What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

“Naturally,” she said, smiling like a snake.

  “Naturally,” Thomas said. “But I’m curious. How would you have shared the play? Only one career would have been made by its discovery, and I doubt it would have been Taylor’s. He wasn’t an idiot, and though I’m sure you charmed him, he must have known that.”

  She smirked.

  “Taylor was never what you might call a leading man,” she said. “I was pretty sure that if he ever came by the play, I could talk him into—er—sharing it with me. He was one of those needy, malleable young men. He was—at the risk of sounding like Eliot—not so much a Hamlet as an attendant lord.”

  “How convenient.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone, Mr. Knight,” she said. “I may have shared some professional fantasies with a man who turned out to be unstable to the point of being a sociopath, I may have bent a few rules in following you to France, and I may have committed the occasional sin of omission by not confiding all I feared to the police, but that’s all. Such deeds I did, they are not near my conscience. And no, I don’t sleepwalk.”

  “Of course not,” said Thomas.

  “So,” she said, “let be.”

  “I may have to,” said Thomas. “But I keep coming back to the first murder. I can believe that Bradley hunted Gresham down in the cellars, and I’m sure it was he who killed David Escolme and tried to kill me in my house, but the first killing—Daniella Blackstone—that seems different to me. The others were methodical, ruthless, but Blackstone was killed on impulse, hit over the head with a half brick. Now Daniella talked movie deals to Gresham and publishing rights to Escolme, but I don’t see why in her quest to get a Shakespearean on board she would have gone to—as you put it—an attendant lord. Escolme might have thought Taylor was a real Shakespearean because he looked up to him as only an undergraduate can, but Daniella would have taken one look at his résumé and known he couldn’t help.”

  “She must have talked to Dagenhart.”

  “Dagenhart had known about the play for twenty-five years, and he would have seen it destroyed before Daniella—or anyone else—made it public. He had made a vow.”

  “He would,” she said, her lip curling. “Dagenhart always was a sentimental old fool who could find ways to dignify his basest urges.”

  “I think he read through the prism of his own experience,” said Thomas, “like we all do.”

  “Then he really was a fool,” she said. “In the end, it was just a book. For him to withhold it, to destroy it, because of what it meant to him was absurd and typically self-involved.”

  “You would have shared it with the world, no doubt?” said Thomas.

  “I would have done with it what people do with Shakespeare these days: they use it to talk about things that interest them. Welcome to academia.”

  “I think Taylor sent her to you,” said Thomas. “Someone with a reputation she would respect.”

  She laughed then, a high musical laugh, part delight, part derision.

  “I already told you I didn’t kill anyone, so if you are looking to worm a confession out of me, you can forget it.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Congrats on your new article, by the way.”

  “Article?”

  “On servant clothing.”

  “Oh, the Cambridge book,” she said, pleased. “How on earth did you know about that? I don’t even have a contract yet.”

  “Word gets around,” said Thomas. “That was what Chad was working on, right? Servant clothing. Livery.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “He was my research assistant for some of it. Why? What did he tell you?”

  “He told me it was all your work and it was right that you made him take stuff out of his Chicago paper.”

  “Well, it wasn’t really his, was it?” she said. Her eyes held his, but it seemed to take an effort, like they were in some children’s staring contest.

  “No doubt,” he said. “But then . . .”

  “What?”

  Thomas reached into his inside pocket and drew out a pair of letters on heavy paper.

  “I got a couple of rejections today,” he said. “One from Shakespeare Survey, the other from Quarterly.”

  She seemed caught off guard by the admission.

  “You are still writing articles for journals?”

  “Well, that seems to be the question,” he said.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I couldn’t understand why Chad was buying you a jump drive,” said Thomas, putting the letters in his lap for a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her confusion seeming genuine enough. “What are you talking about?”

  “Back in Stratford you sent him out to buy you a jump drive, right after you blocked him from answering questions on servants’ clothing. He, loyal lackey that he is, did as he was told, but I saw it, and I couldn’t help wondering why. The only computer I saw the whole time I was there was Randall Dagenhart’s.”

  “So?”

  “He used to leave it out, Mrs. Covington said. She couldn’t decide if he was admirably trusting or out of touch with the twenty-first century.”

  “And?”

  “Probably a bit of both, I think,” said Thomas. “Anyway, after he died I had the police impound the computer. I was kind of hoping that there’d be information there that would help them complete the picture of what had happened—connect the dots, as it were, but there wasn’t really. What there was, of course, was his most recent work.”

  “And?”

  She had become quite still now and her voice was low.

  “I got them to agree to my performing a little test. I found an article he was writing on Love’s Labour’s Lost. I took his name off it and put mine in its place. Then I sent it to every major journal in Renaissance literary study. This morning I got the aforementioned rejections.”

  “I’m sorry to hear they didn’t like it,” she said, eyes and voice quite blank.

  “It wasn’t that they didn’t like it,” he said. “It was that they had recently received the same submission from someone else.”

  She breathed then, as if she had been holding it for a long time, and then she sat back in her chair and all the tension left her body. She looked away, and when her eyes came back to him, she was smiling.

  “I knew you were going to be a problem,” she said. “And it only got worse when you started feeling guilty about being attracted to me.”

  He smiled at that.

  “The police won’t prosecute you for plagiarism, Julia,” said Thomas, getting to his feet, “and they almost certainly won’t prosecute you for conspiracy or murder, but I’m afraid your career as an academic is over.”

  “We’ll see,” said Julia. The words could have been defiant, but sounded merely uncertain.

  Thomas took a step to the door, then stopped and turned back to her.

  “I have to ask,” he said. “Why did you do it? You are a well-respected critic, and I know you haven’t spent your professional life plagiarizing other people’s stuff. Why now?”

  For a moment she just looked at him, as if deciding whether to throw more defiance at him. Then she shrugged.

  “Academia isn’t interested in what you published five years ago, Thomas. At the top, it’s about what you are working on right now, and scoff all you like, but women don’t get to sit on their laurels like men do. A year or two of professional silence, and they’ll knock you right off the heap. It used to be easy for me. I’d wake up with a paper half written in my head, or the germ of a book. But the ideas and methods I was trained in are already old hat, and keeping up with what’s new, what’s hot in Shakespeare studies seems to get harder each year. Chad is only moderately intelligent, but he is already doing work I should be doing. Angela outstripped me before she had finished her prospectus. I know more, and I have more . . . more poise, more professionalism, but as a mind . . . I may not look it, but I’m getting old.”

  “Aren’t we all,” said Thomas. “Cormorant devo
uring time.”

  “A true humanistic sentiment,” she said, smiling. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have a resignation letter to write.”

  3. Two months later

  Westminster Abbey was darker than he had remembered it, cooler, but the fall was well under way in London and the sun set earlier. The green-blazered marshals were warning the tourists that the church would shortly be closed to all not attending evening prayer.

  Kumi drifted by Thomas’s side, her hand clasped in his, pausing to remark on the occasional monument or tomb, but generally silent, absorbing the place. They lingered over the great poppy wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier, and Thomas thought of Ben Williams.

  The evil that men do lives after them;

  The good is oft interred with their bones.

  They moved through the Lady Chapel, where Elizabeth, Mary, and James lay, past the throne of Edward I, the tombs of Henry V and Richard II, and into Poets’ Corner. Ron Hazlehurst was waiting for them under the inscription to Charles de Saint Denis, Lord of Saint Evremond.

  He smiled at them and shook their hands. For a few moments they talked about their immediate plans, how long they had in London, and Thomas’s intent to walk Kumi up White Horse Hill.

  “It’s a ridiculous amount to do in four days,” said Kumi, “but he’s insistent. Has to show me everything.”

  Thomas said nothing, just smiled and shrugged, but he knew in his heart that he had to share it all with her, or it would somehow be less real.

  “And how are you?” the verger asked Kumi without preamble. He was serious, even grave. “If that’s too personal a question, don’t answer, but I feel I have known you for some time now and it matters to me.”

  Kumi looked taken aback, but unoffended. Thomas looked quickly away.

  “The surgery went well,” she said. “And I’ve just completed a course of radiation. Hopefully we’ll get by without chemo. Then . . . we wait. Lots more tests to come, but—for now—we’re good. Tired, but good.”

  The verger nodded.

  “That is good,” he said. “Very good. I don’t understand these things. I don’t mean scientifically, though that is also true. I mean, cosmically. Theologically. But I will thank God for your recovery and pray that you have heard the end of it.”

  Kumi nodded, smiling, though her eyes had suddenly filled with tears and she could not speak.

  “Well,” said the verger. “Perhaps you’d like to go through. I doubt we’ll be short of chairs, but you never know. Once in a while a school group shows up for evening prayer because they don’t want to pay general admission, and suddenly it’s standing room only.”

  He motioned them into the center of the nave—the choir on one hand, the sanctuary, with its shrine to Edward the Confessor, on the other—the massive vaulted ceiling soaring above them as it had for a thousand years.

  As the organ began to play, Thomas thought of the odd hit men or whatever they were—the police had found no trace of them—who had called themselves Mr. Barnabus and Mr. Wattling and the jumbled quotation that had been one of the last things they had said to him:

  Time’s wingèd chariot . . . Waits for no man.

  True enough.

  Almost immediately the minister, reader, and choir processed in and the service began. There were six men in the choir, and they were accompanied by the great pipe organ. The music was exquisite, a lilting, heartbreakingly beautiful sound, and Thomas was alarmed to find himself close to tears.

  Why? He wondered. It’s only music. And, as seemed to happen all the time now, he heard Shakespeare again, this time Orsino opening Twelfth Night . . .

  If music be the food of love, play on;

  Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

  The appetite may sicken, and so die.

  That strain again! it had a dying fall:

  O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,

  That breathes upon a bank of violets,

  Stealing and giving odour!

  He thought back to the production he had watched with Taylor Bradley in Stratford, how it had moved them both, how they had talked of melancholy and loss, and he knew why it was so painful to hear the music.

  Because it won’t last. Because it will fade and die, devoured by time, by mortality. Because everything ends. Because no matter how long you have, it will always be too short to make a world-without-end bargain in.

  He took his wife’s hand and gripped it in his so hard that she turned to look at him.

  “Okay?” she whispered.

  He nodded furiously, so that he would not have to say the word. And when the service ended and they stepped blinking out into the late-afternoon sun, she put her arms around his neck, and he could think only of one more line from Shakespeare, a line said by a flawed and faithless husband at the moment he got back the wife he did not deserve:

  “Hang there like fruit, my soul,” he whispered, “till the tree die.”

  She looked at him, and smiled that distant and knowing smile of hers.

  “If you don’t start using your own words instead of someone else’s,” she said, “I’m going to ask for a divorce. And, while you’re finding some thoughts of your own, you can wipe that dopey, tragic look off your face.”

  “I just keep wondering how much time we have,” he said, “I mean, even if everything is okay—with you, I mean. Your health. It just makes me think that time is short and . . .”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is. No matter what happens. And you could get hit by a bus tomorrow. So let’s not waste time waiting for things to get worse. Okay?”

  He looked into her eyes, her face framed by the vast and storied shell of the abbey, its stones rooted in times and lives past, and he nodded.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “Now, where can we get a glass of champagne?”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND BACKGROUND INFORMATION

  This is, of course, a work of fiction, and all the characters in it are imaginary. Much of the story is inspired by fact, however, so let me clarify what is and isn’t real. Shakespeare was a man from Stratford who wrote poems and plays (like Thomas, I have little patience with conspiracy theories challenging his authorship). One of those plays was Love’s Labour’s Lost. The evidence for the existence of Love’s Labour’s Won is as represented in the novel. I believe the play existed and that it was not an alternative title for another play (say, Twelfth Night or The Taming of the/a Shrew). We don’t have it, but it may still exist. Somewhere.

  The movements of the surviving copy in the novel are fictitious, though Charles de Saint Denis of Saint Evremond was real enough, and except for his dealings with Love’s Labour’s Won, everything I say about him is true. There really is a Saint Evremond champagne sold under the Taittinger label, and though the Demier company is my invention, the cellars are modeled on those belonging to various houses in Epernay. Taittinger is, of course, a respected maker of fine champagne and would not indulge in any of the activities I have attributed to Demier.

  The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford is real, but I have manipulated it a little for my purposes, and there is—alas—no Mrs. Covington. All the scholars with whom I populate the novel are wholly fictitious. Honest.

  XTC are one of the great British pop bands, and I strongly advise all readers to seek them out if they don’t already know them. If I had pursued a life as a musician, this is the kind of stuff I’d aspire to write. I’d like to thank Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding (and the band’s erstwhile members Terry Chambers, Barry Andrews, and Dave Gregory) for the enjoyment and stimulation their evolving music has given me over the years. I will post links on my website to XTC song lyrics and to images of the various locations, particularly the Uffington white horse, Westminster Abbey, and some of the sites in Epernay and Reims: www.ajhartley.net. Readers with comments and questions can reach me there.

  As ever I would like to thank all who helped me in the research and execution of the book, including the mar
shals and vergers of Westminster Abbey, and Christine Reynolds, assistant keeper of muniments there. I am grateful also to Chris Welch of English Heritage, the Ancient Monument Inspector responsible for Oxfordshire who helped me fill in some details of the white horse’s recent history; to Sarah Werner at the Folger, who clarified the tortured history of the Shakespeare folio once thought to have been in the library of Louis XIV; and to Anthony Hartley and Retired Detective Inspector Jim Oldcorn (Lancashire Constabulary), who ensured that I got current British arrest procedures right.

  It is daunting to write a novel (a mystery/thriller, no less) involving material that I write more soberly about in my Shakespearean hat, and I am especially grateful to my academic colleagues who read the manuscript and gave me feedback, notably William Carroll, Ruth Morse, Tiffany Stern, Lois Potter, and Skip Shand. I would also like to thank my style gurus Edward Hurst, Bob Croghan, and Phaenarete Osako.

  There is nothing remotely fictional about the seeming randomness of breast cancer, though—as everyone surely knows by now—the key to survival is early detection and treatment. I am only a novelist, but I would ask those who read this to support cancer research and ensure that they get regular examinations.

  Thanks for reading.

  A. J. Hartley

  July 2008