Poetic Justice, a Traditional Regency Romance (Regency Escapades) Read online

  Poetic Justice, a Regency Romance Novel

  By Alicia Rasley

  Copyright 2011 by Alicia Rasley

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Midsummer Books

  ISBN: 978-1-4659-5673-6

  CHAPTER ONE

  April 1818

  And deeper than did ever plummet sound

  I'll drown my book.

  The Tempest, V, i

  Guilt was an unfamiliar emotion for Captain John Dryden. Indeed, those who knew him best would scoff that he might be ashamed of such a triumph as this. But here he was, standing in a broken-marbled foyer, holding the prize of prizes in his reverent hands, wanting to give it back.

  The little nun in her threadbare brown habit kept thanking him for the dozen gold pieces, which would, she assured him, fix the leaky roof and re-gild the crucifix in the chapel. She even slung a satchel full of honey-cakes over his shoulder, warning, "Now don't you get the dust from that old book on Sister Penelope's cakes." And she sent him on his way with a heartrendingly sincere, "God bless you, my son, for your goodness."

  It was enough to make a sinner repent. But John couldn't afford repentance. Instead he stuck another gold coin in the poorbox at the door, earning another "Oh, God bless you, sir!" from the nun, and exited into the blazing Greek afternoon.

  His horse waited under a drooping tree as John wrapped the dusty old book in linen and then in oilcloth, his fingers lingering on the gold-tooled border design, and slipped it into the saddlebag. It isn't as if I've done anything illegal this time, John told himself, untying the reins and mounting. It was not even immoral.

  His father's favorite Biblical verses echoed again in his head, about the need for good stewards, about the tending of the vines, about the virtue of sharp business practices. He might even have approved of his elder son, for a change, had he lived long enough.

  But the sweet little nun was standing in the doorway, her hand waving in farewell, and John spurred Malta in an attempt to escape her gratitude. The horse sensibly resisted the command to gallop and settled into a mincing gait more appropriate for the steep path down the mountain. This cautious descent gave John more time to debate the morality of bilking a nun.

  He had told her that the book was valuable, and asked her to name her price. And she had giggled like a girl, her plain face radiant with hope, and whispered a shockingly low sum. He had gone so far to suggest that she might want to consult an antiquarian in Athens (reserving of course for himself the first purchase rights) before selling. But she was already aghast at her own effrontery, asking so many drachmae for a dirty old book used as a doorstop in the convent library. And without disclosing the name of his client, John could not convince her that her doorstop might be a prince's treasure. Besides, Greek wasn't one of his better languages, so whenever he made his protests, she mistook his meaning and lowered her price. He finally had to shove the gold into her hands before she forced him to rob her blind.

  Fortunately, on the path below, a cloud of dust appeared to divert John from these useless regrets. Monsignor Franco Alavieri emerged from the cloud, standing up in his stirrups, flogging his disspirited horse, cursing in a fluent, unpriestly way. John glanced back up the mountain to the ancient convent, a pile of rocks on top of a pile of rocks, the sun just sliding down behind it, and felt the first glimmer of triumph. He had beaten the Vatican by three hours.

  Alavieri halted with his whip in midair when he saw his rival. Then he sat down heavily in his saddle. "Captain Dryden. Imagine meeting you here." His sarcasm carried clearly in the dry mountain air. "I take it my ordeal with this foolish nag has been for naught."

  "I fear so." John was glad to switch to flowing Italian, which had none of the awkward archaic constructions of the nun's Greek. Fortunately, Alavieri was a modern priest and didn't insist on speaking Latin outside the Vatican City. John's village school education hadn't prepared him to trade silken insults in Latin.

  He reined in Malta a few feet away and appraised Alavieri's dreary horse with an expert eye. "You are so seldom blessed in your mounts, Monsignor. You might think of shipping your own, and then, perhaps, we might have a better race to the finish line."

  Alavieri was eyeing John's saddlebags, and John instinctively felt in his pocket for the knife he always carried and had so far used mostly to cut string on parcels of books and statues. But the monsignor forced a good-natured laugh and wiped the sweat off his face, leaving a dirty streak behind. "Come, Captain. Let us descend and find a taverna. I will buy you a drink while you regale me with your tale of victory."

  The nearest taverna was a hot, dusty mile down the mountain, and when they finally arrived John wanted to call for ouzo and gulp it like a glass of cold milk. But he needed his wits about him. He chose a rickety table next to a window, so that the rays of the afternoon sun filtered through the dust and illuminated the tabletop. He set his saddlebag under the table and kept his foot on it and his eyes on Alavieri's hands as they gesticulated over the ouzo mugs. The monsignor was a subtle sort, ungiven to overt violence, but rumor had it the big ruby ring on his blessing hand contained a little poison ampule.

  But Alavieri wasn't a Borgia after all. He kept his hands to himself and his poison ring closed, and he never even asked to see the manuscript he had come so far to attain. In fact, he was all that was gracious, as they exchanged news about the rare-book trade and discreet queries about each other's major client. "That regent prince of yours, I hear he's become a collector." He beckoned to the barman to replenish John's drink.

  "Has he?" John covered his mug with his hand, and the barman departed, leaving the jug of ouzo behind. "He has a fine collection of classical art, I hear." In fact, John had purchased much of that art for the Regent, and had recently persuaded him to rebuild the King's decimated rare-books library. None of this was a secret, for the Regent was given to public pronouncements about his art purchases. But John was elusive by nature, and didn't want Alavieri to pin him down. "And the Vatican. Unfortunate that the Aquinas portfolio turned out to be a forgery."

  Alavieri muttered a blasphemy, then glanced around to make sure the barman was not eavesdropping. His voice dropped so low John had to strain to hear it. "His Holiness was too eager for it. I knew it was false, from the first, but he never listens, you know. It said what he always wanted Aquinas to have said, so it must needs be authentic."

  John leaned closer, almost forgetting to keep one eye on his companion's hands as Alavieri poured them both another drink. Forgery was fascination for him, and Alavieri was one of the world's experts on detection. "Was it a modern forgery? Fritz Muller, perhaps?"

  "No, no, Muller could not have done it!" Alavieri slammed his mug down on the table, all aesthetic affront now. "Martin Luther he will forge, but to forge Aquinas he would have to read him, and that would require work! He's the laziest of the bunch, though his technique of aging paper—No. It was an old forgery, within a century of Aquinas's death, I think. Some renegade group of priests must have sponsored it, for the theology was appallingly radical." He fell silent, no doubt recollecting that the pope had found the forgery's theology compelling. "I've kept it in my collection of falsities. Come back to Rome with me, and I will show you how I discovered the methods used."

  It was tempting. But in the week or so it would take to sail to Rome, Alavieri would have a hundred chances to nab the Jerusalem Manuscript. "Some other time, perhaps. I've got to deliver the goods to my client, and conduct some business in London. But I mean to winter in Rome, so I shall certainly pay you a visit then."

  If you haven't
been excommunicated by then, he added silently as he called for the bill, and Alavieri, the gracious host, pulled out his heavily laden purse.

  "Ah, yes, I came prepared," he said in answer to John's unspoken question. "I'm carrying even more in my belt. I would have paid upwards of fifteen hundred British pounds for the Jerusalem. How much did you pay—no, don't break my heart. I can tell it was a pittance."

  After the tavernkeeper had disappeared back into the kitchen, the monsignor pulled out his watch and peered at it. Still seated at the scarred table, he said all in a rush, "Wait! Stay long enough to finish your drink. Besides, I have something that might interest you." Rapidly, before John could get away, he set his satchel on the table. "I found it in the library of one of your English eccentrics—an old actor, a friend of Garrick's. It is a prompt book of King Lear. Annotated for the director, perhaps by the playwright himself. I brought it, in fact, knowing that we would probably meet this way."

  John had risen to go; a lifelong sailor, he was ever mindful of the tide, now reaching its crest. But this sat him right down again. Original stage scripts of Shakespearian plays were very rare, having received hard use by their earliest owners, the actors and directors at London theatres. Most that survived would have been destroyed in the great London Fire a century and a half earlier. Even when one turned up years ago in the attic of a provincial theatre, no one claimed it bore the notes of Shakespeare himself.

  "I might indeed be interested."

  The monsignor yanked his satchel open, rummaged through it, and brought out a small parcel. "Interested enough to trade? After all, the prince—I mean, your client—would surely find the Bard's work more attractive than that of a strange heretical sect."

  "According to your superior, Monsignor, the prince himself, not to mention the Bard, belongs to a strange heretical sect." When Alavieri only looked blank, John added, "The Church of England. You remember. We broke off centuries ago. Before Shakespeare's time, in fact."

  Alavieri dismissed this with a wave. "No hard feelings, I assure you. Indeed, I have always considered Shakespeare a secret papist. It is all here in Lear, the desire for pomp and mystery, the ritual beauty, the patriarchal authority."

  John looked down at his hands. They were flexing, of their own accord, impatient to hold the prompt book still hidden away in the leather parcel. Lear. Fortune, good night, smile once more; turn thy wheel. Could two such discoveries in one day be possible? The Jerusalem, Shakespeare's own hand? "Well, Shakespeare is like the Bible, I think. We all see what we please to see, and we all find evidence to support our interpretation."

  More heresy, but Alavieri only shrugged and slid the book out and across the table to John. It was tied with string, pressed between two pieces of thin board, and John had to grit his teeth to keep his hands from trembling as he undid the knot. He knew immediately the quarto-sized book was old enough and dog-eared enough to have been used in Shakespeare's day, and just for an instant he let his resistance slip. William Ireland, the notorious Shakespeare forger of the late century, had no hand in this—he was not adept enough. It was made of cheap paper, sloppily bound in just a sheet of parchment, handsewn in heavy thread with quarter-inch stitches along the left border. The title was scrawled in faded ink across the front: "King Lear," no author specified.

  With cautious fingers he opened to the first page. The script was handwritten, in a hand more precise than its presentation warranted, tightly bunched on the small page but clear and easily read. And there were the immortal words of the mortal poet, the oddly prosaic opening to the most wrenching of plays: I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

  He turned through the pages, his gaze catching on familiar lines—"Why brand us thus, with base? bastardy? base, base?"—blotted words, crossed-out passages. But of course, it was the notes in the margin that compelled his attention. In a different ink, a less careful hand, the marginalia offered stage directions, alternative wordings, oblique comments. Reverently, as if it were a woman, he touched the harsh stroke crossing out some offending line. It was extraordinary, that stroke, so august, so authoritative, so authorial.

  Unfortunately, not so authentic.

  "What value do you put on this, Monsignor?"

  "As I said, perhaps we can arrange a trade."

  Alavieri was leaning forward eagerly, his hands gripping the discarded leather parcel, and John's suspicions were confirmed. "Now why," he said in a wondering tone, "would I want to trade a genuine illuminated manuscript for a fake?"

  Alavieri slumped back in his chair, shaking his head, smiling faintly. "It is no forgery."

  "No, perhaps not the playscript itself. But the ink of the notes is far newer than the script. There's been an attempt to age it with some acid wash, I think." John slid the open book back to the priest, pointing to a note across from Lear's first soliloquy. "That would account for the light spots on the facing pages." He was, if anything, more disappointed than Alavieri, for sometimes he loved the tawdry torn remnants of Shakespeare more than the most gilded illumination. But facts were facts, and this was forgery.

  Alavieri forced another laugh. "Oh, no, I can't fool you, can I, Captain Dryden? I knew it too, but not so soon. For a moment I thought I might once again be reading his own hand, on his own words."

  "Again?" The word echoed in John's mind, hushing his disappointment. "You've read his hand before?"

  "One of my tragedies. I saw a manuscript of his once. No one else guessed at the authorship, but I thought it was his. Or part of it, at least. The cover boasted the name of one of his friends. I imagined that the actors had been too long without work, and sat down and wrote a play together. But it was before I joined His Holiness, decades ago, before you were born. I hadn't the funds to purchase it, and it went to some Frenchman who didn't know Shakespeare from Chaucer."

  It hardly seemed possible. "An Ireland forgery, surely?"

  Alavieri shook his head. "No, it was far too adept for him. He was a clever one, but his hand and his mind weren't so facile. In this playscript, there several hands, you see, modifying this script, and only one was—the one. I had only a few moments with it, but I recognized the turn of phrase, the old-styled script, the spelling."

  His voice faded into regret, and John felt his resolve not to be fooled fade with it. Alavieri was the best in the business. If Shakespeare had scrawled a single word on that manuscript, Alavieri would have recognized it. "Where is it now?"

  Alavieri was undeceived by John's casual tone. "Oh, now you are intrigued, my lad. Now you are willing to trade, are you?"

  John did not answer; there was no need.

  Alavieri shook his head, and John, for the second time, felt that sharp disappointment, the loss of what he never had. Alavieri was toying with him again.

  "Unfortunately, I have nothing to trade. The Frenchman lost his head in the Revolution, and though I searched what remained of his home, I found no trace of his library. The Vendee, you know, was torched by those barbarians. They would have taken even greater glee if they knew they had burned such a priceless work as that. Ironic, isn't it, that his passage warned about the dangers of mobs in riot? Think of it: Shakespeare's immortal words, that almost unknown hand, licked by the flames and finally consumed, like the French nation itself."

  What remained of John's triumph from his victory with the Jerusalem seeped away. This was doubtlessly what Alavieri intended when he displayed his false Shakespeare, and then so eloquently described the destruction of the real Shakespeare. And it was real, John knew it, in his heart.

  Alavieri smiled, then bent over the forged prompt book to hide his pleasure. "But this is what we are left instead, this falsity. It rather looks like his hand, doesn't it?"

  John had once seen Shakespeare's will, unearthed a few decades earlier from an Oxfordshire church, and had instantly memorized the poignantly shaky script of the aged Shakespeare. "It is rather like. A worthy attempt. What must I give you for it?"

  Alavieri
shrugged. "Nothing. It is my gift to you. In recompense for my losing that play, and causing it to be lost forever." The smile was gone now; he was genuinely saddened, as genuinely as Alavieri could be. "It can be the first of your own collection of fakes, like my own. A curiosity, a cautionary, perhaps. It will remind you that you must not, as His Holiness did, let your hope overcome your sense. Or, as I did, lose a prize for lack of its price." He rose, tossed the leather parcel on the table. "Not that you, my ruthless lad, need be reminded of those."

  Halfway out the door, he looked back over his shoulder. "I would not have let you take the Lear unknowing. I care too much for truth for that. I wanted merely to test you. Now I know that your reputation is true. You have the eyes of an eagle, and the heart of a skeptic. The Jerusalem too must be true, and I have lost it to you."

  John lingered there for another quarter hour, turning the pages of the play, tracing the archaic script with his finger and translating the spelling into modern English, translating the priest's generosity. If it wasn't an original prompt book, it was a very early one, and worth a good deal. Alavieri was not, in John's experience, an impulsive man, nor a benevolent one either.

  Finally he recalled the tide and packed the curiosity away in his saddlebag next to the Jerusalem. The air was cooler now and cleared the ouzo fumes from his head as he rode down the rest of the mountain.

  Down through the winding main street of the village that spilled to the harbor, John kept half of his awareness on his surroundings, half on the sea below. It was sunset, and the fishermen were all gone home to bed, leaving their vessels moored, sails furled, in the tiny harbor.

  There was the Coronale towering over them all, his own sloop, bathed rosy in the dying sun, her single mast soaring, her bow curved as gracefully as a woman's hip. He had other ships, real ships with three masts and dozens of sails and cubic hectares of cargo space. But the Coronale would always be his first love, a lady of mystery, fast and sleek and wickedly experienced. She could outrun any excise cutter and outgun most privateers, though she seldom got the exercise now that he had become respectable. It's a shame the war has ended, he thought, for she's wasted on peaceful seas.