What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

  “These were fairly prominent people,” said Hazlehurst. “Wouldn’t their libraries have been researched and documented? Let me see who I can talk to. I have an acquaintance at the Sorbonne who might be able to connect me with someone who knows more.”

  On his way out, Thomas found a quiet spot to sit where he could ignore the tourists. He had been so pleased that the surgery had gone well that the full enormity of the disease had paled for a few hours. Now, in this place, loaded as it was with mortality, it all started coming back. Surgery, after all, was only the beginning.

  Maybe he should go to her no matter what she said she wanted, no matter what Deborah said, abandon all this aimless investigating and get back to what mattered. But Kumi was still used to being alone. If things had gone badly, he would have gone. As they were, Deborah was right: she would be in her usual crisis-management mode, and if he went out there now he would be in the way, particularly if he moped. She was, he thought, stronger than him. Always had been. Let her find her strength. Then he would go.

  He looked up at the vast space above him and the great stone arcs of the ceiling buttresses and he mouthed the word cancer to himself over and over, as if trying to mute the terror it held. It didn’t work, but he sat there a while longer, quite still, thinking of nothing at all, trying to shut out what might happen next. Eventually he lit a candle in a corner of the abbey where a marshal was reprimanding a brash tourist for shooting video without a permit.

  CHAPTER 44

  Thomas spent an hour in one of the packed and silent reading rooms at the British library by the Saint Pancras station. In the main exhibit hall were remarkable literary relics, including the Beowulf manuscript and hand-corrected pages from Thomas’s favorite translation by Seamus Heaney. He had had to tear himself away and descend into the bowels of the building. It had taken him almost another hour to get his library card and figure out the system, because he wasn’t permitted to get his own books. So much of the massive collection was rare or ancient that the handling and shelving was done by the staff. When they had located the books Thomas had requested, a light came on at his desk in the reading room, and he went to collect them. No one spoke, and the entire business felt secretive and protected.

  Unlike the precious tomes being gingerly handled by the white-gloved woman at the desk next to him, Thomas’s selections were fairly mundane: an atlas and a couple of books on European history. He had read the character prefix “King of Navarre” a hundred times in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but none of the footnotes told him where Navarre was and he had never heard of it outside the confines of the play. It took him only minutes to see why.

  He returned his books and checked out, first from the library and then from his hotel. He took the underground from Kings Cross to the Waterloo station and then called the abbey and asked for Ron Hazlehurst again, to share his discovery. The verger had news of his own, and the two discoveries meshed significantly.

  “My contact at the Sorbonne says that Saint Evremond made a habit of bestowing books on his friends,” said Hazlehurst. “She knows of no reference to Love’s Labour’s Won in his letters, but she does recall a reference to a gift of books to the King of France himself in the course of their reconciliation. In a letter to an elderly dowager he mentions one book in particular that was in English but that celebrates—hold on, let me get this right—‘the royal seat of the receiver.’ She took that to be the King of France himself. Now, I know the King of France isn’t in Love’s Labour’s Lost, except that he dies offstage at the end, and that Love’s Labour’s Won would presumably not involve a King of France at all, since the princess would be queen . . .”

  “That’s what I was calling to tell you,” said Thomas. “The Kingdom of Navarre was in the Basque region of the Pyrenees, occupying parts of what are today France and Spain and centered on Pamplona. The southern part was absorbed by Castille and became part of Spain in 1513, but the northern part joined with France in 1589 when King Henry of Navarre became king of France. When Shakespeare wrote the Love’s Labour’s plays, the two countries were effectively the same and were formally joined in 1620. The last Queen of Navarre—a title they continued to use—was Marie Antoinette!”

  “Indeed!” said the verger. “A story celebrating that union would be a perfect gift from an estranged subject to his royal master, wouldn’t you say?”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Which leaves you where?”

  Thomas glanced toward the sleek train that would take him south and under the English Channel.

  “En route to France,” he said.

  Before he boarded the train, he called Kumi at home in Tokyo from a phone box. She was drowsy, but upbeat, and as she repeated what Tasha Collins had already told him about the surgery, he let her talk.

  “What happens next?” he asked.

  “More tests over the next few days, then they’ll want to start radiation,” she said. “Once that begins, I won’t be able to travel for six weeks.”

  “I can come out,” said Thomas.

  “Actually,” she said, “I was thinking I might come to you. In England. Just for a couple of days. I’d like to see you and it would be nice to be somewhere new, somewhere pleasant but unfamiliar.”

  Thomas told her of his plans.

  “How long do you expect to be in France?” she asked.

  “No more than a couple of days,” he said. He told her what he was doing, the questions he wanted answered, the trail he was trying to follow.

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll look into some flights.”

  “I can meet you in London.”

  “You know, I think Stratford sounds more my speed right now,” she said. “Call me in a couple of days, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And Tom?” she said. “Don’t worry. We’ll beat this.”

  PART III

  No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change.

  Thy pyramids built up with newer might

  To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;

  They are but dressings of a former sight.

  Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire

  What thou dost foist upon us that is old,

  And rather make them born to our desire

  Than think that we before have heard them told.

  Thy registers and thee I both defy,

  Not wondering at the present nor the past,

  For thy records and what we see doth lie,

  Made more or less by thy continual haste.

  This I do vow and this shall ever be;

  I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.

  —Shakespeare, “Sonnet 123”

  CHAPTER 45

  Whatever someone else thought he knew, Thomas didn’t feel he had made much progress in Stratford. He was no nearer to determining where the lost play might be, but he did have an idea as to where it might have gone. Perhaps in tracing its past, he would discover its present. Still, for all that “the game’s afoot” stuff he had done with the verger, he had found the journey dull and dispiriting. His mind constantly strayed back to Kumi. He wished he could think about something else, but long-lost plays and murder seemed too sensational, even disrespectful.

  Blasphemous, he thought, echoing a man he had once known.

  Thomas disembarked the Eurostar in Calais. He had studied rail maps and decided that because he didn’t really know where he was going, he was better off with a rental car.

  Moments later he was walking through a French town less than twenty-five miles from the English coast, and a totally different world. Calais was said to be the most English bit of France and had been a crucial British foothold throughout the Hundred Years’ War. To the south were the battlefields of Crecy, where King Edward the Third used massed longbows and cannon to decimate a much larger and better equipped French force, and Agincourt, where Henry V delivered the coup de grâce and—briefly—claimed the French throne, thus ending the campaign that had begun with the tennis
balls incident at Kenilworth castle.

  Kind of, he thought.

  It was rather more complicated than tennis balls, as Shakespeare suggested, with his hints about domestic troubles, the curtailment of church power, and the plots of old enemies who had reason to doubt Henry’s claim to the throne. For all its talk of heroism, the play was clear-sighted about the brutalities of war.

  The town itself seemed to further undermine the heraldic myths of the ancient war, with its looming petrochemical works and the cranes that huddled along the dockside. The roads were jammed with container trucks, and there was a gray functionality to the place that made it hard to imagine why Elizabeth’s sister Mary had been so distressed when Calais finally slipped from English control. Now it thronged with returning English shoppers towing shopping and kids.

  Now I am in Arden, he thought. The more fool I . . .

  It took him ten minutes to find a pay phone and twice that to get the necessary card that would let him use it. Ron Hazlehurst had obviously been waiting by his phone with news from his contact at the Sorbonne, and he was excited.

  “There is a story that there was a Shakespeare Second Folio in the Versailles collection,” he said, “which supports the idea of the French royalty taking an interest in English drama. The evidence isn’t conclusive and no one seems to know where it is now, but I still thought it rather extraordinary, don’t you? I can find no sign of the Missing Play, however.”

  Thomas smiled at the verger’s term, selected—apparently—in case their call was being monitored. Hazlehurst was clearly enjoying the intrigue.

  “That said, a lot of stuff went missing when the revolution started pounding on the palace gates. Some stuff was looted, some stuff was smuggled out, and some stuff was destroyed.”

  “If it was looted,” said Thomas, “it could be anywhere or nowhere.”

  “So you have to assume it was smuggled out or reclaimed by the original owner.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if someone dies in possession of property that was given to them by someone else, that property might revert to the giver.”

  “But Saint Evremond died long before the revolution.”

  “But his family retained interests in the Champagne region,” said Hazelhurst, who had clearly been thinking this through, “and there’s a brand of champagne named after him. Wouldn’t it make sense that his property reverted to the house?”

  Thomas supposed so, if only because he could think of no other options.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “The Taittinger champagne house—the one that produces the Saint Evremond brand—is in Reims on the Place Saint Nicaise. It’s just under a mile southeast of the cathedral.”

  “Impressive,” said Thomas, still smiling. “Thanks.”

  “I Googled it,” said the verger, pleased with himself.

  CHAPTER 46

  Thomas found a Hertz rental stand and selected a boxy maroon Peugeot from a man with a salt-and-pepper mustache as wide as his mouth who steamrolled Thomas’s faltering, schoolboy French with a stream of clipped English and a laconic stare that hardened when Thomas asked for an automatic.

  “No automatics,” he said. “These you have to book in advance.” He pronounced the last word “hadvance” with the kind of authority that seemed to critique others for lazily dropping the h. Thomas shrugged, signed, and took the keys, privately remarking—not for the first time—how little his dollars seemed to buy him.

  He took a minute to get used to the little Peugeot’s controls, moving the stick around into each gear as the man with the mustache watched with frank disdain from the window. When he started it up, the car lurched forward, but Thomas stared ahead, aiming at the slip road to the rotary and the A26 toward Reims.

  Once on the highway and heading south, Thomas was startled by road signs echoing wars fought more recently than the campaign of Henry V. The Second World War had, of course, figured prominently throughout the region, and he was moving now through a corridor dividing the land conquered shortly after D-Day from the Ardennes to the east, where the Allied push had almost stalled in the Battle of the Bulge. But it wasn’t the Second World War that whispered back from the road signs he passed. It was the First.

  Arras, Vimy, the Somme, Bapaume, Cambrai, the river Marne . . . The names chilled Thomas, but they were only ominous words evoking vague images: countless casualties for a handful of yards of ground, and the unspeakable horrors of trench warfare. Like most Americans, Thomas knew little of the First World War. It didn’t stamp the national consciousness like the Civil War before it and the Second World War after it. Maybe that was because the States had entered the war late, that its losses had been comparatively few, and that the war’s emblematic stamp of futility and devastation had somehow been trumped by the bleakness of later conflicts, particularly in Vietnam. Or perhaps people had just forgotten. So far as Thomas knew, his school didn’t teach what used to be called The Great War in its history classes, and history as a subject was being steadily eroded by subjects such as economics that the powers that be thought more obviously useful.

  Thomas found himself thinking about Ben Williams again, who had made speeches from Julius Caesar in his class six years ago, and had died in uniform in Iraq. In the States, war always seemed so remote, so easily turned into the subject of glamour and heroism. He wondered if the French ever thought in those terms, here where the ground had been soaked with blood every forty years or so since long before any of them had ever heard the name of America.

  It was a hundred and forty miles to Reims, and Thomas cursed himself for not staying on the train as far as Lille. But long as it was, the drive was easy and even picturesque, the countryside opening up the farther he went, till he was passing through great open fields considerably larger and more obviously farmed than the irregular pastures he had seen in England. Sometimes the crop—rapeseed, he thought—was an almost unbelievably vivid shade of yellow-green. Elsewhere fields of grain or some long, nameless grass stretched hundreds of yards back from the road, dotted with immense bales like the wheels of some colossal cart.

  Reims itself was—a little disappointingly—newer than he had expected, and more industrial, and Thomas doubted that much of it predated the Second World War. He parked in the rue de l’Université, a hundred yards or so from the cathedral where in 1429—and in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 1—the dauphin had been crowned Charles VII, in defiance of England, by Joan of Arc: Saint Joan for George Bernard Shaw, the enigmatic and unsettling “La Pucelle” for Shakespeare. Thomas didn’t remember the play well, and hadn’t especially liked it.

  He parked and slid out of the car. The drive had stiffened up his shoulder, but he couldn’t stretch for fear of reopening the wound. He pressed it with his left hand and rolled it a few times, but didn’t dare do more than that.

  He walked up toward the cathedral first, not because he wanted to see it, but because he knew there’d be guidebooks to the region in English in the stores that clustered the surrounding square. He found a shop nestled between a patisserie and a bank. He bought a Rough Guide to France without comparing it to the others, and a pain au chocolat at the patisserie next door, and then he walked back to the car, munching, thinking about his wife, who loved good pastry.

  He hung a left and then walked briskly down the Boulevard Victor Hugo till he reached the Taittinger headquarters, an oddly triangular, modern building with its main door in the apex and the walls crowded with windows. Inside was an imposing model of the equally imposing Saint Nicaise Abbey, which had sat on this spot since the Middle Ages but was now gone, destroyed, not—as Thomas had assumed—during one of the world wars, but by the French Revolution. Again he found himself struck by the density and violence of the region’s history. It was no wonder Americans felt so rootless by comparison that they craved a historical dimension to their lives and families. In Europe that history was everywhere, stacked deep like piles of well-cut stones, many of them bloody. />
  He paid a seven-euro admission fee to an appropriately bubbly hostess who suggested that he “feel free to wander inside” and descended into the cellars, passing phalanxes of empty bottles bearing the Taittinger name and stacked wooden barrels. The bottles were racked at steep diagonals, base end up, like banks of dusty rocket launchers. As he went down he entered the past and, at least in some places, the distant past. As the displays made clear, Taittinger had bought the remains of the abbey and its cellars comparatively recently, returning them to the purpose to which the monks had dedicated them. It was chilly, and the air felt slightly moist, and Thomas—who had never liked dark, enclosed spaces, felt a tremor of unease.

  CHAPTER 47

  Champagne requires storage for years underground as it matures, the bottles being periodically tipped and rotated to clear the sediment that collects in the neck. When ready, the bottle is dipped into icy brine, then uncorked, and the frozen plug of sediment is deftly removed. A little sugar is added to the bottle and it is resealed. The method, a time-consuming, skilled, and labor-intensive one, was still performed in the traditional manner to this day, said a guide, when he asked. A man in a sharp stone-colored suit snorted dismissively, and the guide shot him a look.

  “These cellars date from Roman times,” said the guide, redirecting the attention of those who were still watching the suited man. “They were cut out of the chalk in the fourth century, around the time that Attila the Hun was battling the Roman legions to the north . . .”

  Thomas turned to the man and gave him a quizzical look.

  “They all say that,” said the man, clearly an American, “but these days it’s BS. It’s picturesque, you know, this everything-hand-done-as-it-was-back-in-the-day. Quaint. Makes for good footage: nice long dolly shots of some old dear turning the bottles in soft light. But if it were true, it would be wasted time and money. These days everyone does it mechanically. It’s faster and more efficient and you don’t lose anything in terms of flavor. The flavor is all about the grape blend, additives, yeast, and such. The disgorgement process doesn’t matter a damn. They just like to pretend they still do it that way to keep the tourists happy.”