Foolscap

by Michael Malone

  With its cobbled eaves and its trim fence, the reddish sandstone Victorian railway station (despite the absence of a tearoom, and the presence of a vending machine dispensing wretched-looking coffee in Styrofoam cups) looked so precisely like all the British village stations Theo had ever seen in movies that he half expected to come upon the decent adulterers from Brief Encounter hovering there in a tortured embrace, or Mrs. Miniver at the gate accepting her rose from the kindly stationmaster, or David Niven on the platform jollying the Immortal Battalion off to war. He saw no one who resembled any of them. Nor did he see anyone who resembled Dame Winifred Throckmorton, although when he’d called from London to tell her his arrival time, he had understood her to say she would meet the train. In fact, there was no one in the small waiting area except the ticket collector (who was absorbed in a wrestling match on the telly, and didn’t look at all as if he might cultivate prize-winning roses as a sideline), and there was no one on the platform except two pimply teenaged boys in black vinyl jackets. They were sharing a single cigarette and a bottle of something wrapped in a paper bag, and didn’t impress Theo as recruits for Military Immortality.

  Also, while Dame Winifred had volunteered to arrange accommodations for him in a nearby inn, she hadn’t mentioned which one. So, after a twenty-minute wait and an unsuccessful attempt to phone her, Theo picked up his bags, turned right out of the gate, and crossed a little arched stone bridge over what he assumed was the River Urswick. It was wide but shallow, and so clear that he could see trout quivering in the ripples above the rocks. He watched them a while, then started “up the High” as instructed. The High was a very steep, narrow street of slate cobbles deep sunk in their bed. Shops, most of them gray or red stone, pressed to the edges of the curbs while second-story thatched dormers reached across to neighbors on the other side.

  When Theo reached the top, he sat down to catch his breath; despite the blessedly cooler temperature here in the west, he’d heated himself carrying the heavy luggage (he had with him everything he’d brought to England, which was considerably more than he would ever bring again, particularly all the hard-covered books). He rested beside a tall market-cross in the middle of what he took to be the town square: before him an Elizabethan church; on his left, the imposing King William Inn; on his right, the smaller Nightingale. Little streets wound away in three directions; no one of which, he now realized, Dame Winifred had specified as hers. Rather than chance a mistake, he waited until a middle-aged woman walking (or being pulled along by) an immense Great Dane dog was hauled close enough for him to ask her if she could direct him to Lark Cottage.

  Although unable to pause, the woman was able to help. “Straight ahead,” she wheezed. “Along Gate Row, at the corner, can’t miss it.” She attempted a backward point but was jerked off balance and had time only to add before trotting away, “Saw her just popping in at the station. Shan’t be long, I expect.”

  “Dame Winifred Throckmorton?”

  “Oh yes.”

  Gate Row ended in a narrow rounded street corner that curved back down the hill. On one side was a half-timbered Tudor cottage with fresh white plaster, green window trim, and gleaming black thatched eaves a foot thick, clipped neatly over the dormers. A plaque beside its door identified it as The Heights—quite accurately since one could from here glimpse the Urswick serpentining through the countryside below. Catty-cornered from The Heights ran a low wall of uneven, mossy stones, behind which grew a garden of such wild color and uncontrolled profusion that the house it fronted could be seen only at the end of its brick walk. A slatted gate was hung between two squat stone pillars, each topped by a black orb. And nailed to this gate was a sign that said Lark Cottage. Opening the gate, Theo accidentally leaned his hand against the top of one of the pillars. To his shock, the orb, which he’d assumed was iron, not only fell, but bounced away into the street. He chased after what proved to be a painted rubber ball, nervously balanced it back on the pillar, and entered the yard.

  From low silvery borders to lilacs clinging in clumps from the tops of walls, flowers grew everywhere—as if someone had randomly tossed great handfuls of seeds out the windows, mixing wild flowers, perennials, annuals, and even weeds. There seemed to be no pattern and no end to the colors: blue delphiniums and orange poppies, purple irises and gold achillea reached together for the sun. The whole place buzzed with delirious bees as Theo made his way past lavender foxglove and ruby-red peonies as high as his waist. Even on the path, little star-shaped daisies and nodding yellow pansies had pushed their way through cracks in the old bricks.

  The small lopsided cottage itself was also of dark crumbly bricks, what little of it could be spotted behind gnarled vines of roses and clematis that climbed in a tangle over the rain gutters and onto a roof of hazardous-looking ancient red tiles. On either side of a faded black front door was a bow window with leaded-glass panels, the frames of which were also painted black. The door knocker, a brass bird with folded wings, looked, as it dangled from its one remaining screw, more like a duck hanging dead in a grocer’s window than any lark for which the cottage might have been named. No one answered Theo’s knock.

  He had just returned to the gate when he heard a chinkling bell, and looked up to see a very rusted-looking bicycle whirring toward him down the cobbled lane. Behind a wire basket crammed with packages, a stout bespectacled woman wobbled on the seat. It was undoubtedly his hostess, for her outfit was as out of control as her yard. She wore a plaid tam, a green tweed skirt, a black scarf, and a brown argyle vest over a red jersey. Her hair was gray and thick and stuck out bluntly from her chin line—rather like the sharply trimmed thatch on the nearby roof.

  “Hallooo, Mr. Ryan?” she called in a high urgent way, as if she wanted Theo to catch her, and indeed she was barreling straight toward him awfully fast.

  “Yes! Miss Throckmorton?”

  She had passed him before her screeching brakes slowed her down enough to catch herself on a nearby postbox. Dismounting in a bustle of snagged hems and tangled sleeves, she headed back. “Do forgive me,” she panted in her high piping voice. “Entirely muddled. Not the five forty-two then? But you’ve found your way, I see. Have you had your tea?”

  “Not exactly, but…Dame Winifred?”

  “I’ve bought you some Devonshire clotted cream. Such a pleasure, Mr. Ryan.” Pushing the bike back to the gate, she held out her hand, the fingers a little twisted with arthritis, and gave his an intense pumping. “You look very much as I thought you would. Quite tall and goldish. Elizabethan. Don’t know how I knew.” She looked up smiling at Theo, whose eyes looked even greener in his sun-browned face; his cotton shirt was creamy white and billowing, open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up on his long tan arms. She nodded at him happily. “You should have a beard, of course.”

  Close up, Theo could see that, although very elderly, Miss Throckmorton’s skin had a crinkled glow to it, with spots of pink on either side of a sharp nose, up and down which she continually nudged her glasses. He said, “I can’t tell you how glad I am to meet you at last.” He took the bicycle from her. “Thank you very much for letting me intrude on your schedule on such short notice.”

  Behind the wire-rimmed, loose-stemmed glasses, her hazel eyes were keen. “Mr. Ryan,” she said, resting folded hands on a highwaisted stomach. “I have not so many visitors as you kindly suppose. And in my dotage, my schedule, apart from the—rather soon, I expect—necessity of expiring when called upon to do so, is entirely my own. Come in. Here, let’s just bring my bike. Watch that left pillar, the ball’s a bit of a make-do. Actually, it always puts me in mind of Sir Walter Raleigh when it flies off. Fortune’s tennis ball, you know.” She stopped midway on the brick walk. “Oh my, the red peonies. Absolutely brilliant.”

  Theo looked around him again. “I have a little perennial border at home. But this is breathtaking. How have you managed in the drought?”

  “Drought?” She looked mo
mentarily puzzled. “Ah, that’s true. It’s been quite dry.”

  “Well, you’re obviously quite a gardener, rain or not.”

  “Rubbish,” she said, stooping to yank weeds (and a few columbines) from a bed of irises. “The ladies in Barnet pay collective calls (‘not strong but by a faction,’ you know) and speak of my garden as if of a dying invalid, urging me to pruning, mulching, and in particular, thinning. I’m afraid the poor woman from whom I bought Lark Cottage can’t bear to look in when she passes by. She sowed, and I failed to reap. In any case, many of the local ladies find me insufficiently quaint to make my eccentricity palatable.” She threw the weeds over her shoulder.

  “Everyone does appear to know you. A lady with a huge Great Dane told me you’d gone to the railway station.”

  “Ah. Mildred. The Heights.” She pointed at the neat Tudor cottage across from her. “Such a snoop, but terribly impressed by my title.”

  “Yes, which do you prefer, Dame Winifred or Miss Throckmorton?”

  She snatched the heads off a few chives. “Well, Throckmorton, I should think. My family called me ‘Winnie,’ which I detested as you might imagine. My old friends call me ‘Freddie.’ ‘Dame Winifred,’ yes, yes. Very sweet of the queen, but I would have preferred a pension a bit larger than the one Spenser was given five hundred years ago.”

  “You live on fifty pounds a year?” Theo blurted this out, then apologized for his nosiness.

  “Heavens no. Joking. You Americans, quite generous in buying up my books year after year. Oh dear! Is all that luggage yours?”

  Assuming that the source of her alarm was the thought that he might be planning a visit of eighteenth-century proportions, he quickly explained that he’d “overpacked,” and that tomorrow he’d be on his way.

  “Impossible,” she told him, opening the door with a brisk prod of the bike tire. “I insist on taking you to Sherborne tomorrow. Raleigh would never forgive you if you didn’t see it. And the Abby Church. Sir Thomas Wyatt is buried there, of course, poor fellow. So foolish to chase after Anne Boleyn. I’m sure she led him on.” Miss Throckmorton paused in the doorway and raised her hands to her cheeks with a strangely romantic gentleness. “‘Noli me tangere. For Caesar’s I am, and wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’ Marvelous!” She shook her head and moved on. “But reckless. Just off to the left here. Mind the highboy. Looked so much smaller in my rooms at Oxford.”

  Theo squeezed down a small hall, stepped over a wood carton filled with scholarly journals, and followed her into a sitting room at the rear of the cottage. A glance out its rear window revealed a brick-walled backyard, more flowers, and a large wire cage on stilts with an immense (and angrily squawking) parrot in it.

  Dame Winifred continued talking as she switched on two little tassled lamps. “And then, of course, Wyatt’s harebrained son running about the countryside stirring up rebellion for Anne’s daughter. Promptly loses his head. We may thank God Elizabeth had more sense, young as she was. Such a mess in here. You remember how the Council accused her: ‘Wyatt wrote you treason.’ Back her answer comes: ‘A man may write what he will. Show me where I answered him.’ Remarkable girl.” The old woman stood, one arm half twisted out of her moth-pocked sweater, momentarily lost in contemplation of Elizabeth Tudor’s savvy.

  “Yes, may I just—”

  “Dear me. Babbling. Put those bags down anywhere. Dreadful clutter, I know. Far too many books and not nearly enough shelves. Mind the cats. Tea? Oh dear!” She suddenly darted out of the room, and after the sound of banging kitchen pipes, Theo saw her through the window scampering across her backyard with a basin of water. When she reached the large wire cage, she flung the entire contents of this basin straight at the parrot. He immediately stopped his harangue and began shaking out his wing feathers. A few more seconds and Miss Throckmorton was back in the sitting room, apologizing. “That was Orinoco. He has to be watered down,” she said, apparently in explanation, though Theo had no idea why the parrot required this service. “Now, have a seat. I’ll put on the kettle.”

  Miss Throckmorton’s furnishings resembled her wardrobe and her garden: colorful, disorderly, and desperately in need of thinning. Most in evidence were the shelves, stacks, and boxes of books and records—both of every age, genre, and condition. But there were a great many other things (some extremely nice, some merely odd, and some better sent to the dump) all crammed so tightly together that Theo formed a very stately notion of the size of the retired don’s former “rooms at Oxford.” To eat his scorched scone, he had to clear a large tabby cat, the soundtrack to Zorba the Greek, and pounds of correspondence off the chintz loveseat, slide one foot under a porcelain coal bin, and balance his tea on a tiny whatnot table whose Chippendale proportions were marred by silver duct tape wrapped around two of the legs. Miss Throckmorton had explained over the telephone her inability to “put him up” in the cottage, and she had not exaggerated. There were so many books piled on her own bed, she now confessed, that she herself was sleeping on the couch in her study. This study (under eaves too angled for him to stand upright) she showed him at his request, although it turned out that she hadn’t actually written the volumes which had so inspired him on that particular desk, nor indeed could he have seen it anyhow, so piled was it with more books and yet another large cat.

  She had three cats, all of them males with prizefighter faces, and each named for one of her famous manuscript discoveries. Tom (for Thomas Kyd), Kit (for Christopher Marlowe), and her favorite, a sleek black malevolent-looking creature named Water (Queen Elizabeth’s nickname for Walter Raleigh). Over the next hours, Raleigh himself formed a large part of Dame Winifred’s conversation, although Theo and she talked of many other subjects—their teaching and research, their agreements and disagreements with other scholars’ theories. She showed Theo where and why he’d “gone wrong” in his Shakespeare book, and listened intently to his rebuttal before dismantling it. Throughout their talk, she neither asked for nor offered any personal information at all and clearly assumed that his answer to her query, “Why are you in England?” would be a library shelf number. He didn’t disabuse her. “I came for the manuscript of a play,” he said. “A modern play.”

  “Ah, yes, you teach contemporary drama as well.” She nodded as if it were a foible of his youth. “I like very little of it. There is one. Your American Joshua Ford Rexford I think actually quite good. Of course, he has no language, but that’s hardly the man’s fault in these monosyllabic times. And I am fond of the cinema,” she added encouragingly. “Doctor Zhivago, Duel in the Sun. The big screen. Shake the superflux! Cast of thousands! Very Elizabethan. Don’t you suppose Marlowe would have relished writing the script for Spartacus?”

  As evening lingered in the slow summer sky, Dame Winifred talked of the Elizabethans as if she lived among them—and lived a racy life indeed there, brimming with lust and blood, piracy, plots, massacres, and murders. And in her talk, the great courtier Walter Raleigh took center stage, as he had taken the leading role in her intellectual life for many decades. She spoke of him with such familiarity, such a range of pride, exasperation, and sorrow that Theo realized that Raleigh had laid claim to Miss Throckmorton’s heart as well. She was, in her way, she had long been, in love with Sir Walter Raleigh. And after all, whom might she have met in her bookish girlhood or over her long Oxford years in the Bodleian Reading Room who could match all that silver and swagger? Who could there be like that dangerous black-haired sailor with the double pearl in one ear and the lilt of Devon in his endless shimmer of words? Who else like that six-foot poet, scientist, warrior, historian, botanist, the scourge of Spain, and discoverer of New Worlds? And perhaps most important of all to the old spinster was that the man had been so loving a husband to one Elizabeth Throckmorton, the lady-in-waiting for whom he gave up the favor (and the fortune) of the Virgin Queen. Fierce, loyal Bess Throckmorton, who carried her husband’s embalmed head about with her in a re
d leather bag until the day she died.

  Listening to Dame Winifred talk of Raleigh, hearing her quote from poetry he already knew by heart, hearing again the anecdotes with which he had lived for years, the young American came close to mentioning Foolscap—which he had, in fact, at that moment in his suitcase. But he didn’t. And months later, he would remember how he’d almost told her, and would think how everything would have been different if he had.

  “Are you then,” he asked, as later that evening the two of them walked back toward town together, “descended from Elizabeth Throckmorton’s family?”

  “I am.” She smiled, buttoning (in the wrong holes) a tweed jacket that did not look like the mate to her skirt. “Bustling, clever people they were, the Throckmortons, back in Tudor days. Decent men. But careful to change sides before the wind did. Unlike Raleigh, who was so sure he could change the wind itself. And so wrong.”

  “‘But stars may fall; nay, they must fall when they trouble the sphere wherein they abide.’”

  She stopped, peering up at him. “Well, now, young man, you do know your Raleghagana quite well indeed… Not much farther. Rest your arms a moment. The church over there, Early Perpendicular, of course, Norman font. The King William, coaching inn, Georgian. A bit dear, and the chops are tough. I’ve booked you into the Nightingale. Jacobean. Charles the first said to have hid here one night. Poor cowardly man, seems to have hid in half the inns in the country.”

  “Do they serve meals?”

  “Expect I’ve starved you!” She patted various pockets until pulling from one a large watch on a ribbon. “Quarter past nine. Time is so terribly inconsistent, I find, the way it hurries on or stands still. Our market-cross, early fifteenth century, Saxon site. And our sky—” Lifting her chin toward the deep blue canopy of rolling clouds still gold-tinged even now, the old woman heaved a rapturous sigh that shook through her body and toppled her plaid tam unto the cobblestones.