Lost in a Good Book (Thursday Next 2)

'I can't fault you there, Mr Swaike,' replied Bowden.

I pulled up a chair and looked at the manuscript. At first glance, things looked good, so I quickly donned a pair of cotton gloves, something I hadn't even considered with Mrs Hathaway34's Cardenio. I studied the first page. The handwriting was very similar to Shakespeare's and the paper clearly handmade. I smelled the ink and paper. It all looked real, but I had seen some good copies in my time. There were a lot of scholars who were versed well enough in Shakespeare, Elizabethan history, grammar and spelling to attempt a forgery, but none of them ever had the wit and charm of the Bard himself. Victor used to say that Shakespeare forgery was inherently impossible because the act of copying overrode the act of inspired creation – the heart being squeezed out by the mind, so to speak. But as I turned the first page and read the dramatis personae, something stirred within me. Butterflies mixed with a certain apprehension. I'd read fifty or sixty Cardenios before, but … I turned the page and read Cardenio's opening soliloquy:

'Know'st thou, O love, the pangs which I sustain—'

'It's a sort of Spanish thirtysomething Romeo and Juliet but with a few laughs and a happy ending,' explained Volescamper helpfully. 'Look here, would you care for some tea?'

'What? Yes – thank you.'

Volescamper told us that he would lock us in for security reasons but we could press the bell if we needed anything.

The steel door clanged shut and we read with increased interest as the Knight Cardenio told the audience of his lost love, Lucinda, and how he had fled to the mountains after her marriage to the deceitful Ferdinand and become a ragged, destitute wretch.

'Good Lord,' murmured Bowden over my shoulder, a sentiment that I agreed with whole-heartedly. The play, forgery or not, was excellent. After the opening soliloquy we soon went into a flashback where the unragged Cardenio and Lucinda write a series of passionate love letters in an Elizabethan version of a Rock Hudson/Doris Day split screen, Lucinda on one side reacting to Cardenio writing them on the other and then vice versa. It was funny, too. The world was indeed poorer without it. We read on and learned of Cardenio's plans to marry Lucinda, then the Duke's demand for him to be a companion to his son Ferdinand, Ferdinand's hopeless infatuation for Dorothea, the trip to Lucinda's town, how Ferdinand's love transfers to Lucinda—

'What do you think?' I asked Bowden as we reached the halfway point.

'Amazing! I've not seen anything like this, ever.'

'Real?'

'I think so – but mistakes have been made before. I'll copy out the passage where Cardenio finds he has been duped and Ferdinand is planning to wed Lucinda. We can run it through the Verse Metre Analyser back at the office.'

We read on. The sentences, the metre, the style – it was all pure Shakespeare. It filled me with excitement but worried me too. My father always used to say that whenever something is too fantastic to be true, it generally is. Bowden pointed out that the original manuscript of Marlowe's Edward II only surfaced in the thirties, but I still felt uneasy.

The tea was apparently forgotten and, at midday, just as Bowden had finished copying out the five-page scene, a key turned in the heavy steel door. Lord Volescamper popped his head in and announced slightly breathlessly that owing to 'prior engagements' we would have to resume our work the following day. As we walked out of the house a Bentley limousine arrived. Volescamper bade us a hasty goodbye before striding forward to greet the passenger in the car.

'Well, well,' said Bowden. 'Look who it is.'

A young man flanked by two large bodyguards got out and shook hands with the enthusiastic Volescamper. I recognised him instantly. It was Yorrick Kaine, the charismatic young leader of the marginal Whig party. He and Volescamper walked up the steps talking animatedly, and then vanished inside Vole Towers.

We drove away from the mouldering house with mixed feelings about the treasure we had been studying.

'What do you think?'

'Fishy,' said Bowden. 'Very fishy. How could something like Cardenio turn up out of the blue?'

'How fishy on the fishiness scale?' I asked him. 'Ten is a stickleback and one is a whale shark.'

'A whale isn't a fish, Thursday.'

'A whale shark is – sort of.'

'All right, it's as fishy as a crayfish.'

'A crayfish isn't a fish,' I told him.

'A starfish, then.'

'Still not a fish.'

'A silverfish?'

'Try again.'

'This is a very odd conversation, Thursday.'

'I'm pulling your leg, Bowden.'