The Holes in the Air / Acnestis / 10V15 / 38

The Holes in the Air / Acnestis / 10v15 / 38.

_____________________________________________________________

Acnestis

Giordana Cortassa, Premature Burial

http://www.accademialigustica.it/blog/?cat=9

H

uman foie gras? I can’t believe …. No of course, I understand. Four livers is a lot. Yes, all fat men, granted … but …. No, Your Eminence … Yes Your Eminence. Extremely awkward…. But …. Quite. But it sounds like a put-up job, doesn’t Your Eminence think? A patter of bloody footprints leading straight to the Prior’s door. As if a Trappist were likely to have a taste for goose or pig pâté, let alone …. No, I absolutely …. Yes. Yes…. I’ll be on the first ’plane. At once. Yes. Good night, Your Eminence. Good night.… God.”

“Well?”

“You’re awake?”

“That’s a stupid thing to say, Felix.” She would not have dared such a remark before the summer.

“It was the Cardinal-Archbishop. Of Westminster.”

“That’s two more stupid things. A hat trick.” But now it was late autumn.

“There’s been a – well, you heard what there’s been. A mass murder. At a monastery deep in the Highlands. When the bell rang for Lauds this morning, four Trappists were found mutilated in their cells.”

“You can’t say ‘this morning’ at six. It’s still pitch black.” She never contradicted him in the ancient times before March, when she had chucked him.

“Nonetheless. The Abbot is dawdling about noticing the corpses, officially speaking. The Cardinal wants me there before the Abbot has to call the police.”

“So: am I checking flights, and then making coffee?”

“That’s what you’re doing.” He covered his head with a pillow while Abishag sat up and fiddled with her Blackberry. “God God God. I don’t want to watch the sun come out of the North Sea from a ’plane. I don’t want to come to full consciousness in Glasgow.”

“Courage, mon brave,” she murmured half-mockingly. For it was the end of November – only two days, more importantly two nights, since she had taken him back – and the affair was (as she stuffily expressed it to herself) reconstituted on different terms. “Courage.”

He sat up painfully, dropping rather than swinging his legs out of bed. On the best of days it was a sere, whimpering Felix Culpepper who emerged from sleep. Now it was still far from day; and it seemed certain to be a bad day for him.

For all his jauntiness on the ’phone, he was a wreck, and she glanced at him tenderly: “Poor fellow. Listen, the first flight to Glasgow’s not ’til ten past eight. Gets in at nine-twenty. Train to Bridge of Orchy at eleven. You’ll be with the monks in time for a very late lunch. The ones that are still alive.”

“Humph.”

“Forty minutes’ drive to Stansted – you’ll want a cab in twenty minutes. Half an hour. No great hurry.”

“Humph…. Back, then.” His back was always itchy when he woke, and one of Abishag’s jobs was to scratch it. She performed this duty this now. “Yes. Yes. Higher. To the left …. The Cardinal was odiously breezy, did y’ hear him? ‘Four of ’em ’ovis hand their cheerfuls gouged hout ’orrid with a drum.’”

“What?”

“Drum and fife, knife. Hovis bread, dead, cheerful giver, liver. Christ, the bore of having a retired pearly king as Chief Metropolitan of England and Wales. I’m told his chaplains get used to it. They translate in their heads without noticing. But it’s agony for everyone else. The brain bleeds trying to keep up with him …. Now up and down the spine.”

“What’re you supposed to do?”

“Find culprit – evidently the Prior. Add culprit to casualty list. Fake five natural deaths. Then vanish before the gavvers get in the way.”

“Gavvers?”

“The police. At a guess. ‘Keep the chuffin’ gavvers ahht of it,’ said the Cardinal. ‘And I daan’t wanna read abaht it in the bleedin’ papers neivver.’”

“It’s a lot of skulduggery to drop on one man.”

“It is,” said Culpepper, inclined to self-pity.

Abishag considered the inside of her mind. Highland rain, gulls, distilleries, Calvinists, shaggy cattle, they all flickered about; but the main image, to her surprise, was of Felix and herself merrily dashing across a moor, pursuing a mad Trappist with dripping scalpel. “Then take me.”

“This isn’t a jaunt, Abishag.”

“I don’t want a jaunt. I want to help you in your work.”

“When I return I’ll tell you all –”.

“I’m tired of being your sounding-board. I want to be your apprentice. Even poor dim Watson was taken on field-trips.”

“I don’t need an –”.

“And who’ll scratch your bare back while you’re away?”

“Is that a question?”

“No. I mean, what’ll happen to this poor itchy spot here, the bit you can’t reach yourself? Technically known as the ac –”.

“– nestis. Yes, yes.” Even in his pitiful, newly-awakened state, Culpepper was aggressive about his word-hoard. “Noble term, acnestis. It sounds like the name of a tragic heroine.”

“There ought to be a lost tragedy called Acnestis. By Euripides.”

“Seneca.”

“All right, Seneca.”

“… You make fairly good jokes, my girl. I look forward to getting back to them.”

“But meanwhile, who’ll do the necessary jokes for you? How’ll you stack your memory? How’ll you manage the smell of blood? Who’ll deal with the acnestis of your mind?”

There was a little pause. “That was a startling remark. Positively intelligent.” He stood, stretched, groaned theatrically, vanished toward the bathroom. “Make coffee.”

Abishag considered his retreating back: red wheals from her nails, vaccination scar, poignant shoulder-blades. Sighing, she slid from the sheets, got into a dressing-gown, went into the pantry, found the kettle by feel, clicked it on, sighed again at the sad noise of it working the water into a state, padded across Culpepper’s sitting room, held back a curtain, and peered out.

‘What,’ she thought, ‘a revolting hour. Utterly revolting. Not quite pitch black, but nothing, nothing to suggest this dimness leads anywhere.’ Megiddo Court gave no hint, not even of a bleak sleety November morning. Mere disaster seemed to be overtaking the smoothness of night, a more immediate facet of the disaster overtaking the year. ‘The darkness rots,’ she thought. ‘It’s cankered. Pallor shows like grubby brickwork where the stucco’s pealed. God.’

She let the curtain fall, switched on a desk-lamp, and groaned again. Normally Felix’s desk was a handsome sight: brass lamp, granite bust of Bulwer-Lytton, silk kilim. But this morning or pre-morning it too appeared disastrous. The galley-proofs of Culpepper’s Quincentenary History of St Wygefortis’ College, finished in the summer, had just arrived, and had to be returned before the end of term – four weeks off. so now his desk, sofa and floor were heaped with a clutter of photocopies which mustn’t be touched, notes on torn paper, books held open with other books, manuscripts form the college archives flung about in a way the archivist had better not see, academic journals folded in two and propped against tankards …. The proofs were why Felix was here in College, and not sunning himself in Egypt or Cuba; and why she was here, checking his references and solacing his boredom. Sharing his boredom. Halving it.

She dialled the number for taxis, and with her other hand picked up one of the galleys. There were petulant scribbles and crossings-out down every margin. Title-page. No dedication. Chapter One. Fulsome praise of the founder of St Wygefortis’, Adam Worthyal, Bishop of St Asaph. “Worthyal, although a pluralist notorious even in that age, was one of the morning stars of the English Renaissance.” Felix wrote what he liked to call a neo-Victorian style; his colleagues had ruder names. “His Latinity was Ciceronian without –”.

“Good morning,” said a voice that didn’t seem to mean it.

“So you say. Taxi, please, for Stansted Airport. From the Porter’s Lodge, St Wygefortis. In twenty minutes …. Thank you.” She hung up, and carefully replaced the sheet in its proper random place on the chaotic desk. ‘Prose like that’ll do no harm. The book’s going to be chocker with pretty colour pictures. So expensive only other college libraries are going to buy it. Let’s not worry about the writing.’ The kettle reached its climax, squealed, sighed. She ground the beans small, thinking how nice it would be to go back to bed.

The bathroom door swung back and Felix made his re-appearance through billowing back-lit banks of steam, in a dressing-gown of padded burgundy silk. (‘Like a pantomime-demon rising out of a trapdoor. Coils of sulphurous smoke.’) She handed him, no he took the coffee from her hand. (‘Not sulphurous, though. What pleasing smells English gentlemen generate in the morning. Not gentlemen, dandies. Cologne, shaving soap, shampoo. Leather, sandalwood. Very hot water. Healthy flesh that has never been sick or very tired.’) He handed the mug back to her, emptied, and addressed her. The steam had cleared and he was in cruelly high spirits. (‘It’s always the same when he wakes. First animal discomfort, then remembered human grief. Then water. After that, malignant pomposity. Pomposity’s a good sign. It means he can keep going.’)

“All right. You think you can learn my trade? I don’t think you can. Because first” – that chortle was certainly malicious – “you’d have to pass an aptitude test.”

He rooted in the paper rubble on his sofa, found a dull-brown brick of a book, thrust it into her hands. “Here’s a detective puzzle for you.”

She gingerly found a spot of leather upholstery clear of papers, and sat on it. He straddled the arm and watched her examine the book. A dusty old edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles.

“Turn to the red bookmark.” She did; he tapped a finger on the right place.

“This Iohn Gréene,” she read,

did his errand vnto Brakenberie, knéeling before our ladie in the Tower. Who plainelie answered, The murther of the two yoong princes set abroch. that he would neuer put them to death to die therefore.

It’s the Princes in the Tower!”

“Yes. Greatest of all murder mysteries.”

“This is my exam?”

“yes.”

“Who’s John Greene?”

“A nobody. Just one of Richard III’s henchmen. Brackenbury, of course, is Constable of the Tower of London. Listen. It’s summer 1483. Young Edward V, twelve years old, has just been deposed by wicked uncle Richard, and immured in the Tower with his brother. Who’s nine. By the end of summer the boys have vanished. Everyone assumes the usurper’s murdered them. Which is a bit much, even for the Wars of the Roses. Richard’s regime starts coming undone. If they’re alive he’d parade them. But he doesn’t. Obviously because he can’t.”

“So he’s already killed them. He’s guilty.”

“Of course. The question’s how. Or in other words, who. Exactly who did the murder? Because, as you see, Brackenbury wouldn’t. Turn the page. Here’s the official story, the one put about by the Tudors after they’d overthrown Richard. The king (they say) dispatched Sir James Tyrrel to the Tower with a couple of heavies called Forrest and Dighton – here. We’re in the Princes’ bedroom.”

Abishag read aloud:

“& suddenlie lapping them vp among the clothes, so to bewrapped them and intangled them, keeping downe by force the fether-bed and pillowes hard vnto their mouths, that within a while, smoothe red and stifled, their breath failing, they gaue vp to God their innocent soules into the ioies of heauen, leauing to the tormentors their bodies dead in the bed.

Brutes.”

“Speaking professionally, it sounds like a neat job. No shrieking …. Anyway, you’ll see that once Forrest and Dighton are sure the boys are thoroughlie dead, they burie them at the staire foot, meetlie déepe in the ground, vnder a great heape of stones.”

“Ye – es.”

“And Tyrrel rode in great hast to king Richard, and shewed him all the maner of the murther. The King was pleased and said thankee kindly. But then he became upset at – what does it say?”

“Um – oh yes, at

the burieng in so vile a corner, saieng, that he would haue them buried in a better place, bicause they were a kings sonnes. Lo the honourable coucourage of a king. Whervpon they saie, that a priest of sir Robert Brakenberies tooke vp the bodies againe, and secretlie interred them in such place, as by the occasion of his death, which onelie knew it, could neuer since come to light.”

That seems plausible enough.”

“Doesn’t it? Tyrrel made his peace with the Tudors, but long afterward rebelled. So he and Dighton ended up in the hands of King Harry’s torturers. According to the official account, they confessed to the murder, but whither the bodies were remooued, they could nothing tell.”

“That seems plausible too.”

“Yes it does. Holinshed accepted the story. He copied it word-for-word from Thomas More, the Tudor minister for propaganda. Other historians repeated it from Holinshed. They’re still repeating it. Because all professional historians are dribbling morons.”

“Why are they morons?”

“Because this is the one thing to do with the Princes’ death we know about. We know the official account’s a lie. It’s plausible; it just happens to be untrue.”

“How d’ we know that?”

“Because by the merest chance, in 1674, when a new staircase was being built in the Tower, two skeletons were dug up. Boys aged about twelve and nine. Buried in velvet and silk. D’ y’ know where they were found? At the foot of a stair. Buried deep under a great heap of stones.” Abishag was silent. “Now look just a bit further down. Next paragraph. Holinshed says that what he’s reporting I haue learned of them that much knew, and little cause had to lie.”

Culpepper leaped up, vanished back into his bedroom, and started noisily getting dressed. “That’s it,” he called through the door. “You have all you need. Solve it and it proves you have the knack. You can come with me to Scotland. Fail,” his voice turned unpleasant, “and you’ll never again badger me to come on a field-trip…. Deal?”