by Justin Evans
“The police won’t get involved. This will seem like an internal school matter to them—if Sir Alan were even to call them, which I doubt.”
“You’re awfully rational for someone who just got sacked.”
Fawkes smiled thinly. “I saw it coming.”
“I never called my parents,” Andrew said. “What if Sir Alan calls them first?”
Fawkes shook his head. “He will assume I called them long ago. Which I never did.” Dr. Kahn shot him a questioning look. Fawkes tried to explain. “After our visit to the hospital, Andrew vanished, off to Cambridge—thanks to you, Judy. It didn’t seem like the moment.”
“Should I call them now?” offered Andrew. “It’s just lunchtime there.”
Fawkes chewed a nail. “No,” he said. “We need twenty-four hours. If you get sick, we’ll call them.”
“Reassuring,” said Dr. Kahn. “And what will we accomplish in twenty-four hours?”
“Andrew will complete the research about who Harness really murdered. Father Peter will bless the Lot. We’ll get rid of John Harness. That can be done in twenty-four hours, surely?” At that Fawkes stood; it was his turn to pace the small, carpeted living room. “But for some reason I have a nagging feeling. Like I’ve misplaced something.”
“What were you saying, just before Sir Alan came?” asked Dr. Kahn. “You were holding a piece of paper.” She began shuffling through Andrew’s printouts, which were splayed across the table.
“Something about the victim being both a girl and a boy,” offered Andrew.
“Thank you, yes!” Fawkes cried. “Yes, yes.” He threw himself back onto the sofa and joined Dr. Kahn in picking through the white printer paper. He scanned through the pages, muttering—no, no—then continued this operation one-handed as he shook a cigarette out of the pack and into his mouth. Then: “Got it,” he said, slapping the page down on the table. “Covent Garden!”
“That’s what you said before,” Andrew noted.
Fawkes lit the cigarette, never taking his eyes from the page. “September 1808. Continues debauchery in London. Dinner at Mrs. Moroney’s brothel in Covent Garden. God bless Reggie Cade. This is it. This is it!”
“Would you mind explaining?” Dr. Kahn asked, suppressing exasperation.
Fawkes flopped back into the cushions. “After leaving Cambridge, Byron went into one of his more unsavory periods. Maybe he was heartbroken about being forced to split with Harness. Maybe he was just being twenty, bored, and rich. Or both. He lolled around Cheapside. He hung out with professional boxers, lowlifes. He borrowed money anywhere he could—Jews, his landlady—to keep himself and his entourage drunk all the time. One night . . . in Covent Garden”—Fawkes picked up the page from Andrew’s pile—“he held a little party. Four friends. Seven hookers. I always remember that. It’s an elegant ratio.” Fawkes grinned. “Anyway, at this party, he met a whore. He really, really liked this whore. So, being Byron, he bought her.”
“Like a slave?” asked Dr. Kahn.
“More or less. Byron relieved her of her obligations to her madam. The madam, I suppose, was Mrs. Moroney,” he said, eyeing the sheet in his hand. “The girl’s name was Mary. Mary Cameron. Does that ring a bell, Andrew?”
He shook his head.
“Byron wrote a poem about her, ‘To Mary’—I told you about it; it was excluded from Byron’s first collection for being ‘too warm.’ And smile to think how oft were done, What prudes declare a sin to act is.”
Andrew nodded in vague recollection. “But what does this have to do with Harness?”
“Not for the last time, Byron really fell for this tart. They lived together; cohabiting like modern lovers. Which really meant shagging her all day long. Sorry, Judy. He wrote some very dirty letters about it, and some quite tender poetry, too: all about breasts and watching her as she slept, lyrical stuff about golden hair.”
“But Harness never said anything about a whore, or even a girlfriend,” protested Andrew.
“That would make sense,” Fawkes nodded.
Dr. Kahn made a face. “Why does that make sense?”
“Byron’s snobby Cambridge friends were scandalized by the relationship with Mary and tried to hush it up. They’d come to the flat and be received by this gutter wench as if she were, you know, Lady Byron. Byron wanted to marry her. Across class lines. Unthinkable at the time. His friends told him he was insane. So if Byron couldn’t make her a legitimate spouse or consort, he had to think of another way to keep her around. Byron took her to friends’ houses, to Brighton . . .”
“The Brighton trip was in Harness’s letters,” broke in Andrew.
“. . . while dressing Mary as a boy. They pretended she was his cousin. There he was, taking tea in country drawing rooms, with this streetwalker in drag, speaking in an atrocious Cockney. And poor Mary always got the setup wrong; she kept referring to Byron as her brother. Her bruvva. There are letters about it. Pure farce. It’s hard to dislike Byron when you hear stories like that.”
“Wait,” said Andrew. “You’re saying the rival was a female prostitute dressed as a boy . . . not a boyfriend. Harness got it wrong.”
Fawkes threw up his hands. “Harness made a mistake!”
“What happened to Mary?” asked Dr. Kahn.
“She drops out of sight. Most biographers assume Byron threw her back in the gutter. Got bored, the way he usually did.”
“Could she be the one Harness killed?”
Fawkes thought about this. “I can’t see why not.”
“It would explain the cross-dressing victim,” mused Dr. Kahn.
“Yeah, but the dead girl was here, at Harrow. For Speech Day,” protested Andrew. “Would Byron really bring a hooker to Harrow?”
“He took her everywhere else.”
“It’s rather touching, if he did,” said Dr. Kahn. “Taking a lover to your old school. It’s a sentimental gesture.”
“He wanted to marry her,” Fawkes reminded them.
“Yeah. But instead,” said Andrew, “Byron comes back from getting drunk with his friends at Speech Day, and he finds her dead in the inn.”
They contemplated this grim prospect.
“How do you know all this, Piers?” asked Dr. Kahn after a moment.
“Mary was one of my nominees to be Byron’s great love, for the play. I have a folder on her, back in my study.”
“But she’s not in the play at all,” Andrew pointed out.
Fawkes smiled ruefully. “Harness is not the only one to underestimate Mary Cameron.”
“Sexism, pure and simple,” snorted Dr. Kahn.
“But you shouldn’t take my word for it,” said Fawkes. “This is just . . . background. Historical-literary anecdote. Andrew is the one who saw her. Right, Andrew? What do you think? Could it be her?”
Reluctantly, Andrew conjured up the picture of the struggle he had witnessed; the circling, scratching fight for life and death.
Oo ’er you?
She had a delicate, pointed nose; a mouth shaped like a bird in flight. Her cheeks had grown blotched red in the wrestling match; her eyes had blazed with fear. Yet there was a canniness there, a familiarity with the fight for survival. And in the moment she began to lose that fight, there had been a disbelief, that her survival skills, long honed and effective until now, had failed her.
Then, the corpse. The breasts revealed so peremptorily. So disrespectfully. They were small, young. Andrew shivered. He hovered uncertainly over Mary Cameron’s tangled, despoiled body, her secret unraveled with her hair. He peered; he was not able to help; he was merely a voyeur. He pulled away.
“It was her,” he said. “Although it’s a stretch to call her hair golden.”
Fawkes smiled sadly. “Poetic license.”
THEY HAD A plan. Fawkes would return to the Lot to retrieve his folder on Mary Cameron. Andrew would stay at Dr. Kahn’s and begin writing his essay immediately.
“Do I even need to write the essay?” he said. “I feel like we kno
w everything now.”
“If the departed spirit of a murderer shows up to Essay Club, I think you’ll want to have your ideas clearly organized,” Dr. Kahn advised primly.
“And how are we going to make sure Harness attends Essay Club?” Fawkes asked.
“The ghost seems to have no trouble locating our young friend,” Dr. Kahn replied.
“What about tonight? Can we be sure Andrew’s safe from Harness, here?”
They both looked at Andrew.
“Seems like Harness has withdrawn, for a while anyway,” Andrew said.
“If he’s clever,” said Fawkes, “he’s in retreat, preparing for battle.”
“He’s clever,” confirmed Dr. Kahn, grimly.
“And your plan for rousting the others—the living members of Essay Club?”
“I’ll send an email. Emergency session.”
Fawkes scoffed. “The first ever emergency essay.”
“I’m the advisor. I declare when an emergency session is needed.”
Andrew remained anxious. “Do you think it will be enough?”
“I’ll mark the email high priority,” Dr. Kahn replied drily.
“I mean for Harness.”
They exchanged glances.
“For Persephone’s sake, it had better be,” said Fawkes. “And where the hell is Father Peter?” He checked his mobile. “Still no calls. No messages. I’ve been texting him every hour, practically.”
FAWKES STEPPED OUTSIDE, leapt over the shallow stoop, and zipped up his jacket; only then did he raise his eyes to notice what had happened since they had last opened Dr. Kahn’s front door. Her quiet street—a few cottages huddled into a leafy nook in Metroland—had been brushed white. Silence padded the air. Fog. It streamed over the housetops in wisps and tendrils, and punched across the lane in cloudheads like big fists. The streetlights were muffled; the sounds of traffic seemed faraway, directionless, under its cloaking. The prospect of venturing into it seemed, suddenly, to be madness.
Something primitive seized Fawkes. Turn around. Go back inside and have tea. He stood for a moment contemplating this. Then shook himself. What would he say? That he had changed his mind, because of the weather? No, it was absurd. He began his journey, but with a slower and more cautious stride.
At the next turn, he cheered somewhat. There were more houses on Roxborough Hill: porch lights, bedrooms, flickering blue television screens. He strode up the hill with purpose. But soon the houses looked unfamiliar. Doubt pushed its way into his mind. Was this really the right road? Had he veered off somewhere? And if he could lose himself so quickly, in a place he knew so well—could this fog be here by design? Had John Harness brought it? All the wetness and moisture of the past months. Harness—if it was Harness; the fact that you’re even assuming it could be Harness shows how much you’re panicking; stop it—it seemed, had turned all of Harrow-on-the-Hill into one of his own spongy, diseased lungs. Had wrought upon them all the dampness and disease, the claustrophobia and terror of his own death by tuberculosis. One reads about diseases of the past, Fawkes reflected, but rarely thinks about how they get at you; what the end would really be like, with your own oxygen cut off, with your own blood dribbling out of your mouth. His eyes twitched about the road, hyperalert. Could Harness be here now? Was he using this fog to hide? Andrew had made a comment about Roddy and Rhys seeing something, feeling something there in the room with them, when Roddy sickened. Had it been Harness, frigid, centuries-old? As much as he wanted to help Andrew, Fawkes did not want to see such a thing. Not firsthand. The fog carried a chill into his clothes. It wrapped around his neck, causing him to shiver. He zipped his jacket to the top and sped on.
At last Fawkes reached a familiar turning. He was not lost. This was the High Street, thank goodness. Yet his mind did not turn to sunny thoughts. The street lights and upper windows here, too, took on moist halos—muted, as if seen through a scrim. His morbid turn of mind persisted. This was the way a dead person sees our world, Fawkes imagined, and he immediately thought of Persephone. He had put on a brave face for Andrew; but now, alone, his fears came at him. Could she really be so sick? Sir Alan seemed at the verge of grief. She might be expiring in a hospital room, even at this moment. Was she dying alone? Dread of the end: it came at him with white fingers. He rushed, started to jog. He passed through the Lot gates. He was almost home.
A figure came at him in the drive. Dark, heavy, swift, under the gloom of the plane tree.
“Oh my God!” Fawkes reared back, raising a hand protectively.
“Piers? Is that you?” came a tenor voice.
Fawkes controlled himself. He had been an ass, panicking like that. “Who’s there? You should be inside,” he snapped, thinking it was a Sixth Former.
“It’s Father Peter,” said the shadow, stepping closer. Fawkes made out the priest’s wire-frame glasses, his skinny neck, and the clerical collar under a raincoat buttoned tight against the fog and chill. “I’ve come straight here from the train station.”
“Where have you been? I’ve been calling,” Fawkes said, more testily than he intended.
Father Peter’s eyes went wide. “Have you?” he said. He fumbled in his pocket and fished out a gleaming new mobile phone. Its screen lit the fog around them a bluish white. “My wife bought me this.” Father Peter squinted at the screen unhappily. “I haven’t learned to use it yet.” He gave one of the icons a poke, as if this might bring the machine into submission.
“Come in,” Fawkes said with relief, putting a hand on the priest’s shoulder. “I am very glad it’s you.”
24
All-Nighter
SIR ALAN VINE stood at the doorway of the hospital room. And for a moment, he turned his attention away from his daughter.
He looked at his wife.
His guts melted in gratitude. Thank God he would not have to bear this alone. Formidable: her spine, erect as always, even there in a battered hospital armchair; her gold jewelry shining, as if she were a Byzantine noblewoman, against skin toasted by mornings swimming with her friends on Ydra or one of the islands near Athens in the last warm months of the year; her profile, classically Greek, with that high bridge; her hair, only speckled with grey (while his was thinned to vanishing); and of course, wearing a knee-length skirt and perfectly pressed sweater, even here, so that she managed to bring order and floral scents to the gloom and chaos of the hospital wing. He wanted to rush across the room to her; to embrace her, kiss her full on the mouth; and then weep with her. But he knew what would happen if he did that. She would treat him like a salesman ringing the doorbell: unwelcome, impertinent. Resentments would squeeze between them and push them apart like they were the wrong end of two magnets.
Alan had always desired her. Married her for her exoticism, her style. How could he have known that Greek women of her generation were so goddamned chaste; lived like continual thirteen-year-olds, with their clucking girlfriends, their family gatherings; thrived on tea and shopping; and treated husbands like boys on a playground—occasionally entertaining interlopers. But the Vines were never the kind to pursue counseling. He almost chuckled at the idea of his wife on the Couch. She didn’t have the Electra complex. She was Electra. Tall, busty, prone to outbursts. Very little of self-examination among these Greeks, he observed snidely. The two of them had merely pulled apart, and away, over time. Now, when they met, they sniped like old enemies.
“You’re supposed to be wearing a mask,” he reminded her from the doorway, through his own mask.
Lady Alcina Fidias Vine turned to him defiantly. “I’m not wearing a mask.” Her accent had grown thicker after a few months in Greece, as it always did. “These doctors don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Sir Alan could only admire her. The way she cut through the puffery of authority. But he had a role to play here. The rational male responsible for making sense of it all.
“No? So what’s the matter with her, then?”
“I don’t know,” Alcina rep
lied, unhappily.
Sir Alan lifted a chair and carried it across the room to sit next to his wife.
“Be careful,” she scolded.
They sat next to each other, aligned toward their daughter, watching.
“She won’t drink or eat,” Alcina said.
Now Alan sat close enough to Persephone that he could not ignore the degradation that had occurred in her, just in the past few hours. His daughter’s eyes were closed. Her skin had gone putty-white. Her mouth hung open, like that of a fish in a dirty tank, dumbly hoping more sustaining air would find its way in. Her chest heaved, slowly; her limbs and head remained still as her frame’s energy ebbed away to nothing.
“The oxygen tubes,” said Sir Alan, standing. “Weren’t they feeding her oxygen before?” He went to Persephone’s bedside and began to untangle the tubes from around a thin tank that had been propped there.
The door swung open and Dr. Minos entered, with shaved head and blazing eyes.
“What are you doing?” Dr. Minos demanded.
“Look at her,” Sir Alan blustered, embarrassed to be caught tampering with hospital equipment. “She’s struggling for breath. They had her on oxygen before.”
“Oxygen won’t help.”
“She has fever,” barked Lady Vine. “Those antibiotics you’re giving her are not working.”
Dr. Minos eyed her coolly. “We’re not using antibiotics; we’re using antimycobacterial medications.”
“Hang on,” Sir Alan said. “Why won’t oxygen help? Aren’t the drugs working?”
Dr. Minos pulled Persephone’s chart from the slot at the bed’s footboard. He scanned it. The couple waited in silence. He replaced the chart. He turned to them and spoke in a clear, emphatic manner that left no doubt what he was really saying.
“Your daughter’s case is very advanced.”
Alcina asked some questions and received short, firm replies. And eventually the doctor left. The pair sat in despondent silence. Sir Alan suppressed the desire to touch his girl, feel her pulse, feel for breath, embrace her so that he could somehow pump his own healthy blood into her veins. But he could only stand by, helpless. He found himself counting her breaths, unconsciously measuring them to make sure the time between them remained the same, not longer; and forcing himself to imagine she was breathing more briskly, even when she was not.