Free The School of Night by Louis Bayard

could feel her, all right. The heat of her gaze.
    â€œBut you were a college professor, right? You must have been on a tenure track somewhere.”
    â€œI was.”
    A particularly heavy pause.
    â€œOkay,” she said. “I totally get if you don’t want to talk about it. Just tell me to shut up.”
    And I could have, I suppose. But in this moment, for reasons I can’t define, disclosing the truth seemed easier than concealing it.
    So I told her about a young assistant professor at an eastern Pennsylvania university who, one day, received a rare gift. A previously unknown poem by Walter Ralegh.
    Not just any poem but a love poem written to Ralegh’s young wife, Elizabeth Throckmorton. She had been a handmaiden to the queen, but when her secret marriage to Ralegh was exposed (by the birth of their first son), the queen, in a rage, tossed Ralegh into the Tower. He was able to buy his release, but he never regained his place in the queen’s heart or in her court.
    In this freshly discovered poem, Ralegh contemplated the cost of loving the woman who had been his undoing—the woman whose first name happened to be the same as the queen’s. The effect, on first reading, was charming and complex: Ralegh vibrating between the two poles of Elizabeth.
    Two appraisers verified the document as genuine, but the seller—a Peruvian bibliophile-adventurer domiciled in the Caymans—demanded a steep price. Some of the money came from research accounts, some from the dean, some from a competitive grant. And the rest? Borrowed from Alonzo Wax.
    The document was unveiled at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Studies Association. Not the usual eight-page twenty-minute spiel in a subdivided hotel banquet room but the full ballroom: hundreds of academics … journalists and photographers … a major article set to appear the following week in the field’s preeminent journal … a book contract in the works with a major university press … an air of suspended enchantment.
    Ten minutes into the Q and A, an elderly Berkeley professor with a polka-dotted Frank Sinatra bow tie stood up and, in a mild voice that managed to carry from the very back of the ballroom, said.
    â€œI’m afraid you’ve been led astray, Professor.”
    He’d been offered the same poem by the same Peruvian adventurer. Only he’d been told it was by Marlowe.
    *   *   *
    â€œEventually,” I said, “we found out who the real author was: William Henry Ireland.”
    â€œNever heard of him.”
    â€œA renowned scoundrel of the late eighteenth century. He once forged an entire Shakespeare play. Plus a letter from Shakespeare to his wife, complete with a lock of the Bard’s hair. To hide his tracks, he wrote on the blank leaves of Elizabethan-era books. That’s how he was able to fool a lot of appraisers.
    â€œWell,” I continued, “the end was swift. My article was junked. The book contract was scuttled. Not a journal in the world would print anything I wrote. The dean’s wife looked sad for me at a faculty reception. I was done.”
    â€œSo that was your crime,” Clarissa said. “Getting hoodwinked.”
    â€œMaybe, with a little more fortitude, I could’ve gone all postmodern with it. You know, ‘Here’s my deconstructive reading of the duality between the authentic and the fraudulent. I mean, dude, what’s authenticity, anyway?’” Wincing, I shook my head. “I couldn’t carry it off, not with any conviction. And I couldn’t stand being the departmental fuckup.”
    â€œYou wouldn’t have been the first.”
    â€œIn the world of Henry, I was the first. You know how people talk to you when there’s one thing they’re not supposed to talk about? Something very compressed happens to their voices. It’s not a loud thing, but it feels loud.”
    â€œSo you