The Book of Air and Shadows

4

The crying lasted for approximately five minutes and ended in a series of deep shuddering breaths. Crosetti asked Carolyn what was wrong several times, but received no answer; as soon as the spasms had died down she pulled away from him and vanished behind the bathroom partition. He heard water running, footsteps, the delightful swishing sounds of a girl changing clothes. She’s slipping into something more comfortable, thought Crosetti with unaccustomed anticipation.

But when she emerged, he found that she was dressed in a gray mechanic’s coverall with her hair tightly bound up in an indigo scarf, below which her face had been scrubbed clean of even the light makeup she normally wore. Upon it no trace of the recent outburst. She looked like a prisoner or a nun.

"Feeling better?" he asked as she walked by him, but she didn’t answer. Instead, she began to replace the blotting paper in the wet books.

He walked over and started to pull sodden toweling out of volume three. After a few minutes of silent working he said, "And…?"

No response.

“Carolyn?”

“What?”

“Are we going to talk about what just went down?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you going hysterical just now.”

“I wouldn’t call it going hysterical. I get a little weepy when I drink.”

“A little weepy?” He stared at her and she stared back at him. Aside from a slight reddening of her eyelids there was no sign she had ever been anything but cool Carolyn Rolly. Who said, coolly, “I’m sorry if I disturbed you. I really don’t want to discuss it, if you don’t mind,” and returned to her work.

Crosetti had to be content with that. Clearly, there was to be no leap into intimacy, no sharing of dark secrets, and no further physical contact. They worked in silence. Crosetti cleaned up the scant debris of their supper and the used paper towels. Rolly sat on a stool and did arcane things with her medieval tool-kit and the half-ruined books.

Something at a loss, Crosetti retrieved the manuscript pages, now barely damp, and spread them out on the kitchen counter and the spool table. He grabbed a magnifying glass from Rolly’s worktable and examined a page at random. Some of the letters were obvious-the vowels were similar to modern ones, and short familiar words like the and to could be picked out easily. But actually reading the thing was another matter. Many of the words seemed to be mere sawtooth swiggles, and there were enough completely indecipherable letters to obscure the meaning of well over half the words. Besides that, several of the sheets seemed to be inscribed in some unfamiliar foreign tongue, but he couldn’t be sure of that because the orthography was so difficult to make out. Was he really seeing such a word as hrtxd? Or yfdpg?

He decided to ignore the text and focus on the fabric and character of the sheets. All forty-eight were folio sized, and they appeared to fall into three classes. The first, consisting of eighteen sheets of fine thin paper, were closely written, neatly but with many crossed-out words and lines; they had at one time been deeply creased both vertically and horizontally.

The second group consisted of twenty-six sheets of heavier paper, inscribed on both sides, and on these the writing was larger and messier, with a number of blots: despite this, it was written-at least to Crosetti’s inexperienced eye-in the same hand used on the first eighteen sheets. On each page of this second group, the paper was evenly punctured along one side, as if it had been torn out of a book. Another peculiarity of this set is that they seemed to be overwritten upon faded brownish columns of figures. The word palimpsest popped into Crosetti’s mind, and gave him an obscure satisfaction, although he understood that this was not a true example: palimpsests were normally parchment, where an old manuscript had been scraped down to make way for new text. But clearly this set of pages had been written on paper pressed into duty at need. The remaining four were the pages that had correction marks in pencil, and were clearly a different sort of paper and in a different hand. Crosetti held each of the pages up to the overhead lights and confirmed his guess: three different watermarks. The eighteen sheets of fine paper were marked with a curled post horn and the letters A and M; the twenty-six punctured sheets were marked with some sort of coat of arms; and the last four bore a crown.

But how did this collection wind up padding a binding in the mid-eighteenth century? Crosetti imagined a bookbindery of that era. There was a bale of wastepaper by the binder’s table, a table probably not very different from the one at which Rolly now worked under the light of an articulated desk lamp, her slim neck shone bright and vulnerable against the dark matte of her scarf. It would have been stout English oak, scarred and stained, instead of laminated pallet-wood. The bookbinder sitting before it would have reached into the stack and pulled out six sheets, trimmed them to size with a razor knife against a steel rule, and laid them neatly against the boards.

It was just sheer luck, thought Crosetti, that so many sheets of what seemed to be from the same hand had ended up in this copy of the Churchill Voyages; but on second thought, maybe not. He imagined some old guy dying, and the widow or the heirs deciding to clean out the deceased’s papers. They stack it all in bundles on the front step and send a kid to fetch the dealer in old paper, who comes, makes an offer, and carries the stuff away. Now they’ll have room for a proper pantry, says the heir’s wife, all that dusty old rubbish, pooh! And the old-paper guy tosses the bale into his bin, and after a while, he gets an order from a London bindery, regular customer, say, for a bale of scrap paper…

And because the pages with the pencil marks were not written in the same hand, the binder must have by chance mixed some unconnected printer’s copy in with the scrap from Crosetti’s tidying heiress. Yes, it could have happened that way, and this thought made him happy: he did not desire a miscellany, but a discovery. Although it was giving him a headache now, the peering through the glass, the way the black-brown squiggles refused to surrender their meaning. He put the magnifier down and walked the length of the loft.

“Do you have any aspirin?” he asked Rolly, and he had to ask twice. “No,” said Rolly, in a near-snarl.

“Everyone has aspirin, Carolyn.”

She threw down the tool she was using, sighed dramatically, dismounted her stool, strode away, and returned with a plastic bottle that she shoved into his hand so hard it rattled like a tiny castanet. Motrin.

“Thank you,” he said formally and took three at the kitchen sink. Ordinarily he would have reclined in a quiet place until the pounding pain ceased, but chez Rolly had no comfortable seating, and he was wary of using her bed. He sat therefore on a kitchen chair and was glum and shuffled the sheaves of old paper. Were Carolyn Rolly an actual sane human person, he thought, we could puzzle this out together, she probably has books on watermarks and Jacobean secretary hand or at least she knows more about this shit than I do…

But as soon as he had this thought, he brightened and drew his cell phone from his pocket. He checked his watch. Not eleven yet. At eleven his mother watched the Tonight Show and would not answer the phone during that hour to hear of the Apocalypse, but now she’d be in her lounger with a book.

“It’s me,” he said when she answered.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in Red Hook, at Carolyn Rolly’s place.”

“She lives in Red Hook?”

“It’s gentrifying, Ma.”

“It’s dockies and gangsters. Why is a classy girl like that living in Red Hook?” Mrs. Crosetti had met Carolyn on several occasions, at the shop, and delivered this assessment to her boy afterward, with the implication, like a thrown brick, that if he had any sense, he would put on some moves. She resumed, with a hopeful note, “And how come you’re there? You got something going with her.”

“I don’t, Ma. It’s the fire. She had to work on some heavy books at her place-she’s kind of an amateur bookbinder-and I helped her carry them over here from the city.”

“And you hung around after.”

“We ate. I’m just about to leave.”

“So I shouldn’t rent the hall. Or alert Father Lazzaro.”

“I don’t think so, Ma. Sorry. Look, why I called…do you know anything about seventeenth-century watermarks, or Jacobean secretary hands? I mean how to decipher them?”

“Well, for the secretary hand, that would be Dawson and Kennedy-Skipton, Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500-1650. It’s a manual, although I understand there’s some good stuff on the Web, more like interactive tutorials. For the watermarks, there’s Gravell…no, wait, Gravell starts at 1700; just a second, let me think…oh, right, it’d be Heawood, Watermarks Mainly of the 17th and 18th Centuries. What’s this about?”

“Oh, we found some old manuscript in the covers of a book she wants to repair. I’d like to find out what it is.” He wrote the references down on a Visa counterfoil from his wallet.

“You should talk to Fanny Doubrowicz at the library. I’ll call her for you if you want.”

“No, thanks. It’s probably not worth her time until I know if it’s not just an old shopping list or something. Part of it, some pages, are in a foreign language.”

“Really? Which one?”

“I can’t tell. A funny one, anyway, not French or Italian-more like Armenian or Albanian. But that could just be because I can’t really read the script.”

“Interesting. Good. Anything to keep that brain working. I wish you’d go back to school.”

“Ma, that’s what I’m doing. I’m saving money to go to school.”

“I mean real school.”

“Film school is real school, Ma.”

Mrs. Crosetti said nothing, but her son could well imagine the expression on her face. That she herself had not settled down to what became her profession until she was years older than he was now did not signify. She would have helped him pay for serious grad school, but making movies? No, thank you! He sighed and she said, “I got to go. You’ll be home late?”

“Maybe real late. We’re interleaving wet books.”

“Really? Why don’t you use a vacuum? Or just send them to Andover?”

“It’s complicated, Ma. Anyway, Carolyn’s in charge. I’m just the help.” He heard music faintly in the background and applause, and she said good-bye and hung up. It never failed to astonish him that a woman whose profession had given her an immense store of knowledge and who typically finished the Times Sunday crossword in twenty-two minutes could waste her time watching a celebrity gabfest and listen to a moderately talented comedian tell a skein of leaden topical jokes, but she never missed an evening. She said it made her feel less lonely at night, and he supposed that lonely people were in fact the main audience for such shows. He wondered if Rolly watched the Tonight Show. He had not seen a television in the place. Maybe vampires didn’t get lonely.

Crosetti rose from the terrible chair and stretched. Now his back ached too. He checked his watch and walked the length of the loft to where Rolly was still bent over her tasks.

“What?” she said as he drew near.

“It’s time to change the blotter. What’re you doing?”

“I’m putting the cover of volume four back together. I’m going to have to completely replace the covers on volumes one and two, but I think I can get the stains out of this one.”

“What’re you using to replace the manuscript pages as backing?”

“I have some contemporary folio scrap.”

“Just happen to have it around, eh?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she snapped back. “There’s a lot of it available from books broken for their maps and plates. Who were you talking to on the phone?”

“My mom. Look”-he gestured to the walls of bookcases-“do you happen to have a book about watermarks? I have a reference…” He reached for his wallet.

“Well, I have Heawood, of course.”

Unfolding the counterfoil and smiling: “Of course. How about Dawson and Kennedy-Skipton?”

“That too.”

“I thought you weren’t a paleographer.”

“I’m not, but Sidney asked me to take a course on incunabula and early manuscripts and I did. Everyone in that field uses D & K-S.”

“So you can read this stuff?”

“A bit. It was some years ago.” Here again he heard a tone creep into her voice that discouraged probing.

“Can I take a look at those books after we do the interleaving?”

“Sure,” she said, “but early secretary hand is a bear. It’s like learning to read all over again.” They changed the blotters and then she extracted the two books from her shelves. She went back to work at her table and he sat down with the guidebooks at the spool table.

It was a bear. As the foreword to D & K-S has it, “The Gothic cursive hands of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in England and elsewhere in Europe are among the hardest to read of all the scripts normally considered by paleographers.” Crosetti learned that the contemporaries of Elizabeth and James I made no distinction between n and u, or u and v or i and j, nor did they dot their is. S appeared in two different forms, and r in four, and there were strange ligatures tying h and s and t to other letters, distorting the shapes of each. They punctuated and spelled as they pleased, and to save expensive parchment they had invented dozens of incomprehensible abbreviations, which had remained in common use even when paper came in. Doggedly, however, he applied himself to the exercises provided by the manual, starting with Sir Nicholas Bacon’s An Exhortacion gyuen to the Serieaunts when they were sworne in the Chauncery in Anno domini 1559. By the time he had reached line three, checking nearly every word against the translation provided, it was well past midnight. Rolly was still at her task, and he thought that if he could just rest his eyes and his aching back for a few moments he would get a second wind. He slipped off his sneakers and lay down on one edge of the pallet.

Then there was a weird clatter sounding in his ear. He sat upright with a curse and grappled in the bedclothes until he had the source of it in hand: an old-fashioned alarm clock, the kind they draw in cartoons, with twin bells and a clapper on top and a wide white face, and Carolyn had taped the bells so that when the thing went off it would not awaken her as well, a typically elegant low-tech solution. He shut it off and saw that there was a note affixed to it with a bit of ribbon:

Your turn; I did the last two myself.

It was written on a slip of heavy antique paper in black ink, the hand an elegant italic. Crosetti’s violent annoyance instantly evaporated. He examined the deeply breathing shape in the bed next to him. He could see a shock of hair on the pillow, an ear, a curve of downy cheek. Cautiously, he leaned over and placed his face close to this, mere inches away. He breathed in long and deep and got soap, some kind of shampoo, a note of glue and old leather, and underneath this something more personal, eau de girl. Crosetti was no stranger to the delights of women, specializing in those that liked nice guys rather than the type (more numerous, in his experience) that preferred the other kind, nor was he even sure he particularly liked this woman. No, actually, he was sure he did not, and also sure that never in his life had he obtained an erotic charge as powerful as the one he now received, sniffing absurdly at the skin of Carolyn Rolly.

Incomprehensible, but there it was. He peeked under the duvet and found that she was wearing a dark T-shirt. He could just make out the little knobs of her spine bulging the thin fabric. Below that, dim whiteness. He had to know, and so he reached out and touched her, barely touched her haunch with the back of his hand, and felt tight, sheer fabric; a shock like an electric current flowed up his arm; she stirred and murmured.

He was out of the bed in a flash, and stood there feeling a jerk, with (could it be?) his knees actually trembling and his penis turgid. Holy shit, he said to himself several times, and then Uh-uh, no thank you, this is not happening. He marched like a soldier to the sink, where he drenched his face with cold water. He wished he could take a shower, but there was none, nor any bath either. An image of the occupant standing nude on a towel dabbing at her body with a warm sponge suddenly inhabited his mind. He forced it away by an act of will and started on the changing of the blotters.

After which he found himself with a couple of hours to kill before the next change, scheduled for 5 a.m. Briefly he considered poking through Rolly’s things, checking out her underwear, her pharmaceuticals, her papers. He let this notion play for a while on his interior TV, and then dismissed the idea. The point was not to penetrate more deeply into whatever weird shit she had going on but to finish this stupid project and escape. Thus the mature Crosetti lectured Crazy Al, a new person who was dying to dive back under that duvet and yank Carolyn Rolly’s panties down, or failing that, gather sufficient material to become a successful stalker.

But he did explore the kitchen and found in a cabinet (constructed of the ever-present pallet boards) a package of sugar cookies and one of those tin boxes of flavored instant coffee, hazelnut in this case, that he often saw in racks in the supermarket, when he often wondered who bought that crap. Now he knew. He boiled water in a pan and made the disgusting brew and drank it down for the caffeine’s sake, and ate all the cookies, which were stale and like sweet gypsum in the mouth. On the evidence of her larder, Rolly obviously preferred live prey.

Somewhat pumped up now from the coffee and the sugary snack, Crosetti reset the alarm for five o’clock and renewed his investigation into the old papers. Before half an hour passed he was convinced that either he was going crazy or that the eighteen sheets marked by the post horn watermark were all in a language he did not know, or in some code…no, not code, cipher. Well, well, that might be interesting. The four crown-marked sheets, in a different and easier hand, appeared to be some sort of religious screed:

Worldly tears fall to the earth but godly tears are kept in a bottle. Judge not holy weeping superfluous. Either sin must drown in them or the soule burn

He wondered briefly which kind Rolly had wept, and then put these pages aside. He was much more interested in the twenty-six sheets marked with a coat of arms, which were in the same hand as the ones written in the odd language. Within minutes he was gratified to discover that these were obviously in English. He could pick out the familiar short words-of, and, is, and the like-and after a while he located the beginning of the manuscript, or at least he thought it was the beginning. There was an inscription on the upper right, above the body of the text, the date 25^th Octobr. Anno. Dom. 1642, and the place, Baubnmy. No, that couldn’t be right, or maybe it was Welsh, or…he examined the text again, and suddenly something clicked and he saw it was Banbury. Crosetti felt an odd thrill, akin to his delight when his film editing was going well, the emergence of meaning out of the raw stuff. It was a letter, he soon discovered, from a man named Richard Bracegirdle to his wife, called Nan, and not just a letter, but a final letter, and a…Crosetti knew there was a word for this sort of statement but could not recall it. Bracegirdle seemed to have been mortally wounded in a battle, although Crosetti had as yet no idea where the battle was fought, which contestants fought there, or in what war. Like many Americans, he had only the sketchiest idea of European history. What was going on in 1642? He’d look it up, and would have done so immediately, except that a computer with broadband access was another thing that Rolly lacked. He finished the first page and picked up the next; it had a signature on it, so was clearly the last page of the letter. He began it anyway, for the pages were unnumbered and there was no way of putting them in order without first reading them.

So he plowed on, line by line, slowly increasing his facility at translating Bracegirdle’s hand. And there came at last a moment when Crosetti realized that he was reading the text somewhat more easily, and that the long-dead soldier was as alive to him as any chat room correspondent. The thrill redoubled at this realization, and the romance of paleography struck him like a blow: no one else knew this! No human being had read these lines for over three and a half centuries, perhaps no one had ever read them except for Bracegirdle and his wife. It was like looking out a rear window in an apartment building and observing some intimate act in the domestic life of strangers.

Some more thinges of import for my time groweth short I can scarce make out the page though it be clare day & I am griped by my mortal agonie you know well my leathern boxe that I keep in my privy closet, in it you shall finde the letteres cypher’d in the fasioun I devized. Doe you keepe them safe and show them to no one. They tell all the tale nearlie of my Lord D. his plot & oure spyeing upon the secret papist Shaxpure. Or so wee thought him although now I am lesse certayne. In that manner & bent of lyfe he wase a Nothinge. But certayne it is hee wrought the playe of Scotch M. I commanded of him in the Kinges name. I find it passing strange that all though I am dead and him also yet the playe lives still, writ in his own hande & lying where onlie I know & there maye it reste for ever.

Crosetti was so intent on deciphering each word into English sense that he missed it the first time through and it was only upon rereading this section that the connection between Shaxpure and playe actually penetrated his mind. He froze, gasped, cursed; sweat popped out on his back. He stood staring at Bracegirdle’s squiggles, expecting them to fade away like fairy gold, but they stayed put: Shaxpure, playe.

Crosetti was a cautious fellow, and tight with a buck, but he occasionally picked up a lottery ticket, and once he had sat in front of his TV and watched the girl pull the numbered Ping-Pong balls out of the drum and followed the numbers on his ticket and let out a whoop when the numbers matched. But his mother had come in at the sound and informed him that where the winning number needed 8-3, his ticket read 3-8. Actually, he’d never won anything in his life, had never really expected to, had grown up a fairly happy kid from a working family with no sense of entitlement at all, and now this.

Crosetti was no scholar, but he had at least been an English major, and had done Shakespeare in his junior year. So he understood that what he held in his hands was a colossal find. Shakespeare (for he also knew that the man’s name could be spelled in a vast number of ways) had not to his knowledge ever been the subject of an official government investigation. And for papism! What, if any, religion William Shakespeare had espoused continued as one of the big questions in the field, and if some official contemporary had believed it…and who was this Lord D.? For that matter, who was Richard Bracegirdle? And the cherry on top was the mention of a manuscript of one of the plays, extant at least until 1642. Crosetti tried to think what play it might be that was “commanded of him in the Kinges name.” Oh, God! Why hadn’t he paid more attention in that class? Wait a second! Something to do with King James, some noble had tried to kill him in a Scottish castle, and witchcraft, something in a BBC documentary he’d watched with his mother on TV. He grabbed his cell phone-no, still too early to call-maybe Rolly-no, he didn’t want to think what she’d be like awakened at ten to five with a question about…

And just like that it popped into his mind. Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Players, had wanted a Scottish play to compliment the new king, and refer to his narrow escape, and flatter his ancestral connection, Banquo, and pander to the peculiar monarch’s obsession with witchcraft, and the house playwright had come up with Macbeth.

Crosetti now recalled the necessity of respiration. He gasped. He knew there was nothing in Shakespeare’s hand but a few signatures and some suspect lines in a manuscript of a play that he supposedly worked on. No autograph on any play of his existed, none. The possibility that an autographed Macbeth was still buried in an English cellar somewhere…it boggled the mind. Crosetti knew a little about manuscript prices and he could extrapolate. It was too immense to consider; Crosetti could not wrap his head around it and so he simply stopped thinking about the possibility. But even the thing in his hands now, the Bracegirdle ms. plus what might be a ciphered account of the investigation of William Shakespeare for recusancy, would be enough to send him to film school. Film school! It’d do that and fund his first movie as well…

Assuming always that the eighteen sheets of thin paper with the post horn watermark were in fact the secret letters Bracegirdle mentioned-and these ciphered English rather than a foreign language. Everything depended on the tidy heiress theory again: papers from the same stack of waste at the bindery being used in sequence to stuff the volumes of the Voyage. He spread out one of the sheets and examined it through the magnifying glass.

Ptuug u kimn lf rmmhofl

Or maybe not. Maybe that first series of characters was Ptmmg or Ptmng. He found it impossible to derive even the actual ciphertext accurately, because deciphering secretary hand depended so much on context, on knowing what English word was meant. Or at least it was for him. He imagined that the original recipient was familiar enough with Bracegirdle’s hand to read the ciphered letters and actually decipher it into plaintext. Crosetti knew little about ciphers except what he had picked up from movies, spy novels, and television. He knew what a ciphertext message was supposed to look like: equal blocks of five or six letters or numbers marching across the page. This didn’t look like that at all. It looked like regular writing, with “words” of differing length. Maybe that was how they wrote cipher in Jacobean times. He knew nothing of that subject, yet by analogy with other technical progress, such a cipher must have been fairly primitive. As he considered this, he recalled the difference between a cipher and a code. A code required a code book, or a memorized list of words that meant something other than what it appeared to be. But then it would have looked more like plain English, something like “the parson failed to buy the pig” might mean “the subject suspected of hiding a priest.” And that would limit what an intelligencer could relate. No, he simply knew that this was cipher; indeed, Bracegirdle had called it a cipher in his final letter.

The alarm rattled and Crosetti hurried over to squelch it. In the bed, Rolly turned over murmuring. Her eyes flicked open. Crosetti saw an expression of terror cross her face and her whole body jerked. He was about to say something soothing when she closed her eyes again and turned away, pulling the duvet over her head.

“Carolyn? You all right?”

No answer. Crosetti shrugged and went to change the diapers. The blotters. They were barely damp now and the pages seemed almost dry to the touch, maybe a little cool: the miracle of capillary action. They were still buckled along the edges, in the way of paper that has been wetted, and the gilt edges of the text block no longer had the perfect smoothness of the pristine book. He wondered how she was going to fix that.

As he worked he heard sounds from the sleeping zone: throat clearing, the swish of fabric, the sound of running water, a toothbrush in action, more cloth sounds, the water again, the clunk of a pot, openings of cabinets. He was just finishing the last of the volumes when she appeared at his side, dressed in yesterday’s overalls and black Converse high-tops with bright blue socks; she held two mugs of aromatic bad coffee, one of which she handed to him.

“I’m sorry I don’t have any cream. Or milk.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry I startled you when the alarm went off. You looked like you were going to jump out of your skin.”

A blank look here, a small shrug. She opened a volume of the Voyages and felt the paper. “This is good. It’s almost dry.”

“What are you going to do about the buckling?”

“Press it out, or use heat. This kind of linen rag paper is a lot like cloth. I’ll iron every edge if I have to and then trim and regild.” She turned to face him and smiled. “Thanks for the help. I’m sorry I was cross with you last night. I’m not very social.”

He said, “You let me sleep with you on our first date. I’d call that social,” and instantly regretted it when her smile faded, replaced by a wary look and a very proper sniff. Then, in her characteristic way, she pretended nothing untoward had been said and announced her plans for that day. She had to go out and buy leather for the covers and arrange for the patterned endpapers to be re-created; there were specialty shops in New York that did this sort of work.

“You want me to come along?” he asked when she had finished.

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary. It’s going to be quite tedious. A slog, really.”

“I’m a slogger.”

“No, thanks. I think I have to do this by myself. And, ah, I’d like to get started right away.”

“You’re booting me out?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. I’m sure you have things to do…”

“Nothing more important than traipsing around after you, carrying packages and hoping for the tiniest smile.”

He got it, just. Desiring to build on this, he asked, “Don’t you want to see what I discovered in those manuscripts we found in the cover padding?”

“Like what?”

“Well, for starters, they were written by a man who knew William Shakespeare.”

This got a reaction, although not exactly the one he desired. Her eyes widened, startled, and then rolled in disbelief. “I find that rather unlikely.”

“Come here and I’ll show you,” he said, and led her over to the spool table, where the folio sheets were stacked. He pointed to the key lines and explained about the ciphered pages. She examined the writing with the magnifying glass, and took her time doing it. He sat next to her and inhaled the scent of her hair. He did not kiss the back of her neck, although he had to actually grit his teeth not to.

“I don’t see it,” she said, at last. “Shakespeare was a fairly common name in some parts of England, and that name could also be ‘Shawford’ or ‘Sharpspur,’ not Shaxpure.”

“Oh, please!” he exclaimed. “Sharpspur who wrote plays? For the king? And who was suspected of being a papist and was significant enough to prompt an intelligence operation against him?”

“Shakespeare wasn’t a papist.”

“He might have been. There was a program on PBS I saw that was pretty certain he was one, in secret, or at least that he was raised Catholic.”

“Uh-huh. So on the basis of-what is it?-two hours’ experience in interpreting Jacobean secretary hand and a TV program you think you made a major literary discovery?”

“And the cipher letters?”

“They’re probably Dutch.”

“Oh, fuck Dutch! They’re in cipher.”

“Oh, you’re an expert on ciphers too? Jacobean ciphers?”

“Okay, fine! One of my mother’s best friends is Fanny Doubrowicz, who happens to be head of the Manuscript and Archives Division at the New York Public Library. I’ll show it to her.”

He was watching her face as he said this and so was able to observe the quick intake of breath and the slight whitening around the nostrils that signaled…what? Spinning wheels, hatching plots? He’d seen it before when he’d called her on her current scam about the books and now here it was again.

She shrugged. “Do what you want, but I think it’s unlikely you’re going to find a world-class expert on Jacobean secretary hand in the New York Public Library. Ninety percent of their holdings are American, mostly the paper of local writers and prominent families.”

“Well, it looks like you know everything, Carolyn. I guess I’m just a big asshole, who will now”-here he made a show of stacking the manuscript sheets-“get out of your hair, and take my pathetic manuscript to my low-end pathetic expert who will obviously tell me that it’s a letter from some Jacobean pissant about his case of gout.”

He strode over to her workbench and snatched up the brown paper that had wrapped the Voyages yesterday and began to secure the manuscript in it, using the jerky, clumsy motions that indicate irritation.

“Oh, don’t,” she said from behind him in an uncharacteristically high voice. “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to behave. You were so excited about it and I just…”

He turned around. Her mouth was turned down into an amusing inverted U like many of the indeterminate bumps that made Jacobean secretary hand so confusing. It looked like the start of another wailing session. But she continued in the same strangled voice: “I never see anyone. I haven’t got a life. The only person I’ve talked to in years is Sidney, and he just wants to be like my mentor, which means mainly he gets to paw me and…”

“Sidney paws?”

“Oh, he’s harmless. He thinks he’s some kind of big-time rake, but all he does is take me to expensive lunches and squeeze my leg under the tablecloth and sometimes in the shop, if we make a big sale he’ll grab my ass and hold on for a little too long, and he’ll kiss me semi-quasi-paternally on the mouth. He’s the last man in New York who chews SenSens. That’s the extent of my whoredom. I need the job and the food. You’re the only one I ever told this to. Talk about pathetic. I have no friends, no money, no place to live…”

“You live here.”

“Illegally, as you guessed. This building is condemned for human habitation. They used to store DDT here and it’s totally contaminated. The guy who owns the building thinks I just work here. He’d like to paw me too. You’re the first person my own age I’ve been with in, I don’t know…years.”

Who is also dying to paw you, thought Crosetti, but said only, “Gosh, that’s sad.”

“Yes, pitiable. And you’re decent to me and I treat you like shit. So typical! If you were a complete shithead I’d probably be slavering at your feet.”

“I could try to be a shithead, Carolyn. I could write away to the Famous Shitheads School and take a course.”

She stared at him and after a moment laughed. It was an odd barking sound not too distant from a sob. “But you hate me now, right?”

“No, I don’t,” said Crosetti with as much sincerity as he could cram into the phrase. He was thinking about why she should have chosen to isolate herself so. She was not a fatty, not disfigured, presentable, “classy” as his mother had observed, no reason for someone like that to skulk in the shadows of the city. And she was, if not actually a beauty, a…what was the word? A fetching woman. When her face was together, as now, when she was not scowling or scarily vacant, she could have fetched him from Zanzibar.

“On the contrary,” he added. “Really.”

“No? But I’ve treated you so badly.”

“Yes, and now I’ll give you a minute to think how you’re going to make it up to me.” He hummed and looked at his watch, and tapped his foot.

“I know what I’ll do,” she said after a moment. “I will introduce you to a real expert on Jacobean manuscripts, one of the best in the world. I’ll call him and set it up. And you can come with me on my errands and be bored stiff while I talk about split calf and marbled endpapers and then we’ll go see Andrew.”

“Andrew?”

“Yes. Andrew Bulstrode. Sidney introduced us. That was who I took that course on English manuscripts and incunabula from.”

“Does he want to feel you up too?”

“No. You, maybe.”

“I can’t wait.”

“You’ll have to, a little. I need to visit the bathroom and then I’ll make the call. Why don’t you wait for me downstairs?”

THE BRACEGIRDLE LETTER (4)

Despyte his unseemlie lyfe Mr Matthews workes did prosper mightilie for he knew his art welle, better they sayde than any iron-maistre in the Weald of Sussex. He had contract with the Royal Ordnance & that wase oure chief labour: makeyng of iron & casting gonnes. I was first put to loading & hauling & such donkey-taskes being as I was ignorant of all arte & if I grieved for my lost ease & tyme to studie that which I loved, still I balked not for as God speaketh: whatsoever thy hande findeth to do, do it with thy might: for there is no worke nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdome in the grave whither thou goest.

Now you can onlie caste iron from winter through springe: for in summer you have not the flow of water to werke the mills that empouwer the bellowes that maketh the blaste for the furnaces & the hammers for the forging of your bar-iron: & in summer must you bryng ironstone & charcoal & tayke away what you have mayde, before the roades myre. Soe they muste werke us like dogges in those few moneths: & in every werke we did whether hoisting pigges or carrying iron-stone & charcoales to feed the furnace, or clayeyng the mandrel, or layyng the mould, or heavinge the coolled peeces from the pitte, or knockyng off the sprues, or fileing smoothe, the maistre poynted out mee for being the moste laxe or a blockheade or clumsy withal & maney a harde blow I got from his hande or staffe, & called Sloppy Dick & Malhand Dick & other like naymes or worser. Yet I rebelled not & turned the othere cheeke, as commanded by oure Lord Jesu Christ & I vowed I would learne the worke, all though it went hard gainst my graine, so that he would have no cause for despising mee or but a little. And in the heate & smoakes of that place which wase the nearest I ever came to what we trust shalbe the fate of all sinners ( & that is Hell) to my surprize I found some delight. For it wase a joy to see the blazyng iron spoute from the mouth of the furnace into the mould tossyng up sparkes like the stars in the skye & to thinke that it was, if only in littel, lyke the work of God in the makeyng of our worlde: for if I loved not the werke it self still I loved the werkes done. For these gonnes would be a sheeld against the enemies of England & the reformed religion: as all men acknowledge Englishe gonnes have no equal in the world, & oure shotte as well, soe let Spaine lament.

In this wise a year passed & two & cometh then Ladye Day in the Yeare Three as I stoode before Maistre Matthew to get my wage he sayde well Richard think you I have used you harde? And being honeste I sayde yes Mr that you have. He laughed & sayde still you have grown two span & waxed more than a stone o’ weight & no more art thou the clerkely puling thynge thou wast but a true foundry-man: for you know wee pound on iron not because wee despise it but to mayke it stronge.

After that he used me more kindly & beggan to instruct me in all the mysteries of the founders art, viz. how to tell good iron-stone, that there wase enough shell in it else addyng more shellstone & when to tap heats & controll the bellowes its ayre so that the heat did not sicken the iron & what divers heats were goode for as: the first mere pigge iron, the seconde, bar & firebacks, the third tooles, the fourth smalle gonnes, as sakers & falcons & the last alone for the greate gonnes, viz. culverines, demicannon & cannon royal, &c. Also how to prepare the mandrel with corde & clay & how to packe the mould so it cracke not nor leake & how to rigge cordes & pulleys for the liftyng of heavie weightes. Soe another yeare passed, me growing in craft & art & size too for he sate me at his own tabel & fed me welle. Then at the ende of this yeare he shewed me how to loade & fyre the gonnes.

Hard it may be for you to understand Nan being but a woman, but when first I heard the cannones roare I wase a lost man I had a luste beyond alle tellyng to heare it again & see the flyte of the balle, it wase a drunkenesse of pouwer & might. Soe my cozzen sees this & of his goodnesse says-and this wase nowe sommertyme of the Yeare Fyve me being aged fifteen yeares & a littel-lad, I must stay & over-see the mending of the mill-race & wheel, do you goe along with oure brace of culverines to the Tower & see them assayed by the Ordnance. I was verey eager to do so having not seen my mother & father alle this tyme, so off I went in two cartes the gonnes bedded in strawes, six oxen to each & men hyred to drive & keep, from Titchfield to Portsmouth, thence by lugger to Gravesende & changed to barge up river to the Tower, me never ben on boat before now & lyked it well, nor was I sea-sick lyke some others that were aboard.

The gonnes delivered to the Tower without mishap for which I thanked God most heartilie for the moveing of two loades of 48 cwt each is no smalle thynge with the roades as they were in those daies & the drovers much given to drinke & the common perills of the sea. I repaired to Fish Street & wase welcomed with all friendlinesse bye my family who were much surprized at my mans appearance & kept me late with telling of what had befallen in the yeares since I last had seen them. But my fathere wished to uze me as he once hadde which I could hardlie stande, beinge now a man not a boy, yet I did beare it for my motheres sake & for the peece of the house & in accord with the commandment honor thy father &c. We had a new servante mayde Margaret Ames a sour canting creature if a goode Christian who for what raison I never descryed lyked me not.

Then the nexte morn earlie I made to the Tower for the assaye. The officer of the Ordnance Peter Hastynges by name wase amazed at my youth as he had expected my cozzen as in times before. So both culverin were double-charged to see if they brake but thank God did not. Aftewarde I sat at mete with Mr Hastynges & some other officers, the talk very merrie but bawdy as many of the companie were cannon-maistres lately come from the Dutch warres. Such talk lyked me well for I yearned to be familiar with these artes & pressed them to answer my questions viz. how to site a gonne for best advauntage in the field, how to best aim to strake your marke, the divers sortes & qualities of poudre, how to mix & preserve it, & how to know how farre distant be your marke. This laste put them at a stande for they contended amongst them, one sayde by truste of eye another sayde nay by tryal of fire, looking close where the ball fell at everie shotte adding or taking away of poudre & also changing this according to the heate of the gonne as the day spent, for a hot gonne will throw farther of the same charge.

So I asked why they did not use the methode of triangles & sines & at this they were amazed haveing not heard aught of this beforre. Soe I drew a little picture shewing how a gonners quadrant, a square & a yard-sticke could be soe used to take the distance from one point to another far offe. They had to see & trye this methode without delay & I arranged all & tried to a distant tree & wee paced it out after & they were greately pleazed thereby how it accorded with my figures. Then a bigge heartie man Thomas Keane clapped my shoulder saying lad I would make a true gonner of you, be you ever wearie of making gonnes you can come with mee as matrosse to the warre & shoote them at Spaniardes, for a matrosse you know is a gonneres holpe. Soe I thanked hym kindlie but sayde I had no thought of warre then, how little we know Lord of youre devizynges or youre werkes.