Varduk had opened a drawer of the desk and once more he interrupted. "Here is a magnifying glass, Judge Pursuivant. Small, but quite powerful." He handed it over. "Perhaps, with its help, you can decide with more accuracy."
"Thank you." Pursuivant bent for a closer and more painstaking scrutiny. For minutes he turned over page after page, squinting through the glass Varduk had lent him. Finally he looked up again.
"No forgery here. Every stroke of the pen is a clean one. A forger draws pictures, so to speak, of the handwriting he copies, and with a lens like this one can plainly see the jagged, deliberate sketchwork." He handed back the magnifying glass and doffed his spectacles, then let his thoughtful eyes travel from one of us to the others. "I'll stake my legal and scholastic reputation that Byron himself wrote these pages."
"Your stakes are entirely safe, sir," Varduk assured him with a smile. "Now that you have agreed—and I trust that you will allow us to inform the newspapers of your opinion—that Ruthven is Byron's work, I am prepared to tell how the play came into my possession. I was bequeathed it—by the author himself."
We all looked up at that, highly interested. Varduk smiled upon us as if pleased with the sensation he had created.
"The germ of Ruthven came into being one night at the home of the poet Shelley, on the shores of Lake Geneva. The company was being kept indoors by rain and wind, and had occupied itself with reading German ghost stories, and then tried their own skill at Gothic tales. One of those impromptu stories we know—Mary Godwin's masterpiece, Frankenstein. Lord Byron told the strange adventures of Ruthven, and Polidori appropriated them—that we also know; but later that night, alone in his room, Byron wrote the play we have here."
"In one sitting?" asked Martha Vining.
"In one sitting," replied Varduk. "He was a swift and brilliant worker. In his sixteen years of active creative writing, he produced nearly eighty thousand lines of published verse—John Drinkwater reckons an average of fourteen lines, or the equivalent of a complete sonnet, for every day. This prodigious volume of poetry he completed between times of making love, fighting scandal, traveling, quarreling, philosophizing, organizing the Greek revolution. An impressive record of work, both in size and in its proportion of excellence."
Sigrid leaned forward. "But you said that Lord Byron himself bequeathed the play to you."
Again Varduk's tight, brief smile. "It sounds fantastic, but it happened. Byron gave the manuscript to Claire Clairmont, his mistress and the mother of two of his children. He wanted it kept a secret—he had been called fiend incarnate too often. So he charged her that she and the children after her keep the play in trust, to be given the world a hundred years from the date of his death."