Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

Some more thinges of import for my time groweth short I can scarce make out the page though it be clare day & I am griped by my mortal agonie you know well my leathern boxe that I keep in my privy closet, in it you shall finde the letteres cypher’d in the fasioun I devized. Doe you keepe them safe and show them to no one. They tell all the tale nearlie of my Lord D. his plot & oure spyeing upon the secret papist Shaxpure. Or so wee thought him although now I am lesse certayne. In that manner & bent of lyfe he wase a Nothinge. But certayne it is hee wrought the playe of Scotch M. I commanded of him in the Kinges name. I find it passing strange that all though I am dead and him also yet the playe lives still, writ in his own hande & lying where onlie I know & there maye it reste for ever.

Crosetti was so intent on deciphering each word into English sense that he missed it the first time through and it was only upon rereading this section that the connection between Shaxpure and playe actually penetrated his mind. He froze, gasped, cursed; sweat popped out on his back. He stood staring at Bracegirdle’s squiggles, expecting them to fade away like fairy gold, but they stayed put: Shaxpure, playe.

Crosetti was a cautious fellow, and tight with a buck, but he occasionally picked up a lottery ticket, and once he had sat in front of his TV and watched the girl pull the numbered Ping-Pong balls out of the drum and followed the numbers on his ticket and let out a whoop when the numbers matched. But his mother had come in at the sound and informed him that where the winning number needed 8-3, his ticket read 3-8. Actually, he’d never won anything in his life, had never really expected to, had grown up a fairly happy kid from a working family with no sense of entitlement at all, and now this.

Crosetti was no scholar, but he had at least been an English major, and had done Shakespeare in his junior year. So he understood that what he held in his hands was a colossal find. Shakespeare (for he also knew that the man’s name could be spelled in a vast number of ways) had not to his knowledge ever been the subject of an official government investigation. And for papism! What, if any, religion William Shakespeare had espoused continued as one of the big questions in the field, and if some official contemporary had believed it…and who was this Lord D.? For that matter, who was Richard Bracegirdle? And the cherry on top was the mention of a manuscript of one of the plays, extant at least until 1642. Crosetti tried to think what play it might be that was “commanded of him in the Kinges name.” Oh, God! Why hadn’t he paid more attention in that class? Wait a second! Something to do with King James, some noble had tried to kill him in a Scottish castle, and witchcraft, something in a BBC documentary he’d watched with his mother on TV. He grabbed his cell phone-no, still too early to call-maybe Rolly-no, he didn’t want to think what she’d be like awakened at ten to five with a question about…

And just like that it popped into his mind. Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Players, had wanted a Scottish play to compliment the new king, and refer to his narrow escape, and flatter his ancestral connection, Banquo, and pander to the peculiar monarch’s obsession with witchcraft, and the house playwright had come up with Macbeth .

Crosetti now recalled the necessity of respiration. He gasped. He knew there was nothing in Shakespeare’s hand but a few signatures and some suspect lines in a manuscript of a play that he supposedly worked on. No autograph on any play of his existed, none. The possibility that an autographed Macbeth was still buried in an English cellar somewhere…it boggled the mind. Crosetti knew a little about manuscript prices and he could extrapolate. It was too immense to consider; Crosetti could not wrap his head around it and so he simply stopped thinking about the possibility. But even the thing in his hands now, the Bracegirdle ms. plus what might be a ciphered account of the investigation of William Shakespeare for recusancy, would be enough to send him to film school. Film school! It’d do that and fund his first movie as well…

Assuming always that the eighteen sheets of thin paper with the post horn watermark were in fact the secret letters Bracegirdle mentioned-and these ciphered English rather than a foreign language. Everything depended on the tidy heiress theory again: papers from the same stack of waste at the bindery being used in sequence to stuff the volumes of the Voyage . He spread out one of the sheets and examined it through the magnifying glass.

Ptuug u kimn lf rmmhofl

Or maybe not. Maybe that first series of characters was Ptmmg or Ptmng . He found it impossible to derive even the actual ciphertext accurately, because deciphering secretary hand depended so much on context, on knowing what English word was meant. Or at least it was for him. He imagined that the original recipient was familiar enough with Bracegirdle’s hand to read the ciphered letters and actually decipher it into plaintext. Crosetti knew little about ciphers except what he had picked up from movies, spy novels, and television. He knew what a ciphertext message was supposed to look like: equal blocks of five or six letters or numbers marching across the page. This didn’t look like that at all. It looked like regular writing, with “words” of differing length. Maybe that was how they wrote cipher in Jacobean times. He knew nothing of that subject, yet by analogy with other technical progress, such a cipher must have been fairly primitive. As he considered this, he recalled the difference between a cipher and a code. A code required a code book, or a memorized list of words that meant something other than what it appeared to be. But then it would have looked more like plain English, something like “the parson failed to buy the pig” might mean “the subject suspected of hiding a priest.” And that would limit what an intelligencer could relate. No, he simply knew that this was cipher; indeed, Bracegirdle had called it a cipher in his final letter.

The alarm rattled and Crosetti hurried over to squelch it. In the bed, Rolly turned over murmuring. Her eyes flicked open. Crosetti saw an expression of terror cross her face and her whole body jerked. He was about to say something soothing when she closed her eyes again and turned away, pulling the duvet over her head.

“Carolyn? You all right?”

No answer. Crosetti shrugged and went to change the diapers. The blotters. They were barely damp now and the pages seemed almost dry to the touch, maybe a little cool: the miracle of capillary action. They were still buckled along the edges, in the way of paper that has been wetted, and the gilt edges of the text block no longer had the perfect smoothness of the pristine book. He wondered how she was going to fix that.

As he worked he heard sounds from the sleeping zone: throat clearing, the swish of fabric, the sound of running water, a toothbrush in action, more cloth sounds, the water again, the clunk of a pot, openings of cabinets. He was just finishing the last of the volumes when she appeared at his side, dressed in yesterday’s overalls and black Converse high-tops with bright blue socks; she held two mugs of aromatic bad coffee, one of which she handed to him.

“I’m sorry I don’t have any cream. Or milk.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry I startled you when the alarm went off. You looked like you were going to jump out of your skin.”

A blank look here, a small shrug. She opened a volume of the Voyages and felt the paper. “This is good. It’s almost dry.”

“What are you going to do about the buckling?”

“Press it out, or use heat. This kind of linen rag paper is a lot like cloth. I’ll iron every edge if I have to and then trim and regild.” She turned to face him and smiled. “Thanks for the help. I’m sorry I was cross with you last night. I’m not very social.”