Work Text:
“So you’re the American,” is the first thing Eames says. Later, he wishes he hadn’t been quite so aggressive, but his hackles were up. He hadn’t expected anyone else to be interested in the letters, but the archivist had told him last night about the “Clarke scholar from America”, and now here he was.
“You must be Frederick Eames,” replies the American. He’s wearing a tan coat and a forest-green jersey. The wool looks soft against his skin. “I read your article on Coleridge’s less-studied reincarnation myths."
“Oh?”
“It was passable.”
Eames raises his eyebrows. The archivist comes over before either of them can say anything else.
The American’s name is Arthur Lutzker. He has dark hair and deep brown eyes and an unsmiling mouth. Eames can vaguely recall reading some of his journal pieces (mostly on Wordsworth and Barbauld; solid and insightful and well-researched, as far as Eames remembers, which is irritating, because the American is clearly a prick).
They are both here, in a small, cold university town in the East Midlands of England, because someone (or, more likely, someone’s estate) has donated a not-so-small pile of letters to the university’s archives. The letters are between Laetitia-Maria Price (or simply Maria, as Eames has come to think of her), and Nathaniel Clarke, some late-era English Romantic poet who Eames has barely heard of and whose political essays and poetry, apparently, are the subject of the American's PhD.
The university library also functions as an archive, but they don’t have much. The papers of Lord Byron’s which they’d happened to acquire were published in an anthology a few decades ago, and therefore are no longer exclusive to the archive.
The reading room is in the basement. They are instructed to hang their bags in the hall outside, and are given a pair of gloves each - "no thanks," says the American, "I brought my own" - and given the usual archive rules - pencils, no pens, no photos, no anything.
"It never gets old, does it," says the American, after a few minutes of dead silence. They've taken the letters out of the box - they'd been tied up neatly, for over 150 years, into two little bundles - one Laetitia-Maria's, one Nathaniel's. Eames is holding Maria's, gently, looking through them, pausing to unfold a few but mostly just taking in the sheer volume, the weight of them in his hands. He knows what the American means, and no, it never does get old, the feeling of holding these documents in your own hands, looking at writing so familiar to you, reading the words of someone you know so intimately, the knowledge washing over you again and again that they held these in their own hands, they wrote these letters, the very same ones I'm holding now.
He looks up and meets the American's eyes, and they share a smile - brief, awkward, but a smile nonetheless. He's an academic like you, Eames reminds himself. You might even end up liking him.
He does like the American a little more after their trip to the university.
The few remaining faculty at the English department are generally uninterested in the letters; there’s only one of them that studies and teaches Romanticism, a tiny old man whose studies of William Blake seem to be bordering on obsessive.
“We’re here to study the letters that have just been left to the library,” Eames tells him, when they visit him in his office.
“Oh yes, yes, the Price girl and Gabriel Clarke, isn’t it,” the man says, looking up at them with milky eyes.
“Nathaniel Clarke, actually,” Arthur clarifies, hands deep in his pockets. Eames knows he must be about as pleased about the misidentification as Eames is about the term “the Price girl”. They don’t stay much longer.
“That office was a fucking fire trap,” Arthur says under his breath as they walk back across town, surprising a laugh and an agreement out of Eames. They do not return to the campus after this.
“Clarke is barely even mentioned in accounts of her life,” Eames says the next day, as they read in silence. “But she was writing to him right up until she died, these last ones are from 1862.”
“He couldn’t have travelled to see her very often, if at all,” Arthur replies. “His family were essentially destitute.”
“Maria was too ill to travel. It sounds like they only met the once.”
“Love from a single chance meeting,” Arthur says softly. “Not at all the sort of relationship I would suspect Nathaniel to have had, and yet.”
“And yet.” They look up at each other. A phrase he’s just read springs to Eames’ mind, from Maria to Nathaniel; when feeling comfortless I need only think of your lovely dark eyes .
"How long are you here," Arthur asks him the next morning, as Eames accepts a cigarette from him, stands beside him on the cobbled stone which surrounds the library steps.
"As long as it takes," Eames says. “It’s a two year MA scholarship I’m on.”
"Oh," says Arthur. "Is this only your Masters'?"
"What, did you think I was older?"
"You've bothered to shave this morning, that helps a little."
"Oh, thank you, Arthur."
"And you dress like you're already an Emeritus professor," Arthur says under his breath, flicking ash onto the grey stone.
"I'm 24," Eames says, instead of dignifying that comment with a response.
Arthur smirks. Eames wishes he could truthfully say it looks unattractive. "Who would have thought. I'm 23."
“Overachiever.”
“You can hardly talk, you had a journal article published when you were 19.”
“The one on Didion. When I thought I was interested in contemporary fiction. How do you know about that?”
“I researched you before I came. Making sure you weren’t studying Clarke’s brother, the people who study him are generally annoying.”
"Oh."
"It was a good article," Arthur says. "Come on, I've got a lot I want to get through this morning."
They spend a lot of time over the next few days reading, and copying, and Eames spends more time than he would care to admit looking at Arthur’s long brown fingers, gentle and reverent with the thin paper, noticing how he frowns when he’s concentrating. Noticing his eyelashes.
Reading love letters is affecting my brain somehow, Eames thinks.
Arthur reaches over to borrow Eames’ pencil sharpener without asking. Eames says nothing.
“Did Clarke have any other relationships?” Eames asks one afternoon. He’s starting to get a headache from trying to read Nathaniel’s writing; the lights in the reading room seem too bright today.
“I always assumed he was gay. Not that there’s very much written on it. Which is always the way; every single biography of Byron except that one that’s just come out completely omits all his relationships with other men.” Arthur sounds bitter; Eames wonders if he has a personal reason to be so irritated, or if he’s just dedicated to biographical accuracy. Personally, Eames consumed Byron’s Love and Death when he was young and full of hunger, just as he did with Shakespeare’s odes, just as he did with Sappho, even. “I’m sick of this, do you want to finish early and get another coffee?”
“Absolutely,” Eames replies. It was strange working with Arthur at first, working in the same room with the same texts; almost like some horrible undergrad group project. But it’s starting to feel comfortable now. They have the same rhythm in the way they work. Arthur’s work is largely biographical, unexpectedly complementary to Eames. They fit together.
“What’s your favourite thing about Clarke,” Eames asks one day, as they eat lunch in silence at the café near the library. Eames is nowhere near an expert on Clarke; from what he’s read, the closest comparison he can make is one to Anna Barbauld – effortlessly measured verse, strong political views, a mature and intelligent and barely-biased scope on world events. Nothing like the work of Laetitia-Maria, who adored Burns for his dedication to collecting Scottish lore, whose brief friendship with Christina Rosetti was built on faeries and goblins, who loved the gothic, the unheimlich, the fantastical. Nathaniel Clarke was a practical poet – feet firmly on the ground, clear-eyed, a realist, dealing with current events, with the real-life folly of mankind, working away steadily in the shadow of his brother.
“He’s unwavering,” Arthur says after a moment. “He knows what he wants to say, and he never let Gabriel get in the way of it. I can’t even imagine having that kind of family life, and still having the time and dedication to write this kind of political commentary, and write so much of it in the form of this beautiful verse, these incredible – these metaphors that he uses, they’re so poetic but they leave no room for misinterpretation, you know - did you read that one I gave you about the ruin of the British empire, what he thought about the possibility of another war with France?”
“How time’s slow script will spell out our shortcomings, and we’ll be like the next Rome. An antiquity. Reminded me of Shelley.”
"Ozymandias," Arthur guesses, correctly. “Dom loves Shelley.”
“He’s the one that studies Gabriel, isn’t he,” says Eames. “Your… colleague?”
Arthur chuckles. “Yeah, although I’d call him a friend now, I guess. He supervised my thesis. He was made to study Gabriel. Their minds seem to work along the same tracks. Here, do you want this cake? I can’t finish it.”
“Thanks,” Eames says. So, Dom Cobb is a friend and not a boyfriend. “Chocolate’s my favourite.”
“I noticed,” says Arthur.
“I think it was a terrible waste,” Arthur says, as they eat dinner together in Arthur’s room in the university’s postgraduate hall of residence. They’ve both read the entirety of the letters all the way through now, both sides of the exchange, and are going through again to take better transcriptions, leave nothing out. “They didn’t marry, they could never be together.”
“I’m glad for them anyway,” Eames says. “He made her so happy. I’ve always wanted that for her; she had wonderful friends and she lived as full a life as she could, but she was still in so much pain, she still died too young. I’m glad she had those letters to read every night.”
He expects Arthur to tease him for this, but Arthur smiles. Arthur has been smiling at him more and more; Eames can barely believe his own assessment, two weeks ago, that Arthur was grim and stern and probably boring.
“Maybe I just don’t believe enough in love,” Arthur muses.
“Maybe you need some convincing,” Eames replies.
A few weeks later, the weather is starting to turn colder, and Eames has a chapter drafted on Maria’s real-life romance and its relevance, in terms of both parallels and divergences, to her later works which were based in myth. He also has a routine, which involves Arthur – nearly revolves around Arthur, around Arthur and Maria and Nathaniel Clarke. He isn’t looking forward to giving it up.
“Do you think they were really in love,” Eames asks, as they stand outside the library one evening, sharing a cigarette, “from just that short time they spent together?”
Arthur has Eames’ scarf looped round his neck; Eames gave it to him after he noticed that the tips of Arthur’s ears were pink. Eames has no idea when or how he acquired the knowledge that Arthur’s ears go pink in the cold.
“I think they found something in each other which they never expected to find,” Arthur says, “and which they never expected to love – you know, because they’re such different people - and furthermore, I don’t think they ever expected it to last. At least, not Nathaniel. That’s not his way, trust never came easily to him. But I think it felt like love to them. And if it felt like love to them, then that’s all that matters. You know?”
“I think I do know now, yeah,” Eames replies, taking in Arthur’s dark eyes, the way they crease at the corner when he smiles.
“I think I’m going to stay in town a while,” Arthur says. “It’s a good place to write. I want to annotate Nathaniel’s early works, the stuff that was influenced by Wordsworth. There’s so much in the letters I can use to identify specific scenes, references he makes. Even sentiments. Dom wants me to go back to the States to help him organise a conference, but I think I’d rather stay here.”
“I’d rather you stay here too,” Eames says, “if it makes any difference.”
“It makes a lot of difference,” Arthur says (sounding a little shy, which is not a quality Eames really associates with Arthur), and then, as if he’s heard Eames’ thoughts, he follows this up with “Can we please stay in bed all weekend? I mean tonight through Monday morning. I am fucking sick of that windowless reading room.” They are, without a doubt, completely within earshot of the kind, polite archivist, who is making her way down the library steps in her winter coat.
Eames coughs out his cigarette smoke, choking a little, and, fortunately, avoids eye contact with the poor woman. “Whatever you want, darling,” he says when he’s recovered. “Whatever you like.”
Arthur takes the cigarette back off him and smirks. “By the way,” he whispers, “your blowjobs are better than your Coleridge articles.”
“I’m going to lock you in that reading room,” Eames says, feeling himself blush, “and leave you there to suffocate.”
“That can wait til Monday, though,” Arthur says, reaching out to take his hand. “Let’s go home.”