What Time Devours Read Online Free Page B

his jacket and tie and unfastened several buttons of his rumpled shirt. The room Thomas was standing in was a mirror of its owner: what had been elegant and sophisticated overturned as if by a whirl-wind. The floor was strewn with books and papers, a coffee table had been upended, and the vase of tulips that had been sitting on it lay in pieces on the carpet. A familiar CD case lay on the floor: XTC’s English Settlement .
    “David?” said Thomas. “Is everything okay?”
    Escolme turned, as if just remembering he wasn’t alone, produced a hollow bark of laughter, and went back to his pacing, picking his way between overturned drawers of clothes and what looked to be champagne bottles, at least half a dozen of them, strewn across the floor like howitzer shells.
    “I’m sorry,” said Thomas. “This looks like a bad time. I’ll let myself out and maybe, if you’d like to give me a call sometime . . .”
    “No!” Escolme shouted. “Don’t go.”
    The vagueness in his eyes was suddenly gone, and he looked earnest and desperate.
    “You are obviously busy,” Thomas continued. “I can come back . . .”
    “No,” said Escolme again, crossing quickly to him and grasping Thomas’s arm in a knuckle-whitening grasp. “Please. I am . . . not quite myself. But I need you here. Please, sit down.”
    The inadequacy of the phrase “not quite myself” and the fact that there wasn’t an upright chair in the room that wasn’t covered with discarded books and papers made Thomas hesitate. Escolme turned a leather-backed wing chair, swept a stack of legal briefs onto the floor, and motioned to it.
    “Please,” he said again.
    Slowly, his eyes on the agent, Thomas sat down.
    “Perhaps you would like to join me,” said Thomas, cautiously.
    Escolme nodded thoughtfully and repeatedly, as if mulling the suggestion, then took a seat opposite him, crunching the broken vase underfoot as he did so.
    “What’s going on, David?”
    For a long moment the young man was quite still, and then, to Thomas’s horror, he put his hands in his face again, rocked forward, and emitted a long, breathless sob. At last he lowered his hands, but his face was still set in a grimace of grief, mouth stretched wide in the parody of a smile, eyes squeezed shut, tears smeared on his cheeks.
    “I lost it,” he breathed.
    “What?” said Thomas, still tense and uncomfortable, his voice barely more than a whisper.
    Escolme looked at him then, as if steeling himself to say the words.
    “ Love’s Labour’s Won .”
    “What?”
    “ Love’s Labour’s Won ,” he repeated. “The Shakespeare play.”
    Thomas stared at him, incredulous.
    “But that never existed,” said Thomas. “Or if it did, we don’t have it. It’s lost.”
    “Not lost,” said Escolme. “I held it in my hands only hours ago. And now it’s gone.”

CHAPTER 7
    “What are you talking about?” said Thomas. All the tension had suddenly evaporated and he felt curiously relaxed, as if the whole thing had been a joke or a misunderstanding. “ Love’s Labour’s Won ? There’s no such thing.”
    “There is,” said Escolme. “There was. I had it.”
    “David, it doesn’t exist,” said Thomas, kindly. “It never existed.”
    “It did,” said the agent, calming now, so that the frantic despair was turning into exhaustion. “It does. I had it,” he said, his eyes closing again. “Here.”
    The energy drained out of him again and he slumped in his chair.
    “How could you have had it?” Thomas said, trying to keep the disbelief out of his voice, trying to protect the man from what was surely a delusion.
    “I had it.” He sighed. “I had it, and it’s gone.”
    This was becoming a mantra. Thomas tried a different tack.
    “Where did you find it?”
    “Oh, I didn’t find it. I was loaned it,” said Escolme. “By a client.”
    Thomas breathed out slowly so that the air whistled. It was one thing to have lost something Escolme thought was a lost play by