The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [155]
“You didn’t just buy Cardenio recently or something, then?” I asked, suddenly feeling that perhaps my early dismissal of the find might have been too hasty.
“Goodness me, no. Look here, we found it only the other day when we were cataloguing part of my great-grandfather Bartholomew Volescamper’s private library. Didn’t even know I had it. Ah!—this is Mr. Swaike, my security consultant.”
A thickset man with a humorless look and jowls like bananas had entered the library. He eyed us suspiciously as Volescamper made the introductions, then laid a sheaf of roughly cut pages bound into a leather book on the table.
“What sort of security matters do you consult on, Mr. Swaike?” asked Bowden.
“Personal and insurance, Mr. Cable,” replied Swaike in a drab monotone. “This library is uncatalogued and uninsured; criminal gangs would regard it as a valuable target, despite the security arrangements. Cardenio is only one of a dozen books I am currently keeping in a secure safe within the locked library.”
“I can’t fault you there, Mr. Swaike,” replied Bowden.
I looked at the manuscript. At first glance, things looked good, so I quickly donned a pair of cotton gloves, something I hadn’t even considered with Mrs. Hathaway34’s Cardenio. I pulled up a chair and studied the first page. The handwriting was very similar to Shakespeare’s with loops at the top of the L’s and W’s and spirited backward-facing extensions to the top of the D’s; and the spelling was erratic, too—always a good sign. It all looked real, but I had seen some good copies in my time. There were a lot of scholars who were versed well enough in Shakespeare, Elizabethan history, grammar and spelling to attempt a forgery but none of them ever had the wit and charm of the Bard himself. Victor used to say that Shakespeare forgery was inherently impossible because the act of copying overrode the act of inspired creation—the heart being squeezed out by the mind, so to speak. But as I turned the first page and read the dramatis personae, butterflies stirred within me. I’d read fifty or sixty Cardenios before, but—I turned the page and read Cardenio’s opening soliloquy:
“Know’st thou, O love, the pangs which I sustain—”
“It’s a sort of Spanish thirty-something Romeo and Juliet but with a few laughs and a happy ending,” explained Volescamper helpfully. “Look here, would you care for some tea?”
“What? Yes—thank you.”
Volescamper told us that he would lock us in for security reasons but we could press the bell if we needed anything.
The steel door clanged shut and we read with increased interest as the knight Cardenio told the audience of his lost love Lucinda and how he had fled to the mountains after her marriage to the deceitful Ferdinand and become a ragged, destitute wretch.
“Good Lord,” murmured Bowden over my shoulder, a sentiment that I agreed with wholeheartedly. The play, forgery or not, was excellent. After the opening soliloquy we soon went into a flashback where Cardenio and Lucinda write a series of passionate love letters in an Elizabethan version of a Rock Hudson/Doris Day split screen, Lucinda on one side reacting to Cardenio writing them on the other and then vice versa. It was funny, too. We read on and learned of Cardenio’s plans to marry Lucinda, then the Duke’s demand for him to be a companion to his son Ferdinand, Ferdinand’s hopeless infatuation for Dorothea, the trip to Lucinda’s town, how Ferdinand’s love transfers to Lucinda—
“What do you think?” I asked Bowden as we reached the end of the second act.
“Amazing! I’ve not seen anything like this, ever.”
“Real?”
“I think so—but mistakes have been made before. I’ll copy out the passage where Cardenio finds he has been duped and Ferdinand is planning to wed Lucinda. We can run it through the Verse Meter Analyzer back at the office.”
We eagerly read on. The sentences, the meter, the style—it was all pure