“You getting off ’ere, mate?”
The bus had stopped.
Thomas got out into the aisle, but he gave the driver a blank look. He could stay on, wait till the bus took him somewhere he could get a train back to London and take the first plane back to the States.
“Come on,” said the driver. “You’re ’olding up the line.”
He sounded like someone doing Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, but what might have been comic and quaint sounded brusque, hostile.
Thomas nodded, dragging his luggage with his left hand as he clambered down and out, moving, he knew, too slowly for the driver’s satisfaction. With a pneumatic hiss, the door closed behind him and the bus rumbled away. The driver threw him a dark look as it passed and Thomas thought of the phrase fish out of water with its overtones not of being out of place, but of drowning in the air that everyone else breathed.
If he wasn’t able to make some sense of this visit soon, he would go home, before he found himself flapping around on the sidewalk—what the Brits called the pavement—gasping for breath.
CHAPTER 26
Thomas checked in to the Castle Lodge hotel, which sat right at the access road to Kenilworth’s most famous landmark. The hotel was a large brick house, perhaps once a grange or gatehouse for the castle itself, though he guessed it was only a couple of hundred years old. He had a sports bag crammed with clothes, a few toiletries, and a couple of books and was unpacked in under two minutes.
There was a rack of brochures and flyers for local attractions in the lobby. Thomas took a few that had area maps on them and wandered outside. It was overcast, a moist gray day that muted the greens of the clustered trees. He strolled down the road toward the castle, trying to put his finger on what made the English countryside so clearly different from the States. The fields were small and irregular, a million miles from the cornfields of the Midwest, hedged and fenced in ways they had probably been for centuries, edged with knots of unrecognizable trees and spotted with magpies and crows. There was no one around.
The parking lot was deserted, except for an English Heritage van and a utilitarian bicycle chained to a wooden perimeter fence. Thomas rotated several of the maps on the brochures until he had a sense of the land around the castle, bought his ticket and a guidebook in a shop stuffed with post-cards and plastic knights in armor, and entered the site via a broad path and a narrow bridge. There was a stream beneath, though a glance at the guidebook suggested that it might once have been a good deal grander. Indeed, much of the land around the castle—now low-lying fields scattered with desultory cows—had once been under water, so that the building on the hill had been a fortified island.
Thomas looked up from the guidebook and wandered in, between a pair of ruined round towers, above which the castle proper rose, a romantic straggle of broken walls with empty windows and ragged towers, all in the same warm russet and pink sandstone. It had been built in spurts over several hundred years beginning in the early twelfth century, besieged in the course of obscure medieval wars, and finally deliberately ruined during the English civil war by parliamentarian forces who feared it might prove a royalist stronghold. Compared to the Tower of London, or the castle down the road in Warwick, both meticulously preserved, this was the remnant of a forgotten past, now mysterious and heavy with atmosphere.
It was also a past saturated with Shakespeare. Thomas sat on the graffiti-carved stone foundation of some collapsed doorway, trying to orient himself, and the words leaped off the page, chiming with echoes of things he had once known. King John had once owned and developed the castle, as had Edward I and Edward II, who was forced to abdicate on this very spot before being gruesomely murdered elsewhere in a way immortalized by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. The core of the castle’s remains was loaded with Shakespearean significance. Much of the major building had been done by John of Gaunt, duke of the house of Lancaster and the somber voice of impending collapse in Shakespeare’s Richard II. Geoffrey Chaucer may have read aloud from his Canterbury Tales by the fireplace in the great hall . . .
He came from a city where anything over a century and a half was virtually prehistoric. No wonder he felt out of place.
This very house, said the book, was part of the land and property for which Henry Bollingbroke—Gaunt’s son—had returned from exile in France in the final year of the fourteenth century. On his return, Bollingbroke became Henry IV, the first Lancastrian king and the subject of Shakespeare’s most remarkable history plays. In them Henry’s son, the young prince Hal, rioted in an Eastcheap tavern with Falstaff before beginning his studied redemption by defeating Hotspur and finally being crowned King Henry V, whom Shakespeare called—ironically or not, Thomas was never completely sure—the mirror of all Christian kings. A hundred yards or so to Thomas’s left, Henry had received the insulting “ton of treasure”—tennis balls—sent to him by the French dauphin as better fitting his youth than the French crown he sought after.
Thomas marveled. He had always assumed the story was Shakespeare’s invention. It was astounding that it had actually happened, and on this very spot. The insult had—somewhat conveniently—fueled Henry’s march into France and his decisive and improbable victories, first at Harfleur—“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more . . .”—and then, still more improbably, at Agincourt: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .”
Thomas stared at the empty sandstone ruin, and he felt the weight of it all like a piece of his own past.
The best-preserved part of the castle had been built by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and Elizabeth’s most prominent favorite in the early part of her reign. Indeed, there were whispers that she might marry him, except that the strange death of his wife—she apparently fell down the stairs and broke her neck—raised such scandalous speculation that the politically savvy queen backed away from the possibility. Dudley entertained her here three times, and the festivities surrounding one of those visits may well have been witnessed by the boy Shakespeare in 1575. There was a good deal of pageantry, much of it cleverly but obviously aimed at persuading the queen to marry and settle down with the house’s owner, and some of it seemed to stretch the royal amusement in the direction of irritation. She never returned to Kenilworth and, of course, never married.
But A Midsummer Night’s Dream was sometimes thought to capture a memory of those showy entertainments in Oberon’s reminiscence of Cupid firing his bow at a “fair vestal thronèd by the West.” The arrow missed the “imperial votress” and fell on a flower that, when crushed on the eyes of a sleeper, makes them fall in love with whatever they next behold . . .
You should bring Kumi here, he thought.
She would like the age and the stillness of the place. She would like it the way he liked it and they would wander about in what those nineteenth-century authors called a “companionable silence.” That was, perhaps, when they were happiest: not that they didn’t like to talk, to debate, to spar, even. But there were times when they just clicked, and were content to be together, sharing not the same thoughts exactly but related thoughts, ideas, and feelings linked by analogy and bound by the constant awareness of each other. They might be reading separately by the fire, or bottling his inconsistent home brew, or preparing pasta with anchovy pesto while they listened to Fresh Air on the radio. They would move around each other easily, doing their own things, but somehow acting like a single organism, and from time to time they would catch each other’s eye and smile, knowing. That was the best. That was how things had once been and—in the last twelve months, after years of chill silences and raging shouting matches—they had started to find those moments, those smiles, again. He imagined them together again in his kitchen, but he couldn’t shake the memory of Daniella Blackstone’s dead face against the window.
Thomas drifted slowly through the ruins, dwarfed by the associations of the place, reveling in it, disturbed only by the jackdaws that started squabbling up from the higher perches
. He found his way to the western edge of the castle, where he could look out over the countryside. There, over the fields that had once been the submerged mere where Henry V had built a “pleasance,” or summer house and garden, was a single building. It was nothing so large or ancient as any part of the castle, but it had a quiet Victorian dignity of its own and it was easily recognizable from the tabloid photograph he had seen. It was the house of the late Daniella Blackstone.
Thomas traced the walls down to where scaffolding braced a spot where what may have been a square tower or guardhouse had crumbled to almost nothing. He squeezed through, tripped down the embankment to the footpath that skirted the perimeter wall, and followed it to an unmarked road that pointed west toward the house. As he walked, he kept looking back, drawn to the ruins behind him as if he had been there once long before and had left something of himself behind.
Daniella had died at his house, he thought. Now he was visiting hers. Maybe, just maybe, he would leave with a piece of the puzzle.
CHAPTER 27
The house was sprawling and impressive. It had probably been a farm of sorts, but it had been gentrified and expanded, about a hundred years ago. The roof was steeply pitched and there was a kind of square turret in the middle. While he waited for someone to answer the doorbell, he considered the dark blue Jaguar with its yellow license plate that was parked on the gravel forecourt. Probably Daniella’s.
The door was snatched open and a man appeared.
“Hi,” said Thomas. “I’m Thomas Knight.”
The man in the doorway—a servant of some kind? Or a lawyer?—waited for more and, when he didn’t get it, said, “I’m sorry?” He spoke in clipped tones, his mouth barely moving, his eyes resting on the sling Thomas was still wearing.
“Thomas Knight. The journalist. . . .”
The door started to close.
“Not a newspaper journalist,” Thomas inserted hurriedly. “I’m here for the story I’m doing on Miss Blackstone for the fanzine Thrills.”
The threshold guardian paused, then shook his head.
“Her agent didn’t tell you I was coming,” said Thomas, as if just realizing the problem.
“I’m afraid not. I’m the steward of Miss Blackstone’s estate for now. I’m afraid I can’t let journalists in while the house is being inventoried.”
“And this is probably a bad time,” said Thomas. “It must be difficult for you.”
The door, which had started to inch shut again, held. The man considered for a second and then returned his gaze to Thomas. He was perhaps fifty and balding. He wore a dark suit that made him look a little like a mourner at some nineteenth-century funeral, and though his eyes were a cloudy blue-gray, they were hard and skeptical.
“I did have an arrangement with her agent,” Thomas pressed. “Actually it’s part of a contractual obligation. Would you like to call to confirm it? I can wait.”
“What was it that you were hoping to do?” said the steward, his jaw moving only the merest fraction as he spoke, as if he were practicing to be a ventriloquist.
“Just take a look around the place. You know, a bit of color. I wasn’t even going to take pictures,” he said. “Miss Blackstone was a favorite of our readers and she did a couple of interviews with us. I could come back, but I have to be back in London tomorrow and back in the States by the weekend.”
“How long do you need?” said the steward, checking his watch.
“An hour ought to do it,” said Thomas. “Maybe less.”
“I’ll need to come round with you, and I really don’t have the time . . .”
“I’ll be fine by myself,” said Thomas. “Privacy would be great. I’d probably—you know—absorb more: the feel of the place, you know?”
“No doubt,” said the steward. He had no intention of doing any such thing. “I can give you fifteen minutes,” he said, stepping aside. “Let’s get it over.”
Thomas went inside. The hall was large and ornate, but gloomy. It smelled of wood polish.
“Miss Blackstone’s living quarters comprise the living room, sitting room, dining room, and library downstairs and all the rooms upstairs. Please don’t touch anything.”
“Naturally,” said Thomas.
Thomas had no handle on the man. He could have been a mere functionary, though why he wouldn’t relax that persona after the death of his mistress, Thomas couldn’t say. Perhaps he was privately grief stricken and dealt with it in this formal, businesslike fashion. The British weren’t exactly renowned for their shows of passion. Perhaps he had been her lover and stood to inherit the whole place . . .
“Where would you like to begin?” said the steward.
Thomas looked around, and almost at once, a phone rang in another room. The steward shot him a look.
“Wait here, please,” he said, and stalked off in the direction of the sound.
Thomas waited till he was out of sight and then moved down the hall as quickly as he could without making noise.
He began in the library. It seemed like the logical place, though he thought it unlikely that he’d find Love’s Labour’s Won shelved under S for Shakespeare. What he did find was a room with a single armchair, an end table, and floor-to-ceiling shelves. There was only one small window, which looked out of the back of the house over a field where cows grazed, and the room was dim. The chair looked worn and comfortable, and the oriental rug on which it sat was rubbed threadbare at its foot. Someone had spent a lot of time in here in this one spot, and—given the lack of furniture—had done so alone. A single reading lamp hovered over the back of the chair. Thomas switched it on, but even in daylight the room felt gloomy, and the lamp illuminated only the chair itself.
The bookcases would have been grand if they had been lined with leather-bound volumes of purpose and antiquity, but they were stuffed with beaten-up paperbacks of all shape and color. The only hardcovers he could see looked like her own, pushed off into a corner below the window where they sat, apparently unhandled. Thomas drew a couple out and flipped through them. The room was absolutely silent.
Blackstone and Church books were an odd hybrid combining the British equivalent of the police procedural mystery with the ghosts and vampires of horror. Stylistically they were flowery and overblown, full of purple prose and Dickensian grandiloquence but smart and atmospheric. Thomas selected The Blood Rose and thumbed through it. He remembered a scene in which the intrepid inspector had been cornered in a misty churchyard by a killer whose mortality was by no means assured. It had kept him up late into the night, and though he had smiled at it for much of the next day, the spectral murderess had stalked his dreams. He found the section of the book now and felt the hairs on his neck bristle, so that for a moment he forgot that the steward could return at any moment.
The rest of the books were in the same genre, or variants of it, most more firmly grounded on one side or other of the supernatural divide: P. D. James and Ruth Rendell over here, Stephen King and Ray Bradbury there. This, apparently, was where Daniella kept up with the competition. There was no Shakespeare here at all.
Thomas checked the hall, but there was no sign of the steward.
The other rooms downstairs were even less instructive. They were austere and a little fussy in a Victorian way: lots of dark oak and lace, a few family portraits in oil, only one of which was twentieth century. It hung over the stone fireplace in the sitting room and depicted a young man, blond, with what Thomas thought of as an Errol Flynn mustache. He was in some kind of khaki military uniform with brass buttons and cradled a flat peaked cap with a badge in one hand. A large pistol in a flapped leather holster was slung across his chest. He looked like an officer, though Thomas didn’t know enough about such things to be sure, and it was only the apparent age of the painting and the stiffness of the pose that made him think it was First World War, not Second. The man himself looked cocky, self-assured, but whether it had been painted before, during, or after his military service, Thomas had no way of knowing.
He doubled back toward the kitchen and could hear the steward making occasional and inaudible remarks into the phone. Thomas tried the first door he saw. It opened into a stone staircase that descended into what was now a cellar with racks of wine and champagne—all bearing the Saint Evremond name. Thomas suspected the place had once been a coal house. The floor had been swept clean, but there was a persistent black sparkle in the walls where the coal had been heaped. He looked up and saw a hatch at one end of the room where light showed through the cracks.
Nothing here.
He retraced his steps to the main lobby, moving quietly, listening, then climbed a slow half-spiral staircase, trailing his hand along a heavy oaken handrail polished slick with age and use till it was barely recognizable as wood. He wandered from room to room, finding more of the nineteenth-century fussiness, though here there were more concessions to modern comforts. The bed was an antique four-poster, but the mattress was new. The desk in the study was modern and solid and housed a state-of-the-art computer, while the antique writing desk in the corner looked like a museum piece and had seen about as much use. There were a few books, all modern, but—again—no Shakespeare of any vintage.
At one end of the landing a second flight of stairs doubled back and went up to a third level: the turret he had seen from the front. He went up, but the door at the top was heavy and locked shut. He felt above the lintel and found an old-fashioned key.
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