What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

“Now Hamstead Marshall Park had been given to Elizabeth by her brother Edward the Sixth in 1550. When her Catholic sister Mary was on the throne, Elizabeth was kept under house arrest at Hatfield House and at Bisham Abbey—close to Hamstead Marshall—where Thomas Hoby, the great translator, lived. This was in the mid-1550s. The story goes that one night, an elderly midwife was woken from her bed in London, put in a coach, and driven out to Hamstead Marshall. There she was instructed by a mysterious lord to minister to a young gentlewoman who was in labor. A fire was built in the hearth, and the midwife was supplied with the tools of her trade and commanded to ensure that nothing befell the mother. You must recall, of course, how many women died in childbirth in those days, often because of some hemorrhage that those attending could not stop. But in this case, the young woman came through her ordeal satisfactorily and the midwife was pleased to deliver a healthy baby girl.”

  Mrs. Covington then leaned in, and her eyes widened.

  “It was at this point that the midwife was ordered by the nameless lord to hurl the infant into the fire!”

  Thomas listened, his eyes on the old woman’s.

  “Did she?” he asked.

  “She had no choice. Weeping, she allowed the child to be burned before her eyes. When it was done, she was given a goblet of wine to steady her nerves, and sent back to London, charged to say nothing to anyone. A few days later, she was dead—poisoned, of course—but not before she had whispered to others that the young mother had been none other than the Princess Elizabeth.”

  She held Thomas’s eyes, then sat back again and sipped her tea, gratified by his response.

  “But you think it’s not true?” he said, breaking the tension.

  “There are problems with the dates,” she said, clinical again. “If Elizabeth got pregnant before she ascended the throne, the father was most likely High Admiral Sir Thomas Seymour, uncle to the boy king Edward. This was rumored extensively, and there are documents to suggest that the matter was seriously investigated and that there was at the very least some truth to the stories. But Seymour had fallen from grace and was executed in 1549. So if the story is true, it must have taken place before Elizabeth was given the house, before she was placed under guard at her sister’s orders. It’s not out of the question, because the house had belonged to her step-mother, Catherine Parr, so she could have stayed there, but I fear we will never know. Still,” she added, leaning forward again and grinning so broadly that her entire face was gleefully altered, “it’s a scrumptious story, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would,” said Thomas, thoughtful now. “I would indeed.”

  Thomas walked her back to the institute and they hesitated outside.

  “Thank you for tea,” said Mrs. Covington.

  “My pleasure,” said Thomas.

  “I’m afraid I may have misjudged you, Mr. Knight,” she said.

  “That happens.” He smiled.

  Mrs. Covington turned her key in the lock and pushed the door open. Two men were talking just inside the doorway.

  “Five o’ clock tomorrow, Professor,” said one of them. “Don’t keep me waiting.”

  The other man turned on his heel, head down, and moving fast. Mrs. Covington adjusted awkwardly and Thomas reached up to steady her, but even so they were nearly sent sprawling down the steps as the man pushed past.

  He did not apologize or pause to look back, but they had already seen his ashen face as he barreled through, and even if they hadn’t, Thomas would have recognized the incongruous pairing of tweed suit and laptop case.

  “Perhaps Professor Dagenhart senses I was talking about him,” she remarked ruefully, watching his back.

  “Maybe he just heard a paper by an Oxfordian,” Thomas replied.

  “Excuse me,” said the other man as he also tried to get by.

  Thomas and Mrs. Covington stepped aside, and the man passed between them, turning to give Thomas a level, unreadable look. It was Daniella Blackstone’s steward.

  CHAPTER 71

  As soon as Mrs. Covington left, Thomas returned his gaze to where the steward had been. He was still watching him walk calmly away when someone beside him forced a cough. Thomas turned to find Julia’s scowling graduate student loitering beside him, looking nervous.

  “You have a moment?” said Chad.

  Thomas considered him. He seemed abashed, surly as ever, but chastened somehow.

  “What’s on your mind?” said Thomas.

  “I just wanted to clear up what I said before.”

  “About Julia respecting your work too much?”

  He winced at the words.

  “Yeah. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “So you said.”

  “I just didn’t want you to think . . .”

  “What?”

  “That, I don’t know . . .”

  “Chad, when we first met at the Drake in Chicago, you were polishing a paper you were going to deliver the following day.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Julia—Professor McBride . . .”

  “I call her Julia too.”

  “Right. Of course. So Julia was overseeing your revisions. What form did those revisions take?”

  “Just polishing,” he said, cagey. “It was too long. Stuff had to come out.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Some stuff on early modern servant clothing. Livery and stuff.”

  “Why that specifically?”

  He hesitated.

  “It just didn’t fit.”

  “You’d been researching that subject with her? Under her guidance, I mean?”

  “Yeah,” he said, switching tack and coloring a little. “But that was really her work. I was just a kind of assistant. I shouldn’t have been putting that stuff in my own paper.”

  “Right. I see.”

  “So,” he said. “Let’s just forget it, all right?”

  “All right.”

  The graduate student was sloping off when Thomas stopped him.

  “Chad?”

  “What?”

  “Does Angela know about this?”

  Chad’s face clouded and he took a step up to Thomas.

  “Yes, but I don’t want you to talk about it with her.”

  “Why not?”

  “She and I are . . . it’s complicated. We’re close, all right? Angela really respects Julia’s work, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Angela is just a bit protective of me sometimes. Okay? That’s all.”

  “Okay,” said Thomas.

  “Okay.”

  Chad smiled, but there was still something hunted in his eyes, and Thomas could tell that things were far from okay.

  CHAPTER 72

  Thomas walked down to the river again to think, but he couldn’t come to any hard conclusions about Chad or about why Daniella Blackstone’s steward was meeting with Randall Dagenhart. He had ideas about both, but they were vague and based on little more than instinct. His thoughts got no clearer as he walked, and he found the town distracting.

  He couldn’t decide what he thought of Stratford. It was quaint, and its famous son guaranteed a cultural and intellectual life disproportionate to a town of its size, but there were times when it felt a bit like Epcot. If you sat by the Gower Memorial, you could watch the tourists, bused in on luxury coaches for their allotted half day, snapping digital pictures of thatched cottages and swans under the willows. Few of them made it inside the theaters, and though they processed around the Birthplace and Holy Trinity, he wondered if they were secretly wishing they were in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At least then the carefully preserved artifacts, the history enshrined therein, would mean something, would connect to things they knew, things that mattered to their lives.

  Snob, he thought.

  But that wasn’t what he meant. He wasn’t saying Shakespeare was beyond them, or was necessarily better than the Beatles or XTC. Popular art probably had more in common with what Shakespeare had meant in his own time
than all this carefully preserved history with its high-culture gloss. But it was odd, these people filing dutifully through, instinctively bowing their heads to an idea of literature and theater that was probably quite alien to their own experience. He imagined that Stratford was, for them, a bit like being in church, where only the fanatics don’t shift between contented faith and doubtful unease, where your energy goes not into communing with the divine but into standing up at the right time, remembering the right words and not yelling at the idiotic sermon.

  But then you don’t really know that, do you? You don’t know what goes on in the heads of the other worshippers, and you don’t know what connection to Shakespeare these hordes of camera-wielding tourists have. They might be teachers like you, spending their carefully monitored savings for this pilgrimage. They might be community theater types, or—for that matter—lawyers, laborers, or lobbyists who love literature, or theater. They might carry Shakespeare around in their heads, dimly remembered from high school years ago when their class had put on some scenes from Julius Caesar, led by a National Guardsman . . .

  Okay, Thomas thought. Enough.

  He turned to shake off the idea and found himself looking into the face of the old man in the felt suit.

  “Good morrow, cousin,” said the old man, smiling.

  “Is the day so young?” said Thomas, reflexively.

  “But new struck nine,” said the old man.

  Thomas smiled appreciatively, but he couldn’t remember any more.

  “I don’t know how you remember all those lines,” he said. “The tourists must love it.”

  “To be or not to be, that is the question,” said the old man, nodding thoughtfully. “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind . . .”

  “Do you have to memorize them deliberately, or did you just, you know, absorb them over the years?” Thomas said.

  “And my poor Fool is hanged,” said the old man, and now the smile was gone. “No, no, no, life. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?”

  “Yes,” said Thomas, wanting to be gone. “King Lear. Did you see the show at . . . ?”

  “I am dying, Egypt, dying. Only I here importune death awhile, until of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips.”

  Thomas said nothing. The old man barely seemed to see him. He was staring through him, his eyes full of tears, and Thomas knew that what he had taken for a routine to please the tourists was in fact a kind of madness.

  “I’m going to go now,” he said.

  “So out went the candle and we were left darkling.”

  “Okay,” Thomas said, backing away. “Sorry. Bye.”

  “Here’s the smell of blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”

  Thomas fled.

  He walked straight up Waterside to the Warwick Road, moving briskly, trying to get as far from the old man, the tourists, and the theaters as possible. When he reached St. Gregory’s Road, he stopped on the corner and stood quite still, his eyes closed.

  He needed to go home. He would like to solve it all, of course, but mostly he would like to go home and find Kumi waiting for him there. He no longer cared if he ever found the stupid play, and the idea that it might find its way into the crazy ramblings of the old man in the memorial gardens lodged like a stone in his gut.

  CHAPTER 73

  Back at his hotel, Thomas found a phone message waiting for him. “Have a spare ticket for Twelfth Night tonight. Join me? Taylor.”

  They met a half hour before curtain outside the Courtyard Theatre, which was the RSC’s main space while the Memorial Theatre was being rebuilt. It was a nondescript warehouse of a building on the outside but lavish enough within, with a deep and broad thrust stage that pushed the action right into the audience.

  It was a beautiful production, full of melancholy yearning and frustrated desire. Viola got her Orsino in the end, and Olivia got Sebastian, but both seemed a little uncertain as to how things would go from there. Antonio was abandoned, Sir Andrew rejected, and Malvolio left to fume about future vengeances. Sir Toby married Maria resignedly, and she him out of a desperate impulse to improve her social station. In doing so she cast off Feste, the fool, who lamented the way of the world in his final song, a bleak and haunting rendition of “The rain it raineth every day.”

  The audience leaped to their feet at the end, the applause shaking the Courtyard’s rafters, and Thomas stood with them.

  “You okay, man?” said Taylor.

  They were in the Dirty Duck again, this time huddled in a quiet corner.

  Thomas nodded and reached for his pint.

  “It was a good show,” said Taylor. “Happy and sad at the same time. Poignant.” He was thinking aloud, organizing his ideas by speaking them. “I wonder what the conference crowd will make of it. If they come in here, Petersohn and company. I mean, can we get out of here? If he starts talking Lacan and Derrida, I swear I’ll hit him. You ever think these people make lousy audiences? That they are so invested in seeing their reading of the play up there on stage that they don’t understand theater as well as regular people? Lacan and Derrida! God help us. You sure you’re okay?”

  “Kumi has breast cancer,” said Thomas.

  Taylor stared at him, his mouth open.

  “Kumi?”

  “Cancer,” Thomas said. It was still an effort to say the word, like he had to get it out it before it could turn, snapping at him, but Kumi said he had to say it, that the only way to get past it was to use the word like you might say table or Shakespeare . Then you weren’t afraid of it.

  “I’m sorry,” said Taylor. “Is she . . . How is she doing?”

  “Pretty good, considering. She’s had the surgery. Seemed to go okay. Next is radiation.”

  Taylor was still staring at him.

  “She was just here. I told her I’d seen you and she asked about you,” said Thomas. “Talked about Gammer Gurton’s Needle. Remember that?”

  “Ah yes,” said Taylor. “The joys of academic drama . . . You okay?”

  “Sorry,” said Thomas. “I guess that show, Twelfth Night, I mean . . . Love and death, right? That’s what Shakespeare is always about. And time. Which amounts to the same thing.”

  “Loss,” said Taylor, the word sounding like a bell in his mouth. “I think it’s about loss. Loss, and the fear of loss, which is almost as bad.”

  For a moment they sat there in silence, staring at their drinks.

  “You look like a study for a Rodin sculpture,” said a woman looming over them.

  “I’m sorry?” said Thomas, looking up.

  “The Thinker, double version,” said Katrina Barker.

  “You have a knack for catching me unawares,” said Thomas.

  “It’s my one true skill,” she said, smiling.

  “I think a lot of people in this town would think otherwise. You know Taylor Bradley? We were in graduate school together.”

  She shook his hand and nodded. Taylor looked like he was being introduced to the queen, all self-consciousness, admiration, and a little terror.

  “And where are you now, Taylor?”

  “Oh, I teach at Hattie Jacobs College in Ohio,” he said. “Small liberal arts school.”

  Barker nodded, but clearly didn’t know it.

  “You just came from the show?” she said. “You look like you did. I thought it was marvelous, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Thomas, pleased by her response. “I did. We were just saying how much we liked it.”

  “Well, liked isn’t really the word, is it?” Taylor inserted. “How much we were struck by it. I thought they executed the power dynamics of the households particularly well, didn’t you? Olivia’s house was quite the little panopticon, with Malvolio modeling the kind of authority he didn’t really have.”

  Thomas gave him a look. Taylor was trying too hard.

  “I loved those curtains,” she said. “All that rich blue swag. Marvelous.”
/>   Thomas nodded.

  “I thought they offered a commentary on logocentricism and masculinity,” said Taylor.

  Katrina Barker looked at him, trying to unpack this baffling remark, and Thomas cut in.

  “Care to join us?”

  “Thank you,” she said, sitting. “But only for a moment. I’m waiting for some friends.”

  Taylor was gazing at her, flushed.

  “I just had the most remarkable encounter,” she said. “There’s an old gentleman in Stratford, a former scholar, I believe, and something of a prodigy in his day. He suffered a stroke quite early in life and now has a kind of aphasia. He speaks solely in quotations from Shakespeare.”

  “I met him,” said Thomas, unnerved by the memory.

  “I’ve seen him around before,” she said. “Heard about him. But today was the first time I actually spoke to him. It was really rather distressing. I spent half the afternoon wandering around town to get it out of my head.”

  Thomas nodded. Suddenly she seemed quite upset.

  “It’s a terrible thing,” she said. “Like Alzheimer’s, I suppose. Loss of memory, of a sense of who you are, reduced to babbling someone else’s words like that. Really terrible. And scary. I mean, what if that happens to me? What if it’s already happened?”

  “Already happened?” said Taylor.

  He was inserting himself into the conversation to remind her he was still there, but he also looked uncomfortable, like he needed to go to the bathroom but didn’t want to leave.

  “Sometimes I feel like it has. That I know what I want to say—in my writing, I mean—but I have to say it through him: Will. For me, it’s probably not Will himself, but the words of the field we’ve built around him. I wonder about our profession sometimes. Do you feel sorry not to be in it, or do you think you escaped, before it sucked you in, force-fed you with its words?”

  “Both, I guess,” said Thomas.

  Taylor got up.

  “Excuse me a moment,” he said. As he walked away, he looked back at Thomas and mouthed, Keep her here.

  Barker seemed to sense the gesture and turned to watch him go.

  “An earnest young man,” she pronounced.