The White Devil (11 page)

Andrew slumped unhappily. “Something like that.”

“It seems you
are
my problem.” Fawkes sighed. “I think I’ll have a drink.”

He rose and went back to the kitchen, poured gin onto ice, sipped. He gave it a moment to reach his bloodstream. There was something fundamentally wrong about this, he recognized; drinking gin with students at two in the afternoon while they admit to having a drug problem; but even as he thought this, the first fumes reached his brain and he lit up like an uncharged device getting its first blast of voltage.
Ahh
. He could make it. He could hang on.
Now then
. He returned to the living room.

“Do you believe me?” Andrew stared at him balefully, awaiting judgment.

Fawkes took another sip and smacked his lips. He pondered a moment. “I believe you believe what you’re saying.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“How could I be?”

“I couldn’t invent what I just told you,” Andrew protested.

“Yes, but it’s hardly proof.”

“My ghost quotes poetry.”

“What, Edgar Allan Poe?”

“No . . . more old-fashioned. Maybe that’s proof. He quoted poetry I’ve never heard before.”

Fawkes lit yet another cigarette. “All right, you have my interest—setting aside the fact that I’ll have to take your word for it you’ve never heard the poetry before. This is my area of expertise. I should be in a position to expose those who would take advantage of the credulous.” He paused. “Would it be too much to hope that you remember any of this poetry?”

Andrew sat quietly for a moment. “
The wolf . . . the wolf may prey the better
. He liked that line.” He searched his memory. “And something about a whore. And spit.”

“When was this? Your ghost was quoting poetry during the murder?”

“No, before that. In the basement. In that cistern room.”

“
The wolf may prey the better
. And you’d never heard that before? Could be, you know, autosuggestion, or something.” Andrew shook his head. Fawkes considered the line. “
The wolf may prey the better
. No, neither have I. Or maybe. Once upon a time.” He leapt to his feet. “Technology to the rescue.” He went to the laptop at his desk and booted it up with a chime. Fawkes started his browser and began typing. “The wolf may prey the better,” he murmured. He stared at the screen a moment. He punched a few more keys.

Then he paused again, reading.

He shot Andrew a significant look and turned the laptop away so Andrew couldn’t see the screen.

“I am going to ask you a few questions, Mr. Taylor,” said Fawkes. “And let me warn you. I am a poet and I have a high regard for Truth. I am Apollo’s representative on earth. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir. I mean, yes . . . Piers.”

“Who is John Webster?”

“Ah . . .” Andrew blanked. “I don’t know. Does he go here?”

Fawkes scoffed. “Let’s try again. Did you study Shakespeare in the States?”

“Sure.”

“Which plays?”

“Um,
Julius Caesar
. . .
Macbeth
.”

“Anything else?”

“I saw
Midsummer Night’s Dream
a couple of times.”

“Ever read any of Shakespeare’s contemporaries? Thomas Kyd? Christopher Marlowe?”

“I’ve heard of Marlowe.”

“Try a bit later. Anything in the Jacobean period?”

Andrew frowned.

“John Webster?” Fawkes prompted again.

Andrew shook his head.

Fawkes spun the screen around for Andrew to read. Andrew drew close and peered at the white screen: a page from Google Books. The page showed a scholarly edition of a play. The words in the center of the screen were highlighted yellow, from Fawkes’s search:

VITTORIA
The wolf may prey the better.

There were more lines, attributed to other characters with Italian-sounding names. “That’s it!” Andrew cried. “That’s what he said!”

“This,” declared Fawkes, turning the screen back toward himself, “is
The White Devil
, by John Webster. Jacobean tragedy. I saw this performed once at the Barbican, come to think of it. Nineteen-twenties costume, flappers and white tie. You’re sure you’ve never read this play? Seen it performed?”

“Positive,” said Andrew, excited now. “What is
The
White Devil
? Who is Webster?”

“John Webster is sort of a seventeenth-century Goth. Jacobean, referring to James the First, Queen Elizabeth’s successor. Just after Shakespeare’s time. Webster wrote bloody plays about nasty people.
The White Devil,
if I have it right, is about a duchess who cheats on her husband and then becomes the scapegoat for a bunch of very nasty cardinals. Your average cardinal, in a Webster play, is about as morally wholesome as a
mafioso
. She dies in the end. Strangled, I think. Haven’t read it since Oxford.”

“He mentioned cardinals.”

“Who? Your ghost?” Fawkes asked.

“What does it mean?”

“The play?”

“The ghost quoting it.”

“I haven’t a clue,” replied Fawkes, at a loss.

Andrew turned the laptop toward him, scanning the page again. “These lines here . . .
Bestow’st upon thy master
. . . all that . . . that’s not what the blond boy said. He was reciting something, but,” he continued, crestfallen, “the rest of this doesn’t fit.”

“You said something about
spitting whores
?”

“Spit and whores, separately.”

“Let’s try
spit
. Whores are common as dirt in Jacobean tragedy. But spit . . .”

Andrew waited while Fawkes clicked through the pages.

“Wait, what’s that?” Andrew said, catching something.

Fawkes paused.

“There, that’s it!” Andrew pointed at the text on the screen. “
Murderess . . . whore
. . . those are the lines! Right there!” Fawkes murmured the lines to himself.

“For your names of ‘whore’ and ‘murderess,’

They proceed from you—as if a man should spit

against the wind: the filth returns in ’s face.”

“I’m not crazy!” Andrew said, excited again. “Right? I mean, the play is real. Those words are real!”

“The question is . . .” Fawkes muttered, staring at the screen. “Well, I have a lot of questions.”

Andrew continued poring over the text. “I wonder why he skipped this part here,” he said, pointing to a section on the screen.

Fawkes considered this a moment. Then pointed himself, in turn. “Your ghost said these lines?
Terrify babes
and
The wolf may prey the better
? But not these in between?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Those lines are spoken by Vittoria.”

“Who’s she?”

“She’s the slutty duchess I just told you about.” Fawkes felt something pass through him. He turned to Andrew. “You understand, don’t you? You of all people should.”

Andrew shook his head.

“Your ghost was rehearsing.”

“He was an actor?”

“An actor . . . and if he was a young boy, in the Lot, then he was also a student here.”

Andrew nodded.

“So he must have been rehearsing for a school play.” Fawkes sat back in his chair, chewing his nails again. “Just like you.”

RAIN PATTERED ON
the paving stones leading to the Vaughan Library. Its slitted windows, like the high windows of a cathedral, glowed in the mist. Andrew held his hat to his head against the rain and wind. It was darkening, after supper. At Fawkes’s urging, Andrew had come here
to meet someone helpful
. Fawkes had added:
Don’t let her scare you.
Andrew had not set foot in the Vaughan since that first day. But so many memories of that first day had been blotted out by finding Theo cold and stiff on the hillside. It was one of those old Harrow buildings intended principally, he felt, for postcards and promotional photographs.

He pushed open the heavy carved doors, with their giant brass rings, and entered the long, high-ceilinged room. A Fifth Former manned an information desk, sorting books.

Andrew approached him. “I’m looking for Judith Kahn,” he said. “Um. Dr Kahn?”

The boy’s eyes widened, and without a word he raised a finger and pointed past Andrew.

Andrew turned.

She had come up behind him. The same Dr. Kahn of the Newboys Tour. Her bush of orange hair streaked with grey, her black suit hanging like armor. Scowling.

“You’re late,” she announced. Then without warning she charged past him, across the wide stone tiles in the library—colored deep red, blue, and ivory; great slabs like squares on a giant chessboard. Andrew trotted to catch up.

“Mr. Fawkes,” he protested, “didn’t tell me he’d set a time.”

“I cannot be accountable for what Mr. Fawkes did or didn’t tell you. We keep hours here. We don’t march to the vagaries of poetic inspiration.” She barked this so that it echoed against the beamed roof and the rose windows; and even though he knew it was
her
library, Andrew found himself cringing at the noise.

“I don’t think he realized . . .”

“Don’t defend him. Piers Fawkes is childish the way all artists are childish. They become enthusiastic over nothing, and invent their own little nothings when there’s not enough nothing at hand. Not the temperament required in an historian, academic, or for that matter any adult human wishing to accomplish things related to real life. And that is my study: real life. I am an archivist. A research librarian. Not a book retriever. When Fawkes goes playing literary historical sleuth, he has all the self-important silliness of a boy playing dress-up in his father’s shoes and hat, or better yet, a Sherlock Holmes hat and pipe. He has no idea that what he’s asking is very difficult to get to. And I’ve labored far too long over this collection to go flipping pages at a moment’s notice when Mr. Fawkes gets a twinkle of inspiration. I’m not Google bloody Books,” she boomed, and a half-dozen students lifted their heads to watch Andrew and Dr. Kahn barrel past—then, seeing the speaker, put their heads down again. “That’s where he found his
clue
, isn’t it?”

Andrew didn’t answer. They came to a carved and studded door at the end of the main reading room. Dr. Kahn pulled a key ring from her pocket and unlocked it. It opened on a dark stairway, headed down. The odor of dust, glue, and stillness wafted up.

“What time is it?” she demanded.

“Uh, seven-thirty,” Andrew answered, surprised.

She reached into the darkness. “Thirty minutes.” He heard the snick of a time-set light being set, followed by the ticking away of seconds. “Light fades the books,” she explained. “We only use what we need.
Rupert
,” she bellowed back at the Fifth Former at the information desk. “I’ll be in the catacombs.”

Rupert turned to them and raised his fingers to his brow in acknowledgment; but it seemed more of a salute.

Andrew followed Dr. Kahn down the stairs—surprisingly modern metal steps that rang slightly as their feet struck them—and found himself in a long room with a low ceiling and yellow lamps hung at intervals. The space was honeycombed by shelves holding books and document boxes that had been mummified in plastic and laid on their backs.

“These on the left are letters. OH’s,” Dr. Kahn observed as they passed one shelf.
Old Harrovians
, Andrew translated to himself. “A good section just here. Winston Churchill’s letters to his housemaster. Just after Gallipoli. Completely sentimental. Churchill had a miserable time at Harrow.” She tapped another box. “There’s a manuscript of an early play by Rattigan. Alternate ending.” She grunted. “The vagaries of great men. Their schools know who they really are. We see the sausage being made. Anyway, what you’re looking for is back here.”

She resumed her charge to the back of the room, to a shelf that held a row of leather-bound volumes, big as tombstones. Andrew peered at the titles apprehensively. They were all the same:

HARROW REGISTER
.

“Can I look?”

“You may.”

Andrew eased one of the books onto a shallow table and opened it gingerly to the first page.

Head Master

REV. JOSEPH DRURY, D.D.

LIST OF HARROW SCHOOL, OCTOBER 1800

(From a list in the possession of Miss Oxenham)

“Mr. Fawkes tells me you’re interested in the performance of a play,” said Dr. Kahn.

“That’s right.”

Andrew flipped the pages. They were full of entries, all names, accompanied by
son of
, accomplishments at the school (Monitor, Head Boy), university attended, and inevitably
Died
, with a corresponding year. Some long lives, some short, all receiving the same terse obituaries in telegram style. He could not resist a sense of wonder—to touch such an old book containing names of the dead—and feel awe at the history and consistency of the place. The eccentric names he had snickered at before arriving at Harrow—
Shells, Removes
—were here, and in use, as far back as 1800. The house names too.
Headmaster’s
.
Headland
.
The Lot
.

Tower, Charles (The Lot). Son of C. Tower Esq (OH), Weald Hall, Brentwood. Left 1802. Univ. Coll. Oxf, BA, 1805. Author of various religious works and a Tamil grammar. Died Sept. 25, 1825.

“Are you going to tell me which play?” Dr. Kahn interrupted his snooping.

“Sure,” he said. “
The White Devil
, by Webster.”

“Are you going to tell me why you’re looking for
The White Devil
, by Webster?”

“I . . .”

“Yes?” Dr. Kahn watched him intently.

“Research,” he said, feebly.

“Of course. And for your re
search
,” she pronounced it the English way, with the emphasis on the second syllable, as if to correct him, “were you planning on reading every page of each one of those volumes?”

“I . . .”

“You’ll need more than thirty minutes.”