The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [104]
“Okay. Let’s do it.” I began to open the case.
Bryce wasn’t done talking, however. I suspected that his best party trick was to win with a lecture, without using a single tool, to crack a forger’s brittle confidence with a well-aimed smack from his hammer of knowledge. (“D’ye recall that case where Bryce flew to Minneapolis and terrified the bloke into confessing before he’d even looked at it!”) He was plainly waiting for me to gulp when he reached the trick I hadn’t thought of, to scramble to pack up my quarto and run for it. “Fake paper? The raw materials are not the same as they were. Linen rags are not the same. Flax grows differently now and is processed differently. No pesticides in the 1590s. Did you know that about flax?”
“I did not. How little I know about flax would startle you.”
“Well, even if someone found a stock of blank period French or Genoese laid paper, the paper would not take ink properly because of how it had aged. Not to mention that the ink would now be over any foxing rather than the foxing over the ink. Only four people on earth can fabricate a replica of sixteenth-century paper, and I know them all. They won’t do it. So, if you bleached old writing off printed stock, to print on it again, or found old linen to make new replica paper, modern detergents contain optical brightening agents. The paper would bear traces of the OBAs, which fluoresce a very particular light bluish-purple under UV. Did you know that? All I need for that test is this.” And he withdrew a UV light from his bag, watching me for reaction, then firing it up like a reluctant martial artist forced, despite his profound pacifism, into crushing my windpipe.
He asked me to open the case and lay the quarto on the table. I’m a little color-blind, so I wouldn’t have known if the resulting glow fluoresced correctly or not, but he waved it over every page and finally said, “Well. Hmm.” He was utterly likable and obviously very happy to taste a challenge. “Next we’re going to study every detail of the binding. Stitching styles, threads, glues. Then we shall wallow in the text block, the paper, the orientation of the sheets, the wire profiles, the form of the signatures. We have the polarizing light microscope and the FTIR after that, should we still require. Then our friend Viktor here, from Chicago, will bathe in the ink. It doesn’t matter how many details appear right. If one or two are wrong, then the beast is mythical.”
“Carry on, carry on.”
“Okay. Let’s have fun.” Some answers would be instantaneous; others would require a week or two for a final report.
For six hours, microscopes, lasers, and various doodads of our century were wheeled in and out. Magnified slides of individual letters were projected next to control samples from other quartos printed by William White. Surfaces were tweezed, photos taken, flakes of ink peeled and dissolved in vials, tips of threads were snipped off the edges of pages and mounted behind glass. Individual sheets (“Look away, Mr. Phillips, this might hurt a bit”) were sliced open from the side, butterflied.
“It’s very smooth. Hardly a stain. It’s been pressed all this time, hasn’t it? Bound? No exposure to light. Stored vertically is my guess, which means there should be a divergence in thicknesses between the top and bottom.” There was.
Hands were shaken, results were promised, and I put my treasure back in its case. A frustrating but gleeful send-off from the Englishman: “Mr. Phillips, one curiosity