Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries)

by Maria Hudgins

  The man from the Bodleian Library said he suspected it was the ghost of Prudence Burcote who died of a broken heart when her Cavalier lover left her. “But Prudence normally hangs about on Magpie Lane,” he said.

  To bring Keith into the conversation, I said, “As a scientist you probably think we’re all crazy, talking about ghosts. Did you see it?”

  “I must confess that I did, and that I rather thought it might be M-Madame Curie.”

  That lightened us up. The diners on either side of Keith joined in. The discussion meandered easily from ghosts, to folklore, to the vast differences in the impressions of witnesses to a single event. We all laughed when Keith suggested we were lucky the Grey Lady didn’t kill someone out in the hall because the police would have concluded we were all completely potty. I felt my level of anxiety, at a dangerous peak earlier thanks to Larry, returning to a more reasonable level.

  Between the pheasant and the dessert, Daphne Wetmore left the High Table and made her way down the aisle behind me. She touched me on the shoulder, leaned over, and whispered, “How are your accommodations? Is your room satisfactory?” A purely perfunctory, good hostess question. I’d already told her I liked the room.

  I assured her, again, that it was and that I loved staying in a room that dated back to the Elizabethan period.

  “Which staircase is it? Thirteen? You know, some people refuse to stay there. Unlucky, they say.”

  Unlike the typical dormitory rooms in American colleges, the residence quads at St. Ormond’s didn’t have long central halls on each floor with rooms leading off left and right. Instead, the three-and four-story stone buildings had numbered staircases winding up, ground floor to top, with only one or two rooms on each level and no communication with other staircases. If your room was on Staircase Thirteen you had to go outside, into the open-air central garden to visit someone in, say, Staircase Ten.

  Inside my room I felt a profound privacy—an almost eerie sense of isolation.

  Isolation. The word reminded me of the interlopers from Glastonbury.

  I searched again for Bram and Mignon by craning my neck to see over the shoulder of the man seated next to Keith. There they were, in the same seats as before, but now surrounded by others and actively conversing with them. Bram’s face wore a look of rapt fascination at whatever the man seated across from him was talking about. Mignon and the woman on her left inclined their heads toward each other, nodding. I heard Mignon’s hearty laugh in response to an exaggerated eye-roll by the other woman. I felt a bit better.

  Daphne made polite small talk with others as she worked her way down the aisle. I heard her say, “Pray that Harold doesn’t tell one of his naughty jokes. He’s had four glasses of Merlot.”

  As if he’d heard his name, Harold Wetmore stood and clinked his knife against his wine glass for attention. Slowly the room hushed. He ran one hand in his pants pocket, exposing the green suspenders bracketing his red bow tie. Harold looked like an albino orangutan with a fringe of uncombed white hair framing a great expanse of forehead and small eyes beneath overgrown eyebrows. From his rumpled linen jacket to his unbelted pot belly, Harold was every inch the absentminded professor. He cleared his throat and began:

  “I confess that the ghost of Lady Tanfield crossed my mind earlier this evening. Though her fiery chariot normally confines itself to the night skies above Burford, it is rumored that a black cloud sometimes follows her and if this cloud surrounds you it sucks out your mind—a fate one might suspect has already befallen much of Oxford.”

  This produced a wave of laughter all around the room.

  “I’m so terribly pleased to welcome you to St. Ormond’s College. We are delighted to have a distinguished group of scholars from three continents, and I am sure we will all find much food for thought as we exchange our ideas over the next few days. It is the Elizabethan period that concerns us here. Not the medieval. Not the rule of the Anglo-Saxons or the Normans or the Celts. I’m sure we’re all keenly aware of the tremendous influence of the Arthur myths on social mores in England and France as these stories were invented and popularized in those distant years, but did they die out with the coming of the early modern period? To what extent had they already shaped this island’s psyche? And to what extent were they exported to the rest of the world as England embarked upon a great age of exploration?

  “That’s what we’re here to talk about.

  “If there are any here who wish to turn this into a treasure hunt for the Holy Grail or Arthur’s bones, or Excalibur, for God’s sake, let him forever hold his peace and depart forthwith by the down train. Or, as a certain don would have said, ‘by the town drain.’”

  Amid laughter from the locals and blank stares from most of the foreign guests, Wetmore nodded to his audience and sat down. I had read a lot about Oxford University over the past year and knew that his closing remark referred to William Spooner of New College, famous for his “Spoonerisms.” It was said that he once proposed a toast to “our queer dean.”

  “Well!” said Claudia, the woman from the British Museum, fishing for her purse under the table. “That was rather sharp, don’t you think? What was he talking about?”

  Keith pulled the wayward purse from the floor near his feet and handed it across the table. “That’s Harold for you. He’s a stickler for insisting people remember King Arthur is a myth. Don’t ever suggest there might really have been such a king. Not around Harold.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said.

  “What now? Is this it?” asked the man from the Bodleian.

  “There will be c-c-coffee in the Senior Common Room, for those who wish to relax and chat a bit before retiring.”

  All Oxford colleges kept a Junior Common Room for undergraduates and a Senior Common Room for faculty and grads. In the United States we’d call them lounges. I wasn’t sure where St. Ormond’s Senior Common Room was, but figured I could find it by following the crowd. Stepping out into the arched corridor that connected East Quad to Middle Quad, I felt a cool breeze in my hair. The night was lovely, high sixties, maybe low seventies, and crisp. I decided to sit on one of the benches in the East Quad for a minute.

  My own room was in a corner of this quad but not visible from my seat on the bench because the room’s only window, a tiny, leaded-glass one, opened over Sycamore Lane, which ran parallel to this part of the college. An arched passage on the opposite side, leading to faculty offices, was lit now by one small carriage lantern casting a long beam across the grass. In its pale yellow glow the texture of the Cotswold sandstone stood out in bold relief. The flowers bordering all four walls of the quad were now darkened to shades of blue. Drops of water on the hostas sparkled as they swayed in the passing breeze. A hint of grape-scented heliotrope drifted by. All around the edges, expertly tended flowerbeds seemed to have been planned for maximum impact this very week, but I suspected they always looked their best. The only position at an Oxford college harder to acquire than that of Master was that of Gardener, a post some said required a great deal more knowledge. The English love their gardens, and nowhere was this more obvious than in Oxford.

  A few lights still burned in the porter’s office at the main entrance. A couple, most likely members of our group, tapped the electric eye beside the massive nail-studded door with one of the magic entry buttons the college issued each of us and slipped out into the city night. High heels clicked on a flagstone walk behind me. City traffic noises, damped by the walls around me, seemed farther off than they were. I thought of a line from Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night. “If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement mattered . . .”

  The cell phone in my purse chattered against the wooden seat. I fished it out and fumbled for the talk button. Not surprisingly, it was from my friend Lettie Osgood, and she was calling from across town.

  “Dotsy? I’m not coming back to the college tonight. I’m staying here. Lindsey and what’s-his-name are out and they won’t be ho
me till the wee hours, I’m sure, so I have to stay with the children.”

  Lettie rented a room on the same staircase as mine. She was staying here on a B and B basis, not attending the conference but helping her daughter, Lindsey, a doctor who was working at the Radcliffe Hospital in a summer exchange program. Lindsey’s two children were here because leaving them with her ex back in Virginia was not an option. Lettie hadn’t told me why. Something was going on there, and it wasn’t good, I felt. Who was this man Lindsey was going out with? A new boyfriend? Ah well. Lindsey was in her late thirties and divorced. Naturally she’d be dating again but thank heavens Lettie was here. The children were staying in a strange apartment, in a strange country, and their mother was away most of the time—day and night—not good for the little ones’ sense of security. They were seven and five, the age when children’s fear of strangers, the bogeyman, loomed large and unreasoning.

  Conversation over, I switched my phone back to the ring tone and stuffed it in my purse. A dark form flicked through the lamplight spilling across the grass. I jumped. Silly. Just someone walking through the archway toward the college’s north gate.

  “Fancy meeting you here.” The voice came from behind my bench.

  I turned. It was Bram Fitzwaring. “We must stop meeting like this,” I said. “Have a seat.”

  Bram did as I suggested. “Going out on the town tonight? It’s still early.”

  “For the young, maybe, but not for me.”

  “Oh, come on. How about a pizza? Let’s go for a pizza.” He leaned his shoulder against mine and gave my arm a nudge.

  “We just ate! Are you telling me you could eat another meal?”

  “Not on, eh? Ah well, I’ll probably pack it in, as well.” He straightened his legs, crossed his sandal-clad feet at the ankles, and dropped his head back, looking up at a hazy dark sky. His wooly caftan smelled of incense. “I don’t think they want me here.”

  From nonsense straight to the gut. This man was making my stomach churn. I said nothing.

  “Eh? Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you. Who is they? Who doesn’t want you here?”

  “Harold Wetmore. Harold Wet Fish. Harold-Head-Up-His-Ass-World’s-Foremost-Authority-on-English-History, thinks I should go home.” Bram glanced toward me as if to see how I was reacting. I diverted my gaze to the lawn. “Seems I’m sullying the purity of his precious ivory tower. That comment he made at dinner about ‘if you’re here on a treasure hunt for the Holy Grail or whatever, you need to leave.’ That was for me.”

  “Does he think you’re here on a treasure hunt? I don’t get it.” Actually I did get it, but I didn’t want to say so.

  “No. But this bullshit about the myth of Arthur—the Arthur legend—it’s bullshit. I’ve read all the stories, too, you know. I’ve read Le Morte d’Arthur, I’ve read Geoffrey of Monmouth, I’ve read Tennyson. But Grand Master Wetmore—Lord Wetmore—Lord High Ruler of St. Ormond’s—goes bloody nuts if you mention that Arthur was also a real king.”

  “His opinion is in the majority, you know.”

  “Majority. Majority of what? Majority of poncing pinheads who think history is counting pigs in fourteen eighty-two? Who never think about what life was like for the Britons when the Romans pulled out?” Bram’s beefy arms flew skyward and a board in our bench cracked under his weight. “They think the Romans left and the Brits just stood there for a couple hundred years waiting for someone else to come and tell them what to do!”

  “This is Oxford, you know.” I stood, grabbed my purse, and started walking toward Staircase Thirteen. Bram’s voice was rising several decibels with every comment and I didn’t want a scene. “It’s been a long day. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Bram stood and followed me, shouting at the back of my neck. “Just you wait! I’m going to blow the doors off this place! Just you wait. When I get my turn, I’m going to blow the doors off this place!”

  I took the shortest route, straight across the grass.

  “He’ll come a cropper, ol’ Harry, ol’ Harvey, ol’ . . .” His voice trailed off to an inarticulate mumble.

  Climbing the first flight of stairs, I heard Bram’s rubber soles squeaking on the stone steps behind me. Oh, no, he’s following me to my room! How can I get rid of him without . . . Fortunately, before I said anything I remembered his room was also on this staircase.

  When I reached my own door, I saw that he was gone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  My little room on the top floor felt like the garret of a starving artist. All funny angles and slants, with a tiny single bed, desk, bookcase, sink, wardrobe, and a low table, probably from IKEA, for the tea-making facilities. Every day the scout, their term for housekeeper, tidied my room and left me two bourbon cream biscuits on the saucer beside the cup. Every day I ate them.

  A large stone fireplace, now blocked up, stood on one end of the room, its surround bearing the graffiti of generations of students. Some were in Latin and some looked more like runes but were probably just idle scratchings.

  My room was number six.

  Standing at my door I couldn’t see the doors of any other rooms because the narrow hall extended a few feet, plunged down four steps, made a forty-five-degree right turn, then descended another four steps. Here stood the doors marked four and five. Down two more flights, now turning left, you hit a landing with the bathroom (shower and toilet) on one end and a bifurcated extension on the other, where the two ends terminated in doors marked two and three. There was no room number one, but another flight down, on ground level, stood a blackened wood door with a brass plaque that read, “Bursar’s Office.” I’d never seen it unlocked.

  Lettie Osgood stayed in room five whenever she did stay here, which, in the five days since my arrival, had only been twice. Bram Fitzwaring and Mignon Beaulieu had two of the others, but I didn’t know which two. I hadn’t noticed exactly when Bram, climbing the stairs behind me, had peeled off and entered his own room.

  I stood on my bed to open the little window beneath a gabled roof and let in the night air. A neatly printed sign on one pane of glass read, “No exit.” I laughed every time I saw it. Nowhere but in a college would it be necessary to stick such a warning. The window was fifty feet above the pavement and, fully open, produced a hole no more than a foot wide, but some thin and agile undergraduate would try it. I set my iPad on my little nightstand, brushed my teeth at the sink, then paused. I heard something. Drums? Rhythmic taps. Thirteen taps, then a pause, then thirteen more. Where was it coming from? I hopped back up on the bed and turned an ear to the open window. The drumming noises continued but they weren’t coming from outside.

  I decided to take a shower before turning in. I grabbed my towel, face cloth, soap dish, and robe. Don’t forget the room key. Thanks to Lettie’s earlier mistake, I knew that forgetting your key meant a trip to the Porter’s Lodge dressed however one was when heading to the loo in the middle of the night. Fortunately the lodge stayed open all night, but Lettie had been horribly embarrassed.

  On the way down, I listened for the drumming sounds but they seemed to have stopped. Inside the toilet niche, I thought I heard footsteps coming from outside. The bathroom window was half open, and I stepped over close to it. Some ten feet above the walk that ran the length of the south wall of the quad, the windowsill hit me slightly below my shoulders. The window itself was the sort that cranks out in two tall vertical segments. I stuck my head out and looked down.

  I still heard footsteps but I saw no one. My view from the window was of the grassy quad bathed in shades of blue and a faint yellow glow from the carriage lantern under the archway on the opposite side. A fog was drifting in.

  I heard something hit the walkway below the window. Something small, possibly metallic. Keys? A huge shadow grazed the stones on the opposite side of the quad. A head and shoulders, but they ended in a pencil-thin shadow that extended all across the lawn and ended, I supposed, on the walkway beneath my window. I rai
sed myself to tiptoes and craned my neck down as far as possible. I could see almost straight down. I could see a strip of the flagstone walk but the wisteria vine clinging to the stone wall kept me from seeing straight down. I saw no one. This was spooky.

  Checking the bathroom door to make sure it was locked, I paused until my racing pulse slowed down, then stripped naked and hopped into the shower. Now I was hearing noises everywhere. Clunks. Could be the pipes. A cough? Could be Bram or Mignon inside their own rooms, but could I hear a cough through two doors and a stairwell? Someone outside? An eerie wail sent the soap in my hands flying toward the shower-head. Okay. I must have imagined that. I was happy to bundle myself back into my own little room and check my email on my tablet. This little cyber-connection to home, a message from my granddaughter telling me she had won a medal in swimming, comforted me.

  I had drifted off, my iPad on my chest, when a loud thunk woke me with a start. I couldn’t possibly have imagined it, because, eyes open, I heard another.

  My stomach hurt. In fact, I felt as if I might throw up. How long would it take me to get to the bathroom? Grab robe, grab key, down four winding sets of steps, and pray the room wasn’t already occupied. Suddenly I wished I’d asked for one of the en suite rooms in the new hall. I’d insisted on this quad because of its ambience. Screw ambience, I thought, and pulled the plastic trashcan close to my bed. I heard another thunk. Coming from below, it sounded like a dresser turning over, or a body slamming into a wall.

  I jumped up and ran out into the hall. I remembered, just in time, to keep one foot in the doorway so the door couldn’t close, as it automatically did, and lock me out. My key was on the opposite side of my room, on the tea tray. Calling out, but not too loudly, “Is there a problem? Does someone need help?” netted me no response. I retreated to my nightstand and checked my watch. Two-thirty in the morning.