What Time Devours (34 page)

“You remembered,” he said, beaming. “I’m flattered.”

“You shouldn’t be,” she said, staring down her beaklike nose at him from heavily lidded eyes. “That excursion is for conference delegates only.”

A few days earlier, Thomas would have found this maddening, but Kumi’s visit had eased his mind or—at the very least—reset his priorities.

“Yes, I see that,” Thomas said, “and I’d hate to negatively impact your day, so let’s get through this as quickly as possible, shall we?”

“The castle tour is out of the question, I’m afraid, and if you want to sit in on a seminar, you’ll need a pass or a
friend
who will chaperone you.”

“Because not having a pass means I’m probably here to torch the place,” Thomas said, still smiling.

“People who use
impact
as a verb are capable of anything,” she remarked. “And the word is naturally trochaic, not iambic: IMpact, not imPACT.”

He laughed then, because it was the kind of thing he might have said in class.

“That’s good, Mrs. Covington,” he said. “But here’s the thing. I don’t actually need to get into the institute, and I’m all castled out.”

Her face clouded.

“Then what are you doing here? I’m not running messages to your acquaintances like some lackey . . .”

“No,” he said. “Of course not. I actually came to see you.”

That stopped her. She stared at him, her mouth open, speechless, and for the briefest of moments she looked like a completely different person.

“Me?” she said.

“How long have you worked here, Mrs. Covington?”

“Thirty-five years in October,” she said, proud of the fact.

“Could I buy you a cup of tea?” Thomas said. “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. Think of it as local history.”

 

Stratford was crawling with tearooms. Mrs. Covington selected Benson’s on Bard Walk and stalked there. She was tall and angular and there was something mechanical about her movements, but the woman had a sharpness and vigor that Thomas couldn’t help liking. Even so, he sensed that she felt at sea in this new relationship, and there was a wariness about her that she was clearly unused to.

“I’m not a gossip, Mr. Knight,” she said, as soon as she had ordered her pot of Earl Grey and a scone.

“I never thought you would be,” Thomas answered, honestly. “And besides, my first question is about the distant past, not the recent.”

She eyed him, saying nothing.

“Hamstead Marshall House,” he said. “It was a little south of here in west Berkshire, near Newberry.”

“Hamstead Marshall
Park
,” she said. “Yes, I know it. Burned down in 1718, I believe. It was actually a series of houses. One of the latest incarnations was a Tudor manor built for Thomas Parry that was probably destroyed during the civil war, like Kenilworth Castle. Another house was built on the estate in the late seventeenth century by the Earl of Craven. He modeled it on Heidelberg Castle as a gift for the exiled Queen of Bohemia, Elizabeth, with whom he had fallen in love, but she died before the house was built. It burned down shortly thereafter. The family moved to Ben-ham Park, and the Hamstead Marshall site has been derelict ever since.”

Thomas gazed at her. The woman was an encyclopedia.

“Mrs. Covington,” he said, “you’re a marvel.”

She colored, muttering about having had an “interest in such things since girlhood.”

“But to be able to carry all that around in your head!” Thomas exclaimed. “Most academics would kill for that kind of memory.”

“You sound like Professor Dagenhart,” she said, waving the compliment away. “I’ve been telling him stories like this for thirty years and he never stops treating me like the Delphic oracle. When you live in a place all your life, you know it, and that’s all there is to it. And reading, of course. One doesn’t have to be a professor to like books.”

“I was a student of Dagenhart’s,” said Thomas. “In Boston.”

“Were you indeed?” she said, looking him up and down as if she had never seen him before.

“I didn’t know him well, and he was constantly disappearing to come here.”

“Every summer,” she nodded. “He’s become something of an institution himself. First person I ever knew with a laptop computer. He has a newer model now, but he leaves it in the institute’s reading room constantly, usually switched on. Doesn’t seem to worry about it being stolen. I can’t decide if I think him admirably principled or woefully misguided. I hate to say it, and I know it sounds like mindless sentimentality, but I think the world as a whole is a sight more wicked than it was when I was young.”

“How does Professor Dagenhart know Elsbeth Church?”

For a second she looked baffled. Then it came to her.

“Oh, the novelist! Yes, he would, wouldn’t he? Through Daniella, I suppose.”

“Blackstone?” said Thomas, surprised.

“Oh, yes,” she said breezily. “They knew each other for years.”

“Intimately?”

“Mr. Knight, I told you I was no gossip. I thought you wanted to hear about Hamstead Marshall Park.”

“Yes,” said Thomas, adjusting. “Could the place be considered a
shrine
of some kind?”

“In what sense?” she said, brisk and hawklike again.

“I don’t know,” said Thomas, trying to find the words. “Is there something about its history that might inspire—I don’t know—nostalgia, devotion, strong personal feeling of some kind?”

“I suppose the story of the earl and his love might be that,” she said, “and there is the legend about the Tudor house, though there’s probably nothing to it.”

“What legend?”

“It’s completely unverifiable, and is probably a local version of a story from elsewhere . . .”

“Your interest in historical accuracy has been duly noted,” said Thomas. “What’s the legend?”

CHAPTER 70

Mrs. Covington leaned forward and her eyes grew brighter. It wasn’t just that she was flattered by his interest, she was thrilled by the prospect of telling the story itself.

“I said that the Tudor manor was built for Thomas Parry,” she began.“It is said that the gift of the estate was made by Queen Elizabeth herself and was, perhaps, a very particular kind of reward. Elizabeth, as you know, made much of her status as the Virgin Queen. It was a useful political image that drew on Greek and Roman mythology—Artemis and Diana, goddesses of the moon—and, most importantly, on the iconography of Catholicism. The country was nominally Protestant, but that was a very recent change, and even for those who embraced the new religion there was a lot about the old that they missed. So Elizabeth made herself a kind of royal Virgin Mary. In doing so she neatly tied her secular authority to the divine in a way that protected her from a lot of complaints from subjects who would prefer to be ruled by a man.

“Of course, the issue of her virginity was also very much about her refusal to give up England to a foreign power. If she married, the kingdom would become property of her husband, and with England at war with every Catholic power in Europe, that could spell disaster. So you can imagine how much damage could have been done if it got out that she was not actually a virgin at all, that she had, in fact, already had a child.”

Thomas stared at her, feeling the tension and excitement of her narrative.

“Now Hamstead Marshall Park had been given to Elizabeth by her brother Edward the Sixth in 1550. When her Catholic sister Mary was on the throne, Elizabeth was kept under house arrest at Hatfield House and at Bisham Abbey—close to Hamstead Marshall—where Thomas Hoby, the great translator, lived. This was in the mid-1550s. The story goes that one night, an elderly midwife was woken from her bed in London, put in a coach, and driven out to Hamstead Marshall. There she was instructed by a mysterious lord to minister to a young gentlewoman who was in labor. A fire was built in the hearth, and the midwife was supplied with the tools of her trade and commanded to ensure that nothing befell the mother. You must recall, of course, how many women died in childbirth in those days, often because of some hemorrhage that those attending could not stop. But in this case, the young woman came through her ordeal satisfactorily and the midwife was pleased to deliver a healthy baby girl.”

Mrs. Covington then leaned in, and her eyes widened.

“It was at this point that the midwife was ordered by the nameless lord to hurl the infant into the fire!”

Thomas listened, his eyes on the old woman’s.

“Did she?” he asked.

“She had no choice. Weeping, she allowed the child to be burned before her eyes. When it was done, she was given a goblet of wine to steady her nerves, and sent back to London, charged to say nothing to anyone. A few days later, she was dead—poisoned, of course—but not before she had whispered to others that the young mother had been none other than the Princess Elizabeth.”

She held Thomas’s eyes, then sat back again and sipped her tea, gratified by his response.

“But you think it’s not true?” he said, breaking the tension.

“There are problems with the dates,” she said, clinical again. “If Elizabeth got pregnant before she ascended the throne, the father was most likely High Admiral Sir Thomas Seymour, uncle to the boy king Edward. This was rumored extensively, and there are documents to suggest that the matter was seriously investigated and that there was at the very least some truth to the stories. But Seymour had fallen from grace and was executed in 1549. So if the story is true, it must have taken place
before
Elizabeth was given the house, before she was placed under guard at her sister’s orders. It’s not out of the question, because the house had belonged to her step-mother, Catherine Parr, so she could have stayed there, but I fear we will never know. Still,” she added, leaning forward again and grinning so broadly that her entire face was gleefully altered, “it’s a
scrumptious
story, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would,” said Thomas, thoughtful now. “I would indeed.”

 

Thomas walked her back to the institute and they hesitated outside.

“Thank you for tea,” said Mrs. Covington.

“My pleasure,” said Thomas.

“I’m afraid I may have misjudged you, Mr. Knight,” she said.

“That happens.” He smiled.

Mrs. Covington turned her key in the lock and pushed the door open. Two men were talking just inside the doorway.

“Five o’ clock tomorrow, Professor,” said one of them. “Don’t keep me waiting.”

The other man turned on his heel, head down, and moving fast. Mrs. Covington adjusted awkwardly and Thomas reached up to steady her, but even so they were nearly sent sprawling down the steps as the man pushed past.

He did not apologize or pause to look back, but they had already seen his ashen face as he barreled through, and even if they hadn’t, Thomas would have recognized the incongruous pairing of tweed suit and laptop case.

“Perhaps Professor Dagenhart senses I was talking about him,” she remarked ruefully, watching his back.

“Maybe he just heard a paper by an Oxfordian,” Thomas replied.

“Excuse me,” said the other man as he also tried to get by.

Thomas and Mrs. Covington stepped aside, and the man passed between them, turning to give Thomas a level, unreadable look. It was Daniella Blackstone’s steward.

CHAPTER 71

As soon as Mrs. Covington left, Thomas returned his gaze to where the steward had been. He was still watching him walk calmly away when someone beside him forced a cough. Thomas turned to find Julia’s scowling graduate student loitering beside him, looking nervous.

“You have a moment?” said Chad.

Thomas considered him. He seemed abashed, surly as ever, but chastened somehow.

“What’s on your mind?” said Thomas.

“I just wanted to clear up what I said before.”

“About Julia respecting your work too much?”

He winced at the words.

“Yeah. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“So you said.”

“I just didn’t want you to think . . .”

“What?”

“That, I don’t know . . .”

“Chad, when we first met at the Drake in Chicago, you were polishing a paper you were going to deliver the following day.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Julia—Professor McBride . . .”

“I call her Julia too.”

“Right. Of course. So Julia was overseeing your revisions. What form did those revisions take?”

“Just polishing,” he said, cagey. “It was too long. Stuff had to come out.”

“What stuff?”

“Some stuff on early modern servant clothing. Livery and stuff.”

“Why that specifically?”

He hesitated.

“It just didn’t fit.”

“You’d been researching that subject with her? Under her guidance, I mean?”

“Yeah,” he said, switching tack and coloring a little. “But that was really her work. I was just a kind of assistant. I shouldn’t have been putting that stuff in my own paper.”

“Right. I see.”

“So,” he said. “Let’s just forget it, all right?”

“All right.”

The graduate student was sloping off when Thomas stopped him.

“Chad?”

“What?”

“Does Angela know about this?”

Chad’s face clouded and he took a step up to Thomas.

“Yes, but I don’t want you to talk about it with her.”

“Why not?”

“She and I are . . . it’s complicated. We’re close, all right? Angela really respects Julia’s work, but . . .”

“But what?”

“Angela is just a bit protective of me sometimes. Okay? That’s all.”

“Okay,” said Thomas.

“Okay.”

Chad smiled, but there was still something hunted in his eyes, and Thomas could tell that things were far from okay.

CHAPTER 72

Thomas walked down to the river again to think, but he couldn’t come to any hard conclusions about Chad or about why Daniella Blackstone’s steward was meeting with Randall Dagenhart. He had ideas about both, but they were vague and based on little more than instinct. His thoughts got no clearer as he walked, and he found the town distracting.