The early dark had turned cold with a moist wind by the time Henry crossed the elevated walkway from Charles Street station and descended to the pavement. He did not quicken his pace against the chill. He liked this street, especially in the night, when the phony “antique” store signs approved by the historical commission were faded by shadow, and the yellow light from the windows of the small shops made it easier to imagine the way it might have been a hundred years before. Now Christmas lights softened the glare of fluorescent and halogen. The old gaslights on their cast-iron lampposts, following the curb at either side, gave a steady border of definition to the chaos of illumination and glare.
Stopping momentarily to look upward at the Pinckney Street crossing, he noted the rise of those gaslights hovering in the air all the way to the top of Beacon Hill, their black iron posts invisible in the night. The stern faces of the nineteenth-century brick row houses looked unhappily from behind a barrier of cars parked end to end.
On Charles Street, the sidewalks narrowed around the congestion of parking meters and wastebaskets and black metal rails guarding steps down to lower-level shops, causing him to repeatedly halt his pace to let someone else slip by from the other direction. The street bent here as it turned, as if sagging with the accumulated weight of the brick houses which scaled the modest heights of Beacon Hill above. At Mt. Vernon, the street crossing was clogged by a taxi which had decided to let go a fare. Horns pressed the air. It reminded Henry to pick up a new bottle of aspirin at Finnian's Drug Store on the corner.
As he waited in line at the register, he watched the pharmacist counting pills on a tray. Mrs. Prowder had told him once that her name was Lisa. Now she seemed familiar, though he could not recall ever noticing her before. How could he have missed her? But then, he was seldom sick.
At that moment, a movement of her left hand caught the light in a small diamond on her finger. Henry paid for the aspirin and shoved the package in his coat pocket as he left. “You snooze, you lose.” That was one of Albert's expressions.
But the color of her hair was important. It was the color of the hair in his dream.
Chestnut Street was quiet, as usual, and he took the incline with larger strides to be home sooner. He did not take special notice of the absence of light in his own doorway or see the figure on the steps until the miscalculated swing of a fist just barely caught him on the side of the head.
The guttural rasp of a voice followed the sting. “Son of a bitch. You cost me more than you'll make in a hundred years."
A left hand came at Henry's face in a downward arc and missed his nose only because his body was still reeling backward from the first blow. Henry tried to catch himself on the tilt of the brick sidewalk, but his right foot had not moved far enough, quickly enough, and he fell.
The voiced rasped with an alcoholic slur, “You're gonna need some teeth when I fuckin’ finish with you."
Falling, Henry's arm had doubled beneath him with his own weight, his elbow reaching the brick too hard and jolting him with a shock of pain. The sole of a shoe scraped Henry's cheek as it missed his face. Henry rolled. The wheel of a parked car stopped his escape. Another shoe caught him in the ribs, the padding of his coat taking much of the impact. Henry rolled back beneath his attacker, his free arm numb from the shoulder down, and brought what he hoped were the knuckles of his right hand up into the man's crotch. A short gasp was the answer. Henry rolled away again and gained his feet.
"Fuckin’ son of a bitch,” came the voice.
The face above the stooped body coming at him again was now clearly Arthur's. Henry kicked upward at the white of it, caught a grasping hand instead. He twisted away. Arthur followed Henry's retreat without a pause. Henry turned as if to run and turned again full circle to bring his left fist at the mouth of the man. The mouth was opened as if to speak again, but the words were lost in Henry's fist. Arthur fell backward to the steps. Henry's knuckles blazed with the cut of Arthur's teeth.
The door above them opened. Eliot stared down at them from the frame of light.
"What's goin’ on?"
Arthur turned to look up at Eliot, and Henry took the instant to grab at the collar of the man's jacket and yank it downward at the back. The inner silk lining ripped apart at the shoulder. Arthur tried to twist away, his body still inclined toward the steps. Henry kicked at the supporting foot, and Arthur's body dropped lower, his jacket still pinning his arms enough so that it was his mouth that took the edge of the stone.
Eliot said, “You guy's are really fighting, aren't you? You can get hurt, you know."
Retelling the details the next day, Henry found it difficult to make a victory out of the confrontation. Albert was not impressed, as he sipped the top from a beer. The afternoon had turned toward dark by the time Henry made it to the Blue Thorn.
Albert asked, “What happened then?” Blandly staring at Henry in the reflection of the mirror. He was not going to show Henry any additional concern.
Henry said, “Jessica screamed. Like in the movies. She saw the blood rising in Arthur's mouth."
Tim leaned close over the bar and grabbed at Henry's right arm. “It's not broken?"
Henry shrugged. “I don't know. I can't bend the elbow."
Tim continued to squeeze, as if hoping to cause pain. The numbness had not yet faded. He said, “You need an X-ray."
Henry shook his head. “I can't afford it. I think it's just bruised. I'm going to give it a couple of days."
Tim said, “Go to the emergency room."
Henry sipped his ale before speaking. “Sure. You pay for it."
Tim backed off. “Okay, give it a couple of days. Then go see my doctor. He'll give you a special rate, but you have to donate your body to science and give blood three times over the next year."
Albert grunted. “They won't want his body. It's damaged goods now. So, what happened after that?"
Henry tilted his head with the thought. “Cops came. Arthur was sitting up on the steps then with a towel on his face from Eliot. I gave the cop a report and filed a complaint. I was pretty pissed.... Arthur wouldn't talk. He broke some teeth. I think he was too embarrassed to drop the towel. They took him away in a cruiser to Mass General. I haven't heard anything else."
Albert's voice dropped to the full low of a bass cello. “Does this mean what I think it means?"
"What?” Tim asked when Henry did not respond.
Henry had thought that question through several times as he fell asleep the night before. He answered, “That it wasn't Arthur."
Albert repeated, “That it wasn't Arthur."
Tim seemed confused. “Why not? Because he's a fool and goes around picking public fights? Because he's not trying to hide the fact that he's greedy? Maybe. Maybe not."
Henry played with the bandage on his left hand. The brown stain was hard where some of the blood had come through.
"Maybe not."
How could someone act that way? Why would someone who had so much lose his mind over relatively little? Why had Arthur attacked him? Henry would be happier if he had a better understanding of how Arthur figured into everything. Or at least if he could grasp this short thread of human nature.
Albert said, “It was probably just the weather.” Holding his beer up to the light before he set it down. An amber spark struck Henry's eye.
Henry leaned back. Something more was coming, and he voiced his fear. “Oh, crap."
Albert said, “It makes everyone a little crazy at times. Just like it was in the fifth century. A few of those really cold winters in a row—maybe caused by a couple of volcanic eruptions here or there—and suddenly you had these Germanic tribes marauding about. The Angles, the Saxons, the Frisians, and the Jutes—really just proto-Vikings—tribes that had to move on and find someplace a little more hospitable. The land wouldn't support them all. There was probably a good deal of infighting over who goes and who stays. Better to kill some bloke who couldn't understand your language than to put an ax in the neck of your cousin Fred.... Don't forget, the Huns had just come by, and life was not all that settled for anyone. And these were small tribes—maybe fifty clans or less each, a few thousand individuals. Why not get up and go? They had the boats. They were coastal people. And they had undoubtedly heard of the green hills of Albion, or even seen them, just as they had grown up hearing tales about the Goths and the Vandals. Their larger Frankish neighbors were being pushed west by the Slavs, who seemed to be endless in number. So an old Roman coin was tossed, and the losers took to their boats and crossed to Albion. And there they confronted the Celtic Britons who had invaded the island in their own quest for safety half a millennium before, when they had displaced those strange dark people, the Druids.... I have a theory about that—"
Henry said, “You have a theory about everything."
Albert was obviously reading another book. That was the way he had always committed things to memory after reading. He retold what he could to Henry. Albert had this method down pat.
Albert nodded and swallowed. “Not yet. I'm working in that direction, though. You know Einstein was a genius, but he couldn't manage to brush his teeth or comb his hair. My mother named me after the smartest man in the world because she had high hopes. But my theories are based on more practical realities. I'm going to call it the Unified Trash Theory.... So they cross the sea, and there is King Arthur. He has brought the clans of Celtic Briton together following the abandonment of the Roman overlords. The Romans, of course, are still busy collapsing beneath the onslaught of all those Goths and Visigoths, Franks and Avars and Vandals. The Britons were a fierce people, mind you. They survived on their ferocity, but their numbers were not much greater than the invaders', and worse, they were broken by their own clans, with their own grudges. An independent people, they were. Still are."
Henry interrupted. “And stubborn.” Thinking that the picture was incomplete.
"And stubborn.” Albert nodded. “And Arthur brought them together for a while. For maybe fifty years. He must have been a considerable king. He might have rallied the Celtic clans from Ireland and Scotland and even from far-off Brittany to defend against the Viking invaders. A proto-Churchill, if you will. But when he died, just as it happened to the great Alexander, the alliances broke, and the invaders took the good lands and pushed the Britons off to the rock and mist of Scotland and Wales."
Henry had to ask. “So what has this to do with anything?"
Albert answered, “You asked how I thought Arthur figured into the picture."
Henry let a short beat of silence pass. “You know I meant Arthur Johnson."
Henry watched Albert's face in the mirror. Albert stared back innocently. “Didn't I say it was the weather?"
Henry tried not to smile.
Albert stared into the mirror a moment longer, then drank down the remains in his glass and began again.
"Arthur's a questionable character. We don't know much about him.... He could have done it. But why would he take the risk if he had more than half of everything anyway?"
Tim had worked his way down the line of patrons from the end of the bar.
"Greed,” Tim said. “Because he was about to lose a part of it. The English invader endangered everything."
Henry leaned against the wood toward Tim. “You're right, you know. The property was going to be divided. If Arthur was in debt, and had already used up a sizable portion of his inheritance fighting his own battles, then he might not want to see what still remained divided further."
Tim added, “And then there's the Viking."
Albert shook his head vigorously. “No, we're talking about Arthur Johnson."
Tim asked, “What about that guy, Ranulf?"
Henry smiled and studied his ale.
Albert pushed his empty glass forward with added unhappiness and silently waited a moment for Tim's attention, then asked, “What about Tim's redhead?"
Tim's head jerked about.
Henry answered first, happy to change the subject. “I was considering the redhead for myself."
A look of irritation wrinkled Tim's brow as he pulled a beer for someone else instead.
Albert said, “I thought you were being pursued by your high-school sweetheart."
Henry explained that his father was unhappy with him. Leona had been by to talk. She was asking about things his father was not in a position to answer for. Henry had apologized. His father then suggested to Henry that she was a good woman, and good-looking, too, and Henry was getting a bit old to be still fooling around. He warned Henry that he was going to end up like his Uncle Jack.
Albert grunted his agreement. Tim looked over from his radio without further comment, still ignoring Albert's glass.