Everyone was gathered round me in a circle like the game of Happy Families we had once dragged out of a cupboard when it had been raining for three weeks, and had played endlessly at the dining room table with grim and determined hilarity.
“They think a bolt of lightning touched off your fireworks,” Daffy was saying. “So you can hardly be held responsible, can you? It left a ruddy great hole in the roof, though. Dogger had to organize a bucket brigade of villagers. What a smashing show! Too bad you missed it!”
“Daphne,” Father said, giving her one of those looks he reserves for marginal language.
“Well, it’s true,” Daffy went on. “You should have seen the lot of us standing round, up to our duffs in drifts, gaping like a gang of adenoidal carolers!”
“Daphne …”
The vicar clamped his jaws shut, trying to suppress an angelically silly grin. But before Daffy could offend again, there was a light tapping at the door, and a tentative nose appeared.
“May I come in?”
“Nialla!” I said.
“We’ve just come to say good-bye,” she whispered theatrically, coming fully into the room, a swaddling bundle cradled in her arms. “The film crew’s gone, and Desmond and I are the last ones here. He was going to drive me home in his Bentley, but it seems to have frozen up. Dr. Darby happens to be running up to London for an old boys’ dinner, and he’s offered to drop the baby and me right at our own front door.”
“But isn’t it too soon?” Feely asked, speaking for the first time. “Couldn’t you stay awhile? I’ve hardly had a chance to see the baby, what with all the goings-on.”
She wrinkled her brow in my direction as she said it.
“Too kind, I’m sure,” Nialla said, looking round the room from face to face. “It’s been lovely seeing all of you again, and Dieter, too, but Bun’s put me onto someone who’s working on a new film adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Oh, please don’t grimace at me like that, Daphne—it’s work, and it will keep us fed until the real thing comes along.”
Father shuffled his feet and looked cautiously out from beneath his eyebrows.
“I’ve told Miss Gilfoyle she is welcome to stay as long as she likes, but …”
“… but she must be getting along,” Nialla finished brightly, smiling down at the child in her arms and brushing an imaginary something off its chin.
“He looks a little like Rex Harrison,” I said. “Especially his forehead.”
Nialla blushed prettily, glancing at the vicar, as if for support.
“I hope he has his father’s brains,” she said, “and not mine.”
There was one of those long, uncomfortable silences during which you pray in earnest that no one will make a rude noise.
“Ah, Colonel de Luce, here you are,” said the world-famous voice, and Desmond Duncan made his entrance with as polished and attention-getting a stride as had ever been stridden in front of a ciné camera or a West End audience. “Dogger told me I should find you here. I’ve been awaiting the opportunity to convey to you some remarkably good news.”
In his hand was the copy of Romeo and Juliet he had pocketed in the library.
“ ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news,’ or so, at least, said the apostle Paul, quoting Isaiah, but presumably speaking of his own feet, in his letter to the Romans,” the vicar remarked to no one in particular.
Everyone glanced at once at Desmond Duncan’s Bond Street shoes, but when they realized their mistake, they all stared intently instead at the ceiling.
“This quite unassuming little volume, which has turned up in your library, is, if I am not mistaken, a Shakespeare First Quarto. That it is of great value is beyond question, and I should be guilty of a cruel trespass if I pretended it was not.”
He scanned the cover, removed his glasses, glanced at Father, restored the glasses, and opened the book to the title page.
“John Danter,” he said, in a slow, reverent whisper, holding the book out for inspection.
“I beg your pardon, sir?” Father said.
Desmond Duncan drew in a deep breath.
“Unless I miss my bet, Colonel de Luce, you are the possessor of a First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet. Printed in 1597 by John Danter. Pity about the modern inscription, though. You could, perhaps, have it professionally removed.”
“How much?” Aunt Felicity demanded abruptly. “Must be worth a pretty penny.”
“How much?” Desmond Duncan smiled. “A king’s ransom, possibly. I can tell you that, without question, if brought to auction today … a million, perhaps.
“It’s what is known as a ‘Foul Quarto,’ ” he went on, his excitement barely under control. “The text is quite different in places from the one we are accustomed to seeing performed. It was believed to have been created from Shakespeare’s players having to recall their parts from memory. Hence its inaccuracy.”
As if in a trance, Daffy was creeping slowly forward, her hand extended towards the book.
“Are you saying,” she asked, “that Shakespeare himself might have held this very volume in his hands?”
“It’s certainly possible,” Desmond Duncan said. “It needs to be assessed by an expert. Look here: There are inky chicken scratches all the way through—very old, by the look of them. Someone has certainly marked it up.”
Daffy’s fingers, now no more than an inch from the book, pulled back suddenly as if she had been burned.
“I can’t!” she said. “I simply can’t!”
Father, who had been standing motionless, now reached mechanically for the book, his face as stiff as a chapel poker.
But Desmond Duncan was not finished.
“Having been party to the discovery, or at least the identification of such a great treasure, I should like to think of myself as having something of an edge when and if you decide to …”
The room fell silent as Father took the book from the actor’s hands and slowly turned its pages. He riffled through the Quarto, as most people do with a book, from back to front. He had now arrived at the title page, which lay open in his hand.
“As I say, this modern defacement could be removed easily by an expert,” Desmond Duncan went on. “I believe the British Library employs specialists in restoration who could erase these unfortunate blots without a trace. I’m quite sure that, when all’s said and done, you’ll be happy with the outcome.”
Although Father’s face did not betray it, he was staring at the monogram—his own initials and Harriet’s intertwined.
Slowly, his forefinger moved across the surface of the paper, coming to rest at last on the red and black inked initials, carefully tracing them out afresh: Harriet’s, and then his own, in the form of a cross.
As if by wireless, I was able to read the thoughts that were flying through his mind. He was remembering the day—the very moment—that these initials had been inscribed, the red ink by Harriet, the black by himself.
Had they been written, perhaps, as the two of them were seated at a sunny casement window in summer? Or after taking breathless shelter in the greenhouse, while a sudden sun shower ran in unnoticed rivers down the outside of the glass, casting weak, watery shadows onto their young and wonder-filled faces?
Twenty years flashed like cloud shadows across Father’s face, invisible to everyone but me.
And now he was thinking about Buckshaw. The Shakespeare Quarto, at auction, would bring in enough to pay off his debts and, with a bit of prudent investing, keep us in modest but comfortable circumstances for as long as was needed, with—God willing—even a few odd pounds left over to treat himself to the occasional block of Plate 1B Penny Blacks.
I could read it in his face.
He closed the book and looked round at us all, one by one … Daffy … Feely … the vicar … Dogger, who had just come into the room … Aunt Felicity … Nialla … and me, as if he might find written on our faces instructions on how to proceed.