Carver's Quest (32 page)

A
n elderly porter was sleeping peacefully in the little gatehouse attached to the college. As Adam and Quint passed by, the porter shifted slightly
in his seat and let out a deep sigh of contented slumber. They walked on past a carefully manicured lawn surrounded by medieval buildings, through a short, wood-panelled corridor and into a second
quadrangle. Half a dozen begowned undergraduates were strolling through it, and Adam approached one of them.

‘I am sorry to trouble you but I am looking for Professsor Fields. Does he have rooms still in the Fellows’ Building?’

The undergraduate, who had been lost in his thoughts, started at the sound of a voice. He looked first at Adam and then, with greater curiosity, towards Quint, who had stopped in the middle of
the courtyard and was scratching his buttocks.

‘That is my servant Quint,’ Adam said. ‘He is mostly harmless. Perhaps you know Professor Fields?’

The undergraduate turned back to Adam. ‘Yes, of course. My apologies. I was thinking of something else. I have just seen the professor. He and Mr Dandridge went through into the
Fellows’ Garden no more than two minutes ago.’ He pointed towards a tall wrought-iron gate at the far side of the quadrangle. ‘You may wish to wait for them.’

‘I think we shall follow them into the garden.’

The undergraduate looked as shocked as if Adam had proposed assaulting a member of the royal family.

‘You can’t do that, sir. Only Fellows are allowed in the Fellows’ Garden.’

‘Oh, I think a special dispensation can be made in this instance,’ Adam said, raising his hat to the young man. ‘Many thanks for your information.’ He beckoned to Quint
and the two of them made their way towards the gate into the garden. The undergraduate watched them go, a puzzled look on his face, but made no attempt to stop them.

Once they had passed through the gate, they halted and looked around them. Some fifty yards away were two men, both dressed in the billowing black gowns that denoted their status as academics.
One was prodding the ground with a walking stick and gazing down at the grass as if he was making an inventory of the wildlife sheltering in it. The other was waving his arms and talking
relentlessly.

‘Stay here a while, Quint,’ Adam said. ‘I shall go and interrupt the professor in his conversation.’

At Cambridge, Adam remembered, there had been plenty of students who never attended a single lecture. Several of the dons had matched this undergraduate idleness by never bothering to deliver
one. Fields, however, had not been so remiss. He had always been a great deliverer of lectures, not all of them confined to the lecture hall. It looked very much as if he was in the midst of
addressing one to his companion.

As Adam approached across the lawn, this companion looked up and caught sight of him. He spoke briefly to Fields but his remark did nothing to stem the tide of the professor’s eloquence.
Fields continued to flap his hands in the air and hold forth. Adam caught the occasional word in both English and Greek. He was standing next to Fields before the old scholar noticed him.

‘Ah, Adam, you have arrived at an opportune moment. I have been telling Dandridge here of your letter. And of the extraordinary tale it told.’

The other don made a slight motion of his head in greeting. It was clear that Fields was too distracted to make a more formal introduction. Adam returned the acknowledgement.

‘We have been talking of the poet Euphorion.’ The professor spoke as if the ancient Greek was a slightly disreputable don at another college. ‘We have gathered together the
knowledge we have of him.’

‘It is little enough,’ his companion said, smiling benevolently at Adam. ‘Only fragments of his works have survived. But a few scattered leaves can possess as much beauty as a
mighty tree, do you not think, sir?’

‘Dandridge has written verse himself,’ Fields went on, in a tone of voice that suggested this was a scarcely credible activity for any sane man to undertake.

‘I have rested in the groves of Helicon in my youth,’ the other man acknowledged, with noticeable self-satisfaction. He nodded his head repeatedly as if to confirm to himself that he
had indeed done what the professor claimed he had. ‘I think I can say that I tasted briefly of the fountain of Hippocrene.’

‘And no doubt it was like sweet wine to your lips, Dandridge,’ Fields said dismissively, scarcely bothering to hide his contempt for his colleague. ‘But we can spend no time on
reminiscences of our gilded youth. Adam here has a mystery to solve. Men have died and he needs to know why.’

‘Must he know why?’ Dandridge asked mildly, his round red face still wreathed in smiles. ‘Perhaps the dead should be left undisturbed by such enquiries. Remember what Palladas
says. “Weep not then for him who departs from life, for after death there is no other accident.” ’

Fields snorted derisively. ‘It’s difficult to believe that either victim would have been so philosophical as he saw his own death approaching. But I cannot stay to argue the point,
Dandridge. Adam and I will leave you to the contemplation of mortality.’

Fields turned and strode off. Adam stayed briefly to raise his hat politely to the other don. Then he followed him.

‘The man’s a fool,’ the professor hissed as they made their way towards where Quint stood. ‘As an undergraduate, he published a volume of execrable verse. Hexameters to
make Virgil turn in his grave. And more than a hint of that unspeakable vice that so sullied life in Plato’s Athens.’

‘But you chose to speak to him of Euphorion.’

‘He is well-read in the lesser Greek poets,’ the professor conceded. ‘Ass though he is. I thought it might be of benefit to ask him about the versifier you mentioned. I will
tell you later the little I learned from him.’

Adam wondered how the professor could have learned anything, however little, from Dandridge since he had appeared to allow his fellow don no opportunity to speak, but he said nothing.

As they approached the gate leading out of the Fellows’ Garden, Adam’s manservant, who had been slouching against it, stood up straighter and watched them warily. He looked to be
wondering whether or not the professor might still be harbouring a grudge against him for the loss of his tobacco two years earlier.

‘Ah, the valiant and faithful Quintus is with you still, I see.
Fidus
Achates
, indeed,’ Fields said. ‘How are you, my good man?’

The valiant and faithful Quintus, looking far from pleased to be so described, acknowledged Fields’s condescending nod with a grunt. The incident with the tobacco was, it seemed,
forgotten. Fields returned his attention to Adam.

‘I have learned something more of Euphorion.’

‘What have you learned of him?’

‘You must be patient, Adam. I shall tell you all I know this evening, after we have dined.’

I
n the evening, Quint was banished to take his food with the college servants. The meal was a cheerless affair. The servants ate on benches lining
a long table in a dank and ill-lit room off the kitchens. The bill of fare consisted of a watery soup made from pea or possibly green cabbage, a plate of grey, stringy meat of uncertain origin, and
a cold, collapsed fruit pie. Pints of weak beer provided the only liquid accompaniment to the repast. Few of his fellow diners bothered to address Quint and those that did spoke in a thick
Cambridgeshire accent he could barely understand. After several failed attempts at communication, Quint fell into sullen silence. The college servants soon chose to ignore him. He watched them
morosely, while struggling to separate the small amounts of meat from the large amounts of gristle on his plate. They were a pretty poor crew, these porters and kitchen staff, he decided. Anyone
with a bit of bounce in him, he thought, would long since have left this dead-and-alive hole in the Fens and headed for London. Yet here were these benighted sods cheerily gobbling up tough meat
and downing horse piss they called beer as if there was nothing better anywhere in the world. Not for the first time, Quint despaired of his fellow man.

Meanwhile, Adam and Fields had joined the academic throng in the hall. Unsurprisingly, they fared rather better than Quint – not least in terms of drink, since the college possessed one of
the university’s finest wine cellars – and it was only after several strenuous hours of eating and imbibing and exchanging Cambridge gossip that they were able to escape to the
professor’s rooms. Fields’s servant had ensured that a fire was waiting for them and they sank gratefully into the comforting depths of two decrepit leather armchairs which stood one on
each side of the hearth. Clutching tumblers of brandy and water, they were now ready to discuss what had brought Adam back to Cambridge.

Fields began with characteristic briskness.

‘So, young Carver, to return at last to your letter. I understand that, since our meeting at the British Museum, you have been involving yourself in the most thrilling of adventures in the
great metropolis. Mysterious men importuning you to help them. Corpses littering the pathways where you tread. We can only dream of such excitement here by the waters of the Cam. Here we lead lives
of almost monastic quiet. Dullness, some might say.’

‘Nonetheless, sir, you may be able to throw some light on at least one of the mysteries which now surround me.’

Fields’s angular face, illuminated by the glow of the fire, wore an expression which was hard to interpret. Was he genuinely eager to hear more? Or was he being no more than ironically
indulgent towards a young man who had recently been a favourite student? Adam was unsure, but continued with what he had to say.

‘I think I described in my letter how I followed the enquiry agent Jinkinson out to a pub in Wapping. How I stumbled across him only moments after he had been shot.’

The professor nodded.

‘As I wrote in my letter, I found this on the man’s body.’ Adam held out the visiting card. ‘As you can see, the word “Euphorion” is inscribed on
it.’

‘But, if I understand you correctly, this was not the first time you had come across it.’

‘No, indeed. I found the same word, in Greek characters, in a journal belonging to Creech, the man who was so interested in our travels in Macedonia. I thought I recalled a Greek poet of
that name.’

Fields took the card and examined it briefly before returning it. ‘As I said to you this afternoon, I have been looking into the question of Euphorion, with some small assistance from
Dandridge.’ The professor put considerable emphasis on the word ‘small’. ‘There are several writers of the name. Euphorion, son of Aeschylus, son of the great Aeschylus, is
recorded as having taken first prize in the Athenian Dionysia in 431 bc. But none of his work survives. Better known – and probably the man that you have been struggling to pluck from the
waters of Lethe – is Euphorion of Chalcis, third century bc. Meineke published fragments of his verse in Germany some thirty years ago.’

‘I was correct in my recollection, then. There was a poet of that name.’

‘Your memory served you well. Much better than time has served Euphorion of Chalcis. He raised no
monumentum aere perennius
, no monument longer lasting than bronze. His poetry is
either lost or all but forgotten.’ Fields sipped at his brandy. ‘I cannot see why this man Creech would have noted down the name of an obscure Greek poet.’

‘No, he did not seem a very poetic soul.’ Adam stared into his own glass, as if looking for the answers to his questions in its contents. He found only a further question. ‘But
there are others by the name of Euphorion, you say?’

‘One at least. Euphorion of Thrace,’ Fields said. ‘Author of a text entitled
Ellados Periegesis
. He is an exceedingly obscure writer. Never studied at either of the
universities. I find it difficult to guess what his name could mean to Creech. Or to an enquiry agent, whatever one of those might be or do.’

‘
Ellados Periegesis
. “The Description of Greece”. That is surely the same name given to the work of Pausanias?’

Adam knew the writings of the Greek geographer and traveller of old. He could recall translating several pages of Pausanias’s lengthy account of his visit to Delphi as punishment for some
schoolboy transgression involving a cricket ball and a broken window.

‘Yes, Euphorion was a slightly younger contemporary of Pausanias,’ Fields said. ‘Second century ad. Most of his work is a direct plagiarism of the older man’s but written
in even less elegant Greek. Which probably explains why Euphorion’s work is largely ignored by scholars.’

‘But there is no mystery about this man’s writings? Creech kept talking of a secret within the manuscript. What secret could there be hidden in an ancient travel book?’

‘No particular secret of which I know, but there is one fact about this Euphorion which may be relevant.’

‘And that is?’

‘There are only half a dozen passages of his book which are not very obviously borrowed from Pausanias. All of these refer to areas in which the older writer did not, as far as we know,
travel.’ Fields paused for a moment. ‘All are in Macedonia.’

Adam sat in silence for a minute, thinking of the implications of the professor’s remarks. Perhaps Creech had read something of the Macedonian villages he had mentioned at the Speke dinner
in the pages of Euphorion. Yet the man with the crescent scar had seemed no student of the classics. Adam remembered again his failure to recognise a commonplace phrase from Homer.

‘Has Euphorion’s book always been available to scholars?’ he asked eventually. ‘Modern editions have been published, surely?’

‘Indeed, they have. Not many – but Aldus Manutius the Younger published a critical edition in Venice in the late sixteenth century. The work of a scholar named Palavaccini. That is
the
editio prin
ceps
. And a gentleman at the University of Edinburgh named Robert Munro produced another, some time in the 1760s or 1770s.’

‘So any secret in the book has been hiding in plain sight for nearly three hundred years. What about manuscripts?’