The Forger's Daughter Page 8

  Taking the handwritten document, I scrutinized the time-faded signature at the bottom of the leaf, which read, Yr. Obt. St. Edgar A Poe, underscored with the same wavy flourish I had seen on other Poe letters. A flourish that Poe himself, in his Chapter on Autography, charmingly referred to as being “but part of the writer’s general enthusiasm.”

  “Your obedient servant, Edgar Allan Poe,” Slader needlessly translated.

  To my amazement and dismay, I was persuaded by its seeming legitimacy. Poe’s even word spacing; his letters, well formed if larger and less legible than in later years; his rectilinear baseline; the basic consistency of his ­cursive—it was all there. Even down to the A being slightly smaller than the E and P, an idiosyncrasy I had read about that one graphologist rightly or wrongly interpreted as a subconscious snub to his foster father, John Allan, with whom Poe had a strained relationship, at best.

  “Who’s this recipient?”

  “As you’ll see when you read it, he was apparently an editor at a Boston newspaper. Looks like Poe delivered the book to him hoping for a review, a brief mention, any crumb of acknowledgment,” Slader said. He explained that only the North American Review and United States Review and Literary Gazette—both of which had offices on Washington Street, conveniently near Calvin ­Thomas’s print shop—had bothered to note Tamerlane’s existence in 1827. The letter’s addressee, Theodore Johnston, appeared to be just one more literary gatekeeper who refused to waste a single drop of ink on Poe’s modest pamphlet. When, Slader went on, the August issue of The Boston Lyceum came out that year, it included some remarks by one Samuel Kettell, who wrote of “a young gentleman who lately made his debut as an author by publishing a small vol. of misc. Poems, which the critics have read without praising, and the ladies have praised without reading.” Assuming it was Poe to whom Kettell referred, the “young gentleman” was both mocked and unnamed.

  “Pretty put-down,” I said. “But Kettell might have been insulting somebody else.”

  “True, but since he listed Tamerlane two years later in his volume Specimens of American Poetry, acknowledging Poe as its author, some scholars think that the earlier reference was to Edgar.”

  I shrugged. “Old news. Anyway, by 1829, I suppose it hardly mattered since the thing had sunk into total obscurity. So what you’re saying is that this letter was mailed along with the Tamerlane?”

  “Mailed or, more likely, hand-delivered. I’m thinking hand-delivered since both Thomas and Poe had little money, and back in the day it would’ve been an awkward size to post. Poe was in the army, stationed at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor, but he might have gotten leave to go into town, and could’ve delivered it then. Who knows? Since the envelope’s lost, if there ever was one, it’s anybody’s guess, but it was folded and tucked inside the pamphlet.”

  “Why did you remove it?”

  “Because that’s what I did.”

  Obstinate bastard, I thought, and moved on. “Is there any other known example of the book with a letter?”

  “Nary a one,” said Slader. “As Abigail Fletcher tells it, though she’s by no means certain, Johnston was a relative of a relative, a hoarder who never tossed things out—”

  “Seems to run in their blood.”

  “—and whose accumulation of books for review, broadsides, pamphlets, letters, and the like stayed in an attic for decades until her grandfather, or great-­grandfather, went through the rat’s nest and tried to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

  “To mix a metaphor,” I gibed. “How do I know you didn’t forge this?”

  Unamused, Slader jutted his chin. “You don’t. No matter, I want you to make a copy, if you’re still adept. But with variations in the wording of the cover letter—which I’ll leave to you—and the name of a different critic in the header, one that’s close to the original. The information is in here,” and he handed me a slip of modern paper with the name typed on it.

  “I’m as adept as you,” I retorted, wondering if it was true. “Just, I’m not doing that anymore.”

  “Until now. And let us not forget the gifted Nicole.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “I’ve got to go,” Slader said. “You’ll find everything else you need’s provided, some small leaves for the letter, half a dozen sheets of cover stock. That gives you plenty for makeready, and enough for one good cover. Give me back any sheets you don’t use or that get misprinted or ruined in trial runs.”

  “I can discard the waste sheets myself.”

  He smiled at me again. “One can’t be too careful now, can one? Meantime, as we both know, the cover’s an especially important component since, given the book’s fragility, many people, including Abbie Fletcher, won’t tend to open it up past the first page or two.”

  Realizing more time had passed during this delivery than planned, I offered to show him to the door.

  “Don’t bother, I can let myself out. It’s not like I don’t know the way.”

  Meghan’s earlier cliché about me being a moth drawn to flame crossed my mind, now replaced by the more piteous image of a moth drowning in printer’s ink. Of course, I scolded myself. Of course he’d been lurking around inside the house when we weren’t here. Scoping out my family, invading my private life. It wasn’t like we had a security system. Besides, hadn’t he managed to sidestep the one we’d installed at the cottage in Kenmare, when he broke in and attacked me? I wouldn’t even put it past him to have had something to do with Ripley’s disappearance. Sure, she was a wise old lady inured to the elements, but she rarely strayed far from her food bowl—and, for that matter, her food bowl itself had never strayed either. Compelled as I was to ask him how long he had been trespassing, I said instead, “Go right ahead,” and as he turned to leave, I asked, “When do we meet next?”

  “How long, on a fast track, will it take to finish and deliver?”

  Gazing out the window as I made quick calculations about setup, first-pass proof, performing any necessary adjustments, second pass if needed, then final print run, folding, binding, I told him, “If all goes smoothly, by Thanksgiving.”

  “Sorry, that won’t do. Let’s make it a week from today,” he said.

  “Ridiculous. Ink needs to dry.”

  “Use a hair dryer. We’ve both done that with calligraphic inks, right?”

  “Printing ink is more viscous. The heat can cause alligatoring, even bad crackling,” I countered, noticing that the deer had disappeared into the woods below the house.

  “I’ll be at the Beekman Arms next Saturday afternoon at three,” he said.

  “Will your ugly ginger-head friend be there shadowing us again?”

  “Cricket wasn’t shadowing us,” said Slader, without so much as a blink. “He was just enjoying a drink like everyone else.”

  “Cricket?” I rolled my eyes.

  “He’ll be there if it’s useful to me for him to be there. Otherwise, he’s already done the work that’s necessary to our Poe book, so it may be time for him to disappear.”

  “He made these engravings? Or pulled the paper?”

  Slader let out an exaggerated sigh, tapped on his wristwatch, and said, “One last thing. Now that your daughter will be here, I want her to deliver the goods.”

  “Absolutely not,” I snapped. “She can’t be involved.”

  “You and I should never be seen together again. She’s the only one who can do it,” he finished, and abruptly left the studio.

  I called after him, “That’s not going to happen,” but he didn’t respond. Even as I shouted a second time, I heard the front door close.

  Like it or not, Slader had me trapped. Many times over the years I wished I hadn’t been compelled to remove Adam Diehl from our lives—Slader, not Diehl, had been my true nemesis, though I hadn’t known it then—but never had I regretted it more than now. Nicole make this contraba
nd delivery? Even shadowed by her incognito father? Impossible. Meanwhile, any plans my wife had made to celebrate our daughter’s arrival for the holiday would have to be postponed. Or at least curtailed. What was more, I’d be forced to explain to Nicole in as roundabout a way as possible what was going on here.

  How I wished I could keep her out of it. But, painful as it was to confess, my ability to distinguish dark blues, grays, and blacks had been diminishing in recent years, and I couldn’t confidently rely on my own color vision. I badly needed her help with mixing the exact shade of ink, an apprentice task she was used to doing. She’d nicknamed herself “blind Milton’s daughter” as a way of alleviating any self-consciousness on my part when she was assisting me with coloration on far lesser, more innocent projects. Equally important, though very much a task she was not used to doing, I hoped she could assist me with aging the faux Tamerlane cover. To be sure, this wasn’t why Meg and I’d supported her decision to go to art school, but I wasn’t unaware that she might have picked up fresh insights to offer beyond my old-school methods. She had already studied techniques for staining and scumbling, as well as precision scratching to produce an aciculated surface—all the tricks in the book. Tricks, however, not designed to be applied to the book.

  Nor did it help that Slader had nearly crossed paths with Meg and the girls, and that rather than starting this unholy project from a place of even the most tenuous calm, I’d been thrown into an even deeper inner chaos. When I assured them there was no reason to worry about Slader darkening our door again, and swore that all was well and I was quite unmurdered, I was grateful to hear Nicole respond, “Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

  Early the following morning, having skipped breakfast, I fortified myself with strong black coffee and got down to work. My first step was to prep the press in order to run off test proofs on modern paper of a weight similar to Slader’s—I needed to get a feel for the plates and the bite of their type. When I heard a knock on the studio door, I knew by its confident timbre it was Nicole. I invited her to come in and shut the door behind her.

  Without so much as a Beautiful day out—it was—or How did you sleep?—not awfully well—she asked, “So what exactly are we doing?”

  Ambivalent as I was about the way she phrased her question, and all the pitfalls it implied, I told her, “As I hinted yesterday when I showed you the Tamerlane, I’ve been commissioned to make a facsimile of it for a client.”

  “Client?” she mildly scoffed. “I thought this guy was your enemy.”

  “He was, is. But without getting into our whole tortured history, I owe him this favor. When it’s finished, he and I’ll be square.”

  As far as Nicole knew, her much-loved father had never failed to be straight with her. While her little sister’s twilight run-in with this stranger, and her ­mother’s manifest fear of the man, surely worried her, she didn’t question my commitment to make as perfect a ­replica—the word forgery was expunged from my spoken ­lexicon—as possible. Not that Nicole was some ingenue. Far from it. I knew that, like a treed cat on a slippery limb, I would have to be careful not to make any false moves with her. How much easier my life had been before Slader reentered it. A week turnaround on this project was short, yes, but on the other hand, it couldn’t be over with quickly enough.

  “Let’s get you squared then,” Nicole said, slipping on an apron and standing close beside me at the press. Nor did it take long for my collaborator to weigh in. “That ink’s all wrong, you know,” holding up a trial sheet of the first signature of the book.

  “Of that I’m aware.”

  “Let me look at the original again.”

  I had her put on a pair of the nitrile gloves—she thought in order to protect the slim volume; I knew it was to avoid fingerprints—and gave her the combination of the fireproof safe.

  “That’s new,” she said. “Granting me access to your sanctum sanctorum? Feels like my sixteenth birthday all over again, when you gave me Sir Arthur’s fountain pen.”

  “Nothing’s in there I can’t trust you with,” I said, knowing that my earliest forgery, a purported 1897 missive from Doyle to his brother, Innes, confessing he had fallen in love, despite being married, with an impossibly desirable woman named Jean, was the only conceivable exception. Nicole and Maisie would one day inherit the more licit, truly authentic treasures in the safe, including (to name but an eclectic few) my first-edition set of Lolita, in which Nabokov had used colored pencils to draw two butterflies; my 1742 A Journey to the World Under-Ground by Nicholas Klimius, an imaginary voyage into the hollow Earth, which Mary Shelley read when writing Frankenstein and Roderick Usher kept in his own library; my rare The Tale of Peter Rabbit, privately issued in 1901 by Beatrix Potter herself after a succession of blind-minded publishers rejected her illustrated manuscript. Granting Nicole access to my rare-book repository somehow seemed a lesser extravagance now that the Tamerlane was housed there.

  She carried it over to the window and, putting on the pair of tortoiseshell glasses she’d started wearing this past year, studied it page by page, quipping, “This Calvin Thomas was no Hans Mardersteig.”

  My daughter and I both believed Mardersteig was the best letterpress printer who ever lived—not just in the twentieth, but in any century. I even owned a handful of masterworks produced at his press, the Officina Bodoni, and I sometimes studied these for inspiration.

  “His inking is light in places,” Nicole continued, “pale, then too heavy, smudgy in fact, elsewhere. I’m going to make notes for each page, then break them out into which rectos and versos are inked differently for all the signatures.”

  Hearing this, I couldn’t help being proud Nicole had learned to notice such details by working at my side. Even problematic solace was solace. As I test-printed plates, she mostly sat with Tamerlane by the window overlooking the long meadow, observing details that distinguished each of the forty pages in the book. Though she paused briefly to take a walk with Meg and Maisie, I myself spent the full day snarled in layout computations, plate adjustments, the algebra of counterfeiting. Sunday was gone in a trice with nothing usable printed, all prep.

  The next morning, after apple and buckwheat griddle cakes from a recipe Maisie found in one of Meg’s antique cookbooks, Nicole and I went through her detailed census of how certain pages were variously inked. The bottom third of several were so spotty they were a bit difficult to decipher, she said, then gave me a list of worn or broken letters, like the one on page fourteen that read,

  so that I’d make sure not to fill in that first imperfect O in the second line to match the complete letter at the beginning of the fourth. On the interior half title for ­“Fugitive Pieces,” the first three letters were so over-inked that anyone giving the words a hasty glance might make out the title as “Ficitive Pieces,” a prophetic misreading of sorts. Meantime, if Edgar’s poetry was, as he himself admitted in his preface, hobbled by “many faults,” callow Calvin’s inexperience was more palpable yet. Nor did his printing show any signs of the promising genius scattered here and there in Poe’s verse.

  “Let’s have a look at the binding and imposition,” I said. “Seems to be a simple three-hole pamphlet stitch, if I’m not mistaken—as elementary as the printing.”

  “There’s more than one signature, and they’re side sewn,” she observed, squinting at where the thread was visible beneath the wrapper.

  “Without taking it apart, which we’re not about to do, I think it was printed in three signatures—no, four—and maybe a half-leaf signature interleaved between the others. We’ll need to sort that out and replicate this deckling on the same fore edges as the original here.”

  Nicole nodded and added to her notes.

  By late Monday, having run off three partial copies on different proof papers, I was ready to get down to the nitty-gritty of mixing, and aging, the ink. I had never shared my process with Nicole, even though we had s
pent years doing calligraphy and copying together, skills at which she all but equaled me by the time she was a few years older than Maisie. Not wanting my daughter, who could have worked miracles in the art of fakery, to be tempted to travel the road down which her father had gone—though look at her now, I marveled with shame—I hadn’t let her in on my youthful experiments with oxidizing ink with ammonia, or else adding gum arabic to my mixing pot, then further adding sodium hydroxide, one fussy drop at a time, with a pipette. Granted, these were old-fashioned techniques. Back-in-the-day ruses. Not unlike tricks I’d read about in accounts of the Hofmann forgeries trial in Salt Lake in the 1980s, where it was proved that iron gallotannate ink works marvelously well when used to forge documents on antique paper. Indeed, paper from the very period in which Tamerlane was printed.

  I explained all this to Nicole, who soaked it in like one of those flat Japanese origami toys that, when dropped into a dish of water, explode into three-dimensional swans or steamships or swimmers. As a student at ­Cooper Union, she’d already had plenty of exposure to the way dyes, paints, and inks were prepared throughout the history of Western art. And her internships for the past couple of summers as an artist’s assistant had taught her plenty about the relative merits of sturgeon versus rabbit-skin glue, for instance, or—more to the point—manganese black versus iron oxide black versus bone black. She’d regaled us with such arcana over many a dinner after work in the city, and once again she took her turn at sharing her newly gained expertise with me.

  “People don’t realize how many different kinds of black there are,” she said.

  “You know, Poe himself called it the ‘no-color.’”

  “That’s one way of looking at it, black being the absence of all color.”