“Good God.”

“Quite,” said Peregrine, doing a Greenslade. “I shall now tell you as much as is known of the history. Here goes.”

And he did in considerable detail.

The expert listened in a startled manner.

“Really, very odd,” he said when Peregrine had finished.

“I assure you I’m not making it up.”

“No, no. I’m sure. I’ve heard of Conducis, of course. Who hasn’t? You do realize what a—what a really flabbergasting thing this would be if it turned out to be genuine?”

“I can think of nothing else. I mean: there they lie—a child’s glove and a letter asking one to suppose that on a summer’s morning in the year 1596 a master-craftsman of Stratford made a pair of gloves and gave them to his grandson, who wore them for a day and then—”

“Grief filled the room up of an absent child?”

“Yes. And a long time afterwards—twenty years—the father made his will—I wonder he didn’t chuck in a ghastly pun—Will’s Will—don’t you? And he left his apparel to his sister Joan Hart. And for her information wrote that note there. I mean—his hand moved across that bit of paper. If it’s genuine. And then two centuries go by and somebody called M.E. puts the glove and paper in a Victorian desk with the information that her great-great-grandmother had them from J. Hart and her grandmother insisted they were the Poet’s. It could have been Joan Hart. She died in 1664.”

“I shouldn’t build on it,” the expert said dryly.

“Of course not!”

“Has Mr. Conducis said anything about their value? I mean—even if there’s only a remote chance they will be worth—well, I can’t begin to say what their monetary value might be, but I know what we’d feel about it, here.”

Peregrine and the expert eyed each other for a moment or two. “I suppose,” Peregrine said, “he’s thought of that, but I must say he’s behaved pretty casually over it.”

“Well, we shan’t,” said the expert. “I’ll give you your receipt and ask you to stay and see things safely stowed.”

He stopped for a moment over the little dead, wrinkled glove. “If it were true!” he murmured.

“I know, I know,” Peregrine cried. “It’s frightening to think what would happen. The avid attention, the passionate greed for possession.”

“There’s been murder done for less,” said the expert lightly.

Five weeks later Peregrine, looking rather white about the gills and brownish under the eyes, wrote the last word of his play and underneath it: Curtain. That night he read it to Jeremy, who thought well of it.

There had been no word from Mr. Greenslade. The stage-house of The Dolphin could still be seen on Bank-side. Jeremy had asked at the estate agents for permission to view and had been told that the theatre was no longer in their hands and they believed had been withdrawn from the market Their manner was stuffy.

From time to time the two young men talked about The Dolphin, but a veil of unreality seemed to have fallen between Peregrine and his strange interlude: so much so that he sometimes almost felt as if he had invented it.

In an interim report on the glove and documents, the museum had said that preliminary tests had given no evidence of spurious inks or paper and so far nothing inconsistent with their supposed antiquity had been discovered. An expert on the handwriting of ancient documents, at present in America, would be consulted on his return. If his report was favourable, Peregrine gathered, a conference of authorises would be called.

“Well,” Jeremy said, “they haven’t laughed it out of court, evidently.”

“Evidently.”

“You’ll send the report to the man Greenslade?”

“Yes, of course.”

Jeremy put his freckled hand on Peregrine’s manuscript.

“What about opening at The Dolphin this time next year with The Glove, a new play by Peregrine Jay?”

“Gatcha!”

“Well—why not? For the hell of it,” Jeremy said, “let’s do a shadow casting. Come on.”

“I have.”

“Give us a look.”

Peregrine produced a battered sheet of paper covered in his irregular handwriting.

“Listen,” he said. “I know what would be said. That it’s been done before. Clemence Dane for one. And more than that: it’d be a standing target for wonderful cracks of synthetic Bardery. The very sight of the cast. Ann Hathaway and all that lot. You know? It’d be held to stink. Sunk before it started.”

“I for one don’t find any derry-down tart in the dialogue.”

“Yes: but to cast ‘Shakespeare.’ What gall!”

“He did that sort of thing. You might as well say: ‘Oo-er! To cast Henry VIII!’ Come on: who would you cast for Shakespeare?”

“It sticks out a mile, doesn’t it?”

“Elizabethan Angry, really isn’t he? Lonely. Chancy. Tricky. Bright as the sun. A Pegasus in the Hathaway stable? Enormously over-sexed and looking like the Grafton portrait. In which I entirely believe.”

“And I. All right. Who looks and plays like that?”

“Oh God!” Jeremy said, reading the casting list.

“Yes,” Peregrine rejoined. “What I said. It sticks out a mile.”

“Marcus Knight. My God.”

“Of course. He is the Grafton portrait, and as for fire! Think of his Hotspur. And Harry Five. And Mercutio. And, by heaven, his Hamlet. Remember the Peer Gynt?”

“What’s his age?”

“Whatever it is he doesn’t show it. He can look like a stripling.”

“He’d cost the earth.”

“This is only mock-up, anyway.”

“Has he ever been known to get through a production without creating a procession of dirty big rows?”

“Never.”

“Custom-built to wreck the morale of any given company?”

“That’s Marco.”

“Remember the occasion when he broke off and told latecomers after the interval to sit down or get the hell out of it?”

“Vividly.”

“And when the rest of the cast threw in their parts as one man?”

“I directed the fiasco.”

“He’s said to be more than usually explosive just now on account of no knighthood last batch.”

“He is, I understand, apoplectic, under that heading.”

“Well,” said Jeremy, “it’s your play. I see you’ve settled for rolling the lovely boy and the seduced fair friend and ‘Mr. W.H.’ all up in one character.”

“So I have.”

“How you dared!” Jeremy muttered.

“There have been madder notions over the centuries.”

“True enough. It adds up to a damn good part. How do you see him?”

“Very blond. Very male. Very impertinent.”

“W. Hartly Grove?”

“Might be. Type casting.”

“Isn’t he held to be a bad citizen?”

“Bit of a nuisance.”

“What about your Dark Lady? The Rosaline? Destiny Meade, I see you’ve got here.”

“I rather thought Destiny. She’s cement from the eyes up but she gives a great impression of smoldering depths and really inexhaustible sex. She can produce what’s called for in any department as long as it’s put to her in basic English and very, very slowly. And she lives, by the way, with Marco.”

“That might or might not be handy. And Ann H?”

“Oh, any sound, unsympathetic actress with good attack,” Peregrine said.

“Like Gertie Bracey?”

“Yes.”

“Joan Hart’s a nice bit. I tell you who’d be good as Joan. Emily Dunne. You know? She’s been helping in our shop. You liked her in that T.V. show. She did some very nice Celias and Nerissas and Hermias at Stratford. Prick her down on your list.”

“I shall. See, with a blot I damn her.”

“The others seem to present no difficulty, but the spirit sinks at an infant phenomenon.”

“He dies before the end of Act I.”

“Not a moment too soon. I am greatly perturbed by the vision of some stunted teen-ager acting its pants off!”

“It’ll be called Gary, of course.”

“Or Trevor.”

“Never mind.”

“Would you give me the designing of the show?”