A
young filmmaker in progress works in a
rare book store. A fire next door to the shop sets off an international quest for a literary grail, an undiscovered
manuscript by famous William Shakespeare, written in his own hand.
The 17th Century play which is about Mary
Queen of Scots is about intrigue of England labors under post-Elizabethan religious turmoil under the reign of the beheaded Mary''s son King James the first.
Bracegirdle, a young man of so little promise that his father apprenticed him off, proves to be a talented accountant, inventor, gunner, cryptographer, and a spy.
He is sent by Lord Darden to befriend "W.S." with a fanciful claim that they are maternal cousins. Bracegirdle''s mission is to convince W.S. to write a
play glorifying the late Scottish queen and prove W.S. to be a secret papist.
The Bracegirdle manuscript discovered in the binding of a water-damaged rare book is taken to a British scholar in residence at Columbia who cheats Crosetti and then having made a deal with the devil, a Russian gangster, pays with his life.
But by then the Bracegirdle document has been placed for safekeeping with a New York lawyer Jacob Miskin, who opens this narrative in a cottage on Lake Henry awaiting his own death.
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