Grey Zone (2 page)

As Dulcie talked, the certainty grew. ‘My author was silenced, Chris, and I'm going to get to the bottom of it. Even if I am two hundred years too late.' With that, she reached for her pencil, ready to get back to work. But the kitten was having none of it and nipped her outstretched hand, before knocking the pencil to the floor and darting away.

TWO

D
ulcie was still thinking about the missing author as she left for campus. She wasn't sure who the woman in her dream had been, she realized as she locked the door, slipping her keys into her pocket. After all, she didn't have a name for the author she was studying, much less a portrait. But even as she made her way down the front steps and on to the sidewalk, she couldn't shake off the sense of dread the nightmare had carried. Dread, but also purpose. Something was amiss; someone had wished the mysterious woman ill, and Dulcie couldn't help tying that strange moody feeling of impending danger to the scholarly mystery before her.

She bent into the wind as she made her way along the busy Cambridge street. The bright midday sun had disappeared into more typical March clouds, but the weather only served to make Dulcie more determined.
Abandon'd there upon her windswept peak, plagued by the vengeful spirits . . .
The writer who could pen that didn't simply stop writing. Someone was plotting trouble – or had been.

Chris was right, of course. If there had been some kind of malfeasance, it was way beyond the jurisdiction of the authorities. Even beyond the reach of the university. Dulcie paused in a convenience store doorway. Harvard was only about a mile from the apartment, but on a blustery day like today, the easy walk became a trek. What if she had been abandoned on a windswept peak? A woman alone on a mountainside, desperate and reliant on her will alone . . .

It was no use. She couldn't distract herself, not even with one of her usual fantasies. The dream loomed too large in her mind. Just such a craggy scenario had figured prominently in
The Ravages of Umbria
, the novel Dulcie was studying – the one major work her unnamed subject had left behind. Before she had disappeared. Before . . .

There was nothing she could do. Not from Massachusetts. The woman Dulcie was worried about had been British. A writer whose name had been lost to history, and who – foul play or no – would have been long dead by this century anyway. But Dulcie felt the impact of the crime as if it were personal. The missing author was more than an academic footnote, or even the subject of her thesis. Ever since she'd read the remaining fragments of
The Ravages of Umbria
, Dulcie had been taken with the unknown author's colorful phrases and smart arguments. A tale of heroism, of a lone woman who had to fend for herself in a haunted castle, it had won Dulcie's mind as well as her fancy.

Hermetria had been a woman she could relate to. Strong, smart.
Alone but for her companion Demetria, a noblewoman of good family, whose fortunes had fallen prey to evil times, she would gaze over the majestic peaks, whose summits, veiled with clouds, revealed at times their jagged teeth . . .

There were ghosts, of course, but the story had so much more. And where others had dismissed the little-known Gothic as supernatural fluff, Dulcie had found wisdom. In the dialogue between the main characters, she had spied a smart dramatization of ideas – the kind of ideas that got women in trouble in the eighteenth century. Since that first discovery, she'd unearthed several essays, too: more blatantly political works. It was heady stuff for a scholar of Gothic fiction. Whoever she was, the unknown author had been a groundbreaking thinker, one of the first proponents of women's rights. And then she was gone.

It was a problem Dulcie was still wrestling with as she passed by the small, modern building that housed Middle European Studies. Hunched like an orange hillock, the strangely rounded building made Dulcie long for the soaring stone turrets described so well in
The Ravages.
At least they had some kind of grandeur. This orange lump had none and had already been eclipsed for novelty. A few blocks away, just visible over its sherbet-colored roof, stood this year's architectural wonder, the Poche Building: seven stories of developmental psych. New to the skyline, it had already won the sobriquet of ‘Porches', for the tiny but decorative balconies that broke up its glass and steel facade. But if the encircling railings – smaller than the average fire escape – were supposed to make the building look more welcoming, they failed. Dulcie had grown up without many modern conveniences, but she could never look at those rails without thinking of braces on so many teeth. The effect was humorous and made her fonder of the building than of most of the university's other modern attempts, and more accepting of it than many of her peers.

As she approached the small clapboard house that served as home to her own department, she was reminded of why not many of her colleagues shared her view. Gray, with white trim, the English and American Literature and Language office might not have Gothic grandeur, but it looked cozy and welcoming. So unlike the newer buildings that towered over much of the rest of the Square. As if on cue, the sun broke through again, lighting up the trim and glossy black shutters. And, just as suddenly, the scene before her darkened. Although Dulcie did not subscribe to the theory that the placement was intentional – another blow in the continuing war between social sciences and humanities – there was no doubt of the effect. After more than a century of enjoying the afternoon sun, the little clapboard house was literally eclipsed as the shadow from the Poche cast its gray sides into a gloom the author of
The Ravages
would have recognized.

With a sigh, Dulcie turned into the little clapboard. She had a meeting with her new thesis adviser, Norm Chelowski. Soon he'd have to file his first report on how his new doctoral candidate was doing, and while Dulcie didn't usually cast herself in the role of beleaguered heroine, she feared he would not be impressed with her progress.

‘Hi, Nancy.'

The departmental secretary, a warm, motherly sort, looked up from her keyboard and smiled. ‘He's waiting.' She mouthed the words. ‘Good luck.'

Swallowing, despite the sudden dryness in her mouth, Dulcie took the old stairs two at a time, skipping over the cracked one second from the top. Maybe the department had been shorted on funding.

‘Mr Chelowski?' The door to the second-floor seminar room was open. Peering in, she could see the top of a man's head, a few long strands of hair pasted over a pale scalp. Chelowski was a tall man, but despite his perpetually poor posture, this view was not one to which she could ever become accustomed.

‘Ah, Ms Schwartz, Dulcie, come in, come in.' He unfolded himself from his awkward pose and rose to greet her, patting at his hair as if to reassure himself it was still there. ‘Please, have a seat. I've been reading.'

As she divested herself of her heavy duffle coat and bag, Dulcie looked over. ‘
The Ravages of Umbria
,' she read under her breath. ‘Tracking an Unknown Author.' While she hadn't begun writing her actual thesis yet, she'd started putting her thoughts on paper in a series of essays. These papers, spread over the stained oak table, were her latest – containing all the speculative ideas she had about the anonymous author's mysterious disappearance.

Norm Chelowski was lower by far on the academic hierarchy than her previous thesis adviser. But while Professor Bullock had been a full university professor, he had not been the most attentive adviser. If Chelowski had an uncanny resemblance to a weasel – something about his mouth and the long lines of his body – at least he seemed to take her work seriously.

‘Oh good, you got my pages.' She'd dropped them off the previous Friday – and emailed copies, as well – but hadn't gotten a response. Some things, she figured, never changed.

‘Yes, yes, quite interesting. As you can see, I've been reading.' Maybe he was an enchanted weasel, she mused. Minor nobility under a spell. And as he bent over the papers again, Dulcie tried not to stare at the sheen of lamplight on his scalp. Instead, she let her eyes wander around the room. One window, grimy, opened on a fire escape cast in shadow. Pressed wood bookcases, the veneer peeling. The kind of bookish shabbiness she'd always found so appealing, but which her colleagues increasingly and volubly resented. Another floor lamp hovered in the corner, its bent frame secured with gaffer tape. It was possible, she allowed, that some of her peers had a point. ‘Quite interesting,' he said, not looking up.

She waited. She'd been a graduate student for three years. Long enough to know that ‘I've been reading' was code for ‘I haven't looked at these until now.' At least he was reading them now.

And reading. As the light shifted from gray to grayer, Norm pushed a page aside and muttered. Pulled another toward him and marked something with his pencil. Ten minutes or more had passed, and Dulcie was just beginning to wonder if she could take out some pages of her own when her adviser looked up and she noted the rodent-like dentition again. At the very least, he was a conscientious weasel, she told herself, forcing a smile. He was making the effort to get up to speed on what she was doing, rather than just rubber-stamping her for another semester. Professor Bullock had rarely bothered even to catch up with her work.

‘Very interesting.' He was nodding, and Dulcie revised her opinion. He wasn't a weasel; he was one of those bobble-headed toys. ‘I see you've made some interesting breakthroughs.'

Didn't he have any other word? ‘Thank you.' She made herself smile. ‘As you'll see in my opening, I've found evidence that
The Ravages of Umbria
wasn't the disposable fluff that so many critics have thought. Instead, it's brilliant.'

He didn't look that impressed, but as Dulcie went on, the nodding continued. She explained her discovery: that the language in the book not only revealed the true villain, the heroine's lady in waiting, but also made a cunning argument for women's rights, in an era when ‘the woman question' was being hotly debated. ‘So, you see, by looking at the pages marked, you can find that Hermetria, the heroine, is espousing equality in her mountain castle. While Demetria, her companion, is the real bad guy, even worse than the mad monk and the shifty knight – and the “spirits,” the ghosts that are standard for a book like this, are the different philosophical arguments of the day. It's all ingenious, really.'

He stopped nodding and made a note with his pencil. Dulcie strained to see, but couldn't.

‘I've read extensively in the non-fiction of the period,' she continued. ‘If you want to see more of my notes, I'll bring them in. The author is quite clever in how she picks up phrases from the press.' She waited, watching him, dimly aware that in the window behind him, the weather had started to change.

‘Professor Bullock thought that my work was truly original.' A shadow fell over the table, highlighting the nicks in its surface. Her adviser stood to turn on the arthritic floor lamp, using one hand to balance it as it wobbled, and Dulcie was struck by how rundown the office was. ‘He thought it was publishable.'

‘Yes, yes, I could see that.' He returned to his seat and shifted a few pages. ‘The textual analysis is quite – interesting.'

Only an effort of will kept her from rolling her eyes.

‘But to be quite honest, Ms Schwartz, I believe you could have started writing more than a month ago. All this new material.' He waved one hand over several of the pages, her more recent work, which he had pushed to his left. ‘I'm not sure what you're getting at here.'

‘Getting at?' Dulcie found her own head bobbing, and stopped it.

‘All this speculation about the author. Is it relevant? I mean the text you're studying,
The Rampages
—'

‘
Ravages
.' She couldn't quite keep her correction under her breath.

‘—yes, yes,
The Ravages
, has been pretty definitively dated, hasn't it?'

‘Yes, from the work I've done –' she couldn't resist – ‘it seems likely that the novel was written between 1790 and 1791, and then serialized beginning sometime the following year.'

‘Exactly.' He sat back in his chair. ‘And why are we concerning ourselves with events that may or may not have happened perhaps four years later?'

This was more or less the same question Chris had raised. ‘Because I'm interested.' One eyebrow arched behind the wire-rim glasses. ‘Because establishing the identity of the author is a key component of my thesis.' She rephrased her argument in language even Chelowski should understand. ‘Not only will my thesis present a new theory of
The Ravages of Umbria
, but I will also make the case that the author used her novel to popularize the political and philosophical ideas she wrote about in her essays.'

He opened his mouth, but she didn't let him continue. ‘And those essays, I have reason to believe, may have resulted in her being silenced somehow. Threatened, perhaps.'

That shut him up. As Dulcie watched, he blinked once, twice, three times. She waited. Her reasoning, she felt, had been flawless.

‘Ms Schwartz, Dulcie.' The change of address had to preface an admission of defeat. ‘I don't know how to say it.' She waited for his apology as he took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘But all of this? It has me worried.'

‘Worried?'

‘All this is so speculative. It's positively off track.' He waved a hand over her pages, as if he would make them all disappear. ‘Now, I understand the pressure of the doctoral candidate. I was there not that long ago, you know.' He smiled again, wider this time, and Dulcie fought the urge to recoil. ‘Even without all the . . .' He waved one long, white hand, as if brushing away the unpleasantness of the world. ‘We all experience it, you know. It's an extremely difficult time.'