The Rebel Angels

It was an especially genial Guest Night, because it was our last before the long summer break, and also because the calendar and a public holiday had intervened in such a way that it was our first following Easter. Downstairs, when the first part of dinner was over and the students had gone about their own affairs, all our regulars were present, and as well as Hollier, there were two other guests, George Northmore, who was a Judge of the Supreme Court of the province, and Benjamin Jubilei, from the University Library.

I wondered how long it would be before somebody brought up the murder of Urquhart McVarish, and who would do so; I had made a mental bet with myself that it would be Roberta Burns, and I won. Once again, for The New Aubrey, I give I some notion of how they chirped over their cups.

"Poor old Urky. Don't you remember him dining with us last autumn, and how proud he was of his penis-bone, poor devil? He tried to get a squeak out of me with that, but I was one too many for him; Urky simply had no idea what a tough nut an intelligent middle-aged woman can be."

"He was an Oxonian of the old dispensation," said Penny Raven; "thought women were lovely creatures whose sexual coals could be blown into warmth by raunchy academic chit-chat. Well, well; one down and a few score around this campus still to go."

"Penny, that isn't like you," said Lamotte.

"No, no, Penny," said Deloney; "the poor fellow is dead. Let's not beat the bones of the vanquished."

"Yes," said Hitzig, "we're not hyenas or biographers, to pee on the dead."

"Okay. De mortuis nil nisi hokum," said the unrepentant Penny.

"I was myself at Oxford at least as long ago as McVarish," said the Warden, "and I have never thought meanly of women."

"Oh, but you were Balliol, Warden. Always in the van. Urky was Magdalen – quite another bed of cryptorchids."

The Warden smirked; Oxford rivalries died hard in him.

"I wonder what is to become of all his erotica," said Roberta Burns. "He had a pornographic bootjack at his door that always interested me."

"A pornographic b –!" Lamotte was playing the innocent, as he loved to do with women.

"Indeed. A naked woman rendered in brass, lying on her back with her legs astraddle. You put one foot on her face, forced the other into her crotch, and hoiked off your galosh. Practical enough, but offensive to my lingering female sensibilities."

"I never know what people want with such nasty toys," said Lamotte. "It has been my observation, over a long life, that a man's possessions are a surer clue to his character than anything he does or says. If you know how to interpret the language of possessions." Lamotte looked as if he considered himself such a man.

"All we'll ever find in your cupboards are pieces of rare old china," said Deloney; "and from what I hear, René, they don't provide guarantees of a blameless taste."

"What? What? We must hear about this," said Roberta. Lamotte was blushing.

"René is reputed to have a fine collection of bourdaloues," said Deloney.

"Being –?"

"Eighteenth-century china piss-pots for elegant ladies to slip under their skirts on long, cold coach journeys."

"No, no," said Lamotte. "Named for the Abbe Bourdalue who preached inordinately long sermons – extreme tests of human endurance. But who says this –?"

"Aha, wouldn't you like to know? Are they really painted with naughty pictures?"

"As long as I keep on drinking mineral water while you are sipping port, it will be quite a while before you find out."

"Minds that are too refined slip into grossness. Watch your step, René; we have our eyes on you."

Here it was Lamotte who smirked.

"Do I hear you discussing the deep damnation of Urky McVarish's taking-off?" It was Durdle, shouting down the table, which the etiquette of the occasion forbade him to do.

"Ah, the Pink Ribbon Murder," said Ludlow, the law don. "What did you make of that, Judge?"

"I didn't make much of it," said Mr. Justice Northmore. "I read everything that appeared in all three papers, and the accounts were so muddled and contradictory that I couldn't be sure of anything except that a professor had been murdered under somewhat imaginative circumstances. I wish it had come to trial, so we could have got to the bottom of it –"

Roberta Burns snorted. The Warden raised his eyebrows.

"So that we could have found out the truth about the ten feet of pink ribbon that were concealed in the rectum of the body. Now why would anybody want to do that?"

"There was talk in one of the confessions of 'ceremonies'."

"Yes, yes, Mr. Ludlow, but what ceremonies?"

"The full explanation of that was given only in the letter that reached the police, which I had an opportunity of examining," said Ludlow. "Something very complicated about Queen Anne."

"Can we not talk of anything else?" said the Warden.

"Tell me later, Ludlow," hissed the Judge.

But the Warden's mild plea could not stop the flow.

Deloney was querying Ludlow: "Whatever became of the body?"