Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries) (15 page)

As for Arthur’s and Guinevere’s bones, when the Abbey was finally rebuilt about a hundred years later, King Edward I had them placed in a black marble coffin under the high altar of the new church. Every aspect of these events had been challenged, ridiculed, accepted, and disproven by scholars and clerics from that time until now.

Legend has it that Arthur was a giant. People in fifth century Britain were short, not due to genetics, but to diet, to frequent illnesses, and to the challenges of just staying alive. So a man could have grown to six feet six if he came from genetically tall stock, if he led a charmed life, and if he had a good diet from birth to adulthood. But in western Britain in those days, a man six and a half feet tall would have looked like a giant.

Heading for the dining hall, I seriously considered skipping the afternoon session and holing up in the Fellows Library. If I hadn’t been in charge of it, I would have.

Lunch was cold meats and cheeses. We were to make our own sandwich at the buffet table and sit anywhere we wanted. I saw some people walking out with sandwiches wrapped in paper napkins, heading for the lawn. I found Larry, Claudia, and Harold sitting at the end of a long row of tables and joined them. They were finished with their sandwiches, but lingering over their plates.

“Eat up, Dotsy.” Larry tapped his watch. “It’s ten after one. Your presentation starts in twenty minutes.”

“I’ve been working in the Fellows Library all morning. Lost track of time.”

“How did you get in?” Harold Wetmore looked at me over the rims of his glasses.

“Robin Morris. He swore me in and everything.”

Larry glanced at Harold, then quickly back to me. “Why are you working in the Fellows Library?”

“I’m trying to find out exactly what Shakespeare’s sources would have said about King Arthur.”

“You already know, Dotsy. You’ve been reading nothing else for the past year!” Larry’s face was redder than it should have been upon discovering his student was reading more than necessary.

I saw Claudia’s arm move as if she had laid a hand on Larry’s knee, but I couldn’t see under the table. Harold Wetmore frowned and rubbed the stubble on his chin with the back of his hand.

“But I’ve only been reading about Shakespeare’s sources that related to Macbeth. This afternoon thing is about Shakespeare and the Arthur legends.” I took a big bite of my sandwich.

“Like, what did Willie know and when did he know it?”

Claudia said.

“Exactly,” I mumbled through the food in my mouth and swallowed sooner than I should have. “What? Don’t look at me like that, Larry! My God, you’d think I was researching fairies and crop circles.”

Larry wasn’t expecting that. I’d never talked to him like this before. His jaws clenched. “You could just ask your friends from Glastonbury. They can tell you all about such crap.”

“Friends? Make that ‘friend,’ Larry. Only one left.”

Larry couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. He pulled at his ear with his left hand and I noticed his wedding ring was missing.

“Speaking of Glastonbury,” I said, “I may go there myself for a day or so when the conference is over. It’s not far.”

“Why the hell would you go there?” Larry’s face darkened. “There’s nothing in Glastonbury but fruitcakes and magic shops.”

“I’d like to see the place, okay? I’ll have a free day before we go home.”

Harold mumbled, as if to remind us to lower our voices, “Our library has a lot of old books, but remember, they weren’t subjected to peer review. In today’s market, none of them would pass.”

“And some were complete fiction,” Larry added.

I was happy to see fifteen people show up, filling almost all of the chairs in the little room they’d assigned me. Claudia and Robin’s presentation yesterday had not drawn so many. I had already started my spiel when Larry Roberts walked in. My stomach lurched.

I emphasized the pageantry, citing examples of courtly love and gallantry in Shakespeare’s stories. These were uncontroversial topics, even for Larry, and I felt I was in safe territory as long as I stuck to them. I’d totally forgotten that, in Oxford, I might come face to face with a die-hard Oxfordian—one who believes that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the author of the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare.

A prune-faced man interrupted me defiantly. “And you believe the son of a glove maker from Stratford donned the soul of a nobleman and wrote all this as easily as he could have donned one of his old man’s gloves?”

While considering my response, I gave him one of the looks I used on my boys when they were growing up and acting like asses. “I’m continually amazed that
anyone,
from
any
social background, could write so many beautiful works, but someone obviously did.”

I got smiles and a few winks from most of my other listeners. Having spent half my allotted time in safe territory, I had to venture out. After all, my topic was “Shakespeare’s Historical Sources and References to Arthurian Legend in his Plays.” So far, I hadn’t mentioned Arthur. I killed a few seconds by pouring myself a glass of lukewarm water from the pitcher someone had brought me.

“Shakespeare relied heavily on the work of Holinshed, as most of you know,” I said, hoping no one would dispute that well-known fact. “But remember, Holinshed was also influenced by earlier writers. He didn’t write centuries of history from memory.” That got a laugh. I felt emboldened. “Holinshed read Malory, William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and even Gildas. Gildas was a near-contemporary of the events attributed to Arthur.” I paused for breath. “So the story of King Arthur, be it history or myth, was firmly fixed in the brain of Raphael Holinshed.”

Larry Roberts stopped me there. “You’re suggesting the possibility Arthur is a myth and the possibility he’s history are equally likely?”

“That isn’t what I said.”

“‘Be it history or myth?’ isn’t that what you said? Or is there a strange echo in here?”

“You’re twisting my meaning!”

“I’m listening, but what I’m hearing sounds like it came straight from the grey-haired hippies of Glastonbury.”

By this time, everyone in the room was glaring at Larry. He looked around quickly, then stood and headed for the door.

Someone said, “Of all the nerve!” loudly enough so that Larry, now hurrying across the threshold, must have heard it too.

He turned and looked at me, his face nearly purple, and said, “And you can forget about that PhD.”

At least I thought that was what he said.

I went straight back to my room and paced, talking to myself. I’m sure my blood pressure was sky-high. I checked my iPad and found an email from my son Brian, informing me that business (he has a John Deere farm equipment franchise) was booming, his wife and children were well, but his father, my ex-husband, Chet, was drinking himself into oblivion almost every night now. Too bad, I thought. All in all, his message cheered me up a bit. I decided I couldn’t stay in my room and brood. I needed to go for a walk.

I plodded down the High Street, trying not to think about Larry. The shops along both sides were a hodgepodge of the ancient and the new. An open door, its wood frame painted so many times old nicks and dings were nearly obliterated, spilled hip-hop music onto the sidewalk. I love the mixture you can only find in a college town.

My feet turned in at the Covered Market, a collection of some fifty stores spanning the middle of the block between Market Street and the High. This was the first time I’d been inside. The smell of a leather shop gave way to the sweet aroma of pastries, then fruits, cheeses, meats, and fish. The fish markets were wisely placed near the wide open north exit.

I stopped in front of the fish market and studied the display of mussels, clams, and shrimp on a long bed of ice. That reminded me of the canapés I blamed for the stomachache I and others had suffered. Was it because of the seafood? I only remembered eating one bacon-wrapped mussel, but I may have had more. I still couldn’t get the picture of Bram’s trashcan out of my mind. Placed at one corner of the mattress he’d put on the floor, it was so eerily like the one I’d pulled over to the head of my bed.

I thought about saxitoxin and the oysters in the pan at St. Giles’s lab. He’d told me the oysters were sucking up the poisonous soup, concentrating the toxin in their tissues. I’d read about how animals high on the food chain could get toxic doses of chemicals that don’t harm the animals they eat, because predators don’t eat just one, and over time the toxin builds up. Like the bald eagles and DDT. They got such a big dose, their eggshells wouldn’t harden and the chicks died before they hatched.

In this case it would be people rather than eagles at the top of the food chain. The algae in the water would produce the toxin in tiny amounts. Shellfish, all filter-feeders, get their food by pumping huge amounts of water in one siphon and out the other, removing the algae in the process. The toxins, useless as food, remain behind and build up until the tissues of the oyster, mussel, or whatever has a much higher concentration than the algae had. Then a human comes along and eats a couple dozen of these. That can be a fatal overdose.

Had the mussels they served at the party been contaminated with saxitoxin? Were the algae that produce saxitoxin found in the waters around the British Isles? Might someone have deliberately tainted the shellfish? Again, I found that hard to believe. No one at the party, except possibly Bram, got all that sick. If the object was to inconvenience us, they had succeeded on a small scale, but if it was murder, who was the target? If the target was Bram Fitzwaring, how would the killer know Bram alone would die?

Bram was about six feet four, I guessed, and weighed about 250 pounds. It would have taken a lot of bad mussels to kill him.

What if someone knew Bram was inordinately fond of mussels and prone to eat huge numbers of them when available? That someone would’ve had to have access to the canapé trays before they were brought out. Someone in the kitchen, a cook, a server, or—Daphne Wetmore, who had supervised every detail of the event. Motive? None that I knew of. The only person likely to have known Bram’s favorite foods was Mignon. She could possibly have intercepted the food trays somewhere along their route from the kitchen to the Master’s Lodge, but again, where’s the motive? Perhaps it was simply that the mussels were tainted, collected, and sold without anyone in the supply chain knowing they weren’t safe. I had no idea whether shellfish were subjected to any sort of inspection in the British Isles, or indeed, if saxitoxin could be detected in a batch headed for market. St. Giles Bell mentioned collecting from the cold waters of the North Sea. But was he collecting oysters, saxitoxin, or the algae that produced saxitoxin? I’d read about people dying from shellfish poisoning, but I thought it only happened in the Gulf of Mexico and US coastal waters.

Might that be because I live in the United States and I’m hearing mainly US news?

I’d been staring at the mussels nestled in their bed of ice, so, naturally, the fishmonger asked if he could help me. “Mussels are beautiful, no? Only two quid per kilo!” He had an Indian or Pakistani accent.

“Beautiful,” I agreed. “Where do these come from?”

“From the distributor,” he said, then grinned when he realized that wasn’t what I meant. “One minute.” He stepped back from the display and called to a man who was filleting a flatfish. Turning back to me he said, “Sussex.”

“Have you had any complaints about people getting sick from eating these?”

“Sick? No!” He looked confused and a bit insulted.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest . . . I mean, the other night at St. Ormond’s we had mussels at our cocktail party and several people got sick.”

“They did not come from us, did they?”

“I don’t know where they were bought, or who bought them.”

The blood-spattered man from the worktable, still wielding a filet knife, stepped forward. “You’d best find out where they came from before you start accusing us of selling bad mussels!”

I made hasty apologies and dashed out into Market Street. This wasn’t my day. I felt as if I could do with a Kevlar vest. Turning left onto busy Cornmarket Street, the town’s retail hub, I kept walking until Cornmarket turned into St. Aldate’s and ahead I saw the great Tom Tower of Christ Church, the bell tower named for Thomas à Becket and stubbornly set to ring nine o’clock at five after nine, because Oxford is, in fact, five minutes west of Greenwich, which is officially zero degrees longitude. Only in Oxford.

I kept walking south toward the river Thames—locals called it the Isis—trying to fill my mind with the sights around me and forget my horrible afternoon, but my mind stubbornly returned to Larry. What didn’t make sense was
how angry he got
! I’d never seen him so upset. I’d rarely seen
anyone
that upset over anything. Okay, so he didn’t go for the idea that King Arthur may have been a real man. Okay, so there isn’t any actual proof he ever existed. I understand that historians get upset when non-historians start making things up and proposing them as though they really happened.

But Larry’s anger was out of proportion. Off the charts. Why? I remembered Claudia Moss telling me about the curious exchange she’d heard between Larry and Harold. Something like, “Got your loins girded?” and “Frankly, I’d rather be elsewhere.” This was just prior to Claudia’s presentation and an hour or two before Bram was scheduled to take the stage. It was also about the same time Mignon walked into Bram’s room and found his body. Bram was already dead and had been so for hours.

I knew, from talking to John Fish the ghost tour guide, that Harold Wetmore was an active opponent of all things paranormal. He’d tried to force city council to do away with the ghost tours. The Arthur legend was mixed up with the paranormal—Celtic gods, crop circles, veils between worlds, all that sort of thing—and I could safely assume Harold would have taken a dim view of whatever Bram Fitzwaring had planned to tell us in his afternoon lecture. But active opposition does not call for murder. I’ve seen historians argue for hours as if they might come to blows, then slap each other on the back and order another drink.