Celestial Chess Read online

  I made an effort to prevent my gaze from pursuing the small dark-haired girl I was anxious to talk to. I knew her, in fact; she was Viennese, a charming creature of no more than twenty, with the Blue Danube waltzing in her eyes and Tales from the Vienna Woods hidden in her coquette’s heart. One of Colin Douglas’s many conquests, she had attached herself to him when we were skiing in Austria over Christmas and had recently turned up in Cambridge, only to find there was more competition for Colin’s attention than she had reckoned on. Colin Douglas couldn’t help attracting and seducing women, just as most Cambridge bachelors couldn’t help frightening them away.

  The dean was looking at me with wistful irony. One sensed that people had not been paying much attention to him for years.

  “I’ve never heard the story of the Special Collections,” I said. “Not the whole story, at any rate.”

  “Oh, well, you won’t want to hear it all,” the dean said. “I’ve given my entire life to the College, and I must confess that the affairs of Duke’s have come to interest me more than my own.”

  I wondered if the dean could ever have had any affairs of his own, but merely smiled and waited for his account. I was glad Archie Cavendish wasn’t here, for he wouldn’t have approved of my good behavior.

  The dean settled back into his armchair and crossed his skinny legs. “The Special Collections were established late in the eighteenth century as the result of a bequest from a man named Gerald Brice. He was a fellow commoner at Duke’s. Are you familiar with the term? A fellow commoner was a man of no real standing in the University, perhaps not even a degree, but one who paid for certain privileges. He could dine at High Table, order wine from the College cellar and keep a room for his visits. All the Colleges had fellow commoners, and they helped to pay the bills through some difficult times.”

  I was sure that Colin had decided to give his Austrian sweetheart the slip for that elegant blonde from London I’d seen him with earlier. He had worked his way near the door and I recognized the look in his eyes—that desperately ecstatic look of the aroused Don Juan which always made me think of a dog about to piss on a post. Poor Yvetta; her only mistake was in having given Colin too much too soon.

  The dean sipped at his port with rapid, nibbling little sips. “This Brice was a most peculiar chap, much interested in antiquarian manuscripts. No one knows where he got his money, though there was a nasty rumor at the time”—the dean looked as scandalized as if he’d been there to hear it in person—“that he made his fortune in the West Indian slave trade. Shocking, to think the College might owe a portion of its prosperity to that sort of business . . .”

  Colin had made a break for his freedom. He was out the door and Yvetta was left accepting a glass of port and a cracker from old Dr. Grimshaw’s dotty wife. I took note of the frustration with which Yvetta surveyed the Colin-less room.

  “Do you know,” I asked Dean Singer, “where Brice obtained the Westchurch manuscripts?”

  “Most likely from a dealer who had picked over the remains of someone else’s library. That was a great age of collecting, you know, and there is a tradition—not very well substantiated—that the manuscripts were once part of the Earl of Westchurch’s extensive collection of medieval relics . . . but that whole library was lost during the Commonwealth period. A good many national treasures were lost during Cromwell’s reign.”

  “Wasn’t the Earl of Westchurch beheaded?”

  “Oh, dear, yes. Many noble heads rolled in those days.”

  “He was convicted of . . . ?”

  “Treason, I expect. And popery, and witchcraft, and heaven knows what.”

  “But why did the Puritans destroy his library?”

  “Trying to root out the last traces of popery in the land, I suppose. Then too, the superstitious mind has a curious fear of the written word. Those must have been dreadful times!”

  The dean shook his head sadly, and I watched Yvetta nod without comprehension in response to Mrs. Grimshaw’s inane chatter.

  “The odd part of the whole business, you know, was that this Brice chap just simply up and disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “He called in the College solicitor one evening and made out his will. Said he was off to France. It was the eve of the Revolution and the will proved a prudent measure, for Brice was never seen nor heard from again. Finally the College went to court to have the will executed. All Brice’s wealth and holdings went to Duke’s, and the Special Collections were established according to the terms he had prescribed. Isn’t that an interesting story?”

  Yvetta had escaped Dr. Grimshaw’s wife and was moving across the room. Anxious to intercept her, I was about to rise from my chair with a polite excuse when the dean said:

  “Stranger still, Fairchild, is that an heir showed up to contest the will. Claimed his uncle, as I believe it was, was mentally unbalanced. It caused quite a scandal—most distressing! The young rogue accused his uncle of all sorts of horrid practices—orgies and Satanic rituals and all that sort of thing.”

  “Witchcraft? Was Brice a devotee of the black arts?”

  “Stuff and nonsense!” the dean said. “Certainly he was a bit of an eccentric, but the nephew was eventually exposed as a fraud—not even a blood relative. He hanged himself a year or so after losing the suit.”

  This was all immensely interesting, and since Yvetta had disappeared I tried the dean on a related subject. “Someone was just telling me earlier today that Duke’s experienced an epidemic of ghosts some time later. In the 1880’s or 90’s, was it?”

  At this the dean was forced to laugh—a painful process emanating from the tomblike cavity of his chest. “Oh, my dear fellow—ho! ho!—you really must allow—ho! ho!—that any self-respecting college had to have a few ghosts on the premises in those days!”

  “Then you don’t think that those hauntings could have had anything to do with this mysterious benefactor, Gerald Brice, or perhaps with the manuscripts he left behind?”

  The dean was driven to the extremes of mirth, and one of his bony white hands sought my arm with surprising familiarity. “You young Americans are really too amusing,’’ he said. “Why, such a proposition never crossed my mind—but since you’re so interested in the subject of ghosts, do you know to whom this house belonged as late as—hmm—I should say, 1920?”

  “To whom?”

  “Sir Percy Wickham George,” the dean said grandly. “Surely you’ve heard of Sir Percy Wickham George.”

  I confessed that I had not.

  The dean’s pale eyes twinkled. “Sir Percy was one of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research. It’s said that séances, black masses and Druidic rituals were once performed on these very premises—all in the interests of science, of course. Sir Percy was famous for his investigations into the occult, but ghosts are rather a hobby with us in England. We don’t take them too seriously. Our lives would be quite ghastly if ever we did.”

  I acknowledged the dean’s rebuke with a smile. “Where can I find out more about the Earl of Westchurch and his collection?”

  “The British Museum is very good—but the man you should really talk to about the Westchurch library has, unfortunately, just died. He was a friend of our late Dr. Greggs, a retired clergyman who lived on Hampstead Lane in London. The Reverend Samuel Stemp, for many years the curator of the Westchurch Museum. Stemp knew more about the earl and his collection than any man now alive—though, as I say, poor Stemp was himself recently killed in a freak accident.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “I saw only the newspaper accounts, but apparently Stemp was out for a walk along Hampstead Lane, when a lorry swerved to avoid a cat. The driver lost control, the lorry jumped the curb and drove poor Stemp through a brick wall. The driver was exonerated—several witnesses saw the cat, though it was never apprehended.”

  “Was it,” I asked the dean, “a black cat?”

  This occasioned another outburst of laughter
from the dean, which quite exhausted him. I had worn the old fossil to a frazzle, so I asked if he would like me to call a cab for his return to the College.

  “That would be uncommonly decent of you, Fairchild. These late evenings are not for me anymore, I’m afraid.”

  I went out into the hall. The Bromley House butler was sneaking a cigarette before bringing in another cart laden with fancy tidbits. He was about to snuff the butt with his fingertips when he saw it was only me.

  “Would you call Dean Singer a cab, please?”

  “Sure, guv. Watch the cart, would you?”

  He went off and I helped myself to one of the savories —a cracker spread with cheese and topped with a black olive. The click of heels on the parquet floor announced the return of a lady from the powder room. It was Yvetta.

  “David—I’m so glad to see that you’re still here, at least!”

  As far back as our nights of carousal in that Austrian ski lodge, Yvetta had singled me out as the “nicest”—that is to say, the most manageable—of Colin’s cronies. “Have you been abandoned?” I asked sympathetically.

  “Bah!” Her tiny pink-nailed fingers plucked one of the savories from the tray. “That swine! That—that—”

  Yvetta’s English was not entirely adequate to her needs, and finding no term which could express her feelings, she bit savagely into the cracker, as if into her betrayer’s neck. I watched her fine jaw working vigorously and, as she swallowed, our relationship subtly turned. Her eyes regarded me with new interest.

  “You do like me, don’t you, David?”

  “I’m bonkers for you, Yvetta,’’ I said.

  “You find me . . . attractive?”

  I took note of the evasive glance, the coy tone which made clear her availability. Yvetta had always flirted with me; it was in her nature to do so; her upbringing required it. But it had never meant anything until tonight.

  “I find you very attractive,” I said, “and I’ve been hoping for a chance to see more of you ever since you came to Cambridge. May I see you home?”

  Her smile was like a pact. “Just a minute. I’ll get my coat.”

  I helped myself to another savory while she was gone. Yvetta had found work in Cambridge as an au pair girl. I didn’t know if I could gain access to her room, and trying to smuggle her into the College at this hour would be difficult. I lacked Colin’s resource of private digs. I lacked a good many things gentlemen like Colin took for granted.

  The butler returned. His quick, shrewd eyes counted the crackers on the plate. “You’ve been snitching,” he said. “Now I’ll have to get some more ready before I can take this plate in.

  “Sorry,” I said. English servants always think they can scold Americans. This fellow was a dapper little man with straight gray hair and sporty mustache. I got out my wallet. “Tell me—is there an unoccupied room in Bromley House this evening?”

  He glared at my wallet. “What did you have in mind, guv?”

  “Oh, just a quiet conversation with a lady. Say a quid?”

  “I’d be taking a risk. Me and the missus, this is the best situation we’ve had in years.”

  “Say two quid.” I took them out.

  He glanced at the door to the drawing room, then made my money disappear so quickly he might have been a magician. “There’s a bedroom on the third floor. Number 17. Chap who has it’s in London for the week. Mind you’re out by midnight. The rule says no ladies after midnight.”

  I knew I could have purchased a longer tenancy, but midnight would be sufficient. He provided me with a key and shuffled off with his cart. Yvetta came back, her coat over her shoulder.

  I took the hand she held out to me. ‘‘How would you like to do something very daring?” I asked her. “Are you willing to break the rules?”

  “The rules! I despise all these British rules! I am beginning to despise the British . . .”

  “What I have in mind is very wicked. If we’re caught, it could mean my head on the block.”

  It took her a minute to see that I was joking. “Oh, David, you’re terrible. Don’t make fun of me. What is it you wish to do?”

  “Come along, and I’ll show you.”

  I led her to the back of the house, where there was a servants’ stairway to the third floor. Professor Trevor-Finch, the warden of Bromley House, was a notorious misogynist and prig, and I was indeed risking my place in the College by smuggling a lady upstairs in the house where he terrorized two dozen graduate students and several servants. A man is sometimes compelled to take such risks. I had left the States the survivor of one bad marriage and several torturous affairs, and for months now I had lived a life of monkish purity. Moreover, I was thirty: old enough to realize that the day when I could seduce a girl of Yvetta’s tender age was nearly past.

  I unlocked the door of number 17. Yvetta drew back.

  “Are you sure we should?” she asked.

  I knew she simply wanted a bit more persuasion, so I put my arms around her slender waist and drew her to me. “Darling Yvetta, I may not be as tall and handsome as my friend Colin. I don’t have his money or his excellent connections. But I am madly in love with you, and Colin, as you should know by now, is not. I don’t ask much, but if you’d favor a poor student with a few hours of bliss, I promise to be gentle, grateful and anxious to please.”

  I don’t know how much of this courtly speech Yvetta understood, but she caught the gist. She put a hand on my cheek and looked up at me with eyes like dark but luminous stars.

  “Liebchen, I really shouldn’t—but let’s!”

  I ushered her into the room, where we spent a pleasant hour or so in the bed of the unknown scholar. Yvetta was indeed exquisite, a marvelous mixture of plump and slender, tender and tough, innocent and depraved. I was hard pressed to believe in my luck and found the episode curiously dreamlike, as if the young man who went to England to work on certain esoteric manuscripts never really existed, save in the potent fantasies of the anonymous lad whose bed we usurped.

  As midnight approached we heard cars starting up, doors slamming, people calling out their good nights. Then there were footsteps and voices in the hall, a chorus of running taps and flushing toilets, and finally the heavy silence in which old houses rehearse their repertoire of creaks, clunks and sighs. Yvetta and I were just embarking upon a final round of restrained merriment when I became acutely conscious of a third person in the room.

  I froze on the threshold of recaptured bliss. Had that rascally butler crept upstairs for a peek at what I’d purchased with my two quid? I could hear no breathing but Yvetta’s and mine, could see absolutely nothing in the darkness that surrounded us, but I was sure there was something in the room with us. Caught between the lady’s legs and propped up on aching elbows, I listened to the clamor of some sixth sense I hadn’t known I had; and the longer I listened, the more convinced I became that the presence was something other than human. It was old, it was cold, it was unnatural and grotesque, yet infinitely sad, and it seemed to hover near us in the darkness, as if diverted from its pilgrimage across a frozen universe and drawn irresistibly toward the warmth of our coupling.

  This visitation lasted only the several seconds it took my flesh to grow cold away from Yvetta’s, yet its effect was devastating. My heart was pounding, a cold sweat had started from my pores, and I gasped for breath like a man suddenly plunged into an alien atmosphere.

  “David,” Yvetta whispered, “what’s wrong?”

  Reassured by the sound of her voice, I lowered myself to her pliant little body and tried to capture a sense of purpose to suit my posture. But it wasn’t, as they say in those novels of sexual pathology, “any good.” The abrupt departure of our visitor had left me feeling oddly bereft, even defrauded, as if I’d been on the brink of revelations which could have changed my life.

  Yvetta was decent about my collapse. Of course I’d been wonderful—everything a lusty Fräulein could ask for. Not to worry, darling; there’s always another time. We gat
hered up our clothes, sorted them out as best we could in the dark, and prepared to make our escape from the domain of that dragon moralist Professor Trevor-Finch.

  It was a quarter past twelve as we began our stealthy descent of the Bromley House stairs. We had reached the landing of the second floor when, from a door just down the hall, there came a ghastly scream—hoarse, high-pitched, and totally abandoned. I hustled Yvetta into a closet just off the stairway and we stood in darkness, amid the smell of dust rags and furniture polish, while voices began to sound throughout the house.

  “Good Lord, did you hear that?”

  ‘‘Came from Finchie’s room, I think. We’d better see if he’s all right.”

  We heard the rescue party, now composed of several voices, knocking at Professor Trevor-Finch’s door. There was talk of breaking the door down, or of going after the butler for a key, when the door was apparently opened.

  “I’m sorry, Professor,” someone said. “We heard a scream. Is anything wrong?”

  “A scream? Good heavens, I was having a nightmare, but did I really . . . ? It must have been that Bach fugue we played this evening—always agitates my nerves. Such intricate fingering. Damn, what a nuisance! Here I’ve gotten you all out of bed. Terribly sorry. Won’t you come in for a drink?”

  There were polite refusals, apologies all around, and a general dispersal. ‘‘He was in the war, you know,” I heard one voice whisper as the footsteps passed our broom closet. “The Germans had him for a year or two. It must have been beastly.”

  In a little while, the house grew quiet again. The reek of the broom closet had us fairly groggy by the time I dared to peek out into the hall. The door to the professor’s room was still open, but all was silent within. We had to pass that door to get to the stairs to the first floor.

  I led Yvetta out of the closet and down the hall. Looking into the professor’s room, I saw him lying face down on the sofa, one arm dangling to the floor, his body very still. On the table nearby there was a chessboard. A white knight lay on the floor beneath the table.

  ~§~