I waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t, so I said, “Math was never my strong subject.”
He frowned, but there was a flicker of amusement in his expression. “Surprising. After all, Shakespeare is poetry—most of it, anyway—and there’s a certain mathematical pattern to poetry, isn’t there?”
“You could say that.”
“In any mathematical equation, a series of known and unknown variables add up to the given solution.”
“That’s about what I remember of algebra. Solve for x.”
“Precisely,” he said. “Well, here we have an equation with a known outcome—Richard’s death. We’ll call that x. And on the other side of the equals sign we have your—that is, the fourth-years’—accounts of the event. A, b, c, d, e, and f, if you will. And then there’s everyone else. We’ll call them y. Nine weeks later we have all the variables accounted for, but I still can’t solve for x. Can’t get the two sides of the equation to balance.” He shook his head, the motion measured and deliberate. “So what does that mean?”
I stared at him. Didn’t answer.
“It means,” he went on, “that at least one of our variables is wrong. Make sense to you?”
“To a certain extent. But I think the premise is flawed.”
“How so?” he said, the question wry, almost teasing.
I shrugged. “You can’t quantify humanity. You can’t measure it—not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them.” I paused, just long enough that he might believe I hadn’t planned what to say next. “Or sometimes they drink too much and fall in the lake.”
Colborne blinked and a kind of profound confusion surfaced in his expression—as though he wasn’t sure whether he might have miscalculated me. “Is that really how you think it happened?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course it was.” We’d been saying it for weeks. Yes. He fell. Of course he did.
Colborne sighed, his breath heavy in the lukewarm library air. “You know, Oliver, I like you. Mostly in spite of myself.”
I frowned, unsure if I’d heard him right. “Strange thing to say.”
“Well, truth can be stranger than fiction. My point is, I’d like to trust you. But that’s a lot to ask, so instead I’m just going to ask a favor.”
I realized he was expecting a reply, so I said, “All right.”
“I’m guessing you’ll get a good look at this place as you clean it,” he said. “If you find anything unusual … Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t mind being kept in the loop.”
A pause followed, like a scripted beat between lines in a play.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Colborne’s eyes lingered on me a moment longer, and then he walked slowly back across the room to the stairs, where he stopped. “Be careful, Oliver,” he said. “As I said, I like you. And—let me put this in such a way that you’ll be sure to understand—Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
With that he left, a small smile on his mouth, at once sad and mocking. I stood motionless as his footsteps creaked on the stairs, and only when I heard the front door close behind him did I unclench my fist in my pocket. The blood-spotted scrap there was crumpled and damp with sweat.
SCENE 4
I gave Colborne a five-minute head start because I didn’t want him to catch me leaving the Castle. I stashed my cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink, pulled my coat and gloves on, and left through the back door. I ran the whole distance to the FAB without stopping, frost crunching under my feet. By the time I arrived my limbs were numb, my eyes watering from the sting of the sharp February air.
I let myself in through a side door and listened carefully. The third-years were in the auditorium, stumbling through the second act of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Hoping not to run into anyone loitering backstage, I hurried into the stairwell, one hand skating along the railing as I took the steep steps to the basement two at a time.