The Book of Air and Shadows

refused, I insisted, at which she shamefacedly admitted that she was still too frightened to wander freely in public and wished to eat in the office or be driven back to the loft.
    We therefore ordered from a deli, and while we were waiting, Miranda broached the subject of the manuscript. She said that under her uncle’s tutelage she’d become an efficient reader of Jacobean secretary hand: could she not look at it now? I hesitated but saw no real objection. Heirs often make independent judgments on the value of prospective inheritables. I sent Ms. M. down to the vault.
    While we were waiting our lunch arrived and we ate, sitting at my glass coffee table. She was a precise eater, tiny bites. We talked about IP and her uncle’s visit here, but she had no more idea about why he wanted or needed an IP lawyer than I did. Ms. Maldonado came back with the folder.
    Miranda pulled on cotton gloves before she handled the stiff brown pages. She held several up to the window to examine watermarks. But the day had gone dark, with the beginnings of a spattering rain. She had to use the desk lamp instead.
    “Interesting,” she said, and again as she passed the pages before the light. “This heavier paper is what they call a crown folio sheet, marked with the coat of arms of Amsterdam, which comes from a well-known paper house and quite common in the seventeenth century. The pages look like they were ripped out of a ledger. These other sheets seem to be printer’s copy and unrelated.” She mentioned the name of a paper maker, but I have forgotten what it was, and then she discoursed briefly about the provenance of paper. In one ear and out the other. She drew a folding magnifying glass from her handbag. “Do you mind?” she asked.
    I did not. I was content to watch her. She studied the pages; I studied the swan of her neck bobbing above them and the tendrils of hair that moved delicately in the faint breeze from the heating system. Time passed. I doodled at some paperwork, without enthusiasm. The noises of the office outside my door seemed to come from another world. She read four pages. From time to time she would mutter. Then she positively gasped.
    “What?”
    “The writer of this thing, Richard Bracegirdle-he claims to have sailed with Somers. He was on the wreck of the
Sea Adventure
. Oh, God! My hands are shaking.”
    I asked what was handshakingly important about it.
    “Because it was a famous event. The governor of the Virginia colony was aboard. They were wrecked on Bermuda and they lived off the land and built a ship and got back to Virginia. Some of them wrote accounts of it, and we believe that Shakespeare used them to create the atmosphere of Prospero’s island in
The Tempest
. But if this guy knew Shakespeare in 1610 as he claims…I mean he might have been with him, feeding him tropical color while he was writing. This alone makes it…look, Mr. Mishkin…”
    “Please, you’re a guest in my house. I wish you’d call me Jake.”
    “All right-Jake. I
have
to study this manuscript. Would it be possible for us to take it back to your place?”
    My first instinct as a lawyer was, of course, to refuse. Lawyers famously have free access to money and valuables belonging to others, and the first step on the slippery slope is handling these with anything but the most rigid propriety. Carry a manuscript out of the office for the perusal of a putative heiress and pretty soon you’re hanging the client’s Renoir in the small bedroom and taking the family to Saint Bart’s on the decedent’s yacht.
    Yes, that, but she was looking at me with hope, her cheeks still aflush with the thrill of discovery, and here I thought of Amalie, who never asked me for anything, who expected me to know what she wanted through mystic bonds of affection. At which I inevitably failed. It’s nice to be asked. So I said that I supposed that would be all right, since legally they would not be out of my personal possession. I obtained a stiff folder and placed the Bracegirdle material into it. I called Omar, grabbed an umbrella and my briefcase, and after speaking with Ms. Maldonado about various things, I left the office with Miranda beside me. As it happened, I had promised to pick my children up at school and take them home. This was somewhat awkward, but Miranda was after all a client and not radioactively intimate with Daddy, or not yet, anyway. I made the pickup, introduced the kids, and it was a perfectly pleasant ride.