The Ghost Manuscript Read online

  Carys followed Nicola into the enormous kitchen, a riot of gleaming copper pots, wrought-iron racks, wood-faced appliances, and vases full of pink and white peonies. Nicola already had teacups set out, and, without asking if Carys wanted any, poured out dark tea from a pot surrounded by a puffy light blue cozy.

  “Milk?” Nicola asked.

  “Please, and sugar.”

  As Nicola spooned the sugar from a blue clay pot, her hand started to shake and the sugar spilled across the countertop. She grimaced.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Nicola said. She grabbed a sponge and wiped up the sugar. “It’s the MS. One of the symptoms is the shakes. Sometimes I lose the feeling in my hands. And sometimes I can’t get out of bed for three or four days.”

  “Have you had it a long time?”

  “About ten years,” Nicola said. “I’m on good meds, but it likes to assert itself every once in a while. Would you mind pouring the milk? Unless you’d prefer to wear it.” She laughed. Carys smiled.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” said Nicola.

  “I’m glad, too,” said Carys.

  “You know the collection better than anyone but Mr. Harper, don’t you?” Nicola asked, looking at Carys over the edge of her teacup, which shook slightly.

  “Part of it,” she said, “but the total collection surpasses my involvement. He has books here that I’ve seen only in museum catalogs. It’s remarkable. Who else was he working with on this?”

  “Oh,” said Nicola, dropping her eyes, “I don’t really know. I never really paid attention to the other people. You were the one Mr. Harper mentioned specifically. He was very impressed with your work. He said you were a very good hunter after you located that copy of the Annales Cambriae.”

  Nicola pronounced the words—the Latin name for the Book of Wales, written in AD 550—perfectly. Strange.

  “So, how did a smart woman like you decide to spend her life surrounded by musty books, then?” asked Nicola.

  “As a kid I read voraciously, especially the classics,” Carys said. The truth was that her mother had refused to spend money on cable, and her frequent, months-long bouts of depression made books Carys’s most dependable companions. Nicola didn’t need to know that part.

  “Classics?” said Nicola. “Very advanced.”

  “I got addicted,” she said. “When I learned they were all based on older stories, I became obsessed with tracking down the original tale and its author. Like following a stream in the woods back up to its source. I mean, Shakespeare was the biggest plagiarist of all time, wasn’t he?”

  Nicola laughed. “He was that.”

  “Once I had an ancient handwritten manuscript in my hands, I was a goner. I guess I am a hunter in that way.”

  “Where did you study?” asked Nicola.

  “Smith undergrad. BU for my master’s. PhD at the University of London.”

  “What did you do your dissertation in?” asked Nicola.

  “Paleography of Romano-British manuscripts.”

  Nicola lifted her tea in a little salute. “Well done, you.”

  “I’m a little surprised I made an impression on Mr. Harper,” said Carys.

  “You did,” said Nicola.

  “You seem to know a lot about the collection.”

  “Mr. Harper was kind enough to indulge my curiosity about the books,” Nicola said. “At first, I think he just wanted to impress upon me the importance of keeping the security system on at all times. Eventually, he started teaching me about the manuscripts. He seemed pleased to have someone in the house who appreciated his work. His wife couldn’t have been less interested, bless her soul, and JJ never got the bug—although he always supported his father’s passion. JJ even bought him a very rare manuscript a few years ago. Mr. Harper was very touched by that.”

  “What brought you to the U.S.?”

  Nicola paused, raised her teacup and sipped, then smiled lightly.

  “Just a lark,” she said. “I’d finished college and decided to see the world for a few years.”

  “What did you study?” asked Carys.

  “Celtic languages at University College in Aberystwyth. You ever been up to that part of Wales? Truly gorgeous country,” said Nicola.

  Carys paused mid sip. Her appetite dissipated.

  “No, I haven’t,” she said. She stood up. “I should get to work.”

  “Of course,” said Nicola. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  Carys went back to the library and took a deep breath. Aberystwyth—a town she’d never been to, and never would. The return address on the envelope on her desk last week. The town where her father now lived.

  She’d heard enough about Wales for one week. For one lifetime, really. She turned her attention to the books arrayed before her. They would ease her mind. They always had and always would.

  Verify and authenticate. That was her job. Steven had jokingly called her a “highly educated, glorified fact-checker” when introducing her at an office party. It stung a bit, but he wasn’t the malicious type and she didn’t take offense. He didn’t understand what she did all day—not his fault; she’d never discussed it

  with him.

  He wasn’t wrong. This part of her job was fact-checking. She had to make sure every item listed in the Harper Collection catalog was physically here in the library. Then she had to make sure the description in the catalog was right. That a thing described as Vulgar Latin wasn’t actually Medieval. That the ink used was carbon black and not metallic. That the handwriting style had been in use when the manuscript was written. That the binding technique and material were available when the book was created. That there wasn’t something else hidden behind the words in the manuscript…like a barely visible earlier text, the remnants of writing that had been erased by an ancient hand so the precious papyrus or parchment could be reused. Those types of books, palimpsests, caused so much excitement in the world of ancient book collecting because there was always a much, much older document hidden behind the visible writing—the ghost of a previous author. It was like finding a da Vinci hidden behind a Kandinsky.

  Once that part of the authentication was done came the fun part: verifying the book’s provenance, determining the route it had traveled and the owners who had held it, naming every person or institution that had bought or sold it, from the moment of its creation to the moment it landed in Carys’s hands. It was like doing the biggest puzzle in the world. She would spend months reverifying the documented provenance of a rare manuscript if even one single bit of it smelled funny. Buyers relied on this provenance information to make sure they were weren’t buying war loot, or stolen items, or forgeries, or a manuscript formerly owned by a Jewish family in Berlin during World War Two—a family exterminated except for one survivor, who decades later legitimately could claim ownership of the priceless text, leaving the buyer empty-handed, out a large sum of cash, and possibly under indictment, if it could be proved that he or she participated in any way in the deception.

  It happened more often than Carys could have ever imagined when she entered the profession. The sheer volume of manuscripts and other ancient artifacts pilfered and winding their way through their rarified little world, with fake provenance, with buyers and sellers turning a blind eye to the obvious truth of it as a way to keep the item from being confiscated—it was a booming industry. Doing the most diligent provenance work possible was her small way of getting the real owners justice and giving back to the manuscripts their true history.

  In the end, she was speculating on all of it—making her most educated guess. Her guesses were, it was widely acknowledged in her field, among the best. It was the only thing in her life of which she was deeply, jealously proud.

  Her final job was to estimate the value of each book. She didn’t care much for that task. In her mind, these manuscripts, every single one, were pr
iceless. Utterly irreplaceable. An auction’s purpose was to determine what the market thought the price should be, so her estimates were merely a starting point. Of course, there would be no auction of the Harper Collection. It was a private sale. Whoever was buying would inevitably be well known to Carys—the collecting community was tiny. It would be either a university, a huge private library like the Morgan (the publics would never be able to afford the items here), or one of the strange, mercurial billionaires who collected these books as obsessively as Harper did. And they had better bring a hundred million bucks if they wanted the whole thing.

  She unlocked the first bookcase again and opened the glass door. So far, every book, manuscript, and parchment was exactly where the catalog said it would be. Except for the one that was now directly in front of her face.

  It was a modern notebook wedged between two ancient manuscripts. She pulled out the unexpected volume and opened it to its first page, which read simply, “Cross-referenced Index of Contents.” It was grouped by subject headings and subheadings, each entry pointing to a specific paragraph and page within one of the manuscripts in the library, then listing the manuscript’s location in the collection. For Carys, it was something else entirely: a glimpse into Harper’s mind, an inkling of what he was obsessed with within these books, what drove him, what steered his book selections during his entire collecting career. She leaned her back against the wooden bookshelf dividers and began to read.

  Her eyes danced over the handwritten words for a few moments. Then she began to page back and forth, checking and rechecking. A minute later, the nature of Harper’s obsession stared back at her.

  Mons Badonicus, Gwynyfr, Camlann, Merlin, Glastonbury, Arcturus Rex. It was all Arthuriana—topics relating to the hunt for the mythical King Arthur.

  “You are shitting me,” she muttered. “Please, please, Harper, tell me you weren’t obsessed with King Arthur.”

  She flipped rapidly through the pages, trying to find some reference to another subject. There were lists of names and places, none that looked familiar. But there were no major subject-matter headings other than Arthur and things she vaguely recognized as topics peripheral to him. She closed the notebook sharply, slid the index back on the shelf, and made a note of its existence in her own notebook.

  Carys felt numb. She’d never, in all the time she’d been dealing with Harper, picked up on this. None of the manuscripts that she’d found for him fit into the traditional requests that book dealers were all too accustomed to receiving from Arthur chasers, a particularly earnest and scholarly group of crackpots—sometimes highly educated and university-funded crackpots, but crackpots nonetheless. They chased the legend, convinced that some gold lay at the end of their quest. Unlike the chasers who could be counted on to demand the oldest written versions of the source material for such works as the Mabinogion and Gothic History by Jordanes, or De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae by Gildas, it looked like Harper focused his efforts on Roman land records, census data, and personal letters, none of which had ever been considered primary source material for the pursuit of Arthur. Her arms were heavy with disappointment.

  Her phone buzzed. Plourde.

  “Carys. How is it going at the Harper asylum?” Plourde asked. She could hear him grinning.

  “Fine.”

  “How long do you think it’ll take?”

  “At least a month, maybe two,” said Carys.

  “We can’t take that long.”

  “It’s one of the most comprehensive Dark Age libraries on the planet,” she said. “I think our buyers would expect the most detailed attention possible to this task, don’t you?”

  “Of course, but JJ is eager to get rid of it as fast as possible,” Plourde said.

  “JJ should donate the whole thing to a museum or college, get a gigantic tax break for the estate, and be done with it.”

  There was a brief, all too rare, silence from Plourde.

  “You know what would be a sin, Ms. Jones?” he said. “If any representative of Sothington’s suggested to a client that he endeavor to dispose of a collection in any way that deprives Sothington’s of a substantial commission. Are we clear?”

  “Of course.”

  “Brilliant. I want the final appraisal report in my hands in two weeks.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Make it possible. If you have to cut a few corners, that’s fine. I’m sure the catalog is already in excellent shape. Time is of the essence, Ms. Jones.”

  “Fine.” She hung up, took a deep breath, held it, then exhaled hard, a technique she used frequently at work to keep from throwing something across the room.

  There had to be another index focused on another topic, like ancient medicine or the evolution of law or something worthy. She tossed the catalog on the desk, and it landed with a bang that echoed through the library.

  “Everything okay?” Nicola asked from the library’s door.

  “Yeah,” she said, startled. “My boss. He’s sort of…difficult.”

  “I heard what you said about the collection,” said Nicola. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

  “I wasn’t exactly keeping my voice down.”

  Carys sat at the desk, put her elbows on it, and rubbed her temples with her fingers.

  “It really is a shame that JJ doesn’t want to donate this collection,” said Carys. “I hate the thought of its being broken up or being sold to someone who doesn’t appreciate the importance of what Mr. Harper has collected.”

  “Yes,” Nicola said. “It is a tragedy.”

  Carys turned around.

  “Has anyone tried to talk JJ out of it?” she asked.

  Nicola studied her face.

  “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I should just get back to work here,” Carys said.

  “He’d like to donate it,” said Nicola. “But he’s more concerned with keeping his father’s name out of the papers. He’s very protective of him. Especially now that he’s so sick.”

  “Nicola, the sale of this collection…. It’ll be like someone set off a publicity bomb. A donation could be arranged to be completely private and undisclosed until JJ wanted it disclosed.”

  “That’s not what Mr. Plourde told him,” said Nicola. “He said that a private sale with Sothington’s was the only way to preserve the family’s privacy at this difficult time. He said those words exactly, according to JJ. He said that Sothington’s was the only house that could handle such a sale with discretion. He said a donation would be far too public.”

  “Mr. Plourde does not know what he is talking about.” She turned back to the Harper Collection catalog on the desk and flipped to the page where she’d left off.

  She didn’t hear Nicola leave the library.

  ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  A man’s high-pitched voice cut through the din of the after-work crowd at O’Hara’s. Carys turned around and examined him. Tall, high cheekbones and very white teeth, polyester jacket, slicked-back hair. Salesman. Totally out of place in this particular drinking establishment, where Southie’s long-predicted gentrification was still a laughable rumor, the only acceptable suit was Carhartt overalls, and ordering wine by the glass was still a very bad idea. He smiled at her with his very white teeth.

  “No, thank you,” she said. She turned back to the bar as her cocktail arrived.

  “Bitch,” he mumbled, and faded into the overwhelmingly male crowd. The bartender shrugged an apology. Carys sipped her scotch and soda.

  “Still a hit with the boys I see.”

  Carys smiled and turned around. Her best friend, Annie Brennan, stood there, her long blonde hair flowing over her broad shoulders and framing the neckline of her mostly unbuttoned white button-down oxford. Behind her, a couple of men admired her ass. Annie hugged Carys and wedged
herself into an open space next to her.

  “One day, you might try bein’ nice,” said Annie.

  “What’s the point?”

  “Well, sex, for one,” said Annie. “Speaking of which, how’s the sex machine?”

  “Gone. Dumped me Saturday night.”

  Annie studied her face.

  “Are we sad?” asked Annie.

  Carys shrugged.

  “Reason?” asked Annie.

  “The usual. He wanted to talk. I didn’t.”

  “That sucks,” said Annie. “Aside from the dumping, how ya been?”

  “I hate my boss. I got another letter from Anthony on Friday. But I like my cat.”

  “What did the letter say?” asked Annie.

  Carys sipped her drink.

  “Seriously,” said Annie. “Thirty years. Don’t you think it’s time to open the door a crack on this one?”

  “No. How’s Detective Hottiecakes?”

  “Still very, very hot,” said Annie with a devious grin.

  “Still very, very married.”

  “Yes, sadly,” said Annie. “I’m meeting him at the Green Dragon in Haymarket after his shift.”

  Carys winced.

  “Which part of that didn’t you like?” said Annie. “The meeting part or the Green Dragon part?”

  “That’s where my parents met,” she said. “Saint Patrick’s Day. I think she thought he was Irish. I boycott the place.”

  “They’re not responsible for hookups on their property,” said Annie.

  “You’re playing with fire with that detective,” said Carys.

  “Indeed I am,” said Annie. “I like fire. You should call your dad.”

  “No, I shouldn’t.”

  “Well, I’m glad we cleared that up.” Annie gestured to the bartender. “I’ll have what she’s having. Carys, why not just let him know you’re well, update him on what you’re doing?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Yeah, you do. You’re just being stubborn.”

  “No, I am not. If I wanted to talk to him, I’d call him.”

  “Why don’t you?” asked Annie.