The Bookman's Tale by Charlie Lovett Read Free Book Online Page A

Watercolour Society, and that the meeting would probably be very much like a cocktail party. Without giving the matter much thought, he let his feet lead him to the tube station, a habit he had developed when he and Amanda would part ways for the afternoon before meeting at Fortnum’s for tea. Amanda would go off to the Victoria and Albert Museum or the National Gallery or the Tate. Peter always went to Bloomsbury.
    He emerged from the Piccadilly Line at Russell Square, and ten minutes later he was climbing the steps of the British Museum. A million things to see in London, and Peter always came back not just to the same museum but to the same set of galleries—the British Library displays to the right of the main entrance. He knew every case by heart. When the manuscript book of
Alice in Wonderland
moved from the Children’s Books case to the English Literature case, Peter noticed.
    Today,
Alice
was opened to the scene where she grows so tall she can barely fit into the corridor. Opposite Lewis Carroll’s meticulous printing was his own full-page illustration of Alice folded up into a space too small for her body. The drawing made Peter shiver, not just because of his own bouts of claustrophobia, but because, as he looked at it, Amanda whispered “See the Pre-Raphaelite hair? Carroll was a friend of Rossetti’s.” Amanda was like this, she would rest for a while, leaving Peter in peace, and then, without warning, she would be at his elbow with a comment.
    Peter paused only briefly to admire Alice. He always did this—looked quickly at some well-loved artifact like Handel’s manuscript score of
Messiah
or the Gutenberg Bible—as an appetizer to his main course, his real reason for coming to the museum. That entree was the collection preserved for posterity by Robert Cotton. Although only a few of Cotton’s treasures were on permanent display, they kept Peter coming back again and again. He had been intrigued by Cotton from the moment Francis Leland first mentioned the great collector. He had learned Old English so he could read a facsimile of the
Beowulf
manuscript Cotton had rescued. Now he stood before the original, paying silent tribute to his idol. Though the pages were scorched around the edges from a 1731 fire, he could read the careful brown lettering with ease. This was not a translation or even a facsimile, but
the
Beowulf, the manuscript that forever altered English literature.
    Somehow communing with Cotton always made Peter feel better. Cotton’s accomplishments made Peter believe that anything was possible, not just in book collecting but in life. Amanda had understood that. She would wait for him on the street in front of Fortnum’s and when he would come striding confidently down the pavement, she would say, “Been visiting Robert, I see.”
    Peter thought he could use a little of that Cotton-induced swagger as he sat in a sandwich shop on Great Russell Street at ten past six, knowing he would be late for the meeting, but in no hurry to finish his ham-and-cheese toastie. It was nearly six-thirty when he finally ventured out into the night and began the short walk to University College.
    The meeting of the Historical Watercolour Society was well under way when Peter slipped into the Haldane Room. The room was unpleasantly overheated and as dim as the side streets of London through which he had just walked. At the front a voice droned away while a series of slides was projected on the bare wall. In several rows of chairs, which may once have furnished an elegant dining room but were now what Amanda would have called “not fit for the yard sale,” sat perhaps thirty people. Some took notes, some watched motionless, some squirmed, at least two appeared to be asleep. Along the walls were a few overstuffed sofas and armchairs, but these attracted only two people.
    On a sofa across the room from where Peter sat tentatively in an armchair lounged a woman who struck Peter as the precise opposite of