What Time Devours (13 page)

Thomas frowned.

David Escolme had planned to meet Thomas here, specifically in Poets’ Corner, before he had been shot and dumped in the gray waters of Lake Michigan. Here were buried literary luminaries from Chaucer and Spenser to Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, but the place was also crowded with monuments to people buried elsewhere. Among these was an eighteenth-century statue of a slick-looking Shakespeare on the east wall. Thomas considered it and wondered, not for the first time, what in the name of God he was doing here.

Escolme was dead, so the idea of fulfilling the rendezvous was uselessly sentimental at best. On the plane over he had flirted with the idea that someone else would arrive in Escolme’s place and lead him on some
Indiana Jones
-esque procession of revelations through the secret parts of the abbey, but this was pure fantasy. Thomas had arrived like all the other tourists and there was no one here to meet him or explain what he was supposed to do—or see—next. If Escolme had something in mind that he wanted to show him, Thomas would never find it alone, and it was more likely that his former student had chosen the place simply because it was a convenient location that smacked of art and seriousness: a fitting place to discuss the history of a lost and probably mythical Shakespeare manuscript.

All this he had known before, so the question of what he was doing here was a real one. He’d had no contact with Escolme for the best part of a decade, and when his former pupil had reentered his life it had been trailing a mesh of lies designed to ensnare him. That the kid had wound up dead was not Thomas’s fault. He reminded himself that he owed Escolme nothing.

But here he was.

The fact was that Thomas was bound to David Escolme in life and now in death. There was, after all, the rash, childish note he had left for all to see, the scribbling that, perhaps, had given the killer Escolme’s name . . . So yes, Thomas and his former student were bound together, and his old need to know the roots of things had been joined by something hard and chill, something in addition to the outrage, the need for closure and a sense of justice. Now it was mostly a sense of responsibility.

How could it not be? Shakespeare was woven into his life, had very nearly been the sole focus of his professional identity. Of course it was a part of him. To find a previously unknown play would be extraordinary. Escolme might have been interested in the money, but for Thomas the value of the thing would be in the words. To find it would make him the cultural hero of his age. He would be able to walk into those Shakespeare conferences, and the scholars—the very people who had said he couldn’t be one of their esteemed number—would applaud and smile and honor him . . .

And you’d show that you really were as good as them after all?
said the voice in his head with caustic amusement.

Thomas smiled bleakly.

“Okay,” he muttered, “so I have some unresolved issues with academia.”

Which was all very well, but standing here in this great shrine and mausoleum, Thomas had no idea where to start. He stared at the marble statue of Shakespeare, who was leaning in an improbable fashion on a stack of books but facing outward, one finger smugly indicating a handful of lines from
The Tempest
:

 

The Great Globe itself was not simply the earth, of course, but the theater in which the lines had first been uttered. Otherwise, of course, the statue invoked Shakespeare the poet—the thinker with his books—rather than the man of the theater, though the posture of the figure was, perhaps, deliberately stagey.

“He’s not buried here, of course,” said a voice at Thomas’s elbow.

He turned to find a man in a black cassock beside him, a verger of the abbey. He had pale, waxy skin and unfashionably long black hair that broke in waves about his shoulders. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. His voice was soft, reverential, and his face earnest. He considered Thomas’s sling for a moment and then looked back to his face.

“Yes,” said Thomas. “He was buried in Stratford, right?”

“At Holy Trinity church. Yes,” said the verger. “This monument was erected in 1740.”

“That would explain it,” said Thomas.

“Yes, he is a bit of a dandy, isn’t he?” said the verger, eyes on the statue. “Was there something in particular you were looking for? I couldn’t help but notice you seemed to be drifting. Of course, I see a lot of that, and it’s better than some of the alternatives.”

“Alternatives?”

“Oh, we’re on the
Da Vinci Code
tour now,” he said, sighing.

“Really?” said Thomas.

“Oh yes. There’s a scene in the book set at Isaac Newton’s tomb. A spurious clue of some sort.”

“Intentionally spurious?”

“You know,” said the verger, perplexed, “I’m not sure. Fiction is fiction, of course, which is what makes it fun, but there’s a point at which the pretense that fiction is really fact goes beyond marketing and becomes merely . . .” He sought for the word.

“Deception?” Thomas supplied.

The verger flashed a sudden and secret grin.

“You know, they wanted to use the abbey in the film version,” he added.

“And did they?”

“Did we let them use a Christian church to make a movie about why Christianity was a lie?” said the verger, one eyebrow arched. “Astonishingly, no. I think they used Lincoln Cathedral. God alone knows what the bishop was thinking—or at least I hope he does—though I think that the hundred thousand pounds for the church restoration fund was probably a factor. Ironic, wouldn’t you say? Some might feel that repairing the roof at the expense of the foundations was a bit steep, but such is life in the twenty-first century. We have some leaflets about the mistakes in the book, if you’d like one. I don’t think the theological errors are worth discussing, but one should at least get the facts right, don’t you think?”

“I guess so,” Thomas smiled.

“Still,” said the verger, flashing that schoolboy grin again, “it was a cracking good read, and I was never a fan of Opus Dei.”

“I was looking for a David Escolme,” said Thomas, on impulse.

The verger’s brow furrowed.

“Is he buried here?” said the verger, fishing a battered index from his robes.

“No,” said Thomas, pleased by the man’s eagerness to help. “I was supposed to meet him here, but . . . I think there’s something here he wanted to show me.”

The verger glanced at the stone floor beneath them, each polished stone flag engraved with a name and epitaph, each one resonating in Thomas’s mind like distant bells: Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll of
Alice
. . .

“Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s friend and fellow dramatist, is buried here,” said the verger. “He was allotted only eighteen inches of space, so they had to bury him standing up. He had killed a fellow actor, after all. There’s a plaque here, but he’s buried in the northern aisle of the nave . . .”

Thomas was nodding, but his heart wasn’t in it and the verger could tell.

“I’m sorry,” said Thomas. “As an American, I find this all a bit ...”

“Undemocratic?”

“I was going to say
overwhelming
,” said Thomas, smiling.

“Yes, I think most people feel that way, regardless of where they are from. We have memorial stones to many famous Americans here too. Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Junior, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, though we’ve rather claimed him for the crown at this point.” The verger smiled again.

“Are there people from other countries buried here?” said Thomas.

“In Poets’ Corner? No. This is rather a monument to Britishness, I’m afraid,” said the verger. “I think there’s only one non-Englishman buried here, a Frenchman.”

“A writer?”

“Yes,” said the verger, “though I think
man of letters
might be a better description, and I think he is best known—in this country at least—for who he knew. Charles de St. Denis, an exiled lord from the court of Louis the Fourteenth. A friend of Moliere’s, I believe. Hold on, it’s here somewhere.”

The verger steered him around, his head tipped up, till he found the plaque he was looking for.

“Ah,” he said. “That’s the one.”

Thomas looked up out of politeness rather than curiosity and found a white marble tablet with a shield and flaming torches. The text was in Latin, the bold caps proclaiming the deceased’s name as Carolus de St. Denis.

“Carolus is Charles, of course,” said the verger. He gave Thomas a considering look. “Not what you were looking for, I fear.”

“You’ve been most kind,” said Thomas. “I wish I knew what it was I was looking for.”

“Perhaps you’d prefer something less historical and more spiritual,” said the verger.

“What do you mean?”

“I said you seemed lost, but I’m not sure it’s the kind of
lost
you escape with a map and a guide book.”

Thomas looked at the floor.

“I’m sorry,” said the verger. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Thomas. “I just kind of have to find something. For an old friend.”

The verger’s eyes said he knew there was more to it, but he nodded and smiled seriously, even a little sadly, and Thomas was grateful for not having to say anything else.

There had to have been a reason Escolme had wanted to meet him here, something he had wanted Thomas to see. In so vast a place it was easily possible, even likely, that Thomas had missed whatever it was he was supposed to have found, but he was more troubled by the idea that he had in fact seen it and missed its significance. He would have to come back, but he had other questions to ask first.

CHAPTER 25

The tabloid headlines were a week old, but that didn’t mute their shrillness. BRIT NOVELIST BUTCHERED IN STATES, screamed
The Sun
. MURDERED TALENT, said
The Daily Mail
. CRIME WRITER TURNS VICTIM, crowed
The People
. The stories themselves alternated between the sensational and the maudlin, though the papers had been unable to produce the obligatory grieving relatives, and within a couple of days the only sentiment they could muster was wrung from fans outraged that Daniella Blackstone would be writing no more books. There was also a grumbling undercurrent of anti-American feeling throughout, Thomas thought: if only she hadn’t crossed the Atlantic, they seemed to say, none of this would have happened.

Thomas was scanning the stories on a computer at the British Library next to Saint Pancras, looking for anything of substance that would keep him informed as to how the case was progressing. He might be able to get a little out of Polinski if he called, but he would prefer not to announce to her that he was out of the country just yet. The Chicago papers had said little after the first announcement of the murder, but their English counterparts had seized on it as a matter of national importance. Or at least, they had tried to. No one had come forward to spill Daniella’s secrets, her husband had died in a car accident ten years before, there were no bereaved children at her graveside, and Elsbeth Church, her erstwhile writing partner, was refusing to comment. Within a few days, the story’s energy had stalled, and with no new revelations—about the case or the victim—the papers had moved on. A missing ten-year-old girl seemed to be stirring national outrage at present, particularly because she had vanished on vacation in Spain, and that seemed to generate rather more of what Thomas supposed was still called “human interest.” It made his skin crawl.

There were two pieces of information on Blackstone that he didn’t already know. The first concerned her family, and it was all about absence. Her parents were dead, her husband likewise, and she had no children, her only daughter having perished in what the papers called “a tragic fire” at the age of sixteen. One feature article used this information to sketch Blackstone as both tragic and faintly vampiric: a sinister figure (
those eyes!
) with a taste for the macabre—as manifested in her stories—who had lived under the shadow of death all her life, till it finally took her.

The second piece of information was a picture of a grand eighteenth-century house at the head of a gravel road through rough, green pasture. This was the house in which the novelist had lived. It was in Kenilworth, near Warwick, and though there was no address, it was “in sight of the castle.” That, Thomas thought, should be good enough.

He took the underground—the tube—from King’s Cross to Euston and a mainline train past the backs of houses and Warwickshire fields, to Coventry, followed by a bus to Kenilworth. The whole trip took less than two hours. If he had stayed on the bus, it would have taken him on to Warwick and then Stratford. Was it a coincidence that Blackstone had lived so close to Shakespeare’s birthplace? Probably, but if
Love’s Labour’s Won
really existed, it made a kind of sense that it had found its way here. It could have been the author’s own copy, given to someone local, or inherited and then forgotten . . .

Thomas scowled out of the bus window. He hadn’t even told Kumi he was coming. He’d driven straight to O’Hare from the beach where he’d left Polinski and the body of David Escolme, pausing only to grab a bag of clothes and toiletries from home and load up his prescription pain meds at the CVS, as if he were on some urgent mission. Now he was a world away, his body bruised so that it was impossible to get comfortable in the bus seat—the flight had been a nightmare—in a place that was both familiar and strange. At least in Japan the absolute foreignness of the place had announced itself in everything. Here everything was only slightly unfamiliar—the voices and their language, the cars, the fields, the grown men in soccer shirts—as if the universe had twisted slightly on its axis and reality had distorted.