This Private Plot

by Alan Beechey

  “Then I’ll show her the sights! The Birthplace. Hall’s Croft. Holy Trinity. And we can take a look at Toby’s dig.”

  “You might want to come by the theater. We’re rehearsing again this afternoon.”

  “And have Effie witness the filth that I saw yesterday?”

  Mallard laughed. “Oh, Humfrey changed his whole conception of the play again. It now takes place in a nunnery and we’re performing it backwards. But you’re probably right to skip the rehearsals. Save your applause for Saturday, the big night.”

  He walked away, not knowing that he had been entirely wrong about the blackmailer’s presence at the funeral.

  Oliver stood thoughtfully, looking at a double coil of blue columbine that cricked its way up the rusty railings enclosing a ancient chest tomb. (Were the spikes on top to keep intruders out or occupants in?) Yes, he needed to nurture Effie. And there was still the spotless reputation of his teenage bedroom to be besmirched. He sneezed four times.

  “Bless you,” said the vicar. Oliver hadn’t heard his approaching footsteps, muffled in the long grass. “That was in my secular capacity,” Edwards continued affably, as they began to walk together toward the church. “The habit of blessing the sneezer probably comes from the superstition that a sneeze can release one’s soul into the air and leave it prey to evil spirits. But popular tradition insists on linking it to the bubonic plague. The same misguided belief applies to the children’s rhyme ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’—‘Ring Around the Rosie,’ as they call it in America, but then they call the ‘Hokey Cokey’ the ‘Hokey Pokey,’ so what’s that all about? Sneezes were never especially symptomatic of the plague, and many variants of the rhyme don’t include the words ‘a-tish-oo.’”

  Oliver made a mental note to include this misconception in his book. “Dennis Breedlove wrote an entire book debunking the myth about ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ and the Black Death,” he commented.

  “That’s where I got my information. He and I used to have some great chats. Ah, Dennis—we have done but greenly in hugger-mugger to inter him.”

  “Do you know much about Dennis’s life before he came to Synne?” Oliver asked, sensing the opening. “Religious background, that sort of thing?”

  “No, he never talked about that,” Edwards responded briskly, and Oliver found another example of a positive absence, like the openness of an empty grave: the sudden silence that fell where the vicar’s habitual second sentence should have been. Here endeth the lesson. Ah, that reminded him.

  “I understand you have a book club,” Oliver said, as they stopped by the church door.

  Edwards frowned. “We have a writers’ group in the village, if that’s what you mean. There are about ten of us. We do take it very seriously—only people who are working on a manuscript may join.”

  “You’re writing a book, too?”

  “I’m ever hopeful that my weekly sermons will be less ephemeral.”

  “And less heretical,” thought Oliver. Aloud he said, “May I join you for your next meeting?” The vicar shook his head before the offer was complete.

  “Oh, no, no, no, out of the question. We couldn’t possibly…I wouldn’t dare intrude on your precious family time.”

  “It would be fun for me.”

  “Ah, but under your feminine nom-de-plume you’re the celebrated creator of The Railway Mice and that paragon of animals, the sublime Finsbury the Ferret. You don’t want to be pestered by unpublished midges.”

  Why does everyone assume O.C. Blithely is a woman? What had his mother said? Be insistent. Tell him you know what it’s all about.

  “I do know what it’s all about,” he said.

  Edwards fixed his gaze on a fat bumblebee, dithering around an azalea. “You do?” he asked, after a few seconds.

  “Oh yes. And I’d really like to see what you’re doing.”

  “You would?”

  “Absolutely. Count me in. After all, everyone likes an audience.” Chloe’s prompts seemed to be working, Oliver reflected.

  Edwards brightened a little. “I see we understand each other.”

  “Then I can come?”

  “Very well. We meet at the vicarage tomorrow night, seven o’clock. If you’ve done this before, I’m sure you know what to expect.” He smiled shyly at Oliver. “Perhaps you feel this a little, shall I say, unorthodox? Especially for a man of the cloth.”

  “Not at all. We do so much of it alone, behind closed doors—it helps to show it to somebody else, from time to time.” Oliver remembered his mother’s comment about Effie’s sparing him for the occasion. But did she have to? “Can I bring my girlfriend?” he asked.

  “We don’t generally allow couples.”

  Oliver guessed that Edwards was concerned about Effie’s non-writer status. But Effie was a discerning reader and was unafraid to voice her opinions on works in progress, although admittedly, he’d only heard them in the context of the adventures of woodland animals as told for pre-teens; she might be a tad more scathing about four-year-old Hugowhoisgifted’s maternally ghosted life story.

  “Oh go on, say yes,” Oliver pleaded. “It’s a chance for her to see what I get up to while she’s at work. And she’s quite prepared to join in.”

  “Really? Effie?”

  “Yes. She’d never be content to sit on the sidelines and just observe. You may have trouble shutting her up.”

  “I see. Intriguing. Well, tomorrow then.” Edwards brushed some dirt from his white surplice, noticing as he did that the lower part of the vestment displayed the outline of a generous set of male genitals, executed in tomato ketchup. He sighed.

  Chapter Ten

  Tuesday afternoon

  “Suppose Jesus did have children,” Effie was saying over a Starbucks latte and an indifferent tuna and corn sandwich. “Then surely any of his offspring, male or female, would carry a half-share of God’s genes, not just the first-born son.”

  “I suppose so,” Oliver replied. “Maybe more than half. Look at the Swithins. Toby got a heavy chunk of the brigadier’s genes, going by appearance. But I get my hair and eyes from my mother.”

  Effie lay back in the leather armchair she had snagged and stretched her left leg toward him languidly. Her sneaker had the letter “L” drawn on the toecap. She kicked him with it.

  “It doesn’t always have to come back to you, you know,” she said. “Sometimes I get to talk.”

  “Sorry.”

  Oliver normally avoided Starbucks; as the great songwriter said, it could be anywhere in a Starbucks. But just once in a while, that’s a blessing. Everyone in Stratford-upon-Avon, it seemed, was either serving the Bard, serving up the Bard, or serving those who serve or serve up the Bard, and for a moment, Oliver and Effie had enough of outlets selling souvenir china thimbles of Anne Hathaway’s cottage, Droeshout portrait oven gloves, and kilts in the Macbeth tartan. Starbucks had offered a brief haven from the town’s relentless Shakespeareanism.

  Their conversation had been provoked by a shop that promised tourists their own coats of arms, inviting them to find out if they had any rude forefathers lying in Holy Trinity Church or its graveyard, not far from Will himself. (But not Will himself: Shakespeare’s only great-grandchild died without issue.) Effie had contended that even if a present-day visitor from Buttocks, Texas, did find a family name on one of those sixteenth-century tombstones, it didn’t prove a direct line of descent, and anyway, after half a millennium, any genetic link would be so diluted as to be homeopathic. This had led to her deflation of the many Jesus-rogered-the-Magdalene theories.

  “You just interrupted me with the astounding news that you’re the product of two parents,” she went on after another gulp of coffee, “which makes you just like, oh, most macroscopic organisms that have ever existed. But let’s talk about you, anyway. Now, the brigadier and Chloe each had two parents—your four grandparents
. They had parents—your eight great-grandparents, and so it goes, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, the number doubling with each generation as you go back. Got it?”

  “Sure.”

  “So let’s assume an average generation lasts thirty-odd years, three per century. How many notional ancestors did you have at the time of Jesus, twenty centuries ago?”

  “A pretty big number, I’d imagine,” Oliver answered, with a light laugh. Surely she didn’t expect him to work it out?

  “How many? Take a rough guess.”

  Oliver swallowed. Damn it, she did. Was there a calculator in his satchel? I am ill at these numbers. “Well, thousands. Tens of thousands, maybe.”

  Effie smiled and took another bite of her sandwich.

  “Do you know the old Indian tale of the rice and the chessboard?” she continued. “There was once a king in Kerala, who was addicted to chess. It was known throughout the kingdom that he that plays the king, no matter what his status, can earn a vast reward for a good game. Well, one day, a poor sage turns up to accept the challenge. But he doesn’t ask for gold or jewels. No, he asks only for a few grains of rice if he wins—one grain on the first square of the board, then two on the next, four on the next, and so on, doubling up each time until the last, sixty-fourth square. Just like ancestors, doubling with each generation. The king readily agrees to this, as you would have, apparently, you innumerate dullard. A handful of rice seems to be getting off cheap. Well, they play, and the mysterious sage wins, duh. And so the rice is brought in and placed on the board. One grain, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two. By only the twentieth square, they’re up to a million grains. Soon, the royal granaries are empty. And if they’d gone on to the end, before the sage called a halt, revealed himself to be Lord Krishna, and issued some smug little life lesson involving compound interest—according to Einstein, the most powerful force in the universe—they’d have needed enough rice to cover India three feet deep.”

  I love you Effie, Oliver thought. Nobody in your life has ever loved you or does love you or will love you as much as I do right now. I’d eat a box of wasps for you. I’d cook bacon naked for you. Stay with me.

  “Now the math for that is two to the power sixty-four, minus one,” she was saying happily. “Conveniently, that’s also the number of ancestors you’re looking for, since sixty-four is roughly the number of generations since the year one A.D. Any ideas now?”

  “With or without the minus one?”

  “It’s eighteen quintillion!”

  “I said it would be pretty big.”

  “Pretty big? That’s the number of people who’ve ever lived multiplied by a number that still has too many noughts for you to get your brain around.”

  “But…”

  “But you were going to say that there clearly weren’t eighteen quintillion people alive on Earth in one A.D. Of course not. The world population back then was only about 200 million. So where are the rest of your sixty-second-great-grandparents?”

  “Mars? Betelgeuse?”

  She screwed up her napkin and threw it at him. “If you draw up a family tree, and you go back far enough, you’ll start to see the same names popping up more than once. Your maternal fourth-great-grandfather could also be your paternal fourth-great-grandfather, for example.”

  “As long as he’s not also my fourth-great-grandmother,” Oliver said, remembering again that the vicar had thought his pseudonym was meant to be female. An idea struck him. Travesty!

  “With each generation, you get more and more overlap. Everyone’s everyone’s cousin at some remove. So sixty-four generations ago, with eighteen quintillion slots in your family tree, but only 200 million people to fill them, you’re going to see the same names come up billions of times. By the way, don’t try to draw it. If the boxes on that row were just one-inch apart, you’d need a piece of paper wide enough to go to the moon and back…”

  “Wow.”

  “I hadn’t finished. To the moon and back over 600 million times.”

  “You like this stuff, don’t you? I think it’s the humiliation you inflict on others.”

  “Anyway,” she persisted, “the point is, logically and mathematically, it’s more than likely that everybody in the world today—unless they live in a tribe that’s been totally isolated since the caveman days—is descended not once but billions of times over from every individual who was living and breeding at the time of Jesus. Including Jesus. So all these secret societies that exist to protect Christ’s descendent—Templars, Rosicrucians, Priories of whatever—are going to have their work cut out. By now, everyone on the planet has probably got a bit of the sangreal—the royal blood or ‘Holy Grail.’ Including you and me.”

  “Then I suppose we can never get married,” Oliver joked.

  Effie dropped her sandwich and gasped. Oliver thought at first she was choking, but she waved away his concern and stared at him with wide-open eyes.

  “Oh, Oliver, this is so sudden,” she said breathlessly. “But, yes, of course I’ll marry you, you wonderful man, yes.” She dabbed at her eyes with a napkin.

  “You are so funny,” she went on, looking at him with affectionate indulgence. “Sneaking a proposal into a conversation about genealogy, of all things. How perfect, since the Strongitharm and Swithin family trees will be joined in our children. And I want lots of children, Ollie, starting very soon!”

  Effie paused suddenly, as if reacting to his expression, her joy replaced by fear. “Oh, Ollie, you were serious, weren’t you? I haven’t let my foolish, girlish hopes get ahead of me” She grasped his hand, squeezing it enough to cause him minor pain. “Please say you mean it. Please.”

  “Well,” he began nervously, hoping he could come up with a loving and fair reply in quick determination. “I hadn’t—”

  She laughed suddenly. “Psych!” she cried, prodding him on the nose with her forefinger. “Swithin, you’re such a pushover. Come on, let’s go and see Toby’s dig.”

  She drained her paper cup, watching him with delighted, bewitching eyes. Most people would have said Effie’s best feature was her hair, those thick, copious curls. But Oliver knew it was her smile—even when the source of her amusement was his discomfort. But what did it mean? Life can be very confusing.

  They took the pedestrian Tramway Bridge to the south bank of the Avon. As they came level with the Royal Shakespeare Theatre across the water, they spotted Mallard enjoying a mid-rehearsal beer on the theater’s riverside terrace, too far away to hear their shouts. Cabin cruisers, rowing boats, and the occasional drifting swan passed them, heading downstream with the current as far as the vast chancel window and thin stone steeple of Holy Trinity, the “Shakespeare Church,” on the opposite bank. Further progress was blocked by a chain across the river, just south of the church, the visual warning of something they could already hear—the twin weirs, where the calm waters of the Avon suddenly drop several feet, splashing and spurgeoning over two sets of steps that flanked a broad, tree-covered ait. Boats going further south would take the left fork into the Colin P. Witter Lock, for a slow, gentle descent. Swans had to figure it out for themselves.

  Toby’s college group was working on a small river-island near the lock, recently the site of a Victorian lockkeeper’s cottage, which had fallen into decay. This blot on Stratford’s pristine landscape had survived so long because a dense cluster of horse chestnuts, hornbeams, and willows hid it from both banks of the river. The town had finally decided to demolish the ruins, but as Toby had said, there was no reason to believe the island held any trace of sixteenth or seventeenth century life. So Oliver and Effie were not surprised to be told by the fresh-faced young student who had intercepted them at the plank bridge that Toby often disappeared during the day, using a small rowboat to cross the river and visit Holy Trinity. He mentioned that the mile-long walk to the church could be avoided by taking a hand-cranked chain ferry across
the river, a hundred yards or so back upstream.

  As they approached Holy Trinity, along a long avenue of lime trees, Oliver found himself wishing that Toby’s wild theory was right, that Stratford Will was a red herring. Because take away the Shakespearean accretions, decommission the sightseeing buses, fire the pushy, bright-jacketed tour guides, evict the talentless street entertainers in front of the theater, banish the shirtless tourists, and Stratford could easily be one of the most beautiful towns in the world. But on its own merits—not milking a questionable association with a playwright who did his best work somewhere else, which half the worshippers at his birthplace and tomb had never read nor seen.

  The interior of the church was bright, with massive stained-glass windows at its east and west ends and a clear-glass clerestory above the Cotswold limestone nave. Holy Trinity has a “weeping chancel,” which means it was built out of alignment with the nave by a few degrees. This feature of some medieval churches made the cruciform floor plan even more Christ-like by replicating the leaning of his head toward his right shoulder while on the cross, the way an Englishman surveys a bookshelf.

  As they paid their chancel entrance fee to a jovial cassocked attendant, who conducted a brief, apologetic search of Oliver’s satchel and Effie’s shoulder bag, they spotted Toby, still in his baggy cricket sweater, standing motionless in front of the altar rail. He was at first startled, then pleased to see Oliver. Then he noticed Effie and looked even more startled and pleased, in turn. He tried to straighten his sweater.

  “Your colleagues told us that you decamp here at the first sign of a shovel,” she reported.

  “There are ten of us working on that island. And besides, there’s no real digging. It’s just trowels and brushes in a couple of inches of soil. So I come here to think.”

  Oliver looked down at the spotlit array of gray tombstones in front of the altar. Because the occupants were buried with their heads to the east, toward the rising sun, the inscriptions were upside down, but a blue sign and a bowl of cut flowers indicated Shakespeare’s last resting place. The gravestone itself had no name or dates, just the famous curse. A framed rubbing of the single verse had been placed at the foot of the grave.