In this particular mood it was harder than ever to keep the secret of the duke’s kidnapping. But Lenox did so.
“He has no memory of it?” Mayne asked once more.
They were sitting in the spacious, well-lit office of the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, with its view of the long avenue to Parliament. In the distance, heavy hammers worked; some tremendous bell was going to be placed in a tower right by Parliament, they said, five or six years hence.
Lenox leaned down and rubbed his shin, wincing. “He says not.”
“What is it?” asked Mayne, rather rudely.
“Oh—nothing. My young cousin is staying with me for a few weeks. He hit me in the shin with a cricket ball.”
“I hope you gave him a hiding.”
“Ah,” said Lenox, abashed. “No. I’m afraid everyone is rather soft on him. His father died when he was six.”
“Oh. Shame.”
Lenox nodded. He could see Lancelot’s small, confused face as he held Eustacia’s hand by the grave. “Battle against the French.”
Mayne nodded. “Stout fellow. Died well.”
“Indeed.”
“About the duke, then—you two have had a dispute? The Palace has been in touch with me. They want no hint of a scandal, and they are worried there is a political element, given his high rank and his service in the cabinet. The ivory buttons and all that.”
A cabinet minister’s servants were permitted to wear ivory buttons with the Queen’s seal on their uniforms. “We are meeting this afternoon,” said Lenox. “I am happy to reconcile with him should he apologize.”
“Do it either way.”
Lenox nodded ambiguously.
They sat there speaking for half an hour or so, first discussing Dorset but then moving on to more general subjects, including a number of cases under Mayne’s purview. The commissioner consulted with Lenox in this fashion more often these days, which was gratifying.
“Tell me something,” said Lenox, just before he left. He was standing with his hat in his hand. “What do you know about Shakespeare?”
“I once played Ophelia in Hamlet.”
“Did you!”
“Yes.” Mayne looked dismal at the recollection. “I was nine, and I was the smallest boy at school. I wouldn’t do it again for a hundredweight of coal. I’ve never been able to tolerate Shakespeare since.”
Lenox smiled. “How were the reviews?”
Mayne brightened. “Not bad, in fact, I would have you know! We had it come happy in the wash instead of tragical—they ended up married, I think, Hamlet and Ophelia. The new king died very bloody. Gertrude, too. People liked that. I was a fair soprano then, if I say so.”
Sir Richard smiled at himself, Lenox laughed, and they shook hands.
Mayne kept his grip, though, and added, “Keep me close on Dorset.”
“Yes, Sir Richard.”
“Good chap. Be safe.”
“And yourself.”
Nobody had betrayed to Lenox any reaction on his stray mentions of the name Shakespeare.
At a little after one o’clock, he stopped by the British Library. It was closed on Sundays, but Lenox’s friend there, like Sir Richard, worked seven days a week. Lenox presented his card at a side door, and soon Duncan Jones came down to fetch him—a friend of long standing.
“Mr. Lenox! This is a pleasant and unexpected surprise.”
“How do you do, Mr. Jones?”
“Summer could be kinder on my knees. Come in, come in—thank you, Hillhurst,” he said to the library’s guard, who touched his hat. Duncan Jones counted for a great deal in these noble halls.
He was a fellow of perhaps eighty-five, Jones, with short white hair and a deeply creased face. His father had been a Yorkshire farmworker. Neither of his parents had been able to read. But from an early age he had shown such brilliance in the year or two of school that was expected of him that he had simply kept advancing in his education, every year intended to be his last so that he could quit and help his family on the farm, until at last he found his way to Cambridge through the generosity of a Yorkshire squire.
Now he was perhaps the world’s foremost scholar of incunabula, and the chief curator of the great library’s collection of manuscripts. He still had a very heavy accent. Lenox could not quite remember whether he had been knighted; he suspected so. Nevertheless, there was no pomposity to him whatsoever. They had struck up a friendship once when Lenox requested a very old map of the Kingdom of Dalmatia, on Europe’s southeastern coastline, and it had been in Jones’s carrel.
“What brings you?” asked Jones, as they proceeded slowly down a long, dim hallway, striped at even intervals with shafts of sunlight from outside.
“I was hoping I could buy you a cup of tea as the price of your expertise.”
“Of course. I was pottering—inexcusable, but at my age perhaps inevitable.”
The tea was free, in a small room covered in eccentric portraits of old noblemen and women, ranging in size from a tenpence coin to twice Lenox’s height.
They took cups, Jones’s a proper Yorkshire cup, black with five lumps of sugar, and then retreated to a comfortable nook piled with odd cushions.
“What I was curious about was Shakespeare,” Lenox said as they sat.
Jones squinted at him. “Who, now?”
“I—he was—oh, but I see now, you are having fun at my expense. Very good.” Jones was laughing his wheezing laugh, which came from deep within his gentle soul. “Do you make sport of all your inferiors?”
“Do go on, Charles, do go on,” said Jones, still smiling. “I apologize.”
Lenox smiled, too. “What I really hoped to learn about was the portraits of him that we know to exist.”
Jones brightened. “Ah. An interesting question!”
“Is it?”
“Yes, because really there is only one. That is your answer. It is the black-and-white etching that appeared in the First Folio. You would recognize it instantly. He has a very high bald forehead in it, a white ruff, and a mustache. Not a good portrait—stiff—but his friends are recorded as saying it looked very like him. The artist was Martin Droeshout, who never did a single thing of interest with the rest of his mortal hours.”
“Just one picture!” Lenox said wonderingly.
“There are dozens of imitations. But only one other candidate that could be real. The Chandos.”
Here was a name that Lenox knew well. Just at that instant, perhaps the most famous man in England was Richard Plantagenet Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville—the 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos. Some decades before, he had inherited one of the world’s largest fortunes. Now he was bankrupt. Indeed, they said he owed a million pounds in debt.
“The same family?”
“The very same. In the sell-off of his belongings the current duke sold it to Ellesmere last year, who to his credit immediately donated it to the nation. It is an intriguing picture. Its sitter is dressed in open collar, with a gold earring, and he has a very bright, humorous face. That makes it nice to think it is him.”
“But it is not certain.”
“No, it is very far from certain.”
“What would a certain oil of Shakespeare be worth?”
“Worth!” Jones smiled a private smile, a librarian’s smile, full of dusty secrets and happy solitudes. He thought for a moment. “I often think of Thomas De Quincey saying that the plays are not works of art—they are phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers. But that was not your question.”
“It was still a good answer.”
Jones took a sip of his tea. “There is no price that could be too high, Charles. Imagine looking into Shakespeare’s eyes! The most peerie little oval of his face would be worth the moon.”
“What about twenty thousand pounds?”
Jones smiled, conceding to reality. “Yes. That sounds like a decent first approximation. Twenty thousand pounds. More if there were two buyers competing for it. These Americans are getting rather rich. Gold and railroads, I’m told.”