Stalker
ANDREW WOKE TO a sky so low and foggy it was impossible to tell the time. Persephone lay next to him, warm, her body suffusing the bed with that luscious mix of skin-smell, hair-smell, yesterday’s perfume, and the smell of sleep. She was naked, entangled in the covers. He smiled. He leaned over, stroked the tangle of her hair. As he did so, he realized that one of his hands clenched something, as if it had been doing so for hours, in sleep. He opened his hand.
A tiny object—small, translucent, flimsy—lay there. A fingernail?
He prodded it with his opposite hand. It appeared to be . . . a petal. A tiny petal, shaped like a fingernail, round and white, with a black ridge. Not a flower petal. The petal of a blossom.
He racked his brain for ways a blossom petal could have ended up in his hand, in autumn.
Then the memory of last night’s vision returned to him. He froze, processing. It seemed remote, far in the past. Had it been only a dream? He turned to Persephone in alarm, the mysterious petal forgotten. Was she breathing? Was she dead? Panic flushed him. He scrambled on top of the duvet. Tugged back the sheets from her face. Her cheeks were clean.
“Thank God,” he breathed.
“Is this some American agricultural ritual?” she groaned. “Checking the livestock after you have sex with it?”
He burst out laughing, with pure joy. Last night must have been a normal dream. Not a vision of the real Harness.
“I love you,” he said.
She said nothing and snuggled up to him.
“It’s customary, when one person says I love you, to say I love you back,” he said, trying to sound like he was casually teasing, but very much alert to her response.
“But how would I preserve my mystery, after I’ve given you so much.”
“You’ve given me so much?”
He yanked the sheets from her and she screamed in protest, and they wrestled over them, but eventually lay alongside each other, gazing, as if this were the first time they had seen each other—naked or otherwise—and even Persephone let the minutes tick past without speaking.
AGATHA WAITED FOR them at Trinity Gate, with her red hair and long overcoat, a lone stationary figure in a swirl of bicycles, students, parking cars, and busfuls of Chinese tourists. A fog had set in over the university. She hugged Persephone and gave Andrew a double-kiss, and immediately began teasing them for being late. Cambridge seems to agree with you two. Will there be anything left of my room when I return? The couple grinned, embarrassed, and they squeezed hands. Agatha rolled her eyes and shepherded them through the security booth. They signed in and passed under the arch to the grounds of Trinity College.
The fog gave the place a dreamlike air, but Andrew suspected that even in bright sunlight you would think you had passed into another era. The college, made up of perfectly preserved sand-colored buildings from the seventeenth century, squared around a lawn edged by graveled paths. A high, ornate fountain stood in the center. Agatha chatted away with Persephone while Andrew marveled at the quiet the giant courtyard imposed; how perfectly time had preserved the place. They followed the path around to the building on the far side, climbed some steps, and ducked inside a door set in an ogee arch. A passage, noisy and crowded, cut through the historic building. Students jostled them, wearing scarves and army jackets. In a few paces they reached another door, then emerged into yet another foggy, stony courtyard; only this one was smaller, and completely silent. On the far side rose a multistory building with an arcade on the ground floor.
“That’s it,” said Agatha, leading them out into this second courtyard. “The Wren Library. What’s your archivist’s name again?”
“Lena Rasmussen. Do you know her?”
“I’m reading economics,” replied Agatha. “I don’t have much use for rare manuscripts.”
They passed under the arcade and started up a broad staircase. Ten-foot-high portraits of former college grandees lined the walls: scowling, berobed, monumental.
“Those are to frighten the American tourists,” quipped Agatha.
They found themselves in a long room. It rose two stories high, with windows on the second story admitting the chilly radiance of the sky. Whitewashed walls curled into a series of nooks formed by walnut-brown bookshelves. These were crammed with dusty, crumbling volumes, and were cordoned off with velvet ropes to protect what looked like private study areas with lamps and tiny desks. Arranged throughout, on pedestals, were whitewashed busts of literary heroes: Virgil, Cicero, Milton. At the end of the room the largest of these loomed, a colossal hunk of white marble depicting a figure holding a book and a pen. A hush reigned here; aside from a few shuffling figures at the front, there were more busts than live people in the Wren Library.
Agatha strode up to a desk where a man sat tapping listlessly at a computer. He wore a shaggy brownish sweater and had a bald crown and a surrounding fringe of floppy grey hair; he was the human equivalent of an old manuscript. Agatha asked for Lena Rasmussen. The man seemed surprised to encounter a human here; doubly surprised for that human to be a voluptuous nineteen-year-old in expensive clothes and with torrents of attention-grabbing red hair. A woman approached from the opposite nook. She was in her mid-twenties, with broad Scandinavian cheekbones. She wore a brown T-shirt and black jeans, a nose ring, and black hair drawn back in a ponytail.
“I’m a student of Judith Kahn,” said Andrew. “She sent you some letters I found?”
The archivist appraised him. Her eyes narrowed to an expression of knowing amusement. “That’s you, is it?” she said. “Those papers have caused a stir. You’re students at Harrow?”
“That’s right.”
“Looks like you’ve found some letters left by Lord Byron,” Lena said.
“You found letters . . . written by Lord Byron?” exclaimed Agatha, who had not known the specific purpose of their visit.
“Not by,” corrected Lena. “To. I showed your letters to Reggie Cade. He can explain.”
“Who’s Reggie Cade?”
“He’s a fellow of the college. He founded the Byron Institute at the University of Manchester, before Trinity stole him away. He was just here yesterday, pawing your letters.” Lena nodded down the hall at the full-sized marble statue. “That’s him, you know.”
“Reggie Cade?” questioned Andrew. It was a ten-foot-high figure with pen and paper, heroically astride a fallen Greek column.
The archivist smiled.
“Lord Byron. It was commissioned to go in Westminster Abbey. But the church wouldn’t accept the statue of a known sex maniac. So they sent it to Trinity—where sex maniacs are always welcome.”
She returned to the nook where she’d been sitting and flipped through a notebook for a phone number.
“She’s an odd one,” murmured Agatha. “P . . . you all right?”
Persephone had gone pale.
“I’m all right.”
“You look frightful.”
“I’ll be fine. My blood sugar just dropped.”
Andrew went to wrap an arm around her.
“So sweet,” crowed Agatha, approvingly.
“No snogging in the Wren,” drawled Lena, returning. “Reggie’s on his way. Bicycling here at full speed, no doubt. Come on.”
“Where are we going?” asked Andrew.
“To the vault,” she said.
THEY DESCENDED THE broad steps they had originally come up and found that the Wren connected to a disappointingly modern student library with carpeting, low ceilings, and cramped carrels. They wormed their way to a service staircase and began a descent of several stories.
“We’re underground now,” Lena told them. They reached a heavy door. She punched a code into a security keypad and yanked it open. “Notice it’s cooler here. Needs to be between fifty-five and sixty-five Fahrenheit, and fifty-five and sixty-five percent relative humidity. We’re next to the river. The walls are reinforced concrete, to keep the damp out. Basically we’re in an underground box. And here,” she said, flicking on a bank of lights and pushing open the door of a metal cage with a clank, “are the manuscripts.”
They faced a long, thin passageway. On the left stood high shelves; not ordinary, stationary bookshelves; these were on rollers, with steel crank handles, like the doors to old bank vaults, to slide them back and forth. Lena traced her way to the shelf she wanted and began turning the handle. The shelves oozed apart, silently. She motioned to Andrew. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
He followed her into the narrow space between the shelves, which rose in darkness fifteen feet.
“I hope you trust your friends,” she murmured.
“Why?”
“Each of these shelves weigh a ton. If they turn the crank, we’ll be crushed.”
“You have a funny sense of humor.”
“Passes the time.” She pulled a grey box from the shelf. “Come on, we’ll wait for Reggie in the consultation room.”
DR. REGGIE CADE arrived, red in the face, still huffing from his rapid bicycle ride (Andrew caught Lena smiling to herself at his appearance—her prediction had been accurate). He cut an imposing and strange figure: over six feet, with a vast belly; a green cardigan, green tie; high rubber boots, as if he had just been working in a garden; and large oilskin jacket. He was fiftyish, with a baggy, jowly face covered with a scruff of blond beard, going white; one of his eyes wandered severely; and his hands were soft and flabby with longish nails—that look only English men seemed to acquire, after a lifetime avoiding exercise. In all he was not an attractive man. But when he spoke, he boomed in a rich bass; Orson Welles with a Manchester brogue. Andrew could imagine him as a mesmerizing lecturer. He paused in the doorway of the tiny consultation room—a ten-by-ten box with carpeting, fluorescent lights, and a round table with chairs. The young people had crowded around as Lena removed the contents of the grey box: a dozen letters, stained brown, spread out like a large and fatigued hand of cards.
Dr. Cade sized them all up with his one good eye. “I see only one male, and the letters were found at Harrow School, so I presume you are the finder of the letters.” He directed his remarks at Andrew, without introduction. Andrew nodded. “Make room, then.” Lena found him a chair. He entered the room and eased his bulk into it. “Where did you find them?” he demanded of Andrew, patting his face with a handkerchief.
Andrew told the story about the cistern room and the biscuit tin.
Cade shook his head and chuckled. “Were they Byron Brand biscuits?” At this Andrew grinned and warmed to him. “That’s a story indeed. All right, Lena, let’s have a look at the specimens.”
“Hands dry, Dr. Cade?”
“Don’t hector me, girl. Come on.”
“Have you read the letters?” Andrew asked eagerly.
“I have,” Cade said.
“And?”
“It’s a shame your biscuit box wasn’t a bit dryer,” Cade said, fingering the leaves. “These fibers adhered because they were damp and tied up—squeezed together for two hundred years. Separating them shredded the fibers, and much is illegible. Not to mention the staining. Still,” he said, “there are parts we can read. And what a read!” He peered around the table, as if threatening them to disagree. “When Lena told me it was possible they belonged to Lord Byron . . . how did you know, by the way? Before reading them?” Cade peered at Andrew.
“I live in Byron’s house. His dorm.”
“So have hundreds of boys.”
“I’m playing Byron in a school play. Byron on the brain, I guess.”
“Was this John Harness’s house, too?” he asked. Andrew froze. He felt the others’ eyes on him, puzzled. Cade chuckled. “So you know the name, eh? John Harness, Byron’s lover and classmate at Trinity. You know a lot about Lord Byron, I see. But I’m guessing there’s no plaque at Harrow School to Byron and his young boyfriend, hm? Schools tend not to publicize such things.” Andrew shook his head. “Just as well. The scholarship portrays Harness as an innocent. An early Byron victim. Byron himself had much to do with that.
Those eyes proclaim’d so pure a mind,
Even Passion blush’d to plead for more.
“But what I have here . . . I beg your pardon,” he said, blustering a little, embarrassed, “what you have here, is evidence that innocent young John Harness was far from pure. In fact, he was hell on wheels.”
“How do you know it’s Harness?” Andrew managed.
“How?” the professor replied, with a proud thrust of the chin. “I matched these letters against a detailed chronology of Byron’s life I have been developing for three decades.”
“And how did they compare?”
“Perfectly,” Cade said with a smile of triumph. “That’s why I’m here.” He arranged the letters in front of him. “The writer is not Byron. I believe it’s Harness himself. These would be the first extant letters of Byron’s homosexual lover.”
Andrew leaned forward eagerly. “How do you know?”
“Three factors. The chronology; the intimacy and mutual knowledge; and the tone. Which begins quite lovey-dovey, then nosedives into jealous obsession.” Dr. Cade drew out a pair of reading glasses and squinted at the pages, leaning over them—favoring his good eye, like a bird examining a worm—and chose a leaf. “To Byron. Summer, 1808. The tears which I shed in secret are the proofs of my sorrow. I was and am yours. I give up all here & beyond the grave for you. Beyond the grave,” he repeated.
Andrew found himself glancing at Persephone. Her face seemed ashen in the dim light.
Dr. Cade peeled off his reading glasses. “Harness was to die a year later. He must have known already he had tuberculosis. And he would have known his odds of survival were poor. In those days, consumptives were prescribed fresh air. Trips to Spain, or sea voyages. But you had to have money. Harness had just left Trinity, in penury, to become a clerk in London. He could afford no such luxury. And there’s our fourth theme in these letters.”
“What’s that?” asked Andrew.
“Death,” declared Dr. Cade. “Step by step, a desperate young man dying. Here’s one addressed to Albemarle Street, in March. Winter must have been getting to him.
“If through some accident you have never received the last letters sent by me . . . Starts with a guilt trip—where’s the money to keep me well fed? Where are the funds for my journey abroad? He wants his rich boyfriend to give him some cash. And Byron, typically, is selfish in all the wrong moments. We’re talking about a man who later left his own daughter to die in an Italian convent.”
Cade scanned the pages.
“It’s illegible for a while. My coughing and—unreadable, maybe fever—continue . . . but while these keep me sitting up all the night kerchief clenched to my mouth, it is you and news of you which I . . . looks like thirst for. He’s still feeling well enough to be rhetorical. It doesn’t last. Neither does his writing paper. This is where the crosshatched writing quite overloads the page. Next letter.”
He placed one leaf down and picked up the one beside it. “There is a core of disease in me not easy to pull out. I have ceased to attend to the firm. Harness’s position was at a London company, in shipping, very middle class at the time, which is to say poor by our standards. Can you imagine his isolation? Grown too fancy for his impoverished family. Homosexual, alone, broke, and dying? His world would have been growing smaller by the minute. I live on the guineas put by—and even these are scarcely put to use as I cannot eat. I cannot abide food for the cankers that afflict my mouth. My few visitors chide me for my pallor and insist I eat animal meat—but I am done with both—animals and visitors—and my chest is in a nervous state such that when I draw breath spasms shake me and I cough blood. It is black & thick.”
Dr. Cade frowned at the manuscript. “Tough way to go, TB. But he’s not through yet. The one obsession that keeps him going is Byron. I am relieved only by your love,” Cade continued reading. “In those words—your love—is comprised my existence here and hereafter. But it turns sour when he finds—again, typically—that Byron has taken up with someone else. Another young man. Now the love song shows the discord of jealousy. Mind you, Byron is in and out of London all this time, and seems never to have visited Harness.
“H’s letter reached me . . . I reckon H is Hobhouse, a close friend of Byron, and as such likely a mutual acquaintance with Harness . . . you have a new ‘friend’ espied with you often in London whose name none know but whose countenance all seem agreed is handsome and dainty and fair. Men seldom agree on anything in such unison. Bitchy remark. Not only is he dying; he’s been betrayed. Byron has a new boy toy, a pretty one, and one who’s well enough to run about town with him. Let’s see, from here, little is legible until pretending fair creature . . . black cloud—must be ‘fills’—my mind. Ah yes, then the imperative. Tell me who this is. Harness seems, now, determined to take action. I am coming to Albemarle Street, expect me.”
“Stalking,” observed Andrew.
Dr. Cade nodded approvingly. “I like that. Very apt. Stalking,” he repeated, as if remembering it for later. “No letters for several days,” he resumed. “It appears Byron has given Harness the slip.”
“What did he do? Did it work?” cut in Andrew.
“Well, Harness is very persistent,” Dr. Cade answered. “Listen. My dearest . . . I trust this finds you well at Brighton. You have gone there quickly I am told—the same day as my visit to your rooms. Byron’s dodging him, you see. Mrs. Leckie . . . must be the landlady . . . was kind enough to tell me your FRIEND accompanied you. See the caps?” Dr. Cade held the letter up for them to look at, smiling. “Now two days later. Pursuit has failed Harness. He tries more guilt. He should have known Byron better—the man was no nursemaid. Can you not return to London, even for an hour? When you see me & my need you will forgo all other loves. Today I was going on in good spirits quite merrily—when—in an instant—a cough seized me and I vomited two cupfulls of blood. It is my death warrant. I must die. I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy my only hope for joy—a single sight of you. Very sweet, as far as it goes, but jealousy gets the better of him. The one who enjoys such a vision in my place, I most determinedly do hate. This hate grows and blooms even as I decay and die. Illegible, but it goes on for a time on this theme of hate because he’s still on it”—Dr. Cade flipped the paper—“on the next page. The flowering of it, he says, will be to destroy him.”
“To destroy him,” Andrew repeated. “He means he will kill his rival.” Andrew’s eyes leapt to Persephone.
“As I said. Hell on wheels.”
Persephone coughed. It was a long, itchy, persistent cough, and it interrupted the discussion.
Andrew watched her, a sudden and unnamed suspicion aroused in him. She remained pale, withdrawn.
Stalking.
Andrew had said it, trying to be the clever student, to impress the teacher. But he had unwittingly supplied his own answer. With a crash of misery, he realized his vision of Harness from the night before might not have been a dream at all.
“Are you feeling okay, Persephone?”
“I’m all right.”
“Are you sure? How does your chest feel?”
“My chest?”
The group looked at Andrew, puzzled by his question.
“Your cough,” he said, defensively.
“I’m perfectly fine,” she said crossly.
“I’m worried about you. You don’t look well.”
“You’re being silly.”
“Shall I go on?” Dr. Cade asked.
Reluctantly, Andrew nodded. But his eyes kept finding Persephone, watching her for any change, while he listened to Dr. Cade’s remarks.
“So here,” boomed Dr. Cade, “is the last letter of this extraordinary series, dated June 1809, just a month before Byron sets sail for Portugal. The most passionate of all. If that’s the right word. Dearest—You are going to SD. Not certain what that is. SD? Sounds like a place-name, but I could find no meaningful reference. HE is coming with you. I know. H wrote me and told me all. I will summon all my remaining strength. I am coming to you. There, where we once met, I will find you, destroy him, and all will be well. You said it very well before.” Cade nodded to Andrew. “He is a stalker. A nineteenth-century stalker. For all Byron’s flaws, you can see why he avoided Harness. The young fellow’s jealousy literally drove him mad. I will find you, destroy him . . . doesn’t leave much room for metaphorical interpretation. It’s a death threat.” Cade dropped his reading glasses onto the table. “Still, one is left with many questions. Who was this other lover? And more practically, how did these letters end up all together, at Harrow School? And what is SD?”
Persephone murmured weakly.
“What’s that?” demanded Dr. Cade, loudly, without any sympathy.
Persephone coughed again.
“Water,” said Andrew. “Is there something here for her to drink?”
“Upstairs. The fountain,” said Lena.
Andrew ran up the flights of stairs, panic pulsing in his mind. He felt, for a moment, insane. Persephone was sick. He perceived it. The disease was taking her over at this very moment. His hands trembled as he filled a paper cup of water in the bustling library. He carried it carefully downstairs, back to the consultation room. Yes, she was definitely pale. Yet all these people were sitting around calmly. Of course they are. They didn’t see what you saw, last night, he told himself. He handed the water to Persephone. She drank the water gratefully.
“Speech Day,” she croaked at last.
“Speech Day?” Dr. Cade repeated. He tossed back his head, as if to search for the words’ meaning on the ceiling.
“Speech Day. At Harrow,” Andrew explained, suddenly understanding. “It’s kind of like graduation, at the end of the school year. A bunch of seniors . . . Sixth Formers . . . memorize speeches and deliver them. Byron and Harness might have met on that weekend like . . . like old friends meeting at Alumni Day.”
“You’re going to SD.” Cade repeated the words to himself. “To Speech Day. Yes, of course. It’s in the summer, is it?”
“Early June. So they would have got together at Harrow, on Speech Day, in 1809,” Andrew said, putting the pieces together. “That must be where they exchanged the letters.”
“That meeting would have been a real prizefight,” Cade declared, holding the letters. “After all these.”
Lena protested. “But these are only Harness’s letters, I’m certain. One handwriting only.”
“Quite right. There was no exchange of letters. Byron returned all of Harness’s letters,” Cade exclaimed. “They were toxic. Who would want to keep them?” He grew more animated. “And it explains the receptacle. He would not exactly tie these with a ribbon. And he would not want his Harrow friends to see them. So he returned the letters . . . in a biscuit box. Probably one he picked up in a local shop, or near his lodgings at Harrow. A hastily obtained container. Lucky for us—airtight!” Cade grinned, delighted. “This is good! Very good!”
Cade opened his mouth to ask more questions. But this time he was unable to speak because Persephone coughed again, loudly. The cough perpetuated itself; hacking; scratching; on and on, as the lungs searched for, but never found, the blockage. It bent Persephone double.
Andrew’s stomach fell. Here it was. He had been both right and wrong. Right that he had seen the vision, and known, instinctively, that Harness had infected Persephone. Wrong that he had not acted upon it immediately.
The faces of his companions instinctively screwed up in disgust and sympathy—then finally—finally!—Persephone’s cough seemed to have found the blockage; something caught, at last; and she—with a grimace; and not having time to grab a handkerchief—delivered some liquid into her palm. She held up her hand and looked at it.
Agatha spoke first.
“Oh my God! Persephone!” she shrieked. “It’s blood! Andrew! Persephone just spit up blood!”
Andrew leapt to Persephone’s side, both he and Agatha immediately bending over her, staring at the hand Persephone had extended. She now withdrew her hand, trying to hide it. A puddle of blood, bright red and gleaming.
“It’s nothing,” she said weakly. “Stop worrying.”
“We are worrying,” protested Agatha. “You’ve been looking funny all morning. We’d better go. We’ll go to my room and you can lie down. I’m sorry, Dr. Cade.” They coaxed Persephone from her seat. Professor Cade remained seated, disappointed; his audience was breaking up. Lena Rasmussen whispered to him—I need these back, sir—and took the precious letters from him, tucked them back in the box, and disappeared into the rolling stacks again. Then the group became a chaotic scrum, circling around Persephone, moving her through the passage between the high shelves back to the narrow staircase.
“I’m taking her back to London,” Andrew said.
“London?” protested Agatha.
“She needs to go to the hospital.”
Andrew wrapped his arms around Persephone and led her up the narrow stairs, through the student library, where they drew stares, and out under the silent colonnade. Andrew and Agatha moved their friend back through the courtyard, retracing their steps toward Trinity Street. It suddenly seemed a long way to walk.
“Are you really leaving?” exclaimed Dr. Cade, who had followed them out.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Agatha called over her shoulder. “Thank you,” she added, to Lena.
Andrew heard Cade boom out after them: “I intend to publish this you know!” Then, he added: “How can I contact you?” They didn’t answer. As they reached the portal on the far side of the courtyard, he called out again, with a desperate note: “Do you want credit for the discovery?”
Andrew kept his arms wrapped around Persephone. He kept leaning over to check her face, check the pallor there, check for the shallowness of her breathing, check for things that made her look like Roddy sucking air out of that black punching bag for dear life, or like Theo don’t think it like Theo lying cold and stiff and vaguely purple with gravel on his eyebrows. Agatha peppered him with scolding counsel there’s an infirmary we can be there in ten minutes but he ignored this. He knew what he needed to do.
HE HALF GUIDED Persephone, half carried her, through those streets they had dashed through the night before. Now the route back to the train seemed endless. A market square, crowded, but no one offering to help. It’s okay, I know where to take you, he told her. You’re overreacting, she murmured, then began another attack of heaving coughs that bent her double right there in the street, people giving them a wide berth, disgusted, like they were some degenerate pair—druggies, needles, HIV! It’s like people knew, could sense symptoms that lay outside the normal curve of colds and coughs. Did you get blood again? he asked desperately. I don’t think so, she answered.
At last they reached the train station. He left her on a bench with Agatha—who had stopped protesting a while back, and now merely followed and hovered—as he ran in to check the timetables. The next train left at 12:55. It was now 11:57. Nearly an hour. He choked with anguish. He could not wait an hour. He ran back outside. Persephone remained upright—thank goodness—and had resumed that self-sustaining, self-protecting posture, hands gripped together, shoulders hunched, eyes shut and focused inward. But her face had gone the same cheesy pallor
Know what caseosis is? Dr. Minos had said When your lungs turn to cheese
that Roddy’s had. Andrew fought off panic. He needed to think. He pressed his eyes shut.
When he opened them, he saw a taxi stand.
He ran up to one of them, a sleek grey economy car, and leaned into the open driver’s-side window.
“I’m going to London,” he said.
The driver was a slim guy, young, with an angular, Eastern European squint. He gave Andrew a dubious grimace. “That’ll cost you a hundred quid.”
“Do you take credit cards?”
He did.
Andrew ran back to the bench, gingerly eased Persephone up, across the sidewalk, and into the backseat of the taxi.
“What are you going to do?” asked Agatha.
“I’m taking her to a hospital in London. They specialize in . . .”
“In what, Andrew? Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“She has tuberculosis.”
“Tuberculosis?” she cried. “How . . . how do you know?”
“It’s related to what we talked about with Vivek,” he said. “Long story. I’ll call you later. I promise.”
They said quick goodbyes and the taxi nosed its way out of Cambridge, Andrew willing the traffic to part. He waited the trillion years required for his mobile browser to load a thumbed search for “Royal Tredway London.” He gave the driver the address. As the car moved into the flow and speed of the highway, he leaned back at last, and Persephone tucked into him, wrapping her arms around his forearm. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”
“You would be well, for starters,” he said.
“No,” she protested.
“I know what’s happening,” he told her. “Harness is infecting people. But not randomly.”
“Then how? Why?”
“I . . .” Andrew looked at her pale face. A blood spot still stained her lower lip. His heart crumpled in pity. “You should rest.”
“I want to know, Andrew. You can’t keep it from me.”
“Last night . . . I saw Harness. In our room.”
Persephone’s face fell. “The ghost? Here?”
“He infected you. On purpose.” Her expression flickered with doubt, then fear. Andrew continued. “He’s jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“Remember what the letter said? I will destroy him, and all will be well. He thinks I’m Byron. And anybody I get close to . . . he’s infecting. That’s how Theo died.”
Persephone sat up. “Theo?” she asked. “Roddy?”
“I spent time with them,” Andrew confirmed. “Harness is looking for male lovers. Competition. That rival he was obsessed with.”
“I’m not a man!” she said indignantly.
“I know.” Andrew managed to grin. “But . . . ,” he said, suddenly realizing, “your hair.”
She touched her short locks. Their matching haircuts. “Oh, God.”
“Are you okay?” he asked gently. “You seem a little . . .”
He was going to say better. Their conversation—so ordinary, in a way—had given him a moment of hope, or at least a moment of denial. But he should have kept his mouth shut, he scolded himself. As soon as the word better formed in his throat, Persephone started a wild hacking, so uncontrollable her eyes opened wide in panic, as if some foreign being were trying to fight its way out of her body; she flung her hand to her mouth to cover it, but it came up anyway, spattered through her fingers and onto Andrew, his jacket. Blood.
two cupfuls
“Oh my God!” he cried. He was sticky with it. Like being struck by a water balloon.
“What is it?” she asked, terrified, even though it was obvious; it dripped from her hand; it coated her lips.
“What’s going on back there?” demanded the driver.
“Please just hurry,” urged Andrew. “Please.”