Poetic Justice (9 page)

"Well, if no private libraries were ever sold, I shouldn't have much in the way of merchandise, would I?" Another challenge. He was reminding her that he was in a trade, if the most rarefied of all. And he made his own purpose for accompanying her out here very clear. "You were speaking of some obscure items you might be interested in selling. Might I inquire what they are?"

At random she mentioned a few books she would not mind parting with, and saw him shake his head slightly, as if none of them suited him. Annoyed, she asked, "Was there a book you particularly wanted?"

After a moment's pause, he said, "I am interested in the Elizabethan era, especially Shakespeare and his set. Any scripts by playwrights of the time?"

"I don't think we have any of those. And the First Folios will not be available."

He turned and looked out to sea, his straight implacable back a dismissal. She wanted aid; he wanted Elizabethan. They were at cross-purposes, disappointed in each other already. Instinctively, Jessica rose from her bench and approached him, speaking clearly over the gentle rush of the surf. "But you must understand, I don't know the full extent of our holdings. My father added extensively to the collection, but hadn't time to do a complete inventory. Who knows? Perhaps stuck away in some box is exactly what you are looking for."

Only a few feet of stone separated them now. She leaned against the wall as he had done, mimicking his casual ease, then made the mistake of glancing down. There was a sheer drop of fifty feet down to the rock-strewn water. Quickly she stepped back, trying not to appear unnerved.

But he was grinning as he turned to her. "A long way to the water, isn't it? I hung a rope from that tree when I was a boy—" he nodded back to a dark sturdy oak at the edge of the flagstones, "and anchored my boat down there, and would climb up and down for a lark." He looked down at the waves crashing below. "It's hard to believe I was so reckless."

"No, not hard to believe at all," she replied.

It was only what she was thinking, that he still must be at his best taking risks. But he withdrew slightly, into that civil reserve that reminded her how very different he was than the other men she knew. "You have uncatalogued material in boxes, do you?"

"Yes, I know that's not the best way to treat books. But I haven't any choice yet. That is the first thing I mean to do, when I have the authority, a complete inventory." It would take a year or more, of course, but she couldn't keep the eagerness out of her voice.

"Perhaps you'll find that copy of the Aeneid that went missing during the Civil War."

That ironic derision flashed again in his eyes. He must have heard that Charles I entrusted to the first baron a copy of Caxton's translation of the
Aeneid
, so that it wouldn't fall into the hands of Cromwell. In the muddle that followed—the war, and the King's beheading, and the Restoration—somehow the book never found its way home.

Jessica knew that book, one of the first printed in English, complete with the printer Caxton's spelling experiments. In fact, it was not boxed, but locked away in a display cabinet. She almost told him this, before she recalled that he worked for Charles I's successor. "Caxton's
Aeneid
? Oh, I doubt it's in any of the boxes. It would be too valuable to stash away!"

"And the Caxton guide to chessplaying—you don't expect to find that in a box either, do you?"

Jessica could only laugh, for it was true, the chess book was also supposed to have been a "gift" from Charles I. "Do you know everything?"

"No," he replied evenly. "I don't know what you want of me."

From the coolness of his tone, she realized it was time to tell the truth, or a bit of it anyway. "I only wanted a little advice. The library's curator. I wonder if you might know him."

"Alfred Wiley? He belongs to the Royal Society. I daresay I have encountered him."

"What do you think of him?"

"I don't know him well enough to have formed an opinion."

Now, with the moon hidden by a cloud, it was too dark to see Sir John's expression, but she heard the restraint in his voice. He was not, she had already figured out, one to express himself indiscreetlv. She should probably cultivate the same reticence if she was to win his support.

But reticence was never one of her virtues, and now that an alternate scheme was taking shape in her mind, she could not keep still. "I'm not impressed with him. I think he does not do a very good job." She took a deep breath, and when she let it out she was able to speak without trembling. "The library is a shambles. You'd be dismayed, I know it. My grandfather Parham would—oh, he would take his riding crop to Mr. Wiley, I think. He has supposedly been updating the catalogue of the collection for years, and I dareswear he's got no more than a few pages completed, and meanwhile the condition of the books just keeps deteriorating." After a moment, she added in a low voice, "I can hardly bear to go in there now."

Sir John's hand had curled into a fist, but his voice was perfectly even. "So why hasn't he been fired?"

"Oh, my father liked him. They shared the enthusiasm for Bacon. I never understood it. I think Bacon is tedious in the extreme. So he appointed Mr. Wiley curator in the will. And my uncle and the solicitors know nothing of the field. They think libraries are supposed to be dusty and overstuffed with volumes and impossible to navigate. And they believe him to be a great scholar."

"He is, according to reputation."

Jessica shrugged. "Reputation? A dozen years ago, perhaps, he deserved it. But he has become narrow, I think. Nothing interests him but Bacon. And that is all he values in the collection. I'd give him the Bacon just to make him go away—well," she added in afterthought, "perhaps not all of it."

"Can't you prevail upon your uncle to discharge him?"

"I'm not sure that it is possible, given my father's will. And my uncle—as I said, he is duly impressed with the great scholar Alfred Wiley. And I am not, oh, not in my uncle's best books at the moment. But it is possible that, if I learned enough, I could persuade Mr. Wiley to resign."

She saw the ironic glint in his eyes, the half-smile that seemed so characteristic of him. "And how would you accomplish that?"

"Blackmail."

Now the half-smile became full, and she realized with a certain relief that she had impressed him.

"You are a ruthless one indeed, Miss Seton." He leaned back against the stone wall, his elbow braced behind him. "I don't know how I can help you, however."

"You are in a position to hear things about him, as a member of the Royal Society."

"Such as...what? Do you think the Antiquaries sit about and talk about each other's opium habits? Dishonorable behavior during duels? I fear I must disappoint you with the truth. Most book-collectors have but one vice, and that one is not conducive to blackmail."

Impatiently she brushed aside an inquisitive ant, which had spent the last minutes climbing up her lace sleeve to her neck. "I don't mean anything like opium habits. The man's a monk, I know that already. But perhaps he's been selling off bits of the collection. I wouldn't put it past him, as he cares for naught but Francis Bacon."

"I think I should have heard if he had been doing so. And I am not likely, you must know, to second-guess a colleague, especially if it might mean his dismissal."

She sighed, wishing he would just agree to help her as any proper gallant would. It was dispiriting how bereft of gallants nineteenth-century Britain was. "What about some intellectual crime?"

"Intellectual crime? What do you mean?"

"Forgery."

"Of documents?"

He was wary again, leaning against the wall to put distance between himself and her charge. Forgery was a dangerous accusation these days, when William Ireland's Shakespeare forgeries were still turning up in important collections. Jessica thought to reassure him that she meant only poison pen letters, but knew how paltry, how personal that sounded, how unworthy of the title "intellectual crime." So, reluctantly, she played her best card. "He has adjudged from the signature that Shakespeare is illiterate."

He started to speak, then arrested whatever comment he had meant to make. She had surprised him finally, astonished him, in fact. And despite all her troubles, she smiled. It was such fun to be with a man who could appreciate the full horror of what she just revealed.

And so she stoked the fire with her speculations of the librarian's intent. "Mr. Wiley is writing a monograph about it. He will say that the man called Shakespeare was illiterate and uneducated, that he never went to school or owned any books."

"But that's absurd! He owned books, and he read them. He must have. The history plays draw extensively from Holinshed's Chronicles, just for one example. And he was surely well-read in the classics." He shook his head, relegating this to nonsense. "And if he were illiterate, how could he have written the plays?"

"That's precisely what Mr. Wiley asks. And his conclusion is—well, that he didn't. That he wasn't educated enough or intelligent enough to construct such masterpieces."

This last revelation struck Sir John silent. So she continued playing the devil's advocate, anticipating Mr. Wiley's argument. "You recall, of course, that in his eulogy Ben Jonson remarked that Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greek.' And he would know. He was Shakespeare's best friend."

"A rivalrous friend. That eulogy is one long covert lament that the world preferred Shakespeare. Jonson exaggerated his friend's weaknesses for effect; he must have. And anyway, small Latin and less Greek hardly translates to illiterate! Anyone reading the plays would know that their author knew Ovid well, and not only in translation."

"But Mr. Wiley would say that only proves that the writer couldn't have been Shakespeare, you see." She glanced up at him surreptitiously, watching his response. "Shakespeare didn't go to school, or take the Grand Tour. So of course he could know naught of—oh, of Ovid, or of Italy, or of elevated ideas and emotions, being naught but a glovemaker's son."

That last reference would do it, she thought. This apothecary's son, so elegant, so accomplished, would have no use for such elitism. But he surprised her. He shrugged, and looked away across the Channel to France. "It's a notion. I've never found the Italian settings particularly convincing. They rather sound like mere guidebook material. But I expect it can be argued Shakespeare must have visited there to admire it so. He seldom set a play in France, it's true."

"Perhaps he hadn't a French guidebook."

He looked back at her, his smile only a flash in the darkness. He was more composed now, but she saw his hand flexed into a fist at his side. "Perhaps." Elaborately casual, he asked, "So who was the real author of those plays, does Wiley say?"

"Who but Sir Francis Bacon?"

"Bacon?" He raised his hand in dismissal, found it still in a fist, and slowly opened it. "Nonsense. Bacon was a philosopher, not a poet."

Jessica abruptly consigned the devil's advocate position to the devil. "Exactly my thought. Bacon cared for evidence, for reasoning. For facts. A poet—"

"Cares for truth. Shakespeare cared naught for facts. He has Richard III as a hunchback—which is a truth, a higher truth, but has no basis in fact." He added, in a low voice, "It's an outrageous proposition."

Jessica smiled to herself. She had won herself, and poor defamed Shakespeare, an ally. "Now you see why I am so mistrustful of Mr. Wiley. To think that he might use my collection to such a purpose!"

But even now Sir John seemed only half-convinced. "How? Oh, I will agree, his hypothesis is outrageous. But how can your collection help him prove something that isn't provable?"

In her haste to enlist his aid, Jessica hadn't considered that question, and for once she hadn't a response handy. "He could—I don't know." Slowly she spoke her thoughts. "There can't be any evidence in the Bacon section that Bacon wrote the plays, certainly, if Bacon didn't write them. But Mr. Wiley might find something that he could manipulate to indicate that. Of course, such a misinterpretation would be easy to prove false."

Sir John asked, "You said he was adept at forgery?"

"I think so." She decided not to tell him about the poison pen letters. "He copied out Shakespeare's signature very precisely."

"Could he forge something in Bacon's hand, do you think?"

"Such as a diary entry? 'Finished Hamlet today, will start Macbeth tomorrow'?" She was rewarded by his laugh, but his serious gaze never faltered from her face. And so she considered her own suggestion, testing it against logic, even if it proved illogical. Sir John would expect that sort of intellectual courage, she thought. "But if he has to forge proof, then he will have to accept he has no proof. He would be ruining his own case. So he wouldn't use the collection that way."

Unexpectedly, Sir John demurred. "I don't know about that. Collectors are an odd breed. Obsessive. When they are set on believing in something, they are sometimes blind to the truth. Someday I must tell you about the pope and the Aquinas portfolio."

"I know all about obsessive collectors," she said. "My grandfather traded his wife's wedding ring for an illuminated manuscript. He pulled it off her finger as she slept. She was furious." Jessica added fairly, "But it was a Book of Hours, from a Benedictine monastery no one had ever heard of, so who could blame him? Still, this is much more reprehensible an act than mere theft. You are suggesting that Mr. Wiley is not just blind to the truth, but might actually invent falsity. How could he believe in it, if he knows he invented it?"

"If he believes in the 'higher truth' of his theory, perhaps he won't cavil at a single falsehood, if it means he can persuade others. Think of it. He already believes in this mad idea, and without any evidence at all. It would be no great leap for him to invent proof—or destroy it."

She looked sharply at his shadowed face. "What do you mean, destroy?"

Sir John didn't answer immediately. He pushed away from the wall and started back across the terrace. "Come, we'd best get back." He waited for her to catch up to him, and when they were within sight of the house, he said softly. "Are the Folios all the Shakespeare articles you have?"