Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3)

by David Crossman

  “Esperanza,” he said softly.

  For a moment she said nothing, then the breath on his neck ushered her reply. “It meanshope.”

  Albert hadn’t thought of names having meaning. What did his name mean? Probablyhopeless. Better not to ask. What did Melissa Bjork mean? he wondered.

  “What do you want?”

  He hadn’t meant to ask the question out loud, for fear it might make her evaporate or wilt or whatever specters do when they’re offended. But there it was.

  “Warmth,” she said. She didn’t seem offended. “I’ve been so cold.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because of that little island in your brain,” said said, her lips brushing the little hairs on his ear.

  That little island. He wondered if that was what let him see and hear her. Maybe that’s where he heard the music, as well. Who knew what other worlds, what other parts of himself, that accidental little island was portal to?

  He suspected it wasn’t an altogether friendly place.

  “Annabella Howe,” he ventured. “Do you know her?”

  “No.”

  “She’s dead, too.”

  “I think not all the dead inhabit the same place,” said Esperanza. She was guessing. “Besides, I’m not convinced I am dead. If I am, it’s not like any death I ever imagined.”

  Albert had no trouble believing that death, when it came, wouldn’t be like anything he imagined. To him, life was unimaginable. Unimaginably crowded. Unimaginably cruel. Unimaginably beautiful. Unimaginably complicated. Unimaginably confusing. Unimaginably unexpectable, if that was a word. It was from all those depths, all those interweaving layers of unknowing that his music welled.

  He massaged his temples, but he couldn’t reach deep enough to settle the restless climate of that little island.

  “Maybe that’s why you’re still here,” Albert theorized.

  She nestled into him. “I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “I just want to be here with you. Just to . . . be.”

  That was alright with Albert. He was thrilled at the feeling of all the parts of her that came into contact with him, it was a sexual arousal, he suspected; he’d felt something much like it in the presence of Melissa Bjork; but it was different. It was sexual arousal at a spiritual level, awaking parts of him that had never been explored, surprising little clusters of lethargic neurons with sudden explosions to which they could formulate no response other than to run into one another, shouting. Some laughed in delight. Some screamed in terror.

  “She hired a man name Lossburgh. . .” and he recited the whole story and fell asleep to the sound of his own voice.

  It wasn’t to Esperanza that Albert woke the following morning, but Angela. And she wasn’t in his bed, she was beside it, holding a silver serving tray with, judging from the smell, breakfast on it. He sat up; his hope that it was for him was realized when she set it on his lap.

  “Sleep well?” said Angela. She sat on the edge of the bed, buttered a piece of toast and took a bite of it. Maybe it was her breakfast after all, and she was just using him as a table. He sat especially still. She held the piece of toast, with a piece missing, to his mouth. He took a tentative bite. “The vicar’s friend, Gloria, that he was talking about yesterday? She’s downstairs.”

  Albert swallowed. “Why?”

  “Says she has something to show you. Something about that Foss person.”

  Albert was looking at the other side of Angela in the mirror on the wall behind her. “What do you think of ghosts?” he asked.

  The comment arrested a piece of toast half way to her mouth. “Ghosts? You mean like. . .” she held up her hands in imitation of an overly dramatic phantasm and made a butter-scented moan.

  Not exactly what Albert had in mind. “Just, ghosts. Spirits.”

  “Not much really. No,” she said, consigning another bite of Albert’s breakfast to the abyss. “I mean, I’m not saying such a thing is impossible, but I’ve never seen one. That’s what it would take.”

  “You’d have to see a ghost to believe in it?” asked Albert. This was an interesting thought.

  “Yes. I’m not very metaphysical, I guess. You should eat that egg. It’s very good.”

  Albert took a bite of egg and wasn’t surprised to find that it tasted just like. . .egg. “What about wind?”

  “What about it?”

  “You believe in it?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you can’t see it.”

  “No, of course not. But you can feel it, see its effects in the trees, the flowers, you know.” Her following enactment of foliage in the breeze had much in common with her imitation of the phantasm, but without the sound-effects.

  Albert would think about this. Later.

  Between them, they ate his breakfast in relative silence during which he looked at her in the mirror. He liked that he could look at her without making her uncomfortable. He liked studying her while she ate his egg and toast.

  When the plate was clean, Angela got up from the bed, brushed her hands over the silver tray, picked it up and walked to the door. “Don’t keep the lady waiting too long, Albert.”

  Albert had forgotten he’d been keeping a lady waiting. He got out of bed, put on his robe and slippers, and went downstairs.

  “Ah, sir!” said Balfour, rather than the suit of armor in a little niche at the bottom of the stairs Albert first thought had spoken, “Miss Angela said she told you of your guest. I’ve installed her in the morning room—that’s the one just this side of the one with the piano.” He nodded helpfully in the direction of the room with the piano, then made an untranslatable noise in the depths of his person. “Do you require suitable attire, sir?”

  Albert looked down and took a quick inventory; slippers? Check. Robe? Check. No trousers, so no fly to worry about. He looked at Balfour with a smile. “No.”

  Balfour, who had been alerted by previous knowledge of the maestro, was girded against non-plussment. “No, sir. Of course. Please walk this way.”

  That’s what the world was lacking, Albert thought as he followed the butler along the richly carpeted corridor, People Who Knew Where Things Were and would say, ‘walk this way’ and take you there.

  A lot of paintings of people lined the walls. Presumably they were all of people who had had intimate connection with Oxburgh Hall through time. None of them were looking furtively or enigmatically in the wrong direction. In fact, they were all looking directly at him, following him with their eyes as he walked down the hall. Perhaps their lips were moving, as well. If so, there was no doubt—judging from their expressions—what they were whispering. “Who or what isthatand what is it doing here?”

  Balfour came to a stop in front of a door Albert had never noticed—like all the others—and, opening it, preceded him into the morning room. “Ms. Corliss, Mr. . . .”

  “No introduction is necessary,” said a high-backed woman who had been seated in a high-backed chair and now stood, extending her hand. “Your picture was the front of the Arts section of yesterday’sTimes.” She waited, more or less holding his hand, for him to say something; in vain. “Yes. Well. . .” She released him and reached into her purse.

  “Please forgive my dropping in unannounced like this. Terribly presumptuous, I know.” For some reason she glanced at Balfour—who stood at attention just inside the door—and either saw or imagined in an almost imperceptible twitch of his eyebrow his tacit agreement with the statement. “But it has to do with this Foss that James. . .Vicar Simon. . .asked about.” As she spoke, she withdrew two sheets of paper from her purse. They were stapled together in the upper left-hand corner and, even at a glance, Albert could see that the type-written words were in normal English.

  “I was up half the night trying to remember where else I’d heard that name before. Then it came to me.”

  A lot of things apparently came to people in the middle of the night. In Albert’s case it was a Spanish woman named Esperanza. He wondered
what shape whatever it was that came to Ms. Corliss had taken. “What did it look like?”

  Unlike Balfour, Gloria Corliss hadn’t been pre-prepared for Albert and, therefore was forgivably non-plussed. She knew next to nothing of him other than that he was a famous piano player. She hadn’t much use for music, herself. She couldn’t see the point in it; just a bothering of the air that was there and then was gone. A diminishment of the silence that was, by far, preferable. Those thoughts didn’t occur to her at the moment. She was suddenly aware of the depth of his eyes, so dark they were almost pupiless, and was overcome by a kind of vertigo. She clutched at the back of the Queen Anne chair in which she’d been sitting. “What did what look like?”

  “The thing that came to you in the middle of the night.”

  She cast a look of appeal at Balfour, as if throwing him a line from her quickly floundering punt in hopes he’d catch it and draw her to the riverbank. This time, not so much as the fluttering of an eyelash indicated anything but sublime, almost other-worldly butlery equanimity. She sank back into the chair. The document in her hand flapped non-committally and seemed to be wondering what, if anything, it should do.

  “What I thought of. . .was reminded of was this,” she said, waving the papers, which crackled to attention. She gave them to Albert and he read the first few lines aloud. It was one of those times, not infrequent, when he was grateful to Mrs. Doughty, his first grade teacher who, with great patience, had taught him and his fellow classmates to read; the only skill of any value he recalled having acquired in his years of formal education.

  “‘The memory of Arthur, that most renowned King of the Britons, will endure for ever. In his own day he was a munificent patron of the famous Abbey at Glastonbury, giving many donations to the monks and always supporting them strongly, and he is highly praised in their records.’

  “King Arthur?” Albert had the sinking feeling that the introduction of another king could only muddy waters in which he was already well over his head.

  “This document, calledLiber de Principis instructione,was written about 1193 by a monk named Giraldus Cambrensis,” said the woman. Albert thought how embarrassing it must have been for young Giraldus to have his name called by his mother when he was late for dinner. His own mother used to call him by his whole name at such times, even his middle name which, beyond the fact that it was embarrassing in the extreme and had something to do with a great aunt, or uncle, he’d thankfully forgotten. “More commonly, Gerald of Wales.”

  Albert knew where Wales was. He could even pinpoint Pwllheli on a map, and knew that Dolgellau was pronounced Dolgethlee. This was because, he remembered having been told, the Welsh enjoyed annoying the English which was, according to the same source, the reason the Scots had invented golf, a pastime widely known to induce madness.

  “Read on,” said the woman.

  Albert looked at the document suspiciously. “It’s very long.”

  “I think you’ll find it worth your time.”

  This was doubtful. One thing Albert enjoyed less than people talking to him was the sound of his own voice. He looked appraisingly at Balfour, who looked back. “Sir?”

  “You read it,” said Albert, extending the document to the butler.

  “With pleasure.” Balfour removed a pence nez from his waistcoat pocket and, with a flick of the wrist, opened the paper. “I shall resume where you left off, shall I?”

  Albert nodded, seating himself in the chair opposite Gloria Corliss.

  The butler cleared his throat and began. “‘More than any other place of worship in his kingdom he,’Speaking here of Arthur, I believe, sir,” Balfour explained. ‘He loved the Church of the Blessed Mary, Mother of God, in Glastonbury, and he fostered its interests with much greater loving care than that of any of the others. When he went out to fight, he had a full-length portrait of the Blessed Virgin painted on the front of his shield, so that in the heat of battle he could always gaze upon Her; and whenever he was about to make contact with the enemy he would kiss Her feet with great devoutness.

  Albert sat up as Balfour inhaled to continue. “Wait.”

  “Sir?”

  “Does that make sense?”

  The woman waited without comment while the butler perused what he had just read. “I see nothing to which to object, sir.”

  Albert didn’t know much of knights and armor and shields, but he knewsomething. He’d seen pictures. “How do you hold a shield?”

  Balfour equipped himself with an imaginary shield.

  “So, the front of the shield is facing me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then, if Arthur painted a picture of Mary on the front of his shield. . .”

  “He wouldn’t be the one gazing at it!” said Gloria Corliss.

  “It would be facing his opponent,” said Balfour, studying the shield he held as if it was really there. “Meaning the Blessed Virgin would be the last thing that poor unfortunate saw before being punctuated.”

  The three of them exchanged meaningful looks.

  “I can’t see what difference it makes,” said the archaeologist finally. “But it’s an interesting observation - one I’ve never heard in connection with this document in all my years of study.”

  “Shall I continue, sir?” Balfour asked, hoping he would be allowed to do so.

  Albert nodded.

  “‘In our own lifetime, when Henry II was reigning in England, strenuous efforts were made in Glastonbury Abbey to locate what must have once been the splendid tomb of Arthur. It was the King himself who put them on to this, and Abbot Henry, who was later elected Bishop of Worcester, gave them every encouragement.

  ‘With immense difficulty, Arthur's body was eventually dug up in the churchyard dedicated by Saint Dunstan. It lay between two tall pyramids with inscriptions on them, which pyramids had been erected many years before in memory of Arthur. The body was reduced to dust, but it was lifted up into the fresh air from the depths of the grave and carried with the bones to a more seemly place of burial. In the same grave there was found a tress of woman's hair, blond and lovely to look at, plaited and coiled with consummate skill, and belonging, no doubt, to Arthur's wife, who was buried there with her husband.

  ‘The moment that [he saw],this lock of hair, [one of the monks], who was standing there in the crowd, jumped down into the deep grave in an attempt to snatch hold of it before any of the others. It was a pretty shameless thing to do and it showed little reverence for the dead. This monk, then, of whom I have told you, a silly, rash and impudent fellow, who had come to gawp at what was going on, dropped down into the hole, which was a sort of symbol of the Abyss from which none of us can escape. He was determined to seize hold of this tress of woman's hair before anyone else could do so and to touch it with his hand. This was a fair indication of his wanton thoughts, for female hair is a snare for the feeble-minded, although those with any strength of purpose can resist it.

  ‘Hair is considered to be imperishable, in that it has no fleshy content and no humidity of its own, but as he held it in his hand after picking it up and stood gazing at it in rapture, it immediately disintegrated into fine powder. All those who were watching were astounded by what had happened. By some sort of miracle, not to say. . ., it just disappeared, as if suddenly changed back into atoms, for it could never have been uncoiled and examined closely. . .this showed that it was even more perishable than most things, proving that all physical beauty is a transitory thing for us to stare at with our vacant eyes or to grope for in our lustful moments, empty and availing nothing. As the philosopher says: 'Physical beauty is short-lived, it disappears so soon' it fades more quickly than the flowers in springtime.

  ‘Many tales are told and many legends have been invented about King Arthur and his mysterious ending. In their stupidity the British people maintain that he is still alive. Now that the truth is known, I have taken the trouble to add a few more details in this present chapter. The fairy-tales have been snuffed out, and the t
rue and indubitable facts are made known, so that what really happened must be made crystal clear to all and separated from the myths which have accumulated on the subject.

  ‘After the Battle of Camlann. . .killed his uncle. . .Arthur. . .there are a number of words missing, sir. I shall just read as written, shall I?”

  Albert nodded.

  “Very good.‘The sequel was that the body of Arthur, who had been mortally wounded, was carried off by a certain noble matron, called Morgan, who was his cousin, to the Isle of Avalon, which is now known as Glastonbury. Under Morgan's supervision the corpse was buried in the churchyard there. As a result, the credulous Britons and their bards invented the legend that a fantastic sorceress called Morgan had removed Arthur's body to the Isle of Avalon, so that she might cure his wounds there. According to them, once he has recovered from his wounds this strong and all-powerful King will return to rule over the Britons in the normal way. The result of all this is that they really expect him to come back, just as the Jews, led astray by even greater stupidity, misfortune and misplaced faith, really expect their Messiah to return.

  ‘The King,that would be Henry, sir,had told the Abbot on a number of occasions that he had learnt from the historical accounts of the Britons and from their bards that Arthur had been buried in the churchyard there between two pyramids which had been erected subsequently, very deep in the ground for fear lest the Saxons, who had striven to occupy the whole island after his death, might ravage the dead body in their evil lust for vengeance. Arthur had attacked them on a great number of occasions and had expelled them from the Island of Britain, but his dastardly nephew Mordred had called them back again to fight against him. To avoid such a frightful contingency, to a large stone slab, found in the tomb by those who were digging it up, some seven feet. . .a leaden cross had been fixed, not on top of the stone, but underneath it, bearing this inscription:

  ‘ ‘Here in the Isle of Avalon lies buried the renowned King Arthur, with Guinevere, his second wife.’ ‘