What Time Devours (20 page)

There was no sign of pursuit.

CHAPTER 37

Thomas sat on the edge of his bed and removed the dressing from his shoulder. It had started to bleed again. He swabbed at it with cotton doused with an antiseptic called Dettol that his wary landlady had given him, and then retaped it as best he could. He took double his usual pain medication, then lay on his back, trying not to move. It took him twenty minutes to fall asleep, twenty minutes of staring blankly at the dark ceiling, mapping the contours of its plaster in his mind, and he was still in the same position when he woke the following day, having slept through breakfast.

The landlady scowled, but cooked him a fat sausage, fried egg, mushrooms, and—for reasons he couldn’t quite grasp—baked beans, telling him he needed to build up his strength. He hadn’t told her what had caused the wound in his shoulder or what had happened to him the night before, so he figured he just looked like hell. Her scowl deepened when he asked her for directions to the local police station.

 

Thomas fished in his pocket and drew out a clear plastic bag containing the lino cutter with its almost circular hook of a blade.

“Nasty little weapon,” said the policeman.

“I thought you could check it for prints,” said Thomas.

“An excellent idea, sir, thank you.”

The policeman was so deadpan that Thomas wasn’t absolutely sure if he was being sarcastic. The whole exchange had been like this since he had showed up at the station. Everyone was businesslike and formal, but there was an edge of humor to everything they said, a slightly ironic dryness that Thomas found disorienting. While he had been waiting to give the details of his attack, he had heard the beginning of an exchange between a cop and some guy who had come in to pay a traffic ticket. The police officer had checked the details and remarked,

“Good morning, wing commander. Couldn’t quite reach takeoff speed, could we?”

The other guy had shrugged and smiled in a sheepish fashion before drifting after him to pay his fine.

The policeman assigned to Thomas’s case—a Constable Robson—had responded with similar witty detachment.

“And you led these men into the castle because you figured you could dump boiling oil on them or shut the portcullis on their horses, did you, sir?”

“Well, no,” said Thomas, bewildered and responding as if that had been a real question, “it was just close by and I had been there recently, so I figured I might know it better than the guys who were after me.”

“It was close by,” the constable repeated. “Handy, even.”

“Right.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” the policeman said, smiling amiably. “I mean, it’s not often that you can hide from muggers in a castle, is it? I’ll bet they built it with you in mind.”

“Are you saying you don’t believe me?” said Thomas, genuinely unsure.

“Certainly not, sir,” said the constable, still cheery. “I’m just remarking on the handiness of the castle’s locale in relation to that of your pursuit and subsequent assault.”

“I could give you a description of the two men,” said Thomas.

“Absolutely,” shrugged the genial cop, “why not? They weren’t wearing armor or carrying some sort of battering ram, were they? Only that might make them easier to spot in the high street.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Thomas, trying to decide if he was irritated or amused.

“Well that’s a pity. We get so few bands of medieval marauders these days up for a weekend’s pillaging, that they would have stood right out. As it is . . .”

“There’s probably not much you can do,” said Thomas.

“It’s a question of man-hours,” said Constable Robson. “You weren’t robbed. You weren’t injured. You may have been scared, but that’s a tough thing to devote resources to. I mean, I’m scared of Angelina Jolie. And Cliff Richard, actually. Gives me the willies. Never been able to explain it. Anyway, you see my problem.”

“Yes,” said Thomas, smiling now.

“But I thank you for the lino cutter. I was planning to remodel my kitchen and this will come in right handy. Only kidding, sir. We’ll get this checked out, and give you a bell if anything comes up.”

“Sightings of marauders, for instance,” said Thomas.

“Vikings, perhaps,” the cop agreed. “We haven’t seen any round here for centuries, so they’re due for a rampage.”

CHAPTER 38

Back on the high street, Thomas asked a suited man where he could find a liquor store and got a blank stare.

“A place to buy wine,” he tried.

“A pub or a bar?”

“To take home.”

“Oh,” said the man, light dawning, “you mean an off license.”

“Okay,” Thomas shrugged.

“There’s a Threshers on the Warwick Road,” said the man, pointing. “Nice not to have to work, eh? Have one for me.”

Thomas wasn’t sure if this was friendly banter or mockery for being jobless, so he just smiled, thanked him, and followed his pointing finger.

After last night, he was ready for a drink, but had no intention of buying except, he told himself, for research purposes. He located the so-called off license and paced the aisles of wine racks till he located the champagne selection. It was, unlike the standard American supermarket selection, all French except for a bottle or two of Italian spumantes and an English brand called Nyetimber Classic Cuvée. There was Moët Hennessy, Taittinger, and Louis Roederer. No Saint Evremond.

“Help you find something, sir?”

The man was portly and wearing a green apron. He had a clipboard in one hand and carried his head to one side like a solicitous chicken.

“A friend of mine recommended a champagne house to me, but I can’t find it anywhere,” Thomas lied. “Saint Evremond.”

“No, I’m afraid we don’t stock that, sir,” said the proprietor. “Saint Evremond, you said? I’m not familiar with the name. Hang on a sec and I’ll look it up.”

He waddled away and returned with a hefty and well-thumbed tome with a torn dust jacket sporting the title
A Companion to Wine
. He flipped it open and started riffling through, running one fat index finger down the entries repeating the name under his breath.

“Here we go, sir,” he announced. “Saint Evremond Brut. Oh, it’s a Taittinger brand. ‘A blend of several crus from vineyards in the Champagne region around Reims and Epernay. It is made up of thirty percent Chardonnay and sixty percent Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier as well as a selection of reserve wines as prescribed by the seventeenth-century French exile Charles de Saint Denis, Lord of Saint Evremond.’ ”

Thomas nodded, none the wiser, thanked him, and was considering buying something to show his gratitude when something chimed in his memory.

“Can I see that again?” he said.

He leaned in and stared at the entry till he found the name. A moment later he was in the street, scanning the sidewalk for a pay phone and fumbling in his pocket for his wallet.

It took him five minutes to find a public phone, and another six to get through to Westminster Abbey.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m trying to reach a particular verger. I don’t know his name but he was on duty two days ago. Small man, longish jet-black hair and wire-rimmed glasses . . .”

“That’s Mr. Hazlehurst,” said a woman with a cut-glass accent. “You wish to speak to him?”

“If that is possible.”

“I’m sure it’s
possible
,” she said, as if he had asked if Mr. Hazlehurst swam the backstroke, “though it may take a few moments to locate him. Can I tell him what it is you wish to discuss?”

Thomas told her that they had chatted in Poets’ Corner and he wanted to check on one of the monuments, or rather on the person commemorated by the monument . . .

“Hold the line, please,” she said, crisp as a January breeze.

The phone went silent for seven minutes. Thomas watched the display, anxious that his card was about expire.

“Hello? This is Ron Hazlehurst.”

The voice sounded uncertain.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” said Thomas, talking fast. “We met at the abbey two days ago in Poets’ Corner. We talked about
The Da Vinci Code
.”

“Did we?”

“And . . . I don’t know, Britishness and tourists and . . .”

“You were the lost gentleman who wasn’t sure what he was looking for,” said the verger, pleased with the memory.

“That’s right.”

“And did you find it?”

“I’m not sure,” said Thomas. “Perhaps.”

“But you need some help.”

“Just a little. Would you mind?”

“So long as it doesn’t involve the Knights Templar, I’m at your disposal,” said the verger.

Thomas could almost hear his mischievous grin.

CHAPTER 39

Thomas took the bus into Stratford and walked down to the river past the Gower Memorial, where a bronze Shakespeare stood surrounded by statues of his creations: Falstaff, Lady Macbeth, Prince Hal, and Hamlet. There was a scattering of tourists taking pictures, and behind them, wearing the same suit he had been wearing last time, the old man who rattled off lengthy quotes from the Bard. Thomas caught his eye and nodded, but the man was in midstream—Puck, it sounded like—and did not respond. Thomas didn’t mind. There was something about the game that depressed him a little even as it pleased him to identify the speeches. Maybe it was the man himself. There was something about him, or rather something
absent
from him.

Thomas shrugged the feeling off and returned to the riverbank and the quiet spot under the willow where he had dozed before. He got comfortable and then reread
Love’s Labour’s Lost
. He had not looked at it since graduate school and then somewhat cursorily, and his memory of even the story was sketchy. He read the whole play in an unbroken two-hour sitting.

The main plot was simple enough; the King of Navarre forms a kind of academy with his friends Longueville, Dumaine, and Berowne, their purpose to study and reflect for three years, mortifying their flesh by avoiding banquets, drinking, the company of women, and anything that might distract them from their philosophical labors. The pact lasts until the ambassadorial visit of the Princess of France and her ladies, Rosaline, Maria, and Katherine. The men fall for the women, abandon their academy, and pursue them with various romantic inventions, pageantry, and verbal pyrotechnics. All seems to be going well, moving toward something like the multiple weddings that occur at the end of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
until something remarkable happens. At the very end of the play, a messenger arrives announcing the death of the French king, the princess’s father, whereupon the ladies prepare to leave. The men try to get words of love from their respective women—presumably, promises of marriage—but the mood has shifted drastically. All the witticisms and conventions of romance that the men have used to date are now dismissed as courtly games by the women, who will promise to be theirs only if the men can endure a year of isolation and hardship. But then the play ends.

There was more to it, of course, much of it involving the Spanish braggart Don Armado and the pedant Holofernes, but the play was light on plot, and the delight for the original audience must have been primarily in the sentence-level banter, the verbal posturing, and those puns to which Samuel Johnson thought Shakespeare morbidly addicted. It was an early play, according to the introduction in his edition, though scholars seemed to disagree as to how early it came in Shakespeare’s career: no later than 1595 or so, but possibly as early as the late 1580s, which would make it among the playwright’s very first attempts. Even if pushed back to 1595 it would still be earlier than any of Shakespeare’s comedies except for
The Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew
, and, at a push
, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Whether or not it could be considered evidence for dating the text, Thomas thought the play’s language and characterization was different from any of these, particularly
Errors
, which was all plot, and
Dream
, which seemed an altogether richer and more imaginative piece.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, with its expressly courtly setting and themes, felt like a clever variation on a familiar theme—courtly love—though that cleverness went beyond the repartee and extended images and finally raised serious questions about the validity of the whole enterprise.

The ending was, after all, truly amazing in its unexpected darkening and lack of closure. Thomas couldn’t think of another romantic comedy from any period in which the central couple or couples so pointedly failed to get together. The princess’s remark that they had received the gentlemen’s wooing merely “like a merriment,” something that had passed the time but was of no real value and had nothing to do with actual love, was extraordinary. It was as if, on the death of her father, she and her ladies moved into another genre entirely and the men just didn’t know how to adjust. It wasn’t as if the goalposts had been moved so much as that the light had shifted and it became clear that there never had been any goalposts at all. The king and his friends were utterly thwarted in that which, in romantic comedy, is usually given so easily at the end: the promise of a relationship the audience would never see.

“Now, at the latest minute of the hour,” says the King of Navarre, still not hearing how his suit has been weighed, and with the French court packing to leave all around him, “grant us your loves.”

The princess answers,

 

And that was it. The end.

Except, of course, that it might not be. Thomas found it impossible to read the ending without imagining what might happen in
Love’s Labour’s Won
, the romantic conclusion it must surely bring that the earlier play resisted. Never, since the idea had first been mentioned to him, had he been more sure that there had indeed once been such a sequel, and believing that, he thought, was more than half the way to believing that it still existed.