What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

  Or to keep it secret.

  It was an odd thought that had been floating at the back of his mind for several days. Thomas had been acting on the assumption that the killer—or killers—was trying to recover Love’s Labour’s Won, something that—however brutal—made a kind of sense. Someone wanted to find the lost play because publicizing the discovery would somehow make them rich or important: the book was of massive cultural, historical, and financial value, and if its pages could also make careers, turn the finder into a luminary of his or her field, then that value became almost incalculable. But now, anyone who produced the play would immediately become the prime suspect of three murders. So perhaps it wasn’t simply someone trying to do what Blackstone had planned . . .

  Thomas kept his eyes on the road and headed north.

  Keep it secret . . .

  The thought lodged and the world shifted as if he had walked into a hall of mirrors or—more unsettlingly—as if he had just left one. Someone didn’t want the play found. Someone wanted it hidden and not because they already had it.

  So, why? What could make someone see past the wealth and fame the lost manuscript would bring and make them want to keep it dark? Because the only reason Thomas could think of to keep such a treasure buried was because of what the text itself said. But what could a Shakespeare play say that was unsettling enough that someone would kill to keep it silent?

  CHAPTER 58

  He pressed one hand to his free ear to drown out the noise of the Calais traffic.

  “It’s Thomas Knight,” he said into the phone. “Are you busy?”

  “I’m leading students around Chitchen Itza,” said Deborah. “Frankly I could use a break. How are things?”

  He told her about the surgery, that—so far—things were looking up.

  “Good,” she said simply.

  “But I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You told me that you had an argument with your Shakespeare professor years ago about the authorship question,” said Thomas. “What was the gist of the argument? Can you remember?”

  “I can, but there are a lot of people better qualified than me to explain it.”

  “Let’s just say I’m not sure I can trust those people right now,” he said. “Every Shakespearean in the world has something to gain or lose where this missing play is concerned. Just tell me what you remember.”

  “Okay. But this is my Shakespearean party piece: the thing I wheel out to impress people at cocktail parties. Take it with a grain of salt and remember that I’m kind of ventriloquizing my old professor.”

  “Go ahead,” said Thomas, shouting as a semi rolled by, honking.

  “The book I read was about the seventeenth Earl of Oxford,” said Deborah. “Edward de Vere. Of the various people who might have written Shakespeare’s plays, he’s the front-runner these days. His supporters call themselves the Oxfordians.”

  “Right,” said Thomas.

  “You’re a fan of The West Wing, right?” she said.

  “What?” he shouted.

  “The West Wing. Martin Sheen. You had it on in your hospital room.”

  “Right. Sure.”

  “And what if I told you that the person who supposedly created and wrote most of the show . . .”

  “Aaron Sorkin . . .” inserted Thomas.

  “Aaron Sorkin,” Deborah agreed, “could not possibly have invented the show because he never worked in or near the White House and had no experience in law or politics? What if, more to the point, I could show you that numerous episodes he supposedly wrote contain characters modeled expressly on people Sorkin could not possibly know, people specifically from Richard Nixon’s administration?”

  Thomas pressed the phone harder to his ear.

  “So who are you saying wrote them?” he asked.

  “The only person with the contacts, the knowledge of how government works, the intimate knowledge of the people sketched in the show,” said Deborah, “was former President Richard Nixon, himself.”

  “Wait,” said Thomas. “Nixon was dead by the time the show aired.”

  “That’s the genius of it,” said Deborah. “Nixon couldn’t be seen to be writing for television, particularly if he was revealing things about his former colleagues in the show, so it had to be done secretly. He was paid up front, but the contract clearly specified that the shows couldn’t be aired till after his death.”

  “But . . .” Thomas shook his head. “I’m sorry. That’s crazy.”

  “Right,” said Deborah. “It is. But it’s a pretty good approximation of the Oxfordian argument about Shakespeare. It’s bad history, bad textual scholarship, snobbery, conspiracy theory nonsense, and self-promotion. I don’t think there’s a scrap of good sense in it and I don’t think one new play could possibly alter that.”

  “This is what your Shakespeare professor said?”

  “He used a different analogy, but the gist is the same.”

  “It’s good,” said Thomas, surprised at how much sense it made to him.

  “I’ve had years of museum fund-raisers to perfect it,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said. “That helps. Look, sorry, but I’ve got to go.”

  “Keep me up to speed,” she said. “On the other thing, I mean.”

  “I will. I’m going to see her in England. She’s flying out. Her choice.”

  “Good. Okay. Wish me luck.”

  “On what?”

  “This dig. Today’s is my last day playing tour guide. Tomorrow we have to finish the surveying of the site and then we start digging. Real soon after that we’ll find out if I know what I’m doing.”

  “You’ll be great.”

  “Let’s hope so. Okay. Bye. And Thomas?”

  “What?”

  “Look after yourself, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Thomas hung up and drove to the station, only to find that there had been some unexplained delay with an earlier train, resulting in several cancellations. Unless he was prepared to wait a day, he would have to take the ferry to Dover and a train to London from there. Thomas cursed and blustered but the attendants were unmoved and uninterested.

  “Monsieur, I cannot change this. So you must make the choice. Delay or ferry. Which do you wish?”

  He chose the ferry.

  It was a clear day and the water was calm enough that he barely sensed the movement of the boat. He had expected something small, but these were the big roll-on, roll-off car ferries, and there were hundreds of people aboard. There were kids everywhere, running around and clustering around arcade games that beeped and flashed. Hoards of sun-pinked English people weighed down with bags of wine and cheese waited in lines for the duty-free shops. The boat felt like something halfway between a dilapidated cruise ship and a low-end mall. Thomas, tired and increasingly irritable, fled, climbing the metal stairs and pushing through heavy doors until he found himself on deck.

  He sucked in the sea air, steadied himself, and walked toward the prow. There was no one out here. Gulls wheeled, screeching, overhead, riding surprisingly strong gusts of wind, and Thomas could taste the salt in the air. It was a little cold, but he couldn’t imagine why anyone would stay belowdecks. They had barely left the harbor behind, but he could already see the white cliffs of the English coast rising up in the distance. Their journey would be a little over twenty miles.

  Strange, he thought, that so small a distance could generate such difference in language and custom, such separate-ness. For an American, for whom considerably larger distances generated difference usually only in nuance, it was doubly strange. He thought of the little American towns spreading over the Midwest and South, with their strip malls, their Wal-Marts, their McDonald’s, and wondered how long it would be before everywhere became the same. At least in Europe the generic urban sprawl had to go around the castles and ancient churches. In the States it felt like a disease spreading across the country, contaminating everywhere, eating up whatever
had been there before like . . .

  Like cancer?

  The wind blew the thought away, and as he turned his face from it, he saw a single figure inching along the rail. It was Julia McBride.

  CHAPTER 59

  She hadn’t seen him. He was fairly sure of that. But that was about all he could say. He moved quickly around the deck and ducked into the first door he found.

  “I’m sorry, sir, this is the club lounge. Do you have your pass with you?”

  For a second he ignored the attendant, watching through the porthole window as Julia walked past without looking in.

  “I must have left it in my car,” he said.

  “I’m afraid you can’t stay here without it,” said the woman. She was English, perhaps thirty, with hard, combative eyes. She wore a garish uniform, “tan” makeup leaning to orange that made her look like a store mannequin, and black hair streaked with gold.

  “Right,” he said. “Can you give me a second? I feel a little seasick.”

  She gave him a revolted look, as if he had already thrown up on her shoes.

  “Perhaps you should go to the bathroom,” she suggested.

  “Perhaps you should give me a moment,” said Thomas. He was stalling, but couldn’t suppress a sense of indignation at the way she was treating him. After all, he thought, she didn’t know he wasn’t really sick.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, the politeness brittle now, “but if you don’t have your pass . . .”

  “I can’t enter Valhalla,” said Thomas. “I get it. I’m going. In a second. I just have to be sure I can walk without . . .” He clutched his stomach.

  “You can have a minute,” she said, backing away with a grimace. “But I don’t have a mop in here. If you’re going to puke, you should go outside.”

  “You are the heart of generosity and compassion,” he said, walking away, still peering through the windows. Julia McBride was nowhere to be seen.

  And now Thomas had a new question. Could the footsteps he had heard in the cellars, the cautious pacing that had interspersed Gresham’s purposeful jangling steps, have been a woman’s?

  CHAPTER 60

  He did not see Julia again, not on deck, not in the boat’s cattle-car restaurant, not at the bureau de change or in the lines that began forming for the car deck twenty minutes before they docked. She didn’t appear at the railway transfer point, nor at the Hertz car rental stand. She was gone.

  Thomas didn’t know what he would have said to her if she had seen him, or what he would say when they next met. It could be a coincidence, but he didn’t like it, and all the possible explanations he thought of were, in varying degrees, troubling.

  He hated the idea that he was dependent on buses and trains again. England might be small, but it was densely populated, and getting from A to B could be extremely difficult if neither were major towns. So he rented another car, only realizing the strangeness of what this would be like when he tried the driver’s door and found he was on the passenger side.

  Driving on the left, he thought. How hard could it be?

  Pretty hard. He had ridden a bicycle in Japan, where they also drove on the left, but the Japanese driving test had a famously difficult writing component that effectively (some said deliberately) prohibited foreigners from driving. He had to check himself at every junction, doubly so at those numerous and maddening “roundabouts”—rotaries—where everyone else seemed to know exactly where they were going and shifted from lane to lane with a discreet flash of their turn signals. Thomas went around two or three times before picking his exit, and people blared their horns at him as he cut across the traffic to get out.

  The car was small but the lanes still felt narrow, and he had to concentrate hard to keep the little vehicle out of the way of the trucks and coaches that roared past him with only a couple of inches between their side-view mirrors. After twenty minutes he was stiff with tension and had drifted into the left lane to try to stay clear of the worst of it. Still, he was constantly in the way of people trying to get off the highway, so he moved into the middle lane, tried to keep steady, and put his foot down.

  He got off the M25 and headed north on the M40. At Oxford he found what was ambiguously signposted as “Services,” and pulled in to eat, use the bathroom, and make a phone call.

  “Constable Robson.”

  “This is Thomas Knight. I spoke to you after I was attacked in the castle ruins.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the policeman. “The siege of Kenilworth Castle. How could I forget?”

  “I told you a little about what I was doing here,” Thomas said. “I’d like to tell you a little more.”

  “Okay,” said Robson. “Is this going to take a while, because I was hoping to get a bite to eat soon . . .”

  “Order a pizza,” said Thomas.

  He told Robson about his visit to the Demier cellars and what had happened there. He gave him Polinski’s contact information in Chicago and suggested that they go through Interpol, or whatever they did, so that they could cooperate with the French police.

  “Okay,” said Robson, deadpan. “Look, Mr. Knight, this story of yours is pretty bizarre.”

  “Why don’t you order that pizza and I’ll call you back later,” Thomas suggested. “In the meantime, you might make a few calls of your own.”

  “Fair enough,” said Robson.

  The calls he would make were, they both knew, to check up on Thomas’s story and make sure the policeman wasn’t dealing with a certifiable lunatic.

  Thomas bought an apple and a block of white cheddar. The English, it turned out, knew their cheese. He told the cashier as much.

  “It’s a place, you know,” she said, “not far from here.”

  “What is?”

  “The Cheddar Gorge. Where the cheese comes from.”

  “Oh,” said Thomas, who had never thought of Cheddar as a place. “Good cheese there, is there?”

  “S’pose,” said the girl, shrugging. “I don’t eat cheese. Makes me gassy.”

  Thomas called Robson back a half hour later, and though the policeman’s voice was the same, he sensed a different level of seriousness in the way he listened. Clearly he had confirmed the events in Epernay. Thomas begged one piece of information in return for what he gave: the home address of Daniella Blackstone’s erstwhile writing partner, Elsbeth Church.

  With that in his pocket, Thomas promised to meet with Robson when he got back to Kenilworth. Then he bought a new map, and returned to his car.

  Elsbeth Church’s home was south of Stratford, just off the M4 between Newbury and Hungerford in what was now the county of Oxfordshire but was referred to as the Berkshire Downs. She lived well, but not ostentatiously, on the edge of a village called Hamstead Marshall in the kind of country cottage only England could produce with a straight face: stone, hung with creepers, and tiled with slate, its garden rustic to the point of wildness but dotted with colorful flowers. The house had small, leaded windows, and the walls bulged out of true in ways that could have been ramshackle but were merely quaint. Behind it were meadows running down to a brook, with a massive sycamore tree where some sort of large dove or pigeon called. It was a house off a postcard or a chocolate box.

  Robson said she had divorced her brute of a husband the moment she became financially self-sufficient. She had no children and—unlike Daniella with her steward—lived alone.

  No one answered the door when he rang. He waited and tried again, but with no better luck. The closest house sat back from the road a couple of hundred yards away. Thomas took one look and saw a net curtain twitch in an upstairs window. Someone was watching him. He considered going over there but guessed that this was not a part of the world where people volunteered news of their neighbors to strangers. He drove into the village and, heading north to the motorway, found a pub called The Green Man.

  It was clouding over and the fine day was cooling fast. He went inside, hugging his light jacket to him, took his place at the bar, and order
ed a pint of best bitter.

  Unlike Stratford or Kenilworth, the pub was unused to Americans, and he was soon engaged in a playful discussion with the bartender about the various merits of cricket versus baseball, and the American “buggering up” of the word “football.”

  “I mean, you don’t even use your feet, do you?” he was saying, genuinely bemused. “What’s all that about? And the constant stopping and starting so you can wheel these half-ton monsters onto the field. I mean to say: come on! Those blokes wouldn’t last five minutes in a rugby match—or in a real football match for that matter, when they don’t get to sit down and have a drink on the sidelines every thirty seconds. Taking oxygen between plays. Oxygen?! I mean, if there’s not enough in the air, there’s something wrong, isn’t there . . .”

  And so it went on. Thomas endured with a grin and a shrug and the occasional obligatory remarks about zero-zero ties in soccer, the impenetrability of cricket, and England’s failure to qualify for the European cup, which was then dominating the sports pages. It was good-natured enough, an excuse for a little verbal sparring rather than an actual disagreement. The barman was a lean, middle-aged man who tended to look off to the side when he talked and whose smile at his own wit was so light you might miss it. Eventually the talk moved on to other things: what the area was like to live in, and why the bartender secretly hoped one day to move to Florida. There was nothing around here, he said. The kids were all migrating away to the city. The farms were dying. Even the tourists didn’t come here.

  All of which led neatly into inquiries about what Thomas was doing there and a slightly retooled version of his journalist’s feature on Daniella Blackstone.

  “I had made an appointment to meet with Elsbeth Church, but I guess something got screwed up because she wasn’t home.”