The book that had fallen was Bailey’s Life of William Ashbless. It had landed open and several of the age-browned pages were broken. He laid them back in carefully, closed the book gently and brushed dust off his fingers, then stared at the unhelpful volume.
It would be an understatement, he reflected disconsolately, to say that Ashbless’ life was scantily documented. William Hazlitt had written a brief evaluation of his work in 1825, and incidentally provided a few details about the man, and Ashbless’ close friend James Bailey had written the cautious biography that was, for lack of anything else, considered the standard account. Doyle had managed to supplement the narrative with a few illuminating letters and journals and police reports, but the poet’s recorded life was still flawed by many gaps.
Which town in Virginia was it, for example, that Ashbless lived in from his birth until 1810? Ashbless at one time claimed Richmond and at another Norfolk, but no records of him had so far turned up at either place. Doyle was going on the assumption that the troublesome poet had changed his name when he arrived in London, and he had unearthed the names of several Virginians who disappeared in the summer of 1810 at about the age of twenty-five. Ashbless’ years in London were fairly easy to trace—though the Bailey biography, being Ashbless’ own version, was of dubious value—and his brief trip to Cairo in 1811, while inexplicable, was at least a matter of record.
What’s missing, Doyle thought, is all the details—and some of the undetailed areas tormented Doyle’s curiosity. There was, for example, his possible connection with what Sheridan had lastingly dubbed the Dancing Ape Madness: the surprising number—by sober accounts six, by extravagant three hundred—of fur-covered creatures that appeared one at a time in and around London during the decade between 1800 and 1810; evidently human beings, they outdid even the shock of their sudden, agonizedly capering appearances by falling quickly to the ground and dying in violent convulsions. Madame de Stael noted that Ashbless once, when drunk, told her that he knew more about the peculiar plague than he’d ever dare say, and it was fairly certain that he had killed one of the creatures in a coffee house near Threadneedle Street a week after his arrival in London… But there, to Doyle’s chagrin, the trail ended. Ashbless apparently never got drunk enough to tell de Stael the story—for she’d certainly have passed it on if he had—and of course the Bailey biography didn’t refer to the matter at all.
And what, precisely, were the circumstances of his death? God knows, Doyle thought, the man made many enemies during his lifetime, but which one was it that caught up with him on, probably, the twelfth of April in 1846? His body was found in the marshes in May, decomposed but verifiably his, also verifiably killed by a sword thrust through the belly.
Hell, thought Doyle, dejectedly staring at the book in his lap, more is known about the life of Shakespeare. And Ashbless was a contemporary of such appallingly thoroughly chronicled people as Lord Byron! Granted, the man was a minor poet, whose scanty and difficult work would, if not for some derogatory remarks made about it by Hazlitt and Wordsworth, be absolutely forgotten instead of just reprinted rarely in notably complete anthologies—still, the man’s life ought to have left more marks.
Across the aisle, through the windows on that side of the plane, he saw the twinkling lights of London rise as the huge plane banked, and he decided the stewardess wouldn’t bring him another drink so near disembarking time. He glanced around, then surreptitiously drew his flask out of his inside jacket pocket, unscrewed the top and poured an inch of Laphroaig into the plastic cup his last drink had arrived in. He put the flask away and relaxed, wishing he could also clip and light one of the Upmann cigars waiting in the opposite pocket.
He took a sip of the warm scotch and smiled—Laphroaig was still damn good, if not quite the wonder it had been when it was being bottled at 91.4 proof. In fact, he thought, these new Upmann cigars from the Dominican Republic aren’t nearly what they were when they were being rolled in the Canary Islands.
And none of the young ladies I’ve gone with since Rebecca have been interesting at all.
He flipped open the old book and stared at the frontispiece engraving, a portrait done from the Thorwaldsen bust: the sunken-eyed, startlingly bearded poet stared back at him from the picture, his massive height and breadth of shoulder clearly implied by the sculptor’s skill. And how was it in your day, William? Doyle thought. Were the cigars and scotch and women any better?
For a moment Doyle imagined that Ashbless’ faint sardonic grin was directed at him… Then, in a moment of vertigo so strong that he nearly dropped his cup and grabbed the arms of the seat, it seemed that Ashbless really was looking at him, through a picture and across a hundred and fifty years, in scornful amusement.
Doyle shook his head sharply and closed the book again. That’s how you know you’re tired, he told himself: when a guy a century dead seems about to wink at you out of a picture. Never happened with Coleridge.
He tucked the book into his briefcase next to the book he’d brought along to serve as his credentials—it was The Nigh-Related Guest, a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Brendan Doyle. He had wanted to follow it with a lengthy study of the Lake Poets, but the reviews of the Guest, and its sales, had caused his editor at the Devriess University Press to suggest he pursue, as the editor had put it, “a more uncharted sort of territory. I’ve admired,” the editor had gone on, “your two articles in the PMLA that attempted, with some success, to make sense of the murky verse of William Ashbless. Perhaps a biography of that odd poet would strike the critics—and the college librarians!—as a more ground-breaking piece of work.”
Well, thought Doyle as he closed his briefcase, unless I resort to outright fiction, it looks like it will be a damned short piece of work.
The plane was descending, and when he yawned his ears popped. Forget Ashbless for now. Whatever Darrow is paying you twenty thousand for, it has to do with Coleridge.
He had another sip of the scotch, and hoped fervently that the job didn’t also have to do with planchettes or Ouija boards or any such stuff. He’d once seen a book of poems supposed to have been dictated by the ghost of Shelley, through a medium, and he half-suspected that this DIRE job might be a similar enterprise. He wondered, too, whether twenty thousand dollars might be enough to make him abandon his professional integrity and participate. He drained the cup, as the plane seemed to be about to touch down.
It was certainly an odd coincidence to be hearing so much of DIRE lately. A month ago they’d offered a job to Steerforth Benner, the most brilliant English Literature graduate student Doyle had ever had. Doyle remembered being mildly surprised to hear from Benner that DIRE was still in existence. Doyle knew of the company, of course—from small beginnings in the 1930s, it had become, under the shrewd guidance of its colorful founder, a pillar of American scientific industry rivalling IBM and Honeywell. They’d been very big in things like the space program and undersea exploration, and during the 60s, Doyle recalled, they were always sponsoring Shakespeare plays on television without commercial interruptions. But the company had withdrawn from the public eye during the 70s, and Doyle had read somewhere—in the National Enquirer, he believed it was—that J. Cochran Darrow had learned he had cancer, and after exhausting all the scientific possibilities of a cure, had tried to turn the resources of DIRE toward the occult, in the hope of finding a cure in the dubious annals of magic. Newsweek had only noted that DIRE was laying off most of its personnel and closing down their production centers, and Doyle remembered a Forbes article, titled something like “DIRE Straits,” about the sudden worthlessness of their stock.