The college bade a reluctant if heartfelt farewell this term to one of its noblest and most accomplished sons. Professor C.R.H. Presbury, whose fame as an authority in the field of physiology burst long ago the banks of academe to become a national byword for intellectual rigour and clinical expertise, has chosen retirement following a recent, regrettable period of ill health.
His departure was marked by a brief ceremony, which was attended in considerable number by students and fellows and by sundry others whose lives have been enriched through interchanges of various kinds with the professor.
Presbury himself, a notably frailer figure than he who once bestrode the lecture hall, gave a warm speech in which he thanked the college authorities for their exemplary treatment of him in what he called “trying circumstances”. He also regretted deeply the absence of his daughter and her husband (who were, he said, now resident in the Americas) and declared his intention to leave the university town in favour of a small fenland village where he meant to live out his widower days in “contemplation of the highest of life’s callings”. It needs hardly to be said that he shall be missed greatly by all who knew him.
The overwhelming impression which is acquired during a visit to the village of SEATON LEIGH is one of stark inhospitality. Although not without elements of the quaint and picturesque – its inn, The Upright Badger being, for example, unexpectedly well-stocked and well-appointed – the place boasts a largely taciturn community and a flat fenland landscape. Lone and level fields extend in every direction, studded occasionally by severe dark hedgerows and glowering patches of woodland. There is little to divert that curious traveller who comes in search of the aesthetically pleasing (far better for our wayfarer to journey instead to the nearby homesteads of Baker’s Drive or Graverton) and nothing at all to suggest why, if one were not born to this cold agrarian realm, one should ever choose to make a life for oneself here.
Nonetheless, and against all odds, the village boasts a celebrated resident. Professor C.R.H. Presbury, the once-noted university physiologist, dwells in what was formerly a coaching inn, leading, it is said, an intensely private retirement and taking no part in the business of Seaton Leigh.
I do believe, however, that, during my visitation, I glimpsed him: a tall, defiant figure, stalking into the woods to take his evening constitutional, moving with determined but unfathomable purpose, like some weirdly animate scarecrow.
24th October 1911
Dear Professor,
It is my honour and privilege to enclose within this parcel those curious and singular books that you requested in your last communication, namely:
(i) The Secret Life of a Ballerina
(ii) A Schoolgirl’s Education
(iii) Confessions of a Flagellant
(iv) Further Memoirs of a Courtesan
(v) A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus
I trust that these volumes shall educate and enchant in equal measure. Should you require further additions to your library, pray do not hesitate to renew our correspondence. Until that time, I would remind you respectfully of the ceaseless necessity of discretion and tact.
I remain, sir, your most humble servant,
Sent: 3rd January 1913
From: Scheherazade
To: Panjandrum
Subject located. Extraction begun. Expect further word soon.
More than a decade has passed since last I set pen to paper in this fashion. That was at a time before the delightful – if ultimately faithless – Miss Morphy came first within my purview, before the gentleman from Prague provided the chief instrument of my downfall, before the advent in my rich existence of that professional busybody Mr Sherlock Holmes and before the ignominious end of a career which cannot be characterised as having been anything other than amongst the very first rank. My life since those unhappy days, which saw the cessation of my engagement and the severing of all professional and personal ties of any significance, has been spent in quiet contemplation and solitary philosophical enquiry. I have been – let us not be circumspect – a long time indeed in the wilderness.
What, then, has occasioned my return to this journal, its pages, like the skin of its author, thin, worn and showing advanced signs of age? What has made me write once more of myself?
The answer is this: that an event has woken parts of my character that I had thought to have been forever buried, that the sight of a new face and the speaking of certain words has breathed again on embers in me and coaxed back into full flame the fires of an appetite which I have endeavoured in this long hermitage of mine to curb, to suppress and to cast aside.
It began this morning with a knock upon my study door. I was engaged in the perusal and study of certain antiquarian texts and, being cognisant of their fragility as well as their extreme rarity, I was careful to stow them away in the safest drawer of my desk before answering the bid for my attention with a sturdy “halloa!” It was, of course, Mrs Scott, my redoubtable, boot-faced housekeeper and maid of all work, the only representative of her sex nowadays with whom I pass any words of substance.
Her face was arranged so as to suggest an emotion of which I would not hitherto have thought her capable, namely a crude species of curiosity.
“Mrs Scott? What occasions this interruption?”
“You have a visitor, sir,” said she, her rustic origins evident in every elongated syllable. “A fine young woman.”
Even at these rare words I fancy that something shifted within me, that some new chain was forged.
“Did she give her name?”
In the manner of an angler presenting some oversized prize, Mrs Scott, with a decided flourish, produced a white business card. “See here.” And she passed the thing, with an odd admixture of wariness and pride, to me.
I looked down with considerable interest, callers of any kind being a rarity and those of this stranger’s sex and age unprecedented, and I saw written there four words.
The first, evidently the caller’s name, in bold type and gothic calligraphy, read:
Underneath, in more modern print, ran the legend:
TELLER OF TALES