Guilty by Definition

Simon explains that the Shakespearean rhyme scheme is a numerical key to the Chorus letter. By selecting words from the letter based on the pattern, the team deciphers a hidden message: “Search the psalm. That is the answer to the universe. Find the thirsty creature” (190). The team is initially unable to identify the specific psalm. 

Later, DS Oliver Caldwell calls Martha to report that her sister Charlie’s secret bank account contained just under £5,000, with income from legitimate book dealers in London and cash withdrawals, the last made just before Easter.

While on an evening run, Safi connects “the answer to the universe” (194) to the number 42 from Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. She calls Alex, who realizes this points to Psalm 42. Its first line mentions a “hart” (194) panting for water. The team agrees to meet back at the office immediately to search the dictionary’s slips for the word hart.

Martha has dinner with Gemma Waldegrave, a family friend and Jonathan Overton’s literary agent. Gemma mentions receiving a postcard with a Shakespeare quote, similar to one Martha received, and admits to having previously shut down true-crime projects about Charlie’s disappearance to protect the family.

Gemma recalls that shortly before Charlie vanished, she had insisted on a lunch meeting to pitch an “exciting” (200) book project, offering Gemma “first refusal” (200). Charlie later canceled; Gemma assumed she had gotten cold feet. Gemma also reveals that Jonathan once engaged in “sock-puppeting” (202), giving a critic’s own book a one-star rating and negative review on Amazon under a false name and posting fake reviews of works by his contemporaries. The dinner ends when Alex calls Martha with news of their breakthrough. Martha rushes back to the office.

Martha, Alex, Safi, and Simon meet late at night in the dictionary’s Slips Room to search for the keyword hart. While looking through the files, Safi finds a misplaced slip for the word “besmirch” (207), which Alex identifies as one of the many words thought to be first used to the English language by Shakespeare. The slip contains a citation from a ballad titled “Ballad of the Spinner, Anon. Before 1599” (207), recorded in The Commonplace Book of J. H., A Provincial Woman, which predates the dictionary’s current first-use entry from Hamlet (1604) by five years. The slip also lists Charlotte Thornhill as editor of the commonplace book.

Martha confirms the handwriting on the card is her sister’s. The team realizes that the slip is evidence that Charlie had discovered a lost, historically significant manuscript before she disappeared, one that would have a significant impact on both the dictionary and Shakespeare scholarship.

Over the holiday weekend, Martha searches Charlie’s shoe cupboard and bookshelves at her father’s house for the commonplace book mentioned on the slip, but finds only printed books and no manuscript. Alex calls to report that her ex-husband, George, has finally agreed to meet her in London to discuss Charlie. Having failed to find the manuscript, Martha decides to attend Oxford’s May Day morning celebration alone. The event was once a family tradition, and she reflects on how her sister Charlie had always disliked Sundays, using the 17th-century term “mubble-fubbles” (209) to describe her end-of-weekend gloom. She thinks about her time in Berlin and decides against calling a woman named Sabine.

At the May Day celebration, Martha encounters DS Caldwell. He asks about the manuscript, and she explains that a commonplace book was a type of personal journal kept from the 15th to 18th centuries, used to collect and organize external information like quotes, ideas, observations, and facts that were interesting to the compiler. She emphasizes that the discovery of a 16th-century woman’s commonplace book would be a monumental literary find—akin to “Tutankhamun’s tomb” (217)—as so few have survived. She theorizes that Charlie could have authenticated its date through internal historical references. 

Caldwell suggests that possessing such a valuable artifact could be a motive for murder. His words make Martha recall Chorus’s instruction to read Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” a story about three friends who murder one another over a cache of gold.

Martha and Safi meet at Alex’s house, where Alex recounts what she learned from her ex-husband, George, a specialist in early modern manuscripts at the British Library. George confirmed that, just before Charlie disappeared, she had visited him to have a single page from a late 16th-century manuscript authenticated. He believed the page was genuine, but Charlie refused to leave it with him for further study. That visit prompted him to send her a postcard. He later emailed her after she sent a photograph of a second page—notes on a performance of Edward II in what appeared to be a church hall—asking about her progress, but she did not respond to him.

Safi speculates that Charlie might have been having an affair with Jonathan Overton, an expert in the period with a reputation for pursuing students. Martha immediately and firmly insists this is impossible, as she herself was in a romantic relationship with Jonathan.

Martha confesses to Alex and Safi that she, not Charlie, had an affair with Jonathan. The relationship occurred the summer before Martha left for university, when she was a teenager and he was in his early thirties. Jonathan had urged her to keep it secret, claiming he wanted to protect Charlie’s feelings because she supposedly had a crush on him. Martha admits she never fell in love with Jonathan and that her motivation was partly a desire to finally win something her sister wanted, believing Charlie admired him despite having Tom.

The weekend before Charlie vanished, Charlie saw Martha leaving Jonathan’s rooms early in the morning. For 10 years, Martha has carried the guilt, believing the sight of her betrayal is what caused her sister to run away. She also notes that Jonathan recently seemed to dismiss the idea of Charlie’s crush, contradicting the story he used to manipulate her during their affair. Though she insists that Jonathan did not take advantage of her, she concedes Safi’s suggestion that she would not think highly of a colleague in their thirties “having an affair with someone in their teens” (231).