What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

  Sweet.

  He was putting it into the lock, trying to work it with his clumsy left hand, when a voice behind him stopped him cold.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The steward was standing on the landing below, and his face was hard.

  “What is in there?” said Thomas, trying to sound casual.

  “That would be Miss Alice’s room.”

  He said it as if this should be explanation enough.

  “Could I have a look inside?” said Thomas.

  Miss Alice?

  “No. I told you to wait for me downstairs.”

  “Does Miss Alice still live there?” said Thomas, ignoring the man’s hostility. Perhaps Blackstone had had what they used to call a “companion.” Her husband was, after all, long dead.

  “Miss Alice was her daughter,” said the other, and his cloudy eyes flashed as if Thomas had said something offensive. “What magazine did you say you worked for?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Thomas. “I forgot. We always tried to stay out of Miss Blackstone’s personal tragedy.”

  “And yet here you are.”

  There was a pause.

  “The key, please,” said the steward.

  He extended his hand without taking a step, and Thomas had to come down to him. Thomas stretched out his left hand, twisting his body so that the pain in his shoulder flared. The steward noticed and his head cocked with interest, even amusement.

  “Been in the wars, Mr. Knight?” he said.

  “Walked into a door,” said Thomas.

  “And now you can walk out of one.”

  With the key in his fist, the steward turned and walked away, descending the stairs so quickly that Thomas had to jog to keep up.

  He entered the office by the kitchen, where a wooden table sat beneath a rack of pans. The room was immaculate, but dim as the rest of the house and cool. There was a crate beside the table, its wood branded with the Saint Evremond crest. Above it was a board hung with keys. The steward hung the key in place and turned to Thomas. His face was still blank, but the muscles of his jaw were taut and his eyes were hard.

  “Miss Blackstone liked her champagne,” Thomas said, nodding at the crate.

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  “She liked many fine things in moderation,” said the other, pointedly. Thomas could think of nothing to say.

  “I’ll see you out,” said the steward.

  At the door he added, “Oh, and Mr. Knight?”

  “Yes?” said Thomas, turning to him.

  “Don’t come back, there’s a good chap.”

  The steward’s unblinking eyes held Thomas until the door swung heavily into place with a deep snap that resounded through the house.

  CHAPTER 28

  The University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute is located in Mason Croft, a sprawling two-story brick building on Church Street in Stratford that was once home to the novelist Marie Corelli. Located minutes from the properties most definitively associated with Shakespeare—his birthplace, the house he bought and lived in, the school he attended, and the church that housed his bones—it provided a unique focus for academic study and periodic conferences. It was here that Julia McBride, Randall Dagenhart, and a score of other Shakespeareans had gathered for a special week of seminars and lectures with their colleagues and students, a conference unshackled by the usual rules of the International Shakespeare Conference, which, as Julia had pointed out, did not permit graduate students to present. Thomas wondered if the professional Shakespeareans felt the aura of pilgrimage that haunted the place, or if—as scholars schooled in the posthumanism of current literary criticism—they were immune to such romantic mysticism.

  Thomas knew that the kind of anonymity he had experienced at the Chicago conference was out of the question at the institute, Mason Croft being big for a house, but not for a conference center. Still, he was surprised to find the front door locked. There was an old-fashioned bell pull. He tugged it.

  A moment later, the door opened.

  “Can I help you?”

  The woman was large and tough-looking, middle-aged rather than elderly by sheer force of character: a woman used to weeding out people who didn’t belong. People like him.

  “I was looking for the conference session,” he said, trying to look like a confused delegate and not like an interloper.

  “There’s a guide to the institute with your registration materials. You are registered, I take it?”

  In fact she didn’t take it at all. She knew he wasn’t, or she would be opening the door. Thomas opted for honesty.

  “I’m not, actually,” he said. “But there was to be a session on early comedy that I really wanted to attend. Randall Dagenhart is speaking . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, crisp and patently not sorry, her back straightening. “The institute isn’t open to the public.”

  “Yes, I realize that,” he said, forcing himself to be patient. “I was wondering if I could register for that one session. A kind of day pass, as it were.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “that’s out of the question. The sessions are all fully booked.”

  “I can pay,” he said.

  “No doubt,” she said, as if his offer had only proved his crassness, “but that really isn’t the issue.”

  “Yes,” he said, his smile hardening. “I can see how admitting one extra person might shake academia to its core. We wouldn’t want to share the mysteries of literary scholarship with the great unwashed . . .”

  “Good day,” she said, stone-faced.

  “Thank you so much,” he said. “It’s good to know knowledge is so well guarded.”

  “There’s plenty of knowledge to be had elsewhere,” she said. “And you can always go and look at the ducks.”

  Which should suit your brand of tourism, she added only with her eyes.

  “Is there a problem, Thomas?”

  He turned into the arch smile of Julia McBride.

  “You know this gentleman?” said the battle-ax, with barely concealed astonishment.

  “Tom Knight and I go way back,” she said. “Mind if he sits in with me? He’s been looking forward to this session.”

  “Not at all,” said the woman, her eyes hard. “It would be a shame not to share the mysteries of literary scholarship with . . . all who show an interest.”

  She gave Thomas an icy stare and stalked away.

  McBride giggled.

  “That’s Mrs. Covington,” she said. “She’s a kind of house-keeper and local historian. But she’s also a self-appointed gatekeeper. She’s very deferential to Shakespeareans, but a bit fierce with the general public.”

  “I spotted that,” said Thomas.

  He was irritated, by the old woman and the fact that Julia had had to rescue him.

  “Thanks,” he remembered to say. “I did want to hear this talk.”

  “What happened to you?” she said, noting his sling.

  “Fell,” he said. “No big deal.”

  “Come with me,” she whispered, rolling her eyes. “If they try to throw you out, I’ll hide you under my chair.”

  She took his left hand and led him, almost running, to the lecture. Her skin was soft and warm.

  The room had been cozy once and still retained something of its former domesticity, but it still felt more like a Great Hall than a sitting room. There was a broad fireplace with a carved mantle painted white, and beside it a simple podium. The audience—Thomas counted twenty-three—were arranged on closely packed chairs. There were no vacant seats together and, with a moue of disappointment, McBride peeled off to the right while Thomas sat to the left, as close to the French windows at the back as he could get.

  He sat between people he didn’t know, torn between regret and relief at having been separated from Julia McBride. Both feelings made him want to call Kumi, who did not know he was in England, did not know he had been shot. He had become used to being alone in the years
since she had left him, but since their reconciliation—or partial reconciliation, he wasn’t yet sure what it was—they had talked at least once a week, usually more. He felt a crease of guilt for getting so preoccupied, and then wondered if she had missed his call or tried to reach him herself. If she was busy at work, she might not have noticed the silence. The thought bothered him, so he refocused his mind on what the lecture might be.

  Cultural politics, probably. The nondiscovery—announced with gleeful righteousness—that we are more insightful on matters of gender, race, and class than Shakespeare was . . . There was an annoying whisper of truth to it, which made Thomas weary, confused, and disappointed. It sapped all the color out of literature, all the life and excitement and nuance. At least in the high school classroom the idea that literature communicated with the present, that it enriched the reader, was not obviously laughable.

  The thought annoyed him as it had at the Drake conference, but before he could iron away the scowl on his face, the lecture began.

  The speaker was introduced as Alonso Petersohn, associate professor of literature at Stanford, and his talk was titled “The virtue of your eye must break my oath: gendered ethos/ethic and the post-Lacanian subject in Love’s Labour’s Lost.” Petersohn was young and confident, a smallish man who dressed like a Hollywood studio executive—or at least, as Thomas imagined they dressed—in an open-necked silk shirt and some form of upmarket chinos with pleated fronts. He wore brown leather sandal-like shoes, all straps and thongs without socks, and a single earring with a bright blue stone. He spoke fluently in a well-modulated, expertly paced tone and was completely incomprehensible.

  “The libidinal dynamism inherent in the Lacanian mirror stage,” Petersohn said, “is both a problematic as well as an ontological structure of the human world . . .”

  Thomas considered the rest of the room with an inward sigh. He saw a few familiar faces, but other than McBride and Dagenhart—still in tweed and armed with his laptop—none he could put names to. Some—the very young—were obviously graduate students; a few—the very old—might have been local residents, ex-high school teachers, perhaps. As the talk continued, accumulating impenetrability, the young nodded seriously and made notes while the old looked blank or worried. Thomas was merely irritated. After a couple of minutes he had begun to shift in his seat indiscreetly. After twenty, he put his head in his hands.

  Alonso Petersohn’s argument wound its tortured way to the three-quarter-hour mark and stopped with an uneven patter of applause. Thomas was far from clear what had been said, though he had to concede that Petersohn’s rhetorical high-wire act had positively stunk of cleverness even though he had grasped little of it. Some of the old dears were clearly befuddled, but it was hard to get a sense of what people had thought, and Thomas had a glimpse of that Emperor’s New Clothes dynamic again, in which to point and scream with laughter would only demonstrate his status as impostor. That he could neither talk the talk or walk the walk.

  Thomas scowled at himself. He remembered the Drake conference all too well. However much he’d like to think of his flight from graduate school and the ivory towers beyond as a principled reconnection with all he thought valuable about books and teaching, he knew that the real reason had at least as much to do with the fear that he couldn’t cut it as a scholar. Of course, any such sense of failure would vanish were he to emerge from this trip brandishing a long-lost Shakespeare play . . .

  People were asking questions now, and Petersohn, smiling and nodding sagely, was fielding them as best he could. An older professor in horn-rims at the front had some grumpy quibbles, but all the rest who spoke up seemed to think that what Petersohn had said was insightful and dynamic, something they wanted to be seen to support. What it was they were supporting, Thomas had no idea. It came as something of a surprise even to himself, therefore, when he realized he had raised his left hand and that heads were turning toward him expectantly.

  “Yes,” he said. “This is all fascinating. I was just wondering what difference it would make to your argument if the play’s sequel were available for study.”

  “The play’s sequel?” said Petersohn, benign but bewildered.

  “Love’s Labour’s Won,” said Thomas.

  CHAPTER 29

  Suddenly everyone in the room was smiling and shifting, some embarrassed, some enjoying what they took to be a joke.

  “Is that likely?” said Petersohn, still smiling. “That Love’s Labour’s Won is going to be available for study?”

  The audience relaxed, liking him more for his kindly treatment of the crank with his arm in a sling.

  “Any day now,” said Thomas, with complete composure.

  “Well,” said Petersohn, opting to spare Thomas the easy cruelty of ridicule, “won’t that be exciting?”

  And then another hand was raised urgently in the front row: Chad—Julia’s eager and dour grad student—anxious to get back to serious matters. By the time Petersohn had fielded that one, it was time to break for tea.

  “Like to make an entrance, don’t you?” said Julia McBride, appearing beside him and whispering with delight. “Did you see their faces? Like polite people farting in an elevator. Wonderful!”

  Everyone else was filing out, avoiding his eyes. Only one paused to join them. He recognized her regal bearing before he saw her face.

  “For a high school teacher, you do like your Shakespeare conferences,” said Katrina Barker, smiling.

  “Just here to make trouble,” he said, feeling suddenly stupid again.

  “I think academic gatherings need all the trouble they can get,” she said. And with another expansive smile she sailed off, parting the crowds before her.

  “How on earth do you know Katy Barker?” said Julia. “She’s colossal.”

  “Oh, we go way back,” said Thomas. “I have a long history of making dumb remarks in her presence.”

  “Well, if it helps, she’s a nice person as well as a genius,” said Julia, “which really isn’t fair.”

  “I thought genius meant you didn’t have to be nice.”

  “She’s the exception that proves the rule, I guess.”

  “Talking of genius,” said Thomas, as Alonso Petersohn walked past.

  “You didn’t like his talk?”

  “Did it make any sense to you?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I have my disagreements, and he really needs to define his terms, but yes . . .”

  “He barely mentioned the play,” said Thomas.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The quote in his title was about the only time he referred to the text at all!”

  “This is the twenty-first century, Mr. Knight,” she said. “You can hardly expect him to start analyzing image clusters and figuring out the ways they could be ambiguous.”

  “But I want to learn about the play, about what it means—or might mean—what makes it profound as literature, not about how it’s a matrix for social energies and discourses . . .”

  “Oh!” she shouted, with the kind of delight someone might muster on spotting a chipmunk. “You’re a humanist!”

  Thomas grimaced.

  “You are!” she said, clapping her hands together.

  “I’m a high school teacher who has to convince kids why these four-hundred-year-old plays are worth reading when they can be playing video games . . .”

  “And joining street gangs,” she said, still grinning.

  “Some of them do.”

  “Well, I think it’s sweet,” she said. “Unfashionable and politically a bit suspect, but kind of sweet.”

  “There’s nothing suspect about my politics,” Thomas muttered. “I just want a little more literature and a little less theory.”

  “Aren’t you a little young for the fogey club?”

  “I’m not a fogey,” said Thomas, offended.

  “So there are things you stand for as well as things you stand against? Such as?”

  “I love words,” said Thomas,
jutting his chin out. “Expressive nuance. Precision. I like implications and—yes—image clusters, themes, and tropes.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” he said, warming to his theme. “I like getting my students to read critically—and therefore think critically—by exploring complex and sophisticated literature. They live in a visual culture, but without words . . . Language is about who we are, how we reason, even how we feel. Words make experience.”

  “Thank you, Wittgenstein,” she said.

  “I happen to think that literature has something to teach us, something . . .”

  “Universal?” she inserted, delighted.

  “No,” said Thomas, avoiding what would damn him as a conservative. “Something that helps us reflect on who we are, on . . .”

  “The human condition!” she giggled. She was enjoying his failure to dodge the mines of critical discourse far too much.

  “I just don’t think the sole purpose of literature,” said Thomas, pushing through her amusement, “is to expose social hierarchy.”

  “Neither does Petersohn,” she replied.

  “Who the hell knows what he thinks?” said Thomas. “I didn’t understand a word of it.”

  “So you’re mad,” she said. “That’s understandable. But this isn’t a talk at the local library for whoever happens to walk in. This is a seminar for professional Shakespeareans to talk to other professional Shakespeareans about the things that interest them in the terms they understand.”

  “I’d just like to hear something about the play,” Thomas huffed. “I thought that was why we were here.”

  “No, you didn’t,” she said. “This was exactly what you thought it would be and you came to complain as much as those kiddies in the front came to applaud. Which is fine. But let’s be honest about it, shall we?”

  Thomas frowned. The room was now empty except for them.

  “Tea?” she said, taking his left arm and propelling him out.

  “Okay,” he said. “But don’t expect me to enjoy it.”

  “Heaven forfend.”

  As they stepped out into the hallway where the attendees were still chatting in huddles, Thomas caught two sets of eyes fixed on him, both cautious and attentive: thoughtful eyes, wary eyes. One set belonged to Alonso Petersohn, who was staring past the admiring graduate students clustered around him, fixing Thomas with a stare that was quite unlike the genial charm he had displayed in the lecture room. The other set of eyes belonged to Randall Dagenhart, Thomas’s former advisor, and though they shared Petersohn’s unnerving focus there was something else to them, something very like rage.