The Town Car pulled away and I started walking down First Street toward East Capitol, away from the Library of Congress. The Folger was the next block behind it on East Capitol and Second. Grant Lowry was a Freemason, just like Prescott. Had he known anything about Prescott’s search for the documents hidden in Bruton Vault, or supposedly hidden there? Did Grant believe Prescott, or, like Clay, did he consider Prescott’s search to be an expensive wild-goose chase?
It felt, all of a sudden, as if I were running out of time to find the Bruton Vault documents. If there was something to find. My heart was still pounding as I walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library a few minutes later.
“Can I help you, dear?” A middle-aged woman standing behind a counter in the small dark-paneled entryway gave me a concerned smile. “Are you all right?”
“Yes … I’m fine, thanks. I have a meeting with Tana Rossi at one o’clock,” I said. “I’m Lucie Montgomery.”
The woman made a call and Tana Rossi appeared before I’d finished signing in. She looked as if she were about Frankie’s age, in her early fifties, with short, curly, salt-and-pepper hair, a pair of knee-high suede boots worn with faded jeans, a turquoise-and-lavender knitted turtleneck, and an eye-popping fuchsia scarf around her neck. Elaborate turquoise earrings that looked Southwestern dangled from her ears and she wore scholarly-looking oversized tortoiseshell glasses.
We shook hands and she said, “Won’t you come with me? We need to leave your coat and purse in my office before we do anything.”
Her office was a small rectangular room off a hallway on the main floor that made me think of a repurposed coat closet. I shed my winter coat, scarf, and gloves and set them on a chair.
“Your purse will be perfectly safe here,” she said in a faint English accent. “I’ll lock the office. You may bring a notebook and your phone, if you want to take photos without a flash, but all notes must be taken in pencil. Help yourself to one from that pencil holder on the table over there.”
I did as I was told and followed her back down the corridor after she locked her door. The building, I knew, dated from the 1920s, but inside it seemed more like a place where Will himself would feel at home, with its subdued lighting, dark, heavy oak paneling, and carved wood.
“I’ll show you the Great Hall and the library later,” she said. “Plus if you’d like to visit the vault and see our manuscripts—I presume you’d like to see a First Folio—we can do that as well. For now, I thought we could talk in the Founders’ Room, where we’ll have some privacy.”
She opened a door and I followed her into a dimly lit room with more carved paneling, a stained-glass window, and an enormous stone fireplace with a large oil painting of Queen Elizabeth I hanging above it. A long table with a dozen or so high-backed chairs on either side of it like a dining room table in a palace or a grand English country home occupied most of the room. It felt like a place where we might drink mead from golden goblets, minstrels would play, servants would bring platters piled high with roast pheasant or wild boar for us to dine on, and candles in tall silver candelabra would gutter if a draft of air swept through the room.
“Please have a seat,” Tana said, moving to the other side of the table and pulling out one of the chairs. “You’ve never been here before, have you?”
“How did you know?” I sat down across from her.
“The awed look on your face. We may be off the beaten path for a lot of tourists,” she said, “but the Folger contains the preeminent collection of material on Shakespeare in the world, thanks to the foresight and generosity of Henry and Emily Folger. And, yes, I know, it’s like stepping back to the 1600s in here—always a surprise after the Art Deco exterior, especially if you don’t know what to expect.”
“Busted.” I smiled. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“Not a problem. Anything for a friend of Francesca’s. And now tell me more about what brings you here.”
I told her as much as I could without bringing Prescott into the story. She listened attentively but I could tell by the spark in her dark, intelligent eyes that she’d heard this story before. And more than once or twice. Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.
When I was finished, she folded her hands and leaned toward me. “There have been Shakespeare doubters for years, Lucie. Centuries, even. Among the more notable were Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Fenimore Cooper, so you’re in excellent company.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I think.”
She grinned. “Are you familiar with what a First Folio is and why it’s so important?”
“It’s a book containing all of Shakespeare’s plays,” I said, “that he had published by members of his company. I do know that these days a copy sells for a fortune.”
“Not exactly,” she said. “The First Folio, which was put together by John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s colleagues, was published in 1623. Shakespeare passed away in 1616. He didn’t know about it and he certainly couldn’t have vetted the contents. Although a number of his plays had been published before 1623, what makes the First Folio so important, perhaps the most important document in the English language, is that it is the first time all of Shakespeare’s plays—that we know of—appeared in a single bound book. The exceptions are Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and Two Noble Kinsmen. Then, of course, there are the two ‘lost’ plays: Cardenio and Love’s Labour Won.”
Frankie had sent me to the right place. But surely Prescott knew all of this, even if I didn’t have my facts completely straight. Jock had contributed financially to the Folger when it was being built. Prescott had done considerable research here.
“You need to remember that in those days, members of the cast weren’t given a script containing the entire play the way they are now,” Tana went on. “Everything was handwritten and what an actor got were his lines—only his lines—with the last few lines of the previous actor’s part and the first lines spoken by the next actor. The plays were written out on long rolls of paper and then each part was torn off and handed to the appropriate actor. It’s is where the word ‘role,’ as in role in a play, comes from.”
I had been making furious notes with my new Folger pencil in a notebook I’d brought with me. Now I sat back and stared at her.
She smiled. “I know. It was a different world.”
“Clearly.”
“So,” she said, “do you have any idea what happened to these ‘rolls’—rolls of paper—when the play was finished? What each actor did with his individual part?”
“No,” I said, but I had a feeling I could guess what her answer would be.
“They were thrown out as scrap paper or the paper was reused, perhaps for the binding of a book,” she said. “Which is what makes the First Folio so important. Because in it we have thirty entire plays in one place. If it weren’t for the First Folio we never would have known that The Tempest, Macbeth, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night even existed. Can you imagine?”
The Tempest. The last play Shakespeare wrote on his own and supposedly based on the wreck of the Sea Venture. Without the First Folio no one would have known about that play.
“Are you saying that anything in Shakespeare’s handwriting—all those different papers for each actor in each play—didn’t survive?” I asked.
“Not only his plays,” she said, “but anything in Shakespeare’s handwriting. Do you know where we get most of our information about his life?”
I shook my head.
“Not from his plays. From court records,” she said. “It was a very litigious age, believe it or not, and we have many court records from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that document Shakespeare’s business life as well as his real estate assets since he was a businessman and an investor. We learned the most about him when the family applied for a coat of arms.”
“So how was the First Folio put together if no one had the pages from the plays?” I asked.
“More than likely from prompt books. And there were what are called ‘fair copies’ of the plays that existed.” She stood up and took off her glasses, cleaning them absentmindedly on her scarf. “Would you like to see a First Folio? And I can give you a tour of the library as well—especially the Tudor Great Hall.”
“I would.”
“Come with me.”
We took a tiny elevator down one level to the basement where the vault was located. The anteroom had more dark paneling, glass cabinets containing figurines from Shakespeare’s plays and busts of the Bard that were no doubt collectors’ items, along with a couple of antique chairs tucked in corners, and a beautiful Oriental carpet. It looked as if it could be the waiting room of a Fortune 500 company CEO. The substantial-looking exterior door to the vault was open.
“It’s going to be cool in here,” Tana said as she swiped her badge to unlock the interior steel door. “We keep the temperature at fifty-nine degrees with fifty-five percent humidity to protect the manuscripts and documents. In case of a fire, we have a system that removes the oxygen from the air—literally pushes it to the ground—to give the fire nothing to feed on. If you’re ever caught in here when that happens, you need to crawl out of the place if you want to live. And be fast about it.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” I said.
She grinned and led me into a room filled with rows of book-lined shelves that went from floor to ceiling. We walked down a narrow corridor to the back of the room.
“Are all these books about Shakespeare?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “our collection is much broader. It dates from 1475 to 1714—the period of the reign of the Stuarts in England. That said, we own more First Folios than anywhere else in the world.”
“How many are there?”
“Between five hundred and seven hundred and fifty were printed. Of those, two hundred and thirty-five are extant. The Folger owns eighty-two.”
“Eighty-two? That’s more than a third of the number of copies still in existence. Why does a private American library own more First Folios than anyplace else?” I asked. “More than a British library or, say, the Globe Theatre in London?”
“Because Henry Folger bought them during what we call the ‘Downton Abbey’ years in England,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice. “After World War I, many once-wealthy English families were selling off their copies because they needed the money.”
“So he picked them up on the cheap?”
“Let’s just say he did all right.” She brought me over to a counter where an open book rested in a cradle. “Here you are. One of Shakespeare’s First Folios. This is copy number fourteen.”
I held my breath as I looked at it. Bound in rust-colored leather with gilded trim, First Folio number fourteen looked as if it were in pristine condition. In the last four hundred years, how many people had owned it, turned its pages, read it, recited the words of a favorite passage?
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“It is. As you can see, it was bound in Moroccan leather—which was a decision made by the individual who originally bought the unbound pages, which were basically stacks of sheets folded in half. Hence the name ‘folio.’ Each copy is different, some more elaborately bound than others. Gilded pages, different choice of leather, some people just bound the pages as they received them with no cover … the decision was up to the owner.”
Tana walked around the counter so she was facing me. “I’ll turn the pages for you so you can have a look at the book. Stop me if there’s something you particularly want to read.”
“Don’t you need to wear gloves?”
“At the Folger we believe it’s better for the books to be handled without gloves. You can’t really feel the paper with gloves on and we think there is less wear and tear if the pages are turned by hand. Plus there’s no harm to the paper from the natural oil from one’s fingers—as long as they’re clean, that is.”
The book was already open to the title page. Above a familiar engraving of Shakespeare—the one everyone knows—the publishers had printed:
Mr William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies
Published According to the True Originall Copies
Tana began turning pages. Just as in Quinn’s copy of Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest was first. Comedies, then tragedies. I read the opening lines.
A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard
Enter a master and a boatswain
And so the story began when Prospero used his magical powers to cause a ship that had left North Africa after a wedding and was bound for Italy to be wrecked on his island.
“Do you think The Tempest was based on the wreck of the Sea Venture?” I asked.
“There’s plenty of evidence that it could have been,” she said. “Shakespeare would have known members of the Virginia Company and he could have read the diary or the letters that were sent back to England by one of the men who was stranded on Bermuda.”
“What about Sir Francis Bacon? Couldn’t he have written some of the plays? He was a shareholder in the Virginia Company so he definitely would have known about the Sea Venture. There are accounts that claim that Shakespeare wasn’t educated enough to have written them, couldn’t write well enough … he was just the front man, to speak for others in power to express their political opinions anonymously.”
“Without proof,” Tana said, “at the Folger we believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. So far, no one has come forward with anything to the contrary. Definitive proof, that is.”
I nodded and she continued, “Look, I’m not saying something’s not out there. But after all this time it seems doubtful.”
“I get it,” I said.
In the elevator back to the first floor, she said, “Of course, there’s always Project Dust Bunny.”
“Project what?”
She smiled as the door opened and we stepped out. “The technical name is ‘proteomics,’ which is the study of proteins and their interactions to learn about the past.”
“Sorry, I’m lost.”
“Do you remember a news story a few years ago when the body of Richard III, the British king who also happened to be one of Shakespeare’s great villains, was discovered under a parking lot in Leicester, England?”
“I do.”
“The archeologist who identified the body as King Richard came to Washington to talk about it. Her visit started a conversation about whether there might not be an easier way to get DNA samples than digging up bodies buried under parking lots,” she said. “And what we at the Folger specifically wondered was whether or not there might be DNA traces left behind in old books. After all, people lean over them, turn pages, handle them—meaning they deposit skin and hair on those pages, right? And then they put the book away, usually in a cool place where that DNA remains intact and essentially in the dark. It can be left undisturbed for centuries.”
“You’re saying you can find DNA in old books?”
“Actually we did find it,” she said. “We took a four-hundred-year-old Bible and used a Q-tip to swipe the gutter, which is the seam where the pages come together. Then we sent it off to the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. And guess what?”
“They found something.”
She nodded. “It was incredible. Not only did the scientists at NIH manage to sequence the mitochondrial DNA of two individuals, they were also able to discover their haplotype, which means the region they were from—in this case, northern Europe. They even managed to find bacteria that suggested those two people had acne.”
I knew my mouth was hanging open. “Do you mean you might be able to find out if Shakespeare had acne? Although if it’s true, I don’t think I’d want to know. It would ruin some of the magic and the aura around him.”
Tana laughed. “Worse than finding out Santa Claus isn’t real.”
“Something like that.”
“As it happens, the Folger owns one of his property deeds—Shakespeare, not Santa Claus. So if he did leave any proteins on that deed, we might be able to identify his DNA by getting a sample from a living member of his family and seeing if there’s a match. It wouldn’t need to be a direct descendent—but it would work as long as it was someone traced through his mother’s lineage.” She saw my hopeful look and held up her hands, palms out. “Whoa. Hold on there. We’re a long way from that happening. It’s true the possibilities are really exciting, but for now we’re just trying to collect more dust bunnies from the gutters of books that go to our Conservation Lab to be restored. In the next few years, we’ll see what happens as biologists study those samples. But mark my words you’ll be reading more about it.”
BY THE TIME WE finished our tour of the library, it was nearly three o’clock, which, Tana explained, was teatime at the Folger. I declined her invitation to stay, thanked her for her help, and managed to hail a cab back to my car at Farragut Square as soon as I stepped outside the front door because someone was just getting dropped off.
Leaving Washington at rush hour was another story. Traffic was a nightmare as usual, but at least the crawling pace heading west on Interstate 66 gave me time to think. I had learned plenty yesterday at Jamestown and Williamsburg about the history of the Bruton Vault and more today about Shakespeare writing Shakespeare. Josie Wilde and Tana Rossi had humored me and my questions, but neither of them believed any documents existed, even if I did.
Unfortunately I was no nearer to finding out where they might have disappeared to—that is, if Thomas Jefferson had brought them to the White House from Williamsburg and if Dolley Madison had given them to Hobson Banks to hide somewhere for safekeeping the night the British burned Washington in 1814. And of course, if they existed.
I also didn’t know whether Prescott had actually known where they were hidden or if he merely had a good idea where they might be and was still looking for them. Either way, it no longer mattered. His secret had died with him.
Unless.
What if he’d been forced to reveal that information to his killer? Someone who was after the same thing he was—who believed the documents in Bruton Vault really existed and were still hidden away. Someone who wanted to find them as badly as he did. The same person who had walked into my home yesterday and gone through the envelope with Leland’s documents.
Which meant I probably ought to mind my back so I didn’t end up like Prescott.
Dead.