“Aye, John. Help him,” growled the gravedigger. “But come not into the street again, ’cept to bring out your dead. Once the pestilence be on your house, you must stay till it leave. ’Tis the law.”
John turned quickly from the black-shrouded figure and led his father up the alley.
“Oh, Rob,” cried Katherine as they came in the door, “we are . . . Good God!”
Robert reached toward her, and a stream of vomit shot from his mouth.
John Harvard did what he could to comfort his family, then stuffed more rosemary into his nose, said a prayer for strength, and went out again. If the plague was soon to take him, he would see St. Saviour’s and the face of Rector Morton once more, no matter the laws, for no man-made law would stop what God wished otherwise.
He moved quickly through death-gripped Southwark. The ringing of the bells and the cries of the gravediggers could be heard on every corner, as if this were some black festival. Guards with fearsome pikes and frightened faces stood outside the Globe Theater and the Bear Gardens, both closed to keep people from congregating. Men lay dead in the gutters, their plaguey sores a feast for the rats. In Clink Street, the corpses were piled before the gates of the prison like kitchen slops. But the Winchester geese, the Southwark whores, had all flown, rents to the bishop be damned.
Soon enough, John Harvard arrived at St. Saviour’s. He took a pew in the same small chapel where he had been baptized, and he began to pray.
“Why, John!” cried Rector Nicholas Morton at the sight of him. “The plague be on your house. You must go home. ’Tis the law.”
“I come to pray, sir, to understand God’s purpose in sendin’ a plague.”
“You have only to read your Holy Scripture to know.” Morton peered from across the room, as if to make sure that no signs of the infection were yet upon John Harvard. “Why should God treat sinful London different than he treat the Egyptians?”
“But we have not enslaved the Israelites.”
“We have enslaved ourselves, John, to vain amusement, to Whitsuntide revel, to pomp and arrogance that mask corruption. Reason enough to incur God’s displeasure.”
“But my parents? They be good Christians. Why does this happen to them?”
“I know not. Though there be some in the church who would say that your father’s friendship with actors and the like was . . . was too frivolous.”
“Will Shakespeare worshiped in these very pews, sir. He was a faithful friend.”
“I said
some
in the church, John. Not all.”
John looked up at the stained-glass windows of the chapel. “There are
some
in the church who would say that even the colors in that glass be too frivolous for worship.”
Rector Morton now slipped into the pew, pulled a few sprigs of rosemary from his pocket, and waved them as if to ward off a bad smell. “You aspire to Emmanuel College at Cambridge, do you not, John?”
“Yes, sir.” John took comfort, as always, in the round, solid presence of the rector, despite the waving herbs.
“’Tis high ambition for a tradesman’s son to attend any college,” said Morton, “and for certain a college given to producing men who would purify our ritual and bring preciseness to the manners of this world.”
“I’m aware of it, sir, and if this plague pass over me, I’ll shoulder it.”
“And I’ll speak for you.” Morton clasped the boy’s forearm. “But remember . . . at Emmanuel, men of wisdom see the works of Shakespeare and his ilk as tools of the devil, glorifications of man’s vanity, his passions, his appetites, all the things that lead us toward sin. Do you understand?”
“I believe so, sir.”
“Then turn your mind to higher things. In them will you find the answer to your hardest questions. . . . Now, a prayer for all the Harvards.”
Whatever the prayer, it was not answered.
Just after sundown, a delegation of bishop’s men did as the law prescribed. They boarded up the windows and painted a red cross on the door of the Harvard house, now one of hundreds of plague houses in Southwark.
The first to die was Kate, whose fever rose so high that she all but burned to death, which was merciful, for it saved her from far worse.
Robbie lay moaning until the third day, when the buboes erupted on his neck and under his arms. They began as small black blisters, swelled quickly to the size of hazelnuts, and within a few hours were as big as hen’s eggs. Then they split and began to ooze black blood, and this boy with his whole life before him cried out for death.
Peter, the youngest, went feverish, erupted, and died—all in a single afternoon.
John and his mother rushed from misery to misery, from the third floor to the master bed to the great room, giving such care as they could—a wet cloth to cool a burning forehead, a clean shirt to cover a suppurating body, a prayer to calm a terrified spirit—and all the while, they watched one another to see which of them would fall next.
By the third day, Katherine Rogers Harvard had lost three sons and a daughter, all of them now laid out on the table in the great room. She herself had fallen into a pit of grief that left her wordless and motionless on a chair in the midst of her dead children. And neither urging nor prayer nor imprecation from John could induce her to mount the stairs and speak a final time to the man she loved.
So it was left for John to comfort his father, to pray with him, to read Scripture to him, to give him drafts of ale to cool his fever, and finally to watch the buboes erupt and grow, bringing with them their unconquerable agony.
By the morning of the fourth day, Robert Harvard was a living corpse, putrefying through the open black sores at his neck and groin. Yet he raised his head from the pillow, looked about the room with eyes suddenly clear, and called for Katherine as calmly as if he were calling for a cup of broth.
“Father,” said John, who had spent the night at the bedside, “she cannot come.”
“Is she . . . is she dead, too?”
“No . . . but—”
“She must come then. I must tell her that it still be summer.”
“Yes, Father. ’Tis August. ’Tis still summer.”
“No . . .
summer . . . soft summer . . .
temperate summer . . . ’tis a metaphor . . . or simile . . . ’tis . . .” He knitted his brow, as if a new idea had come to him, something to which he must give breath. “Johnny—”
“Aye.”
“Me books.” He looked toward the volumes on a shelf by the window.
“Yes, Father . . . your Bible, your Homer . . . a man will be known by his books. ’Tis what you’ve always said.”
“
All
me books,” said Robert with a sudden vehemence that made him seem to rise from the pillow like a demon in bloody bedclothes. “I want you to keep ’em all.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Even . . . even Will Shakespeare’s book.”
“
Love’s Labours Won
?”
And Robert Harvard was wracked by a spasm of pain that caused his whole body to shake. When it passed he said, “I . . . I know your heart. That you would go to the college at Emmanuel, that you hold with them who would purify the church. . . .”
“Yes, Father.”
“Rector Morton be a good friend, a good man, a learned man . . . I be a simple butcher. But I tell you . . . you must cherish what Will give us.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Cherish joy. Know . . . know love’s labors . . . in book and life.” The father grabbed for the son’s collar, pulled him close, and whispered, “Give . . . me . . . your . . . word.”
The stench of his breath was like rotting meat, but John did not pull away.
He grasped his father’s hand in both of his and said, “My word.”
And Robert Harvard sank back onto the pillow, back into himself, back toward some inner peace. Then he lay silent. . . .
John sat for some time contemplating the body. Then he covered his father with the bloody sheet and spent several minutes more contemplating the shelf of books.
A man, he knew, would be known by his books.
iii
Twelve years later, a small ship called the
Hector
pounded west into the Atlantic.
John Harvard, master of arts, Emmanuel College, the last of his family line, heir to the Queen’s Head Inn and other London properties, clerk, cattle breeder, putative minister, and husband to Ann Sadler, was going to America. The Harvards were part of the great Puritan migration. Men and women of conscience, who did not hold with the rituals of the church and despaired of the corruption in the state, had obtained a charter to build a new England some three thousand miles from the old, well beyond the reach of robed bishops and royal authority.
They were a week into the journey, and Ann Sadler Harvard was seasick. With skies darkening and seas rising, it was likely that she would be seasick some time more.
So John put his body between his wife and the sea-foam spraying over the bow, in hope that she could vomit in peace.
“Good Lord, but what a stream,” cried Nathaniel Eaton, a young man of such surpassing strong stomach and lack of compassion that he went about the seasick deck chewing on a piece of smoked herring. Black-bearded and burly, he might have been taken for a sailor, though he was the son of a leading churchman, brother to a member of the Massachusetts Bay Company, which backed the voyage, and author of a respected treatise on the meaning of the Sabbath. All of this had put him in line to be first master of the colony’s new college. None of this, however, meant that he had received the gift of tact.
“John,” he said, “she pukes like a grass-fed dog, but no man on the ship show better devotion to his wife.”
Ann Harvard looked up, her delicate features sharpened by sickness and fear, her skin the color of the sea. “’Tis the same devotion my husband will show to a flock, once we reach America, sir.”
“A fine place for man to become a preacher,” answered Eaton, “though the company shows true foresight in bringin’ aboard a dozen Warwickshire breeders. Such beasts will give birth to a mighty herd, should they survive. Though they do stink, do they not, ma’am?” Eaton grinned, as if he enjoyed turning a lady’s stomach by mere suggestion. “Ship smells like a floatin’ barnyard.”
And the face of Ann Harvard grew a little grayer.
“’Tis as if we travel on the ark,” said John Harvard, who himself looked more gray than pink, “on our way to make a new world of righteousness.”
“My husband will nourish men’s minds,” said Ann Harvard, “with books.”
“Books shall nourish, especially in the college, where we shall raise up new Puritan ministers and magistrates.” Eaton popped the last of the herring into his mouth. “But if your belly be empty, food matter more than books.”
“I carry four hundred books.” John Harvard shivered off the cold, then sought to cough it away, then spat a phlegmy splatter over the side. “Books to enrich our souls and lighten our lives. A man will be known by his books, Nathaniel.”
“Had I such a cough as that, I’d see to my health, John, before my books.”
“I’ve survived worse, Nathaniel. The plague carried away all but my mother and one brother. Now they, too, be gone. The Lord spares me for a purpose. That I know.”
Suddenly, a great wave struck the bow and sent a shudder down the length of the keel. A fountain of water burst over the rail, knocking the Harvards to the deck and knocking the bulk of Nathaniel Eaton on top of them.
The ship rode down into the trough behind the wave, then up the side of the next, and from belowdecks came cries of fear as the green sea poured down the gangways.
Ann said, “The books, John!”
“Fear not for the books!” cried Eaton. “Worry for the cattle.”
John Harvard prayed for his books but imagined the water doing its damage, spilling down into the hold full of trunks, trickling down into one of his trunks of books, seeping down through the oilcloth lining, swelling the bindings on his Latin texts, staining the covers of his Calvin, and causing the ink to run on the pages of one book that should never have been in the trunk of a good Puritan—a play by William Shakespeare, a play that he kept to keep a deathbed promise, a covenant with his father as sacred as that he had made with his God.
P
ETER
F
ALLON
stared into the eyes of William Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare stared back.
Peter Fallon blinked.
William Shakespeare didn’t. But, then, Shakespeare hadn’t blinked in almost four centuries.
They met in what Peter Fallon considered a perfect environment: constant temperature of sixty-eight degrees, constant humidity of 50 percent, u.v.-filtered glass on the windows—the Harry Elkins Widener Room, sanctum sanctorum of Harvard’s Widener Library.
Peter was looking at a First Folio, the first complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623. It was displayed next to a Gutenberg Bible, in a case that defined the term “embarrassment of riches.”
In the frontispiece portrait, Shakespeare was staring across the centuries. The eyes were piercing, smart, and just a little puffy, as if he’d stayed up all night to finish a scene. The nose was sharp and straight, the nostrils slightly flared, suggesting his impatience to get back to work. The mouth didn’t tell much, though it could probably tell everything. And that high forehead? Well . . . it looked as monumental as the dome on St. Paul’s.
What a face. What a book.
All man’s best thoughts and basest emotions, all his joys and tragedies, all the vast parade of humanity, all in a single volume worth . . .
what?
There were some two hundred First Folios, though only seventeen in what the rare-book dealers called “very fine” condition. And one of them had recently fetched close to $6 million.
Six million.
Peter Fallon dreamed of selling a First Folio. He dreamed of just holding one, of touching the leather binding and fine rag paper and feeling the words imprinted on every page . . . those ageless, wondrous words and wisdoms and cadences and characters. And if not a folio, then a quarto, a single play published in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Very rare. A quarto of
Hamlet
could be worth a million or more.