The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [22]
And it might have become part of the critical canon had not L. H. Pascoe delighted in delicious young fellows with smoky eyes and pouting lips, and having such a taste, not promised one of these a trip to Cap d’Antibes, and a new wardrobe with it, and having so promised, not reneged, causing the young fellow, naturally enough, to drop a dime on his patron. The police raided a certain industrial estate in Ealing and found the handpress and the paper and the ink, with the fake Hamlet still set up in the forms. This occurred some eighteen months after the sale.
The money from this had apparently been mostly spent on high living of a particularly lubricious kind. The tabloids ate it whole, reserving a special venom for the peccant expert, Bulstrode. Into this mess strode my old pal Mickey Haas, who defended his colleague in the public press as having made an error that any other expert in the world would have made, including Dr. Haas himself. He arranged for Bulstrode to occupy a visiting professorship at Columbia in the hope that England might cool down after an interval. And now it seemed someone else had unloaded a document on Bulstrode, which I thought odd, since he was the last person eligible to present any important manuscript to the world, and also the last person to want to. But I had long surrendered any notion that experience was an efficient teacher. I, for example, would still be happily married had I been able to learn from my mistakes.
Or perhaps he had snapped under the strain. Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession their madness is less often remarked. As a reality check I looked up Lord Dunbarton and, somewhat to my surprise, found he was no figment. Henry Reith (1570–1655), second Baron Dunbarton, was a Puritan grandee. His dad, the first Lord Dunbarton, had won his spurs as one of Henry VIII’s ransacking minions, a “visitor” as they called them, kicking nuns and monks out of their cloisters and making sure that the Protestant Reformation reached every lootable ecclesiastic property in England. He was rewarded with a title and an estate in Warwickshire, Darden Hall. The son was introduced at court late in Elizabeth’s reign, won the favor of Lord Burghley, and got into what they then called the “intelligencer” business, working to catch Jesuits and expose their knavish plots against the queen’s and later King James’s peace. Under Charles I, he was a staunch Parliamentarian, having, like his father, a keen eye for the winning side, although he seemed also to be a sincere Puritan fanatic, energetically pursuing the recusants of Warwickshire. Darden Hall was occupied by Royalist troops during the brief campaign that ended at the battle of Edgehill. No mention of libraries, of Bracegirdles, of lost Shakespeariana. Now I thought that I should call Mickey Haas, to get the full story on the poor man, and I did, and was informed that Dr. Haas was at a conference in Austin and would not be back until the beginning of next week. So I went to lunch.
Here I consult my diary. Ms. Maldonado keeps my appointments, of course, and every Monday I get a sheet of paper telling me what I have for the week, but I transfer these appointments to a little leather-bound diary with blue tissue pages that I keep in the breast pocket of my shirt. I am not really what one could call absentminded, but I do get involved in the library sometimes or on the telephone, and unless I glance at this every so often I find that I miss meetings. This is how I knew it was