The Devil Will Come (20 page)

‘One should use gloves,’ he mumbled absently. He rested it on his pinstriped trousers and slowly opened the mottled leather cover of the quarto to reveal the front plate. ‘Ah, look at this,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Look at
this
.’

‘Is it authentic?’ Meyer asked him.

‘There’s not a shred of doubt,’ Harris said. ‘B text, 1620.’ He carefully turned several pages. ‘The cover’s a little shabby but the book is in remarkably good condition. No water damage. No mold. No tears that I can see. It’s a remarkable copy of a remarkable book.’

He passed it to Meyer who searched her purse for a pair of reading glasses and perused it for herself.

‘And you said you obtained it in Germany,’ Harris said. ‘In Ulm.’

Elisabetta nodded.

‘Can you divulge any details?’ he asked. ‘Provenance is always of interest in these kinds of circumstances.’

‘It was given to me by a baker,’ Elisabetta said.

‘A baker, you say!’ Harris exclaimed. ‘What was a baker doing with an extraordinary treasure like this?’

‘She was the landlord of a tenant who passed away without next of kin. It belonged to him. He’d been a professor at the University at Ulm.’

Meyer looked as though she was attempting to arch a brow but the Botox was defeating her. ‘And do you know where he obtained it?’

‘The only information I have is that he received it as a gift,’ Elisabetta said.

Just then her father came back in, apologizing for
the
intrusion. He was looking for an article he’d copied from a math journal but as he sorted through the stack of material on the sideboard he couldn’t help inserting himself into the proceedings.

‘What do you think of her book?’ he asked Harris.

‘I think it’s genuine, Professor Celestino. It’s a very fine copy.’

‘Is it worth anything?’

‘Papa!’ Elisabetta exclaimed, scarlet-faced.

‘I believe it’s quite valuable,’ Harris said. ‘It’s rare. Very rare, indeed. That’s why we’re here.’

‘I’m interested in finding out more about it,’ Elisabetta said.

‘May I ask where your interest lies?’ Meyer asked. She was still holding the book on her lap and didn’t seem inclined to hand it back.

Elisabetta shifted in her chair and smoothed her habit, a show of nerves she’d developed when forced to tell half-truths. ‘As I told Professor Harris, the work I’m doing concerns attitudes of the sixteenth-century Church. Religious themes run large through Faustus.’

‘Indeed they do,’ Harris said. ‘And you indicated that your work pertains particularly to differences between the A and the B texts.’

Elisabetta nodded.

‘Well, let me give you some background which might be useful and I can steer you to a host of scholarly work on the subject for further inquiry. I’ve spent my career on Marlowe. You might say I’m a bit obsessed with him.’

‘More than a bit,’ Meyer added, pressing her lips into a fleeting flat smile.

‘I concentrated on English literature as an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, which was called Benet College in Marlowe’s day, the same college that he attended. And I spent two years living in the same rooms as him. I went on to get my D.Phil. in Marlowe studies and have been teaching at Cambridge since then. I suppose every Marlowe scholar has his personal favorite play and, as it happens, mine is
Faustus
. It’s extraordinary in its scope and complexity and the power and beauty of its language. You can have your Shakespeare. I’ll take Marlowe.’

Uninvited, Elisabetta’s father slipped into one of the chairs and seemed to be listening with interest. She shot him a perplexed look, which was her silent way of asking what he was doing, and he answered with a stubborn pout, his way of saying it was his house and he could do in it what he pleased.

Harris continued: ‘Marlowe received his Master’s degree in 1587 under somewhat mysterious circumstances, concerning absences from College and his alleged covert activities on the Continent on behalf of Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham. He most probably left Cambridge for London to take up a career as a playwright. While we don’t know the precise order in which he wrote his plays, it’s well documented that the first one to be staged in London was
Dido, Queen of Carthage
, an interesting but somewhat sophomoric work.

‘The best information we have on
Faustus
is that Marlowe wrote it in 1592. The first documented performance was in 1594, a production by the Admiral’s Men troupe with Faustus played by Edward Alleyn, the greatest actor of his day. Marlowe was killed in May of 1593. Did he ever see
Faustus
performed? I would hope so. Perhaps there were earlier performances.’

‘And this performance in 1594, was it the A text?’ Elisabetta asked.

‘Well, that’s an excellent question but the short answer is that we don’t know. You see, the first known publication of the A-text quarto was in 1604, well after his death. There was a second publication in 1609 and a third in 1611. All told there are only five known original copies of A text in existence, one at the Bodelian Library in Oxford, two at the Huntington Library in California, one in the Hamburg State Library and one at the National Trust’s Petworth House in West Sussex. They’re all essentially the same, so one might be tempted to say that they represent the earliest stage versions, but that would be a supposition.

‘The first B text wasn’t published until 1616. That quarto is similar to yours in that it’s the first to use the now famous woodcut on the title page that shows Faustus raising the Devil while he, Faustus, stays inside his magic circle. That copy is in the British Museum. The next edition to surface is a 1619 one, essentially the same as the one from 1616. There is a single known copy in the hands of an American collector in Baltimore. Then we come to yours, the 1620 edition. Here,
curiously
, there’s a misprint on the title page – printers were notorious for misprints back then – the word “History” is printed as “Hiftoy”. There’s a single copy in the British Library. We know that three copies have appeared in the saleroom in the past forty years. All of them have been lost to follow-up. Until now, I’d say. Yours is undoubtedly one of them.’

Elisabetta’s father had been scratching at his stubble. He never shaved on his days off. ‘So the B text is a third longer than the A text. What else is different?’

Harris looked surprised. ‘I’m impressed you know that!’ he said. ‘I thought your field was mathematics.’

‘My father has eclectic interests,’ Elisabetta said quickly, begging him with her eyes to stay quiet.

‘Well, to be precise,’ Harris said. ‘The B text omits thirty-six lines of the A text but adds 676 new lines.’

‘Who made the changes?’ Elisabetta asked. ‘Marlowe?’

‘That we don’t know. Perhaps he wrote a second version. Perhaps an unknown collaborator or hired hand made changes to suit the Elizabethan audience after Marlowe’s death. As a playwright of his era, Marlowe would have had nothing to do with the publication of his plays and only a very limited control over the content of the performances. Scenes could have been added or deleted by another writer, by actors – by anyone, really. Unless future handwritten manuscripts turn up we may never know.’

‘What would you say are the truly significant differences between the A text and the B?’ Elisabetta
asked
, conjuring the envelope note in her mind:
B holds the key
.

Harris took a deep breath. ‘Gosh, where to start? Dissertations have been written on the subject. I myself have made some contributions to the field. I will be happy to send you a detailed bibliography so that you can delve as deeply as you like. In a broad sense, let me say, however, that the similarities far outweigh the differences. In both, our Doctor Faustus summons the demon Mephistopheles from the underworld and strikes a pact to have twenty-four years on Earth with Mephistopheles as his personal servant. In exchange he gives his soul over to Lucifer as payment and damns himself to an eternity in Hell. At the end of these twenty-four rather excellent and sinful years, though filled with fear and remorse, there’s nothing Faustus can do to alter his fate. He’s torn limb from limb and his soul is carried off to Hell.

‘As to the differences, textual differences occur in all of the five acts but the preponderance of additions lie in Act III. In the B text, Act III is far longer and becomes a rather concentrated anti-Catholic, anti-Papist tract – which in and of itself isn’t terribly surprising in the Protestant hotbed that England had become under Elizabeth. Faustus and Mephistopheles travel to Rome and observe the Pope, his cardinals, bishops and friars acting like scandalously greedy buffoons. It must have been a real crowd-pleaser in its day.’

‘What’s your opinion about the reason for this addition?’ Elisabetta asked.

‘On that we can only speculate. In the A text,
Faustus’s
visit to Rome was there but was quite abbreviated. Perhaps whenever it was performed and the Pope appeared on stage, the audience jeered and stamped and carried on so much that Marlowe or someone else embellished Act III as part of the B rewrite to milk the sentiment thoroughly.’

Elisabetta jotted some notes on a pad. ‘May I ask about astrology in the play?’

Harris nodded enthusiastically. ‘Of course. Another subject dear to my heart. Well, astrology was extremely important in Marlowe’s day. The Queen had her own court astrologer, John Dee. In
Faustus
, Marlowe would have certainly been influenced by the classic ecclesiastical account of witchcraft, the
Malleus Maleficarum
, which posits – and I’m almost embarrassed to say that I’m able to quote from memory – “demons are readier to appear when summoned by magicians under the influence of the stars, in order to deceive men, thus making them suppose that the stars have divine power or actual divinity.” And we see the direct result of these ideas in Act 1, Scene 3 of
Faustus
when Faustus begins to conjure from inside his magic circle:

‘Now that the gloomy shadow of the Earth
,

Longing to view Orion’s drizzly look
,

Leaps from th’Antarctic world unto the sky

And dims the welkin with her pitchy

breath, Faustus, begin thine incantations.”’

Harris paused and smiled in a self-deprecatory way. ‘I could go on and on.’

Elisabetta looked up from her note-taking. ‘I’m curious about the astrological symbols depicted in the magic circle. Do they have a particular significance?’

Harris furrowed his brow at the question. ‘Stephanie, may I see the book?’

It was still on her lap. Meyer passed it carefully to him. He opened it to the title page. ‘Well, it’s the standard zodiac, I suppose. Constellations, planets. To be honest, I’ve never thought about it in a rigorous way.’ He looked up, blinking. ‘Maybe I should.’

Perhaps sensing an opening, Meyer broke her long silence. ‘I’m sure you’ve been wondering why I came to Rome with Professor Harris,’ she said.

‘I don’t know about my daughter, but
I
’ve been wondering why you’re here,’ Carlo said undiplomatically. Elisabetta cringed and waited expectantly for the answer.

‘Let me be open with you,’ Meyer said. ‘I’m here on behalf of the University. We want this book. We want it badly. It represents a tremendous gap in our library collection. Christopher Marlowe was a Cambridge man, one of our most illustrious and colorful graduates. Yet we do not possess a single copy of one of the early quartos of this, his most famous play. Oxford has one and we do not! This must be remedied. As a friend of the University and a supporter of the humanities I have pledged my personal resources to facilitate the acquisition of this book. Is it for sale, my dear?’

‘How much?’ Carlo chirped.

‘Papa! Please!’ Elisabetta begged, staring him down. She turned to face Meyer. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. I’m so honored that the two of you came all the way to see me. Frankly, it’s not something I’ve thought about.’

‘But the book is clearly yours,’ Meyer said, pressing on. ‘I mean, it’s yours and the decision to sell it rests with you, does it not?’

‘I have no personal possessions,’ Elisabetta said. ‘I was given the book as a gift to the Church. I suppose if someone were to buy it, the funds would go to my Order.’

Meyer smiled politely. ‘Well, then. Now that we’ve seen it and Professor Harris is initially happy with its authenticity and condition, perhaps when we return home we can send you an offer in writing. Would you then entertain a formal offer?’

Elisabetta flushed. ‘You’ve been so kind to come and speak with me. Of course. Send me a letter. I’ll speak to my Mother Superior. She’ll know how to respond.’

When the visitors were gone, Elisabetta slumped wearily on the sofa, surrendering to her fatigue. She removed her tight veil, ran a hand through her short hair and massaged her throbbing scalp. Her father shuffled back with a fresh cup of coffee and a look of paternal concern on his face.

‘You need to sleep. No one goes through a night like you had without a need for rest. Have your coffee. Then go to your room.’

Elisabetta took the cup. ‘You sound like you did when I was a child. “Go to your room, Elisabetta, and don’t come out until you’re ready to say you’re sorry.”

‘Someone had to give you some discipline,’ Carlo said. ‘Your mother was a very soft person.’

At that moment she could almost see her mother through her misty eyes, young and beautiful, passing from the hall to the kitchen. ‘I still miss her so much,’ she said.

Her father sniffed defiantly – his way of saying he wasn’t going to let himself succumb to emotion. ‘Of course you do. We all do. If she hadn’t died maybe you wouldn’t have done what you did.’

Elisabetta stiffened. ‘What did I do?’

‘Became a nun.’ She could tell that once it was said that he regretted it but it was clear he meant it.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said evenly. ‘Maybe if Marco hadn’t been killed, maybe if mama had been alive, maybe, maybe, maybe. But things happen in a life, God has ways of testing us. My answer to his tests was to find Him. I don’t regret it for a minute.’