The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [38]
“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