Secrets of Shakespeare's Grave Read online

  He began unpacking the crate. Slowly and precisely, he set each piece of the device into place in the cavity. The device had been made, in large part, of an alloy of bronze and gold. The metal was hard and expensive but would resist corrosion. The device was, he understood, intended to last for centuries.

  Strange, though, he mused. Built to last forever, but designed to be used only once.

  Finally, it was time for the central component.

  The placement of the central component was critical. He slowly lowered it into place until the right and left sides clicked into position. From the box he retrieved an iron rod with a slightly concave tip. Placing the tip into a slot in the right side of the device, he gave a slight pull until he felt it click. He then moved back to the central component and inserted the tip of the iron rod into yet another slot.

  This will not be as easy, he thought.

  Taking a deep breath, he pulled hard on the iron rod. Slowly it began to move.

  One click.

  A second click.

  A third click.

  One more click, and the device would be set.

  He pulled hard. The iron bar did not want to move. Despite the cold, he was sweating intensely.

  And then, finally, when it appeared that it was not going to budge . . .

  CLICK

  It was done. Once the stones were put in place, the device would set itself until . . .

  Until whenever.

  Chapter One

  What News, I Prithee?

  “CHANGE AT THE TOP FOR

  PUBLISHING FIRM”

  BY WALTER R. LICHAND

  WALL STREET JOURNAL

  JANUARY 24, 2005

  For more than four hundred years, Letterford & Sons has published books of note and distinction. Established in 1590 in London by Miles Letterford, the company had opened its first office in America in 1793 in New York City. Although Letterford & Sons is not the largest publisher in the world, many in the publishing community consider it the most prestigious. It remains a family-owned and -operated business. Yesterday, after forty years under the successful direction of Raymond Letterford, Jr., ownership of the company passed to his oldest son, Raymond “Mull” Letterford III. Mull Letterford has most recently served as vice president of business operations for the company. A ceremony celebrating the transition took place at the family’s ancestral home in London.

  “WAREHOUSE FIRE DESTROYS

  BOOK INVENTORY”

  BY ROJAS SMITH

  LOS ANGELES TIMES

  MAY 19, 2008

  A fire broke out in a warehouse on Smaklin Street last night, destroying over ten thousand copies of the new book by author Debra Tavenhast. Tavenhast is the author of the wildly popular children’s series about Tobby, the boy accountant. The books destroyed in the fire represented the entire first printing of her latest book, Tobby Bridges the GAAP. It was expected to be released on June 5. Mull Letterford, president of Letterford & Sons and the publisher of the series by Tavenhast, was not available for comment. The cause of the fire is unknown at this time and is under investigation.

  “RECLUSIVE AUTHOR SIGNS CONTRACT

  WITH DOUGHERTY HOUSE”

  PUBLISHING TIMES

  NEW YORK

  JUNE 14, 2008

  Dougherty House Publishing announced today that it has acquired the exclusive rights to publish the forthcoming novel by the reclusive and eccentric author Brogdon Honeycutt. Honeycutt, who has not appeared in public since the publication of his renowned novel Concrete Monkey Hymns in 1977, is reportedly receiving an advance of more than $3 million, half of which, he has insisted, must be paid in Mongolian Tugrik coins. The novel is expected to be ready for publication in time for the holiday shopping season. The signing of Honeycutt by Dougherty House ended one of the fiercest bidding wars between publishing houses in recent years. Mull Letterford, president of Letterford & Sons, expressed disappointment at his failure to acquire the rights to the new novel. The failure was a particularly hard blow to Letterford & Sons, which had published Honeycutt’s famous 1977 novel. Honeycutt, who purportedly refuses to acknowledge the existence of Canada, released a two-word statement through his gardener regarding his agreement with Harvest House: “Pepper butterbottom.” Dougherty House offered no comment on the statement by its author.

  “DEATH OF LOCAL PHILANTHROPIST

  STUNS COMMUNITY”

  MANCHESTER STAR MERCURY

  JULY 2, 2008

  The sudden and unexpected death of Raymond Letterford, Jr., has shocked the Meriwether County community and the worldwide publishing community. Well known for his local philanthropic efforts, Raymond Letterford died of a heart attack at his family’s home in Manchester on Monday, June 30. Letterford gained fame and fortune as the owner of Letterford & Sons, perhaps the most prestigious publishing company in the world.

  Chapter Two

  Homeward Did They Bend Their Course

  Manchester, Georgia

  Wednesday, November 26

  Late afternoon

  Colophon Letterford took off her glasses, stuck her head out the open window of her father’s car, and breathed deeply. The cool wind whipped across her face and through her shaggy blond hair.

  Fall was far and away her favorite time of year. The mornings were cool enough to justify jeans and a light sweater; the afternoons were warm enough to accommodate shorts. The fall air smelled of dry grass and smoke from distant fireplaces, and the autumn sun painted the countryside with a warm ocher glaze. Colophon took it all in. It was perfect.

  The moment, however, did not last.

  “Hey, doofus, shut the frigging window. I’m freezing.”

  It was Case, Colophon’s older brother and constant source of irritation. At fifteen, Case was three years older than Colophon. He had grown tall over the past year—at least two inches taller than their father—but this growth spurt had done little to mature him. He was the same bully that he had been a year before, only bigger and stronger.

  Colophon kept her eyes closed and pretended that she hadn’t heard her brother. This strategy didn’t work. A quick punch to her left arm ensured that she paid attention.

  “Jerk! You’re not supposed to hit a girl.”

  “Bite me,” he replied with a smirk.

  Colophon shut the window, put her glasses back on, and sat back in her seat as their father’s car trundled lazily down the long driveway leading to their home in Manchester, Georgia. Colophon’s great-great-grandfather had moved to Manchester in 1876. He had selected the small southern city because it shared the name of his mother’s hometown in England, but not the cold and wet climate. Originally intended to serve as only a summer home, it eventually became the family’s full-time residence.

  The drive home from school had been unusual. As a general rule, their father was usually too busy to pick up Colophon and her brother from school. The family’s publishing business occupied his time—now more than ever. Moreover, when her father did pick them up from school, he normally rambled on nonstop about some new manuscript that he was reading or a new book that would be coming out soon. Today, however, he remained silent as they drove home. Although his cell phone rang twice, he made no effort to answer it.

  Colophon knew her father’s company had recently suffered a series of mishaps, tragedies, and outright disasters—the loss of a best-selling author to a rival publishing house, a fire in a storage facility, and worst of all, the death of her grandfather. These events had led her father to be somewhat disengaged from family matters. Lately, he always seemed to be distracted. Case was, of course, oblivious to his father’s mood. He passed the time on the drive home from school in his usual fashion—with earbuds in place and tethered to his iPod.

  The driveway leading to the family home wound its way through a thick forest of tall hardwoods and then a large rolling field. Golden bales of freshly cut hay peppered the landscape. On both sides of the road, a low-stacked stone wall corralled the vehicle as it sped toward the
large brick Victorian resting at the edge of the field. The three-story home was constructed of a dark red brick that had grown considerably darker over the last hundred years or so. A fine knit of fig ivy covered the tower at the front of the house.

  As the vehicle turned into the pea gravel drive in front of the house, Colophon spied her mother waiting for them by the front door. Beside her sat Maggie, the family’s golden retriever, her tail beating the ground in anxious anticipation.

  Meg Letterford, Colophon’s mother, was a small, thin woman with short, dusty-blond hair. A college professor by trade, she was as comfortable sitting on a tractor as she was teaching history behind a classroom podium. She had an earthy, outgoing quality that perfectly balanced her husband’s bookish and scholarly demeanor.

  Mull Letterford pulled to a stop. As Case and Colophon stepped out of the car, their mother greeted each of them with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Case, in usual teenage fashion, shrugged off his mother’s affections, although his efforts appeared halfhearted at best.

  “Any homework?” asked Meg Letterford.

  “No,” replied Colophon. “We have all of Thanksgiving off—no homework and no assigned reading!”

  “Pity. I’m sure I could come up with something, if you like? Perhaps a call to one of your teachers for some suggestions?”

  Colophon feigned shock. “Mom!”

  “Very well,” Meg Letterford replied in mock exasperation. “Rot your brains with TV and video games—see if I care.”

  “You know better,” Colophon said.

  “Indeed I do,” replied Meg, who was intensely proud of her daughter’s academic efforts.

  Meg bent over and whispered in Colophon’s ear: “How was your father on the way home from school?”

  Colophon could hear the concern in her mother’s voice. “Quiet,” she replied.

  Meg sighed deeply.

  “Is everything OK?” asked Colophon.

  Her mother stood up straight. “Just business, that’s all. It’s been tough lately. It has him distracted.”

  Colophon looked into her mother’s eyes. She could sense there was more going on than she was willing to say. She started to ask, but her mother interrupted.

  “This, too, shall pass,” she said. “Let’s have a happy Thanksgiving break, OK?”

  Chapter Three

  My Books . . . Shall Be My Company

  Colophon walked down the long entrance hallway, past the library, to the stairs that led to her room on the second floor. At the end of the entrance hallway, on the wall opposite the stairs, Miles Letterford stared down at her from a large, ornately framed portrait. The painting had always given Colophon the creeps. In the portrait, Miles Letterford sat in front of a window, a book in his hands, and stared angrily at the viewer. Despite her father’s assurances that Miles had been considered a rather nice fellow, Colophon remained firmly unconvinced.

  Colophon’s room, located down a short passage at the top of the second-floor stairs, overlooked the front of the house. It was large, painted bright blue, with an exceedingly high ceiling. After tossing her book bag onto her bed, she grabbed her laptop and headed back downstairs to the family’s library.

  The library was, far and away, Colophon’s favorite room in the house. Entering it was like stepping into an old sepia-toned photograph—it was timeless. The room gave no overt hint that it existed in the twenty-first century.

  Two stories tall and equally wide, the library’s considerable size belied its coziness. From the center of the ceiling hung an enormous half-dome light that cast a soft amber glow throughout the room. The wide oak flooring, which had aged warmly over the years into a deep, rich reddish brown, creaked slightly as Colophon took a step. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The room smelled of dust, old paper, and pipe tobacco. It was, in her estimation, quite wonderful.

  She walked over to one of the massive oak bookcases and ran her fingers across the leather spines of several books. She had grown up around this vast collection, and the titles (at least those at her eye level) were as familiar to her as her family’s names. A copy of every book ever published by Letterford & Sons was kept in the room. In fact, shortly after construction of the house, the entire Letterford library from London—including all of Miles Letterford’s personal volumes—had been shipped to Manchester to be included in the collection. The room itself was a precise copy of the family library in London.

  A large stone fireplace occupied a sizable portion of the library’s far wall. Above the fireplace and mounted on the wall was a tellurion, a large mechanical device designed to show the motions of the earth and the moon around the sun.

  Anchoring one side of the library were two enormous oak tables with brass reading lamps and heavy wooden chairs. A massive oriental rug, tea-stained through age and use, covered the middle of the room. At the edges of the rug sat four large, well-worn leather chairs. Squatting in the center of the rug was an enormous coffee table stacked impossibly high with books, manuscripts, and various items of indeterminate nature.

  Four massive bookcases flanked the fireplace. The first bookcase, to the far left of the fireplace, was occupied only by vellum-covered books from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Their spines looked like the skins of mummies, drawn dry and tight with age, revealing the bones beneath. As the books were both creepy and written primarily in Latin and other languages that she did not read, Colophon had spent little time exploring them. The books and bookcases progressed through the centuries from left to right and from top to bottom. Familiar titles and authors—first editions all—filled every shelf.

  Colophon’s favorite part of the room was the “curiosity shelf” that was built into the wall on the left side of the room. The items on this particular shelf had been collected by members of her family for hundreds of years. They were fossils of every size and shape, dinosaur teeth, ancient timepieces, strange glass orbs, an old type set, political buttons, small framed autographs of famous and not-so-famous authors, at least two swords, a carved wooden fish from Pitcairn Island, an odd little machine made of brass devised for the apparent purpose of crimping paper, old sporting trophies, ancient coins, Bronze Age spear points, and numerous other oddities and artifacts. As if to complement this odd collection, in the corner of the room sat a large copper pot that contained an assortment of ancient wooden golf clubs, several cricket bats, a field hockey stick, an old wooden lacrosse stick, two warped wooden tennis rackets, and a pair of wooden skis. The books, antiquities, and artifacts that filled the library were a constant marvel and delight to Colophon.

  She closed the library doors, took her seat at one of the oak tables, and opened up her laptop.

  Technically speaking, she had told her mother the truth—she did not have any homework to complete over the Thanksgiving holiday. However, she did have an extra-credit assignment. Her history teacher, Mrs. Eager, had offered ten bonus points for every student who wrote a short essay on Eleanor Roosevelt over the Thanksgiving break. Piece of cake—history was Colophon’s favorite subject. And an essay on Eleanor Roosevelt? Icing on the cake. Colophon loved reading about Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After all, President and Mrs. Roosevelt had spent more than their fair share of time at a small cottage in Warm Springs—not more than a mile from where Colophon now lived—known as the Little White House. Colophon could write this essay in her sleep.

  Colophon had not said anything to her mother about the extra-credit assignment because she knew that her brother would tease her mercilessly, particularly since she was doing bonus work.

  She got enough teasing already from Case. She certainly didn’t need any more, thank you.

  After about half an hour of peace and quiet, Colophon heard the door to the library creak open. She looked up and saw her brother entering the room.

  Can’t he just leave me alone? she thought. She shut her laptop.

  “Hey, dipstick, whatcha doing?”

  “None of your bu
siness, Case.”

  He walked over to the table and flipped the laptop back open.

  “Leave my computer alone!” she snapped.

  Ignoring his sister’s protests, he bent over and looked at the screen.

  “A report? You are actually working on a report for school? You are on vacation. V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N. Vacation. You are such a dork.”

  Colophon slammed the laptop back shut. “You are such a . . . jerk!”

  “Ow. That hurt. Really, I’m hurting. I suppose you’re also looking forward to tomorrow’s dorkfest for Thanksgiving, aren’t you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am,” replied Colophon. “I’m sorry our family is not more exciting. Perhaps our parents might be willing to find you a new home at a distant military school?”

  “Again, that hurt. I probably won’t sleep tonight because of that cruel comment. You wound me.”

  Colophon grabbed her laptop and stomped out of the library. She headed directly for the kitchen. A cookie (or two) wouldn’t make her brother vanish, but it wouldn’t hurt either. As she turned down the hallway leading to the kitchen, she passed her father’s office. The door was slightly ajar, and she could here voices from within. She paused. One voice was her father’s, and he did not sound happy. In fact, he seemed very angry.

  “You cannot be serious!” her father thundered.

  “But I am,” said a deep, calm voice. “Very serious.”

  The voices mingled, and Colophon heard heavy footsteps heading toward the door. She quickly moved down the hallway and around the corner, then stopped with her back against the wall and listened.