The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (23 page)

"Captain," I said, feeling the wave of pique that came over me whenever he talked on top of me. "I don't believe I even mentioned the good doctor. Did I mention the good doctor?"

Well, he just wanted me to know that Artemus Marquis came from a fine family, a distinguished family, and his collusion in such inconceivable acts was--was inconceivable. Yes, Reader, he was starting to repeat himself... until something rose up in his head and left him, for a short time, mute.

"There was an incident," he said at last.

I stayed perfectly still in my chair.

"Yes, Captain?"

"I remember, yes, it was some time ago, well before Artemus was a cadet. It had to do with Miss Fowler's cat."

More rummaging now.

"This cat," he said, "vanished under circumstances I can't recall, but I do recall it met a bizarre end."

"Dissection?" I guessed.

"Vivisection. Yes, I'd completely forgotten that. And it was--" His eyes went light with wonder. "It was Dr. Marquis who assured Miss Fowler that the cat had been dead prior to--to being quartered. I remember how deeply affected he was by the incident."

"Did Artemus ever confess to the deed?" I asked.

"No, of course not." "But you had reason to suspect him?"

"I knew he was intelligent, that's all. Not malicious, not by any stretch, but prankish."

"And a doctor's son."

"Yes. A doctor's son."

Newly agitated, Captain Hitchcock drew himself out of the candlelight. I could see him rolling something--a marble? a ball of clay?--in his palm.

"Mr. Landor," he said, "before we go any further toward impugning anyone, I wish you would tell me whether you've discovered anything to tie Artemus to Leroy Fry."

"Precious little, as it stands. Artemus was a year ahead of Fry, we know that. There's no sign of their having fraternized in any way. Never sat at mess together, never shared a section. Never, as far as I can tell, marched together or sat together in chapel. I've interviewed several dozen cadets by now, and I've yet to hear any of them mention Artemus' name in connection with Fry."

"What about this Ballinger fellow?"

"That's a little more promising," I conceded. "There's some evidence that Ballinger and Fry were friendly at one time. They were seen together a couple of summers ago, pulling tents down on a bunch of new plebes. Both were also, for a brief while, members of the... oh, damn, what's the... the Amo--Amo-soapic--"

"Amosophic Society."

"The very one. Fry, being a quieter soul, didn't take to debating as naturally as Ballinger, and he soon quit the place. No one can recall having seen them together after that."

"And is that all?"

I almost let it rest there, but something in his voice--a note of retreat, maybe--egged me on.

"There is one other link," I said, "though it's nothing but innuendo. Ballinger and Fry both appear to have had a hankering for Artemus' sister. Indeed, from what I hear, Ballinger considers himself the prime candidate for her affections."

"Miss Marquis?" echoed Hitchcock, arching a brow. "I think that unlikely."

"How so?"

"You may ask any of the faculty wives. Miss Marquis is well known for discouraging the overtures of even the most importunate cadets."

All but one, I thought, grinning to myself. Who would have guessed my little bantam would be rushing in where other cocks feared to go?

"Aha!" I exclaimed. "She's a prideful thing, I suppose." "The exact opposite," he answered. "So exceedingly modest as to make one doubt whether she has ever seen herself in a mirror." The slightest reddening came over the captain's cheek. So he was open to the calls of the flesh, after all.

"Then what explains her withdrawing from the world?" I asked. "Is she so awfully shy?"

"Shy! You must engage her on the subject of Montesquieu sometime and see for yourself how shy she is. No, Miss Marquis has ever been a puzzle and even, among certain circles, a consuming pastime. Now that she has attained the ancient age of twenty-three, she is no longer much spoken of. Except, I am sorry to say, by nickname."

Politeness, I guess, would normally have kept him from venturing further, but seeing my curiosity, he moved to slake it.

"They call her the Sorrowing Spinster," he said.

"And why "sorrowing," Captain?"

"I'm afraid I couldn't tell you."

I smiled and folded my arms across my chest and said, "Knowing how carefully you choose your words, Captain, I'll have to presume you don't use the word couldn't when you actually mean, maybe, wouldn't."

"I choose my words with care, yes, Mr. Landor."

"Well, then," I said, cheerful as a shower, "we may come back to the business at hand. Which, unless you object, leads us in the direction of Artemus' quarters."

Oh, how grim he looked in that moment! For he was already heading down the same path.

"Shall we inspect them first thing tomorrow morning?" I suggested. "Ten o'clock, why don't we say? Oh, and Captain, if we could keep this between the two of us..."

It was cold as blazes, that I remember. The clouds were low and sharded like icicles, and the stone edifices of North and South Barracks, standing at right angles to each other, made a whetting stone for the hard flat single-minded wind that drove in from the west. We felt it, didn't we, standing in that L-shaped assembly yard, preparing our little raid? Shivered like fish on a line.

"Captain," I said. "If you don't mind, I'd like to look first at Cadet Poe's quarters."

He never asked me why. He'd gotten tired, maybe, of digging in his heels. Or else he had his own suspicions about this young man of mine, who so freely clothed himself in myth. Or else he just wanted to get in out of the cold.

My, but it was small enough, this room where Cadet Fourth Classman Poe and his two roommates passed their days and nights! Room is no word for it--bandbox. Thirteen by ten, and halved by a partition. Numbingly cold, smoky, close, with a smell like whale guts. There were a pair of candle sconces, a woodbox, a table, a straight-backed chair, a lamp, a mirror. No bedsteads, not in Thayer's monastery: you sleep on a narrow pallet on the floor, which you roll up each morning with your blanket. Oh, it was a bare gray mean space--not to be owned by anyone. There was nothing in Number 22, South Barracks, to announce that somebody here had once swum the James River or written poems or been to Stoke Newington or was in any way different from the other two-hundred-odd boys that the Academy was squeezing into men.

Well, the soul will out, I suppose, even against large odds. So it was that after a cursory look at the room, I came to Poe's trunk and, unlatching it, found--there on the underside of the lid--an engraving of Byron. As fugitive and damning as a love letter.

From another pocket, I drew out a tiny bundle layered in black crepe. The crepe fell away in an instant to reveal the cameo portrait of a young woman in an Empire gown and ribboned bonnet. An almost aching girlishness to her sweetly huge eyes, her frail shoulders. She looked nearly the same as she had looked at the Park Street Theatre, all those years ago, singing "Nobody Coming to Marry Me."

The very sight of her left a clot in my throat. A familiar sort of tightening--it was, I realized, the same feeling I got whenever I thought too long about my daughter. I remembered then what Poe had said, sitting there in my parlor:

We're both alone in the world.

Breathing out, I closed the trunk and clicked the hasp.

"He keeps a neat room," said Hitchcock, grudgingly.

That he did. Should he care to, I thought, Cadet Fourth Classman Poe could go on keeping a neat room for another three years and a half--three years and a half of bedrolls and tightbuttoned collars and shiny boots. And for his reward, he would get--what? A posting on the Western frontier, where, in between hunting Indians, he could recite his poems to military men and their neurasthenic wives and wasting daughters? Oh, what a figure he would cut in those small bright parlor-graves.

"Captain," I said, "I no longer have the heart for this."

The rooms in North Barracks were at least larger--twenty-five by nineteen--a sop for the upperclassmen. The only sop, so far as I could see. Artemus' quarters, though warmer than Poe's, were even drearier: the pallets patched, the coverlets hard used, the air sneezy, and the walls pouched and streaked with soot. Because it faced west, the room had to make do with whatever light broke over the mountains, and even at midmorning, the gloom was so deep we were reduced to using matches to peer into some of the tighter corners. It was in this way that I found Artemus' compacted telescope, tucked between a water bucket and a chamber pot. No other signs of old revels: no cards, chickens, pipes, not even the stray aroma of tobacco (though the windowsill bore scattered grains of snuff).

"The woodbox," said Hitchcock. "That's always the first place I look."

"Then by all means, Captain."

Surprise! He could find only wood at first. Oh, and an old lottery ticket from Cuming's Truly Lucky Offices and a scrap of book-muslin handkerchief and a half-empty packet of Brazil sugar--one by one, he dragged them to the surface, and I was just about to pocket the sugar when I heard a sound behind us.
A clicking, like a latch being slid into place. And then an even fainter sound coming from behind that.

"Captain," I said, "I'm beginning to think we were expected."

The sun by now was just starting to carom off the blue rocky slopes to the west, and for the first time that morning, waves of hard yellow light were flooding into that dank chamber, and it was the light, really, that made me understand what was happening, more than anything else.

"What's wrong?" called Captain Hitchcock.

He had drawn a small brown-paper bundle from the woodbox, and he was holding it out to me like an offering, but I was already throwing myself against the door frame.

"It won't open," I said.

"Step aside," he shouted.

He set down his bundle and charged, gave the door two good kicks. It shuddered but held firm. Another two kicks: the same. We were both kicking now, slamming our boots sole-first into the wood--a perfect racket of thumps and counterthumps. But even through that din, the sound on the other side of the door could still be heard.

A sound with no equal. A queer damp sputter, like a half-extinguished candle.

And something else now: a light, flickering through the door's lower crevice.

Hitchcock was the first to act. He grabbed one of the cadet trunks and hurled it at the door. The wood sagged just a little--enough to give us hope. On the next attempt, we both held the trunk, and we threw our combined weight against it, and this time the door wrenched clear of its frame, leaving a space of maybe three inches, enough to poke an arm through. One more kick from Hitchcock, and the latch on the other side at last tore off, and the door groaned away, and we were standing in the hallway, looking down on a black ball the size of a cantaloupe, with a long yarny fuse that was streaming with fire.

Hitchcock grabbed the shell and took three long strides to the nearest window. Yanked open the casement and, after checking to see no one was there, tossed the ball with no further comment into the yard below.

And there it lay, studded in the grass, smoking and fuming.

"Stand back, Mr. Landor."

But I couldn't, any more than he could. We watched that bristly fuse burn down and down-- who would have thought it had so much distance still to travel?--and it was like trying to read a book over somebody's shoulder, waiting for the page to turn.

And then it turned, but there was no climax, only the slow dying of the spark, followed by... nothing. No explosion or cloud of sulfur, just silence. And a few hoops and vines of smoke, and the smack of my traitor heart. And a thought, real as a wound, that someone had once again danced ahead of us.

Minutes later, when the last of the smoke had cleared and the shell still slumbered in the yard below, Captain Hitchcock went back to the wood-box, picked up the bundle he had dropped, and slowly, with the care of someone unwrapping a dead pharaoh, peeled away the brown paper.

It was a heart. Oozing rust. As raw as life.

Narrative of Gus Landor

18

November 16th

It was good fortune, I guess, that Dr. Marquis, when we brought him a heart to identify, never thought to ask us where we'd found it. The sight was too thrilling for him: a by-God heart, still in its wrapping, lying on a blacksmith bed in Ward 3-B just as Leroy Fry had once done. It might have been a Park Avenue matron with corns, judging from the way Dr. Marquis' fingers stole toward it. He clucked his tongue, he cleared his throat...

"Not too badly decomposed," he offered at last. "Must have been kept in a cold place."

"It was cold, yes," I said, remembering the chill of Artemus' quarters.

Slowly the doctor circled the bed, scratching his chin, squinting hard.

"Mmm," he muttered. "Yes, gentlemen. I can see why you might have thought it was a man's heart. Nearly identical, isn't it? The atria and ventricles, the valves and the arteries, all where they should be, yes."

"But?"

His eyes were aglitter as they met ours. "The size, gentlemen. That's what gives it away. This whippersnapper"--he worked his fingers under the bundle, gave it a speculative lift--"weighs upwards of five pounds, I'd wager. Whereas a human heart seldom gets above nine or ten ounces."

"No bigger than a fist," I said, recalling our last conversation in this room.

"Exactly," he said, beaming.

"Then tell us, please," said Hitchcock. "If it's not a human heart, what sort of creature did it come from?"

The doctor hooked his brows over his eyes. "Hmm, yes, that's a bit of a puzzler. Too big for a sheep. A cow, that's my best guess. Yes, almost certainly a cow." His face brightened in a flash. "I don't mind telling you, gentlemen, it calls me back to my youth, seeing one of these specimens. Many was the cow heart I used to dissect in Edinburgh. Dr. Hunter used to say, "If you can't find your way round a cow's heart, you've got no business with a man's." " Captain Hitchcock's hands were tented over his eyes. His voice was weary as suds.