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Oxford was coming alive in green and grey. Early sunlight beamed through Harriet's window, pale and flickering through the drawn curtains but gaining in strength with each passing minute. In another hour flurried undergraduates would be milling outside the Great Hall, chattering about life and Schools. For now the business of academia was still suspended, all nature having taken over the grey walls of Shrewsbury; a cheerful gardener whistling through his teeth clipped at the hedge beneath her window as he had every Wednesday morning. Through the bedroom door Harriet caught hasty footsteps walking to and fro. This early the undergraduates confined themselves to splashing erratically in bathrooms and bustling past one in robes of startling vividity. It was summer. Harriet had been here six months, and though no less focused upon the problem that had brought her to Shrewsbury, the sense of urgency seemed to have weakened.
Peter was here now and Harriet tried not to think of her dream in light of his comfortable reality. Far better to leave psychological analysis to the Freudians, but then in a sense she must be a psychologist for her books. She seemed to have overslept and woken with a fresh resolution to tackle Wilfrid until his erratic characterisation was beaten into consistency. Peter had put his finger on it as usual with that business of Ada's handkerchief.
--
The Dean was shamelessly enthralled by the sight of Harriet with pen in hand attacking the draft of Death Twixt Wind and Water vigorously.
"Good heavens!" she said. "Do you often have to re-write whole books? Somehow I thought mystery writers worked out the plot before they began. Like settling on X killing Y with the old Indian carving knife in the pagoda...and then writing enough red herrings around that to obscure the fact."
Harriet looked up with flushed face, the quiet strength of Peter's words on the subject repeating in her memory. "This is the writing around bit," she said, stretching out cramped fingers. "The jigsaw pieces aren't quite slotting into place; there's a character whose edges don't fit the outline."
Miss Barton looked up from her newspaper interestedly. "Are you re-writing the outline to fit your characters?" said she.
The question was a perfectly correct one and yet Harriet felt a rush of irritation. Miss Barton's vision of justice did not match her own; she suspected the Senior Fellows' world adjusted to fit criminals and innocents alike, encompassing all their flaws and inconsistencies. Harriet shook her head. "No," she replied, "the other way round. I'm re-writing a character to keep him psychologically consistent."
"Loving his mother and wanting to kill his father and all that?" The Dean began cheerfully and Harriet chuckled in response.
"Happily that tale has already been told."
"An act of creation then," Miss de Vine said from the corner, eerily echoing Harriet's own thoughts from the morning.
"I have always thought," Miss Lydgate broke in suddenly, "it was really extraordinary that the Greeks should have known so much psychology before it was even invented. The tradition of psychological consistency is well consolidated in fine literature." She smiled at Harriet. "I always did think you had a literary mind."
Literary mind and a squeamish heart, Harriet thought, for Wilfrid and his mangled psyche repelled her. She was truthful enough to admit to herself though that the life she was giving her novel bore an obvious parallel to her own - Phil's words in a new mouth, her thoughts in another's head, brief memories and description gathered by her own senses - and this made her want to abandon the endeavour and return to the safety of words and stereotypes. Had this been easier even before the trial? Was this ever easy?
It was Miss Chilperic who quoted Ovid and troubled the waters: "...simulaverat artem ingenio natura suo."*
Conversation broke out into contradictions and assertions as academics returned to the age-old question of whether life imitates art or vice versa.
Miss Lydgate was discussing Ovid's quotation and Wilde's imprecise aphorism on the subject in equal doses to anyone who was inclined to listen. Miss Barton nodded along with her, interjecting occasionally that in her opinion some of the biggest trouble with people these days stemmed from the ideas one put into their heads, the poor things.
Miss Hillyard was smoothly pointing out that if one actually looked at three thousand years of civilisation one would swiftly come to the conclusion that all art forms and indeed their contents stemmed from the age-old practice of Man looking around at the world he inhabited and asking questions. If one assumed that Art could shape Life without the necessary variable of Man, who was instrinsically part of Life, one could be forgiven for insisting that the Intangible influenced the Tangible.
All in all, the S.C.R seemed to be holding up remarkably well. Harriet in contrast felt worn through, a bit hollow. She could not allow herself the leisure of disappearing into Le Fanu or any other work. Now that Peter had arrived, he had brought London with him and she felt the comforting walls of Shrewsbury withdraw slightly. There was work to be done and none of it had anything to do with academic bickering or an intellectual exercise of her wits; her guts and heart were required now if she was but brave enough to employ them.
"Goodness, Miss Hillyard's fairly got the bit between her teeth now." the Dean whispered in the manner of a running commentary. "Miss Barton is about to start arguing her point as well."
Harriet gathered her proofs together and stood up. "I think I shall go and play God in the Library," she whispered back.
"A Deborah come to judgement!" the Dean replied. "I shall escape with you; I desperately need some peace and quiet."
--
The words preyed heavily on Harriet's mind after the Dean had cheerfully said goodbye in the Quad to go back to her own rooms. They touched some hitherto undisturbed pain that was merely sleeping in the cloistered rooms of her memories of Phil. He had said much the same to her in one of their brief intial encounters. She had a swift recollection of his handsome face smiling at her, speaking in slightly arrogant tones:
"How go the murders, Miss Harriet Vane?"
What had she replied? They had struck up a conversation, she remembered. And Phil had casually dropped his arm around Harriet, bearing her away to meet his friends, one of whom was Vaughn. It had been he who'd asked cattily if Harriet shared Phil's belief in love free from the shackles of matrimony.
Vaughn's answer to her interdiction had been much the same as the Dean's but in the opposite spirit. "A Deborah come to judgement in fact. How shall ye judge without a palm tree?" he had said, mockingly.
She had been forced to swallow those words less than a year later.
How horrible that there should still be pain; impotent rage against Time's forward march, she supposed, that she could not turn back the clock and re-live that part of her life. Peter would understand. Hadn't he said much the same thing to her once on one of his confiding days?
It had been at the Eton-Harrow match; that's what had brought it so close to the surface of mind and memory now. Between Peter himself and Freddy Arbuthnot's cavalier disclosures, Harriet felt as though in steeling herself to withstand Peter romantically over the last five years she had somehow turned away the little clues to his intellect and intelligence, forever doomed to know only what he told her of himself, which was pitifully little when she reflected on it.
But - she acknowledged wryly - if he had opened himself to her, leaving bare the details of his personal life as hers had been laid bare before the world, she would have hated him for it. Hated him for having the choice and for the unavoidable fact that he needed to stoop to conquer. Peter had never stooped to her and that in itself was an admirable thing.
My mind is wandering, Harriet said to herself with a quick mental shake. That Peter disturbed her composure so thoroughly was worrying, but there was still work to be done and she allowed it to overcome her troubled thoughts and distract her completely.
--
'tis more easy
To tie knots, than unloose them
- John Webster
Lord Peter waved Bunter away from the small front parlour of his suite with a cheerful, "Get awa' wi' thee, man and take the rest of the night off."
By which instruction Bunter understood his Lordship to mean, 'Thank you, Bunter and would you be so kind as to traverse down to the local pub and finagle the local gossip on the topic of Shrewsbury College?" Accordingly, the Mitre found him comfortably seated, chatting up a serving maid and promising quite the rudest songs of his music-hall repertoire once he had a good pint or three in him.
Wimsey, left alone with his pipe for company, settled into a deep Regency wingchair and fidgeted, tapping his fingers against the arm for several moments; on the occasional table to his right a decanter of port and Harriet's case book sat side by side. He was restless and worried.
The Shrewsbury Poison-Pen appeared to be escalating her efforts; that Harriet might have been one of the original victims gave him pause. If it had indeed been so, her continued presence and now his own involvement invited the kind of danger he had spent the last five years waiting for her to forget.
Morbidity, Peter reflected with mercurial self-deprecation, was a most unbecoming habit for a middle-aged man. His mother would probably put it down to apricot flan and lemon-flavoured swill; she had a superbly practical mind for the little daily ugliness'.
An' speaking of practicality, he had a case to solve and solve it he would. But he was beginning to be afraid of what he might uncover. Between the neat lines of Harriet's writing he read the pattern of a madness that she had missed.
In his own pocketbook he put down the following:
The earliest received items coincided with the celebration of Gaudy Night. Arrived for Gaudy: Harriet Vane and other returning students. Presumeably no further letters to Old Students sent as none reported. Arrival of Miss de Vine a few weeks earlier.
The business of the grotesque bolster-figure made Lord Peter frown. Trusting in the power of a well-appointed list, he set out his own thoughts on the matter.
Further things to be noted:
1. The dress has not been reported stolen and nobody claims to recognise it, so evidentally it is not an attempt to frame another. X owned this dress. It is three years old. It is not from Shrewsbury or it must have been recognised.
2. Murder is intended.
3. The Harpy quotation. Who is the man?
Long fingers tightened round the bowl of a pipe; this then was the key. Like the handkerchief in Harriet's book, he could see both the outcome and intent of its placement. Harriet wanted celibacy for her scapegoat - an intellectual deranged by long cloistered years and starved of sexuality - but the evidence disagreed, tugging him by his long nose towards the outline of a woman in the grip of a grand passion and frenzied in revenge. Love was indeed at the bottom of the events, but not its absence. No, the knife had gone through the make-shift figure, if the bolster-figure was a symbol of scholarship, it was one to be destroyed. And somewhere hidden lay a man at the centre of the maelstrom. This was not the slow insanity of a frustrated woman; somewhere at Shrewsbury was a vengeful woman with murderous intent in her heart.
"Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind," Peter said to himself. "Perhaps I should tell her."
--
Wilfrid was a remarkably appalling tick. He skulked, he sulked, he lurked on the fringes of an embarrassing display of emotion that made Harriet grateful she claimed no acquaintance with a Wilfrid in real life.
She wondered if Peter had deliberately set her on to the ideas of pleasure and the wages of sin; Philip Boyes had been a parson's son.
--
Back and forth his thoughts went - from Harriet to the case, the case to Harriet. Strangling and stabbing; Harriet's bitter, poisoned view of love and its demands; a dangling mock-murder in the Chapel and a weak-willed scholar in the river; Harriet kissing a poisoned bible: 'Kiss it...thy curiosity hath undone thee'; death...
Bunter, appearing through the door with quiet tread, saw the lines of strain on Lord Peter's face.
"Well, Bunter? "
"I fancy, my lord, that public opinion is not averse to the women's colleges. The men-" he coughed discreetly here,"-are grateful for the view and the women for the increased trade." A bit o'leg without them bags and don't come in 'ere, they don't but the dress shops an' such is doing very well.
"Good God, never tell me you had that opinion from a pub full of people?"
Bunter focused his eyes on the clock, which proclaimed the late hour through a haze of gilded cherubim. Lord Peter, following his gaze, laughed suddenly. "All right. If my sheets are turned down I shall say my prayers and go to bed."
"My lord."
Before he retired for the night, Lord Peter made one final adjustment to his list:
4. How many ways to wound a man in academia? Refuse him, refute him...ruin him professionally? Who is the Harpy? And do they have the stomach for it?
The 'They' in question naturally - in Lord Peter's sleep-deprived state - referring to the S.C.R as a whole and not the singular female in question, else the Dons of Balliol might have risen as one to wreak a horrible vengeance upon his tired soul.
--
Many years later Harriet would reflect that those last days ran together in a terrible block and that all frame of time before Peter was ordered and all frame of time after his arrival was muddled, as though his presence had stirred the water and damaged the thin shell of her impenetrability. She had felt, in short, much like a poorly coddled egg.
Wilfrid was re-imagined somewhere between Harriet's determination to refuse Peter, her awareness of him as a man, and the bleak realisation that now was the time to put aside the meagre knowledge of love she had gained from Philip Boyes.
She did not write a morbid sexual neurosis into his character; taking real life for her palate, normal human emotions seemed perfectly capable of creating the effect she wanted for her story: passion and the fear of one's own emotions, a rigid upbringing and a tendancy to lose one's head, a well-meaning but Judas soul capable of betraying one's most deeply held convictions if threatened.
For P.D.B.W.,
My Dreame thou brok'st not, but continued'st it,
Thou art so truth, that thoughts of thee suffice
To make dreames truths.
--
Notes:
* From Book 3 of the Metamorphoses: '...nature in her genius had imitated art.'