What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

  Julia was right, he thought. You are an old humanist.

  Maybe so. There were worse things to be. And as if to celebrate the point he wandered down to the river and sat under the lengthening shadows of an old willow to watch the water, thinking vaguely of lines written by a man who could have been recalling this very spot when he wrote them.

  I know a bank where the wild thyme blows

  Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows

  Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine

  With sweet muskroses and with eglantine . . .

  And so thinking he lay and napped in the sun for an hour, as the swans and ducks dabbled at the shore as they had done for centuries unnumbered.

  CHAPTER 33

  The Dirty Duck was a Stratford institution. Its official name was The Black Swan—or at least that was the name of its restaurant—and it had been an actor hangout since the days of David Garrick, if his guidebook was to be believed. Thomas was skeptical. Surely, Stratford hadn’t been a theater town in the days of Garrick? Still, the place looked old enough. It overlooked Waterside and the Avon beyond, a brick-and-timbered building like a hundred others he had seen in rural England already, but lit by a Bohemian aura of expectation. Maybe he’d bump into Ian McKellen or Judi Dench having what they might call “a swift half” after the show, or sit where Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and Richard Burton had drunk each other under the table . . .

  Thomas arrived early and ordered a pint of Old Speckled Hen. He paid with a ten-pound note and received a handful of heavy pound coins as change. His pockets were already full of them as if he was collecting them. He had been spending nothing but notes because they were easier to read, because fumbling with unfamiliar coins made him feel like a tourist, and because everything was so damned expensive that trying to use single pounds seemed pointless.

  The place was quiet—a couple of big guys on the patio, and a near-silent family of four in one corner—though the barman assured him it would fill up as soon as the matinee got out.

  “You must have seen some famous faces over the years in here,” said Thomas. “You could probably write a book.”

  “I probably could,” said the barman in a tone that said he never would. He was drying a glass with a white towel, but his eyes were on Thomas.

  “American?”

  “That’s right.”

  The barman nodded as if that couldn’t be helped.

  “Shakespeare professor?”

  “No,” said Thomas.

  “Not just a tourist, though, right? Not here by yourself at this time.”

  “Meeting a friend,” said Thomas. He added on a whim, “Actually I’m from Chicago, looking into the death of Daniella Blackstone, the novelist.”

  The barman stopped polishing the glass and his eyes grew wide and interested.

  “That right?” he said.

  “I suppose this was a bit far from Kenilworth to be her local,” said Thomas.

  “She did come in, once or twice,” said the barman, pleased not to be talking about actors, “but I don’t think she was a local type. Wasn’t around much anyway. Book tours and celebrity appearances all around the world.”

  He said it with a roll of his eyes, his voice gruff and a little sour. Thomas just nodded.

  “Still,” he said. “I expect she had her reasons.”

  “For what?”

  “The fame, the glamour. Filling a void, as it were.”

  He used the phrase as if he’d heard it on the radio, or read it somewhere.

  “Alice, you mean,” said Thomas. “Her daughter.”

  “Maybe,” said the barman, nodding significantly as if unwilling to be drawn. “I mean, tragedy makes people do strange things.”

  “What exactly happened?” said Thomas, emphasizing the word exactly as if he knew all but the details.

  The barman leaned in.

  “She was sixteen,” he said. “Imagine that. Fancy losing your daughter at that age. Tragic,” he said. “Bloody tragic.”

  “It was a road accident or something, right?” said Thomas.

  “A fire,” the barman corrected him. “At the secondary school. Five girls were in the school hall one evening after classes. All local girls—students at the school—apart from one. There was a fire and they couldn’t get out. All killed. Worst incident of its kind since the war. I remember the television pictures. Well, after that . . . I mean, who knows what something like that does to a mother?”

  “How did the fire start?”

  “There’d been a what-d’ya-call-it . . . a spate of them. Empty buildings. Three or four over the previous few months. Vandals. Delinquents. Bored kids with nothing to do. Schools are always a target for yobs like that. ’Cept this time, there were kids inside. They weren’t supposed to be there. No one knew. They only found out when they found the bodies. Like I said, tragic.”

  Thomas nodded and stared at his beer, unable to think of anything to say.

  “Someone die?” said Taylor Bradley, brightly.

  The barman shot him a cool look and Thomas rallied.

  “Hey,” he said. “How was the show?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Taylor. “Generally good, I think, but I need to let it sit. There were some really wonderful moments, and the Lear himself was terrific a lot of the time, but there were parts of the play the show wasn’t that interested in.”

  The barman rolled his eyes again and moved off. Taylor didn’t notice.

  “I hated the Fool,” he said, “though it’s a tough role. Liked Cordelia: spunky, you know? More personality than you often see. At the beginning she was clearly in love with Burgundy, so marrying France was hard. Nice touch.”

  Thomas had forgotten that Taylor Bradley was a performance person. He remembered how he would trudge into that dusty, overheated university office on the ground floor of the BU English department, ranting or rhapsodizing about what he had seen at the American Repertory Theatre or the Huntington. When he talked about theater he came alive. His customary diffidence fell away and his eyes brightened. A good production filled him with excitement, a bad one with vitriol. Thomas prompted him now as he had done then, enjoying the way he relished those grace notes of a performance most audiences barely notice, and railed at the things he despised.

  Thomas smiled and sipped his beer.

  “Don’t tell me you liked it?” said an amused voice behind them.

  Julia McBride was easing through the suddenly crowded bar, looking sardonic.

  “Didn’t see it,” said Thomas. “Taylor did. You know Taylor, right?”

  “You’re at the institute, yes?” she said. “Enthusiasm for productions like this could get you barred.”

  Taylor laughed.

  “You didn’t like it, I gather,” said Thomas.

  “It was ghastly,” she said. “I wonder sometimes if these directors have read a single word of scholarship. How do you misread the power politics of a play like Lear that badly?”

  “I was just saying,” said Taylor, “that it seemed a more domestic version of the play.”

  “If cursing your daughters with sterility—a moment, incidentally, that they completely misplayed—is your idea of domesticity, remind me never to settle down with you. I’m Julia McBride, by the way. Is this seat taken?”

  “I think you’re being sought for,” said Thomas.

  Alonso Petersohn was pushing his way through the crowd, cradling what looked like a gin and tonic in one hand and a murky cocktail in the other.

  “Over here, Al,” she waved.

  Petersohn nodded and pressed on, struggling to part the crowd with a constant muttering of “Excuse me, please.” He wasn’t making much headway. Suddenly the people parted and Thomas saw Angela and a scowling Chad, Julia’s attendant graduate students. Chad pushed his way through, his pint held high, and Petersohn followed in his wake. Taylor met Thomas’s gaze and pulled a face.

  “It seems everyone is here,” said Thomas.

  “D
oesn’t it,” said Julia. Her smile at him was a little rueful, or was intended to seem that way. Her eyes had the familiar amused sparkle, so that the look—like every other—seemed ironic, playful. Thomas wondered how she would respond if he made a pass at her overtly, then dismissed the thought.

  Petersohn was shaking hands with Taylor.

  “I think I saw you in Chicago,” he was saying.

  “You were at the Drake?” said Thomas to Taylor. “Why didn’t you look me up?”

  “Didn’t know you were there,” he shrugged. “And we have kind of grown apart.”

  “True,” said Thomas, raising his glass. “Here’s to catching up.”

  They clinked pints and drank.

  Chad was watching, a slight sneer on his face. Julia was watching too, amused, but just as interested. Thomas caught her eye, smiled, and then realized he was fiddling with his wedding ring. He looked at it and stilled his fingers. When he looked up, Julia had turned her attention to Petersohn, who was leaning into Taylor, midstream:

  “. . . well, obviously if you think the purpose of the plays is to communicate,” he said, as if no one could be that stupid, “or if you think the speaker is a character rather than a discursive nexus generated out of the energies of class and language . . .”

  Thomas opened his mouth to say something, but chose to drink his beer instead. Taylor could not keep quiet.

  “You think Cordelia is a discursive nexus?” he said with baffled disbelief. “What the hell is that? She’s a daughter, a princess, a fiancée, a sister . . .”

  Petersohn just laughed.

  “That’s just a romantic projection onto a textual intersection,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” said Taylor, shrill. He turned to Thomas. “What is he talking about?”

  Thomas just smiled and held up his hands. Hey, they said, I’m not one of you.

  “I’m saying that to treat Cordelia as if she is a person is to misread the nature of the early modern dramatic text,” said Petersohn.

  “But she’s right there on the stage,” said Taylor, spiking the table with his index finger as if the whole show were playing out in miniature before them. “She’s a thinking, feeling person . . .”

  “But of course,” supplied Julia, “on the early modern stage, she wouldn’t have even been a woman. Just some boy in a dress . . .”

  “So what?” Taylor protested. “That changes nothing . . .”

  And so it went on. Thomas sat back and watched and listened as they railed at each other, feeling half envious and half relieved that he was not expected to contribute. The discussion left him behind quickly, and though he got the gist of some points, he was in the dark for a lot of it. He watched Chad, realizing how much anxiety there was under the surliness, realizing that for graduate students and junior faculty, these gatherings were little more than interviews with beer. They were unlikely to be the basis of your career, but they could certainly help or hinder. Being here in Stratford, finding himself surrounded by the same faces he had seen at the Drake in Chicago, reminded him of just how tightly focused the academic community was. Everyone knew everyone. If not enough people knew you, you were no one.

  Probably why Taylor is going toe to toe with some of the biggest names in his field, even though he knows he’s branding himself as a reactionary.

  At least they’ll remember him. Thomas wasn’t sure the strategy would work. If they thought he was stuck in the nineteenth century, if they deemed him wedded to those outmoded ideas Julia lumped together as “humanism,” then this kind of outburst could do him more harm than good, however engaging he was as he did it. Maybe he had had too much to drink.

  “Thomas, what are you having?” said Taylor, on cue.

  “Same again, please.”

  “Julia?” said Taylor.

  “Oh no, I should be getting back.”

  “Nonsense,” said Taylor with an expansive gesture. He was a little flushed from the beer and was determined to be the life of the party. “Come now, dearest chuck,” he said, “another chocolate kiss?”

  Thomas thought Julia hesitated a second, and there was something frosty in her gaze, as if she didn’t like being pushed, or thought he was being too familiar.

  “Come on, Julia,” said Petersohn. “One more won’t kill you.”

  “Very well,” she said.

  Taylor cheered, and Thomas thought her eyes lingered on him, thoughtful.

  “Just one more,” she said.

  “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous,” Taylor demanded half joking, “there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

  She laughed at the quotation, but she looked away almost immediately, as if to catch her breath, or compose her thoughts, and Thomas felt sure something had passed between them that no one else understood. Only Chad seemed to notice, and he glowered from one to the other, till Angela put her tiny hand on his arm and pulled him back into the conversation.

  Thomas thought the girl looked troubled, even afraid.

  CHAPTER 34

  It was dark by the time Thomas boarded the Warwick bus, but that was okay. All he had to do was wait for the last stop before changing for Kenilworth. He rode on the top deck, for the sake of novelty, but it was too dark to see anything, though going up the stairs as the bus leaned around corners was, he decided, adventure enough for one evening.

  He wouldn’t have noticed the two men if the Kenilworth bus had been on time. As it was, he had four minutes to kill waiting for the doors to open, and that gave him ample time to recognize the two heavyset men who had been sitting on the patio at the Dirty Duck. They had probably been on the lower deck of the Stratford bus, but Thomas only saw them now, and really only paid attention because one of them was smoking, contrary to the signs all over the bus station.

  They had similar looks, though one was completely bald and wore an earring that sparkled. The other—the smoker—had a florid face and a flattened nose like a prizefighter. They were dressed well, in square-cut suits that made their shoulders wide enough to block doors, and wore trench coats over the top. They had the look of ex-sportsmen run very slightly to seed, but what really struck Thomas was that sense that they did not belong in those clothes and in this place, where the poor and drunk made their way home to bed. They didn’t talk to each other, they never seemed to make eye contact with anyone, and their movements were small and easy. The bald guy had a rolled-up newspaper. The other had an umbrella.

  Thomas didn’t like it.

  He had some small hope that when the bus doors opened they would stay where they were, waiting for another, and for a moment he seemed to have gotten his wish. He had taken his seat at the back as the loud kids and a couple of old ladies had filed dutifully on, but there was no sign of the two men, till the engine started to turn over. Then they had gotten on, moving with animal nonchalance, paying, and sitting midway down the bus so that Thomas could see the backs of their heads. They never looked at him, never spoke, but Thomas’s heart had begun to race.

  He watched the lights of the town slipping away, becoming patchy as they hit the outskirts of Warwick and then merged into Kenilworth. The two men had still not said a word to each other, and Thomas felt a gathering weight in the pit of his stomach, though he tried to will it away. Surely he was overreacting. It was a coincidence, and not a particularly remarkable one, that the two men had been in Stratford’s most celebrated pub and were now on their way home. He stared hard into the darkness outside as trees flashed green and close in the light from the bus windows. It was almost his stop.

  He thought quickly. The bus stop was maybe a quarter-mile walk from the hotel, and he could remember little of the route: a house or two? A lot of trees, certainly, and a quiet road: at this time, close to deserted. He could make to get off, and if they rose too, could pretend to change his mind and stay on, though where he would go from there, he had no idea. He could speak to the driver, but what he would say that wouldn’t sound pathetic—even crazy—he couldn’t
imagine.

  An old woman with shopping bags up front reached up and pushed a button. A bell rang. Moments later, the bus began to slow and she began gathering her belongings together in a ponderous manner. Thomas glanced out the window, then leaped to his feet.

  He was past the woman in three long strides, then off the bus as the two men—surprised—hurried after him, their way blocked for a moment by the woman’s groceries.

  Thomas didn’t look back. He sensed the commotion, but he peeled off across the road at a run, keeping out of the glow from the bus windows, hitting his stride as he turned into the wooded and gravelly road with the sign to the parking lot of Kenilworth Castle.

  CHAPTER 35

  He knew now he should have stayed on the bus, knew it the moment they had given chase. He should have simply faced them down or suggested that the driver radio for the police. At worst, he would have looked stupid.

  Too late now.

  He ran.

  More accurately, he loped, his right arm clasped to his stomach as if he were still wearing the sling. It was too much to hope that they wouldn’t realize which way he had come. They would be after him, maybe only a hundred yards behind. But Thomas was prepared to bet that his visit to the ruins earlier meant that he knew the layout of the castle better than his pursuers. He also knew that, apart from a strand of chain looping across the gateway, there would be nothing substantial that would stop him from getting in.

  So he ran, pounding the gravel road even more awkwardly than usual, listening for sounds of pursuit but not pausing to look back, his pockets full of change jingling with each step. A moment later he was crossing the bridge and passing between the two ruined round towers that guarded the entrance proper.

  Now what?

  It was dark, the kind of darkness a city boy like Thomas was unused to. There was a soft glow in the sky to the north and east, where the town nestled, but the ruins themselves were mere silhouettes against it, and even as his eyes adjusted, the castle itself was a black labyrinth of stone. There was heavy cloud cover overhead and no moon. Thomas spun around to get his bearings and felt a wave of panic. The site with which he had gotten reasonably familiar had been a picturesque monument of rosy stone against a sharp blue sky: this tumbled-down maze of jagged black rock was a different place entirely. Then he heard voices and running footsteps.