The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [36]
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