Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

It’s 9:30 P.M. here, afternoon on the East Coast. I get the number and make the call. A woman’s voice. No, she’s sorry to say Miss Evans is deceased. Recently deceased. My speaker is Sheila McCorkle, and she’s a church lady from Miss Evans’s church, a Catholic church, of which the late Mary had been a pillar. Mrs. McCorkle is helping to clean out the place, and my! Isn’t there a lot of old stuff! I say I’m calling from London, England, which impresses her, and I ask her if she has disposed of any of Miss Evans’s possessions. No, not yet. Why? I tell her that I am the lawyer for the Bracegirdle family and would like to inspect Miss Evans’s home to see if there are any important memorabilia extant, would that be possible? It would, she supposes. I get her home number and make an appointment for the following day.

Well, I was crazy, I suppose, to believe in such a long shot, but did not the great La Rochefoucauld say that there were situations so dire that one had to be half-crazy to get out of them alive? I called Crosetti and told him to get ready to move to London on my call, because I had a lead I was following up over in the States, and if it paid out I would need someone in England. A brief pause on the line. Shouldn’t he stay with Amalie? I said that this might be our only chance to get our hands on the Item, and that this was perhaps more critical to getting my kids back than any comfort he could give my wife. We made the arrangements and then I hung up on him and called our pilot.

By six the next morning I was in the air flying back across the Atlantic. We had a tailwind and made it to Baltimore-Washington Airport in slightly over seven hours. Three hours after that I was pulling my rental Lincoln up to the front of a modest frame house sitting white and weathered under leafless oaks and dogwoods, in Newton, Maryland. Mrs. McCorkle proved to be a stout fiftyish lady with a homely open face, dressed in country work clothes, an apron, and gloves. Inside, the place had the burdened atmosphere of a long life eviscerated by death. The cartons were out and Mrs. Mc. was valiantly trying to separate the salable from the junk. Miss Evans had been, she told me, a spinster (she used that now very unfamilar antique word), a sad case, had a fiancé once who didn’t come back from the war, had a father who lived too long, she took care of him, never married, poor thing, and yes, she was a Bracegirdle on her mother’s side, Catholic of course, from an old family she said, they came to America in 1679, one of Lord Baltimore’s Catholic shiploads, well, she could believe the old part, look at all this stuff, it looked like they hadn’t got rid of anything since 1680! Feel free to look around. Over there near the fireplace is the stuff I thought would sell. Her will left everything to St. Thomas’s, which is why I’m here.

I looked at the box of books first. An old Douay Bible, crumbling leather, inside it a family tree going back to Margaret Bracegirdle, the original emigrant. Margaret had obviously married in America, and her sons and daughters had married, and the name was lost to the record books but not to memory, for there were numerous among the family tree who bore the ancestral name: Richard Bracegirdle Clement, Anne Bracegirdle Kerr…

Putting the old Bible aside I dug deeper in the carton.

It was a quarto, of course, its red full-calf binding leather nearly black with age and the covers and the endpapers foxed and swollen with damp, but the pages were all there, the binding was intact, and the name on the flyleaf in faded sepia ink was “Richard Bracegirdle” in the familiar hand. An edition of 1598, I noted, as I flipped through the front matter. Genesis was marked with tiny pinholes. On the back flyleaf were inscribed in that same hand a string of letters in fourteen uneven rows.

I closed the book with a snap. Mrs. McCorkle looked up from her sorting and asked if I had found something I liked.

“Yes, I have. Do you know what this is?”

“A Bible, it looks like.”

“It is. It’s a Geneva Bible, from 1598. It belonged to Richard Bracegirdle, an ancestor of your friend.”

“Really? Is it valuable?”

“Well, yes. I suppose that it might fetch twenty-five hundred dollars at retail, because of the damage. It’s not a perfect copy, and, of course, this particular translation was used by practically every literate person in England for eighty or so years, so there are a lot of them.”

“Lord! Twenty-five hundred dollars! This is like Antiques Road Show .”

“Almost. I’m prepared to write you a check for twenty-five hundred right now, which is a good deal more than you’d get from a dealer.”

“That’s very generous of you, Mr. Mishkin. Could I interest you in some nice Fiesta ware?” We were all smiles now.

“Not really, but there is another item I’m looking for, mentioned in some old family papers, a kind of old surveying instrument, made of brass…?”

“Surveying instrument? No, I don’t think so. You mean one of those things with a tripod and a little telescope?”

“Not necessarily. This would have been portable, maybe a yard or so long, and a few inches across, like a big ruler…”

“You don’t mean that ?” She pointed. Dick Bracegirdle’s invention was hanging above the mantelpiece, softly gleaming, kept and polished by generations of his female descendants, ready for use.

Or a concoction of the scam artists, I should say. Once again, I was impressed with the intricacy of the plot. Had Miss Evans been involved in some way? Had they actually found a real descendant of Richard Bracegirdle, or had they begun with this old lady and built up the whole fraud around this antique instrument and an old Bible, and invented an ancestor to suit? Even a master of the involved lie such as myself could not help admiring the clockwork detail.

At Baltimore-Washington Airport,I went into one of those lounges they reserve for the prosperous traveler and called Crosetti in Zurich. I told him what I had just bought and then I used the computer facilities to scan and send off to him via e-mail the cipher from the flyleaf of Bracegirdle’s Bible. He said he would run it through his solution program and get back to me. I had a coffee and some snacks and killed an hour or so, and then he called me back, and not with good news either. The cipher did not solve with the Bible and grille key that had been used for the letters.

“Why would he have done that?” I asked Crosetti. “He had an unbreakable cipher. Why the change?”

“I don’t know. Paranoia, maybe? He was dealing with two hostile parties, Dunbarton and Rochester, and both wanted something he had, and both of them had the Bible cipher. Maybe he wanted to hold something back, or maybe he wasn’t thinking too clearly by then.”

Oh, yes, I sympathized there. “So it’s another grille?”

“Not necessarily. I think it’s a regular book cipher. I mean it’s a running key based on a text.”

“What text? The Bible?”

“I don’t think so. Do you recall all that business in the last ciphered letter when he’s talking with Shakespeare about where to hide the play and he explains how a key works and he says something to the effect that Shakespeare said to use his own words to hide his play?”

I did, but vaguely. I said, “So we’d have to run through all of Shakespeare’s work to find it? That’ll take forever.”

“Not really. Remember that Shakespeare’s plays weren’t published in a complete edition until 1623. Bracegirdle wouldn’t have wanted to use a play that might be out in different editions, some of them corrupt. I mean he was in the business-he knew that.”

“So what then?”

“Well, fourteen rows of ciphertext. Maybe it’s a sonnet. The sonnets were published in 1609.”