The White Devil

by Justin Evans

  10

  Sledgehammers

  FAWKES SAT UNDER an overhang on the porch, Moleskine notebook in his lap, ballpoint in hand. Raindrops slapped the iron table the former housemaster had left there (which Fawkes had bought off him, knowing he would be too lazy or preoccupied to buy his own porch furniture) and the spray dotted his notebook. The paper curdled; the ink made tiny blue pools. But Fawkes would not move. This nook was his refuge, rain be damned. No windows looked onto it. Here Fawkes could pump himself full of coffee, smoke, and scribble. Here old instincts took over, thirty years of habit. He reverted to a primitive state; heard the rhythms of all his life’s reading like the clanging of a great, shared workshop; rows of poets pounding hot stressed and unstressed syllables into forms. The second act of the play was flowing, faster than he could write. His fingers shook from excitement—not, he told himself, from the gin racking his system. He reread it. It had the music. It would need shaping; there was flab there. But that was rewriting, mere sifting. The important thing was, he had found a vein of gold.

  He snapped his notebook shut and strode to the center of the porch, and let the drops soak him, holding up his face and letting it get wet, soaking his grey sweatshirt, his mind still echoing with rhythmic thunder.

  “Sir?”

  Fawkes leapt. “Good Christ! What are you doing here? What time is it, Andrew?”

  “A couple of minutes to eight.” Andrew stood in the French doors, in bluer and tie. “Sorry. I buzzed but there was no answer.”

  “That means no one’s home!”

  “But you are home.”

  “No, I’m not!”

  “I found the name,” said Andrew, eagerly. “Of . . . you know . . .”

  “Ah,” said Fawkes, now trying to be casual, keeping his place in the center of the porch, pretending the rain didn’t bother him. “Judy helped you out? Jolly good. The mighty Kahn knows her archives, eh?”

  “Should I . . . come out there?”

  “Ah. No.” Fawkes pushed past Andrew and grabbed a towel off a chairback in the kitchen to mop himself up.

  “What were you doing?” asked Andrew.

  “I was communing with the gods.”

  “How are they?”

  “They’re back.” Fawkes led them to the living room, plumped himself onto the sofa, and lit a cigarette. “In no small part due to you, Andrew.”

  “Really?”

  “Mm. I’m beginning to understand: playwrights draw energy from their cast. Having an actual Byron . . . and you’re a very, very close copy—you know that, don’t you? Well, it’s damned inspiring.”

  Fawkes grinned. Andrew perceived that Fawkes was trying very hard to make out that he was kidding, which made him believe Fawkes was actually telling the truth.

  “Well,” Andrew said, “that’s good.”

  “So, what have you got from Lady Judith, eh? Will I need a drink to withstand the news?” Fawkes rose and went to the kitchen, where he began fondling a half-consumed blue bottle of gin like a pitcher squeezing a baseball on the mound.

  “Piers,” Andrew said, “it’s not even nine.”

  Fawkes made a face. “I was joking, of course.” It took him a long moment to peel his hand off the bottle. “What did you find?”

  Andrew checked the paper where he’d jotted his notes. “So the guy,” he said, “was the only one who was in the Lot and in a performance of The White Devil. His name is John Harness. He left school in 1807. So the play must have been performed . . .”

  Fawkes started. His hand, still near the bottle, jerked, causing it to flip and crash onto the tiled floor.

  Fawkes cursed. He dropped to one knee and began picking up the shards. There was a scramble while Andrew leapt to his feet and supplied a soiled kitchen towel to mop up the liquor.

  “Did you just say John Harness?” Fawkes exclaimed, cupping the shattered bottle-bottom, like a boozy crown. “John Harness?”

  “Yes. Do you know who he is?” Andrew replied.

  “You’re sure about this name? Judy confirmed it?” The heap of glass was flung into the garbage with a clatter.

  “Yeah, she helped me find it.”

  “Does she know about him?” Fawkes was standing over Andrew now, watching the boy clean up the rest.

  “Know . . . ?” Andrew looked up at Fawkes. He had gone a little pale. “She—she said he was a free scholar.” He rose and shook the glass from his hand into the bin. “Free scholars were poor financial aid students from the town. Picked on . . .”

  “Picked on, yes. But this one was defended by an older boy, with a famously rotten temper. If any fellow bully you tell me and I’ll thrash him if I can.”

  Andrew hesitated. “She didn’t tell me that. But she did say Harness might have known Byron. They overlapped.”

  “Overlapped?” Fawkes scoffed. Then he stared out the kitchen window into the emerging white-grey morning.

  “Uh . . . Mr. Fawkes? Piers?”

  Fawkes felt the gooseflesh crawling from his lower spine and over his back like an army of furry spiders. “Whether this proves the existence of your ghost or not, I can’t say, Andrew,” he stammered. “But it is awfully strange.” Fawkes resumed staring out the window.

  “Is something the matter?” Andrew asked.

  Fawkes stirred. “Follow me.” He led Andrew back to the living room. He started flinging open desk drawers, not finding what he wanted, and slamming them shut with a curse. “Come on.”

  Andrew trailed Fawkes up his narrow staircase. He was not especially eager to see Fawkes’s private living area, given the state of the rooms he showed to guests. The upper regions of the house were dim and stuffy. A towel lay on the floor of the open bathroom. The sink had a hairy look to it, and an uncapped toothpaste tube lay on the porcelain like a wounded soldier left behind. They passed the bedroom (bed unmade; a pair of dingy underpants visible on the bedspread) and charged into Fawkes’s study, a boxy room with shutter blinds, largely unfurnished and seemingly unused. In the corner lay a pile of some dozen manila folders of varying thicknesses. Fawkes squatted over these a moment. Then he stood, holding a thin one out to Andrew. He watched the boy’s expression carefully.

  “What’s that?” Andrew asked.

  “That’s the John Harness file,” Fawkes declared. Andrew’s eyes widened. “I made files on each of Byron’s major lovers.”

  “His lovers?” Andrew demanded, puzzled, taking the folder. It contained photocopies of poems.

  “Not all of them. Only the biggies. He had hundreds.” Fawkes gazed at the heap of folders on the floor and sighed. “It’s what you do when you’re blocked. Research. Facts are the long way round to Truth.”

  “So why do you have a file on this John Harness? They were school friends, not lovers.”

  “Ah you naïve Americans,” said Fawkes. “John Harness was Byron’s lover. At Harrow,” he amended, in response to Andrew’s shocked expression. “It was common in those days. Little love affairs among boys. Harness and Byron ‘took up together.’ That was the phrase at the time. What attracted Byron was the fact that Harness was also lame. Childhood accident. Harness’s lameness healed eventually. But in the early years, Byron was his defender. The older, tougher schoolboy protecting the younger. Yet another way Byron is hard to pin down.

  “The bodyguard relationship turned romantic. They wrote passionate, jealous notes to each other. Again, rather commonplace. What was uncommon—why we care—is that it grew into something else. They both went to Cambridge. And it turned into love. Real love. Scholars ignored it for a century because the gay part made it taboo. By that time most evidence had washed away.” Fawkes tapped the thin folder. “But Harness is unmistakably still there, in the poems and letters. A face staring from the page.”

  Andrew held the folder as if it were made of uranium. “Harness is the white-haired boy,” he said.

  “If John Harness is your ghost,” Fawkes went on, “you are in a very strange position.”

  Andrew d
idn’t like the use of the word position. He looked up at Fawkes suspiciously, as if Fawkes knew the substance of that encounter with the boy by the cistern.

  “What do you mean?” Andrew asked.

  “Well . . . he’s Harness. You’re Byron.”

  “Yeah, in the play . . . wait, sorry?”

  “Persephone saw the resemblance immediately.” Fawkes leaned against the wall, crossing his arms, eyeing Andrew. “Don’t you see?”

  “No,” Andrew said stubbornly.

  “Maybe this ghost thinks you’re Byron.” Fawkes’s lip curled in a fascinated half smile.

  “Thinks I’m his boyfriend?” Andrew said, willfully incredulous.

  Fawkes started to pace the tiny office room. “Maybe that’s why he came back. He saw you. Or felt you. Or whatever. Here. He wanted to contact you. Do you think he could tell you things? About Byron? God, this is a weird, but fascinating, research opportunity!” Fawkes laughed with excitement. “We could hold a séance to summon John Harness. ‘When Byron was writing Manfred, did he, you know, say anything about it?’ ”

  “I’m not summoning him,” Andrew replied, morosely. “I just saw him kill Theo.”

  Fawkes frowned. “Right. I must say, this doesn’t help me over to your view of Theo’s death. John Harness, a murderer? The poor, gay, local boy with the crippled foot? Not my notion of a cold-blooded killer.”

  “Why, what was Harness like?” Andrew asked.

  “Harness was always treated as something of a victim. You know: Byron toyed with him for a time and then discarded him.” Fawkes shrugged. “No record of murder anyway. Though admittedly his life is poorly documented.”

  “I thought you believed me,” Andrew said morosely.

  “I believe you saw something,” Fawkes said. “But just because you saw John Harness kill Theo . . . doesn’t mean he actually killed Theo. The coroner made his judgment. Sarcoidosis, or what have you. Do you want to call the police? Or maybe the head man? Tell them, ‘Theo Ryder was killed by a ghost! Name: John Harness. Residence: The Beyond. No, that’s not in Middlesex.’ ”

  Andrew rolled his eyes. “We can’t say that.”

  “Rather my point,” Fawkes replied.

  Andrew brooded. As he did so, he felt a kind of heaviness come over him; a sickliness; a vivid perception of unhappiness, self-doubt, anger; so tangible, it infiltrated his senses as if it were a terrible smell; the mental equivalent of a carrion odor. He felt both sleepy and anxious. The air in the room had gone hot and stale, creating the desire to nap in its unhealthy fog. Andrew looked at Fawkes. Fawkes was staring back at him, his eyes wide.

  “Do you feel something?” Andrew said. Speaking required effort. His words seemed to die in the thick atmosphere.

  Fawkes nodded. “We need to leave this room,” he declared with equal effort.

  Andrew dropped the Harness folder. He stooped to replace the copies that had fallen out. They had names like The Cornelian and To Thyrza. Andrew was mesmerized by the titles. He distractedly began to read them.

  “Come on.” Fawkes tugged Andrew’s elbow. Andrew bundled the photocopies to his chest and allowed himself to be dragged out of the room and into the narrow corridor. They breathed somewhat easier here. Fawkes clattered down the staircase. He was at the bottom before he turned and realized Andrew remained at the top. Dreamy again, distracted.

  “Andrew!” he shouted.

  Andrew came to his senses and followed Fawkes. Together they stood at the bottom of the stairs and gazed up at the landing from which they had just escaped.

  “That was very strange,” stated Fawkes.

  They paused, as if waiting for something to follow them. But nothing did.

  “I . . . did not like that,” the housemaster ventured. “Is that what you’ve been experiencing?”

  Andrew nodded. “Yeah.”

  “You’re braver than I gave you credit for. Let’s go and sit down.”

  They did, in the living room. Both on the sofa, just staring while their senses recovered.

  “I don’t think I’ll be using that room for a while.” Fawkes made a face.

  Andrew didn’t respond. They shared another moment of baleful gazing into the middle distance. Unexpectedly, Fawkes started chanting, or reciting, in a rich baritone; a voice that knew poetry, knew how to draw out the vowels, make them into music; a voice at odds with the sarcastic leer of his ordinary conversation:

  “Lest man know not

  That he on dry land loveliest liveth,

  List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,

  Weathered the winter.”

  “That Byron?” asked Andrew after a pause.

  “Pound,” corrected Fawkes.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Ah, children, who want to know what poems mean. They don’t mean. They express. They are songs. When you sympathize, you make them mean something, up here.” He tapped his head. “That is a poem called The Seafarer. It is about going off to sea; back in the days before navigation, before radios. When that meant being completely, irrevocably, on your own.”

  Andrew absorbed this. “We’re on our own?”

  “On this . . . yes.” Fawkes smiled thinly. “Welcome, Andrew Taylor, to the ice-cold sea.”

  FAWKES CLOSED THE door behind Andrew a few minutes later. His first thoughts were of the room upstairs. The cloud seemed to have cleared from his apartment. Should he go back to the room, and check? No, thanks! came the quick response. Fawkes smoked and paced his living room, sending furtive glances to his staircase. How would he get back to his bedroom, at night, alone? And then, with a wave of pity and fear, a realization came to him: That feeling, that sensation, was not resident in his study. It was attached to the boy. To the American.

  Fawkes flopped onto his sofa, thinking. God, what a nasty notion. How could he protect the poor kid?

  But as he sat there, and smoked a second cigarette, and then another, the direction of his thoughts changed. He stubbed out his third cigarette. He hesitated. Then picked up his cordless and dialed a London number. He spoke to an assistant. He was forced to wait several minutes. Then, cheerful:

  “Tomasina! Piers again. Remember my play about . . . ? Right. There’s an angle I stupidly left out. I was being vain, as usual, and hoping that the poetry alone would be enough. But what if . . . what if there’s a scholarly angle, too? Well, I’m finding new material on one of Byron’s lovers—a gay lover—that’s just emerging. So we wrap the publication of the play in sort of a literary discovery.”

  Tomasina wanted to know whether the story was documented, and whether it was really new.

  “Absolutely new,” he answered. “Working on the documentation—but I’m here at the source, at Harrow School, where Byron went of course. And the story, well . . . it appears that one of Byron’s little pals at Harrow, who was also his lover, was a murderer. Never before known.”

  Tomasina spoke enthusiastically, talking herself through how she would promote it. So we would treat this as a scholarly event and a literary event. Make it an off-the-book-page story. . . .

  Fawkes let her talk, grinning to himself. He walked to the kitchen holding the cordless phone, and while she prattled and pitched, he made himself a drink.

  ANCIENT HISTORY FELT like a straitjacket. Boudicca, berms, javelin warfare, and the literary style of Tacitus . . . Sir Alan Vine sneered his way through a lesson, bathing the class in the acid of his nasal voice. Andrew sat at his desk in the Leaf Schools—so named because the small brick building nestled into the arboreal northern slope of the Hill. He daydreamed and gazed at the trees. Their leaves seemed to have passed poisoned into fall, sickened by all the rain and gone a soggy, withery brown. He was anxiously waiting for the moment when Sir Alan would look at his watch and dismiss them. At last the bell rang. Andrew leapt. He had another Vine on his mind.

  The hall filled with boys. Hats, jackets, chatter. Fifty teenage boys crammed into the small foyer, crosscurrents of classes arriving and leaving.<
br />
  Fifty boys, fifty bluers—and one white shirt. Andrew’s heart pulsed. He forced his way through.

  Oi.

  In a hurry?

  He reached her and grabbed her elbow.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” he hissed.

  “Andrew.” Persephone’s voice rose, a warning. “Do you know Seb?”

  Andrew saw the tall Sixth Former from rehearsal, the one with red hair. Up close he was even more handsome—square chin, athletic build, and the coolly affronted expression of someone who’s just had a cookie taken out of his hand. Rebecca-the-short-skirted-girl’s words came back to him. She seems to know a lot of boys.

  Andrew frowned. “Hi.”

  “The famous Andrew Taylor,” Seb drawled.

  “Would you excuse us?” Andrew said.

  “Of course. See you Thursday, Miss Persephone,” Seb said with a mocking bow, raising a hand to his hat. Persephone laughed. Her glorious eyes crinkled and shone. Seb shot a sharp look at Andrew. I see her two times a week for English A-Levels, the look said. Don’t think I’m done here. Andrew watched him stride off. He was fucking jaunty.

  “New friend?” he said sarcastically.

  “Seb is the cleverest boy in my class. We were discussing ‘The Pardoner’s Tale.’ ”

  “He seemed sorry to go.”

  “Are you my chaperone now?” she returned. “Let’s see. I have boys in my lessons for English. And . . . Art! And . . . Biology! My God! There are boys everywhere! Andrew, it’s not safe!”

  He fumed. They walked side by side in silence for a few paces. Then he charged ahead. “It was important,” he snapped. “But never mind.”

  Andrew, she called behind him.

  HE LAY ON his bed. Staring at the wallpaper.

  In the back of his mind, a stampede of snorting buffalo trampled a landscape, ripped up turf and kicked stones. They thundered in a brutal, endless charge.

  In the front of his mind, he was aware of the silent room.

  I fucking hate this place.

  Andrew heard footsteps approach. He prepared a cutting remark to Roddy. Something especially heartless. But after his usual, perfunctory knock-and-enter, Roddy spoke in a different tone. “Oi man, stand up, you have a girl visiting.”