What Time Devours (15 page)

The bookcases would have been grand if they had been lined with leather-bound volumes of purpose and antiquity, but they were stuffed with beaten-up paperbacks of all shape and color. The only hardcovers he could see looked like her own, pushed off into a corner below the window where they sat, apparently unhandled. Thomas drew a couple out and flipped through them. The room was absolutely silent.

Blackstone and Church books were an odd hybrid combining the British equivalent of the police procedural mystery with the ghosts and vampires of horror. Stylistically they were flowery and overblown, full of purple prose and Dickensian grandiloquence but smart and atmospheric. Thomas selected
The Blood Rose
and thumbed through it. He remembered a scene in which the intrepid inspector had been cornered in a misty churchyard by a killer whose mortality was by no means assured. It had kept him up late into the night, and though he had smiled at it for much of the next day, the spectral murderess had stalked his dreams. He found the section of the book now and felt the hairs on his neck bristle, so that for a moment he forgot that the steward could return at any moment.

The rest of the books were in the same genre, or variants of it, most more firmly grounded on one side or other of the supernatural divide: P. D. James and Ruth Rendell over here, Stephen King and Ray Bradbury there. This, apparently, was where Daniella kept up with the competition. There was no Shakespeare here at all.

Thomas checked the hall, but there was no sign of the steward.

The other rooms downstairs were even less instructive. They were austere and a little fussy in a Victorian way: lots of dark oak and lace, a few family portraits in oil, only one of which was twentieth century. It hung over the stone fireplace in the sitting room and depicted a young man, blond, with what Thomas thought of as an Errol Flynn mustache. He was in some kind of khaki military uniform with brass buttons and cradled a flat peaked cap with a badge in one hand. A large pistol in a flapped leather holster was slung across his chest. He looked like an officer, though Thomas didn’t know enough about such things to be sure, and it was only the apparent age of the painting and the stiffness of the pose that made him think it was First World War, not Second. The man himself looked cocky, self-assured, but whether it had been painted before, during, or after his military service, Thomas had no way of knowing.

He doubled back toward the kitchen and could hear the steward making occasional and inaudible remarks into the phone. Thomas tried the first door he saw. It opened into a stone staircase that descended into what was now a cellar with racks of wine and champagne—all bearing the Saint Evremond name. Thomas suspected the place had once been a coal house. The floor had been swept clean, but there was a persistent black sparkle in the walls where the coal had been heaped. He looked up and saw a hatch at one end of the room where light showed through the cracks.

Nothing here.

He retraced his steps to the main lobby, moving quietly, listening, then climbed a slow half-spiral staircase, trailing his hand along a heavy oaken handrail polished slick with age and use till it was barely recognizable as wood. He wandered from room to room, finding more of the nineteenth-century fussiness, though here there were more concessions to modern comforts. The bed was an antique four-poster, but the mattress was new. The desk in the study was modern and solid and housed a state-of-the-art computer, while the antique writing desk in the corner looked like a museum piece and had seen about as much use. There were a few books, all modern, but—again—no Shakespeare of any vintage.

At one end of the landing a second flight of stairs doubled back and went up to a third level: the turret he had seen from the front. He went up, but the door at the top was heavy and locked shut. He felt above the lintel and found an old-fashioned key.

Sweet
.

He was putting it into the lock, trying to work it with his clumsy left hand, when a voice behind him stopped him cold.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

The steward was standing on the landing below, and his face was hard.

“What is in there?” said Thomas, trying to sound casual.

“That would be Miss Alice’s room.”

He said it as if this should be explanation enough.

“Could I have a look inside?” said Thomas.

“No. I told you to wait for me downstairs.”

“Does Miss Alice still live there?” said Thomas, ignoring the man’s hostility. Perhaps Blackstone had had what they used to call a “companion.” Her husband was, after all, long dead.

“Miss Alice was her daughter,” said the other, and his cloudy eyes flashed as if Thomas had said something offensive. “What magazine did you say you worked for?”

“I’m sorry,” said Thomas. “I forgot. We always tried to stay out of Miss Blackstone’s personal tragedy.”

“And yet here you are.”

There was a pause.

“The key, please,” said the steward.

He extended his hand without taking a step, and Thomas had to come down to him. Thomas stretched out his left hand, twisting his body so that the pain in his shoulder flared. The steward noticed and his head cocked with interest, even amusement.

“Been in the wars, Mr. Knight?” he said.

“Walked into a door,” said Thomas.

“And now you can walk out of one.”

With the key in his fist, the steward turned and walked away, descending the stairs so quickly that Thomas had to jog to keep up.

He entered the office by the kitchen, where a wooden table sat beneath a rack of pans. The room was immaculate, but dim as the rest of the house and cool. There was a crate beside the table, its wood branded with the Saint Evremond crest. Above it was a board hung with keys. The steward hung the key in place and turned to Thomas. His face was still blank, but the muscles of his jaw were taut and his eyes were hard.

“Miss Blackstone liked her champagne,” Thomas said, nodding at the crate.

It was the wrong thing to say.

“She liked many fine things in moderation,” said the other, pointedly. Thomas could think of nothing to say.

“I’ll see you out,” said the steward.

At the door he added, “Oh, and Mr. Knight?”

“Yes?” said Thomas, turning to him.

“Don’t come back, there’s a good chap.”

The steward’s unblinking eyes held Thomas until the door swung heavily into place with a deep snap that resounded through the house.

CHAPTER 28

The University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute is located in Mason Croft, a sprawling two-story brick building on Church Street in Stratford that was once home to the novelist Marie Corelli. Located minutes from the properties most definitively associated with Shakespeare—his birthplace, the house he bought and lived in, the school he attended, and the church that housed his bones—it provided a unique focus for academic study and periodic conferences. It was here that Julia McBride, Randall Dagenhart, and a score of other Shakespeareans had gathered for a special week of seminars and lectures with their colleagues and students, a conference unshackled by the usual rules of the International Shakespeare Conference, which, as Julia had pointed out, did not permit graduate students to present. Thomas wondered if the professional Shakespeareans felt the aura of pilgrimage that haunted the place, or if—as scholars schooled in the posthumanism of current literary criticism—they were immune to such romantic mysticism.

Thomas knew that the kind of anonymity he had experienced at the Chicago conference was out of the question at the institute, Mason Croft being big for a house, but not for a conference center. Still, he was surprised to find the front door locked. There was an old-fashioned bell pull. He tugged it.

A moment later, the door opened.

“Can I help you?”

The woman was large and tough-looking, middle-aged rather than elderly by sheer force of character: a woman used to weeding out people who didn’t belong. People like him.

“I was looking for the conference session,” he said, trying to look like a confused delegate and not like an interloper.

“There’s a guide to the institute with your registration materials. You are registered, I take it?”

In fact she didn’t
take it
at all. She knew he wasn’t, or she would be opening the door. Thomas opted for honesty.

“I’m not, actually,” he said. “But there was to be a session on early comedy that I really wanted to attend. Randall Dagenhart is speaking . . .”

“I’m sorry,” she said, crisp and patently not sorry, her back straightening. “The institute isn’t open to the public.”

“Yes, I realize that,” he said, forcing himself to be patient. “I was wondering if I could register for that one session. A kind of day pass, as it were.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “that’s out of the question. The sessions are all fully booked.”

“I can pay,” he said.

“No doubt,” she said, as if his offer had only proved his crassness, “but that really isn’t the issue.”

“Yes,” he said, his smile hardening. “I can see how admitting one extra person might shake academia to its core. We wouldn’t want to share the mysteries of literary scholarship with the great unwashed . . .”

“Good day,” she said, stone-faced.

“Thank you so much,” he said. “It’s good to know knowledge is so well guarded.”

“There’s plenty of knowledge to be had elsewhere,” she said. “And you can always go and look at the ducks.”

Which should suit your brand of tourism
, she added only with her eyes.

“Is there a problem, Thomas?”

He turned into the arch smile of Julia McBride.

“You know this gentleman?” said the battle-ax, with barely concealed astonishment.

“Tom Knight and I go way back,” she said. “Mind if he sits in with me? He’s been looking forward to this session.”

“Not at all,” said the woman, her eyes hard. “It would be a shame not to share the mysteries of literary scholarship with . . . all who show an interest.”

She gave Thomas an icy stare and stalked away.

McBride giggled.

“That’s Mrs. Covington,” she said. “She’s a kind of house-keeper and local historian. But she’s also a self-appointed gatekeeper. She’s very deferential to Shakespeareans, but a bit fierce with the general public.”

“I spotted that,” said Thomas.

He was irritated, by the old woman and the fact that Julia had had to rescue him.

“Thanks,” he remembered to say. “I did want to hear this talk.”

“What happened to you?” she said, noting his sling.

“Fell,” he said. “No big deal.”

“Come with me,” she whispered, rolling her eyes. “If they try to throw you out, I’ll hide you under my chair.”

She took his left hand and led him, almost running, to the lecture. Her skin was soft and warm.

The room had been cozy once and still retained something of its former domesticity, but it still felt more like a Great Hall than a sitting room. There was a broad fireplace with a carved mantle painted white, and beside it a simple podium. The audience—Thomas counted twenty-three—were arranged on closely packed chairs. There were no vacant seats together and, with a moue of disappointment, McBride peeled off to the right while Thomas sat to the left, as close to the French windows at the back as he could get.

He sat between people he didn’t know, torn between regret and relief at having been separated from Julia McBride. Both feelings made him want to call Kumi, who did not know he was in England, did not know he had been shot. He had become used to being alone in the years since she had left him, but since their reconciliation—or partial reconciliation, he wasn’t yet sure what it was—they had talked at least once a week, usually more. He felt a crease of guilt for getting so preoccupied, and then wondered if she had missed his call or tried to reach him herself. If she was busy at work, she might not have noticed the silence. The thought bothered him, so he refocused his mind on what the lecture might be.

Cultural politics, probably. The nondiscovery—announced with gleeful righteousness—that we are more insightful on matters of gender, race, and class than Shakespeare was . . . There was an annoying whisper of truth to it, which made Thomas weary, confused, and disappointed. It sapped all the color out of literature, all the life and excitement and nuance. At least in the high school classroom the idea that literature communicated with the present, that it enriched the reader, was not obviously laughable.

The thought annoyed him as it had at the Drake conference, but before he could iron away the scowl on his face, the lecture began.

The speaker was introduced as Alonso Petersohn, associate professor of literature at Stanford, and his talk was titled “The virtue of your eye must break my oath: gendered ethos/ethic and the post-Lacanian subject in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
.” Petersohn was young and confident, a smallish man who dressed like a Hollywood studio executive—or at least, as Thomas imagined they dressed—in an open-necked silk shirt and some form of upmarket chinos with pleated fronts. He wore brown leather sandal-like shoes, all straps and thongs without socks, and a single earring with a bright blue stone. He spoke fluently in a well-modulated, expertly paced tone and was completely incomprehensible.

“The libidinal dynamism inherent in the Lacanian mirror stage,” Petersohn said, “is both a problematic as well as an ontological structure of the human world . . .”

Thomas considered the rest of the room with an inward sigh. He saw a few familiar faces, but other than McBride and Dagenhart—still in tweed and armed with his laptop—none he could put names to. Some—the very young—were obviously graduate students; a few—the very old—might have been local residents, ex-high school teachers, perhaps. As the talk continued, accumulating impenetrability, the young nodded seriously and made notes while the old looked blank or worried. Thomas was merely irritated. After a couple of minutes he had begun to shift in his seat indiscreetly. After twenty, he put his head in his hands.