Lost in a good book by Jasper Fforde Read Free Book Online Page A

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, butterflies stirred within me. I’d read fifty or sixty Cardenio s 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 thirty-something 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 wholeheartedly. The play, forgery or not, was excellent. After the opening soliloquy we soon went into a flashback where 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. 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 end of the second act.
    “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 Meter Analyzer back at the office.”
    We eagerly read on. The sentences, the meter, the style—it was all pure Shakespeare. Cardenio had been missing for over four hundred years, but for it to surface now and quite out of the blue gave me mixed feelings. Yes, it would throw the literary world off kilter and send every single Shakespeare fan and scholar into paroxysms of litjoy, but on the other hand it worried me, too. My father always used to say that whenever something is too fantastic to be true, it generally is. I voiced my concerns to Bowden, who pointed out less pessimistically that the original manuscript of Marlowe’s Edward II surfaced only in the thirties. So unearthing new plays wasn’t unprecedented— but I still felt uneasy.
    The tea was apparently forgotten, and while Bowden copied out the five-page scene for the VMA I looked around the library, wondering just what other treasures might be hidden here. The large safe-within-a-safe stood at the side of the room and contained, Swaike had said, another dozen or so rare books. I tried the safe door but it was locked, so I made a few notes for Victor in case he thought we should apply for a Compulsory Literary Disclosure Order. I then ambled round the old library, looking at books that caught my eye. I was thumbing through a collection of first-edition Evelyn Waugh novels when a key turned in the heavy steel door. I hurriedly replaced the volume as Lord Volescamper popped his head in and announced in an excited manner that due to “prior engagements” we would have to resume our work the following day. Swaike walked in to lock Cardenio back in the safe,