Poetic Justice (2 page)

Unfortunately, not so authentic.

"What value do you put on this, Monsignor?"

"As I said, perhaps we can arrange a trade."

Alavieri was leaning forward eagerly, his hands gripping the discarded leather parcel, and John's suspicions were confirmed. "Now why," he said in a wondering tone, "would I want to trade a genuine illuminated manuscript for a fake?"

Alavieri slumped back in his chair, shaking his head, smiling faintly. "It is no forgery."

"No, perhaps not the playscript itself. But the ink of the notes is far newer than the script. There's been an attempt to age it with some acid wash, I think." John slid the open book back to the priest, pointing to a note across from Lear's first soliloquy. "That would account for the light spots on the facing pages." He was, if anything, more disappointed than Alavieri, for sometimes he loved the tawdry torn remnants of Shakespeare more than the most gilded illumination. But facts were facts, and this was forgery.

Alavieri forced another laugh. "Oh, no, I can't fool you, can I, Captain Dryden? I knew it too, but not so soon. For a moment I thought I might once again be reading his own hand, on his own words."

"Again?" The word echoed in John's mind, hushing his disappointment. "You've read his hand before?"

"One of my tragedies. I saw a manuscript of his once. No one else guessed at the authorship, but I thought it was his. Or part of it, at least. The cover boasted the name of one of his friends. I imagined that the actors had been too long without work, and sat down and wrote a play together. But it was before I joined His Holiness, decades ago, before you were born. I hadn't the funds to purchase it, and it went to some Frenchman who didn't know Shakespeare from Chaucer."

It hardly seemed possible. "An Ireland forgery, surely?"

Alavieri shook his head. "No, it was far too adept for him. He was a clever one, but his hand and his mind weren't so facile. In this playscript, there several hands, you see, modifying this script, and only one was—the one. I had only a few moments with it, but I recognized the turn of phrase, the old-styled script, the spelling."

His voice faded into regret, and John felt his resolve not to be fooled fade with it. Alavieri was the best in the business. If Shakespeare had scrawled a single word on that manuscript, Alavieri would have recognized it. "Where is it now?"

Alavieri was undeceived by John's casual tone. "Oh, now you are intrigued, my lad. Now you are willing to trade, are you?"

John did not answer; there was no need.

Alavieri shook his head, and John, for the second time, felt that sharp disappointment, the loss of what he never had. Alavieri was toying with him again.

"Unfortunately, I have nothing to trade. The Frenchman lost his head in the Revolution, and though I searched what remained of his home, I found no trace of his library. The Vendee, you know, was torched by those barbarians. They would have taken even greater glee if they knew they had burned such a priceless work as that. Ironic, isn't it, that his passage warned about the dangers of mobs in riot? Think of it: Shakespeare's immortal words, that almost unknown hand, licked by the flames and finally consumed, like the French nation itself."

What remained of John's triumph from his victory with the Jerusalem seeped away. This was doubtlessly what Alavieri intended when he displayed his false Shakespeare, and then so eloquently described the destruction of the real Shakespeare. And it was real, John knew it, in his heart.

Alavieri smiled, then bent over the forged prompt book to hide his pleasure. "But this is what we are left instead, this falsity. It rather looks like his hand, doesn't it?"

John had once seen Shakespeare's will, unearthed a few decades earlier from an Oxfordshire church, and had instantly memorized the poignantly shaky script of the aged Shakespeare. "It is rather like. A worthy attempt. What must I give you for it?"

Alavieri shrugged. "Nothing. It is my gift to you. In recompense for my losing that play, and causing it to be lost forever." The smile was gone now; he was genuinely saddened, as genuinely as Alavieri could be. "It can be the first of your own collection of fakes, like my own. A curiosity, a cautionary, perhaps. It will remind you that you must not, as His Holiness did, let your hope overcome your sense. Or, as I did, lose a prize for lack of its price." He rose, tossed the leather parcel on the table. "Not that you, my ruthless lad, need be reminded of those."

Halfway out the door, he looked back over his shoulder. "I would not have let you take the Lear unknowing. I care too much for truth for that. I wanted merely to test you. Now I know that your reputation is true. You have the eyes of an eagle, and the heart of a skeptic. The Jerusalem too must be true, and I have lost it to you."

John lingered there for another quarter hour, turning the pages of the play, tracing the archaic script with his finger and translating the spelling into modern English, translating the priest's generosity. If it wasn't an original prompt book, it was a very early one, and worth a good deal. Alavieri was not, in John's experience, an impulsive man, nor a benevolent one either.

Finally he recalled the tide and packed the curiosity away in his saddlebag next to the Jerusalem. The air was cooler now and cleared the ouzo fumes from his head as he rode down the rest of the mountain.

Down through the winding main street of the village that spilled to the harbor, John kept half of his awareness on his surroundings, half on the sea below. It was sunset, and the fishermen were all gone home to bed, leaving their vessels moored, sails furled, in the tiny harbor.

There was the Coronale towering over them all, his own sloop, bathed rosy in the dying sun, her single mast soaring, her bow curved as gracefully as a woman's hip. He had other ships, real ships with three masts and dozens of sails and cubic hectares of cargo space. But the Coronale would always be his first love, a lady of mystery, fast and sleek and wickedly experienced. She could outrun any excise cutter and outgun most privateers, though she seldom got the exercise now that he had become respectable. It's a shame the war has ended, he thought, for she's wasted on peaceful seas.

The dirt road ended at the quay, no more than an old pier with a few fishing sheds drooping over the water. Over the suddenly loud clatter of his horse's hooves on wood, John heard something, something stealthy, the scrape of metal blade from metal sheath, the slide of a boot over wood. His hand found his own blade, gripped it surely, drew it out. He scanned the dock ahead, half-hidden now in dusk's shadows, and urged Malta into a gallop.

There was a guttural Greek shout, forms catapulting from behind a shed, the flash of metal reflecting the last sun rays, a slash against his boot, across the leather bag under his knee. John let the reins drop, grabbed the bag with one hand, slashed up with the other. One of the attackers dropped screaming, blood spurting from his arm, but two others leaped up as John dug his heels into Malta's side and she sprang away.

One bandit got hold of John's leg and hung on, and he felt Malta slide out from under him. The fall to the dock seemed to take forever. Malta was halfway to the sloop's mooring before John, curled protectively around the saddlebag, landed against the rough wood and the rough wool of the bandit's shirt. He glimpsed the other bandit leaping, blade held high. John kicked upward, slashed indiscriminately, all dervish motion and deadly intent, his boot heel jamming against the bandit's chin, his knife ripping through cloth and flesh, heat coursing through him, infusing his muscles with liquid energy. Ah, this I remember, this I am; I have not lost myself after all.

He had fought off attackers on other docks, and on the docks of other ships on other seas, and he knew just what to do. He sprang up into a half-crouch, his blade arcing, forcing his enemies away. It was no time for subtlety, for graceful thrust and parry. This was pure demonic combat, an anarchy of blades and bodies. His true element.

By the time his shipmates arrived panting, daggers drawn, the light was gone entirely and the dock was slippery with blood. Two of the bandits had fled, and the third lay unconscious on the dock. John loosed his death grip on the saddlebag, let his first mate take it, let his steward peel his fingers from around the knife and put it away. He nudged the bandit with his foot. "Tell your employer," he said, then paused to drag in a breath, "that I passed that test too."

CHAPTER TWO

May 25, 1818

Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book.

He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink.

Love's Labor Lost IV, ii.

I have spent most of my life like this, Jessica Seton thought, sitting here on this settee, waiting for two men to determine the rest of my life. It was an exaggeration, of course, if a forgivable one. Long ago she had waited here in the hallway while a solicitor read her father's will to her uncle, and three years ago when a colonel from the Horse Guards came with news from Waterloo.

Now another afternoon of anxiety and dread. Impatient suddenly, she slipped off her shoes and in her stockinged feet crossed to the door that shut her out of her uncle's study. She rested her temple against the cool wood and held her breath. She could hear nothing but a low rumble of voices. Consigning convention to perdition, she reached for the knob. But it turned under her fingers, and she stepped back quickly as Damien Blake emerged.

She could tell from his brooding face that his suit, like the others, had been unsuccessful. She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the drawing room, closing the door behind her and leaning back on it, near despair. "He said no, didn't he?"

Damien was a poet, and measured his words for sound and sense before he spoke them. "That is so." Two beats, and then rest of the line. "He will not give his consent."

"Did he tell you why?"

Damien inclined his head to the side, considered this. He was a radical also, and so etched irony into his next verse. "A man granted such authority need have no reason to use it."

Jessica closed her eyes for a moment and gathered her tattered temper back together. "Did you try to persuade him?"

"Persuade him?" The radical vanished, and the marquess's son regained control of Damien's features. "Certainly not."

"Damien, oh, what did you say, then, if you didn't try to change his mind?"

Suddenly he swept her into his arms, protective and ardent at once. "I told him that true love needed no consent, and we would marry without it."

"You didn't really say that," One look up at his proud noble face told her he did. She wrenched herself free of him. "Oh, Damien, this isn't Romeo and Juliet! We can't marry without his consent."

Damien withdrew sulkily to the couch, assuming a picturesque pose with head back and arms flung out. In the dusty sunlight he shone like an Elgin Marble. "You are of age. I am of age. We can marry tomorrow, if we desire. No man can gainsay us."

"That man can gainsay my inheritance. Damien, if you would just have tried to convince him that you care enough—"

"It should be self-evident."

That this was true did not make it right. She halted her pacing in front of the couch and regarded him with exasperation. "Probably my uncle thinks that the perfect suitor would argue his case."

"Probably," Damien suggested, ironic again, "he thinks no one is the perfect suitor. No one yet living, that is." He reached out his hand to hers, and drew her to sit beside him. "As far as your uncle is concerned, you were meant to marry his son. His son's best friend is no substitute. And neither, I wager, is anyone else."

As he spoke this home truth, he regarded her sympathetically and opened his arms in invitation. But with her uncle just across the hall, she didn't take advantage of this to seek comfort, instead rising again to pace, her stockinged feet sliding across the oak floor. Comfort wasn't what she wanted, at any rate. She wanted control. Control over her life, her fate, her inheritance.

"It isn't fair."

"What isn't fair is that you deny yourself to suit him."

"I am not denying myself to suit him. It is in my father's will, that I must marry with his consent, or lose my inheritance."

"Jessica, what is it you want, me or the inheritance?"

It was too obvious to say aloud. But Damien was waiting, sitting up, leaning forward, as if he didn't know the answer.

"Both."

"Both? Both? Equally?"

No, she almost said. It was not the answer he wanted. But it was the only one she had. And, she thought with renewed anger, he should accept that. "I have lived all my life thinking—knowing—that I was to have the Parham Collection. I am not going to give it up, not while I still have a chance."

"And if you marry me now, without your uncle's consent, you will lose it forever."

Relieved that he understood, she nodded.

But Damien was Damien, and she should have known that whatever else he understood, it wasn't the value of the Parham Collection. "Well, love is worth the sacrifice of it, I think. And you should think so too."

A sacrifice for love. It was a poetic sentiment, and with half her heart she longed for the sort of man who made it. The other half, however, was reserved for the collection her parents had left her, or would have left her, had they known how much she would sacrifice for it.

Damien observed her stubborn silence for a moment, then rose, his jaw taut but his hand open and extended towards her. "I can promise you a pleasant, worthy life, in recompense for giving up the collection. You won't have the old books, but you will be my helpmeet as I write new books." When she only frowned and looked at his hand, he withdrew it and bowed. "I shan't try to persuade you, but my offer remains open. If you decide you want to marry me, you may send a note to my lodge in the Cotswolds. I am preparing a book of pastorals, and need more of nature than I find here in London."

As he departed, Jessica considered suggesting that he might sacrifice his communing with nature to help her change her uncle's mind. But she knew she wouldn't be able to strip the sarcasm from her voice. Indeed, even the careful "Do have a good holiday" she called after him fairly dripped with irony.