7 Paperclips

"My Dear Devil"

2010-07-13T09:48:00.000-07:00

November 16, 1914

My Dear Devil,

Am finding that, contrary to all current popular mythology, leave is not nearly as exciting when one has no one to see, and that no one wants to see you.

Arrived home in the middle of an infernal gale that made me question why I’d ever disparaged the heat of the lovely English summer sun. The only person awake was Mrs. Crockett, dear soul, and she proceeded to cry over me more than the Mater had in our twenty years of co-habitation. Since then, it’s been dull meetings. One after the other until my head aches. Have only been twice to the theater, and both times rather disappointed--everyone seems to be substituting furious merriment for actualy artistry these days.
Find myself unused to be alone now, despite being willing to sell my soul for a little peace during the whole endless weeks of drilling.

And what of you, Devil? I’ve no idea if this is indeed your address, but Allington said this was where you could be reached. How in the world did you end up that far north? Are you near Gibson Gardens? The Pater had some interests around there in former years. Have you seen polar bears? Does the postman even deliver to those parts anymore?

And A--? Not to pry, of course. Simply tell me when we are next sitting in a damp hole somewhere that she is…or isn't. And I shall be content.

Well, we’re off, so I’m told. Minnie Walker (the brunette, if you remember) has attached herself to my side this week to make sure this sentence of enforced gaiety is carried out to its fullest extent. How I wish they has warned us that the worst part of military training is in the leaving of it.
Until Friday, then, I suppose.
B.R.

The second document wasn’t a letter. It was a will.
It was standard for a solider to carry a will in his pay book, so that if his proverbial number came due, there would be some record of his last wishes. They were fairly informal and unwitnessed, more a precaution than a formal document. Later in the war, official forms with witnesses became a bit more common. Form B.243 allowed the benefactor to name one beneficiary--usually his mother, but occasionally it was a sibling or a wife. Form B.244, which was a rarety in my experience, was used when more than one beneficiary was listed. Most of the men who filled out these forms were too young to have many possessions or funds that required dispersal. The formal documents were left with the commanding officer so there was no risk of them being destroyed, but it wasn’t uncommon to find them jumbled up among the maze of paperwork that the war left behind.

There were myriad superstitions among soldiers, and some of the more gruesome came from the First World War. I’d read a few diaries and letters where men stated in no uncertain terms that those who carried their own wills were all but inviting a smiting from the Almighty. Others believed that to write one at all was requesting a bit too much attention from unfeeling fate, while a few others said that, just as you put your life in your comrades’ hands, it was symbolic to hand them your will, as well. While the policy may have let some men sleep better, it also meant that wills were frequently lost or mutilated and any worldly goods were simply forwarded to the next of kin, even if the particular signatory had designated otherwise. Thus, I wasn’t overly surprised to find that Barnaby Rutledge’s will was in L. Thomas’ collection. Perhaps he had believed in passing on his paperwork for safekeeping. It could very well have been a complete mix-up somewhere along the line, as well, so I decided not to worry about the presence of the will in the collection, at least until I’d read it. The signature on the form was similar to the one on the letter, but looked as if the writer had been running through a hurricane at the time of signing. The pen had punctured the paper twice in the signing, and the ink ran from a few places where the paper had been soaked through at some point in the past. It was dated October 1917. It specified that, in the event of the death of the below signed Barnaby Francis Rutledge left all his worldly goods, including items specified with his solicitor, to one Lieutenant L. Nathaniel Thomas. The money in his account and his books were left to one Alice Thomas (with a provision in case her name changed due to marriage), of Green Lanes, Haringey, London.

The Beginning, Again...

2010-06-29T13:54:00.000-07:00

Nothing of any importance took place on Sunday. Mitch had two shows for which he had to usher, and I realized that, if I failed all my courses, it wouldn’t matter very much who Barnaby Rutledge and his mysterious female shadow might be, as I would be on the next plane to Boston. So I read about the role of women in the British Empire and took dutiful notes on whether woman had “agency” or a “voice” in the course of their current events or in the creation of their history. And by that evening, I’d given myself such a headache that the only thing I was fit for was bed.
The next morning, I was up early enough to not only make coffee, but to stop in to see Sergey. As soon as the bell over the door chimed my entry, he was poking his head around the side of a rack of bread and brandishing the stack of photocopies I’d given him the day earlier.
“My dear Kipling!” He smiled, but his eyes were worried. “I read, as you asked.”
I shivered. The weather was chill and the damp seemed to have found its way through my sweater and between my ribs. “And?”
“Not mad, my friend.”
He said it so grimly that I took a step closer, suddenly worried.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that this…Rutledge,” he over-enunciated each syllable of the unfamiliar word. “He is not mad. I read your notes. On the side. Here.” He pointed to the list of oddities I’d scribbled. “And he is not mad. But you are right. This girl. It is the same girl. And she is very important. Very…” And his eyes suddenly fixed on the counter. His eyebrows drew together and he murmured something too low for me to hear.
“What is it?”
“Beatrice.” The words came out with an Italianate trill.
I felt my own eyebrows rising skywards before I realized what he was talking about.
“You mean—like Dante?”
“Indeed. The woman he wrote to. And wrote for, I suppose. If he writes her, she doesn’t die. Not completely. You understand?”
“I think so.” The shiver came back. “The only biographical information I could find—about his life, not his writing—was that he died alone. With no one.”
“He had her.” Sergey held up the paper. He had put brackets around one of the first descriptions of the woman from one of the stories.
“I guess so.” I took the papers and slid them in my bag.
A crisp paper bag was waiting for me on the counter when I looked back up.
“If you keep handing out free food,” I warned with a forced smile, before realizing I had no end to the threat. “It’s probably not the best business sense.”
“I will give you food until you stop looking so…tragic.”
That brought out a laugh. “I’m not tragic. Just…I don’t know. I hate the thought of him going nuts over a dead girl. It’s…it’s just awful.”

The elevators in the building where our seminar was being held were undergoing another round of closures, with signs bedecking the walls promising that they would be over shortly. I scanned the lobby in the hopes of seeing a workman, or even a few discarded tools, and saw nothing. I was about to resign myself to the ten-storey climb when the chime from the one working elevator sounded behind me. I turned toward the sound of the swushing doors and nearly collided with a blonde woman coming out.
“I’m so sorry!” I blurted before realizing quite what was happened.
“Oh honestly,” she hissed under her breath. Not loud enough to cause a scene, but certainly loud enough to let me know I’d just ruined her entire day.
I took a quick look at her. She was shorter than me. This didn’t surprise me, seeing as how most women (and a fair amount of men) were shorter than me. She was startling—and naturally blonde, with a tiny waist, ice blue eyes and treacherously high cheekbones.
“Are you alright?” I asked meekly, feeling like the most enormous, clumsy human being in the city.
“Quite,” she sniffed, then fixed me with a glacial smile and snapped away on her little kitten heels.
Thoroughly humiliated, I stepped through the doors of the elevator, only to be greeted by Damien and his growing smirk.
“Are you alright?” He managed without chuckling.
“Umm…yeah.” If my cheeks could have heated anymore, I think my face might have become radioactive. I turned around swiftly and faced the doors—which I realized too late were completely reflective—and sighed. “Yikes.”
Behind me, Damien kept grinning until the doors opened again.

The day did not improve. I found myself at odds over women and “agency” and history, not only with the rest of the class, but with my professor, who was apparently a new-age feminist with an axe to grind. I held my own, but by the time we left two hours later, I felt like I’d just gone twelve rounds with a steam shovel. When Damien had spoken, which wasn’t frequently, he usually came down on my side, which was a relief, but the rest of the time, he kept his eyes trained on me while I spoke, which only made me feel even more awkward.
He hung back to discuss an upcoming research paper with the professor, so I quickly slid through the doors to the stairs in order to avoid the rest of the class who was heading toward the single overworked elevator. I needed my desk, I needed some old diaries, and I needed to be left alone.
And, of course, there was a visiting researching who was making use of my desk when I arrived. He was short and thick, with round glasses and an Adam’s apple large enough to make him look like he was trying unsuccessfully to swallow a golf ball.
“Sorry, Kip,” Rich said quietly as I stared in dazed confusion at the person filling my seat. “I kept meaning to call, but the day just got away from me.”
“It’s ok,” I was physically unable to stay angry at Rich for long, so I merely hefted my bag again and snatched my teacup off the corner of the desk, startling the bespeckled squatter, who muttered a useless apology and went back to reading.
“The Room at the End of the Hall is open.” Rich offered. The room was usually used for meetings with Museum officials or members of the public donating major collections. Fitted out with a tea pot and a china set, it was where we went to impress people. I think it was technically referred to as a Conference Room, but The Room at the End of the Hall was its most common title. It was also the farthest from any office in the department, and seldom used during normal hours.
“Perfect,” I said, and Rich gave me a confused little smile when he realized I meant it. “Do you mind if I start the Thomas Collection today?”
“Still all tied up with Rutledge?”
“You could say that.”
Rich grinned and liberated the fat folder from the stack on his desk. “Have at it.”

I was settled in The Room at the End of the Hall with a mug of tea and took my first deep breath in what felt like hours. The room was equipped with a computer, and I pulled up a Word document in order to start making a list of the contents of the folder. There were a handful of letters in a feminine hand addressed to “Lt Nathaniel Thomas” in Egypt, then Salonika, and finally, one address to him in France. There was a clutch of letters from Rutledge. All written in a very small, neat hand. None were more than a page, front and back, but the writing was compact enough that they were sure to hold a good deal of information. I just had to hope that it was significant information. More often than I cared to admit, letters to and from soldiers tended to be filled with inside jokes, personal references and the most mundane of information about the war. Usually, it was about food, but just as frequently, it was about women.
Seeing his writing was oddly jarring. I’d been expecting a Poe-like hand, so tiny and scrabbled that every word was an effort to decipher; perhaps even a John Wilkes-Booth kind of grandiose scrawl that could cover an entire page in a handful of words. This, though…this was neat and precise and showed not only education, but patience. The return addresses were nearly all from somewhere near a front. If Barnaby Rutledge had taken the time to make his writing so neat and orderly in that kind of chaos, he certainly was not an emotional hysteric, as I had at first wondered. Nor was he a compulsive. The bridges between his letters were all level and rounded. Most of all, they were done quickly. He wasn’t laboring over each letter, they way Poe did, making the reader feel still and suffocated under the weight of the pen.
This writer, I realized, squinting again at the little letters, was perfectly, and utterly sane.

Diversions

2010-02-13T20:02:00.000-08:00

The sun was shining when I woke up, which went a good way to lifting my spirits from their depths of the previous night, despite the fact that I was freezing cold and couldn’t feel my feet. Mitch had laid claim to the vast majority of the blankets over the course of the night, and looked thoroughly comfortable, borrowed so deep beneath them that the only thing that could be clearly seen was his hair, sticking out from the top of the blanket as if trying to make a bid for freedom.

Slowly, with devious caution, I slid my feet back under the blanket and beneath the hem of his shirt.

“Kipling Philby,” he muttered, jerking forward, “so help me, but if you ever touch me with those cold feet again, they won’t be able to find enough of you to identify your body.” He didn’t open his eyes at all, but I could see a grin fighting to make its presence known.

“Let’s go to Portobello Road Market.”

He pulled his arm to his face, and hazarded a one-eyed squint at the watch he had forgotten to remove last night.

“It’s…seven fucking thirty. What?”

“You. Me. Portobello Road.”

“Why?”

“Books.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“Come on! I want to get there before the crazies descend.”

“Oh trust me,” he threw the blankets off his shoulders and finally turned over enough for me to see his face, creased and wrinkled with sofa-marks, “once you get there, there will be plenty enough crazy for everyone. Make me coffee. I’ll be back soon.”

When he clumped up the stairs a bit later, he was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt beneath an engulfing green cardigan that covered his hands completely. I froze in the act of handing him a mug of coffee and considered the elbow patches on the sleeves, which in themselves were large enough to cover most of his forearms.

“Umm…”

“It was my Uncle Samuel’s. One word and I swear…”

I giggled and set the coffee on the table. Mitch swooped down on it like an ungainly green buzzard.

“So last night’s little literary-fest wasn’t enough for you?” He took a hesitant sip and quickly pulled his head back, rubbing ruefully at his upper lip.

“Not a chance,” I replied, stirring in sugar meditatively. “I made this list last night of all the similarities in the stories and I think there’s more going on here than just shell-shock?”

“You mean the girl with the eyes?”

“You caught that, too?”

“How could you not?”

I made a non-verbal sound of agreement into my cup.

“I wonder if he really—“ Mitch’s comment was cut short by my mobile waking up and jittering spastically across the dining room table.

“Hello?” I said, catching it just before it crashed to the floor and flipping it open with my thumb.

“Kipling?” The voice was muffled by the several other shouts on its end of the line.

“Toni! How are you?” I kept my own voice cheerful while making a face of frustrated anguish for Mitch’s benefit.

Antonia and her husband, Eric, owned the house in which I was currently squatting. They were lovely people, but seemed to have a professional talent for calling at exactly the wrong time and proposing inopportune visits to collect their mail, let Eric make nice with his London-based colleagues, and generally make sure I hadn’t yet allowed the house to erupt into flames.

“Quite well, thank you. And you?”

“Oh, things here are fine.”

“Ah, good. Listen, Kipling,” I braced myself for the inevitable, “we’re in the car and I thought it would be nice to come down and check in on things. Would that be alright with you?”

“Of course,” I said, banging my head silently against the table, as Mitch smothered a chuckle in the expanse of his sweater.

“Hi Kipling!!” Came a fearsomely high screech, followed by a few grunts and a scratching noise. Then Toni’s patient reminder to her two kids in the backseat that they could be evacuated at any time to find their way home, should their continued presence prove too trying.

“Sorry about that, Kipling.”

“It’s ok. Tell Ned and Lily I can’t wait to see them, too.”

Ned was ten years old and introduced me to his friends as his ‘rental sister’. Lily was twelve and a phenomenal artist and already far too cool for the likes of me. I am unashamed to admit that I bought my way into her good graces by letting her wear my mascara and eye shadow to the movies, to see a film that required a guardian for anyone under thirteen. Since then, I have not only been upgraded to “cool”, I even got invited to her birthday party in Kent in the spring.

The message was conveyed, to another round of squeals and thumps, before Toni came back.

“Right, well, we’re on the road now, so—perhaps an three quarters of an hour or so?”

Which meant about an hour and a half. I was never in what time zone Toni operated, but it must be really quite fun.

“Great,” I said, looking at Mitch. “Would you like me to have anything ready for you.” He nodded forcefully.

“Oh, you don’t have to! That would be lovely!” Ah, the fatal challenge of contradictions.

“Great,” I said again. “It’ll be a pleasure.”

We bantered for a bit, during which I watched the minute hand on the clock on the wall spin faster and faster. When Toni was done telling me about the trees they were passing and cows grazing on the field, I was down to one hour and ten minutes.

“You blinking liar,” Mitch said flatly when I finally closed the phone.

“What?”

“It’ll be a pleasure’. What, pray tell, are you going to whip up? A nice bowl of Frosties? Some apples and yogurt? Because I think that’s the extent of your pantry, Friend-O.”

“Shit.” He was right, of course. Flingpot has consumed the last of my groceries. I eyed the clock again and sighed.

“We’ll have to hit the Farmer’s Market,” I said, more to myself than to Mitch. “And I’m sure Sergey’s open by now. I’ll get some bread and something fattening and call it a day.”

“What is this ‘we’ all about?”

“Do you want to eat today?”

“Not if the little people are going to be here.” He grimaced. “I don’t do the little people.”

“Excellent,” I said, trying very hard not to laugh. “I’ll just tell them you’re my imaginary friend.”

“Works for me.”

And, thus liberated from a day of book-buying, Mitch stood, swung his arms until his sweater released his hands, and headed back home. Before descending the basement steps, he turned and nearly slammed my head with the door.

“Umm…oops. Anyway, bring those stories to Sergey. See what he says.”

“Good idea.” I said, stopping the mad whirlwind of cleaning and clearing.

“But take a shower first, ok?”

“Wherever would I be without you?” I replied dryly and ran upstairs to the bathroom.

Stoke Newington holds this tiny little farmer’s market every Saturday morning in the local school’s recess yard. It means that Church Street is nearly impassible by car until about 2pm, but there aren’t too many other places where you can see whole fish on ice next to a table of homemade gooseberry jam next to buckets of dirt-covered, moony mushrooms, next to the cupcake lady, who sells baby cupcakes for 75p, next to the enormous cheese wheel, next to the Cajun guy who sings while brewing coffee, who works beside the curmudgeonly Irish baker, who stands behind a table heaped with enough bread to make it hard to see his head over the crusty mountain.

Twenty minutes after Mitch’s departure, I was ducking through the gates of the William Patton school, politely taking a leaflet from a short women with enormous dreadlocks bundled on top of her head, admonishing me to abstain from buying produce from some foreign country that was doing something not-nice to some other foreign nation. I shoved the leaflet in my bag, where it met its friends from weeks past, and buzzed the circle of breads and veggies, deciding to skip on the aquatic life, since I had neither the time to cook it nor the inclination to kill us all with salmonella.

Once I had enough to make a passable vegetable and cheese dish, I zipped down toward the Green, sidestepping slower pedestrians and nearly colliding with a young blonde with a baby carriage as I rounded the corner.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, not stopping long enough to give the words any meaning.

Sergey was leaning against the door frame of the shop, absorbing the thinning sunlight, a dough-flecked copy of The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in his hands. He looked up at the sound of my rustling bags, and a brilliant smile broke out across his face.

“My Kipling! I have missed you!”

An older man walking past on the opposite side of the street looked over warily—a true Londoner, I thought fleetingly. Frightened of any loud noises or real emotion.

“Hello Sergey,” I panted, setting my bags just inside the shop and shrugging off my sweater.

“How are you, my friend, how are you?”

“I’m ok—in a bit of a rush today,” I explained Toni and Erik’s unexpected incursion into my weekend.

“I see, I see.” He nodded, as if contemplating the fate of nations, rather than my culinary crisis. “You will need Blini. To wrap them. Yes. Definitely.”

“I am in your hands.” He chuckled and began wrapping a stack of whisper-thin pancakes in crackling brown paper.

“Have you brought me anything?” When he raised his eyebrow at me, I noticed it was coated with flour.

“Sort of,” I yanked the photocopies from my bag, where they had wrapped themselves adoringly around a zucchini. “It’s not a book, but a friend of mine gave this to me.” I put the papers on the counter and realized the list was still in the margin, devil horns and all. Sergey followed my eyes and scrutinized my artistic renderings.

“You have been giving this much thought, yes?”

I nodded. “I don’t know what to make of him yet. You let me know what you think, alright?”

“Absolutely.” He over-enunciated all the syllables with guttural relish. “I love a good mystery.”

I thanked him profusely and buzzed home. A quick check of my watch as I opened the door showed I had exactly twenty-five minutes left.

Mitch was sitting at my kitchen table, rubbing resin on his violin bow.

“If I help you cook, can I have some later?”

“Do you really need to ask?” I dumped the contents of the bags on the table as he snatched his bow out of the field of fire.

“I’ll chop. Turn the oven on.”

“You turn it on. I’m afraid of it.”

“He picked up an eggplant and eyed me warily.

“You what?”

“It growls at me!”

“It’s a convection oven! That’s the fan!”

“It wants to eat me.”

“Oh for mercy’s sake…” He crossed the kitchen in two steps and flicked a few switched and the oven roared to life

“Have I mentioned that I absolutely adore you?”

“Yup. Just now. I heard you.” He threw a dishrag at me that landed on my shoulder. “Wash your face. How did you get flour on you?”

We made it. Barely, but we made it. Just as I was taking the baked veggies and cheese out of the oven—which Mitch had turned off before scurrying off home—the door banged open and the hallway was filled with happy screeches.

“Children, children,” Erik was chiding. “Kipling is going to think that we have a rodent problem!”

“Kipling!” Ned launched himself at my hip nearly sent the pan flying.

“Hey, you!” I grinned. It was nice to be missed. “What’s up?”

“Mum said we could go to Victoria Park this afternoon—wanna come?”

“Definitely.”

Lily sauntered in and plopped down into a chair. “What smells good?”

“Veggies and cheese. And blinis to wrap them. Want some?”

“Oh my God, yes. I’m starving. I didn’t get any breakfast because Ned ate the last of the eggs this morning.”

“But if you were up earlier, you could have—“

“I was tired. I was sleeping in. That’s what you do on weekends. Not go on some big expedi—nice shoes, Kip.”

“Thanks.” I set plates before both of them. “Dig in.”

And thus the day progressed. We ate, then Erik and Toni went over the house, ostensibly to retrieve various books and scarves and sneakers, but I was fairly sure they were looking for scorch marks, or Satanic ritualistic markings carved into the railings, or drunken Hobos napping in the bathtub. As ever, I passed inspection, and we spent a fairly pleasant afternoon in Victoria Park, marred only slightly by a dog who tried to remove Ned’s shoe while we were sitting under a tree, eliciting a storm of hysteria and by a butterfly that landed on Toni’s bag, which necessitated a detailed, half-hour lecture on lepidoptery. That and the consistent requests for tag and hide and seek and catch the grasshopper that I couldn’t, in good conscience, refuse. Seeing as how I was the cool one, and all.

I spent the time sitting in the shade of a chestnut tree and wondering about Barnaby Rutledge and watching people stroll or jog or amble past, examining each face for a pair of eyes that could be as arresting as the ones he’d described.

They took off again about five, and as soon as they were out of sight, I flopped on the couch, savoring the return of silence. Silence that was broken about three minutes later when there was a resounding bang on the floor beneath my feet and the cellar door opened to the sound of a violin, faintly playing the Hallelujah Chorus.

“I completely agree,” I smiled. “There’s plenty in the fridge. Go nuts.”

I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of cutlery on porcelain and the patient beeping of the microwave. Then there was the smell of melting cheese and the weight of another body on the couch beside me. I opened one eye and watched Mitch digging into his enormous plate with relish.

“You know,” he said between mouthfuls, “I was thinking.”

“Really? Well done.”

“Hush, you.” He put a folded-up blini in the hand that was lying in my lap and I found the energy to bring it to my mouth. “Anyway,” swallowed and sat back, “you know that Lost Angel story you brought home last week?”

“Yeah?”

“What was she listening for?”

“What?” I sat forward, something in my brain clicking very loudly into place.

“There was a line that—“

“I know, I know, wait a second.” I knelt down and started rummaging under the couch, where I’d thrown everything that would fit during my morning cleaning fit. The copies of the Rutledge manuscript were jammed under an unidentified show, but I managed to get it out relatively undamaged.

“Here…” I flipped the pages until I came to the line, “De-dah, de-dah, circles of the damned, words held no power over her, de-dah de-dah, umm….right. ‘The song had been made in the secret darkness of the night, and carried in it the spice of spring rain and the lonely chill of autumn winds. It was a song to hold her and keep her as no words ever could, as he would never be able to himself. And so he cast his spell in song, trapping her soul in his melody’…and then… she goes around the ward and, let’s see….’in her head played endlessly the promise of paradise and the lost wonder of eternity ‘”.

“Yikes. Right.” Mitch mumbled and swallowed. “And how about the mountain man?”

“I gave the copies to Sergey, but…”

I looked up to see Mitch nodding, a very serious expression on his face.

“It’s the same song, isn’t it?”

He nodded even more emphatically. “It’s got to be. I mean, it’s the same girl, isn’t it?”

“You think so, too?”

“Well,” he slid his empty plate to the side and started plucking fitfully at the strings on his violin, “if it’s not the same girl in each story, each girl in each story has to be based on one girl. Does that make sense?”

“Totally.” My mind was firing like an engine, racing ahead of this one clue to make a thousand more connections. But without more evidence, without any more stories, it was just consuming itself.

“I wonder who she was,” Mitch asked his violin. It gave a little chirp in response.

I stared at the photocopy in my lap, at the little note in Rutledge’s quick, sharp hand, and remembered.

“Whoever she was, he never found her.” Mitch’s hands stopped moving, but he didn’t look up. “The biography in Damien’s copies,” my voice sounded oddly far away, “said he died without family.” Died? I thought nervously.

“Alone.” Mitch whispered.

It was one of those words that didn’t need any answer.

In Which I Get Suspicions.....

2010-02-08T10:22:00.000-08:00

I finished reading and dropped the photocopy to my lap. Mitch was asleep, sprawling out over most of the couch, his head lolling awkwardly over the arm. It looked totally and absolutely normal. I desperately wanted to wake him up and make him tell me it was ok. To tell me this guy had died at least sixty years ago and there was no rational reason for me to be as freaked out as I currently was.

I didn’t know what it was about his writing, but something about each of these stories was setting off a who cacophony of alarm bells, both the professional ones and otherwise. From a professional standpoint, having spent years reading historical documents, there was something about Rutledge’s writing that made me incredibly uncomfortable. And it wasn’t just that he sounded like someone who was nuttier than a peanut butter factory.

I had spent a few months working on a collection of spy correspondence in college. They were letters written by an American diplomat who got stuck on the wrong side of the continent at the outbreak of the war. He was granted permission to receive letters from his “Maiden Sister in Dorchester”, over whom he had full responsibility following their parent's death. No matter that she was in her mid-thirties and apparently nearly six feet tall and built like a water tank. Not only that, it turned out later that the sister was an old acquaintance of Howard Burnham, an American who spied for France during the war. It did appear that there was some kind of code, or linguistic understanding between the siblings before the diplomat’s departure, since there was never any cipher discovered, either in the collection of their correspondence, or in that of Burnham that any of us could find. It took about two years, but we finally figured out (or thought we figured out) that it wasn’t so much what they were saying, but the order in which they were saying things, and the way in which they said it. Each letter had passed the censors in Vienna because, as far as they were concerned, the sister was merely writing about her cat chasing moths and her love of opera and the apple pastries she had baked that afternoon—simple stories of a crazy-old-cat-lady, cooped up in her house and knitting herself into obscurity.

It was the cat stories that gave it away, actually. We noticed—no, I noticed, damn it—that the cat was an Abyssinian. When I realized that Burnham had been sent on an expedition to Algeria, which was a French colony that had become a bit too friendly with the Germans, things started to fall into place. Especially when the poor cat was "pushed from the window by the moths, taking all its friends with it, and we were lucky to get him back in one piece". Burnham's team was captured in Germany and alone was able to return to France. It was all quite cleverly done, and no one suspected a thing for nearly eighty years. Truth be told, I've still no concrete proof that I didn't make the whole thing up, but it paid the bills for a bit and I got my name in the paper.

Anyway, the point of it all that is that these stories were setting off the same alarm-bells that the story about the cat had when I was working on the diplomat’s letters. There was an emphasis on certain images or themes that seemed far too obvious. Because the rest of the writing was so lyrical, these bits stuck out like someone singing the wrong notes in the Hallelujah Chorus. And thinking about these little dissonances was keeping me from sleeping with the lights on for a month after reading Rutledge’s ravings.

I reached for a pencil on the coffee table and pulled the pages back up against my thigh. Using the side of the pencil that still had lead exposed and grimacing at the teeth marks that dotted the metal band around the eraser, I wrote, as neatly as possible under the circumstances, a heading in the margin:

“Many Deaths + Down/Mountain + Angel”

Drawing a line, I began a shorthand list of the similarities that recalled themselves to me.

“Fire” I wrote, and underlined the “fire somewhere in France”, the “Wicked Man” who was born in the fire, and the Coward who was “left behind with the fire”. Flipping to the back of the story, I drew a big arrow to Barnaby Rutledge’s death in the flame. The arrow wrinkled the paper and when I tried to make it more emphatic, it looked like it had grown hair instead from all the errant lines around it. The Lost Angel had been looking for her love who had been “lost in the fire”. The piano player had looked at his love, I remembered, “and he wished that he had died in the cold or in the flames or in the filth”…

Next on the list, I added “Eyes”. Not just any eyes, I realized. There was someone—or, more to the point, a specific person’s eyes. That Angel in the hospital and the woman in the nightclub…were they the same person? They had both been listening for to a song, and the only feature that Rutledge had felt the need to mention on both of them was…their eyes. And in this one, there was “the salvation that can live in a pair of human eyes”. Not just any eyes, I was willing to bet.

Looking at the word “salvation” gave me a thought, and I added “damnation” to my list. The letters from the Angel’s missing soldier-love talked about those who walked the “circle of the damned”, and the same line was nearly repeated in this story, as well. And there was the continued reference to the ‘Fallen Angel’. I wrote “Lucifer?” beside “damnation”. Then, because I was getting slightly creeped out, I gave the word horns and made an attempt at a forked tail, which much more closely resembled an artistic rendition of a squashed fly. The piano-player—he was in hell by the story’s end, wasn’t he?

Below my mangled devil-word-doodle, I added “salvation—no”. Because each character could see the thing that could save them—usually music of some kind, it would seem, or eyes. Or the release of death. And none of them were able to do more than glimpse it, making the hell in which they existed even crueler.

I frowned at the list and tapped the nibbled pencil against my chin. There was another aspect to Mr. Rutledge’s writing that was bothering me as much as the stories themselves. They made sense. They weren’t stream of consciousness and they weren’t hallucinations or dreams or maniac rantings. They were sane and they were well-written. Barnaby Rutledge wasn’t writing to cure himself of shell-shock; I’d bet the vast majority of my paltry pay check on it. He was writing with a much more definite purpose. I just hadn’t—yet—figured out what it was.

And seeing as how all the libraries in the vicinity would be closed for another six to seven hours, it didn’t seem like I was going to be making much progress in that direction anytime soon. Not to mention the fact that Mitch had rolled over, pinning my legs beneath him.

I thought about kicking my way free and heading to bed. Then I thought about the darkness at the top of the stairs, and the way the wind sometimes made the walls creak like someone was walking along the landing, and decided that I had a very over-active imagination.

“Mitch,” I whispered sternly, “move. Mitch—move! Mitch,” I thunked his arm with the side of my foot, “move.” He made a high, sighing sound and rolled back, liberating my feet, and curled up his legs, leaving me a bit more than a cushion of couch.

“Thanks,” I muttered, and tugged some of the blanket back from his clenched hands. I scooted my perpetually cold feet between his legs and against the couch, hoping his body heat would keep them warm, and tucked my head against the arm of the couch. I shut my eyes and listened to his breathing for a long time before I finally fell asleep, too weary by then to dream about angels or fires or madmen at all.

The Many Deaths of Barnaby Rutledge: Prologue

2010-01-06T21:49:00.000-08:00

The Many Deaths of Barnaby Rutledge

(as transcribed by Mitchell Berenson)

Prologue:

Three men sat huddled before a fire somewhere in France. One was a coward, who was too afraid to live, one was a man who was far too wicked to die, and one man was Barnaby Rutledge.

The Coward had spent the day with a French battalion, organizing the handover of a local trench and thus had nothing to speak about but the smell of burnt sausages and the salacious reading material matted to the walls of the trench and smeared with too-many filthy thumbprints. Every time a shell ruptured the sky, he ducked his head and tried to hide the tremors in his hands and his mouth. But it wasn’t this that made him a Coward. But if I were to tell you all my secrets, there would be no way to keep you near me.

The Wicked Man was, like the fallen angel himself, born in fire and had heard the music of angels, and now inhabited the circles of the damned. There were very few who knew anything of this man’s story, and it was Barnaby Rutledge alone who knew it all. All men will try and gain immortality by telling their story, and there are none so insistent as those into whose eyes Death had stared. Their voices filled the night, lonely souls, seeking the comfort of ghosts. But for these two, it was different. For Barnaby Rutledge had already lived too many lives for one man, and it was in his power alone to save the Angel from the fires into which he was born to perish.

The Coward slept eventually, his naturally dull mind further tamed by the liberal application of French whiskey. He was far too well-bred to snore, but, like all men who had seen war, his sleep was broken by frantic words that even the wind had learned to ignore. And as he slept, the blessed unconsciousness that is the only haven, the Fallen Angel watched the flames, and spoke to Barnaby Rutledge. He explained to him about the songs that the winter whispers in the fall of the snow and showed him the path that is trod by dreams and the limping lope of nightmares, and of the salvation that can live in a pair of human eyes. He told him the truth. For Barnaby Rutledge was to die that night, once again.

Once again and once again.

It happened at dawn, as somehow all deaths must. Barnaby Rutledge and his wicked companion had risen, and were walking through the mud and the stench that was a mockery of farmer’s fields and children’s gardens. The Coward had been left behind in the fire and neither man remaining could even remember his name. They were lost and they were cold and neither had slept in nearly three days. And still, their battalion was no where in site. The earth was filled with men and with parts of men and yet, for all the faces they saw and all the faces they tried not to see, the men for whom they searched remained utterly elusive.

How many do you think there are, whispered Barnaby Rutledge to The Wicked One.

As many as there are grains of sand on the shore, and all of them worth no more than that combined. Came the hushed reply from a dry and rasping throat.

But Barnaby Rutledge knew this could not be. For Barnaby Rutledge could see the men behind the mud and the fear and the blood and the mask of stupid indifference that a life in the earth casts on each face. And it was because Barnaby Rutledge saw a man, or the helmet of one, at least, pass along the top of a nearby ridge that he climbed to the top and peered over. And then the sky was lit with a fire brighter than the dawn; a fire known far too well to the wicked man. Whether the fire came from the sky like an arm of the vengeful sun or from the ground where the demons dwelled who had once been men, no one had time to tell. For before the eye could see the spark or the ear hear the scream of triumph, Barnaby Rutledge was consumed by the fire. And Barnaby Rutledge died, once again.

It was not a sensation he feared, for Death had grown fond of Barnaby Rutledge. There was, indeed, a sort of relief in knowing that the worst that humankind could conceive was not merely tolerable. It was a blessing. For there were so many ways to die in the cloying mud of France. The fire sang and shrieked with joy when it burned, and the sound of its song drowned out the voice of the men. Its heat warmed him in places he didn’t know existed. It made him feel as if he had a soul.

And so Barnaby Rutledge closed his eyes and thought of how his next death should be and from where the fire would next descend. And he studied the eyes of the wicked man below him. He could have saved him, he thought, as the flames traced the blue of his eyes. The Wicked Man watched the fire with guilty envy. And he watched Death take Barnaby Rutledge and lead him away from the trenches and the things that lived in them. And in Death, he saw a familiar face; one that he had known from his first days, but a face that had never looked at him with anything but contempt. And he wondered why it was that he was never permitted to follow. And when the last chorus of the flames had floated away, the wicked man looked at the earth that now held the best of a good man, and he spit and he walked away, alone.

He would find Barnaby Rutledge again, one day, he knew. And he would whisper to him of the song of rain on a windowpane, or the hushed frenzies of dried autumn leaves. And he would watch him die. Once again.

Once again and once again.

Excerpts...

2009-12-05T22:52:00.000-08:00

Days passed, as days have an irritating habit of doing, and before I wasproperly prepared, Thursday arrived once again. I took an extra twenty minutes to settle my hair and poked myself in the eye twice trying to even out my eye shadow, telling myself all the while that I was not trying to impress anyone. At all. I’m a terrible liar.

But Damien never showed up to class. No one had heard from him, so we muddled through a discussion on the importance of uniforms in building identity among national armies, and no one gave me a second look, except for when Sam and I got in a spat over the merits of wool uniforms for infantrymen in the First World War. As we were rising to leave, Professor Bryson made an announcement that next week our meeting would take place in the conference room down the hall, as a new staff member would be moving in and he didn’t want “this group to be disturbing…disturbed. You know. “ And with a wave of an arm encased in some deeply disturbing mauve paisley fabric, we were dismissed.

I spent the rest of the day at work, slogging through a photocopy request that had come through from a patron that no one else wanted to tackle. Which was understandable, considering the fact that it took me the rest of the day to get even halfway through with the order, and in the end I had to call maintenance to bring up more toner so I could finish the rest on Friday. As with all manner of technology, as soon as the machine learned that I was in need of its services, it collapsed in a steaming heap of plastic and inkblots, and it took the vast majority of my day to convince it to act like a man and get the copies in the post.

The thick autumn sunlight outside was warm and I decided a bit of a walk would do me good, so I alighted the bus at Angel and ducked into the Tinderbox in order to fortify myself for the journey. I was standing in line behind a tall, heavyset man and his German Shepherd when a low voice behind me murmured, right in my ear, “And here I was, just looking for a friendly face.”

Being me means being very jumpy in crowds, and thus reacting very badly to chance meetings. Having had no sense that there was anyone at all behind me to begin with, I spun around, far more startled than any normal person would ever be, and found myself staring into a pair of familiar blue-gray eyes.

“Ned! I…oh. Hi. How…uh…hi.”

“Did I startle you? I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean...”

“No, no!” I tried again, wishing there was a way to discreetly kick myself. “I just…” I waved a hand and tried to look vaguely coordinated. And failed. “Didn’t expect to see you…here, I mean. Just surprised.”

“I’ll have to sneak up on you more often then.” He winked, his smile stretching as my face grew hot. He really was quite easy on the eyes, especially with that smile. Which made the whole situation ten times worse. It was difficult enough to talk with someone who was so socially at ease without becoming tongue-tied with jealousy. Being distracted by those eyes and that secret little smile was not in any way what the situation required.

“Spectacular,” I replied dryly.

“Can I help you?” The man behind the counter tapped his finger testily against the metal pitcher in his hand, making the milk thermometer clunk loudly in response.

“Large skinny latte,” I replied automatically.

“Make it two,” Damien interjected, and the man nodded briskly and set about steaming and brewing.

“So where were you yesterday?” I turned back, trying to slow my heartbeat, which was pounding in my ears so loudly that I could hardly hear his first few words.

“Uh…right.” He ducked his head. “I completely lost track of time and by the time I realized where I should be,” he shrugged and his eyes crinkled into a smile, “I figured showing up would just make things worse.”

“I see,” I replied, not entirely convinced.

He took an infinitesimal step closer.

“Miss me?”

My mouth opened, but before anything asinine could fall out, the man behind the counter set two cardboard cups before us. Damien paid for both and handed one to me. “The least I can do after stalking you.” He winked again and I followed him back onto the street, hoping the breeze would dampen the heat in my cheeks.

“Well, I can’t say it was the most stimulating class I’ve ever attended, so don’t feel bad,” I prevaricated. “I could get you my notes, if you think you’d like them.”

“Might not be a bad idea,” he said distantly, watching a few commuters hustle past the wall against which he had propped himself. When he turned back to me, his eyes stopped at the bag on my shoulder and his eyebrows lifted slowly.

I had visions of bird stains, of gaping holes; hell, at the rate this exchange was going, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn I was spontaneously combusting. With mounting trepidation, I looked to my left and saw my museum ID swinging from the strap of my bag.

“Sorry…didn’t mean to stare. I just had no idea you worked there.”

“No worries.”

“Sounds perfect for you.”

“Not far from it, at any rate,” I smiled.

“What do you do?”

“I catalogue new First World War acquisitions—letters, diaries, that kind of stuff.”

“Jesus, seriously, that sounds perfect.” He sipped his coffee and watched my smile intently. “Oh! Speaking of which,” he rolled his own bag from his shoulder to the ground and knelt beside it, ruffling through several bunches of loose paper before extracting a small pile of photocopied sheets stapled together. “I copied those stories I was telling you about. If—you’d still like to read them.”

For an instant, he looked unsure of himself; but I put out my hand and took the stack. His hand was cool and dry when it brushed my own.

The top of the page was headed with Early 20^th Century Fiction: An Anthology. The shadows on the photocopies suggested they were made from a hardcover book, and the traceries of cracks and folds made me fairly sure the book had not been a new one.

“There’s only two of them, but it’s a start.” I was saying, as I flipped through the pages. “I’d love to find some more—it would make the rest of the paper so much better.”

I started to tell him about my find at the museum, about the other Barnaby Rutledge stories I’d found, about the letters that might contain more information or further leads. Then, with a stab of guilt, I bit my lip. I had already started thinking of Rutledge as mine, and the idea of sharing him so soon was not one I was willing to tolerate.

“I’ll keep my eyes out for something,” I said instead.

“I’ve tried before,” he zipped his bag and settled it across his shoulder once again. “It’s like he just…I don’t know. Disappeared, or something.”

“How bizarre.”

“I know. Sometimes, I wonder—“

A cell phone began chirping urgently. With practiced ease, Damien shifted his cup to his other hand and extracted a phone from his pocket. It was sleek and chrome and looks incredibly efficient.

“Damn. I need to run,” he said, staring at the blinking screen. “But you’ll have to let me know what you think of those.” He nodded towards the stories and a lock of hair tumbled into his eyes. He shook it away and his eyes locked on mine. “Sometime next week, alright?”

I nodded, and felt heat tingle through my hand as I held my own cup tighter and tighter.

“Excellent.” He smiled that charmingly bemused smile at me. “I’ll try to be a better stalker and not scare you to death next time, ok?”

I laughed. “Fair enough.”

He jogged across the street and headed into the network of streets by St. Michael’s Church, while I sagged into the wall and grinned like an idiot.

That night, after Mitch got home and showered away the stale smoke and fug of other people’s colognes, we made Flingpot for dinner in his house. Flingpot, you see, involves collecting all the potentially perishable things in the refrigerator and flinging them in a pot. That night, our Flingpot consisted of basmati rice, red peppers, mushrooms, broccoli and cloves, and was remarkably edible. Especially considering the other combinations of Flingpot we’d tried in the past…

While cleaned up, I filled Mitch in on my run-in with Damien and the new Barnaby Rutledge stories he’d provided.

“Hmm,” Mitch tapped a spoon against the inside of the metal sink, clearly delighted by the hollow clunking sound it produced. “I’d keep an eye on him, Kip.” He grinned wickedly. “He’s clearly got his on you.”

I threw a sponge at him.

“We’re changing the subject.”

Mitch rolled his eyes and flicked an errant soap smudge from his sweater.

“Very well,” he sighed dramatically. “What about the Rutledge bloke’s stories?”

“No idea. Haven’t looked at them as yet.”

“Good. I’m too tired to watch a film. You can read to me.”

So we tramped across to my house, which had more furniture, and Mitch sprawled out on the divan, his bright eyes fixed on the photocopies in my hands.

“Go on then. What’s it say?”

“Well, the introductory stuff says that Rutledge was in the First World War…apparently saw action at Ypres in 1915, the Dardanelles, the Somme….Jesus, back to Ypres in 1917—how the hell did he manage all that? –And was taken prisoner in the winter of 1917-8. Treated for shell-shock—little surprise there—and began writing in order to “expunge the memories of the horrors from his mind.” Apparently, he suffered severe insomnia and most of his descriptions of the people in the hospitals were taken from real life, observed at night while they slept.”

“How awful,” Mitch breathed.

“I know. Let’s see… released from Queens Square National Hospital in 1926 and published continually until his death in 1941. No mention of any private life, though…hmm… Listen to this: ”His departure from our workaday world is a tragedy among tragedies. Alone, without family and with only the specters of his past for company, Mr. Rutledge’s works are terrifying, entrancing reminders of the darkness that is possessed in every human soul. His writing probes the secrets in all our hearts and sings a siren’s song of madness that every heart can, in some way, understand.”

“Well, if that wasn’t histrionic, I don’t know what is.”

I grinned distractedly. “Agreed. But did you hear that? ‘His departure from the world.’ Not ‘his death’.”

“Just a quaint little euphemism, isn’t it?”

“Is it? That Wikipedia entry said he might have faked his death.”

“Do you listen to yourself sometimes? A Wikipedia article?”

“I know, I know. But it is interesting.”

“No, I suppose you’re right. It is odd. And he had a family somewhere, too.”

“Good point.”

“So what stories are there?”

There were two. One was entitled “Down from the Mountain”, and was a retelling of a sorts of Rip Van Winkle. In this version, a soldier is released from a POW camp in Germany and finds himself in an utterly changed, utterly alien world: “Women walked about dressed as men and men sat is metal chairs with vacant eyes and useless limbs.” The man finds work at a restaurant where he plays the piano while the strange, unknowable people eat: “They consumed their food, they talked and they lived with a strange, frenzied haste, as if they knew everything before them could be obliterated. Life had to be lived at a pace that kept time with the scream of bombs and the march of boots. And in his corner, The Man tapped at his keys and marked their time for them, all the while wondering if the horrors he had escaped were not quite as frightening as the world into which he had been freed.”

In the end, The Man sees a woman he had loved from before the war. He tried to play a song for her that will make her remember him:

And whatever was left of his stained soul called out to whatever was left in her that could still be called human. And as he played, he heard the wind sigh in trees that had been burned to ashes years before, and the laughter of children long since dead, and felt the heat of the sun on skin, which, for an instant was smooth and young and nearly beautiful. And she turned her head and looked at him and he wished that he had died in the cold or in the flames or in the filth. For there was nothing in her eyes but vacant fear. The soul he had known was gone and she was one of Them.”

“My Lord,” Mitch huffed as he rolled over, his long fingers brushing at the fringe of the blanket over the back of the divan. “He can make anything sound like a nightmare, can’t he.”

I nodded, thinking of the Lost Angel from the last story and the song she had heard in the shadows of the ward. There was a odd feeling of continuation in the two stories that made my skin tingle.

“I mean,” Mitch propped himself up and pointed to the page. “How do you think like that? Are you born that…dark? That fucked up? Or…”

What had that other story said? That the fiancé was “lost in the great fire of 1917”. Not killed. Taken prisoner.

“Or did he become like this?” He looked up at me, the echo of my question on his face.

The other story had mentioned her eyes, too. Vacant eyes. And this woman was silent, too.

“Read the next one.” He said, rolling over onto his back once again and folding his arms around him. “Not like I can be any more disturbed, right?”

My mother would have called them “Famous last words”.

The italic introduction noted that the second story was taken from Rutledge’s 1940 book, The Many Deaths of Barnaby Rutledge. “Perhaps the most well-known of Rutledge’s works,” the introduction explained, “it has never been determined how much of the stories in this collection were taken from the author’s experience and how much was a product of imagination or hearsay. What is certainly true is that, of all of Rutledge’s stories, these are the most realistic and, perhaps, the most simplistic. In the following, Rutledge seeks not to trap the reader in a nightmare, but to lay before them the truth, which, under his pen, is equally as chilling and labyrinthine.”

The except was only five pages long…

"The Lost Angel"

2009-10-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

As the day remained sunny and not entirely unsummery, I got off the 76 around Southgate Road and began the walk back home. I was eager to read the Rutledge manuscript, but if my inner six-year-old would sit still a lot longer if I tired her out a bit first. Like a true New Englander, I could feel rain in the wind, which would mean confinement to a fug-filled bus full of damp and grumpy Londoners, so I decided to enjoy the open air as long as possible.

My cell phone began buzzing in my backpack, rattling against my keys and causing a racket loud enough to make a passing jogger turn and regard me warily as I swung the bag over my shoulder and fumbled to extract the phone.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?”

“Nearly home. You?”

“Just finishing up here.”

“Where is here?”

“Covent Garden.” The blare of a truck horn bellowed down the line and I heard Mitch’s muttered curse before he continued. “Some American family gave me fifteen pounds!”

I giggled. “Someone didn’t read the exchange rate properly, me thinks.”

“I’m not complaining, but I don’t want to be around when they figure it out for themselves. Anyway, you want burritos for dinner?’

“Have I mentioned to you lately that I think you are wonderful?”

I could hear him snicker. “Not in the past few hours, ungrateful thing that you are.”

“How about I let you pick the movie, then?”

Neither of our families had seen it as worthwhile to pay for a TV license in a house in which they were no longer residing, and the two of us decided we’d be damned—or starving—if we forked over it. So we watched one hell of a lot of movies. And ate a great many burritos from this new place in Islington that had given out free food the day it opened and got us both hooked. In the seven or eight weeks we’d been—co-habitating, I guess is the best word—Mitch and I had watched nearly a hundred movies and I’m sure the mail-rental company was kicking themselves that we were getting charged a flat monthly rate to rob them blind.

“Whatever came in today is fine. Chicken for you?”

“Yuppers. No beans, extra cheese.”

“Sounds good. I’ll probably be back by seven—ok?”

“Perfect.”

“I think I’m about to be hit by a bus.”

And he hung up.

Thanks, Mitch.

I pushed open the door to the house and gathered up the mail that had accumulated on the floor, adding it to the trash bag hanging behind the kitchen door, tossing the next delivery of DVDs on the living room coffee table, and put the kettle on for tea. Ten minutes later saw me in my ratty black sweatpants and an enormous t-shirt I had inherited at some point in my wanderings, curled up on the sofa beside a large mug of tea and tucking into the photocopies of what looked to be Barnaby Rutledge’s last manuscript.

I should have known I was in for something strange as soon I read the author’s note on the second page:

Author’s Note:

These stories, like so many of the others, are all true, for there is no story written that is not in some way the confession of a truth. The face of the confessor is unimportant, for in revealing his tale, he ceases to become unique and instead joins the procession of human smoke that rises from the ashes of history and disappears without trace. It is only I, who am watching you now, as ever, who remains.

BR.

“Holy hell,” I muttered, laying the sheet face down on the coffee table before looking down at the one beneath it.

Dedication:

For the one who has never left me.

I pulled the blanket on the back of the couch over my legs and shimmied down beneath it, as if hiding.

The stories were all set in a ward in a national hospital somewhere in London. A nurse on the night watch was walking from bed to bed and checking on the men who slept—or didn’t—on each. As she looked at them, another story began, whether of their childhood, their wartime experience, or whatever specific memory defined them and defined the cause of their madness.

They were beautifully well-written, with long, elegant sentences that made you feel like there was someone, tall and thin and wasted, who was curled up beside you and whispering in your ear. And because it was so graceful, it was all the more frightening. The beauty of it transfixed you, and by the time you realized what this crazed man had done to his characters—or what they had done to him, since it seemed that it was their combined madness that had sent him to this imaginary hall lunacy—it was too late to look away. Despite the residual heat of the day, I was curled up under the blanket and the fringes of it were dusting my face by the time I was a third of the way through the stories.

The one that stuck with me the most was the one in the middle, a kind of intermission in this insane literary circus. It was the story of the nurse herself, who looked in at each of the men in the ward. Rutledge described her as “too tall for delicacy and eyes just a little too wide-set and wide for beauty, with a tide of dark hair curling behind her ears and small, childlike hands. Standing in the doorway, a man might be fooled into believing her an angel of mercy in that hall of tormented spirits. But one look at those eyes showed that she was nothing more than a ghost herself, a soul, like all the others, frozen in another time and forced forever to hide in the darkness of memory.”

The other stories told of violence, of angry death or shouted curses that had chased these men into this ward. The Nurse’s story (we never learn her name. She is only referred to as “The Nurse”, or “The Lost Angel”, which is also the title of the story) was different. She had grown up nearly mute, speaking only when there was no other way of communicating, and no one was nearby to speak for her. It wasn’t that she was afraid or unable to speak, it was that “words held no power over her”, which seemed utterly contradictory to me. That a woman created with words could refuse the power of them made her somehow disturbing, and yet, infinitely more real than the other characters. It was as if she had managed to break free of the author’s control and was wandering around the book of her own free will. Anyway, she was loved by a man (who also had no name) who had written her a tune on the piano, since she refused to hear any spoken declaration of his feelings for her. They had been engaged when the war broke out, and had both enlisted, he as a Captain and she as a nurse. He was lost in “the great fire of 1917”, which I could only assume was 3rd Ypres, more commonly known as the Battle of Passchendale.

The man who loved her had written her several letters from the battle, telling her of the horrors of the trenches and of the lunatic beauty of shells exploding at night and the “exquisite horror of treading the circles of the damned”. In truth, he sounded like the maddest of them all. When she had opened the letter, she had begun to hear his song playing on the air, and assumed him to be dead. When no telegram arrived, and no news of his injury or capture was forthcoming, she had burned the letter. The music had sounded from the flames. Now, wherever she went, “she was followed by the cadence of a melody she knew better than her own soul”. The reason she was in the ward, peering in at all these men, was in the hopes of finding her fiancé among them. But there was no recognition in any of the dull eyes before her. She never spoke—indeed, it was assumed by most of the men that she was unable to speak.

“But what use were words,” Rutledge asked at the end of the story, “crude, useless words that could speak only of mud and of death and of pain, when in her head played endlessly the promise of paradise and the lost wonder of eternity?”

It was melodramatic, yes, and perhaps a little more dated than the others because of the nature of its subject matter, but I was shivering when I had finished reading it. The room seemed filled with ghosts and with ghostly music and try as I might, I couldn’t help but hear the footsteps of that silent, haunted nurse, forever treading the halls, searching for something she would never…

“Do you want to eat in here or in the kitchen?”

I let out a yelp and tumbled off the couch.

“What the—are you alright?”

“When the hell did you come in?”

“Like, five minutes ago—didn’t you hear me say “Hi Kip, I have dinner?”

The smell of spiced chicken and peppers began to waft across the room and I sat up, disentangling myself from the blanket and blinking at Mitch.

“No, actually. Jesus, you scared me.”

“Sorry. What are you reading, then?”

I held up the book and gave him a brief explanation of the stories while we carried plates and glasses into the living room. I tucked Mr. Rutledge back into his folder, slid him back into my bag, and settled back down on the couch with Mitch’s laptop on the coffee table between us.

“My, my. Sounds like a charming subject matter. So—what’s come in, then?” He asked, tucking into his burrito with gusto.

“Umm…” I giggled. “My Fair Lady and The Green Mile. What the hell?”

“Mmm…My Fair Lady. Audrey Hepburn’s better looking than Tom Hanks.”

“Fair enough.”

We sat, chewing and singing along at intervals, and I expressed the wish that all lower-middle class workers in England really did burst into song at every opportunity. The group dances would make economic history much more interesting. Mitch snorted and turned up the volume to drown out my ruminations.

Do you know the scene where Higgins brings Eliza to the races and she goes on and on about how her aunt died of influenza—“fairly blue with it, she was”? If you do, take a look at the way Freddie looks at her while she’s giving that little speech. That, I realized belatedly, was the same way Ned had been looking at me while I was rambling on earlier that afternoon. And I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it, even as I felt a furious blush rising to my cheeks.

“So tell me,” Mitch said, as the ‘intermission’ played, “how did you manage to find this mad Mr. Rutledge?”

“I met a guy in one of my classes who is working on his as part of his dissertation. He said he’d loan me some, but we had this at the museum and I figured I’d—“

“Wait, wait, wait. You ‘met a guy’?” I thought Mitch’s eyebrows were going to raise themselves right off his forehead. “As in ‘met a guy’?”

“What?”

“You know what I mean!” He poked one absurdly strong finger into my arm.

“Ow, you maniac! No—I mean…well, we did go out for coffee.”

“Alright, do you want me to alert the media, or just your mother?”

I swatted at him. “It’s nothing! Just—“ and he burst out laughing.

“Whatever you say, Miss Philby.” The ‘intermission’ scene faded and Rex Harrison began stalking across the screen once more.

“Funny,” Mitch mumbled through the last few bites of burrito. “I would have assumed poetry or something to get a nice girl to notice you, not a bunch of awful madmen in a war hospital.” He sniggered. “This bloke must have you down to a tee.”

Meeting Mr. Rutledge

2009-10-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

Since work was just up the street from the coffee shop, I managed to get to my desk just south of on time, and by the time Rich, the head archivist, came back from his stint in the reading room, I was hard at work on the next diary in my stack of pending documents.

When I say ‘hard at work’, I really mean ‘making a genuine effort at appearing interested at the words before me’—in order to hide the fact that I couldn’t get the idea of this Barnaby Rutledge character out of my mind. It wasn’t that the diary I had in front of me wasn’t interesting—on the contrary, actually. It had been written by a 19-year-old private who had been trying to make a career in journalism before the war, and saw his diary as the prototype for a series of articles, or possibly a biography, when he returned home. Consequently, his entries were full of exclamation points and underlined phrases and some delightedly lurid descriptions of rats and corpses, up until mid-September 1915, just after his battalion had been sent to Egypt with the that it would assist with the attack on the Dardanelles. Then came the entry:

Found the body of Lieutenant Allington outside the camp this morning. His clothes were singed and filthy and the skin below his nose and around his lips was black with soot. According to Captain Fitz., he had a leave pass last night and was going into Cairo. Final verdict is that he was killed by Arabs, dirty dark scoundrels. Though where he received the burns, no one could say.

It is odd that the sight of corpses by the stacks has had little effect, but the sight of one man who one has respected and regarded and who was kind to one and perhaps, in a different world, a man who one might call ‘Friend’—the sight of that can turn one completely cold and sick. That he should fall even before the battle seems like an injustice beyond measure. Such a brave man, too. The fellows were telling me of his work in the pyramids before the war and how he was to be married next year.

Am thoroughly sick of this whole business.

Shortly after this incident, the battalion was returned to France without seeing action at Gallipoli. After that, Pte. Sheldon really did seem to lose most of his fighting spirit, though his eye for detail made the rest of his experiences quite interesting reading. He never did get to publish them, if you’re wondering. He was killed during the German Spring Offensive, sometime after March 25, 1918, as that was the last entry. He had given his diary to his best friend to hold for him, and it was because of the friend that the diary was returned to the family. The author’s body was never recovered.

As much as I tried to give him the attention he deserved, with every turn of the page, every pause to decipher a scrawled phrase, my mind turned back to Damien and, more importantly, to the mysterious Barnaby Rutledge. Personally, I was intrigued. Professionally, I was furious. There were few things in this world that I can say for a fact that I know. Up until that day, the First World War was one of those things. To have this near-stranger upstage me was galling, to say the least.

Finally, I was forced to make my apologies to Private Sheldon and turn my attention to my cinder-block of a computer that was wheezing and grumbling on the corner of my desk. I opened the internet and something inside the massive monitor whirred angrily. Eventually, the homepage of the Museum wavered into view and I typed “Barnaby Rutledge” into the little search bar at the top.

And my embarrassment abated somewhat. Amid the almost humorously erroneous hits from Google (among them a law firm of Corliss, Whittemore and Rutledge, a Facebook listing for a Barbara Rutledge and a series of photos of someone’s one-eyed dog who was apparently named Barnaby), there was one Wikipedia entry headed ‘Barnaby Rutledge’. And I swallowed all my professional pride, and I clicked on the link.

I was met with two lines of information, with the disclaimer that the following information was a ‘stub’, but that I could help Wikipedia by expanding it with my own information. Muttering dark threats to whatever entity had conceived of truth by majority consensus, I read the following:

“Barnaby Rutledge (1892-1941?): Was a British writer and poet who wrote a number of short stories and novellas based on his experiences in the First World War, and later in several clinics where soldiers received treatment for shell-shock and neurasthenia. Though selectively popular in the inter-war period, Rutledge’s notoriety declined significantly following his presumed death during the Blitz in London. Though his death was reported, his body was never recovered and there were claims that he may have staged his own death.”

Below this was a list of anthologies of his works. There was one book that was published before the war entitled "Winds of Autumn", but no other information on it was availble. The rest had suitably ominous titles like “The Face in the Shadows” (1924) and “Whispers of the Dead” (1926).

“People don’t just disappear.” I snapped at the screen.

“What was that?” Rich’s coppery-blonde head leaned out from behind the stack of folders on his desk, and his eyes held a weary smile.

“Nothing,” I jumped slightly, forgetting there was someone else in the office. “Just looking for someone—say, have you ever heard of a writer named Barnaby Rutledge?”

“The crazy bloke?” And Rich’s face assumed that very solemn expression it always did when the conversation strayed to the First World writers. It was one of my favorite of his idiosyncrasies. “We have a few of his manuscripts, you know.”

“Am I the only person on this earth who has never heard of him?”

Rich laughed quietly. “Not at all. I don’t think they’ve ever been requested since…well, maybe once since I’ve been here, but that was at least—oh, a decade ago? Maybe?” He shook his head. “He was mad, that one.”

“How so?”

“Go get him off the shelf. Take a look for yourself.”

“I will. Do you know anything about what happened to him?”

“Oooh! What happened to who?”

Lily, the exhibition liaison, had bounced into the room, her auburn curls swirling around her ears, an enormous green mug of tea in her tiny hands.

“Did you ever hear of Barnaby Rutledge?” Rich leaned back in his chair so he could see both of us over the Babel of papers around him, and I knew that all work has ceased for the time being.

Lily shook her head and the eyes behind her glasses widened eagerly. “Nope. Don’t think so. Is it a good story?”

“Might just be at that.” Rich grinned. “He wrote these stories after the war, apparently from Maghull—“

“Oooh…that can’t have been fun.” She sipped her tea and tucked one leg beneath the other on her chair.

Lily is a master at the art of understatement. Maghull one of several national hospitals established to treat mental cases from the First World War. If you’ve heard of any of them, most likely you’ve heard of Craiglockhart, the immortal sanctuary of Siegfried Sassoon and WIlfred Owen and headed by the saintly William Rivers. But Craiglockhart was an exclusive hospital for officers that used what was considered at the time to be very avant-garde treatment methods (which included talking to the patient about his feelings and experiences). The vast majority of cases, mostly ordinary men of the ranks, were sent to places like Maghull—places that were overlooked by the authorities because of the nature of the patients who were treated there and disregarded by the press. Other hospitals could repair heroes, could give men back their arms and legs and heal their courageous bodies. Maghull, and Queens Square and others like then, by contrast, treated men whose minds were injured, and there is never a way to prove that a mind, once warped by trauma, could ever be healed—or that a man who had been sent home from war for nightmares and visions was not simply too cowardly to face reality. I remembered that Maghull had also gained attention because of its almost non-existent sanitation policies and that fact that patients were required to act as orderlies when the staff was struck by the influenza pandemic in the 1920’s.

“Not so much,” Rich’s voice broke across my thoughts. “I don’t know who the hell published them—or, for that matter, who read the things, but they were apparently quite popular up until the mid-thirties or so.”

“But you know what happened to him?” I pressed, and Lily leaned forward, sensing more gossip.

“How do you mean?”

“Well,” I nodded at the computer, which clicked and hummed and belched overheated air in response, “the only thing I could find on him said he disappeared in 1941.”

“Really?” Rich’s brow furrowed. “I thought he was killed in the Blitz.”

“According to the omnipotent Wikipedia,” I lectured drolly, “he was ‘said to have been killed’ in 1941,” I made liberal use of air quotes, “but that some think he faked his own death.”

“Maybe he went mad.” Lily whispered dramatically.

“I doubt it was a long trip,” Rich’s flicked a sardonic glance over and she giggled. “I also think someone on Wikipedia had one too many before writing that. I do know that we got those manuscripts in—maybe ’82? From his housekeeper, I think. They were up in an attic and she wanted them kept safe. He was definitely dead by then.”

“His housekeeper? No family, then?”

Rich raised his eyebrows. “You read those stories. Then tell me if you think anyone would be mad enough to marry him.” Footsteps sounded in the hall and he leaned forward, giving the appearance to any who might pass by that he was far too busy to be interrupted. “But don’t complain to me if you have nightmares afterwards.”

I turned back to my computer and politely tapped the space bar to awake it. It blinked to life with a heavy sigh. I requested the museum’s catalogue and twenty minutes or so later, the query window opened and I typed in ‘Rutledge, Barnaby’.

I blinked.

There were two entries.

The first was the one Rich had described: A collection of five short stories, typed, but with handwritten notations, written presumably between 1918 and 1926, when the author was receiving treatment for neurasthenia at Maghull and Queens Square Hospitals, dealing with his memories of his service in several different battalions during the First World War (including a battalion in the Manchester Regiment), that were published in 1941 as "Watches of the Night".

The other was a pending collection that was not yet available to the public. The only information in the database was that it was a series of correspondence addressed to a Lieutenant L.N. Thomas from 1914 to 1917, that included letters from his family, several musicians whose names I didn’t recognize, and a few writers, including a number from Barnaby Rutledge.

“Rich?” I said without turning.

“Hmmmmm?”

“Do you have the Thomas Correspondence Collection around there somewhere?”

“Umm…” He began flipping through the folders on his desk, and then moved to the filing cabinet behind his chair. “The one that came in a few months ago, right? Yeah,” he held up a fat blue folder that was swollen with letters still in their envelopes and the hairy ends of torn sheets of paper. “You want it?”

“I think so. There’s a Rutledge listing in there.” I tapped the diary before me. “When I finished with poor Sheldon here—yeah. I’ll take it.”

“Fine by me.”

With this added incentive, I finished reading Private Sheldon’s diary by 4:15, and by 4:30 had written a catalogue description that would be added to the database once he had been put in a proper folder and settled on a shelf in the stacks. I spent the next half hour rummaging around for the Rutledge Collection, which turned out to be about 75 pages of surprisingly good-quality paper that were clearly intended for a publisher. The stack was headed by a letter, typed on the same typewriter and dated 17 October 1941:

Dear Melvyn,

Here, as requested, is the next batch of tales. Do what you will with them.

I have one more here—not like these. This is longer and a bit less horrid, but infinitely more true. There is someone else who must approve it first, but if you think there’s a market, do let me know.

Best Always,

B.R.

At the bottom, in a quick, angular hand was “Would lunch on Friday suit?”

I was able to photocopy the stack before the museum security came to turn off the lights at 5:30pm (the number of times one of us in the Department had left the lights on overnight and necessitated a security check in the wee hours meant that we were quickly relieved of that task). Carefully, I tucked the folder back into its box and shoved the papers into my bookbag before heading off to my bus stop by Waterloo Station. On the way, I passed the coffee shop where Damien and I had sat just hours before, and smiled, suddenly unspeakably grateful to the mysterious Mr. Rutledge.

Marx, Damien and Barnaby Rutledge

2009-09-24T02:49:00.000-07:00

Our class meeting for War and Imperialism that day was a lot of preliminary discussions the need of empires to expand, the nature of Capitalism and a great deal of Marxist, proto-Marxist, neo-Marxist and pseudo-Marxist theory that made me want to grind my teeth right out of my head. I respect the man’s ideas enormously, don’t get me wrong; but I hate the way he reduces all the humans in his philosophies to bees in a hive. Unfeeling, unthinking entities that exist, perform their role and die. There is no room for human greed (outside of the greed for money), lust, love, generosity—no room for all those quirky, irrational and spontaneous emotions and actions that make humans….well, human. And don’t even get me started on how many times people felt thing in the course of this discussion.

The two most overused words in the English language in this current age of individual expression are “I feel”. It is not simply enough anymore to “think” something, to “know” something, or to “doubt” something. According to Lydia, “I feel that Marx’s theories about slave labor do not take into account the dual dependencies of the slave and the master adequately.” Similarly, according to Caroline, “I feel that the concept of Capitalism as a finite entity is,” here she stopped, moved her hands around in large circles and never properly finished her thought. Or feeling, as the case may be.

“I know what you mean.” Sam jumped into the gap left in the conversation. “I feel that the progression from Capitalism to Communism isn’t thoroughly explored in any of the writings we were assigned.”

I jammed the nib of my fountain pen into the paper of my notebook so hard that the tip split and ink began to dribble out of the pen and down the page, a line of aqua-green blood that dried presently into a comet-shaped stain on the margin of my notes.

“Well,” said a low, measured voice from across the small room, “I think we might be missing the fact that this is a guideline—a hypothesis, if you will—more than it is a blueprint for the way of the future.”

I looked up and caught Ned staring directly at me, a small smile lifting the corner of his mouth. And I felt a great sense of relief knowing that there was someone else in the room with a suitable grasp of the English language. And I thought about his invitation for coffee after class and then I felt an enormous wave of trepidation hit me squarely in the solar plexus.

I don’t do coffee. I don’t do pleasant conversation. And dear God, I don’t flirt. I don’t understand the complex dance of body language and spoken words, or the rules of who calls whom and when and how one folds ones hand to express interest, or the way a blink can alert someone to another’s intentions…the whole thing is just some kind of over-elaborate mating dance that makes little, if any sense to me, and I wish fervently that we could all just evolve past it and move on. If he wanted to talk about tank formations at the Battle of Cambrai, or the proper method for removing oil stains from cloth-bound books, I’d be fine. But looking at that smile. I knew this wasn’t going to be a business meeting. And I knew that this couldn’t end well.

All too soon, our post-modern meeting about Marx, which by now had the air of a self-help group with the amount of feelings being thrown around, ended. I slid my notebook back into my bag, tucked by still-weeping pen into the side pocket and grabbed the shoulder strap, swinging the bag over my head as I stood up. And nearly collided with Ned who was standing next to my chair.

“Oh—hi!” I said, breathless for no good reason.

“Hello.” He did the grinning thing again. “You still up for that coffee?”

“Definitely. I have work at 2pm, but I’m free ‘til then.” I replied, wondering what rabbit had gained control of my speech and motor functions as we walked down the seven flights of stairs to the ground level and negotiated our way out of the building.

“Do you have a preference?” Ned slid his hands into his pockets and looked over to me.

“Not especially.” I figured shorter sentences were probably best for now.

“There’s a nice quiet place just behind the National…fancy a bit of a walk?’

“Sounds great.” I smiled genuinely. The view from Waterloo Bridge is one of my favorites in the whole city. From one side, you can see St. Paul’s, the lazy curves of 30 St. Mary’s Axe (more familiarly known as the Gherkin after some reporters squinted too hard and decided it looked more like a pickle than a massive lipstick, or, more accurately, a disturbingly-large Freudian slip plunked down in the middle of the City), and a scattering of cranes along the horizon, rising up like ghostly question marks over the city. On the other side, you have Parliament, the London Eye (which gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies just to watch) and the MI-6 Building, which frankly looks like an enormous Lego-creation squatting in front of the Thames. It’s beautiful view of all those lovely, odd things that make you realize quite definitely where you are, and how fiendishly small you are in comparison.

It’s also one of the most perversely windy parts of the City, a fact that escaped me until we were actually on and bridge and a blast of air grabbed all my hair and shoved it in my face. When I tried to sweep it back, it merely whipped back around my head, tangling and snarling together in a knot behind my right ear. I glanced surreptitiously at Ned, who was scanning the horizon over St. Paul’s. The fringes of his already unruly mob of hair fluttered and fell, framing his face and those sharp, dark eyes. The world is full of injustice.

By the time we reached the opposite bank, I was groping for the elastic band around my wrist and trying to rake my hair into some kind of knot at the back of my head to obscure the fact that it now looked like a bale of tumbleweed had somehow managed to fix itself to my scalp. Catching a quite half-reflection of the two of us in a bus-stop shed, I saw with grateful relief that I had managed to look human one again, and noticed Ned put a hand to his hair, ruffle it a few times and watched it settle perfectly. I don’t get it.

“So what did you think of class?” He asked as we descended the bridge to the South Bank.

“Umm…I’m sure it will be interesting soon.” I said diplomatically.

“Marx not really your thing? Just up here…”

We walked past the entrance to the National Theatre and crossed the road to a little coffee shop set into an overpass.

“Not so much. I respect him and all, but…I don’t know. It’s just too—clinical? Does that make sense?”

He tilted his head and squinted at me. “Maybe—tell me more. After you tell me what you’re having.”

“Oh…coffee’s fine. Black, please.” Two textured cardboard cups were soon pushed across the counter in our direction and Ned scooped them up with practiced ease and carried them to a table outside.

“So—Marx?”

“Oh, right.” I sat, and wrapped my hands around the cup to keep them from doing anything stupid, and took a deep breath of the caffeinated steam billowing up around my face. “I don’t know. It’s just…I have a hard time with people who think they can define human behavior. I think you were completely right to say that his stuff is just a hypothesis, but…it’s still so—formulaic….I don’t know.”

“You don’t think humans are predictable and definable?”

I grinned at the table. “I think individuals are ridiculously predictable. Or at least under most circumstances.” It had taken years to figure out, but everyone has something that makes them tick, and if you can find it, you can figure them out, at least on a basic level. It did, however, require a massive amount of energy to remember each person’s individual quirks and tailor my behavior around them. Which is one of the main reasons I hate crowds and am so terrible about meeting new people. I needed to get him to do some more talking if this little exchange had any hopes of survival.

“But….” He tilted his head again, “but more than irrational, people are selfish. They’re not going to consider their place in the Proletariat if they are starving. Don’t get me wrong, there are those who will. But there’s a reason that they get into history books. They’re few and far between.”

“Very high opinion of your species there, Miss Philby.” He grinned.

I shrugged. “I don’t think it makes any sense to put the essential element of historic study on a pedestal. If you’re going to study humans, you need to accept the fact that they are lazy and selfish and messy and generally do a lot of ugly and unpredictable things, or you’re going to get very jaded very quickly.”

I looked up. He was still smiling, but he had this look of confused amusement in his eyes, as if he didn’t quite know what to make of me yet. But he seemed to be enjoying himself, I thought, with a renewed sense of belief.

“So what is it that you study, specifically?” He asked before I could frame a question to force him to talk.

“Me? First World War.”

He snickered into his cup. “Doesn’t get much messier or uglier than that.”

“But it’s a prime example of my point. People under pressure don’t always react the way you assume they will. And very often, it’s those people who determine the way the story ends, not the people who toed the line.” I bit my lip, knowing I was tottering on the precipice. If the conversation wanders anywhere close to the First World War, and I become very seriously verbally incontinent. “But what about you?”

“Hmmm?”

“What are you studying?” It was an awkward transition, but my jaw was starting to hurt.

“History of literature.”

“You already said that.” Stellar, Philby. “Anything more specific?”

He gave me that look again. “I think I’m going to be working on the history of writing about battle-stress….if that makes any sense.”

“Tell me more.”

“Well,” set his cup down and leaned forward, settling his elbows on his knees and looking over at me through his eyelashes. “I was thinking of looking at the way people with battle-stress—shell-shock, post-traumatic stress disorder, whatever you want to call it—the way they write about their experience and how their mental state affects their writing.”

I unabashedly gaped. “That…sounds incredible.”

He blinked. “Really?”

“My undergraduate work was on shell-shock, actually, so—yeah.” He beamed. “What books are you looking at?” I put my hands back around the cup and told myself to sit still.

“Well, I was thinking of Tim O’Brien’s stuff, like The Things They Carried, and maybe Catch-22 or some of the Russian stuff from World War Two, and for the First World War,” he looked up at me to gauge my reactions, “I was thinking of doing Barnaby Rutledge.”

My heart flipped over. “Who?”

He burst out laughing. Even though I knew it was at me, it was a pretty nice sound. “Don’t worry—nobody’s ever heard of him.”

“So who was he?”

“He wrote these really, really messed up stories that were supposedly autobiographical, but I doubt that. They were published either privately or in really small numbers, but he had quite a devoted following up until the Second World War.” He took a final sip of coffee and set the cup down beside him. “So far as I know, there’s only been one article written about him since, like, the ‘60’s, but a few of his stories are still being printed in anthologies, so I figured it was time someone looked at him again.”

“That’s—that’s amazing.” I said, equally fascinated and annoyed that I hadn’t heard of this guy.

“I can bring one of his stories with me to class next week, if you like.”

“Really? “ My voice did some kind of squeaky thing that was far from pleasant in my ears. “I’d love it.” I tried, a little more sedately.

Ned chuckled. “Alright then. As long as you promise to tell me what you think.”

I risked a smile back. “I don’t think that will be a problem.”

“Excellent.” He rubbed his hands together and looked at his watch. “Not that I’m not enjoying your company, but did you say you needed to be at work at two?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s ten to now.”

“Oh. Oh!” I stood up and slid my bag over my head. “Thanks for that.”

He stood up as well. Awkward, awkward, awkward…. “This was really nice.” I said, surprised at how genuine I sounded.

“It was,” he quirked a little grin. “We’ll have to do it again. Soon.”

“I’d like that.”

And I realized that I would.

The Devil's Trill

2009-09-20T04:33:00.000-07:00

The building which Mitch and I mutually inhabit was built before the Second World War, and, not surprisingly, sustained a fair amount of structural damage during the Blitz. According to the man in the poorly-fitting suit who came to assess the property before the actual owners left said that the building was ‘bowed’, basically meaning that the two halves are slumped together and holding each other up. It’s a fairly common condition, especially in Stoke Newington, part of which got blasted out of existence one autumn evening. It will be a bitch if anyone ever decides to knock down any of the houses on the street, as the general opinion is that when one goes, quite literally, so goes the neighborhood, and if one house is removed, the whole thing will cave in like massive mortar dominoes.

The less-dramatic meaning of all of this is that there are places in our building where the walls are very thin. Not so much so that you can hear the other person making a cup of tea, but with a little effort, your neighbor can hear you. So it was probably a good thing that Mitch and I were both single, I guess. But it also explains why he felt the need to call when he was practicing. The first time he started tuning his violin when I’d first moved in, I thought the walls had mice and was ready to turn around and move back out.

That morning, however, I wish mice were the worst of my problems. I was up, had managed to open the window, run to the other side of the bedroom to turn on the lights, and was halfway down the first flight of stairs before I realized that I was awake and that Mitch was at it again (for the record, I have no idea why I thought opening the window would help. Very little that I do when startles awake makes any long-term rational sense). Since I was halfway there already, I clumped down to the kitchen, grabbed the phone off the wall and pounded Mitch’s number with a great display of excessive force.

I could hear the phone chirping on the other side of the wall, and its echo in my ear six times before he picked up.

“Umm…hello?”

“What the fuck are you playing?”

“Oh! Do you like it?”

“It sound like you are dueling with imps from the deepest pits of hell. What is it?”

“It’s a new Kreisler piece,” he said, sounding a little deflated.

“You do know that it’s not even seven, right?”

“Umm…”

“Mitch, in the name of Stephen King and all that is holy, I beg you to never, ever play that in the morning ever, ever again. Ok?”

“Umm….ok. Are you awake?”

“I am now, you evil man!”

“Oh. Good. Well, put on the kettle.”

And he hung up.

And it’s impossible to be angry with Mitchell for long. He’s just doesn’t have the kind of intellect that could be intentionally cruel or hurtful. If I can fault him for anything, it’s simply of not thinking all that frequently, but if that’s the worst I have to put up with, I think I’ve got it pretty good.

I heard the bang of the broomstick while I was pouring water over two teabags and presently, the cellar door opened, wafting the smell of toast through the house. Mitch’s hair led the rest of him into the kitchen. I don’t know what he had or hadn’t done with it in the past two days, but it looked like a lazy cartoonist had taken a black marker and scribbled it into place. He had stubble on his milky-pale skin and Panic at the Disco shirt on over his sweatpants.

“Is that mine?” I asked, nodding at the shirt.

“Maybe. It was in the dryer.”

“Fair enough.” He clattered the plate down on the table and wrapped both hands around the mug of tea, breathing in the caffeinated steam with near-religious zeal.

“So what the hell was that thing?”

“What—the piece?”

“Unless you really were torturing demons over there.”

He grinned and sucked a toast crumb off his thumb. “I found it at the British Library the other day. You know they have music manuscripts there?”

I nodded.

“Oh. So anyways, there’s this piece called “The Devil’s Trill”, and what he did was—“

“It’s called the what?”

“’The Devil’s Trill’,” he sighed and ran a hand through the riot of hair near his forehead. “Ok, so it was originally written by this chap Tartini in seventeen-whenever. He had this dream that the Devil came to him and asked him to be his servant. And in order to test him, Tartini hands the Devil his violin and he goes to town. And when he wakes up, Tartini tries to write down what he heard and, of course, fails utterly. Though the piece is an absolute monster to even try to play.” He leaned across the table and wiggled his eyebrows. “It’s said that whoever plays owes Satan their soul ever afterwards.”

“Charming.”

“Anyways, so it’s a nifty little thing. And time goes on, la la la. And then Kreisler joins the army during the First World War—you know this part, don’t you?”

“I knew he was in the Army for—what, like two months or something? I have his book about it around here somewhere…”

“Yes, yes, well, I found this letter by him that talked about this utter nut-job he met during his army career. The guy was British and they met at a hospital or who-knows-what. The point is, according to Kreisler, this British chap was the greatest musician he’d ever met. Ever. Said he’d never believed in diabolical talent ‘til he met this guy. So he arranges the Tartini piece for this chappie, and adds a movement. That’s what that was,” he flipped his head back, as if the sound were still resonating through the walls.” And sends it to this chappie’s address in London, but never heard word one from him ever again.”

“So how did it end up at the British Library?”

“Damned if I know. But you haven’t heard the best part yet.” He dropped his crust back onto the plate and it made a little ceramic ping. “This chappie’s name? Was Lucifer.”

“What?”

“Honest to God, I swear it. That’s why Kreisler went on and on about devils and demons—and that’s why he picked that piece to arrange for this British guy.”

“That’s…that’s just weird.”

“I know! Isn’t it great?”

“I don’t know about that…who names their kid Lucifer?”

Mitch shrugged. “I didn’t copy the letter. I was too busy trying to get all the notes down. But he said that he’s never seen elegant hands or such dark eyes in a human head.”

“Weird.”

Mitch grinned. “It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever seen.” He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a battered photocopy of some sheet music. The thing was, indeed, a riot of notes. Looking at it, I could follow the part I had heard Mitch play. Judging by the amount of ‘vibrato’ signs above the notes, the whole thing must sound like someone sobbing—or screaming.

“How can you play this with one violin? There are...these are four-note chords.”

I looked up and he was giving me the most manic grin I’d ever seen. “I have absolutely no idea. But I’m sure the Prince of Darkness will give me the aid I require.”

“Oh please, spare me.” I said, and swiped the last piece of toast. “With your luck, you’d get the ghost of some off-kilter First World War soldier with black eyes and skeletally beautiful hands menacing you in your sleep.”

“You are absolutely sick, you know that?”

I grinned back. “I have class this morning and work tonight. You off all day?”

He nodded and stretched in the chair, tilting it back until the headrest met the edge of the sink. “I love Mondays.”

“Bite me.” And I started sweeping the dishes and mugs into the dishwasher.

Exerpts

2009-04-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

(Reproduced with the permission of Jeremy Bannerman and Susan T. Lynch)

[Postmarked Newington Green, addressed to L. Nathaniel Thomas, St. Dennis' School, East Sussex]
4 March 1903
Dear Nathaniel,
How strange to write that name now!
How are you? Miss Thorne has kindly given us thirty minutes to write to you so that you won’t think that, though you are gone from our schoolroom you have gone from our thought. So I am writing to you in the school room, and through the window, I can see the first of the robins searching from branch to branch of the thicket by the fence, looking for a good place to build his nest. I got a new pinafore yesterday. It is white and Mamma says I can help embroider it with primroses in the evening. Miss Thorne says that I am getting on in my penmanship beautifully. Alice’s new pinafore is blue. I think white looks better but Mamma says she can’t be trusted to keep it clean. She wants to embroider hers with water lilies, which is a charming little thought, but I think they look too much like callalilies at a funeral.
Are you enjoying school and learning a great deal? Are the other boys nice? Mrs. Chester’s son always brings his mates home from school for the holidays. You must be the one to come home, and bring lots of friends back to keep us all entertained.
Miss Thorne says I must get back to my sums. Until later, then,
I remain,
Your Loving Sister,
Tabitha

[Postmarked Newington Green, both in the same envelope, same address]
4 March 1903
Lucy,
Miss Thorne wants us to write to you. She says I can't call you Lucyfer anymore and we have to call you Nathanial. That is Poppa's name. No one calls me Cecilia.
Why do you get to go off to school and why did you leave me here? Are you coming home soon? Miss Thorne says you get a holiday in the summer.
Willie Chester pulled my hair yesterday after I told him he couldn’t walk with me to the park. So I hit him and he cried.
Alice
PS: Miss Thorne says this isn’t a nice letter and to write you one about cheerful things.

4 March 1903
Dear Nathaniel.
How are you? I am well. We had lemon tarts at tea and I had two.
Mr. Elliot The Gardener says I can help him prune the roses this weekend.
I like reading but not maths.
Yours truly,
Alice

[Postmarked East Sussex, addressed to Miss Tabitha Thomas, Newington Green, London]
7 March 1903
Dear Tabitha,
Thank you for your letter. I am well and enjoying school very much. I am afraid that I am still lagging behind in my mathematics, but the tutors are all very understanding. I have entered a competition to see which boy can remember best and deliver a passage from Virgil.
I am afraid I haven’t made too many close friends, so don’t pin your hopes on any company over the holidays, but I’m sure you won’t need too much help in filling your schedule. Good luck with the pinafore and tell Miss Thorne to stop talking like a pillow sampler.
Yours,
L.N. Thomas

[Postmarked East Sussex, same address to Miss Alice Thomas]
8 March 1903
Dear Alice,
I liked your first letter much better. Tell Willie Chester if he so much as looks at you, I’ll turn him inside out when I come home. The end of term here is 30 May, and I will be home two days later, on the first of June. Mark that on the calendar in the schoolroom so you will remember. I won’t forget you.
Until then,
Lucifer
PS: I hate maths, too.

[Postmarked Newington Green, addressed to St. Dennis' School]
10 March 1903
Dear Nathaniel,
Many thanks for your kind letter. It came just as we were sitting down to tea and was welcome indeed, as the Rector came to call on Miss Thorne and Alice was sulky. I hope your recitation goes well—I am sure that you will do brilliantly!
My pinafore is nearly finished. Mina Hatterly was over with her Mother the other day and Mrs. Hatterly says that it is some of the best work she has seen in someone of my years. Mina was jealous enough to spit. John Chester just called with his Mother and little brother. John is taller than me now, but I don’t think he is as yet as tall as you.
I should stop, as I am meant to be copying a passage of Mrs. Beeton before the end of lessons.
With affection,
Yours truly,
Tabitha
Later: Alice just came in covered in dirt and with thorns and twigs in her hair. Apparently she has been bothering the gardener all afternoon. Mamma is beside herself and Alice is perversely pleased with herself. Quite pandemonium.

[Postmarked Newington Green, same address]
12 March 1903
Dear Lucy,
Mr. Elliot says I am the best helper he has ever had and that I am welcome to come anytime and help with the roses. Mamma was mad when I came in muddy but Jacob The Footman laughed and Mamma sent him out of the room. Don’t worry about Willie. He won’t come near me since I hit him.
I put a big x on the calendar on 1 June. Come home.
Alice

[Postmarked East Sussex, addressed to Mrs. Nathaniel Thomas, Newington Green, London]
15 March 1903
Dear Mrs. Thomas,
I am sure you will forgive my writing to you directly, but we have had word of your husband's recent illness and, out of consideration for his recuperation, I thought it best to address my term assessment to you.
Nathaniel (I fully concur with your decision to use his second name in all public settings) seems to be settling in well here at St. Dennis'. He is a quiet young man with neat habits and very good manners both in his lessons and at table. I believe that Mr. Thomas has already noted that Nathaniel shows a natural talent for music, and we have arranged for him to continue his lessons here outside of schoolroom hours. According to Dr. Foster, our Latin Master, Nathaniel shows a unique proficiency for language which he is encouraging. Though not gifted in mathematics, I am proud to say that Nathaniel shows determination in his work, which will serve him well in the future.
I note one other memoranda in Nathaniel's file but, Mrs. Thomas, I worry about bringing it to your attention in such a cavalier fashion as through the post. If I had the ability to travel up to you, or Mr. Thomas was well enough to travel, I should say it could wait until such time as we can meet face to face, but since, regretfully, neither eventuality is likely in the near future, I must apologize in advance for what I am about to relate. Our school's physician, Dr. Francis, has noted that Lucifer suffers from a slight disruption of the heart. I believe the medical term is a 'heart murmur'. According to him, it means that the boy's heart does not carry on a regular rhythm, but skips a beat, or beats irregularly for a certain length of time. We are fortunate that he is otherwise perfectly healthy and strong, and thus it would seem that this condition does not pose a significant problem at the present time. However, it should be monitored, and, according to Dr. Francis, could be the cause of ill-health in later life. I am very sorry to trouble you with such news, my dear Mrs. Thomas, but I hope you know that I share it in good faith and in the hope that it will not add to your present worry.
If there is any other matter in which I can be of service, you have but to ask. As discussed, another letter will follow at the commencement of the summer term. Until then, Madam, I remain,
Yours Faithfully,
Deacon H Mather
Master of St. Dennis' School for Boys

[Postmarked East Sussex, addressed to Miss Alice Thomas, Newington Green, London]
22 May 1903
Dear Alice,
I haven't read that book yet but perhaps you can read it to me when I come home. Tell Mrs. Bateman that I want treacle pudding for tea when I get there.

Next week seems farther away than Mars today.
Soon, though I'll see you,
Lucifer

Words for Breakfast: In Which We Meet Another Supporting Character

2009-04-03T16:33:00.000-07:00

Mitch scooped the last piece of toast, blew me a jam-sticky kiss and banged out the door about ten minutes later. I took a few minutes to finish some unnecessary chores around the house, realizing there was plenty of time before I was actually due at work (I had managed to fall head-first into a freelance archival job at a museum in South London that needed First World War expertise, which was frankly far more fun than anyone deserved to have at their job).

The day that waited for me on the other side of the door was warm and sunny, with a breeze that warned of colder days and shorter nights that were all too fast approaching. Consequently, I resolved to walk at least to Angel Station before subjecting myself to the fetid air and inhumanely close quarters of the London underground and set off down the road with the slightly melancholy air that late summer mornings always bring.

Newington Green was full of children squawking and shrieking on the swings and tumbling across the grass as if determined to squeeze every instant of sunlight left in the sky and the earth. I rounded the corner and was almost immediately collared by the smell of fresh-baked bread. Suddenly, irrationally ravenous, I allowed myself to be led down the street to a aqua-fronted bakery by the smell that was strong enough to be like a physical force, pushing me to the door.

The shop looked empty as I peered around the door frame, save for the paralyzingly delicious smells, now not only of bread, but of crumbly pastries and the snappy tinge of sugary frosting.

"Come in! Come in! How are you?" The voice came from behind a cooling rack of small, crusty rolls and, heeding it, I saw a man--or, rather, his head, peering through the loaves at me. He soon came around the racks to rest his elbows on the pale wooden counter before him, his floury fingers having left streaks up his arm when he rolled up his sleeves.

He wasn't exceptionally tall, but he had long limbs, and carried himself with enough grace that he seemed to be much taller. He had dark hair that fell across his forehead and just brushed his eyebrows, which shaded some of the brightest eyes I'd ever seen. He had a constant look of expectancy, as if the world was unfolding for his sole entertainment. The skin around them was wrinkled with traces of past laughter and as I came into the shop, they folded up into a smile. I had originally thought him around fifty, but the transformation that came over his face with that grin made me wonder if indeed I wasn't a little older than him. You couldn't look at such an expression without feeling a reciprocal gladness from it, and I came up to the counter, eyeing the basket of croissants just behind him.

"You are new, yes? Such a face I would remember." My eyes jerked back onto his face, missing the compliment in my surprise.

"Govoritiye parussky?" I said automatically. His eyes widened and he snapped up to his full height, which was barely equal to my own.

"Of course I speak Russian!" He cried (in Russian), throwing his arms wide, "the surprise is that you do, as well!"

"I spent five years learning to read it, but I don't speak as well as I should."

"Then your Russian is no better than my English. We shall fumble together?" He finished in English with a small wink. "I am Sergey," he offered me a flour-dusted hand and squeezed my hand with a strength for which I wouldn't have previously given him credit.

"Kipling," I replied, smiling in spite of myself.

"Like the author? Of the Phantom Rickshaw and the Jungle Books?"

"The same," I said, relieved that there was one person who didn't need any further explanation.

"This is brilliant! I have just finished the Just-So Stories, and they are for me quite wonderful."

He bent down as he spoke, pushing the release button on a battered microwave behind him. The door sprang open and I saw that it was full of paperback novels, many with pastry-dribbles across the covers, and all dog-eared and well-loved. He pulled out a volume from the far left, leaving a flour smudge across the spines of two nearby books, and set a 1960's Penguin edition of Kipling's Just So Stories on the counter between us.

"That is fantastic!" I tried in Russian, "I need to start keeping books in my microwave!" He laughed out loud at this, a sound of pure delight that made him look almost elfin.

"If my Sonya found me reading during working hours--well, there would be darkness and storms around here for days. So I hide them away where she doesn't think to look and practice my English in between batches." He winked conspiratorially, nodding sideways as if to indicate Sonya's relative position. I could only smile back, marveling at the sheer energy of the person before me. There ensued a few inevitable minutes of literary banter, mostly about my namesake, but it turned out that his microwave also held Sherlock Holmes, Dracula and, incongruously, a book of Wittgenstein's essays on mathematics.

"Yes, yes. My taste in books is...quixical?"

"Quixotic?" I tried, unsure if his look of concern was over Wittgenstein or the word.

"Quixotic?" he tried it slowly, as if trying it on for size, "Quixotic....this is it?"

"Yes, it's from Don Quixote, describing--"

"The windmill man!" I jumped, but he didn't notice it, as he suddenly produced a notebook from his back pocket and began writing with the stub of a well-chewed golf pencil. "I must..add...'Quixotic'...yes. To my collection." He smiled, sliding the notebook and pencil out of sight once again.

"So, Miss Kipling," he began, clearly as comfortable in English as Russian, "if you don't mind me noticing, you are from far away, are you not?" I nodded, not feeling the same sense of embarrassment that usually comes from being a transplant. "Where is home for you, then, where they teach you to speak such good Russian?" I laughed.

"Home is Boston," I said simply.

"No! I have been to Boston!" Sergey cried, slapping his side of the counter with an open hand, "it is where I first start learning English!"

"Really?" his excitement was infectious.

"Certainly. My Sonya and I go to visit my niece and nephew in New York and our plane lands in Boston. And it is while we are waiting for the train to New York that I buy my first English dictionary. And I begin to learn English." I smiled, already enchanted with this bizarre baker, but also feeling every mile between me and that train station he described. He squinted ever so slightly at the expression he saw on my face and his eyes softened.

"You are a long way from home as well, aren't you?" he said quietly. I nodded, suddenly unable to speak. This happened every once in a while. I could talk about home for hours on end, or relish in my distance from the familiar for days, but every so often, something, often too subtle to even warrant mention, would inspire a melancholy homesickness to sneak up and sucker-punch me, causing my eyes to fill and my throat to contract before I had time to throw up my defenses.

"As am I." Sergey said, still quiet, but with sunshine in his smile again. "It's not easy, but think! Think of the stories we have to tell! No one believes me when I tell them the things I have seen! And now," his linguistic shifts were making me dizzy, "I find this beautiful American who speaks Russian! There are too many surprises left for me!" I laughed in spite of myself, slightly confused by his real meaning but too charmed to let it bother me long.

"Come, come," he said, suddenly slightly flustered, "if Sonya sees tears here, she will never forgive me." He passed a napkin over the counter to me and started staving off the mascara trails that were building in my lower lashes.

"Thanks," I said, my voice steadier than I expected.

"Not at all. I am glad to have met someone with such--immaculate, yes?--taste in literature. You are close by?" I nodded.

"About twenty minutes that way," I pointed through the far wall.

"Excellent. Then I expect to see you soon, yes?" I nodded again, and he beamed. "Brava! Now, that I have taken up all this your time with talk of books, here," he slid one of the plump croissants into a thin paper bag and handed it over to me. I took it eagerly and moved my hand to my sweater pocket for my wallet. Before I could do any more than shift my weight, he had snatched the bag back and was glaring at me in mock severity.

"No, no! Here is the bargain, my friend," he jerked his head to the microwave library, "I am in need of 'The Valley of Fear' still. You have a copy of this?"

"Of course!"

"Excellent! You bring it for me tomorrow, then. Words for breakfast, yes?"

"I think that sounds perfect." I answered, wondering how I had made it through twenty-something years of existence without a croissant-dispensing bibliophile friend like this.

"Until then, my quixotic friend."

"A Day Once Dawned, And It Was Beautiful": North London, Present Day

2009-03-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

As will become readily apparent quite quickly, I have a slightly imperfectly-wired brain. It functions quite well on the theoretical and anachronistic level, and it can achieve some pretty impressive things under pressure. However, in any given routine situation, it has a tendency to some rather bizarre reactions. Take the morning after that first class, for example. A normal person, on being awakened by a phone ringing in the dark of an autumn morning, would rise and answer said phone, with or without a due sense of impending catastrophe.

Not I. By the time I was actually aware of what had woken me, I was out of bed, across the room and furiously flipping away the light switch until the strobe-effect of the overhead light bulb finally forced me into consciousness. I turned off the light, stumbled back to the night table, and flipped open my mobile phone, which was blinking up at me indignantly.

"Hello?"

"Kipling? Are you alright?"

"Mitch?"

"Yes"

"Are you on fire?"

"Umm...no."

"Then why are you calling at 6:30 in the morning?"

"Oh. I, uh, I wanted to know if it would be alright if I practized for a bit. I didn't want to wake you."

I sat on the edge of the bed, resting my now pounding head in my free hand.

"You woke me up to make sure that playing the violin wouldn't wake me up."

"Right, I....oh. Sorry."

I couldn't help but chuckle, "It's ok. In the future, though, I can barely hear you anyway, so don't worry about it."

"Ok. When do you have to be in to work?"

"About 12:30. Why?"

"Good. I have to leave by 10, so get ready and put some coffee on and I'll be round with the toast at, say, 9?"

"Sounds good."

Mitch is my next-door neighbor, and fellow Economic Orphan. His aunt and uncle own the house, but are receiving a large stipend to move out of London for their work, and thus we are both squatters while our homes refuse to attract any attention on the market. He works as an usher some theater in the City and can usually be seen on dark days playing his violin either in tube stations or near Covent Garden. We had become friends about 6 weeks earlier, just after I moved in, when I had unwittingly let a pigeon into my kitchen and was too petrified to do anything outside of waiving a badminton net in its general direction and yell very loudly. It turns out that he has a passion for making toast (it might be the only thing he knows how to make, come to think of it, but at least he enjoys it), so we had most of our breakfasts together. This enterprise was rendered even easier by some sort of subterranean tunnel that connected our two basements, and if you had the courage to brave the clammy, spider-kingdom of my basement, and the labyrinth of discarded toys and gardening implements in his, it was actually incredibly convenient, especially as neither of us was very good with grocery shopping.

I took a shower and cobbled together an acceptable wardrobe out of the still-clean options in the drawers, and was just dumping coffee grounds into my inherited French press when I heard three sharp raps coming from under the floorboards at my feet. Mitch and I both felt that the scraping and shuffling noises that accompanied our trans-domestic journeys were unnerving enough that we tied a broom to a hook in the ceiling between the to houses in order to alert the other of a friendly (and non-spectral) arrival. Seconds later, there were shuffling footfalls on the stairs and the door creaked open, allowing the smell of warm toast to flood the kitchen, followed soon by Mitch and his tray.

The sight of Mitchell Berenson could inspire maternal instincts in a stone. He is small and impossibly thin--not rakish, not wiry--just about as lean as it would seem possible to be and still remain functioning. In fact, he eats more than I do, but somehow it never seems to be enough to get him to cast a shadow. He has wide blueish-gray eyes that always seem somewhere between giggling and weeping, a smile that makes him look positively angelic, and a head of blackish hair that has a personality unto itself and, at the current moment, was swarming over to the left side of his head in a damp, tangled mess. He was wearing a pair of dark jeans that were held on by a belt with makeshift holes bored along its length and a bleu sweater that probably would have fit me well. On him, it was engulfing.

"How did the practice go?" I asked, snatching the topmost piece on the stack and going to work with the butter and jam.

"Amazing. Well, I mean, I've still got ages to go, but the piece! Aw Kip, it's incredible!" He sat folded himself up at the table with a dancer's grace and began slathering. "It was written for Kiesler's fiance and it--this sounds absurd, but--you can hear the love in it." A shower of crumbs scattered on the table.

"Sounds amazing," I said, putting the coffee pot in front of him and taking a stool opposite.

"It is. I worked with a guy once--brilliant. A total drunk, but brilliant all the same. Anyway, he was convinced that love was like energy. You know, in science, how, like, energy can never be decreased? It's always there, just not always--in motion, like?" I nodded, trying to keep up with the speed of his monologue. "Anyways, he used to say that when a piece was written, the emotion that went into it, the love, the anger, the hate--well, you know what I mean. Anyway, that whatever inspired the piece went into it and became part of it. That it became the energy of the piece, like. And when you play it, that energy is what drives it."

"That's beautiful."

"I know. Unfortunately, he was completely out of his head on bourbon when he told me that, so I don't know how much stock to put in it, but it's a nice story all the same."

"I like it, bourbon or otherwise."

Possessions: North London, 1895

2009-02-28T17:04:00.000-08:00

Emily--he always called her Emily, in his head, least ways. If nothing else, they could both agree that she could never be 'Mother', but any other kind of formal title seemed equally ludicrous for someone so fundamentally weak, so frivolous and petty as to be already beneath his growing contempt. Emily, then, was nestled in a rocking chair when he and Tabitha were ushered in by one of the housemaids. She wore something shapeless and rosy-pink with frantic profusions of lace at her wrists and throat and was wrapped in the old quilt from Tabitha's linen cupboard, another crescendo of pink and rose and lace. He looked sideways at Tabitha, herself an echo of her Mother--and here the title suited admirably--in her pink frock and frizzy halo of golden urls, her plump lips open in surprise and her gray-green eyes blinking rapidly. She clasped her hands together under her pudgy little chin in a confused ecstasy of excitement.

"Oh Mamma! Is this the new little baby for us?" Emily looked up, her gaze warming at the sound of her child's voice.

"Yes, Darling. A new little girl for you to play with and care for. Would you like to see her?"

It was only then that he realized that the quilt was not for Emily, but was tucked around something in her arms. The Baby.

Tabitha tripped lightly to her Mother's chair and peered over her arms into the swaddled thing that lay therein.

"Oh! Mamma!" There was a pause between the two words that made him look up quickly, "She's so--" had he imagined it, or was there a flash of--what? Panic? In her cherubic face? "--delicate! She's lovely! Just like a little doll!" She looked up at her Mother, who smiled back in pleasure. Tabitha flushed and smiled back, her eyes focused on nothing in particular. Perhaps he was mistaken, but he was nearly certain that Tabitha had just told her first lie.

Emily raised her head, but did not turn. "Would you like to see her--Lucifer?" Her voice wasn't quite as harsh as usual. More weary than resentful as she muttered through his name. He stepped over to the other side of the chair, aware of Tabitha's wide-open eyes on his face, searching his expression for some kind of reaction, a clue as to what she should be doing next. It really was a pity, he thought fleetingly, Tabitha wasn't as bad as the rest. She had definite potential, but she also had that weakness, that blight she had contracted from her Mother that she would never escape. He could see a kind of fear in her face that he couldn't understand, and knew that she needed him to tell her how to proceed, just as she needed him to hold her hand when they went for walks and guide her through all the situations that her natural beauty and grace couldn't confront for her. Her gave her a little crooked grin and her face relaxed just a bit as she stepped back from the chair.

Careful not to touch Emily in the slightest way, he tilted his head over her elbow and peered down, right into the face of the new little human.

It was nothing of the slightest importance. The baby might very well have been disturbed by the activity around her. She might have been hungry. She might have felt the breath nearer to her new skin. Regardless, she chose that instant to open her eyes--already just a bit too large for her face. They flitted about, unseeing, oblivious to the Mother's soft sigh and Tabitha's smothered gasp, before locking on the face above her.

He heard something snap. Unable to look up for fear that Emily would whisk the little thing away to a place of safety or that Tabitha would cry, he couldn't understand how it was that no one moved, no one reacted at all, when his own ears were ringing with the echo of it and his breath was caught in his throat with fright. Even the baby didn't react. She stared up at him without blinking. The room rang faintly, each surface vibrating softly with the still-tangible force that no one else had even noticed.

After a time, his surprise over this universal deafness would wear off. It would take years longer, however, before he would become accustomed to the shock of the sound in his own ears.

He was aware that Tabitha had said something, but his head hadn't yet cleared enough to make out what it was. He didn't look up. He didn't think he could bear to look at Tabitha just now, but he wasn't sure why.

"Alice," Emily's voice cut through, crashing against his already shaken nerves.

"It's lovely," Tabitha sighed.

"It was your father's mother's name," she said, as if by way of an apology.

"What do you think, Lucifer?" Tabitha's voice carried a hint of hysteria, the same voice she used to ask if he was still awake after the lights had been put out.

"Yes, what do you--not so close!" Emily tilted herself away from him, shielding the Baby from those eyes, and instantly felt ridiculous and humiliated for having done so. Try as she would, though, she couldn't help feeling that The Child--she abhorred his name, one of Nathaniel's perverse jokes that she could never accept--would somehow contaminate her child. Children, now. He didn't move as she flinched back, keeping those horrid dark eyes fixed on little Alice--another of Nathaniel's abominable choices of names, but at least this one was merely mundane. She sighed and tried again.

"What do you think of Tabitha's new little sister?" She thought the point was subtle enough, but he suddenly looked directly at her, turning those eyes on her for the first time in as long as she could recall. They were cold and composed and, in his eight-year-old face, were fierce enough to make her instinctively cling a little tighter to the seems of the quilt beneath her fingers.

"She's mine." He said it in a chill whisper. Emily opened her lips, but no reply came.

"Of course!" chirped Tabitha, sensing something terrible, like a thunderstorm, suddenly in the air. "Of course she's your sister, as well, Lucy! She's our little baby sister--Alice."

"Of course." Emily managed a small smile, which gave her the strength to meet his eyes. But he had already turned his attention back to the Baby.

"Take Tabitha downstairs and play 'til supper. I need to rest."

The Boy calmly walked over to Tabitha and took her hand--Emily shuddered at how eagerly her girl reached for this little stranger--and guided her from the room. As he exited, he turned his head, fixing his eyes once again on the Mother with a look so fierce, so forceful, that Emily was left in no doubt what his bizarre statement had truly meant.

The Beginning: North London, Present Day

2009-02-08T05:50:00.000-08:00

So, having decided that a stationary life of reasonable prosperity and routine was far too simple, I had recently left a job that afforded me not only mental stimulation and friendly interchange (as well as a few interesting little problems that may or may not have involved the Boston and Cambridge Police Departments), but also enough money to pay rent, sleep and buy books and take a stab at doing the job I had always wanted---becoming a professional student. With my house and cats in good hands for the next year, I had managed to get accepted to a highly-accredited institution and took my leave of the western Atlantic shores.

I had intended to rent some rooms from a family but, upon arrival, I learned that they had decided to move to the country "in order to raise the children in a proper environment". I was willing to overlook their abandoning me in an apparently improper environment when I learned that I had full run of the house for the same rent--at least, until the property sold. "Which could be weeks, dear, or it could be months, in this economy. Heaven's knows we're stuck with it until we can shift it, so we'd be ever so happy to know that you're here, keeping the drunks away from the stoop." And with these heart-warming wishes, I was left to my own devices.

A week after my arrival, I made the grand journey from Stoke Newington to school for the first time, and was directed to the History Department, which was on the top floor of the building. "It's just been added on," said the woman at the information desk, batting her overly made-up lashes, "They've not got a lift up to there, yet, so take that lift up to the seventh floor, and then you'll have to walk up the last flight." She neglected to mention that of the four elevators in the lobby, only on was working, and fitfully at that, so it was almost fifteen minutes before I arrived at the door to the History Department (luckily, in my first-day jitters, I'd arrived half an hour early).

I sat down at one of the state-of-the-art portable plywood and cork desks and tried to appear invisible. There was an older man sitting a row away from me who was glowering at me over his shoulder, so I was fairly sure my plan wasn't working. Trying now for an air of intellectual indifference, I reached into my bag and pulled out my date planner, flipping to the date and trying to think of something worth writing. He man sighed and turned back to his book, while I rooted around for a pen. As I began doodling around the page of my next birthday, a small girl with curly dark hair and needlessly pointy-toed boots clattered into the room, the charms on her bag jingling in syncopation to her footfalls. The man gave her a similarly withering glare, and I couldn't help but smile, both at his mow comic anger and in relief that it was no longer directed at me. As he turned back, his eyes didn't even pick me out from the cork dividers around me. I had achieved invisibility. I turned the pages on my date book, looking for a day with enough significance to warrant a note. Alighting on my father's birthday, I bent over the page, only to find that there was no longer any ink flowing into the pen. Gritting my teeth in irritation, I gave the pen an overly-demonstrative shake that sent droplets of ink splattering across the page and the desk and the pen cap flying back over my head, where it hit the wall and skittered across the floor. Instinctively, I ducked from the gaze of the man, whose head was already turning back in my direction, trying at the same time to see where the damned cap had stopped.
"I think you dropped this." I turned, and found my eyes were on level with a hand, in which was resting my errant pen cap. I reached out, briefly noting that the hand was attached to an arm, which connected it to a torso, all of which was encased in a green sweater.
"Thanks," I mumbled, and looked at the head that was poking out of the top of the sweater. It had a mess of sunshine-brown hair that fell over a pale forehead, and deep brown eyes that were crinkled in a smile.
"Are you here for the imperialism and war seminar?" It was a nice face, with a disarmingly bright smile. As he straightened up, I realized he was fairly tall, almost lanky, wearing some kind of gray tweedy pants. He had a brown leather satchel that I immediately coveted and as he sat down at the desk beside me, I realized I had not yet answered.
"Umm, yeah. You?" I kept it short in order to keep from tripping over my own words.
"I am indeed. Are you in the history department?" He asked, as if to imply he wasn't. Which I could believe. Honestly, he was too good-looking to be an historian.
"I am as of today. Aren't you?" He shook his head, renewing the smile. I grinned back, more out of self-satisfaction than anything else.
"English Department, actually. This class is--well, useful for my dissertation."
"I see."
"I'm Ned, by the way."
"Nice to meet you. Is Ned short for Edward?" He ducked his head and grinned up at me through his lashes.
"Not quite. It's, uh...it's Damien, actually."
"Really? I like that."
"Most people think it's the strangest name they've ever heard."
"Oh, I don't know about that."
"Wait, are you here for the War and Imperialism course?" It was the small dark-haired girl, who was jingling and clacking back towards us. She had a thin voice and I could tell she was an up-talker, despite her question. Her face wrinkled up into a smile, but it wasn't wholly genuine, and therefore made me distinctly nervous.
"Apparently we are." He turned to smile at her as two more people, a man with graying hair and a girl about my age.
"Are you lot here for the War and Imperialism course?" the new girl asked. She was wide-eyed and slender with brown hair and wearing an enormous woolen hat despite the late September heat. She slumped into the chair on my other side and her book bag thumped to the floor. The older man let out an audible huff, rose to his feet and stomped out, letting the door slam behind him.
"Looks like we're already making friends here," the man with gray hair smiled with a slight air of smugness. As he spoke, the door to one of the offices opened and Professor Bryson, the course convener, in a green tweed suit and deafeningly loud green paisley shirt, ushered us inside. Once we had performed the awkward dance of assembling ourselves in the chairs that were crammed into what turned out to be Professor Bryson's office, we began to introduce ourselves. The wide-eyed girl was named Lydia, the man with the gray hair was named Sam, and he had just retired from a career in stock management. The up-talker was named Caroline, and then came Ned's turn. As each person mentioned their name, Professor Bryson ticked off their name on his list.
"Hi," said Ned, to no one in particular, "I'm Ned. I did my undergraduate work at Queen's College in Belfast, and I'm actually studying in the English department, working on the history of literature." Caroline had leaned forward while he spoke, her eyebrows traveling ever further skywards and her smile spreading eagerly across her face.
"Great, thanks, Ned." Said Prof. Bryson, adjusting his glasses and turning to me, "And you are..."
"Hi," I said, trying to find a place to look. "I'm Kip."
"Kim?" Bryson's forehead wrinkled and he squinted at the list in his lap.
"No--Kip. With a 'p'. My full name is Kipling." Why, after 25 years, I really still felt the need to blush over my name was utterly beyond me, but I felt my ears starting to burn.
"Ah yes..." Bryson made a tick on his list, and looked at me with mingled interest and..pity? I looked sideways and saw Ned's eyebrows arching. I made a stab at speech, figuring I had remarkably little to lose.
"I'm studying the First World War, actually. I've been working in archives back home in Boston for a few years and decided to come back to school."
"Well, thank you, Kipling." Bryson smiled at me as if he had just performed some elaborate ritual in a foreign language and turned back to the group, launching into an explanation of the course.

The meeting was mercifully brief, and after some brief chat over books and essays, we all began plodding down the endless flights of stairs down to the lobby. I had started walking with Lydia and Caroline, but soon ended up trailing behind, as they began planning to go out to a club later that night.

I heard an echo of footsteps behind me and leaned into the railing in the expectation of being passed.

"So, Kipling, eh?" It was Ned, his satchel over his shoulder and an amused grin slung across his face.

"I told you you're name wasn't that strange." I said, finding it impossible not to smile back.

"I guess not. Where did, that is, how--"

"My dad has a killer sense of humor."

"Hmmm...there's a story there, I think." We reached the lobby and crossed in front to hold the door to the street open for me. "You free after class on Thursday?"

"Umm--yeah. I don't see why not."

"Good. Until then." And with a final flashing grin, he waved and headed off to the tube station.

I was still blushing when I got on the bus twenty minutes later.

Ashes to Ashes: North London, 1890

2009-02-07T15:15:00.000-08:00

"Oh, honestly, Nathaniel! You can't be serious!"
Why not, my dear? The little fellow clearly needs a home."
"Children aren't like stray dogs, Nathaniel. You can't just take him in and let him eat table scraps. Think about what everyone will say when it all comes out!"
"Emily, the boy's parents are dead. Any life he may have had is gone, is burned. If not us, it's an orphanage, then most likely a workhouse and a short brutal little life that would mean nothing. With us, he has a chance. We can afford it, my dear. Even...even if there are more to come...We can certainly afford to keep him and raise him for some profession. You can't really want to send him away, can you?"
She stared at the small figure in the thin blanket for several silent moments.
"He's not my son."
"No, he isn't. But he was someone's son. He was Claridge's son, and out of respect for him, I think the least we can do is to make sure his only son is provided for."
"Oh, but Nathaniel, look at him."
"What about him?"
"Well, he's odd, isn't he? I didn't think baby's eyes were supposed to be so dark! Aren't all babies supposed to have blue eyes when they are that young?"
"Well now, you can't really blame him if his eyes are the way they are? I admit, they are a trifle strange, but I would already guess he's seen enough with them to turn them that dark. I don't know how he managed to survive that fire. In any case, it's nothing to signify." These last words were spoken more to the infant in his arms, who blinked up at him with those odd black eyes.
"Well, if you really feel that strongly about it..." She bit her lip in obvious disapproval.
"I do. The lad was clearly preserved for some sort of greatness. The least we can do is give him a chance to claim his destiny."

Introductions

2009-02-02T04:39:00.001-08:00

I've been told that before we get started, it would be wise to introduce myself to you.

I would rather read than eat.

I have been forced to do so on more than one occasion when a spree left me with hardly enough for rent, let alone food money for the week.

I live near the beach in Beverly, because rose bushes and people fare better with sea breezes. And I love the Cabot Street Cinema more than I probably should.

I have two cats, named Quentin and Flora, who I found in a shelter, batting at each other through the mesh of their separate pens and knew that we were destined to be together.

I also have a seagull named Dmetri, who crashed landed on my front lawn about a year ago with a mangled wing. Once the MSPCA gave him a clean bill of health and tagged him as a Weather Bird (Bird DM3, hence the name), he found his way back, and now winters on my roof.

I am a trained archivist and 'preservation specialist', which means, when all is boiled down and refined, that I preserve and repair books. Which, considering that I like books far more than people, is a perfect job. I trained with a blind bookmaker in Boston who taught me to detect mold and cheap bindings through smell and water damage and paper quality through touch. It's just as effective, but does get you some pretty odd looks at antiques markets. Which is second only to the looks I get when I tell people my name.

I should explain that, while it's on my mind. I can't expect you to believe the rest of this if you spend half the time believing I've made up some kind of ridiculous pseudonym (which, if I wanted one, would be obscenely conventional). My great uncle, Danny, lived near Rudyard and family in Devon until around the First World War. He was devastated by the news of John Kipling's death and wrote home to my great-grandfather "How sad it is that the Kipling name will so soon now die away." Fast forward some sixty eight years, with the birth of a new Philby, who, medical expertise, family convictions and some good old Irish superstition said should have been male. When the next Patrick Thomas Philby turned out instead to be female, there ensued two days of panic, while the clan searched for a name for this unforeseen circumstance. Then Mad Uncle Pat (not to be confused with Old Uncle Pat or Uncle Pat from Dundalk) remembered Danny's letter. And in a fit of humor until then and as yet unparalleled, my father decided that, indeed, the Kipling name should live on.

And so it was, and so it is. And now, on to what will be...which, I promise, will be far more interesting...