‘And, whereas in the past I have been able to return to a set of stairs where I know there has been a Pocket that I have Transited through successfully—why, now when I revisit those stairs, the Pocket is no longer there! What is going on? This has never been the case of things before! Not in all my five hundred and seventy-three years of Transiting have I known Pockets to disappear. They have shifted about, yes, but to disappear? No, things have changed, Glory. Things are different now . . .’

  She picked up a small pair of eighteen-carat gold scissors and began trimming her fingernails. She snipped her thumbnail quickly, snappily, impatiently.

  ‘What has changed, Glory, that I am having these difficulties? It seems as if,’ she continued snipping the nail on her next finger, ‘it seems as if there is not room enough now. Maybe the highway back is becoming more crowded . . . maybe there are other Transiters taking my routes, using my Pockets, venturing into the vortexes that are mine, and mine alone!’

  With a sudden snip, she accidentally cut into the flesh under her fingernail. A small line of deep red appeared there, and she winced. ‘Fie!’ she exclaimed, watching as the blood welled up. Vesta Colley hated disfigurement of any kind, especially when it came to herself—she always desired to be as perfect in appearance as she could, despite her lazy, droopy eye.

  ‘Squeeeetch-squeeeetch-squeeeetch!’ Glory smelled the blood and scampered across the table, down onto the floor, up the back of the chair, down Vesta Colley’s arm and onto the dressing table. There she started licking the rich redness from her mistress’s finger.

  Colley closed her eyes. ‘Dear Glory,’ she murmured. ‘I must keep trying. I will get my prize. And then, with all the wealth it will give me, all the great richness, I shall stop my Transiting . . . it is wearing me down, Glory; my eyes can only take so much. Yes, I shall retire on the spoils of my final accomplishment and become powerful—powerful in ways I have never been able.’