The Book of Air and Shadows

she carefully placed the enciphered sheets.
    “Now,” she said. “Let us see what we have here.”
    Doubrowicz looked at the copies for a long time, examining each sheet with a large rectangular magnifying glass. At last she said, “Interesting. You know there are three separate documents in all. These copies are of two different ones and these originals.”
    “Yeah, I figured that part out. Those four sheets are obviously the printer’s copy of some sermons and I’m not interested in them. All the rest is the letter from this guy Bracegirdle.”
    “Umm, and you sold this letter to Bulstrode, your mother said.”
    “Yeah. And I’m sorry, Fanny, I should have come straight to you.”
    “Yes, you should have. Your dear mother thinks you were cheated.”
    “I know.”
    She patted his arm. “Well, we shall see. Show me the part where you thought he mentioned Shakespeare.”
    Crosetti did so, and the little librarian adjusted a goosenecked lamp to cast an intense beam at the bright paper and peered at it through her lens. “Yes, this seems a clear enough secretary hand,” she remarked. “I have certainly had to deal with worse.” She read the passage aloud slowly, like a dim third-grader, and when she reached the end exclaimed, “Dear God!”
    “Shit!” cried Crosetti and pounded his fist into his thigh hard enough to sting.
    “Indeed,” said Doubrowicz, “you have been well cogged and coney-catched, as our friend here would have said. How much did he pay you?”
    “Thirty-five hundred.”
    “Oh, dear me. What a shame!”
    “I could have got a lot more, right?”
    “Oh, yes. If you had come to me and we had established the authenticity of the document beyond any reasonable doubt-and for a document of this nature and importance, that in itself would have been a considerable task-then there’s no telling what it would have fetched at auction. We would probably not be in it, since it’s a little out of our line, but the Folger and the Huntington would have been in full cry. More than that, to someone like Bulstrode, having possession,
exclusive
possession, of something like this-why, it’s a career in itself. No wonder he cheated you! He must have seen immediately that this thing would place him back in the center of Shakespeare studies. No one would ever mention that unfortunate fake again. It would be like an explosion opening up an entirely fresh field of scholarship. People have been arguing for years about Shakespeare’s religion and his political stance and here we find an official of the English government suspecting him not only of papistry but papistry of a potentially treasonous nature. Then you have a whole set of research lines to explore: this Bracegirdle fellow, his history, who he knew, where he traveled, and the history of the man he worked for, this Lord D. Perhaps there are files in some old muniment room that no one has ever explored. And since we know that Shakespeare was never actually prosecuted, we would want to know why not, was he protected by someone even more powerful than Lord D.? And on and on. Then we have a collection of enciphered letters apparently describing a spy’s observation of William Shakespeare, an actual detailed contemporary record of the man’s activities-an unimaginable treasure in itself, assuming they can be deciphered, and believe me, cryptographers will be fighting with sticks to get hold of them. But at least we have
these
in original.”
    Doubrowicz leaned back in her chair and stared up at the coffered ceiling, fanned herself dramatically with her hand, and laughed her sharp little bark. It was a gesture familiar to Crosetti from his childhood, when the children had brought what they imagined was an utterly insolvable puzzle. “But, my dear Albert, all that, enticing as it is, is mere trivia compared to the real prize.”
    Crosetti felt his throat dry up. “You mean that an autograph manuscript might still exist.”
    “Yes, and not just that. Let me see, does he give a date anywhere?” She lifted her magnifier and cast over the sheets, like a bird seeking a scurrying bug. “Hm, yes, here is one, 1608, and here, ah yes, he seems to have begun his spying career around 1610. Do you understand the significance of that date, Albert?”
    “
Macbeth
?”
    “No, no,
Macbeth
was 1606. And we know how it came to be written and there were no secret Bracegirdles involved. The year 1610 was the year of
The Tempest
, and after that, except for some