What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

  Thomas leaned over and looked hurriedly around the courtyard, but there was no sign of Randall Dagenhart. He turned to the curtain wall below and to his right and saw Alonso Petersohn coming up the steps toward him.

  CHAPTER 76

  Thomas thought fast. Petersohn might just stroll the walls, but having made the bulk of the climb, he would probably come the rest of the way, if only for the view. Thomas descended as quickly as he could. He burst out from the tower, down the external stairs, and onto the wall with his head lowered. Petersohn was ten yards ahead of him, still on the stairs to the courtyard, his eyes down on the worn stone steps.

  To Thomas’s right was a squared bulge in the battlements, an alcove giving vantage over attackers at the foot of the walls outside. Thomas stepped hurriedly into it, turned his back to Petersohn, and bent low as if peering through the great crossbow slit in the parapet.

  He sensed Petersohn, wheezing slightly, behind him, but the scholar didn’t pause and moved to the tower stairs. Thomas turned and descended quickly to the courtyard.

  He was now at a significant disadvantage. The group had split, he didn’t know where Dagenhart was, and any of them could see him as he hunted about. He doubted being seen would put him in any real danger, but it would certainly draw suspicion and would hamstring any attempt to learn anything from Dagenhart’s proposed meeting.

  The group had split in a little starburst and Dagenhart hadn’t been with them, which meant he had gone in a different direction. Thomas gambled that he wouldn’t have returned to a portion of the castle they had already seen, because that would look conspicuous, and that reduced the options to one: he had gone out, back through the gatehouse, and over the bridge.

  Thomas began to trot, still with his head down, still close to the walls. Outside, by the ditch surrounding the castle’s east face, a crowd of tourists had gathered to watch an archery display. Thomas scanned their faces then looked at his watch: ten minutes to five. The path snaked north, up to the main entrance, and south—by the sound of it—to the river. He turned south, furious with himself for having lost Dagenhart, knowing that he didn’t know what was on this side of the building at all and that that could cost him.

  The path dropped through trees, skirting the walls and Caesar’s Tower, emerging suddenly beside the river Avon, broad and even farther downstream, but here tight and fast. Fragments of an ancient stone bridge lurched out of the river like the arches of a sea serpent, covered with grass and overhung with ivy. Downstream was a weir, and beside it a square Gothic building butting into the castle’s lower embankment, where an iron waterwheel turned rapidly. The path led there.

  Thomas stopped jogging and walked down to the building via a railed ramp that ran down to the water’s edge and the great churning wheel. There was no one around. Thomas moved into the arched stone doorway and tried to hear above the sound of the mill mechanism. He could hear voices, one low and calm, the other loud and angry: Dagenhart. At first he couldn’t make out the words, but then he heard the old professor quite clearly.

  “Or what?” he shouted.

  The other man—surely, the steward—responded, but Thomas couldn’t catch any of it. He dared not lean in any closer. The sound of the mill and the echoing stone made it impossible to tell how close they were.

  “I don’t have that kind of money!” Dagenhart shouted.

  The steward’s response was louder, but no less clear.

  For a moment there seemed to be silence, and then a different kind of sound, a scuffling, grunting, physical noise like a struggle.

  Thomas stepped inside and followed the sound, past informational displays, whirring pumps, and other pieces of machinery. Part of the floor was cut away in one room so that the huge sprockets of the system were revealed. Thomas kept his distance. If there was to be some sort of confrontation, he didn’t want to find himself falling into those grinding gears.

  And then, quite suddenly, the sounds of fighting had stopped and he could hear voices again, low and breathless. Then footsteps, coming his way.

  Thomas turned and ducked behind a great blue-green mechanism with a huge belt-driven wheel that looked like a generator. He squatted down, flattening himself against the mechanism, as first one set of feet, then another stormed past and out: first the steward, stuffing paper into his pockets distractedly, then Dagenhart, slower, winded. Thomas waited for a second and then started to follow but stopped himself.

  He moved to the room they had just left, which opened into a re-creation of the mill manager’s office, complete with a stuffed and mounted fish and an archaic telephone. The mill might once have been for grinding grain, but more recently it had clearly been converted into a power generator.

  On the floor in the corner was something that did not belong: a scrap of torn and crumpled paper. Thomas picked it up. It had words written on it in ballpoint pen: “shouldn’t practice at . . .”

  The words meant nothing, but he knew that writing, particularly the little circle over the i of practice: Alice Blackstone’s diary, and though he couldn’t be sure, he was prepared to bet that this fragment came from a page that had been cut from the rest of the journal.

  That was what Dagenhart and the steward had been fighting over.

  Thomas headed out the way he had come. Outside, he paused by the massive waterwheel to think, leaning against the rail beside a spoked iron ring that might control a valve somewhere. If he went after the steward now—assuming the steward still had the pages he had razored out of the journal—he would have to take them from him by force, something that would certainly land him in jail.

  The thought had barely gone through his head when he realized what he was looking at. Below him, wet and clinging to a grate only inches from the waterwheel, was a page of closely written paper. He had no doubt what it was, or how the steward had dropped it as he stormed away.

  He looked about him. The castle was ready to close and there was no one about. He threw one leg over the wooden barrier and dropped to the grate. He shrunk to his left to keep clear of the great metal wheel as it spun, turning the water in a fine spray. There was only a single wooden beam between him and the foaming river below.

  Thomas crouched down and peeled the journal page off the timber and tried to read it. The ink had not bled much, but the paper itself was translucent and fragile. He bent to it, studying it, and only then became aware of a presence behind him, some movement half heard. Someone was there, standing behind him. He started to turn, but the kick still caught him off guard and off balance.

  He fell forward through the square of light below the wooden rail and into the churning Avon.

  CHAPTER 77

  The kick had been little more than a push, so Thomas never lost consciousness, but the shock of hitting the water—the surprising cold of it—was so disorienting that it took a second for him to realize the true danger.

  The wheel!

  He felt the water turn him toward it, pulling him down. He fought it, but as he struck out with his arms, he felt the metal blades crash against his injured right shoulder. The pain was so violent, so intense, that he started to cry out, and his mouth filled with the musty coolness of the river. He tried to blow it out, but a second blade, then a third hit him, and he was being sucked down with the motion of the wheel, driven toward the riverbed.

  He rolled against it, trying to surface, and the wheel edge slapped hard against his forehead, tipping him backward. For a moment everything was black, and then he was aware enough to feel his whole body stuck on the wheel as it rotated him deeper, chest and groin curved to the edge of the wheel as it turned him down. He was just awake enough to know that if there were rocks less than a couple of feet below it, he would be split upon them . . .

  There weren’t.

  The wheel shoved him down and he pulled his arms in tight instinctively. If he got a hand or foot between the wheel and a support bracket, the force would slice it right off. So he went still, letting the mechanism drive him deeper a
nd then kick him out the other side.

  But a second later he was yanked out of the water and revolving up. His belt was snagged on a blade of the wheel. He looked up. Above was only sky, but if the wheel could take him up, it would take him over, and he remembered the bracing beam with the valve controller at the top. If he didn’t get off, he was dead.

  Belching water, he slammed both hands to his waist and fought to free himself. The wheel spun him higher. His fingers clawed at his belt buckle.

  He was almost at the top, less than a second away . . .

  The belt came free and he was falling back into the river. He tried to turn, to put his arms back to protect his head, but it all happened too fast. He landed with a heavy splash, sank deep enough for his left foot to graze a submerged rock, and then was up again in air and daylight.

  As soon as he broke the surface, he twisted around to see the platform by the mill wheel, but whoever had kicked him was gone.

  For a second he drifted out of sheer relief, and then swam to a reedy island where the river divided. He hauled himself onto a jagged stone, spat the last of the river from his mouth, and breathed. Then he sat up and opened his palm.

  The page had torn some, but there was enough left to prove that he hadn’t imagined what he had read.

  “Third rehearsal and Debs still doesn’t understand her lines . . .”

  Thomas sat there, soaked and freezing, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The girls had not been preparing to do some dance routine. They may have been obsessed with pop music, but they considered themselves thinkers, sophisticates.

  “Didn’t get to see Pippa today,” Alice Blackstone had written. “Had a good laugh with the gang, but Liz was having her hair done and couldn’t come property shopping.”

  He had assumed that reference to “property” was adolescent pretension, a slang supposed to make their petty purchases mature. He was wrong. There was a little pretension there, perhaps, but only in the sense that they used the full word and not its more common abbreviation. They weren’t buying property, they were buying props.

  Alice and her best friend Pippa, along with Liz and Nicki and Debs, had been rehearsing a play—a play with obscure wording—that Alice had found among her dead great-grandfather’s things, a play by the world’s foremost writer that no one had seen on stage for almost four hundred years.

  CHAPTER 78

  Thomas drove back to his hotel, his clothes sopping, his shoes sliding on his wet feet. He showered and changed. His right shoulder would bruise badly where the waterwheel had hit him, but the wound had not reopened. He had a matching bruise over his right eye, but things could have been much worse. He took more painkillers, replaced his sodden loafers with running shoes, and went straight back out to the car.

  He wasn’t happy about returning to Hamstead Marshall Park, but he knew that he was close now. He could sense it.

  The weather was better than it had been the last time he had visited the absent manor house and there was no sign of Elsbeth Church skulking among the ruins, but the place still unnerved him. He parked by the church and wandered around through the graves before straying out into the ragged meadow that had once been the grounds of the great house. It was sunny, but the air was cold and there was dew in the grass, and an edge to the wind. It might rain yet.

  He entered through the gateposts—a strange and unnecessary choice, given the openness of the land—and walked slowly toward the spot where he had seen the novelist at her most unearthly. There were still fragments of cut flowers, brown and faded in the grass, and Thomas couldn’t help but think of Ophelia distributing herbs to the Danish court in her madness: “There’s rosemary. That’s for remembrance . . .”

  It was a fitting enough association, he supposed, though Elsbeth Church was mourning her daughter, not her father. And Thomas was convinced that flowers weren’t the only memorial Elsbeth tended here. There was something else. Something buried.

  But there was no sign of recently dug earth. If the play had been interred here, the site had not been disturbed in a long time, and there was no way he was going to light on it by chance. Thomas muttered to himself as he combed the wild patch of ground, but there was nothing to see and the area within the vanished walls of the estate was just too large.

  It was only a hunch to begin with, he reminded himself.

  A part of Elsbeth saw the loss of her daughter in that (surely apocryphal) tale of Elizabeth’s incinerated newborn, but now that he was here he doubted that this was the place where she and Daniella Blackstone would have chosen to hide the play their daughters had been rehearsing. Daniella had been extremely level-headed, and he doubted even Elsbeth would have seen this as a fitting place for the play. After all, Elsbeth’s association with the old house had come about after—indeed because of—her daughter’s death. It would have meant nothing to Pippa herself, and less to Alice, who did not live close by.

  Then where?

  Thomas stood there, listening to the rooks cawing in a distant oak, and he had no idea. If it had been put into some conventional storage—a safe-deposit box, say—official representatives of the Blackstone estate would surely have uncovered it. If so, the steward would have it. But that seemed impossible. And besides, other people were looking for it, and—if the episode in the Demier cellars was anything to go by—in pretty unconventional places. Thomas wasn’t the only one who thought the little quarto had been concealed where someone else might find it.

  But there was something else that made him think that the play wasn’t simply in a locked drawer somewhere. The two novelists had fallen out immediately before Daniella had started whispering about the play to other people. Elsbeth now claimed no knowledge of the play, but the two women had worked together for years after the fire, intimately bound by loss and grief.

  What could have disrupted that closeness?

  Elsbeth said it was about money, but that seemed unlikely, unless money was only part of a larger issue. Blackstone had certainly been looking to profit from the play once it was clear that her solo career was going nowhere. Could that have been it from the start, the source of the tension between them? Had Daniella wanted to cash in on the value of the play and found Elsbeth defiantly adamant? If so, perhaps the original intent had been to keep the play secret as a kind of private memorial to their dead daughters.

  Yes, thought Thomas, his stride quickening.

  If they had pledged to keep the surviving manuscript to themselves in memory of their daughters, then Daniella’s desire to go public with the text might have seemed like a violation of that promise and, by extension, a cheapening of Alice and Pippa’s deaths. If so, the play would have been hidden somewhere symbolically fitting not to their deaths, but to their lives. The play would have been concealed somewhere the girls had valued, not somewhere linked by vague historical association to their deaths in the fire. He didn’t know where it was, but Thomas was sure that he would never find Love’s Labour’s Won on the grounds of Hamstead Marshall Park, even with a fleet of industrial excavators at his disposal. He tried to remember what he had read in the diary, the places they had gone together, the things they had done, but all he could remember was a bunch of references to concert venues and something about “scouring” a horse. Perhaps Pippa’s family owned a stable.

  He stood quite still and looked out over the empty plot where the manor had once been, and he felt a sudden and unexpected sadness that made his breath catch. He thought of Elsbeth Church’s pilgrimage to this spot, made almost daily for years, wondering how long after Pippa’s death it had begun. He and Kumi had had only one viable pregnancy, which had failed to produce a child. The miscarriage had scarred them for life, had—for a time, at least—sent fissures through the base of their marriage till they had not been able to live on the same continent as each other. What the loss of a teenaged daughter would do to a person, he couldn’t begin to imagine.

  What about the loss of a wife?

  The thought came gusting ou
t of the chill air. It stopped him.

  “She’ll be okay,” he countered, aloud.

  He looked down at the earth with the cut and drying blossoms, and the thought he had been holding back since she had first told him about the treatment options finally broke through.

  Yes, she could beat it. Lots of people do. But if not this, then something else. Sooner or later. Everything dies.

  It was beyond obvious, but the fact was that he hadn’t known till now. Not really. Not even when he had been lying on his kitchen floor with a bullet in his shoulder and his lungs filling with fluid. Not even then.

  When she had first told him, something had started buzzing in his ears, something terrible and ordinary. For the first time, he knew what it was. It was the sound of a clock ticking off their remaining time together.

  Love’s not time’s fool, he thought, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle’s compass come . . .

  But that wasn’t true, was it? And when things die, everything about them is lost. They become unimaginable, as if they never really existed.

  That was the worst.

  “She’ll be okay,” he said.

  He rubbed his bruised forehead, then took a breath of the cold air and felt it sear his lungs. He began stalking back toward the car, eyes focused like a blinkered horse, convinced he had to get out of this place, as if the air were infected.

  CHAPTER 79

  After the episode at Blackstone’s, Thomas hardly needed to remind himself of the dangers of breaking and entering, but he was in no mood to play it safe as he pulled up in front of Elsbeth Church’s stone cottage. Somewhere, in some dark, unreasoning place in his mind, something that worked by an obscure system of symbolic association instead of actual logic, he thought that if he could solve the mystery into which David Escolme had propelled him, it would somehow make other things better. He didn’t dare think of Kumi’s name in this context, because to make the vague assumption even that specific would make it absurd, but he thought it anyway.