Death in an Ivory Tower (Dotsy Lamb Travel Mysteries) (3 page)

The cell phone in my purse chattered against the wooden seat. I fished it out and fumbled for the talk button. Not surprisingly, it was from my friend Lettie Osgood, and she was calling from across town.

“Dotsy? I’m not coming back to the college tonight. I’m staying here. Lindsey and what’s-his-name are out and they won’t be home till the wee hours, I’m sure, so I have to stay with the children.”

Lettie rented a room on the same staircase as mine. She was staying here on a B and B basis, not attending the conference but helping her daughter, Lindsey, a doctor who was working at the Radcliffe Hospital in a summer exchange program. Lindsey’s two children were here because leaving them with her ex back in Virginia was not an option. Lettie hadn’t told me why. Something was going on there, and it wasn’t good, I felt. Who was this man Lindsey was going out with? A new boyfriend? Ah well. Lindsey was in her late thirties and divorced. Naturally she’d be dating again but thank heavens Lettie was here. The children were staying in a strange apartment, in a strange country, and their mother was away most of the time—day and night—not good for the little ones’ sense of security. They were seven and five, the age when children’s fear of strangers, the bogeyman, loomed large and unreasoning.

Conversation over, I switched my phone back to the ring tone and stuffed it in my purse. A dark form flicked through the lamplight spilling across the grass. I jumped. Silly. Just someone walking through the archway toward the college’s north gate.

“Fancy meeting you here.” The voice came from behind my bench.

I turned. It was Bram Fitzwaring. “We must stop meeting like this,” I said. “Have a seat.”

Bram did as I suggested. “Going out on the town tonight? It’s still early.”

“For the young, maybe, but not for me.”

“Oh, come on. How about a pizza? Let’s go for a pizza.” He leaned his shoulder against mine and gave my arm a nudge.

“We just ate! Are you telling me you could eat another meal?”

“Not on, eh? Ah well, I’ll probably pack it in, as well.” He straightened his legs, crossed his sandal-clad feet at the ankles, and dropped his head back, looking up at a hazy dark sky. His wooly caftan smelled of incense. “I don’t think they want me here.”

From nonsense straight to the gut. This man was making my stomach churn. I said nothing.

“Eh? Did you hear me?”

“I heard you. Who is
they
? Who doesn’t want you here?”

“Harold Wetmore. Harold Wet Fish. Harold-Head-Up-His-Ass-World’s-Foremost-Authority-on-English-History, thinks I should go home.” Bram glanced toward me as if to see how I was reacting. I diverted my gaze to the lawn. “Seems I’m sullying the purity of his precious ivory tower. That comment he made at dinner about ‘if you’re here on a treasure hunt for the Holy Grail or whatever, you need to leave.’ That was for me.”

“Does he think you’re here on a treasure hunt? I don’t get it.” Actually I did get it, but I didn’t want to say so.

“No. But this bullshit about the
myth
of Arthur—the Arthur
legend
—it’s bullshit. I’ve read all the stories, too, you know. I’ve read
Le Morte d’Arthur,
I’ve read Geoffrey of Monmouth, I’ve read Tennyson. But Grand Master Wetmore—Lord Wetmore—Lord High Ruler of St. Ormond’s—goes bloody nuts if you mention that Arthur was also
a real king.
”

“His opinion is in the majority, you know.”

“Majority. Majority of what? Majority of poncing pinheads who think history is counting pigs in fourteen eighty-two? Who never think about what life was like for the Britons when the Romans pulled out?” Bram’s beefy arms flew skyward and a board in our bench cracked under his weight. “They think the Romans left and the Brits just stood there for a couple hundred years waiting for someone else to come and tell them what to do!”

“This is Oxford, you know.” I stood, grabbed my purse, and started walking toward Staircase Thirteen. Bram’s voice was rising several decibels with every comment and I didn’t want a scene. “It’s been a long day. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Bram stood and followed me, shouting at the back of my neck. “Just you wait! I’m going to blow the doors off this place! Just you wait. When I get my turn, I’m going to blow the doors off this place!”

I took the shortest route, straight across the grass.

“He’ll come a cropper, ol’ Harry, ol’ Harvey, ol’ . . .” His voice trailed off to an inarticulate mumble.

Climbing the first flight of stairs, I heard Bram’s rubber soles squeaking on the stone steps behind me.
Oh, no, he’s following me to my room! How can I get rid of him without . . .
Fortunately, before I said anything I remembered his room was also on this staircase.

When I reached my own door, I saw that he was gone.

My little room on the top floor felt like the garret of a starving artist. All funny angles and slants, with a tiny single bed, desk, bookcase, sink, wardrobe, and a low table, probably from IKEA, for the tea-making facilities. Every day the scout, their term for housekeeper, tidied my room and left me two bourbon cream biscuits on the saucer beside the cup. Every day I ate them.

A large stone fireplace, now blocked up, stood on one end of the room, its surround bearing the graffiti of generations of students. Some were in Latin and some looked more like runes but were probably just idle scratchings.

My room was number six.

Standing at my door I couldn’t see the doors of any other rooms because the narrow hall extended a few feet, plunged down four steps, made a forty-five-degree right turn, then descended another four steps. Here stood the doors marked four and five. Down two more flights, now turning left, you hit a landing with the bathroom (shower and toilet) on one end and a bifurcated extension on the other, where the two ends terminated in doors marked two and three. There was no room number one, but another flight down, on ground level, stood a blackened wood door with a brass plaque that read, “Bursar’s Office.” I’d never seen it unlocked.

Lettie Osgood stayed in room five whenever she did stay here, which, in the five days since my arrival, had only been twice. Bram Fitzwaring and Mignon Beaulieu had two of the others, but I didn’t know which two. I hadn’t noticed exactly when Bram, climbing the stairs behind me, had peeled off and entered his own room.

I stood on my bed to open the little window beneath a gabled roof and let in the night air. A neatly printed sign on one pane of glass read, “No exit.” I laughed every time I saw it. Nowhere but in a college would it be necessary to stick such a warning. The window was fifty feet above the pavement and, fully open, produced a hole no more than a foot wide, but some thin and agile undergraduate would try it. I set my iPad on my little nightstand, brushed my teeth at the sink, then paused. I heard something. Drums? Rhythmic taps. Thirteen taps, then a pause, then thirteen more. Where was it coming from? I hopped back up on the bed and turned an ear to the open window. The drumming noises continued but they weren’t coming from outside.

I decided to take a shower before turning in. I grabbed my towel, face cloth, soap dish, and robe.
Don’t forget the room key.
Thanks to Lettie’s earlier mistake, I knew that forgetting your key meant a trip to the Porter’s Lodge dressed however one was when heading to the loo in the middle of the night. Fortunately the lodge stayed open all night, but Lettie had been horribly embarrassed.

On the way down, I listened for the drumming sounds but they seemed to have stopped. Inside the toilet niche, I thought I heard footsteps coming from outside. The bathroom window was half open, and I stepped over close to it. Some ten feet above the walk that ran the length of the south wall of the quad, the windowsill hit me slightly below my shoulders. The window itself was the sort that cranks out in two tall vertical segments. I stuck my head out and looked down.

I still heard footsteps but I saw no one. My view from the window was of the grassy quad bathed in shades of blue and a faint yellow glow from the carriage lantern under the archway on the opposite side. A fog was drifting in.

I heard something hit the walkway below the window. Something small, possibly metallic. Keys? A huge shadow grazed the stones on the opposite side of the quad. A head and shoulders, but they ended in a pencil-thin shadow that extended all across the lawn and ended, I supposed, on the walkway beneath my window. I raised myself to tiptoes and craned my neck down as far as possible. I could see almost straight down. I could see a strip of the flagstone walk but the wisteria vine clinging to the stone wall kept me from seeing straight down. I saw no one. This was spooky.

Checking the bathroom door to make sure it was locked, I paused until my racing pulse slowed down, then stripped naked and hopped into the shower. Now I was hearing noises everywhere. Clunks. Could be the pipes. A cough? Could be Bram or Mignon inside their own rooms, but could I hear a cough through two doors and a stairwell? Someone outside? An eerie wail sent the soap in my hands flying toward the shower-head. Okay. I
must
have imagined that. I was happy to bundle myself back into my own little room and check my email on my tablet. This little cyber-connection to home, a message from my granddaughter telling me she had won a medal in swimming, comforted me.

I had drifted off, my iPad on my chest, when a loud
thunk
woke me with a start. I couldn’t possibly have imagined it, because, eyes open, I heard another.

My stomach hurt. In fact, I felt as if I might throw up. How long would it take me to get to the bathroom? Grab robe, grab key, down four winding sets of steps, and pray the room wasn’t already occupied. Suddenly I wished I’d asked for one of the en suite rooms in the new hall. I’d insisted on this quad because of its ambience.
Screw ambience,
I thought, and pulled the plastic trashcan close to my bed. I heard another thunk. Coming from below, it sounded like a dresser turning over, or a body slamming into a wall.

I jumped up and ran out into the hall. I remembered, just in time, to keep one foot in the doorway so the door couldn’t close, as it automatically did, and lock me out. My key was on the opposite side of my room, on the tea tray. Calling out, but not too loudly, “Is there a problem? Does someone need help?” netted me no response. I retreated to my nightstand and checked my watch. Two-thirty in the morning.

Dropping my room key into the pocket of my robe, I traipsed down, past Lettie’s vacant room, and knocked on the door of room four. No response. I knocked again. Nothing. Down two more flights with my stomach still churning, I came to the Y-shaped hall and knocked on the doors at each end. Nothing. Nothing at all from room two but after the third knock on number three, a frowzled Mignon Beaulieu opened the door.

“I heard a loud noise from down this way. Are you all right?”

Her eyes were puffy slits and she didn’t seem to understand me. She was wearing footie pajamas with teddy bears all over.

“Just checking,” I said, nodding and stepping backwards. “Sorry.”

I was up at five-thirty, too early for breakfast but wide awake. Breakfast, in fact, sounded good, so the nausea of last night must have passed. I tested my blood sugar and stuck a straw in a little carton of orange juice from the unrefrigerated six-pack I always keep handy. I’ve been diabetic all my life. I started the kettle for tea and sat down to study the printed program. This was the first official day of the conference and we had a full one ahead of us.

St. Ormond’s College
Oxford
The Lingering Effects of the King Arthur Tales on Life in
Elizabethan England

Saturday, July 7

Breakfast 7:30 to 9 am—Dining Hall

Lecture 9:30–10:30—Smythson Hall

Larry Roberts: “Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur
”

Tea 10:30–11—West Quad Lawn (weather permitting)

Lecture 11–12—Smythson Hall

Harold Wetmore: “Courtly Love and the Tudor Court: Elizabeth, Raleigh, and Leicester”

Lunch 12–1:30—Dining Hall

Lecture 2–3—Smythson Hall

Claudia Moss: “
Arthur’s Tale
and the Players of Mile End Green”

Tea 3–3:30—West Quad Lawn (weather permitting)

Lecture 4–5—Smythson Hall

Bram Fitzwaring: “The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A Case History”

Dinner at 7—Dining Hall

Note: In inclement weather, outdoor events will be held in the SCR.

I knew the first lecture by heart. With me as his audience, Larry had delivered it in its entirety a dozen times back in Charlottesville, Virginia, and emailed me a hundred alterations to a paragraph, a sentence, or even a single word when I wasn’t physically present to hear the whole thing. The time I spent in Charlottesville, an hour’s drive from my home near Staunton, I was supposed to be ironing out kinks in my dissertation, with Larry’s help. After all, he was my major professor. But every time I brought up the subject of my dissertation, his eyes glazed over. He’d fidget until I paused long enough to change the subject to the only one on his mind: This speech.

In Larry’s mind, Oxford scholars stood between God and the angels in the Great Chain of Being. His invitation to deliver the opening paper of this conference was, to him, the pinnacle of his career. I wondered if he’d be able to eat any breakfast this morning.

The big surprise was the fourth speaker. They’d actually put Bram Fitzwaring on the schedule for day one. How had he managed to swing that? I was scheduled to conduct one of the breakout sessions on Monday right after lunch when people were most likely to skip out and go shopping. Bram’s topic, however, “The Dissolution of the Monasteries” under King Henry VIII, was apropos of the conference goal and sounded relatively uncontroversial.

I dressed as I drank my tea. This being the first day of the conference, I donned my best black slacks with a black tank top under my new, printed silk, chiffon tunic. I checked myself in the mirror, thinking about Smythson Hall and how I could take off the tunic if the room was too hot and how that would leave my arms bare. The tank top was sleeveless. There are those who think a woman of my age should never show her upper arms. My upper arms looked all right to me. Shoes? I’d only brought three pairs so it would have to be the black pumps because the other two pairs were tennis shoes and brown sandals.