Celestial Chess

by Thomas Bontly

  Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?

  Or why is this immortal that thou hast?

  Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

  These fragments I have shored against my

  ruins . . .

  Eliot, The Waste Land

  A March Sunday in Cambridge, 1962. As was our custom on Sundays, we took our luncheon not at High Table but down among the undergraduates on the long benches, where we encountered Professor Haverhill gloomily devouring his cold roast beef.

  “It was a shocking accident,” he said, reverting to the topic which had dominated College conversation for several days now. “Simply shocking. I don’t know where well ever find another librarian to match old Greggs.” A bit of mustard clung to his shaggy mustache and I glimpsed his bad teeth as he chewed.

  Archie Cavendish leaned across the table toward me, a glint of mockery in his bright blue eyes. “A horrid way to go, though, wasn’t it? Crushed beneath a giant concordance to the whole works of Shakespeare! My God, do you suppose the book had it in for Greggs? Some imagined affront, perhaps, or years of ill will? The academic life seems to have its hazards after all.”

  Professor Haverhill gave Archie a stare that would have withered a lesser man—or a wiser. “I should hardly consider the incident cause for mirth, Cavendish. Dr. Greggs was a fine man, a good scholar, and a credit to the College.” He bit ferociously into a green onion and the table was perfumed by his breath.

  Colin Douglas remarked that it was uncommonly fine weather for March and hoped that the clemency would extend into the week, for the upcoming “bumps.” Colin took a great interest in the College rowing club and none at all in Archie Cavendish.

  “I certainly meant no disrespect to Greggs’ memory,” Archie persisted. “Nevertheless, there’s a curious irony in the whole business—the great gray scholar, murdered by his books! Marvelously suggestive, I must say!”

  “Suggestive,” I asked, “of what?”

  “Oh, I leave that to you,” Archie said, “I simply wish to observe that the scholar’s life”—a quick glance at Haverhill—“is not as secure and settled as some of us have thought.’’

  Now I understood. Archie’s graduate work at Duke’s had been followed by a junior fellowship—a kind of probationary appointment in the College. Neither his research nor his wit had impressed the senior fellows, and Archie would be leaving Cambridge soon to take a chemistry master’s position in Yorkshire—a fate, I gathered from our late-night conversations, only slightly superior to Dr. Greggs’.

  We ate in silence for several minutes. The sunlight, coming through the great stained-glass windows behind us, threw pastel dabs on the long tables, on the darkly paneled walls and on the portraits of the stern-visaged patriarchs who watched over us. A blossom of pink light rested on Professor Haverhill’s knobby forehead like a friendly sprite. It skipped away when he turned to me.

  “I suppose, Fairchild, that this dreadful occurrence rather upsets your plans, as well.”

  “There’s nothing I can do,” I said, “until the Special Collections are reopened.”

  “Yes; that’s devilish awkward,” Haverhill said. “I’m afraid we’re in a bit of a bind there. You see, the original bequest which set up the Collections specifically states that none of the materials may be used save under the personal supervision of the librarian—and Dr. Greggs is sure to prove a hard man to replace. Our holdings are immensely valuable.”

  “Perhaps,” Colin Douglas said, “an exception could be made so that David can get on with his research. It is rather important to him, you know.”

  “And Fairchild’s work is of considerable interest to the College as well,” Professor Haverhill said. “Here we’ve had these manuscripts gathering dust all these years, simply because we haven’t had a man who could work with them—and now that we have such a man, we can’t let him get on with it. Were you making any progress?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I have some ideas I’m going to try out on Dr. Dilbey, who’s been kind enough to take an interest in the project.”

  “Good man, Dilbey,” said Haverhill. “He’ll keep your feet on the ground.”

  “But don’t you think something could be worked out vis-à-vis the Special Collections?” Colin asked. “David is only here for the year, and he’s already put a huge amount of work into those manuscripts.”

  I could see that Colin’s appeal carried considerable weight with Haverhill. Though an American himself, Colin had gained a permanent place at Duke’s and was highly regarded by all the senior fellows.

  “We’ll have to look into it,” Haverhill said. “There are possibilities, I expect, though I shouldn’t get my hopes up, Fairchild.”

  Having done his bit to aid a compatriot, Colin rose to his six feet and several inches. “I must be off, chaps. Want to catch the rowing practice this afternoon, and there’s a lady coming up from London I’ve promised to show around.”

  “Goodbye, Colin,” Haverhill said with that sweetness he reserved for young men of whom he approved. “You’ll be at our little concert this evening?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” Colin said. “See you all there.” And he was off, a latter-day Doug Fairbanks sweeping down the aisle, his black gown billowing behind him. I half expected that, upon reaching the stairway to the court, he would vault over the balustrade, brandishing a breadstick and singing out for the glory of Duke’s.

  Professor Haverhill began extricating his arthritic legs from the cunning trap of bench and table. ‘‘Well, Fairchild, I’ll look into it and see if there’s anything to be done. Goodbye now. Goodbye, Cavendish.”

  There was a note of finality in his farewell to Archie, who was needed in Yorkshire the very next term, the previous master having been injured in a laboratory prank.

  “What a couple of sticks,” Archie said, when Haverhill had hobbled off. “Old stick and young stick, but cut from the same bloody tree. Sometimes I wonder why I mind leaving this place at all. Perhaps where I’m going I shall encounter a few genuine human beings, anyway.”

  “I like that,” I said. “I’m not a genuine human being?”

  “Oh, you,” he said with a smile. “You don’t belong to this pompous lot any more than I do. That’s why we get along, I suppose; but I wouldn’t trust you alone with those manuscripts, either. You have the look of a born thief.”

  I liked Archie because of his wit, his futility, his disavowal of donnish sham, and because he alone, in his patronizing way, had been brave enough to befriend me when I first arrived in Cambridge. “Tell me—was Dr. Greggs really killed by a concordance to Shakespeare?’’

  Archie’s full, florid face was ignited by a grin. “You mean you hadn’t heard? I thought that story had got all over the College by now. Yes, Greggs was up on a ladder when one of the shelves collapsed. The books tumbled down on him, the concordance chief among them, and knocked him right off the ladder. Drop of some eight feet. The fall broke his neck, but the concordance, so the porter told me, landed plump on his noggin, and there they found it, the old boy’s head literally buried in a book! Extraordinary, hey?”

  I knew the accident had happened early in the morning, while the rest of the College was at breakfast. The library was still locked and Greggs, who had the bibliophile’s devotion to order, must have been straightening a row of books here and there, going up the ladder, down the ladder, from bookcase to bookcase, a harmless moth fluttering fussily among the lights he adored.

  “The library’s open again,” I said. “Let’s walk over. I’d like to take a look at the scene of the—’’

  “Crime?” Archie asked impishly.

  “Accident,” I said.

  Archie rose from the table, round and roguish, an over-grown leprechaun. “Are you thinking of bringing an action against the concordance, Fairchild? Perhaps you should, you know. These damned books must be kept in their places.”

  We left the hall, still in our gowns, and went down to the New Court. A timid March sun shone down
from a colorless sky and brought a faint blush to the high stone walls that surrounded us. A few undergraduates strolled the walks. Near the porter’s lodge, a party of tourists gazed up at the great Gothic spires of the chapel. I heard the insidious click of a camera as we passed and wondered into how many family photographs I’d been smuggled since I came to Cambridge. One gets used to that sort of thing, living, as it were, in a national shrine.

  We entered the library, which more than one tourist had mistaken for another chapel. There were stained-glass windows, Gothic masonry, rows and rows of ancient books, and at the back of its long nave, an iron gate with spiked tips, which sealed off that holy of holies, the Special Collections.

  Archie led me to a large, free-standing case of books not far from this gate and pointed to the top shelf, well above the ladder and a good fifteen feet above the floor, where I saw the famous concordance. The massive book looked down on us rather smugly—as if to say that whatever it had done before it could do again.

  A few scholars roamed the aisles or sat hunched over open volumes. The assistant librarians seemed even more wary and furtive than usual, as if they too detected some nebulous menace in the chilly, churchlike silence. I walked around behind the case and saw there was a ladder on this side as well, leading to a complementary set of shelves. There was a space of something less than three feet between the case and the wall. A single narrow window lighted the corridor, which was confronted on either end by bookshelves set flush against the wall.

  Archie poked around the corner. “What are you up to?’’

  “A cozy spot, isn’t it?” I asked him. “I suppose a man could hide back here, or up on that ladder . . .”

  Archie glanced up. “I suppose he could, but surely you’re not suggesting . . .”

  “These shelves have remained stable for centuries, haven’t they?”

  “Oh, scarcely centuries. The library was renovated, I believe, about 1880. Greggs must have lost his balance and grabbed for a shelf . . .”

  I took a closer look at one of the lower shelves. ‘‘Screws and brackets. It would take a giant to rip out one of these shelves—unless the screws had already been loosened.”

  “I’m sure the police took all that into account,” Archie said as we left the library. “The investigation’s been closed. At worst it could have been some wretched practical joke, but why on earth should anyone want to kill a harmless old drudge like Greggs?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But his death has had one certain consequence—closing the Special Collections.”

  “With all due respect to your work, I must say that smacks of paranoia. Those manuscripts have been lying about the library for centuries. Do you think the College would have let an American at them if there’d been a single soul in the British Isles seriously interested in the job?”

  Archie had a point. I had chosen to work on the Westchurch manuscripts largely because no one else seemed interested in them, and I’d never expected my research to lead to anything more substantial than a pleasant year abroad—until lately.

  ‘‘Duke’s has made it abundantly clear that I’m here as a migrant worker,” I said. “As soon as I’ve harvested the crop, I’ll be shipped back to the States; but those manuscripts may turn out to be more important than anyone could have imagined.’’

  Archie pulled up. “Fairchild, you were becoming damned mysterious about your work even before Greggs was killed. Have you actually discovered something important in those papers?”

  A pair of undergraduates gazed curiously at us and I waited until they had passed. “There’s still a ton of work to be done. Those texts haven’t had any serious scrutiny since old Throcknagle of Yale dismissed them as ‘addle-pated allegorizing’ some thirty years ago. Throcknagle’s reputation is immense, but I’ve discovered some rather crucial errors in his monograph. And shortly before I left the States I talked to a former student of his, who said the old boy absolutely refused to discuss the Westchurch manuscripts—as if he found the whole subject repugnant.”

  “Our manuscripts—repugnant?”

  Archie’s loyalty was tragic, but endearing.

  “They deal with some pretty grim subjects,” I said. “Mostly treatises on the occult arts—astrology, alchemy, sorcery, demonology. Even an ancient Islamic text on chess. Once you get into those texts, they begin to exert a nearly hypnotic influence on your whole outlook. Some people might find it distressing—though I don’t, particularly.”

  Archie smiled and said, “Just your cup of tea, I’ll wager. But what’s so important about a lot of mystical speculation?”

  “I’m convinced that Throcknagle bungled the dating on these manuscripts, when he put them all in the mid-thirteenth century. There’s at least one—a long and excellent poem—which is much earlier. On the basis of syntax alone, it had to have been written in the twelfth century.”

  “And that could be important?”

  “Extremely important. The literary histories all say that the English language went underground after the Norman Conquest—that it was spoken only by illiterate peasants for nearly two hundred years. To come up with such a neglected masterpiece—in a period where there isn’t supposed to be any English literature of significance—well, that would oblige us to rewrite the literary history of the entire Middle Ages.”

  “Quite a coup for one so young. And who is this giant of English verse? Anyone I ever heard of ?”

  “The poem is anonymous. Also maddeningly obscure. I can see why Throcknagle lost patience with it, but I’m going to make sense of that poem, and then the Throcknaglians of scholarship will sit up and take notice.”

  “More power to you, old boy. But I still don’t understand—if someone was determined to interrupt your work, why didn’t they kill you instead of poor Greggs—who was really, you know, an excellent librarian?”

  We had paused outside Archie’s staircase, and I looked up at the hazy sky, the Gothic spires and slate rooftops. I had always felt myself a man misplaced in time, and here, in this splendidly anachronistic environment, I seemed to see everything more clearly. Perhaps I had begun to see things that no one would ever believe.

  “I suppose it was just an accident, Archie, but I can’t help wondering at the way that one manuscript has been neglected and ignored over all these centuries. I’d like to learn more about who first collected these papers, and why, and who besides Throcknagle has been into them over the years.”

  “Dean Singer would be delighted to tell you,” Archie said, “if you can stand to listen to him go on. But right now you should stop mystifying the whole affair. This is the bloody awful twentieth century. All our gods are dead, and all our fairy tales forgotten.”

  “There must be something,” I mused, “to account for this feeling I have . . . this feeling that Dr. Greggs’ death was no accident.”

  “Ah, now we’ve come down to it, lad,” Archie said. “You’ve been working too hard, and all this medieval nonsense is starting to get to you. I should be careful, if I were you, not to spread these suspicions about. Duke’s has already had more than its share of the mysterious. We were nearly haunted right out of existence back in the nineteenth century, when every undergraduate was finding a spook under his bed. Quite an epidemic it turned into. The Master finally had to pass an ordinance that the next member of the College to see a ghost would be automatically expelled. That quelled the psychic disturbances somewhat, but you bring up these ‘feelings’ of yours and we’ll have pandemonium all over again. This lot of guilt-ridden masturbatory neurotics will go crackers at the drop of a hat.”

  We watched a swallow knife through the hazy sky and seek its nest near one of the gargoyles that peeped out from beneath the chapel eaves.

  “I thought you didn’t care about the College anymore, Archie.”

  “I don’t, but I wouldn’t like to see you make a fool of yourself.”

  “I shall use the utmost discretion, I assure you.”

  Archie grinned at me. �
�Good enough! What you need now is a bit of relaxation, a change of pace. What do you say we take in the cinema tonight? There’s a French flick at the Victoria—la Brigitte de la Bardot in all her glorious immodesty.”

  “Sorry. I promised Colin I’d go along to that musicale or whatever it is—the one Haverhill mentioned.”

  “God, those evenings at Bromley House are insufferable. Stop by beforehand and I’ll give you something to anesthetize you.”

  “Thanks, Archie, I will. See you later.”

  I walked back around the court and left my gown at the porter’s lodge for my return. Then I went out through the great thirteenth-century gate. As I emerged from its shadow, the busy Cambridge street leapt at me, clamorous and harsh, bright and glassy. The sunlight seemed brighter, glaring off windshields and grilles. The air was filled with bleating horns and noxious fumes. I paused to put on a pair of dark glasses and to pull my nerves back into shape, then set off in search of the quiet gardens and still waters of the Cam, where, stretched upon a spongy bank, I could mull over the droll contradictions of my life and work.

  Except for a shift of some ten degrees in the earth’s axis of rotation, and a corresponding eastward migration of the stars, the night sky of December, 1146, must have looked to the naked eye much as it does now. Of course, the universe has been expanding these past eight hundred years; certain heavenly bodies were light-years closer to us then, others much farther away, yet in the infinity of space and to the poor instrument of vision which is the human eye, these differences would have been indiscernible. What a transplanted stargazer of the twentieth century would have noticed was the striking brilliance and fullness of the heavens. In that cleaner atmosphere and deeper darkness, the stars shone down with commanding splendor on the upturned face of the fourteen-year-old boy who sat shivering in the courtyard of a monastery on the barren vastness of the Yorkshire moors.

  The boy was bound by coarse ropes to one of the ribs of a small cart, but he could move his legs a bit to keep them warm, twist his head around to gawk at his murky surroundings. His father’s servant held the horse’s reins, and the boy could smell the acid stench of horseflesh and piss in the frigid darkness. He could catch other smells in the courtyard, some of which he could recognize and some he could not. The lingering aroma of boiled vegetables and yeasty bread from the monks’ supper—that was familiar to him; the spicier aroma of the abbot’s meal was not. He sniffed the musty dampness of the massive structure which blocked a portion of his sky, detected the reek of the stables, the odor of tallow from scores of burning candles, the bitter scent of sweat, sewage and garbage from a community of ascetics. The most mysterious element in this deluge of smells was the faint hint of parchment and ink which emanated from the monastery’s library. The boy knew nothing of libraries, had seen only a few books in his life and had been taught to read and write only a little French by the manor priest; yet he recognized the smell and it intrigued and gratified him.