WE STARED AT each other. The First Folio was the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works, published posthumously in 1623 by his old friends and patrons. To them, it had been a monument more precious than marble, and they had lavished money, care, and time on it. The book that had rolled from the presses at last was a beautiful thing—a blatant bid to shift the author from the rowdy, disreputable world of the theater to the eternal truths of poetry. To Shakespeare’s enemies—all those who’d taunted him during his life as an upstart crow, not fit to pick the crumbs from their tables—it had been a sharp stroke of revenge.
“Motive and cue enough for murder, all right,” said Sir Henry. “The Folio’s one of the most valuable and coveted books in the world. You know that a torn and water-stained copy, missing pages, fetched a hundred sixty thousand pounds at auction a while back?” He shook his head in disbelief. “When Sotheby’s put an exceptionally fine copy on the block last year, it went for five million dollars. Sir Paul Getty is rumored to have spent six. Think about that: one old book bringing in ten times the average price of a house in London. No offense, Kate, but if Roz found a First Folio, why not just run straight to Sotheby’s or Christie’s, auction it off, and retire to a villa in Provence? Why come running to you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, wading through a tangle of thoughts as I spoke. “Unless it wasn’t a Folio that she found—a new copy, I mean—but something in it. Unless what she wanted was information.”
“Information that you’d have, and she wouldn’t?”
If he’d been talking about anyone but Roz, his incredulousness might have seemed insulting. Roz had been famous for her encyclopedic knowledge of how Shakespeare’s plays and poems had woven through speeches in the U.S. Congress, for instance, and sprouted up as Soviet ballets and Nazi propaganda. Because of Roz, the world knew that Shakespeare was equally at home in Japanese Kabuki theater and around campfires in the East African bush. Her last book—which I’d helped research in its earliest stages—had gleefully detailed the popularity of Shakespeare in the wild American West, among illiterate mountain men and miners, cowboys and whores, even the occasional Indian tribe. Her expertise and advice had been sought out by scholars, museums, and theater companies all over the world.
But she had sought advice from me. “I need help, Kate,” she’d said that afternoon. “Your help.” Now, as then, I could think of only one reason why: my dissertation. I’d modeled my work on hers, except that I’d chosen to sift the past for murkier stuff.
“Occult Shakespeare,” I said aloud. “Secret, not magical,” I added, launching into the old, familiar defense. “It’s the one Shakespearean subject I know in more depth than Roz—the long, strange history of attempts to recover forbidden wisdom thought to be scattered through his works. The vast majority of it supposedly hidden in the First Folio.”
Sir Henry scrutinized me. “Forbidden wisdom?”
“Prophecy or history. Take your choice.” I gave him a wry smile. “Those who believe in Shakespeare the prophet treat the Folio like the oracles of Nostradamus: as a riddling prediction of the future, foretelling the rise of Hitler, the landing on the moon, the date of the Apocalypse, what you’ll have for dinner next Tuesday. The ‘historians,’ on the other hand, spend most of their time digging up the old love story between Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Leicester—”
“Hardly a secret,” said Sir Henry. “Not a decade goes by without a bestselling bodice-ripper on that old affaire de coeur. Hollywood’s been in on the act for the last hundred years.”
“True. But the histories I’m talking about claim a marriage between the queen and the earl, not an affair, and the birth of a legitimate heir, to boot. A son bundled off into hiding at birth, like King Arthur—and also, like King Arthur, promised to come again.”
Sir Henry said something that sounded suspiciously like “Harrumph.” When he managed words, he sounded annoyed. “And just how is a lowly playwright from Stratford supposed to have had access to such information?”
A gust of wind moaned around the corner of the house and rattled the French doors to the balcony behind us. I took a sip of cognac. “Because he was the hidden boy.”
For a moment, the only sound was the hiss of the flames. Then Sir Henry burst out laughing. “You can’t possibly believe such poppycock,” he chortled, pouring more brandy into my glass.
I smiled. “No. Neither did Roz. We used to laugh at most of it—though one or two of the stories were tragic.” I stood up, walking toward the fireplace. “I don’t believe she would’ve chased after any of it without some solid, scholarly reason. But it doesn’t matter if it’s true, does it? She might have been killed because someone thought she’d found something.”
“Or feared she would.”
I set my glass down on the mantel. “But what? And where? Something like two hundred thirty copies of the Folio survive, scattered all over the world. Even if I knew which one—or she proves to have found something present in all of them—it’s a big book. What am I supposed to look for?”
Sir Henry was poring over the card on the table. “Hear me out,” he said. “She had to pick lines from sonnets sixteen and twenty-three, to make up the date. But she had fourteen lines to choose from in each sonnet. Why these particular lines?” He tapped his finger on the card.
I crossed to look at lines he was pointing at:
O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast.
Revelation crept through me in a flush of heat. “She meant her books, didn’t she? Not just Shakespeare’s. That’s brilliant, Sir Henry.”
“Still a bit of a needle in a haystack for a learned professor.”
“We have a head start, though,” I said with a grin. “Turn it over.”
On the other side, in the uneven, pocked lettering of manual typewriters, was an old card-catalog entry:
Chambers, E. K. (Edmund Kerchever). 1866–1954.
The Elizabethan Stage.
Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1923.
“Marvelous tome,” said Sir Henry.
“Tomes, you mean. Four fat volumes.” Chambers had been one of the last of an old breed of scholars who collected facts the way that Victorian botanists once collected beetles and butterflies—indiscriminately and in depth, displaying them with wit and exuberance. At the time of its publication, The Elizabethan Stage had held every known scrap of evidence relating to the theater in Shakespeare’s day. A few had been unearthed since, but not many. For scholars, it remained a sort of pirate’s chest of forgotten theater trivia.
“Better than the Folio, at any rate,” he said, pushing himself up from his chair. “Because I happen to have a copy.” He strode across the room.
“Wait,” I said. “Not your books. Her books. This is her card.”
He turned back. “Roz put her own books in a card catalog?”
“No. When it came to books, she didn’t distinguish too clearly between hers and Harvard’s. See this?” I pointed to a number at the top: Thr 390.160. “That’s a call number from the old system used in Widener—Harvard’s main library—before Dewey dreamed up his decimals.”
“She took a card from Harvard’s catalog?”
“Hers now. The university put its catalog online a few years back, and in a fit of techno-hubris the library’s powers-that-be deemed the card catalog obsolete. To save space, they decided to toss the old cards—all eleven million of them, some dating from the eighteenth century. They’ve been using them for scrap paper ever since. The minute Roz saw that, she had a fit—and kept having it.”
“Eloquently, no doubt,” said Sir Henry, tongue firmly in cheek.
I smiled. “She wrote pieces for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, TLS, all lambasting the library. In the end, she kicked up such a ruckus that the university offered to give her all the cards pertaining to the English Renaissance and Shakespeare, just to shut her up. All she had to do was sort them out from the others. The library staff probably figured that would send her running for the hills, but they figured wrong. She employed three research assistants for a year and a half just to pick through that mountain of paper…. One of those researchers was me.” I looked ruefully at the card. “She keeps—kept them in one of the library’s old cabinets, in her study. I don’t think she’d have used this as a calling card lightly.” I ran my finger across it. “In fact, I’d be willing to bet that something in her copy of Chambers will tell us which Folio she meant, and where.”
“Willing to bet what, exactly?”
“A trip to Harvard?” I asked. But it wasn’t really a question.
Sir Henry set his glass down. “Why not just go to the police? They’re a damned sight closer.”
“And hand it over to some patronizing bastard of a policeman who won’t be able to decipher it in the first place, so he can shove it to the back of some evidence shelf where it’ll rot? No.” I swallowed hard. “Besides, Roz didn’t go to the police. She came to me.”
“And Roz is dead, Kate.”
“That’s why I have to go.” I fingered the brooch on my lapel. “I made a promise. And I may be the only one who can follow her trail.”
Except maybe her killer. The phrase hung unsaid between us.
Sir Henry sighed. “Inspector Sinclair won’t like that much.”
“He doesn’t have to know. I’ll fly over, take a look at the book, and come right back.”
“It would be quicker and safer to ask someone there to do the looking for you. You needn’t say why. Surely Harvard has another Shakespearean scholar or two.”
I retrieved my glass, swirling the brandy with an impatient shake. Mellifluous of speech, with fluent pen and facile wit, Professor Matthew Morris had arrived at Harvard with tenure and fireworks the year before I left. Undergraduates and journalists adored him; the university treated him like a rock star. But I’d disliked him on sight, and so had Roz. My learned colleague, she used to call him, with silky venom. In her estimation, he represented the worst of modern academics—all wind and no substance. He’d be the last person with whom she’d want me to share any aspect of her secret. On the whole, I thought, I’d rather go to Sinclair.
In my snifter, the cognac slowed and settled. I shook my head. “My grad-school cohorts have scattered. And Matthew Morris is on sabbatical at the Folger Library in D.C.” Which was, in fact, the case—ironically, since he scorned archival research as plodding and dull—even if it wasn’t my primary reason for skipping over him. “There is no one else I would trust,” I said. That, at least, was unequivocally true.
On the subject of my journey, Sir Henry had either agreed or capitulated, I wasn’t sure which. But on the question of me going home to pack, he refused to budge. “Your flat’ll be watched,” he said. “Besides, you need some rest. Give me a list, and I’ll have Barnes get you a few things. I promise, we’ll get you off to Heathrow and the first flight out to Boston.”
“Barnes is not buying me underwear.”
A pained look crossed his face. “Lingerie, darling. Ever so much more sexy.”
“Call it whatever you like, but Barnes is not buying it.”
“We’ll leave that to Mrs. Barnes—an intrepid soul. Not likely to retreat in the face of an army of brassieres.” I’d had no idea there was a Mrs. Barnes, but Sir Henry looked at me in mock horror. “You don’t imagine that I keep my own house, do you?”
I began to laugh. “You live in another century, Sir Henry.”
“So does everyone who can afford it,” he said airily, finishing off the cognac.
As I climbed into a heavily draped bed grand enough for a dozen kings, I heard a clock chime three somewhere in the depths of the house. I curled up tight, clutching the brooch in one hand and Roz’s card in the other, thinking about the shadow I’d glimpsed earlier, in the window of my flat.
Surely I’d been rattled, had glimpsed some strange angle of curtains and furniture from the wind-scattered street, like seeing wolves or whales in the clouds. I lay awake for a long time, listening to the sleeping house.
I must have drifted off at last. Gradually, my dreams filled with the sound of rushing water. I sat up. The bed had grassed over into a bank beside a moon-silvered stream. Not far off, someone lay asleep amid violets. A gray-haired king with a crown on his brow. I crept toward him. The violets beneath him had all withered on their stems; the man, too, was dead. At least, I’d thought him a man, but as I watched, the face rippled and shifted like a face seen underwater, and I saw that it was Roz.
In a flash of green, her eyes sprang open. Even as I jumped back, a shadow crept over me from behind, and I heard the hiss of a blade sliding from its sheath.
I sat bolt upright in bed to find that I’d shoved the pin from the brooch into my hand; it had bled a little onto Sir Henry’s quilt. I rose and cautiously drew back the curtain. In the garden, roses as big as peonies glowed pink and crimson beneath a relentlessly cheery sun. I stood in the window, letting the light stream across my face until it had dissolved both the dream and—more slowly—the fear that lingered in its wake.
In the dressing room new clothes had been laid out: slim black pants, a scooped-neck top more clinging than I was accustomed to, and a jacket of expensively simple tailoring. I was pleasantly surprised at how nice it looked. Nearby stood a small suitcase, already packed. A plane ticket lay on top. My flight was at nine. Dressing in a hurry, I pinned Roz’s brooch to my new jacket and headed downstairs to find Sir Henry.
“Being chased by paparazzi teaches you more about cunning than the theater ever could,” he said with satisfaction as I entered the breakfast room. The Bentley, it turned out, was on the point of departing for Highgate with the gardener and his granddaughter in the backseat. Not even the dispatch of a diversionary vehicle, though, could stop Sir Henry from fussing over me all through breakfast. “You sure you don’t want company?” he asked, stirring what looked like a pound of sugar into his tea.
I shook my head. “Thanks, but I’d attract a lot more attention traveling with a world-famous actor than without.”
It was a relief, at last, to slip into a Range Rover with Barnes at the wheel. “Take care, Kate,” was all Sir Henry said as he shut the door. But his eyes were full of worry.