Letters

He was, well, charming: not at all the blustering boor of the Maryland Historical Society — except (and here too he is at least in spirit my André’s kin) in the company of “adversaries” such as Morgan, who joined us after di

So. The only unattached lady among so many charming, unattached gentlemen, and too unfortunately distracted to enjoy their gallantries. Or properly to acquaint myself with the youngest member of our company, the most detached certainly, if not unattached, who hovered in the margins of the evening as of this letter. “And I believe you’ve not met Mr Prinz,” Jane said at the end of our cocktail introductions, as I attempted dazedly to measure A. B. Cook against André’s depiction. In the following year, last year, when I found myself de facto mistress of Tidewater Farms, playing “Esther” to Harrison’s “Ahasuerus” (his conceit, after one of George III’s) whilst “Queen Vashti” refreshed herself at the real Bath and Cheltenham, I had occasion to re-view Reg Prinz — else I’d be unable to describe him now, so distraught was I and evanescent he that November evening. The “son [Harrison] should have had” is at the end of his twenties, lean, slight, light-ski

Do not ask me where, when, or to whom the young man has delivered himself of these opinions, most of which I have at at least second hand from Ambrose. I have indeed, on occasion since, heard him speak, in a voice almost inaudible and invariably in ellipses, shrugs, nods, fragments, hums, non sequiturs, dashes, and suspension points. Ambrose declares that his immediate presence (I must add “except at formal Guy Fawkes Day di

If the last, I’d have graded him B at best that November evening, which we are now done with. Today — I don’t know. I left Tidewater Farms no wiser than I’d arrived, but sorely troubled. To Joe Morgan and Todd Andrews, of course, I could say nothing of my deepest concerns; but in the car back to Cambridge from Redmans Neck (Morgan kindly returned us to our addresses) I learned that while my two pleasant bachelor companions agreed that A. B. Cook was an enigma and a charlatan, more subtle and sophisticated than the role he played with Schott and Company, they did not (then) agree on what if anything underlay the oafish masquerade. Andrews was inclined to think him a wealthy, eccentric, heartfelt reactionary whose support (both financial and poetical) of certain Dixiecrat politicians was legitimate if lamentable; whose friendships with Harrison and other civilised right-wingers were genuine, his relations with vulgar red-necks like Schott merely expedient. And his duplicity, in Todd Andrews’s opinion, was probably limited to loudly supporting in the crudest fashion a famously conservative gubernatorial candidate so that a lesser-known but even more conservative could run against him on what pretended to be a liberal platform, and the Tories win in either case. The rest, he declared — Cook’s rumoured paramilitary “club” on or near Bloodsworth Island, his rumoured co

Morgan disagreed. Through his activities with the historical society he’d had frequent dealings with Cook, who’d been the first to propose him to Harrison Mack for the presidency of Tidewater Tech, as he’d been the first subsequently to propose his resignation from Marshyhope in favour of Schott. Quite apart from any grudge against the man for whatever harm he might do the college (it is a mark of Morgan’s tact that he didn’t mention Cook’s slanderous resurrection, so to speak, of his late wife’s death), Morgan believed him genuinely menacing and perhaps psychopathological. What’s more, he believed there might be some truth in a body of rumour that was news to Mr Andrews as well as to me: that Cook was literally sinister, a threat not from the right but from the left! On this view, his public co

“Once, ten years ago,” Morgan told us matter-of-factly, “when I first got to know him, Cook offered to arrange a murder for me. Said it was the easiest thing in the world. I didn’t take him up on it, but I didn’t have the impression he was boasting, either.”

We didn’t press; perhaps Andrews, like me, wondered uncomfortably whether the victim was to have been the late Mrs Morgan or someone involved in her death. Given the whispering campaign against him, Morgan’s remark seemed ill-considered — but I took it as a mark of his trust, and was in any case more interested in Cook’s possible co