Flashback

“A sculptor from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale,” said the driver, his broad grin glowing whitely in the dash lights. “The only artist of his day that Shakespeare ever cited by name. I know. Act Five, a celebratory dinner is supposed to be held in the presence of a lifelike statue of Hermione, Leontes’ dead wife—‘ a piece many years in doing and now newly perform’d by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape.’ Weird, huh, Lenny?”

“But an anachronism in Shakespeare’s day,” Leonard couldn’t stop himself from pointing out. The old academic could allow one anachronism to pass without challenge, but not two in one night. “The Julio Romano was a reference to Giulio Romano, an Italian artist from the early and midsixteenth century. But why Shakespeare would have cited Romano as a great artist—and a sculptor—is a mystery. I don’t believe he was even a sculptor.”

They were crossing the broad, snow-covered plateau of the summit. The headlights of trucks ahead of them illuminated a battered but still-standing sign—SUMMIT, 3,655 m., 11,190 ft. Julio shifted gears as the truck prepared for an even more tortuous descent on the eastern side of the Continental Divide. Behind them, the idle wind turbines receded like so many white columns holding up the dome of the brilliant night sky.

“Actually, Lenny,” said Julio, “that Giulio Romano was a sculptor, so the early Shakespeare scholars were wrong about that. In Vasari’s Lives of Seventy of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, not translated until eighteen-fifty, there were two Latin epitaphs for Romano that showed he was an architect and rather famous sculptor as well as a painter. Shakespeare would have heard of him as a sculptor, it turns out.”

“I stand corrected,” said Leonard. The descent, he now knew, was going to be many times more terrifying than the climb to the summit.

“I only know because I share the name,” said Julio. “My father was a professor of art history at Princeton.”

“Really?” said Leonard and immediately wished that he hadn’t put so much amazement in his voice.

“Yeah, really,” said Julio with another grin as he downshifted rapidly and wrestled the wheel hard left. Beyond the emptiness where the missing guardrail should be only inches to their right, there was only more emptiness for a mile or more to rocks below. “But I know what you were thinking… how odd it is that I married a woman named Perdita, since Perdita is King Leontes’ long-lost daughter with whom he’s also reunited, before the statue of his wife, Hermione, comes to life. I mean, what are the odds that Julio Romano from The Winter’s Tale would marry a Perdita named after a character in the same play?”

“Was she?” managed Leonard, hanging on to armrest and dashboard as if his life depended on his grip. “Named after Shakespeare’s Perdita, I mean?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely.” Julio grinned at the highway ahead. “Her parents were both Shakespeare scholars. Her father, R. D. Bradley, met Perdita’s mother, Gail Kern-Preston, at a conference in Zurich that accepted papers exclusively on The Winter’s Tale.”

“The R. D. Bradley and Gail Kern-Preston?” gasped Leonard. For a moment he was too astonished to be terrified.

“Yeah.” Julio turned the bright grin toward Leonard. “Perdita’s mommy kept publishing under her maiden name after she got married. I guess scholars are like movie stars in that way… they build up too much equity under the original names to change them for a stupid little thing like marriage.”

Leonard had to smile at that. Two of his wives—his first, Sonja Ryte-Jónsdóttir, and his fourth and last one, Nubia Weusi—had felt that way. Leonard had certainly understood at the time, especially since both were better known in their respective fields and specialties than he was.

“So did you and Perdita meet at some sort of academic conference?” asked Leonard.