Slaying is Such Sweet Sorrow (12 page)

“Yes, I’m going to my daughter’s place by Folly Bridge, where I left my car.”

“Ah, then, instead of following the streets, let’s go by way of Magdalen Grove. Have you seen the deer park, and the view of Magdalen Tower from Addison’s Walk? No? Come along, it’s one of the best sights in Oxford.”

I had to walk briskly to keep up with his long legs, down a couple of residential streets and across a traffic circle, toward a large green area ahead.

“I wouldn’t have the patience to deal with someone as difficult as Mrs. Stone,” I said.

“Ah, but you didn’t know her before.” His face flushed with emotion. “Before the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune had wounded her, when she was young, when we were all young together. Her mind then was perfectly sound. One should perhaps have realized how vulnerable such a mind would be to adversity, but we only saw how dashing she was, how reckless, a free spirit—brilliant, in every sense of the word! She was a tremendous favorite in OUDS productions, played all the great parts—Cleopatra, Webster’s Vittoria, Hedda Gabler. She could certainly have acted professionally, but like the rest of us she preferred academia. Her father was a well-known Shakespearean scholar, a Trinity man—even gave his children names from the plays.”

“Yes, I recognized ‘Perdita,’ she’s the heroine of—oh, dear.
The Winter’s Tale
?”

“Quite right! She was herself more interested in Jonson and wrote an excellent paper on his plays in her second year, which was later published.”

“So, she was into acting,” I said, remembering my earlier suspicion that she might not be quite as crazy as she seemed.

“We were all mad for the stage. I was a credible Falstaff, though I say it myself. Cyril and Dorothy usually took on the secondary parts, although I remember that he did very well as Antony to Perdita’s Cleopatra. It’s how we became friends, and when Edgar came to Oxford, a year behind us, he made quite an impression as Iago. But soft—here we are!” he said heartily as we started down a dirt path, under a canopy of very old trees beside a slow-moving stream.

“This path,” he told me, “is known as Addison’s Walk. Have you read Joseph Addison?”

“Of Addison and Steele?” I ventured uncertainly.

“Yes, editors of the
Tatler
and the
Spectator
in the seventeenth century. Addison was a Magdalen man, and college tradition says he liked to walk here. I’ve always found him a bit didactic, although he’s generally considered a great prose stylist. Terrible judge of literature, however, wrote a long ode called ‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets,’ including Montague, Roscommon, and Waller, but omitting all of our fellows, as well as Donne, Marlowe, and Shakespeare.” We both laughed, and he went on. “If you look off to the right you’ll see some fallow deer, part of a little herd they keep here.”

The beautiful creatures gazed at us without fear as we passed the fence that enclosed their grazing ground. They were much smaller than American deer, and even the adults were spotted like fawns.

“How nice of the college to take care of the sweet little things!” I said.

“Well, actually, the herd was established to provide meat for the dining hall, in the eighteenth century. They’ve become an institution, of course, but when they’re judged to be overplentiful, venison does still appear at table.”

As we got closer to Magdalen College three or four tourists passed us, as well as a couple of dons who acknowledged Geoffrey with nods. A few undergraduates lounged under the trees, reading, and mallard ducks paddled slowly downstream. It was hard to believe the noise and traffic of the Oxford streets was so nearby.

We walked in silence for a while, but in the end I couldn’t resist the opportunity to pump him for more information.

“How did Stone get into your little group?” I asked. “Surely you wouldn’t have wanted such a nasty character as a friend!”

“His sarcastic wit seemed daring to undergraduates,” he said. “We quite admired his impudence, and his acting ability did enhance our productions. He was interested in the ‘other’ Elizabethans too, and so we took him into our circle.”

He sighed deeply and stopped for a minute, looking across the stream at the deer.

“A bit rum, repeating all this ancient history,” he said with a sound of finality. I could see how uncomfortable it made him, but I was certainly not going to let British reticence get in the way of a chance like this. I hadn’t been able to get anything useful out of Perdita, but if I could get Geoffrey to open up to me, now I had him started, he might inadvertently hand me the key to Peter’s jail cell.

I was startled to hear him pick up that very subject, as if he had read my mind.

“Do you know, I see in Peter the same enthusiasm, the same willingness to take chances that we all had then. His book is full of daring conjectures, exciting new interpretations, quite like the writings of the Elizabethans themselves. They were a bold lot, in and out of prison for their audacious opinions, killing one another in duels, challenging all the contemporary mores—and we, their interpreters, have lived long enough to become conservative, conventional, wary of new ideas! I quite wanted Peter to be named head, you know. Spoke to Cyril about it, but he didn’t want to be the one to change the whole direction of the program, take power out of the hands of the old boys. If only the poor lad hadn’t allowed himself to be goaded into precipitate action, he would have won recognition another day.”

“
You
don’t think he did it, surely? You were his mentor!”

He looked at me with surprise. “Is there reason to hope he’s innocent, then? I’d heard the police are convinced of his guilt.”

“Who cares about them?” I exclaimed impatiently. “All they want is to get the case off their books. It’s his friends who have to find the evidence that will save him. You’re his friend, aren’t you, Geoffrey?”

“Of course, of course I am! But I don’t see how—”

“Then tell me more ancient history. The real reason for the murder could lie somewhere in Edgar’s past. I know it’s a long shot, but we have to try everything.”

“Really, I—What can I tell you that could possibly help?”

“How did Edgar come to marry Perdita? He didn’t seem to love her at all.”

“That couldn’t be relevant to his death,” he said shortly.

“Oh, come on, Geoffrey! Don’t you want to help Peter? Do you want him shut up in some prison for the rest of his life?”

“Of course not, but—Well, Edgar Stone made a dead set at Perdita, and when she—They were married before the end of our last term.” His face was growing redder by the sentence. It wasn’t hard to guess why. Edgar must have got her pregnant and had to marry her. “We all scattered after graduation, teaching in various schools. Edgar and Perdita went to Tyneford, sixty or seventy miles from Oxford, where he taught in a preparatory school. It’s since closed down, I understand.”

“Didn’t Perdita get a positon too, with her brilliant mind and all?”

“They had a child. He had certain needs—She gave up her career to care for him.”

“Simon,” I said softly.

“Yes. Look, Mrs.—er—I simply cannot discuss these things further.” He stood still again, looking at the ground. “I’ve no right to violate the privacy of my friends, anxious though I naturally am to help Peter. Now, I wish you would look to the left, at those small purple flowers in the grass. Do you see them? Those are very rare wildflowers, fritillaria they’re called, extinct in the wild. Magdalen is famous for its little colony.”

I looked bleakly at the bright dots in the grass, nodding in the chilly breeze that had sprung up.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right, I’ve got no business asking you for details about people’s personal lives. I’m just scrabbling around desperately for something, anything, that might save him!”

“I quite understand,” he mumbled. “I only wish I could give it you.”

Eventually we came to the end of the path and went through a scrolly blue gate, along the serene cloisters of Magdalen, and out into the mayhem of High Street traffic. Geoffrey led me across the street and down a lane between college buildings, and then through another gate. Now we were on a wider path, turning at a shady bend of the river into a broad open meadow. To the right, across a playing field, rose the pale medieval buildings of Christ Church College, and to the left a little herd of black and white steers grazed the meadow grass, oblivious to tourists and students, who were much more numerous here than on Addison’s Walk.

“That’s Christ Church Meadow,” Geoffrey said determinedly, “and this is called the Broad Walk. The little alley of trees over there was planted by Dean Liddell, whose daughter was—”

“Yes, I know, Alice in Wonderland,” I finished for him. “It’s very kind of you, but I’m not in the mood for sightseeing right now. I think I’ll just go home and heat a can of soup. But thank you for showing me the gardens, and I apologize again for quizzing you.”

I held out my hand and he took it in his big paw. “Not at all, not at all. It’s really most admirable of you to take up Peter’s cause like this. I say, why don’t you join my colleagues and me for supper this evening? We’ll be dining at High Table in the Great Hall, and people often bring guests. You might find the experience interesting, and I assure you the victuals will be better than any tinned soup.”

I allowed myself to be persuaded. “High Table in the Great Hall” sounded like an experience not to be missed, and besides, it would be another chance to ask questions that might lead somewhere. Almost immediately, while he gave me directions and a time, it occurred to me that I had nothing to wear to such a grand-sounding event. I had ended up throwing the red dress away, knowing it was no use taking it to Oxfam, the British equivalent of Good Will, with that indelible stain all over it. So when we parted at the end of the Broad Walk, instead of crossing to Emily’s I turned to the right and hurried up St. Aldate’s toward Debenham’s Department Store.

I didn’t seem to have learned anything that would be helpful to Peter, I mused while pushing back dresses on the racks. I’d only got to know and like Geoffrey better, and to appreciate how disturbed Perdita Stone really was. At least, she seemed to be. Something bothered me about her behavior, maybe a bit too much Lady Macbeth? That business about the blood on the wall, for example. And how could anyone sleep while bloody murder was being committed downstairs, and not hear a thing?

I wondered, too, why she kept saying Edgar had killed the child, Simon. If he had done such a thing, why wasn’t he in jail? Why was Perdita the only one who talked about it, while the others always looked embarrassed? Nasty as Edgar had been, it was a stretch to imagine any man deliberately murdering his own little boy, much less getting away with it.

Then I came upon the perfect dress, not too formal but respectful of the occasion, and trotted off to the fitting room, abandoning detection temporarily for the nervous decisions about shoes and jewelry that women have to make on such occasions.

Trust me, Plantagenet, these Oxford schools

Are richly seated near the river-side…

The town gorgeous with high-built colleges,

And scholars seemly in their grave attire,

Learned in searching principles of art.

—Robert Greene,
The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bongay

H
ow tragic that Peter can’t be here for this lovely Dover sole! I believe it’s his favorite dish. One doesn’t want to think what sort of dinner he’s having in that prison.”

The two men, Cyril Aubrey and Geoffrey Pidgeon, murmured agreement to Dorothy Shipton’s lament. I leaned back in my ornate Jacobean armchair and let my eyes roam over the Great Hall.

It was an impressive room, carrying out the Roman motif typical of eighteenth-century Adam buildings, with round stone pillars at the corners and dark paneled walls richly carved in swags of wooden fruit. Classical stone heads gazed down at us from above the big, leaded windows at either end of the room. The stone floor echoed the sounds of chairs scraping and the shoes of formally dressed servers clacking among the long trestle tables. The place was full of students producing a loud but civilized murmur of voices and clinking of tableware and glasses. Most of them were dressed, like my dinner companions, in the black gowns that I always thought of as graduation outfits, but a few wore street clothes.

“Is there a reason some students wear gowns and others don’t?” I asked idly.

A sigh went round the table. Cyril Aubrey answered me sadly, “Actually, subfusc—the scholar’s gown, with a dark suit under—is required for dinner in Hall, as well as on ceremonial occasions and at exams. But there is strong sentiment among the undergraduates to abolish that requirement.”

“No respect for tradition,” Dorothy grumbled. “Come to Hall in blue jeans, if they could!”

“Quite,” Cyril agreed. “Well, the world
is
changing—if perhaps too rapidly for some of us. Subfusc has already been abolished at Cambridge, you know.”

“Kind of a shame,” I said. “It’s such a distinctive part of the college scene.”

“The ones wearing street clothes tonight are expressing solidarity with the movement for abolition, you see,” Geoffrey put in. “We’ve decided it’s not worth a fight. It would only lead to demonstrations and the like, and they’re bound to have their way in the end, aren’t they?”

“ ‘Now all the youth of England are on fire,’ and why? To force even the most solemn precincts to accept their denims and underwear tops!” Dorothy declaimed.

The men chorused, “
Henry V!”
and smiled their congratulations on the aptness of her quotation.

The five of us sat at our own table on a platform slightly above and at right angles to the other tables. I’d felt at first like an actor on a stage, until I realized the kids were paying no attention at all to us. There had been sherry in the Senior Common Room before the walk across the quad, and now, with the fish, a bottle of chablis was moving around the table. I was beginning to feel kind of mellow, so I counted five minutes by the pendulum clock on the far wall before taking another sip of wine. It would be too humiliating to get silly in front of these erudite people, although
they
didn’t seem to be counting. And I did want to stay alert, in case any information useful to Peter should drift my way.

“Tom and Gemma not joining us?” Cyril asked.

“Apparently not,” Dorothy said gruffly. “They’ve become very thick again, off in corners at every chance. We shall have to speak to them, they really should put in an appearance at least once a week.”

“Edgar’s death has certainly changed their lives,” I ventured to remark.

“Alas, poor Edgar,” said Cyril Aubrey, and startled me by launching into iambic pentameter.

Geoffrey muttered grudgingly, “I suppose one
could
describe him as ‘learnéd.’ ”

“Come along, Pidgeon,” said Aubrey, “one cannot deny he was a good scholar, and I for one still believe he would have made an excellent head of faculty.”

Geoffrey burst out, “He would have been a disaster for this house!”

“There, now,” Dorothy put in quickly, “what’s the good wrangling over that? It’s done with. Have you begun thinking which of us will be your replacement now, Aubrey?”

“Not just yet,” he answered, refilling his glass. “Disrespectful of poor old Stone, you know, and I don’t think the rest of us need any further disruption just now. Ann and I must just put off our plans, and stay on until a better time.”

“Was that quotation from the Other Fellow too?” I asked him. “The one about ‘Apollo’s laurel-bough’?”

“Christopher Marlowe, actually,” Aubrey replied. “
Dr. Faustus
.”

“But the O.F.’s famous line on Marlowe’s murder could certainly be said to have some relevance,” said Dorothy. “ ‘A great reckoning in a little room.’ And who would have thought Peter, of all people, would exact a reckoning in blood?”

“He didn’t, you know,” I said doggedly.

“I assure you, my dear lady,” said Dorothy, “we don’t want to believe it—but the evidence seems incontrovertible! I mean to say, that telephone call—”

“There’s some other explanation for that,” I said, “and I’m going to find out what it is. No matter how long it takes or how hard it gets, I’m going to find out what really happened.”

“Certainly we hope you will!” said Aubrey heartily. “Well. Perhaps not the most suitable subject for High Table. Are you partial to Dover sole, Mrs.—er, Catherine?”

It was obvious that the recent unpleasantness was not going to be allowed to dominate the conversation. But after I had expressed my feelings about the very tasty fish, Dorothy skirted the edge of it again.

“Do you know, Aubrey, Geoffrey says Perdita is planning to sell all Edgar’s books? Isn’t there some way to dissuade her? Surely the college should have that collection.”

“I agree, of course,” Aubrey answered, “but I should be willing to wager any opposition to her plans will only harden her resolve. My wife tells me her mental state seems to be deteriorating.”

“No, no, not at all,” Geoffrey put in quickly. “I’ve spent far more time with her than Ann has since the incident, and I see definite signs of improvement. Got a bee in her bonnet at the moment about moving back to their old house at Tynesford, but that will pass.”

“Come along, Pidgeon!” Dorothy said impatiently. “She’ll never be well again. You must face facts. It’s not only the thing about Simon, or the sick relationship she developed with Edgar—Perdita was always on the edge, even when she was young.”

“She only had the artistic temperament,” he said indignantly, “but she’s as capable of being rational, and happy, as anyone—given time, and the kindness Edgar was never willing to expend.”

“My dear fellow, you are preparing to devote your life to a hopeless cause,” Dorothy persisted with some irritation. “You must give her up.”

Cyril Aubrey said, almost under his breath, “Give her up, give her up, oh give her up!” We all looked at him in surprise, and saw a diffident smile spreading over his face. Then, to my bewilderment, Dorothy burst out laughing, and even Geoffrey smiled, if reluctantly.

“Sorry, old fellow,” Aubrey said to him. “Couldn’t resist. Come along, let’s drop these unpleasant subjects and enjoy our dinner. But look, amazement on our visitor sits. That ‘give her up’ was rather a fateful line from an old play called
Vortigern,
you see. Amusing story, if you’d care to hear it.”

“I’m determined to hear it, now!”

“One of Aubrey’s techniques for defusing tensions within our little group,” Dorothy told me, “coming along with a bit of a joke. Yes,
Vortigern
was thought in the eighteenth century to be by the Other Fellow, but it was actually forged by a nineteen-year-old boy.”

“Extraordinary,” Cyril went on, “how all the literary lights of the day leaped to believe young William Henry Ireland had
found
all these documents—Shakespeare’s mortgage, an IOU, a ‘love effusion’ to Anne Hathaway.”

“Yes,” said Dorothy, “that last one contains my favorite passage of the lot:

A laugh went round the table that made some of the undergraduates glance up at us.

“People really believed Shakepeare wrote that kind of doggerel?” I asked.

“Not so surprising really,” said Geoffrey. “People in those days idolized him in a completely irrational way. That’s when the people of Stratford began making a nice living selling mementos of their favorite son. One wheel-wright sold all sorts of things made from the wood of a crabapple tree under which he claimed Shakespeare had passed out drunk.”

“No different today,” Dorothy put in, “when fans tear pieces off the clothes of their musical and film idols.”

“Or the enthusiasm for saints’ relics in the Middle Ages,” Aubrey said, “which also gave entrepreneurs a chance to profit by manufacture. There seems to be an inborn human need to touch something that has been close to the person one reveres. People wanted to believe they were actually in the presence of Shakespeare’s mortgage, so they made themselves believe it. Young Ireland fooled Boswell, Edmund Burke, our own New College—”

“But when Sheridan produced
Vertigorn
at Drury Lane, the jig was up,” Geoffrey said. “The audience fell into fits of laughter at lines like the one Aubrey just quoted. Young Ireland finally confessed.”

“I’ve always rather felt the dint of pity for William Henry Ireland,” said Aubrey as the server replaced our fish with rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, brussels sprouts, and a bottle of Burgundy. “After all, the supposed experts who were fooled revealed themselves unable to tell good poetry from bad. Apart from embarrassing them, Young Ireland didn’t hurt anyone.”

“Any forgery hurts the cause of scholarship,” Dorothy said decidedly. “But you’re right, of course, in that the literati who were deceived revealed themselves to be poetically tone-deaf. Now, it would be impossible to bring off a trick like that today, but only because modern science could detect it. People like the deconstructionists in this very university deliberately denigrate the aesthetic value of literature, call it merely subjective. I’ve no doubt they could be taken in as easily as Edmund Burke was!”

“I hope all this history isn’t boring you,” Aubrey said to me with a smile.

“Not at all,” I replied, putting my hand over the wine-glass as he went to fill it. “What happened to young Ireland?”

“Ah well, he became old Ireland,” he answered, “publishing unsuccessful novels, in and out of debtor’s prison. If he’d been able to resist trying his hand at the theater, he might have lived in honor and prosperity on the proceeds of his forgeries. But it’s hard for the young to resist a chance at the theatrical world. After all, none of us could! Of course, the only one who had any genuine talent was Perdita.”

“Great waste, that she didn’t pursue it,” Dorothy said.

Geoffrey’s voice deepened with emotion. “Do you remember her Hedda Gabler?”

“Of course,” Aubrey answered. “No one who saw it will ever forget it. A really catlike ferocity in those last scenes. But not a patch on her Ralph in
The Knight of the Burning Pestle
!” They all murmured agreement.

“Ralph?” I said in surprise, pronouncing it in the English way as he had: “Rafe.”

“Ah, yes,” said Geoffrey eagerly. “That production is legendary in the annals of OUDS. Are you familiar with the play?”

“Never heard of it,” I had to admit.

“Oh, a marvelous piece!” Dorothy exclaimed, pouring herself another glass of wine. Amazingly, she showed no effects from the previous ones. “Still hilarious after almost four centuries. Beaumont and Fletcher’s best-known work.”

“Point of fact, it’s being done this season at the Globe in London,” Geoffrey put in. “It’s a satire of the popular romances of the time, with a grocer’s apprentice named Ralph thrust into the hero’s role by a series of incidents too complicated to tell now. He’s rather a send-up of Don Quixote, you see, although he’s just a lumbering, well-intentioned boy. Actors playing his master and his wife sit among the audience, cheering him on.”

“At the curtain call, when Perdita came out and pulled off her boy’s wig, her long black hair tumbling over her shoulders, and thanked them in her normal voice instead of the masculine voice she’d assumed, the audience suddenly realized that a girl had played the part,” Cyril said. “At first a collective gasp went up, and then this tremendous eruption of applause. They had never guessed.”

“Yes,” I said slowly, “you wouldn’t guess. She’d only have to lower her voice a little.”

“That wasn’t the only male part she played,” Cyril went on. “In fact, she became well known for them. I remember how she studied recordings of a particular male actor for each part, until she could imitate him perfectly—Albert Finney, I believe, was her model for Ralph. Ah, that first time, though, that was a great experience. I played the grocer, and was onstage with her when the gasp went up. Of course, she was also impressive in women’s parts. I played Antony to her Cleopatra, and Benedick to her Beatrice. Ah, well, long ago, long ago,” he ended, looking at the others with a sad little smile, and they nodded solemnly.

The servers cleared away again and brought sherbet and port, which I was definitely not going to try. I felt much too relaxed as it was, my mind slower than I’d have liked at processing information, although I was sure I’d just heard something important.