Poetic Justice (15 page)

Exasperated, he replied, "What kind of evidence do you want then?"

"A copy of this brilliant monograph about Shakespeare's illiteracy. Even my uncle would be able to see how wild a notion that is."

"So tell him. Why do you need a copy?"

She let her breath out in annoyance. "Because otherwise he will ask Mr. Wiley if it's true, and Mr. Wiley will profess ignorance, and make helpful little observations about how spinsters so often give into their imaginations and believe their fantasies are real. And then Mr. Wiley will be warned that I know his secret."

"Precisely. Better that he remain entirely unaware as long as we can manage it. Your uncle is an estimable man, no doubt, but I don't think you should count on his discretion."

"But—"

Sir John cocked his head, then laid a rough finger across her mouth. "Hush," he whispered. "I hear him coming. Now no more provocations, Miss Seton. Let me take the lead here."

His finger was gentle enough on her lips, but this last request—or was it a command?—made her twist away and out from behind the shelf. Just as Mr. Wiley rounded the corner she sped out the back of the workroom, into the corridor that led to his office. Sir John could stay there and fence with the librarian if that's what he wanted to do. She was going to conduct her search while she still had access to the library.

What with her fear of discovery and the chaotic condition of the office, Jessica again had to confine herself to the desktop. Edging around it, so as not to tip over any of the precarious piles of books on the corners, she scanned each sheet of notepaper, then gingerly lifted the blotter to peer underneath. The page she had seen previously was gone, and for just an instant she wondered if she had been indeed imagining things.

Then she took firm hold of her emotions. She wasn't the lunatic in Parham House. Wiley was. He had probably squirreled the monograph away somewhere, waiting for some final dubious "proof to emerge from the collection. She tiptoed around a decade's worth of unbound journals and pulled open the nearest cupboard. It was jammed with papers. She knelt down and lifted out a handful, using her thumb to fan through the pages.

She would need all afternoon to go through one cupboard.

Despairing of the task, she replaced the pages and rose, brushing off her skirt. The floor hadn't been swept for years, she thought. Mr. Wiley never let the maids in to clean here. Struck by a thought, she spun around, knocking a book from the desk.

She made a grab for it, but missed, and it landed with a crack on the floor. Immediately, to still the reverberations, she put her foot down on it and held her breath. When there was no response from the workroom, she exhaled and replaced the book on the desk, sending up a prayer of gratitude that Sir John was keeping Mr. Wiley preoccupied.

As she expected, the rubbish basket was overflowing under the desk. Deciding to sacrifice her dress for convenience, she sat down on the floor and sorted through the crumpled papers.

She didn't find what she was looking for, that incriminating statement about Bacon as Shakespeare. But she did discover another rendition of Shakespeare's signature on a coffee-ringed sheet of paper. She smoothed out the wrinkles and folded it carefully, then put it inside the cover of the novel in her reticule. After restoring the rubbish basket to something akin to its earlier disorder, she slipped back into the corridor.

When she came to the corner, she flattened herself against the wall and slowly edged over till she could see into the workspace. Mr. Wiley was just turning away from her. Suppressing a gasp, she pulled back, pressing her face to the wall, breathing in the dry scent of old paint and plaster, listening hard.

They were discussing bindings, Mr. Wiley holding forth on the possible identity of the bookbinder Bacon had used. She stole another glance. Mr. Wiley had his back to her, but Sir John saw her and with a quick jerk of his head sent her back into hiding. He raised his voice slightly to say, "Bring that volume over here to the window, will you? Perhaps I can identify the bookbinder's stamp." After a moment, he added, "See? If you hold it up to the light, you can see it. No, look closer."

She took this as a signal that Mr. Wiley was well-diverted and, still pressed close to the wall, she slipped around the corner and sped down past the shelves to the door. Her light leather slippers made a scuffing noise on the wood floor, but the adroit Sir John covered this up with another speculation about the binding. She glanced back through the shelves to see him looking over Wiley's shoulder, amused and annoyed. With a slight gesture of his hand, he urged her away. Laughing silently, she passed through the door and into safety.

She waited on an upholstered bench down the hall from the library door. Her heart stopped pounding after a few minutes, but she was still exhilarated by her adventure. She slipped her hand into her reticule, touching the edges of the folded sheet where it stuck out from the book, afraid yet to bring it out and look at it again for fear that Mr. Wiley would emerge.

But only Sir John came out of the library. She called out softly to him, and smiled as he turned and shook his head in admonishment. When he came up to her, she took his arm and drew him towards the backstairs. "Come," she whispered urgently when she felt his arm tense in resistance under her hand. He doesn't like being led, she thought with a tiny thrill. He would soon learn that neither did she. "I must show you what I found."

As always, curiosity proved the lure. Stealthily they went up to the gallery that ran the length of the next floor. Sir John closed the door firmly and then pulled a sidechair in front of it to serve as a warning of an interrupter.

The long narrow windows overlooked the garden, letting in a trace of flowery fragrance and the glare of west light. On the other wall, half in shadow, were the portraits of dead Setons. Tacitly they pretended to study the portrait of a fearsome baroness, done in oils on a dark background. "You didn't take a copy of Wiley's monograph, I hope," Sir John said in a low tone.

"No, I couldn't find it. What a mess that office is! But I found this." She pulled out the page and opened it for him to see, but didn't let go when he reached out for it.

He made a low, exasperated sound deep in his throat, something rather like a growl. "I shan't keep it, I promise."

Reluctantly she released it, and he spread it out against the uncomplaining baroness's bosom. Framed by his square, hard hands, the signature looked spindly, like an elderly man bowed down by his sins. "By me, William Shakespeare": The "W" in William began with a long wavering diagonal stroke, and the last letters in Shakespeare trailed off into illegibility.

"Not a bad forgery," Sir John pronounced at length. "He's got that bow on the 'h' dragging below the line, as Shakespeare always did, but the 'y' doesn't trail far enough. The ink and the paper are modern, of course, so there's no chance he'd be able to fool anyone. I don't think that's his aim, anyway. He's just rehearsing, I think. But he's got a good hand, does Wiley. Now," he concluded, folding the page back up and handing it back to her, "how do you intend to replace that in his office?"

"I got it out of the rubbish, I'll have you know. He'll never miss it."

He acknowledged her resourcefulness with a quick grin, and, encouraged, she added, "Perhaps I should go through all the rubbish thrown out from the library. If I can only get to it before it's merged with the rest of the house's trash, I can surely find an entire early draft of his monograph."

"You must be joking. Going through the rubbish? No, no," he said, "we have more important things to do. We must search the library for that index of the—

"Of the contents of the St. Germaine trunk. Yes, I heard you the first time you said that, Sir John. And it makes no better sense now. Even if there is an index, and I don't concede there is, what good will it do us? It won't prove Mr. Wiley a scoundrel or a lunatic, or turn my uncle's head, or win me back my collection. What good will finding it do?"

"It might serve as protection. If we have the index, we know what the trunk contains."

When he didn't continue, she exclaimed, "What? Do you think Wiley means to do some harm? Tell me!"

"I don't know," he finally answered. "He told me that in a month or so he will have what he needs to prove his case. A month or so, what happens then?"

He knew of course, but she sighed and repeated the schedule that felt emblazoned on her brain. "My birthday is in a month. The collection will be turned over to the legatee." She wished she could say "to me" with a real conviction, but she thought it might be tempting fate. "And the vault will be opened. And the trunk unsealed."

"If the evidence he is anticipating were in the extant collection, he would have already claimed it. So he must know—or believe—that the evidence is still hidden away." He walked slowly to the next picture, a sweet-faced man in a gold-edged ruff and velvet doublet. "Perhaps, when he advised your father to seal the trunk for a mere quarter-century, he got some clue as to what might be in it."

"But my father didn't know! Oh, he had his speculations, but he didn't know."

"I suspect your father's speculations might be credible, based as they were on close evaluation of St. Germaine's collecting practices. And it could be, you know, that he took a look at that index, after your mother's death."

His insistence on speaking of the index as if it were an established fact almost persuaded her. Her mother was a list-making sort; she used to keep track of books she read and plays she attended. It would have been in character to keep a list of the books she had smuggled out of France. "It will take us weeks to search the whole library. And we haven't got weeks, at least not weeks without Wiley. He's surely going to get suspicious about our coming in together every afternoon."

"Oh, I think I scotched any suggestion that I appreciated your presence. I took advantage of your scarpering off that way to tell him we'd had an argument."

She couldn't help but admire his resourcefulness in using whatever opportunity presented itself. "What did we argue about?"

"That Milton pamphlet. I said you had insisted it was the official edition, and that I had shown you the anomalous type on one page and proved you wrong. You did not admit defeat—I take it you seldom do—but only flounced out in high dudgeon."

"I never flounce, in high dudgeon or otherwise," she said witheringly, then added, "What did he say?"

"Oh, he was torn between congratulations for putting you in your place and defense of the collection's inviolability to fraud. But he was clearly pleased to think that no accord exists between us."

"So we'd best not re-engage his suspicions by returning to the library together?" Jessica knew a moment's disappointment at the prospect. Sir John gave her hope, that was what it was. She didn't want to risk despair without her constant exposure to his cool objective optimism.

"Not during the day, certainly."

Without explaining this cryptic remark, he crossed to another painting—a Hoppner portrait of her father. It didn't look very like him, Jessica thought, coming over to touch the little brass plate that identified the subject. Her father had always been shy around strangers, but during the portrait sittings he had covered that up with a righteous glower more appropriate to his brother Emory.

"Is there a picture of your mother?"

"No. She would never sit for one. She didn't care for representational art. No one in the family really did."

"So I see," Sir John said ironically, and she laughed.

"Oh, I know, it's a most indifferent collection of paintings, don't you think? It's because we care only about books." She glanced up at him, knowing that he collected art as well as books, and wondering if she could explain her family's bias. "Books are beautiful, but not consciously so. They are books, first of all, you know. Something useful. The beauty is extra, added by the artisans who were supposed to just be recording words on paper, and not making art. Somehow that makes it more precious than paintings which are deliberately, and only, art." She stole another glance at him, but only saw herself reflected in his silver eyes. "Do you understand what I mean? Don't you think that, withal, the book is the most lovely thing invented by man?"

He smiled, and she saw the warmth even in those cool eyes. "Oh, you should see my sloop full-sail on a breezy afternoon. Then you will see the loveliest thing invented by man. But books—they come close. Their beauty is not a raison d'etre, but a result of our need for them."

There was a moment of that perfect amity that Jessica, with a bit of her consciousness, knew Mr. Wiley should not witness. Instinctively she glanced up and down the gallery, to make sure all the doors were still closed.

And John, too, must have thought it best to break the connection. "We will have to break into the library at night."

This, at least, had the effect of diverting her from whatever connection had flickered between them. "Break in? You mean—" For a moment, she was too taken aback to speak. Finally she whispered, "You mean, fiddle the lock on the door."

"I would prefer the window," he replied with commendable aplomb. "If we used the door, they would know it was an inside job. And I noticed a likely looking elm tree, just outside the window."

She breathed, "How perfect! How exciting! Oh, let's do! Tonight!"

When he grinned at her, she saw that the elegant art consultant had been replaced by that pirate Ada had dreamed up. Jessica felt her mouth curve in an answering smile, and wondered if the upperclass heiress had vanished into an—oh, an adventuress, something daring and wild and indiscreet.

So it was somewhat deflating to hear his dismissal, though his excuse was impeccable. "Not tonight. The Regent has returned from Brighton for the weekend, and I'm to dine with him. Tomorrow night."

Reluctantly she replied, "We're going to Surrey tomorrow."

For a moment he looked dismayed, then, evenly, he asked, "Do you mean to spend the summer in the country then?"

"The summer? Oh, heavens, no!" She saw the relief flash in his eyes, and wished she knew how to interpret it. He didn't want to lose his accomplice, probably. "My aunt is probably the only person in the kingdom who finds London air salubrious in the summer. Hay gives her sneezing fits, you see. We're just going down for the Waterloo anniversary, and will be back Monday."