Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries) (17 page)

White curtains fluttered out from an open window in the second floor of the building on my left. I imagined a fan in the room beyond, because there was no moving air to produce any cross ventilation. Voices, so low I couldn’t make out the words, slipped out as well. This window would be at about the same place as Keith’s rooms on the staircase closest to the northwest corner of the building. I listened for another minute, hearing an angry or perhaps excited voice and a deeper, calmer one. I heard a long scrape, as if someone was pulling a chair across the floor. Then, quite clearly, perhaps because the speaker had moved closer to the window, a girl’s voice said, “If looks could kill, I’d be dead right now!”

Not wishing to be caught eavesdropping, I turned right and stepped into the archway where I felt the Grey Lady must have gone. At the far side stood the small door cut into the gigantic wooden nail-studded gate. Then I saw it. An iron railing to the left of the door sloped down, disappearing into the cobbled stone floor. Stepping across and peering over the rail, I spotted a door below ground level, at the bottom of a stairwell so dark I could hardly read the sign on the black, water-stained door. “No Admittance.” Whatever lay beyond the door must run beneath the wall itself.

If the Grey Lady had slipped down these stairs I would have missed her, whether she went through the door or not. She could have hidden in the stairwell in her black, hooded cape and I wouldn’t have seen her. I checked my watch and decided there wasn’t enough time to visit the SCR, so I wandered around the Middle Quad, admiring the borders. The gardeners stuck small brass plaques, with common and scientific names, in the ground beneath some of the more exotic plants. I stopped at a huge black flower with a plaque that read
Aeonium arboreum
and wondered if I could raise one of those in my garden back home. If I saw a gardener before I left I would ask him; that is, if the gardeners hadn’t quit following Daphne’s verbal harangue.

“I’ve tried to grow those with a singular lack of success,” a voice behind me said. I turned and found Claudia Moss.

“Claudia. I need to talk to you.” Still studying the flower border as we both moseyed in the general direction of the dining hall, I said, “Have you talked to Larry Roberts this afternoon, since, say, three o’clock?”

Claudia hesitated as if she might be revealing more than she should by answering, then said, “I had tea with him at the Randolph at four.”

“Did he mention my presentation? He came in, but left soon after. He was angry with me. Furious would be a better word.”

“He did mention it.” She paused again and her next words seemed to have been carefully weighed. “He said you were being taken in by our visitors from Glastonbury. He’s adamant, you know, that history must be done scrupulously and objectively.”

“I know. He and I have had these discussions before, but what I said in my presentation was not the least bit controversial. I was careful in the way I worded my one and only reference to Arthur in Glastonbury, and none of the others thought anything of it. Once I got the Oxfordian squared away, and after Larry stormed out, we had a nice discussion.”

“I knew this sort of thing would come up as soon as I heard the topic they’d selected for the conference.”

“Who selected it, by the way?”

“I don’t know. Dr. Wetmore, perhaps?”

“I doubt it. Did Larry also tell you he said I could forget that PhD?”

“Give him time to cool down.” We had reached the doors to the dining hall. “Would you join us for dinner?”

“I think not. He needs more time to cool down and so do I.”

A small group of diners waved me over, and I was ever so glad for their invitation because otherwise I would’ve had to sit by myself or go up to someone I didn’t know very well and ask, “May I sit with you?” A perfectly normal thing to do in America, but here? Not always. And you might find yourself with a group speaking another language, although all the conference attendees spoke English well enough to understand the lectures and discussions.

I recognized two of them as participants in my breakout session today. We introduced ourselves all around. “Your presentation today has given me so much to think about. I took three pages of notes,” one said.

“I’ve never fully appreciated the fact that historians in Shakespeare’s day were no more writing from personal knowledge than we are today,” another added.

“Correction. We may be writing from personal knowledge when we write about recent events,” yet another said and looked at me. “As an American, do you remember the assassination of President Kennedy?”

“I was in high school, but yes, I remember.”

“You were there. You could write that story from personal knowledge.”

“But I wasn’t in Dallas. All I know is what I saw on TV.”

“Exactly! Just my point!”

We paused while the server straightened out our first courses, two of our group having ordered vegetarian and unwilling to accept the salads with prosciutto.

“That man who stormed out! It was Dr. Roberts, wasn’t it?”

I explained as quickly and calmly as I could.

“What’s his problem? If I were you I’d find another mentor to work with.”

“And the man who brought up the Earl of Oxford! There’s always one in every crowd.”

Having established ourselves as moderate historians, we had a lively discussion through the rest of the meal. We were starting on dessert, which the English call “pudding” whether it’s pudding or not, when I looked up and saw Lettie standing in the door, looking around the room.

I stood to get her attention and pulled out a chair for her.

“I’m not eating,” Lettie said, grabbing my coffee spoon and helping herself to my cake.

Introductions complete, Lettie said, “Lindsey is staying home tonight—for a change. I felt like I should introduce her to her own children.” To the others, she added, “I’ve been babysitting my two grandchildren while my daughter works at the hospital. Don’t get me wrong. I love to spend all the time I can with my grandchildren. They are the sweetest things. But enough’s enough, you know? Children need their mothers, as well, don’t they?” She paused for breath and looked at me. “Sorry. I’m running off at the mouth, aren’t I?”

“I understand,” said the man sitting across from me. “You haven’t talked to an adult all day, and the freedom makes you feel quite giddy.”

Lettie purchased a bottle of Merlot from our server and we took it with us to the SCR. She wasn’t sure she was allowed, but I assured her this wasn’t part of the history conference and she had as much right to relax in the faculty room as the rest of us.

The air had turned chilly while we were at dinner, from hot and still to a cool breeze and that eerie change in pressure that you can’t exactly feel, but register, somewhere deep down. The city’s lights reflected off low-hanging clouds and archway lanterns began creaking on their chains.

Someone had raised all the windows in the SCR. As if responding to the change in weather, most of us took chairs and bunched them around the unlit fireplace. The last time I was in this room, with Robin Morris, the occupants had wandered about the room or gathered in little conversation pods.

“Poor Harold. Did anyone else notice how shaky he was tonight?”

“Daphne wasn’t there. That’s why. He needs her to tell him when to stand up and what to say.”

“Where was she? She’s always there.”

“I can answer that,” I said. “I ran into her about a half-hour before dinner and she was leaving to run some errands. She gave me a note to give to Harold and I did give it to him, but all it said was that his guest tonight was named Malcolm and Malcolm’s wife died last week.”

“Harold called him Martin when he introduced him.”

I threw up my hands. “Hey, I did my best! I gave him the note.”

The man who had challenged me on the authorship of Shakespeare’s works spoke up. “I hope I didn’t offend you today, Mrs. Lamb. The debate over the authorship of the plays and poems is a long-standing one. It’s ground we’ve all been over a hundred times, but to an American perhaps it seems like a minefield.”

“No offense taken,” I said. His apology sounded sincere but with a touch of arrogance.

“Too bad we had no Baconians,” said the woman who had invited me to sit with them at dinner. “We could have had a right jolly row.”

“I’m glad we didn’t. I wouldn’t have had time for my prepared remarks.”

Lettie, sitting on the settee beside me, had a bewildered look on her face so I said to the group, “This is my lifelong friend, Lettie Osgood. She’s a librarian, but her own interests are not especially along the lines of British history. I doubt she knows what a Baconian is.”

“A Baconian, Mrs. Osgood, is one who believes Sir Francis Bacon wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.”

“And then there are the Oxfordians, who believe Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays.”

“All perfectly silly of course,” said a thin woman with a deep voice and black hair cut in what they used to call a Dutch boy style. “Because it’s all based on the idea that a working-class man couldn’t possibly have written so intelligently.”

“And the idea that a common man couldn’t possibly have known so much about the places where he set his stories,” another added.

All eyes seemed to be on Lettie, the lone pupil in a room full of tutors. Lettie shifted uncomfortably in her chair, clasped her little hands tightly in her lap, and straightened her back. “Does it matter? After all,
somebody
wrote those wonderful plays, and whoever did
deserves
the name Shakespeare.”

I threw my arm around her shoulders and laughed, letting the others know they could too, but not too much. Lettie didn’t get it. I looked beyond her bewildered face and saw Larry Roberts as he stepped through the door, surveyed the scene, turned, and left.

We heard voices, then rhythmic, hollow, thumps wafting through the open windows on either side of the fireplace. No one spoke for a minute while we listened. Drums? Then a high-pitched voice singing something that sounded like classical church music broke through, alternating with the drumbeats. I, sitting closest to the right-hand window, jumped up and looked out while the Oxfordian man dashed to the other window.

They were marching in, two by two, the New Agers. Dressed in long robes and carrying flashlights held aloft as if they were torches. I counted ten marchers, their robes of uncertain color in the dim light of the East Quad.

“Oh, Lord! It’s an invasion!” said the Oxfordian.

The overhead lantern under the college’s main entrance cast the invaders in silhouette as they turned toward Staircase Thirteen. The last pair carried the drums. Striking in unison they sounded like one. The marchers in back stopped to allow the front ones to go up the stairs in single file. Stepping up and onto the stone threshold, they entered, lowering their flashlights and giving me a quick glimpse of their faces, but I really didn’t need to see their faces to know they were Mignon Beaulieu and her friends.

As the doorway swallowed the last one, a tremendous bolt of lightning lit up the courtyard. A deafening thunderclap followed less than a second later. I jumped, and I heard several startled cries from the room behind me. Then the rain began, and it came in undulating sheets.

The front of my shirt and slacks caught the first of it so I quickly lowered the window, the sheer drapes sticking to my raised arms. I turned and saw others rushing to close windows along both exterior walls.

Another flash and another clap, and the lights in the room went dark. I stood there stupidly, wondering whom we’d find lying on the floor, murdered, when the power came back on.

“Oh, my Lord! My brolly is in my room! Who has one here?”

“Those damned hippies! How did they manage to start a storm?”

“I don’t know about you, but I still have a half bottle of Merlot. I’m staying right here until it blows over.”

“Are the lights out all over college?”

“Dotsy! Where are you?” This came from Lettie.

A man said, “May I suggest we all either leave the room or find a seat? We’re going to start banging into each other if we don’t.”

Another flash of lightning showed me where I was in relation to the settee, so I groped my way over, found Lettie’s spiky hair with my hand, and guided both of us to the same seats we’d left earlier.

“Any good ghost stories?” someone said.

I heard the door open and close several times as people left to brave the elements. Lettie and I waited until the rain slackened. Meanwhile we joined the other stragglers in making silly comments about dark and stormy nights. Fifteen minutes later the pounding tapered off. I returned to the window and pulled back the curtain. A small figure leaning into an umbrella turned the corner at the Porter’s Lodge and hurried toward the Master’s Lodge. I recognized Daphne by her size and her determined gait.

Lettie and I grabbed sections of yesterday’s
Oxford Daily Mail
for our heads and made a run for it.

Climbing the stairs, I wasn’t the least surprised to see yellow light slipping under the door of Bram Fitzwaring’s former room. The electricity was still off, so it had to be candlelight, I thought. I stopped and grabbed Lettie’s arm, shushing her.

Now they were doing a really strange chant. One at a time, in voices high and low, they uttered sounds that might have been words, but I don’t think they were in English. We kept climbing. Lettie fumbled for her keys and asked me in. I groped my way around the wall until I felt the back of her desk chair. We talked for a few minutes, mostly about Lindsey. Lettie said she thought Lindsey and her new boyfriend, St. Giles Bell, had broken up because Lindsey came home to her apartment that day with red, swollen eyes and told Lettie to leave. Whatever the problem was, Lindsey wouldn’t talk about it.

I left and felt my way up the next flight to my room. My footsteps sounded like gunfire on the wood floor outside my door. Opening the door with one arm while pressing my body against the wall, I saw a pale stream of light slanting through my little garret window and onto my bedspread. I managed to dress for bed and brush my teeth in the dark. I had to use my travel flashlight to read the number on my blood glucose meter. As the light brushed my face, I looked in the mirror over my sink. My hair was dripping wet and beginning to kink up around the ears. The hair dryer was plugged in and draped over the unheated radiator. I flipped the switch. No electricity, of course. I’d need to wash and style my hair tomorrow morning.