“Will, the man is treachery incarnate. Look what happened in Kenmare when you agreed to meet him but refused to do the dirty work he wanted,” I argued, raising my voice higher than intended. Maisie gently asked if I was all right, but nothing was right. While she was putting on a brave face, I knew she’d been badly shaken. As for my husband, he wasn’t making sense. “Will, listen. If Slader’s on the up-and-up, why forge the letter in a hand that can’t be traced to him?”
“Because that isn’t who Slader is,” he said. “Be like asking a vampire to spend a day at the shore, sunbathing. Not in his nature.”
“But you’ll happily go meet this pathological vampire for a drink?”
“Not happily. Just, let’s say, unavoidably,” sitting down and blowing on his coffee. “Let’s eat, please.”
“I want to know what was in the package.”
“Honestly, I’d rather not show you. But it’s in our house now.”
Outside, the rain was finally beginning to taper off. Through the back windows I could see skeins of mist lifting off the wide field that led down to a curtain of second-growth trees ranging along the perimeter of our land. Beyond that were tumbledown drystone walls that early farmers, who originally owned sizable swaths of this county, had built after they cleared meadows from rock-strewn forests. Everything was glistening, like diamonds winking in the greenery. On normal days, no matter how distressed I was—whether it was some problem at the bookshop, with one of the girls, even with Will—I found I could look out on this expanse of rolling grassy earth, stretch my eyes, and recenter myself. Even today, fraught as matters were, I gazed down at the meadow in search of calm.
One of our wisest decisions when we reverse-emigrated from America to Ireland, twenty years ago this summer, was really a nondecision. While we’d incrementally divested ourselves of most of our possessions—Will, his many books; me, my bookshop—we hadn’t gotten rid of this farmhouse, which had been his late parents’ cherished retreat. On a long-term lease to the family of one of his father’s closest business associates and friends, the property had brought us a steady monthly income. Besides, Will felt it would have been a betrayal to them, as well as his father’s memory, to attempt eviction and list the place. When, about a decade ago, the Cunningham family had begun to disperse and, well, die off, we found ourselves in a position to take it over again. Will, who loved little better than to restore, renovate, and revive, had spent every possible waking hour away from his job in the city working on the house. Other than a few family heirlooms, including several of his mother’s watercolors, my Augustus John drawing in a gilt frame, and an ultrarare literary artifact—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s own fountain pen, inherited from Will’s collector father and given to Nicole on her sixteenth birthday—this was pretty much all that remained from earlier days. And, for my part, long after disposing of my own childhood bungalow in Montauk after the murder of my brother, I made this getaway mine too. Yes, we considered ourselves New Yorkers, city folk. But each of us felt most comfortable in our own skin when we were here.
The sun had begun to peek out as we finished breakfast. Time had come to see what was in the parcel. As we walked down a corridor from the kitchen, past the mudroom in back, toward the studio, Will said, “I hope you’ll forgive me for stating the obvious, but it’s important that none of us mention a word of this to a soul. Nobody, not a hint of it to anyone. Can we agree on that?”
Maisie and I assented, she more readily than her mother. Being asked to enter into a pact of secrecy only raised my suspicions. Some toxic old sentiments fought to rise to the surface, but I tamped them down.
“We’ll tell Nicole when she comes,” he added. “Goes unsaid.”
An addition to the house—once Will’s father’s lair, outfitted with leather club chairs, antique rolltop desk, stacking mahogany bookcases—had been converted into a small-press printing studio that Will shared with Nicole, who passed many productive hours with him here whenever she was upstate, helping with one of his, or rather their, projects.
Back in Ireland, when apprenticing at Eccles & Sons’ stationery and print shop in tiny Kenmare, Will fell in love with letterpress printing, a skill he developed over the years, one that nearly matched his staggering, if troubled, talent as a calligrapher. When we settled into the farmhouse, he rolled up his sleeves, joined by Nicole, who’d learned the gentle art of letterpress printing at the elbow of her craftsman father. Together, they dedicated themselves to hand typesetting and printing limited-edition fine press chapbooks, which they sold under the imprint Stone Circle Editions, named in honor of the Bronze Age stone circle known as the Shrubberies in Kenmare. A pair of gifted obsessives, they made just enough from these sales to buy more ink, paper, and other supplies. So it was that Will’s father’s club chairs came to be replaced by a Vandercook proof press. Where the rolltop desk once stood was now home to a pair of large vintage Hamilton cabinets filled with various fonts of metal type. Where before his father had stored first-edition rarities in glass-front bookcases, industrial metal shelves now housed cans of printer’s inks, tympan paper, press oils, and the like. There were objects as large as a beautiful Jacques board shear they bought at an auction in the Berkshires and as small as intricate little reglets, quoins, and loupes. And paper, lots of drawers choked with a full-blown menagerie of paper. While my engagement with books had always been as a reader, learner, buyer, and seller, I’d never felt compelled to make a book. Marveling at their workshop—their biblio-laboratory, as Nicole called it—I sometimes wished it were otherwise.
He also kept his calligraphy pens and inks here, but rarely if ever used them anymore. Knowing his forgery days were behind him, I once asked Will why not throw that stuff out or give it to Nicole? “You’re like a recovering alcoholic keeping a stock of favorite liquors around.” He said he wasn’t thirsty, and not to worry about it. For the most part, I didn’t.
I suppose I should not have been surprised that Will had locked Slader’s package in his fireproof safe overnight. But I was surprised by what, with the great delicacy only a person who has handled rare books and manuscripts his whole life displays, he pulled from the heavy-card mailer. Swaddled in tissue, which Will neatly unfolded and set aside, was a drab, nondescript pamphlet, a bit the worse for wear. The kind of ephemeral detritus most people would recycle with yellowed newspapers and outdated catalogs, or else use to line the bottom of a tiny birdcage. Its edges were somewhat tattered and its tea-colored cover was lightly spotted along the bottom with what looked like old water stains. At about half a dozen inches tall and maybe four and a half across, it was altogether unmemorable.
Neither Maisie nor I said a word when Will, whose own anxious eyes were dancing, looked up from the artifact and said, “Well?”
There was no reason Maisie should have known what her father was so restless, even edgy, about. As for me, early American literature—this was printed in Boston in 1827 by some Calvin F. S. Thomas, so stated on the front cover—was outside my usual province. Had it been an early recipe book or art monograph, then maybe. But I’d never seen this before and said as much to Will.