The White Devil (25 page)

18

Stalker

ANDREW WOKE TO
a sky so low and foggy it was impossible to tell the time. Persephone lay next to him, warm, her body suffusing the bed with that luscious mix of skin-smell, hair-smell, yesterday’s perfume, and the smell of sleep. She was naked, entangled in the covers. He smiled. He leaned over, stroked the tangle of her hair. As he did so, he realized that one of his hands clenched something, as if it had been doing so for hours, in sleep. He opened his hand.

A tiny object—small, translucent, flimsy—lay there. A fingernail?

He prodded it with his opposite hand. It appeared to be . . . a petal. A tiny petal, shaped like a fingernail, round and white, with a black ridge. Not a flower petal. The petal of a blossom.

He racked his brain for ways a blossom petal could have ended up in his hand, in autumn.

Then the memory of last night’s vision returned to him. He froze, processing. It seemed remote, far in the past. Had it been only a dream? He turned to Persephone in alarm, the mysterious petal forgotten. Was she breathing? Was she dead? Panic flushed him. He scrambled on top of the duvet. Tugged back the sheets from her face. Her cheeks were clean.

“Thank God,” he breathed.

“Is this some American agricultural ritual?” she groaned. “Checking the livestock after you have sex with it?”

He burst out laughing, with pure joy. Last night must have been a normal dream. Not a vision of the real Harness.

“I love you,” he said.

She said nothing and snuggled up to him.

“It’s customary, when one person says I love you, to say I love you back,” he said, trying to sound like he was casually teasing, but very much alert to her response.

“But how would I preserve my mystery, after I’ve given you so much.”

“
You
’ve given
me
so much?”

He yanked the sheets from her and she screamed in protest, and they wrestled over them, but eventually lay alongside each other, gazing, as if this were the first time they had seen each other—naked or otherwise—and even Persephone let the minutes tick past without speaking.

AGATHA WAITED FOR
them at Trinity Gate, with her red hair and long overcoat, a lone stationary figure in a swirl of bicycles, students, parking cars, and busfuls of Chinese tourists. A fog had set in over the university. She hugged Persephone and gave Andrew a double-kiss, and immediately began teasing them for being late.
Cambridge seems to agree with you two. Will there be anything left of my room when I return?
The couple grinned, embarrassed, and they squeezed hands. Agatha rolled her eyes and shepherded them through the security booth. They signed in and passed under the arch to the grounds of Trinity College.

The fog gave the place a dreamlike air, but Andrew suspected that even in bright sunlight you would think you had passed into another era. The college, made up of perfectly preserved sand-colored buildings from the seventeenth century, squared around a lawn edged by graveled paths. A high, ornate fountain stood in the center. Agatha chatted away with Persephone while Andrew marveled at the quiet the giant courtyard imposed; how perfectly time had preserved the place. They followed the path around to the building on the far side, climbed some steps, and ducked inside a door set in an ogee arch. A passage, noisy and crowded, cut through the historic building. Students jostled them, wearing scarves and army jackets. In a few paces they reached another door, then emerged into yet another foggy, stony courtyard; only this one was smaller, and completely silent. On the far side rose a multistory building with an arcade on the ground floor.

“That’s it,” said Agatha, leading them out into this second courtyard. “The Wren Library. What’s your archivist’s name again?”

“Lena Rasmussen. Do you know her?”

“I’m reading economics,” replied Agatha. “I don’t have much use for rare manuscripts.”

They passed under the arcade and started up a broad staircase. Ten-foot-high portraits of former college grandees lined the walls: scowling, berobed, monumental.

“Those are to frighten the American tourists,” quipped Agatha.

They found themselves in a long room. It rose two stories high, with windows on the second story admitting the chilly radiance of the sky. Whitewashed walls curled into a series of nooks formed by walnut-brown bookshelves. These were crammed with dusty, crumbling volumes, and were cordoned off with velvet ropes to protect what looked like private study areas with lamps and tiny desks. Arranged throughout, on pedestals, were whitewashed busts of literary heroes: Virgil, Cicero, Milton. At the end of the room the largest of these loomed, a colossal hunk of white marble depicting a figure holding a book and a pen. A hush reigned here; aside from a few shuffling figures at the front, there were more busts than live people in the Wren Library.

Agatha strode up to a desk where a man sat tapping listlessly at a computer. He wore a shaggy brownish sweater and had a bald crown and a surrounding fringe of floppy grey hair; he was the human equivalent of an old manuscript. Agatha asked for Lena Rasmussen. The man seemed surprised to encounter a human here; doubly surprised for that human to be a voluptuous nineteen-year-old in expensive clothes and with torrents of attention-grabbing red hair. A woman approached from the opposite nook. She was in her mid-twenties, with broad Scandinavian cheekbones. She wore a brown T-shirt and black jeans, a nose ring, and black hair drawn back in a ponytail.

“I’m a student of Judith Kahn,” said Andrew. “She sent you some letters I found?”

The archivist appraised him. Her eyes narrowed to an expression of knowing amusement. “That’s you, is it?” she said. “Those papers have caused a stir. You’re students at Harrow?”

“That’s right.”

“Looks like you’ve found some letters left by Lord Byron,” Lena said.

“You found letters . . . written by Lord Byron?” exclaimed Agatha, who had not known the specific purpose of their visit.

“Not by,” corrected Lena. “To. I showed your letters to Reggie Cade. He can explain.”

“Who’s Reggie Cade?”

“He’s a fellow of the college. He founded the Byron Institute at the University of Manchester, before Trinity stole him away. He was just here yesterday, pawing your letters.” Lena nodded down the hall at the full-sized marble statue. “That’s him, you know.”

“Reggie Cade?” questioned Andrew. It was a ten-foot-high figure with pen and paper, heroically astride a fallen Greek column.

The archivist smiled.

“Lord Byron. It was commissioned to go in Westminster Abbey. But the church wouldn’t accept the statue of a known sex maniac. So they sent it to Trinity—where sex maniacs are always welcome.”

She returned to the nook where she’d been sitting and flipped through a notebook for a phone number.

“She’s an odd one,” murmured Agatha. “P . . . you all right?”

Persephone had gone pale.

“I’m all right.”

“You look frightful.”

“I’ll be fine. My blood sugar just dropped.”

Andrew went to wrap an arm around her.

“So sweet,” crowed Agatha, approvingly.

“No snogging in the Wren,” drawled Lena, returning. “Reggie’s on his way. Bicycling here at full speed, no doubt. Come on.”

“Where are we going?” asked Andrew.

“To the vault,” she said.

THEY DESCENDED THE
broad steps they had originally come up and found that the Wren connected to a disappointingly modern student library with carpeting, low ceilings, and cramped carrels. They wormed their way to a service staircase and began a descent of several stories.

“We’re underground now,” Lena told them. They reached a heavy door. She punched a code into a security keypad and yanked it open. “Notice it’s cooler here. Needs to be between fifty-five and sixty-five Fahrenheit, and fifty-five and sixty-five percent relative humidity. We’re next to the river. The walls are reinforced concrete, to keep the damp out. Basically we’re in an underground box. And here,” she said, flicking on a bank of lights and pushing open the door of a metal cage with a clank, “are the manuscripts.”

They faced a long, thin passageway. On the left stood high shelves; not ordinary, stationary bookshelves; these were on rollers, with steel crank handles, like the doors to old bank vaults, to slide them back and forth. Lena traced her way to the shelf she wanted and began turning the handle. The shelves oozed apart, silently. She motioned to Andrew. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

He followed her into the narrow space between the shelves, which rose in darkness fifteen feet.

“I hope you trust your friends,” she murmured.

“Why?”

“Each of these shelves weigh a ton. If they turn the crank, we’ll be crushed.”

“You have a funny sense of humor.”

“Passes the time.” She pulled a grey box from the shelf. “Come on, we’ll wait for Reggie in the consultation room.”

DR. REGGIE CADE
arrived, red in the face, still huffing from his rapid bicycle ride (Andrew caught Lena smiling to herself at his appearance—her prediction had been accurate). He cut an imposing and strange figure: over six feet, with a vast belly; a green cardigan, green tie; high rubber boots, as if he had just been working in a garden; and large oilskin jacket. He was fiftyish, with a baggy, jowly face covered with a scruff of blond beard, going white; one of his eyes wandered severely; and his hands were soft and flabby with longish nails—that look only English men seemed to acquire, after a lifetime avoiding exercise. In all he was not an attractive man. But when he spoke, he boomed in a rich bass; Orson Welles with a Manchester brogue. Andrew could imagine him as a mesmerizing lecturer. He paused in the doorway of the tiny consultation room—a ten-by-ten box with carpeting, fluorescent lights, and a round table with chairs. The young people had crowded around as Lena removed the contents of the grey box: a dozen letters, stained brown, spread out like a large and fatigued hand of cards.

Dr. Cade sized them all up with his one good eye. “I see only one male, and the letters were found at Harrow School, so I presume
you
are the finder of the letters.” He directed his remarks at Andrew, without introduction. Andrew nodded. “Make room, then.” Lena found him a chair. He entered the room and eased his bulk into it. “Where did you find them?” he demanded of Andrew, patting his face with a handkerchief.

Andrew told the story about the cistern room and the biscuit tin.

Cade shook his head and chuckled. “Were they Byron Brand biscuits?” At this Andrew grinned and warmed to him. “That’s a story indeed. All right, Lena, let’s have a look at the specimens.”

“Hands dry, Dr. Cade?”

“Don’t hector me, girl. Come on.”

“Have you read the letters?” Andrew asked eagerly.

“I have,” Cade said.

“And?”

“It’s a shame your biscuit box wasn’t a bit dryer,” Cade said, fingering the leaves. “These fibers adhered because they were damp and tied up—squeezed together for two hundred years. Separating them shredded the fibers, and much is illegible. Not to mention the staining. Still,” he said, “there are parts we can read. And what a read!” He peered around the table, as if threatening them to disagree. “When Lena told me it was possible they belonged to Lord Byron . . . how did you know, by the way? Before reading them?” Cade peered at Andrew.

“I live in Byron’s house. His dorm.”

“So have hundreds of boys.”

“I’m playing Byron in a school play. Byron on the brain, I guess.”

“Was this John Harness’s house, too?” he asked. Andrew froze. He felt the others’ eyes on him, puzzled. Cade chuckled. “So you know the name, eh? John Harness, Byron’s lover and classmate at Trinity. You know a lot about Lord Byron, I see. But I’m guessing there’s no plaque at Harrow School to Byron
and
his young boyfriend, hm? Schools tend not to publicize such things.” Andrew shook his head. “Just as well. The scholarship portrays Harness as an innocent. An early Byron victim. Byron himself had much to do with that.

Those eyes proclaim’d so pure a mind,

Even Passion blush’d to plead for more.

“But what I have here . . . I beg your pardon,” he said, blustering a little, embarrassed, “what
you
have here, is evidence that innocent young John Harness was far from
pure
. In fact, he was hell on wheels.”

“How do you know it’s Harness?” Andrew managed.

“How?” the professor replied, with a proud thrust of the chin. “I matched these letters against a detailed chronology of Byron’s life I have been developing for three decades.”

“And how did they compare?”

“Perfectly,” Cade said with a smile of triumph. “That’s why I’m here.” He arranged the letters in front of him. “The writer is not Byron. I believe it’s Harness himself. These would be the first extant letters of Byron’s homosexual lover.”

Andrew leaned forward eagerly. “How do you know?”

“Three factors. The chronology; the intimacy and mutual knowledge; and the tone. Which begins quite lovey-dovey, then nosedives into jealous obsession.” Dr. Cade drew out a pair of reading glasses and squinted at the pages, leaning over them—favoring his good eye, like a bird examining a worm—and chose a leaf. “To Byron. Summer, 1808.
The tears which I shed in secret are the proofs of my sorrow. I was and am yours. I give up all here & beyond the grave for you.
Beyond the grave,” he repeated.

Andrew found himself glancing at Persephone. Her face seemed ashen in the dim light.

Dr. Cade peeled off his reading glasses. “Harness was to die a year later. He must have known already he had tuberculosis. And he would have known his odds of survival were poor. In those days, consumptives were prescribed fresh air. Trips to Spain, or sea voyages. But you had to have money. Harness had just left Trinity, in penury, to become a clerk in London. He could afford no such luxury. And there’s our fourth theme in these letters.”

“What’s that?” asked Andrew.

“Death,” declared Dr. Cade. “Step by step, a desperate young man dying. Here’s one addressed to Albemarle Street, in March. Winter must have been getting to him.