Harris and the woman both stood, blinking their confusion in harmony.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ Elisabetta said. ‘I’m Elisabetta Celestino. I think my father didn’t tell you I’m a nun. For that matter, I’m afraid I neglected to mention it too.’
‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ Harris said graciously. ‘And I must apologize for the fact that I neglected to tell you I was bringing a colleague. May I introduce Stephanie Meyer, a very distinguished member of Cambridge University’s governing body, the Regent House. She is also a generous donor to the University.’
‘I’m delighted to make your acquaintance,’ Meyer said with the careful elocution of the British upper class. ‘Your father is absolutely charming. I told him I would suggest to the Chairman of our Mathematics Department that he be invited to give a talk on his Goldberg Conjecture.’
‘Goldbach,’ Elisabetta said, gently correcting her. ‘I hope he didn’t force a lecture on you.’ Suddenly she remembered that he’d been working on her tattoo puzzle. The last time she’d checked, his jottings had been all over the sitting room. There was a messy stack of lined yellow papers covered by some journals on the sideboard. Fortunately, he’d tidied up to some extent.
‘Not at all,’ Meyer said. ‘I hope he cracks it. And I hope his department will treat him with the respect he so clearly deserves.’
‘Is there anything he didn’t tell you?’ Elisabetta said, shaking her head.
‘Only, apparently, that you were a nun,’ Harris said, smiling.
‘So please, sit,’ Elisabetta said. ‘What can I bring you?’
‘Only the book,’ Harris said. ‘We’re very keen to see it.’
It was in her old bedroom, on her small student desk. She took it out of its envelope, brought it back and put it in Harris’s outstretched hands. She watched the anticipation on his face, like that of a child receiving his first Christmas present. His hands were trembling.
‘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.’