The man behind the desk gives them a hard, professional look.
The hands of Toby and Gabriela remain firmly in their pockets. No wedding rings. Fingers out of sight. No possibility for the asking of awkward questions.
“I’m afraid this is private property, sir. Technically, you’re trespassing. You’re breaking the law.” A humourless smile.
“Yes,” Gabriela says brightly. “It’s something literary now, isn’t it, this place?”
“We’ve got the biggest collection of Cannonbridge papers in the world.” There is an odd, unexpected note of pride in the man’s voice although, Toby thinks, he doesn’t look like all that much of a reader.
“Wonderful.” Gabriela again. “Might we take a look at them?”
“Not without an appointment, ma’am, no. Not without permission.”
“Then how do we get that?”
The guard grimaces. “With considerable difficulty. Trust me.”
Toby now: “How come? I mean, who owns it all?”
“It’s in private hands, sir. Private.”
“Ah. But surely you wouldn’t mind if a couple of sentimental fools took a walk down memory lane? We shan’t be long.”
“Sorry, sir.” He doesn’t sound sorry. “Can’t be done. Besides…” Toby knows what is coming, the old cliché.
“It’d be more than my job’s worth.”
Nothing for it now.
Toby and Gabriela swap glances and the girl goes, expertly, to work. She turns out to be a better actor than Toby had dared to hope. The performance is exact, persuasive and does not give way to the temptation of melodrama. The eyes roll back in their sockets, her limbs start to shake, her mouth dribbles and gurns. Within seconds, she is on the floor, convulsing wildly, shaking and palsied.
The guard looks up, astonished. Out of his depth, Toby thinks, experiencing a little spike of pleasure at the thought. Out of his comfort zone.
He meets the man’s gaze and says coolly, as though this has happened to him many time before: “My wife’s having an epileptic fit. Stay with her. Hold her head upright. I’ve what we need in the car. I’ll fetch it.”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course. Christ. Sorry.”
The guard does as he’s been asked. He goes to her and cradles her head. Toby steps towards the door and opens it. As he does so, Gabriela begins to make a peculiar, strangulated noise, like a creature in pain, at which Toby is put in mind of a time he heard a nest of baby sparrows attacked by a crow, and at which the guard leans in, trying to help. Toby lets the door slam shut but doesn’t leave the building. Instead, he doubles back and passes swiftly and, he hopes, wholly unnoticed through the green door beyond.
He will not, he knows, have long before their stratagem is uncovered. He knows he has to hurry now.
He is in a long corridor with a series of rooms on either side. Each has a sign outside with two letters for the alphabet, A-D, E-H etc. Distantly, he hears Gabriela’s wail. All the rooms are closed, all look empty.
He picks the third possibility—I-L—pushes open the door and steps inside. He sees filing cabinets now—big, solid wooden cabinets. A treasure chest, he thinks—the very lodestone of Cannonbridge studies.
Surging with adrenaline, he pulls open a cabinet at random. Sheets of paper are inside, all neatly ordered and arranged with dividers and markers. He riffles through them, as quickly as he can, and what he sees then, at least what he thinks he sees then, brings him up short, makes him gasp. He peers closer, unbelieving.
It is at that moment, when he hears a dry cough from nearby. He stiffens and turns slowly around to be confronted by a bespectacled man in late middle-age, dressed in an Italian suit which seems rather too smart for him, wiry dark hair neatly parted. He looks anxious and panicked, like a spy taken out of the queue of the airport.
“Do you know,” begins the stranger, in a soft, educated Scots voice, “I’ve been waiting for someone like you for a long time…”
1849
THE BRONX NEW YORK
SHE IS NOT yet sixty yet she looks very much older. Frail, she walks with a stoop and her every step is tentative, filled with aching and beset by sorrow. Yet there is a certain resilience to her, a kind of hopeless indefatigability which comes from outliving everyone whom she has ever loved or cared for and which will sustain her—barely—for what lies ahead: for ignominy, for poverty, for the quiet horrors of the poor house.
When we see her first, she is advancing slowly down a long, dark hallway in answer to a brusque knocking that she heard but a few moments ago. Evidently impatient, the caller raps again.
“Coming,” she says, although her voice is high and thin and bird-like and she suspects that there is little hope of whoever it is having heard her, not on the other side of that thick portcullis.
She moves, perhaps just a little faster but not so one would really notice. If it’s important, she thinks, then they’ll wait.
Finally, she is at the door and with far more exertion than such an action should take, tugs it gloomily open.
She blinks in the sudden rush of bright New York sunlight, her pinched, pale face screwed up against the glare.
There is a young man outside. Blond and tall and brawny. Once she would have thought him handsome, once she would have giggled and flirted and fluttered her eyelashes. But all that was long ago. Now she sees only a boy.
“Mrs Clemm?” he asks and his voice is serious and concerned almost as if (she will wonder later), as if he is aware of the weight and nature of his mission.
There is something in his hands, a fat cream envelope held out before him like an offering.
“Yes,” she says. “That’s me.”
“I’ve got a letter for you, ma’am.”
Again that note of earnestness and—does she imagine it? Surely not. Condolence.
“Thank you,” she says. “Do I…”
She tails off, hopefully.
“No, ma’am. ’Tis all paid for.”
“Thank you,” she says and she must look confused as her visitor feels the need to add: “I was told to make sure that it was put directly into your hands.”
He passes it to her and she accepts it, feeling the dreadful heft of it.
For an instant, at the thought that it might be from Eddy, she experiences an exhausting kaleidoscope of emotions. Might it, she wonders, be some final, desperate epistle, full of forgiveness and love, some heartfelt apologia sent just before his death?
But no, the handwriting is quite unfamiliar.
Neat, she thinks. Neat and official. Quite unlike Eddy, then, in every way.
“Thank you,” she says again.
The brawny, handsome man nods—“ma’am”—and is gone. She closes the door again, against the stranger and the light, and moves dolefully back down the hallway and into her parlour, her sad prize clasped in one wrinkled, claw-like hand.
Shortly afterwards, with a cup of something restorative by her side (and how dear Eddy might have approved of that!), hunched in her frayed and threadbare armchair, her face furrowed in awful, anxious concentration, she reads the following words:
Presuming, madam, that you are already aware of the malady of which Mr. Poe died I need only state concisely the particulars of his circumstances from his entrance until the time of his death. When brought to the Hospital he was unconscious of his condition, of who brought him or with whom he had been associating. He remained in this condition from five o’clock in the afternoon (the hour of his admission) until three the next morning. This was on the 3rd October. To this state succeeded tremor of the limbs, and at first a busy, but not violent or active delirium and vacant conversation with spectral and imaginary objects on the walls. His face was pale and his whole person drenched in perspiration.
I questioned him in reference to his family, place of residence, relatives &c. But his answers were incoherent and unsatisfactory. He told me, however, he had a wife in Richmond (which, I have since learned was not the fact) that he did not know when
he left that city or what had become of his trunk of clothing. Wishing to rally and sustain his now fast sinking hopes I told him I hoped, that in a few days he would be able to enjoy the society of his friends here, and I would be most happy to contribute in every possible way to his ease and comfort. At this he broke out with much energy, and said the best thing his best friend could do would be to blow out his brains with a pistol—that when he beheld his degradation he was ready to sink in the earth. Shortly after giving expression to these words Mr. Poe seemed to doze and I left him for a short time.
When I returned I found him in a violent delirium, resisting the efforts of two nurses to keep him in bed. This state continued until Saturday evening (he was admitted on Wednesday) when he commenced calling for one “Reynolds”, which he did through the night up to three on Sunday morning. At this time a very decided change began to affect him. Having become enfeebled from exertion he became quiet and seemed to rest for a short time, then gently moving his head he said, “Lord help my poor Soul” and expired.
This, Madam, is as faithful an account as I am able to furnish from the Record of his case. I have, thus, complied with your request, Madam, and therefore subscribe myself respectfully yours,
J. J. Moran, Resident Physician By the time that Mrs Clemm has finished this sad message, her cheeks are damp with tears. There have been few surprises in the nature of her son-in-law’s demise for she had always known that it would be liquor which would destroy him in the end, that and his own weakness of will. Nonetheless, some of the details seem to her to be troublingly odd.
What had Eddy been doing in Baltimore? The last time that she had heard from him he had been talking only of going to New York. Why was he wearing another man’s clothes?
And there is something else, something more, which worries her greatly, a name which will return to her for the rest of her largely unhappy life, coming back in the small hours of the morning when she cannot sleep and the shadows and their horrors crowd greedily around her.
She reads the letter again, twice, three times, and still she wonders, still she asks about “Reynolds”. Why should that name and that name in particular—which is now and shall forever remain quite unknown to her—have been the last upon the lips of her poor, benighted Eddy?
NOW
WHEN TOBY JUDD comes skittering pell-mell back into the lobby of the erstwhile hotel ten minutes after his conversation began with the man with the glasses and the neatly-parted hair, running faster than he has in twenty years or more, there are three simultaneous assaults on his senses, two auditory and one visual.
The auditory elements are these—the whining clangour of the alarm sounding even shriller and more demented here than it had been in the archive room and the echoing noise of boots pounding along the corridors nearby. The visual element is this: that the security guard whom they had met on arrival and for whose benefit they had feigned matrimony, now lies sprawled out on the floor, unconscious but breathing.
Toby stops for a sliver of a second to take all of this in, casting round wildly for sight of Gabriela.
Save for the man on the floor, the atrium is empty, although Toby suspects that very soon now the place is going to be filled with men who wish to do him harm.
Then, to his relief, above the cacophony, he hears the honking of the Fiat’s horn. Dashing outside, he sees that the car is waiting, its passenger door open, its engine running. He hurls himself towards it, his slight little body complaining at every step, and plunges gratefully into his seat, pulling the door awkwardly shut behind him.
Gabriela looks excited, keyed-up. Her pupils are dilated and she is breathing too quickly.
“Well?” she asks but Toby—heart racing, head thumping, nausea seething in his gut—is too short of puff to answer her. Instead he manages a kind of elongated gasp, equal parts thank you and exhortation to move, and Gabriela, needing no further encouragement, urges the car to move at speed back down the driveway and away from the Cannonbridge Collection, leaving their pursuers with only tire tracks and dust.
When the archive is a mile behind them and once they are as certain that they can be that they are not being pursued, Gabriela says again: “Well?”
Toby, still wheezing and shuddering, like a man in a public information film about the dangers of coronary disease, manages a slightly longer, if scarcely more detailed response than before.
“It’s worse,” he says, each syllable a struggle. “God, it’s worse than I thought. Whatever the hell it is, it’s more than a hoax. More than just a confidence trick.”
Gabriela just nods grimly, as if she were somehow expecting his answer.
Neither of them notices the dark car, the Saab, which dogs their movements at a clever distance. Gabriela checks the rear-view mirror with some diligence but she never spots it, nor does Toby, slumped in his seat, his heart accelerating at least as much at his discovery as at his recent exertions. A little way behind them the man with the earplugs chews his toffees and watches his targets with a warped species of tolerant affection which, to the objects of it, generally proves more dangerous even than his violent ire.
They are back in Edinburgh proper now, heading Leith-wards and cruising past a dejected gang of students, a troupe of Ukrainian knights (‘the Camelot of Kiev’ reads the sign that has been pasted to the back of the stoutest of them) and a few disgruntled locals looking as though they are wondering whether it can ever truly be said to be too early in the day for a fight, when the woman speaks again.
“Tell me what happened,” she says.
Toby, calmer now and almost stable, replies: “Yes. Yes, I will. But I have to thank you first.”
Gabriela waves away his gratitude.
“That guard, you must have…”
“What happened?” she repeats, with a hint of some strange conviction in her eyes which ought, perhaps, to concern Toby rather more than it does at present, distracted as he is by the hectic dramas of the day.
As they pass a group of teenagers bad-temperedly carrying along the pavement a large inflatable whale, and whilst, behind them, the dark car prowls, Toby tells his peculiar story.
“There was a man,” says Judd. “A librarian. An archivist. Something of that sort. It was so strange—like he’d been waiting for me. He was dapper and neat. But he seemed weighed down. Melancholic.”
Gabriela nods, steers the car expertly down a side street so as to avoid the most choked and clotted thoroughfares, and waits for her passenger to get on with it.
“We only had a very few minutes together. He began by asking me a question…”
“Hmm,” says Gabriela, negotiating a line of speed bumps with finesse. “And what was that, then?”
“He wanted to know…” Toby passes the back of his right hand across his forehead. Hot now. “What I thought would come after humanity. What I thought the next stage of evolution would be.”
Past the bumps and gathering speed, hand on gear stick, moving up. “And did you have an answer?”
“No. Not really. I mean, I wasn’t expecting it. It seemed like such a non sequitur, you know?” The hand across the forehead once again. “And after he’d asked me that, as if in explanation, he pulled open one of the cabinet drawers. And showed me the papers inside.”
“And? What did you see?”
“I’m… not sure. I’m still not sure.”
“You don’t seem certain of much.”
Toby doesn’t seem to have heard her. “At times,” he murmurs, hunkering back in his seat now, like a child being told a cautionary tale, “each page seemed full. Absolutely stuffed with texts, images, photographs. A long life mapped meticulously. But at others, when I blinked, when I rubbed my eyes and looked again… It was as though every sheet was entirely blank.”
Curiously, Gabriela does not sound too surprised at this surely remarkable disclosure. “Hallucination?” she suggests. “Brain fart of some description?”
“Perhaps,” Toby says, though he doesn’t sound at a
ll persuaded. “And, then, at the end, just before the alarm went off, there was one more thing. The librarian bowed his head, as if damning himself for the rest of time, and he said. ‘Blessborough. Remember Blessborough. Look at his dedication again.’”
They are deep now into Leith itself. The crowds have subsided and the flat is almost in sight.
“What on earth did he mean by that?”
“Blessborough. Professor Anthony Blessborough. Dead now. He wrote the first critical appreciation of Matthew Cannonbridge. Just after the war.”
“I know that. Actually, I think I’ve got a copy somewhere. But what did he mean about the dedication?”
“No idea. No idea at all.”
The car pulls into the side of the pavement, beside the flat.
Engine switched off, the soft burr of the city. No other sound. The two of them secure for now in the bubble of the Fiat’s front seats.
“Well, looks like we got away with it,” Gabriela says and grins.
Toby snorts, in pleasure and relief and from the delayed effects of his adrenaline surge.
“Let’s go inside,” she says. “See if we can’t figure this latest thing out.”
Toby, grateful, agrees. They step out of the car together and, still casting anxious glances behind them as they go, walk up to the steps to the flat’s front door.
Neither of them has the slightest presentiment that this will be the last time that they shall ever do so.
INTO THE SITTING room and the flat is silent but somehow uneasily so, as if a party had been abruptly wound up as soon as its participants heard the sound of the key in the lock. Toby and Gabriela look at one another for a moment—and it’s a bit odd, a little bit awkward—neither of them choosing to articulate what they’re both thinking about the freighted silence.
Toby, who has not taken a woman who is not his wife out to dinner or to the pictures for fifteen years, reflects, nostalgically, that it feels a little like coming home for the first time after a date, both parties in a state of skittish expectation.
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