“Here,” he said to me. “We’ve got to get him sitting up, sir, elevate that cut, if he has no other injuries.” He felt carefully up and down Hedges’s rigid body, and when my friend didn’t protest, we propped him against the wall. I supported him on my shoulder, where he leaned heavily, his eyes closing. “I’m going for the doctor,” Ronald said and vanished down the hallway. I kept a finger on Hedges’s pulse; his head lolled next to me but his heartbeat seemed steady. I couldn’t help trying to call him back to consciousness. “What happened, Hedges? Did someone strike you? Can you hear me? Hedges?”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. His head listed to one side and half his face looked slack, bluish, but he spoke intelligibly. “He said to tell you…”
“What? Who?”
“He said to tell you he will brook no trespasses.”
Hedges’s head fell back against the wall, that big, fine head that sheltered one of England ’s best minds. The skin crawled on my arms as I held him. “Who, Hedges? Who said that to you? Did he hurt you? Did you see him?”
Saliva bubbled at the corner of his mouth and his hands worked by his sides.
“Brook no trespasses,” he gurgled.
“Lie still now,” I urged. “Don’t talk. The doctor will be here in a few minutes. Try to relax and breathe.”
“Dear me,” Hedges murmured. “Pope and the alliterative. Sweet nymph. For argument.”
I stared at him, my stomach tightening. “Hedges?”
“‘The Rape of the Lock,’” Hedges said politely. “Without a doubt.”
The university doctor who admitted him to the hospital told me Hedges had suffered a stroke along with his wound. “Brought on by the shock. That gash on his neck,” he added outside Hedges’s room. “It looks as if it was made by something sharp, most likely sharp teeth, an animal. You don’t keep a dog?”
“Of course not. They aren’t permitted in college chambers.”
The doctor shook his head. “Very odd. I believe he was attacked by some animal on his way to your room, and the shock brought on a stroke that was perhaps waiting to occur. He’s pretty well off his head, for now, although he can form coherent words. There will be an investigation, I’m afraid, because of the wound, but it seems to me we’ll find someone’s nasty watchdog at the bottom of this. Try to think out what walk he would’ve taken to your digs.”
The investigation turned up nothing satisfactory, but neither was I indicted, since the police could find no motive and no evidence for my having hurt Hedges myself. Hedges was incapable of testifying, and they finally recorded the incident as “self-injury,” which seemed to me an avoidable blight on his reputation. One day during a visit to his rest home, I quietly asked Hedges to think about these words: “I will brook no trespasses.”
He turned incurious eyes on me, touching with idle, puffy fingers the red wound on his neck. “If so, Boswell,” he said pleasantly, almost humorously. “If not, begone.” A few days later he was dead, of a second stroke suffered during the night. No external injuries to the body were reported by the rest home. When the college master came to tell me, I swore to myself that I would work tirelessly to avenge Hedges’s death, if I could only figure out how.
I do not have the heart to record in detail the pain of the service held for him in our chapel at Trinity, the stifled sobs of his old father when the boys’ choir began their beautifully set psalms to comfort the living, the anger I felt towards the impotent Eucharist on its tray. Hedges was buried in his own village in Dorset, and I have visited the grave alone, on a mild November day. The stone saysREQUIESCAT IN PACE,which would have been my exact choice, too, had the decision been mine. To my infinite relief, it is the quietest of country churchyards, and the parson speaks as mildly of Hedges’s interment as he might of any local honor. I heard no tales of an Englishvrykolakasat the pub on the high street, even when I dropped the broadest, blandest hints. After all, Hedges was attacked only once, not the several times Stoker describes as necessary to infect a living person with the contagion of the undead. I believe he was sacrificed as a mere warning-to me. And to you, as well, unfortunate reader?
Yours in profoundest grief, Bartholomew Rossi
My father stirred the ice in his glass, as if to steady his hand and give himself something to do. Afternoon heat was relaxing into a calm Venetian evening, making the shadows of tourists and buildings stretch long across the piazza. A mass of pigeons started up off the paving stones, frightened by something, and wheeled overhead, enormous in flight. The chill from all those cold drinks had finally reached me, seeped into my bones. Someone laughed, far away, and I could hear seagulls crying above the pigeons. As we sat there a young man in a white shirt and blue jeans came loping up to speak with us. He had a canvas bag slung over one shoulder and his shirt was spotted with colors. “Buy a painting, signore?” he said, smiling at my father. “You and the signorina are the stars of my painting today.”
“No, no,grazie, ” my father replied automatically. The squares and alleys were full of these art-student figures. This was the third scene of Venezia we’d been offered that day; my father hardly glanced at the picture. The young man, still smiling and perhaps unwilling to leave us without at least a compliment for his work, held it up for me to see, and I nodded sympathetically, glancing at it. A second later he was bobbing away in search of other tourists, and I sat frozen, watching him go.
The painting he had shown me was a richly hued watercolor. It depicted our café, and the edge of Florian’s, a bright and unprovoking impression of the afternoon. The artist must have been stationed somewhere behind me, I thought, but fairly close to the café; he had caught a splotch of color that I recognized as the back of my red straw hat, with my father in blurry tan and blue just beyond. It was an elegant, casual piece of work, the image of summer indolence, something a tourist might well want to keep as the souvenir of an unblemished Adriatic day. But my glance at it had shown me a lone figure sitting beyond my father, a broad-shouldered, dark-headed figure, a crisp black silhouette among the cheerful colors of awning and tablecloths. That table, I recalled clearly, had been vacant all afternoon.
Chapter 13
Our next trip took us east again, beyond the Julian Alps. The little town of Kostanjevica, “place of the chestnut tree,” was indeed full of chestnuts at this time of year, some already underfoot, so that if you set your shoe down wrong on the cobbled streets you slid precariously on a sharp burr. In front of the mayor’s house, originally built to shelter an Austro-Hungarian bureaucrat, the nuts in their wicked-looking shells lay everywhere, a swarm of tiny porcupines.
My father and I walked slowly along, enjoying the end of a warm autumnal day-in the local dialect, this was called gypsy summer, a woman in a shop had told us-and I reflected on the differences between the Western world, a few hundred kilometers away, and this Eastern one, just a little south of Emona. Here everything in the stores looked like everything else, and the shop clerks, too, seemed to me exactly like one another, in royal blue work coats and flowered scarves, their gold or stainless steel teeth glinting at us over the half-empty counter. We had bought an enormous chocolate bar to supplement our picnic of sliced salami, brown bread, and cheese, and my father carried bottles of my favorite Naranca, an orange drink that reminded me already of Ragusa, Emona, Venezia.