Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories (37 page)

She was still stunning, just as Mr. Leslie had said. Her hair was still chestnut brown, not like I’d imagined, cascades of curls, but swept up in a glamorous way that drew attention to her periwinkle-blue eyes. Her clothes were absolutely
au courant
, yet dignified. I could imagine her surrounded by suitors. I couldn’t imagine her eating pie with a spoon in the open air.

“Miss, I believe you have a room for us, Mr. and Mrs. John Baldwin. I can’t believe you don’t have parking.”

“It’s not on site, no, but we can take care of your car.”

“I’ll be happy to park your car for you, ma’am,” Freddie said carefully putting their bags down.

“This used to be a remarkable hotel,” Mrs. Baldwin observed, “and now you have people who can do two things at once. You will take care of our bags,” she said to Freddie without looking at him, “and you,” she indicated Ted the bellman behind her with the slightest tip of her head up and backwards, “will take care of the car.” Her voice cut through the lobby air like a blade made of frozen honey. It hurt, but you couldn’t say why.

It was my turn. I hadn’t moved. I could see Mr. Leslie by the fireplace, underneath the picture of Edward the VII, craning his neck for a better view. “Apparently he can do two things at once and you can do none. Eyes front, young lady. We would like to check in.”

“Yes, of course, I’m sorry,” I handed her the registration form. Mr. Leslie moved closer. He was standing by one of the two pillars closest to the desk.

“Pen, you ridiculous girl!” Her irritation was accelerating. I felt caught between it and Mr. Leslie’s approach. I hastily found a pen and handed it to her. She began to fill out the registration form, pressing ever harder in order to make the pen work, tearing at the three-part form with the pen as if it were a dull knife. “Bring me another form and a pen that works,” she ordered. Mr. Leslie seemed to hesitate.

“I’m terribly sorry about the pen. I’m sure you’ll like the room: it’s one of our best. Do you have any special plans for while you are in town?” I was babbling. I knew it, but it was all I could think of to try and sweeten her mood. “I see you are here for your golden anniversary. Congratulations, that’s quite a milestone. My parents just separated. It’s wonderful to see such commitment.”

Mr. Leslie took another step forward. She was nearly finished with the form. Without looking up, she quietly told me, “Stop being pious,” Mr. Leslie was within earshot now, “and take off that poppy you sanctimonious chit; Remembrance Day was two days ago.”

I handed the suite key to Freddie, tough Freddie, friend of whores, procurer of drugs and after-hours alcohol who, like me, had tears in his eyes. Mrs. Baldwin turned on her expensive heels and motioned for him to lead the way.

All experience is gained at a loss. Where Mr. Leslie had stood there lay a small pile of dust.

Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, I worked as a front-desk clerk at the Edwardian Hotel. In that time I also graduated from high school, learned to drive, had my appendix out, lost my virginity, nearly finished a degree in history and saw a ghost die. Torontonians are notoriously indifferent to their local heritage. When time came for the Edwardian to make way for condos, there was a whimper of protest outside and a couple of articles beside the electronics ads in the newspapers.

I was not sorry to see it come down.

Originally published in On Spec
Summer 2009 Vol 21 No 2 #77

Toronto born
Sandra Glaze
attended Brock University, after which she has been scribbling out a living as a business writer, journalist and blogger. The author of a children’s book,
Willobe of Wuzz
, her ghost stories have been published in Canada and the U.K. 

Tony Pi

Madoc was a striking man in his thirties, his eyes bluer than the sea. I could well imagine him as an ancient prince.

I sat next to his hospital bed and smiled. “
Siw mae
, Madoc.”

He paused, the way I would whenever I heard a phrase in Newfoundland English to make sure I hadn’t misheard. Then he sat up and spoke excitedly, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Contrary to what people believe, linguists don’t all speak twenty languages or pick up a new language instantly. Where we excel was figuring out linguistic patterns.

Doctor Liu smirked. “Did you call him
pork dumpling
?”

I understood the confusion.
Siw mae
sounded like
siu mai
in Cantonese, which meant
pork dumpling
. “It means
how are you
in modern Southern Welsh. Madoc would have been from Snowdon, Northern Wales, so I should have said
sut mae
.”

Two weeks ago, on December twenty-sixth, a strange ship had drifted into the Harbour of St. John’s. Found aboard the replica of the Viking longship were four dead men and one survivor. Will Monteith from the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary contacted me to help him pinpoint the man’s origin through his language. Analyzing the tapes of the man’s speech, I came to the strange conclusion that the man who called himself Madoc had been speaking two archaic languages: Middle English and Middle Welsh.

To be certain, I asked Will to arrange a face-to-face interview. Sometimes linguistic evidence was visual. For example, the
v
sound in Modern Welsh was produced like in Modern English, with the upper teeth against the lower lip, but the
v
in Middle Welsh was produced with both lips, like in Spanish.

I turned on the tape recorder and pointed to myself. “Kate.” I indicated Detective Monteith and Doctor Liu. “Will. Philip.
Meddic
.” Doctor, in Middle Welsh. The double
dd
sounded like the first sound in the English word,
they
.

He repeated the names and grinned.

Madoc was a puzzle indeed. The theory that made most sense was that he and the other men were trying to recreate the Madoc voyage. Prince Madoc of Gwynedd was a Welsh legend, believed to have sailed west from Wales in 1170. He returned seven years later to tell of a new land of untouched bounty across the sea. Intending to settle the new land, he set out with a fleet of ten ships of settlers, and disappeared from history.

This man could be a Middle Ages scholar with damage to Wernicke’s area. Wernicke’s aphasics had no problems with articulation, but their utterances made little sense. For the most severe cases, sounds were randomly chosen, spliced together to sound real, but contained few actual words. “Madoc” might be suffering from a similar jargon aphasia. However, the MRI and PET scans showed no such damage to his brain’s left hemisphere.

But how authentic was Madoc’s command of Middle Welsh? I had two tests in mind.

I gave Madoc two poems I had found, one by Gwalchmai ap Meilyr, another by Dafydd ap Gwilym, both printed in a font called Neue Hammer Unziale. The font seemed closest to Insular Majescule, the script a twelfth-century prince might have been familiar with. “
Darlle
,” I prompted him to read.

Madoc read the first poem easily, but tripped over some of the words in the second.

Will raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t he be able to read both poems?” he asked, his detective’s instincts coming to bear.

“I made it difficult on purpose,” I explained. “The first poem was by a court poet who lived around the same time as Madoc. The second poem, however, was poetry written in the fourteenth century, and is usually designated as early Modern Welsh. I expected him to have more difficulty with that one. It’s like Chaucer trying to read Shakespeare, or Shakespeare reading Tennessee Williams; different time, different language.”

“You’re trying to trip him up! Police work and linguistics are a lot alike,” Will said. “Patterns and mistakes.”

“I’ve never quite heard it put that way, but you’re right.” Will and I shared a smile.

Second test was a production task. I took out a colour pictorial of England, and opened it to a photograph with nine men in a pub.

“
Gwyr. Pet
?” Men. How many?

“
Naw
.” Nine.

I shook my head. “
Naw wyr
.” Nine men. I prompted him to use compounds, as I wanted to test a phenomenon called lenition or mutation. In Welsh, if a word came after a number, the first sound sometimes changed or was dropped, as in the case of
gwyr
to
wyr
. Mutations appeared elsewhere as well, but seeing as I was only dabbling in Celtic, I kept it simple for myself.

Madoc caught on fast; we went through the book counting people and things. When we came to a picture of a boat, Madoc pointed to it, then himself. “
Gwyr. Pet
?” How many survived from his ship?

I cast a sidewise glance at Will.

“
Un
,” I answered. One.

A shocked expression overtook Madoc’s face.

“That’s enough for today,” I said. I gave him a bottle of ink, a sketchbook, and a seagull feather I had cut into a quill pen, and mimed writing motions. I wanted to analyze his writing.

Madoc took my hand and drew it close for a kiss.

Will smiled. “He might not be able to say it, Kate, but I think you’re after making a friend for life.”

A week of interviews later, at Detective Will Monteith’s request, I presented my findings to the other experts at the R.N.C. Headquarters downtown: Doctor Birley from the Provincial Coroner’s Office; Rebecca Shannon, a lawyer working
pro bono
for Madoc; and Professor Connon from the Department of Anthropology at Memorial University.

I had reservations about coming. My linguistic analysis had led me to a strange and inescapable conclusion: there was no doubting Madoc’s native fluency in Middle Welsh. Even if a hoaxer had learned Middle Welsh, he might pronounce words wrong, or not know the words for common things. Madoc never tripped over syntax or vocabulary, except when it involved a modern object. Could he
be
the genuine Madoc, lost at sea over eight hundred years ago, found at last in St. John’s?

Was it a mad fancy? Perhaps. The academic in me scoffed at the idea. But the romantic in me wanted to believe. Here in Newfoundland, it seemed like anything was possible. I didn’t know how to describe it, but there was something magical and mystical about this place. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a leprechaun at my house, for instance. Time had stopped this winter, snow falling every day like the weather was stuck and couldn’t move ahead to anything different. I felt like I was living in a snow-globe, and the same guy kept turning it upside-down and shaking it. In his world it was only five minutes of playing; but inside the snow-globe, an entire month passed.

But could I convince the others?

“He’s a native speaker of Middle Welsh, with some training in Middle English,” I said. “He did quite well on the reading passages, and the way he pronounced his vowels and consonants were consistent with my expectations. The written evidence further supports it.”

“Preposterous!” Connon said. “A good scholar could learn a second language well enough to fool you. It’s a hoax by someone in the Society of Creative Anachronism, I wager.”

“We spoke to the Seneschal at Memorial University and contacted everyone on their Shire Roll, but no one from their group is missing, and no one heard about any re-enactment of the Madoc voyage,” Will said.

“I hear he’s learning English,” Connon continued. “How do we know that it wasn’t his plan, fake the Madoc story long enough to ease back into English?”

“You can’t stop someone from learning a new language. He’s a human being, not an artefact from some dig!” I said.