The White Devil

by Justin Evans

  “Yet at the same time,” Fawkes continued, “if I truly believed that something supernatural, and harmful, were afoot, and I did nothing,” he said, measuring his words, “then I would be responsible for whatever happened.” The two men regarded each other. “Am I making myself clear?”

  “Very much so.” Father Peter was pensive. “If I were to say a prayer in the Lot,” he said, “just as a precaution—as a way of providing support for the boys in a troubling time—that might do the trick?”

  “That’s precisely what we need,” Fawkes said.

  Father Peter beamed, clear at last.

  He had always liked Father Peter. Youthful, thin, a runner; cheerful and social, but never one of those simpering clerics who sought to climb the status ladder. He would think better of the priesthood and their spells if all this worked out.

  “One more thing,” said Fawkes.

  “Oh dear. Go ahead.”

  “Rather tricky. Ah,” Fawkes mumbled. “Can you wait a bit?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Can you wait? Say, a week or two?”

  “It will take me at least that long to prepare. This is what I would call specialist work. The Church of England does do it, but not without some inquiry. Rather like getting an estimate from a contractor.” Father Peter smiled, trying to be disarming. “To make sure you’re getting the right solution to the right problem. Do you feel the ghost is dangerous, then?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Then I’ll look into it immediately.”

  “A week or two would be marvelous,” said Fawkes. “I’m grateful for your discretion.”

  “Not at all,” said Father Peter.

  He saw his guest out. As he opened the door onto the High Street, he paused. The two of them stood facing each other with the chilly breeze blowing between them.

  “If you think it’s dangerous,” the priest said, with sudden clarity, “why do you want me to wait a week or two? That seems rather a contradiction.”

  “I want to study it first,” said Fawkes. The priest’s eyes widened. “I think the ghost has to do with Lord Byron. If you get rid of it too quickly, I won’t get any original material for my play.”

  “Surely you’re joking.”

  Fawkes said nothing. Father Peter regarded him coldly.

  “Your priorities are all wrong, Piers.”

  “I know.” The poet shrank into his jacket, against the breeze. “I’m used to it.”

  DR. KAHN TOOK the bundle from him suspiciously, as though Andrew had just handed her a paper bag full of pound notes.

  “I wrapped the letters, so the oil from my fingers wouldn’t get on them,” he said.

  “Well done,” she said evenly. “And you found these where?”

  “In that cistern. Underwater, in a tin box.”

  “May I see the box?”

  He produced it from his backpack. “Is this a special box for letters or something?” he asked.

  Dr. Kahn’s office was a brightly lit rectangular box set behind the elongated eastern windows of the library, with a close-up view of the stones of the chapel. A cross between an administrator’s command center, a researcher’s lair, and a storeroom, the office was lined from floor to ceiling with hanging shelves, each neatly sectioned and labeled, carrying books, files, or folders. She presided from a desk—a wooden monstrosity, some six feet wide, sipping tea from a gnarled homemade clay mug painted with the words AWESOME AUNTY.

  “Letters?” She turned over the tin box in her hands, smiling. “It’s for biscuits. Lucky for us. It’s airtight for the pastries to keep. It can hardly have been the preferred solution. Your letter-writer must have been in a hurry. Or perhaps I should say, your letter receiver.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You tell me,” she commanded, in that iron-firm way of hers.

  She snipped open the twine around the letters with a pair of scissors. Andrew winced. He had been treating every part of the discovered letters gingerly, including the twine.

  “Because . . . the person receiving the letters would be the one to have them, and therefore the one to store them.”

  “Just so,” she murmured, and reached into her drawer for a small box. From this she retrieved two wads of white material and pulled them over her hands—latex gloves. She cleared a wide patch on her desk.

  “Why does the writing go like that?” he asked. “Crossways? And in bunched-up lines?”

  “Writing paper in the nineteenth century was harder to come by than today. Letter writers would write horizontally, as we do; then when they ran out of paper, they would write vertically, over top.” She traced the writing going left to right with her finger, then the lines of script going from the bottom of the page to the top. “This writer had a lot to say, but little paper; and seems to have added a second set of horizontal lines. I’ve never seen this before.” She frowned. “Maddening to read.”

  “Is there a signature?”

  She flipped. “No.”

  “Are they from Byron?”

  “Unlikely. Barons tend not to skimp on stationery, especially when they’re also poets.”

  “Are they from Harness?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Why else would he lead me to that room?” Andrew asked.

  “I do not like John Harness,” grunted Dr. Kahn. “And I do not trust him.”

  “I know. But it’s a clue.”

  “A clue to a murder, from a murderer,” she said. “Why would he show us? Is he trying to reveal himself? Trying to come clean?”

  “Maybe he wants us to solve it.”

  “If John Harness committed the murder, it is unlikely that he requires it to be solved,” she observed tartly. Andrew shrugged. “Two cups of blood at least caught in my hand,” she read from the parchment through her reading glasses. “I will box these up and send them to a friend. Miss Lena Rasmussen. A friend of my niece’s; an archivist. An archivist because of me, in fact.”

  “You make it look cool.”

  Dr. Kahn made a face. “She’s at the Wren Library, a library for rare manuscripts of great distinction, at Trinity College, Cambridge. Byron’s alma mater. They occasionally take a break from worshipping Sir Isaac Newton, long enough to pay attention to Byron. I think she’ll know what to make of this.”

  “Thanks,” said Andrew, as enthusiastically as he could muster. He felt anxiety allowing these letters to go to someone else. “Will she . . . will she be able to get to them in time?”

  “If I ask her, Lena will do it right away.”

  “How long will it take to get them to her?”

  “I will send them overnight. All right, Andrew?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “Now, I have something for you,” she said. She nodded to a stack of battered and age-worn hardcovers at the corner of her desk. “They are the best sources I can find on Byron. I was going to allow you to take them to the Lot, as a special favor—since we do not lend.” Andrew smiled at the imperious plural Dr. Kahn employed whenever the subject was the Vaughan Library. “But upon reflection I would like you to read them here.”

  Andrew slumped. “Why? You don’t trust me?”

  She peered at him. “The atmosphere of the Vaughan seems to be healthier than that of the Lot, just now,” she said. “I would rather keep you with me. And away from him.”

  ANDREW RETURNED TO the Vaughan every evening he did not have a rehearsal. On the first night, he found that Dr. Kahn had cleared a carrel for him in the corner of her voluminous office, with his books stacked neatly on its shelf. On the second night she handed him a large, white I HEART LONDON mug, steaming and practically sizzling with sugar, along with a bundle of biscuits in a napkin. You look pale, Dr. Kahn explained. I cannot cook, but I can brew. On the third night, there were more books waiting for him, and he had the office to himself (Dr. Kahn was attending an event in London). He flipped pages but was distracted by his cell phone vibrating incessantly.

  Ha
ve permissn frm housemaster aka Dad to go London Sat.

  Andrew texted back.

  I have rehearsal! Can we go at 1?

  A long pause. Andrew examined the yellowed gluey pages. He suspected Persephone did not like his last message and was either intentionally stringing him along or was giving up on the idea of their getaway entirely. He became panicky.

  I can try and get out of it

  he offered, at last.

  Which of your girlfiends, she typed—he wondered if the typo was intentional—is it with?

  Not sure. Rebecca?

  The phone then went silent for twenty minutes. Andrew strained to concentrate.

  Maybe you’ll want to go to London with her

  No no! I’ve been waiting . . .

  To what?

  He grabbed the volume of Byron poetry on the shelf above his head and flipped to find a page he’d marked.

  . . . for your nameless grace which waves in every raven tress

  he typed.

  He waited a few seconds.

  That’s all right then

  came the response.

  He smiled.

  Then another:

  Quote Byron to me and I will definitely fuck you.

  Whoa. That was out there. He started to laugh. But he quickly stopped, as something caught his attention. It was as if Dr. Kahn’s office were slowly filling with an invisible gas, starting from the floor and rising quickly, until it reached the ceiling. A presence, thick and repressive, stole the thrill from Andrew’s throat. Those subtle, tiny noises that arise from a human being when they stand nearby—the rustle of clothing, the creak of a floorboard—came whispering through the thickened atmosphere. And yet it made no move to reveal itself. Just throbbed with a desire to watch. Predatory. Silent. Then, bit by bit, came the breathing. It started softly, as if being hidden by an arm over the mouth, or a handkerchief. But it came. And finally it emerged fully into Andrew’s hearing. As if, once observed, the watcher stopped bothering to hide itself.

  Andrew gripped the phone in his hand until his knuckles went white. He whirled around with a gasp. The phone flew from his hand and hit the floor with a clatter.

  An empty office stared back at him. Dr. Kahn’s papers throbbed under the fluorescent lights as if they had been supercharged with a light of their own. Then they subsided, that sickly, oppressive gas draining from the room like it was being sucked away through a straw.

  Andrew cautiously picked up the phone. Four texts pulsed there, waiting for him.

  U still there?

  I frightened u off didn’t i.

  Oh damn it. I was only joking.

  Thanks thanks awfully

  He thumbed clumsily into the phone.

  I’m here, he explained. Someone came in, that’s all.

  THAT THURSDAY, HE found Dr. Kahn waiting for him behind her desk. Her eyes were small, round, and black-brown, peering at him over her reading glasses as though they could bore through steel plate.

  “I’ve brought you the best background books in the collection,” she declared, not waiting for him to settle in. “Now tell me what you’ve made of them.”

  Andrew felt a nervous tremor. He placed his hand on one of the books—the shaggy blue one, Byron at Harrow, by Patrick Burke, published in 1908—as if it might transmit the knowledge by electric circuit.

  Byron and Harness were two years apart at Harrow, Andrew began.

  Byron cut an angry and exotic figure at Harrow. His clubfoot disfigured him; the metal contraption doctors gave him to correct it embarrassed him; and his eagerness to prove himself through fistfights and show-offy displays in class drew attention to him. He had a chip on his shoulder because, despite his title and his wealth, Byron had come into his inheritance unexpectedly, at age ten, and had had a troubled childhood. His father was a scoundrel, philanderer, and drunk—he had earned the nickname Mad Jack—and had abandoned Byron and his mother not long after marrying her for her money. Mrs. Gordon, his mother, was obese and—at least by her son’s account—something of a maniac, given to tantrums and harangues. So while being George Gordon, Baron Byron made Byron one of the loftier students at Harrow from a social perspective, his clanging foot and uncertain upbringing gave him a lot to prove.

  “Not bad, as far as it goes,” said Dr. Kahn. “Nothing new, of course. Go on.”

  Andrew proceeded.

  Byron was also something of a sexual prodigy. His physical beauty was widely commented upon. There were hints that he had been sexually molested by one of their housemaids when he was as young as eleven, and that an aristocratic male neighbor, a Lord Grey, had fallen in love with him at thirteen.

  “Mostly conjecture,” noted Dr. Kahn sourly. “Though not necessarily false.”

  Harness, on the other hand, was more difficult to describe. The facts that survive came through in Byron’s own letters about him. At Harrow, Harness was small, sickly, pale, a member of the local poor but with a beautiful singing voice and a love of plays and playacting. Harness first came to Byron’s notice because, like Byron, he had a limp. (A shelf had fallen on him, the accident taking place in his childhood home in Northolt.) Byron felt compelled by sympathy, and, according to the letters, declared If any fellow bully you, tell me, and I’ll thrash him if I can. That was the beginning. The injury healed. They took up with one another. The details are sketchy here . . . Andrew hesitated.

  “Yes?” prompted Dr. Kahn.

  “Am I allowed to fill in with my own speculation?” Andrew asked nervously.

  Her mouth tugged, fighting a smile. “That’s rather the idea, Andrew.”

  Andrew pressed on: The Lot was overcrowded and run-down. The two boys were in love. Harness would be constantly abused for being a town lout. So they went to the only place in the house—the cistern room—where they would rehearse, or . . .

  “Yes?” Dr. Kahn prompted again.

  “You know. Fool around.”

  “What all teenagers need. A place to experiment sexually.”

  “Right. And that’s why Harness goes back there. As a ghost. It’s their secret place.”

  Dr. Kahn became stern again: “But there were many schoolboys who had schoolboy affairs. Not all, surely, are coming back to haunt the Hill. We’d never make it down the street for the crowd. What made this one special?”

  Andrew was stumped. “I’m not sure.”

  “I have a rule,” she said. “It’s silly. But it helps me a great deal in my research. Would you like to hear it?” He said he would. “First find the heart. Then find the start.” She blinked at him. “Don’t confine yourself to chronological order. Find the most powerful part of their story and build out from there. Where did they feel the greatest love?”

  “In the cistern room.”

  “But that was only at Harrow.”

  Silence.

  “For goodness’ sake, Andrew, you mean you’ve only been reading the Harrow books? Did you see the marks I made in Byron’s letters?”

  “Those are from later,” he protested. “Like, 1807.”

  “You’re not paying attention,” she said testily. And to Andrew’s surprise, she crossed the room, leaned over him, and began spreading open the volumes and pounding their spines flat like an overzealous baker.

  “Easy on the books!” he said, withdrawing to safety.

  “These are still in print,” she declared. “Mere information.”

  Andrew, she sniffed, was confining himself too much to the Harrow period. The answer, she said, waited for them in Cambridge (Trin. Coll. Cam., Andrew recalled from the Harrow Record), where Byron had matriculated, and where Harness had followed.

  “There,” she said, stabbing a page with her index finger. Andrew read:

  TO ELISABETH PIGOTT, 1806 [a childhood friend who would not judge, Dr. Kahn editorialized]

  He certainly is perhaps more attached to me than even I am in return. During the whole of my residence at Cambridge, Harness and I have met every day, summer and winter, without
passing one tiresome moment, and separate each time with increasing reluctance. I hope you will one day see us together. He is the only being I esteem, though I like many. He has, just in this week past, presented me with a ring, a carnelian, the expense of which he bore himself completely. He offered it fearfully, as if I might refuse it. Far from doing so, I said my only dread was that I might lose so precious a token.

  “What does that tell you?” she demanded.

  “He esteems Harness.”

  “Oh, bollocks,” exploded Dr. Kahn. “Harness gave him a ring! A second-rate stone, but it cost him more than he could afford, which was nothing, and he nearly fainted with anxiety doing it. Now, when do men give people rings, Andrew?”

  “When they want to get married,” he answered meekly.

  She flipped pages furiously, this time in the poetry volume, and read aloud: “There is a Voice whose tones inspire such softened feelings in my breast, I would not hear a Seraph Choir. . . . Harness was an actor, remember? With a beautiful singing voice? That’s how he earned his place at Harrow, and at Cambridge: in the choir. All right, let’s keep going.” She turned the page. “Here we are. There are two Hearts whose movements thrill, in unison so closely sweet, that Pulse to Pulse responsive still they Both must heave, or cease to beat. Pulse to pulse is flesh to flesh, don’t you agree? This is not unconsummated. This is your partner, someone with whom you’re wrapped in the blanket of juvenile love.”

  There are two Souls, whose equal flow

  In gentle stream so calmly run,

  That when they part—they part?—ah no!

  They cannot part—those Souls are One.

  Dr. Kahn regarded the page. “They cannot part,” she muttered. “See the date?” She flipped the book and held it for him to see.

  “1807,” he said quietly.

  “Yes. Boring old 1807.”

  She pulled up a chair beside Andrew, then crossed her arms over the books and spoke to him, earnestly, energetically, as she might to a colleague or a peer. Byron, she said, began dreaming of a life with Harness. One that mimicked heterosexual marriage. And he was utterly deluded. How deluded, she promised to reveal shortly. “But first,” she said, “let us examine the fantasy he spun of their life together.” She placed another letter to Pigott in front of Andrew.