Celestial Chess

by Thomas Bontly

“Yvetta,” I said, as I walked her back to her lodgings, “I have to go down to London for a few days next week. Would you like to come along? I have a check from America I haven’t cashed yet. We could do the town.”

  She slipped her arm through mine, her body swaying against me as we navigated the cobblestones. “I’ll lose my job if I do, but what does that matter? I never should have come to Cambridge. I miss Wien—I must go home soon. England, phooey!”

  “Then you’ll come with me? A last fling, say, before you return to Vienna?”

  She gave my arm a squeeze. “Why not? You are a very naughty boy, Liebchen. You will teach me how to break all these stupid British rules.”

  “I’ll try,” I promised, and thanked Colin for at least a hand-me-down romance.

  It was after one by the time I climbed the staircase to my room, mulling over the uncanny coordinates of the evening. England had obviously been working on my imagination during the months I’d spent at Duke’s. I was as much in love with Cambridge as Archie Cavendish, who pretended to hate it only because he couldn’t stand to leave it, and I knew I was becoming susceptible to all sorts of things I’d never been susceptible to before.

  The door to my room was ajar, although I was sure I’d locked it when I left for Bromley House. I reached in to turn on the light and entered cautiously. The room was empty, but I saw at once that someone had been into my desk. I sorted through my notes on the Westchurch manuscripts and, counting over my index cards, I noticed one conspicuous absence. It was the card on which I had attempted to reconstruct a game of chess obscurely alluded to in the long major poem. I searched the room for it without success. Finally I poured myself a stiff shot of whisky, propped a chair against my locked door and went to bed. It took me a long time to fall asleep.

  ‘‘Oh, yes; Mr. Stemp was devoted to chess. Poor man, he had so many innocent little hobbies.”

  We had paused, in the extinct clergyman’s study, over a chessboard and a game in medias res. I noticed that black held the commanding position. White was badly down, soon to lose either his queen or his rook. Mate wasn’t more than a few moves away.

  “Did you play chess with your husband?” I asked Mrs. Stemp. She was a large, angular, sagging creature who seemed born to her widow’s black dress. I couldn’t imagine her as a girl or a bride, but as a widow she was perfection.

  “Heavens, no. Mr. Stemp had no patience with women at chess. Said we hadn’t the intellect for it. He usually played alone.”

  “You mean he reconstructed famous matches from the chess books?”

  “I guess that’s what he did. But sometimes he just played against himself. That is possible, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” I said, without adding that it seemed rather pointless.

  Outside the small house, buses and lorries rolled along Hampstead Lane with ominous insistence, their passage afflicting all the small, fragile objects that filled the darkened rooms with intermittent shudders. British homes are frequently darker than an American would find consistent with a cheerful outlook on life, and I was finding the dead man’s house exceedingly oppressive.

  Mrs. Stemp looked around her husband’s study with a somewhat guilty air. “And what was it you wanted to discuss with my husband, Mr. Fairchild?”

  I mentally advanced one of white’s pawns, then saw it was a disastrous mistake. “I understand your husband was for many years the curator of the Westchurch Museum in Paxton-Brindley.”

  “Yes indeed; until he retired in 1957. Poor man—he had so few years left!”

  “I’m told that he was an authority on the sixteenth Earl of Westchurch, Lord Peter Brindley—the one who lost his head during Cromwell’s reign.”

  “Ah, my husband wrote a book about the earl, you know. Mr. Stemp received many compliments on his ‘little book,’ as he always called it.”

  “And was he working on anything at the time of his death?”

  “Mr. Stemp always intended to revise and enlarge his book—to bring out what he called the ‘definitive study’ of the earl. But I’m afraid he didn’t get very far with it these last few years. He tired easily, and travel wasn’t good for him.”

  “Did he have to travel a great deal in order to research his book?”

  “He was always going off somewhere and coming back quite, quite exhausted. ‘You’ll do yourself in,’ I used to tell him, ‘if you don’t stay home for a change and get a bit of rest.’ And to think he was only a few steps from his very own door when—’’

  There was little one could do, when these genteel sniffles came upon the widow, but preserve a moment’s respectful silence. Do you have any idea where your husband went on these trips, Mrs. Stemp?”

  “All over the British Isles, I’m sure. Often back to Paxton-Brindley; sometimes way up north. He took me along on holiday once when he visited Wimsett-by-Sea. Have you been there? Charming little town on the Norfolk coast, and not too far from Cambridge.”

  “Mrs. Stemp, did your husband have any papers—any notes or first drafts toward the revision of his book? It could be that Duke’s College would be interested in purchasing his literary remains.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid I’ve sold those already.”

  ‘‘And to whom did you sell them, might I ask?”

  “To a friend of Mr. Stemp’s—at least, he said he was a friend. He came here the day after the funeral and offered to take all Mr. Stemp’s papers off my hands, so of course ...”

  “I hope you got a good price for them.”

  “I believe I was quite well paid,” she said, with the complacency of a woman who had never been bothered by money matters. “Mr. Regis was most generous.”

  “Mr. Regis?”

  “I have his card somewhere about; I’ll see if I can find it. As you can see for yourself, Mr. Fairchild, everything’s been taken. There used to be stacks and stacks of papers everywhere in this study. I hadn’t the heart to go through it all myself—quite dreaded the thought of throwing anything away—and yet what use was it all, once—once—”

  “I’d appreciate it very much if you’d find me that card,” I said quickly, “and in the meantime, if you don’t mind, perhaps I’ll just take a look around.”

  She glanced at me with a renewal of that skepticism I had talked my way past in order to enter her house. “I can’t see that it matters very much now, or that Mr. Stemp would object, since you are, in a way—well, whatever you are. I’ll hunt up that card.”

  As soon as she was gone, I went over the room like a burglar, checking every nook and cranny that might harbor a stray scrap of Mr. Stemp’s writing. There was nothing. I was looking behind the individual volumes of several standard sets of the poets in the glass-enclosed bookcase when Mrs. Stemp returned.

  She gave me the card. Simon Regis. Bookseller, Dealer in Rare Volumes, First Editions, Literary Curiosities. 83 Blackfriars Road, London. I slipped the card into a shirt pocket.

  “There’s one more thing you might find interesting,” Mrs. Stemp said. “That is, if you’ve never seen my hus-band’s book. There’s one in that bookcase, I believe.”

  After a bit of looking, I found the reverend’s pamphlet lodged between a volume of Byron and another of Milton—rather magnificent company for such a slender contribution to scholarship.

  “That’s the one,” Mrs. Stemp said. “That was Mr. Stemp’s study copy, but you can have it, Mr. Fairchild. There’s dozens more boxed somewhere in the house.”

  The book had a paper cover, on which was displayed the Westchurch coat of arms, and beneath it, the title:

  THE NOBLE EARL

  An Informal Account of the Life and Times of Lord Peter Brindley, Sixteenth Earl of Westchurch; together with a Description of His Library. Based on records in the parish of Paxton-Brindley and on the Westchurch family papers. By the Reverend Samuel Stemp, B.A., M.A. Printed for the Dorset Bibliographic Society by M. J. Steadly and Sons, Ltd. London, 1953.

  Mrs. Stemp watched as I thumbed through the slim volume. �
��Will it be of any help to you, do you think?”

  “I’m sure it will,” I said. I noticed that there were several loose sheets of paper inserted among the leaves, but I did not take these out in Mrs. Stemp’s presence.

  As we were leaving the study, my gaze fell once more on the chessboard. I was hardly an avid student or frequent player of the game, yet there was something tantalizingly familiar about the situation on the board. I had encountered a similar problem not long ago, and I thought I knew where. Had the Reverend Stemp visited Cambridge before he died?

  Mrs. Stemp led me down the long dark hall to her front door. Yes, Mr. Stemp often went up to Cambridge, she said. A pity we hadn’t met. She held the door open and I caught a glimpse of ponderous vehicles passing along the street. I had one last question for her.

  “Your husband was killed near here, I believe?”

  “Just up the street,” she said, pointing the direction. “He wasn’t gone more than a few minutes when they came for me. I rushed to his side, but the body was covered by a tarpaulin and they wouldn’t let me—I never got to—’’ Tears had begun to trickle down her powdered cheeks once more and her parched lower lip was quivering.

  “I know this must be hard for you,” I said, “but did the police—well, did they explain the accident to you? I mean, to your satisfaction?”

  “Satisfaction?” she asked, blinking uncertainly.

  “I mean, are you satisfied that it was an accident?”

  “Oh, Mr. Fairchild, I never thought . . . ! What else could it have been? Besides, there was a cat—a cat in the road . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was just a thought. Thank you very much for your help, Mrs. Stemp, and—and—’’

  I was still trying to think of what sort of condolence to offer the widow of a retired clergyman recently run over by a truck, when Mrs. Stemp shut the door in my face.

  I walked up Hampstead Lane past the brick wall, weather-stained and mossy, which more than likely had formed one slice of bread in the fatal sandwich. A patch of bright new bricks and white mortar marked the spot. It was near the corner, and just across the side street from a pub whose front windows provided a good view of the street. I crossed over and tried the door. British pubs keep hours according to a schedule I’d not yet fathomed, but this one was open. Its interior was dark and quiet, warm with polished wood and cracked leather. A trio of old men were at a table by the window, squinting over their pints at the endless parade of vehicles.

  The pubkeeper stood waiting for me at the bar, his beer-keg belly pressed against the gleaming wood. “A pint of bitter, please,” I told him.

  “Yank, is it?” he asked pleasantly as he drew my glass.

  I’d long since given up trying to pass as a native and had learned to trade, in such situations, upon my exotic interest. Yes, I was an American; no, not a tourist; a professor of English literature, in fact, doing some research at Duke’s College, Cambridge. Had the pubkeeper by any chance known the distinguished old gentleman who had lived just down the street, one Samuel Stemp?

  “He didn’t come in here much,” the pubkeeper said, dropping his haitches. “Not a drinking man, I’d have to say. We used to see him passing by on his daily walks, howsomever—like as not, same time every day. A gentleman of very regular habits, he were.”

  ‘‘Did you happen to witness the accident?” I asked.

  “No, I can’t say as how I witnessed anything myself. I was down in the cellar bringing up a keg. But those lads over there might’ve seen something. You’ll have to ask them.”

  I sent three pints over to the three old men and presently followed my offering to their table.

  “Cheers,” said one, lifting his glass. “Sit yourself down, if you’ve a mind to.”

  “Thanks. I was wondering if you fellas could tell me anything about the accident last week. The Reverend Stemp was a good friend of mine, and I’ve just been to see his widow.”

  “Terrible thing that was, Yank—just terrible. The rev got it right over there where you see that brick wall—and a proper bloody mess it was, too.”

  “I suppose the police came around to ask you all about it.”

  “Aye; they was here. Not much they got out of us, though. There’s none of us here as got much time for the bloomin’ bobbies. Not since old Arf ’s youngest got sent up for pinchin’ a few tools he happened to find layin’ about some bloody construction site—ain’t that right, Arf ?”

  Arf agreed that was bleeding right, and gorblimey if he’d ever give another bloomin’ bobby the correct time of day, by gor.

  Was there something, then, which the police should have known about the accident? Something peculiar, let’s say?

  The three old men became cagey and evasive. I had to order another round. We compared soccer and football, baseball and cricket. I agreed the American games were sorry imitations of sports already perfected by the British. Humbly, I confessed that America had not done right by Britain since the war, that John F. Kennedy (being Irish and Catholic) was not to be trusted, but that honest workingmen the world over were united in a common cause. Finally, on our third round, I got them back to the Reverend Mr. Stemp.

  “Go on, Arfie,” the leader of the trio said. “You can tell him what you saw. He’s straight enough, I guess.”

  Arfie yanked his checkered cap a bit lower over his bleary eyes and leaned close to me across the table. “I were comin’ up Hampstead Lane, you see, just about to pop round here for a pint, when I notice the old chap comin’ toward me from down his way. Across from him, pulled up alongside the heath, there were this little gray Anglia with two men in it—right in front of a ‘No Standing’ sign an’ causing a bit of a jam-up. Battered old wreck of a car it was, too—well rusted at the gills and dents all over it. Well now, the reverend, he’d just about reached the corner, and there was this bloomin’ big lorry comin’ uphill behind him, when what should these blighters do but open up their car door and let out a cat. That’s right, a bloody cat! They dumps him right out in traffic and takes off and leaves him. Now the rev, he sees the cat an’ makes to run out an’ save its mangy hide, an’ the lorry driver, he sees the cat an’ takes a quick turn to slip by it, an’ that’s just how it happened. The lorry and the old chap goes bashin’ into that brick wall, and the bloody cat gets off scot-free, scamperin’ across the heath about as lucky as a cat ever were.”

  “Some folk will go to any lengths to kill a cat,” observed one of the old men, sadly shaking his head.

  “Or a retired clergyman,” I said. “You didn’t get the Anglia’s license plate, did you, Arfie?”

  Arfie hadn’t. There was no more they could tell me about the incident, so we had another pint all around and then I set out for my hotel.

  I found Yvetta seething with resentment upon my return.

  “I don’t like being cooped up in this dreary hotel all day while you go off to those libraries or museums or wherever you go. I thought we came to London to have fun!”

  “But, Yvetta, haven’t we been having fun?”

  She caught the direction of my glance and was some-what mollified. “Yes, Liebchen, in bed it is all quite pleasant. But I thought you were going to take me places, spend money—talk to me, at least. Soon I must return to Wien. Aren’t there things we should talk about?”

  I couldn’t think of any, but I did have to admit that Yvetta had a legitimate complaint. My resources were far more limited than Colin Douglas’s, my interest in Lon-don’s standard attractions slight. “Tell you what,” I said. “Put on that sexy little frock you bought on Carnaby Street the other day and I’ll take you out for a tour of West End night life. How’s that?”

  She considered it no better than a token acknowledgement of her existence, but went down the hall to take her bath. While she was gone I went through the Reverend Stemp’s “little book,” turning first of all to the loose sheets inserted among the leaves. They were notes concerning Stemp’s later researches, but they made no sense to me.
I was obliged to begin at the beginning, submitting myself to the reverend gentleman’s leisurely pace and inestimable sense of style.

  The sixteenth Earl of Westchurch, so Stemp tells us, converted to Roman Catholicism during a period of residence in Italy as an envoy of the Crown. He married a beautiful Italian princess, whom he brought back to England in 1635. Perhaps because of his conversion, the earl became interested in those vestiges of medieval Catholicism which had survived a century of Protestant vandalism. He purchased and attempted to restore the old monastery at Blackstone, not far from Westchurch Hall. The monastery had fallen to ruins, its treasures plundered by pious nationalists, but the earl, it seems, discovered a secret chamber which still harbored a marvelous collection of medieval manuscripts. Much intrigued by these ancient books, the earl built a library for them at Westchurch Hall. He imported scholars from Oxford and learned to read the primitive version of his mother tongue for himself. By 1645 he had assembled one of the largest libraries of medieval literature in England, rivaling the great Cotton Collection in London and those at Oxford and Cambridge. Just what the earl was searching for in these ancient manuscripts is unknown, yet it did seem to his biographer that the earl had a purpose beyond mere reverence for his adopted religion. He even smuggled a Spanish Jesuit into the realm to have a look at his treasures. Of course, such activities were viewed with alarm by the religious zealots who were just then seizing power in the realm.

  In the first year of Cromwell’s government, the earl was accused of treason, blasphemy and various other offenses against the Protestant sensibility. The earl’s own vicar testified that the nobleman commonly practiced “certaine ungodlie and vicious actes unbefitting a Christian gentleman,” and several peasants gave evidence that his wife was a “known sorceress, necromancer and familiar of diverse wicked spires—most of them no doubt Italian. On this evidence and that of the tortured Jesuit (captured in his attempt to escape England and subjected to engines which, as a child of the Spanish Inquisition, he should have admired), the earl was convicted and beheaded in 1649. Westchurch Hall burned to the ground shortly thereafter, and there was a curious legend (doubted by Stemp) that the earl himself had ordered the fire from his prison cell.