The Sirens Sang of Murder

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There will be much disappointment, I fear, among my fellow scholars. From the Senior Common Room of St. George’s College, where anxious colleagues ask daily, “Finished yet, Hilary?” to the far distant lecture halls of Yale and Columbia, where I understand that the phrase “In Professor Tamar’s forthcoming publication” is constantly to be heard, the world of learning waits with impatient eagerness for my long-promised work on the concept of causa in the common law. How then am I to admit that I have yet again allowed myself to be led astray from the true path of Scholarship and that what I now offer my readers is no more than the chronicle of my defection?

Would it not perhaps be more seemly to refrain from publishing any account of my investigation of the Daffodil affair and to allow the whole matter to rest in obscurity? The mere facts of the case, after all, are hardly in themselves of sufficient importance to warrant publication. The reason for the high mortality rate among the advisers to the Daffodil Settlement; the identity of the white-robed figure seen on the cliffs on Walpurgis Night; how Julia Larwood came to be arrested in evening dress one morning on a beach in Jersey — of what serious interest or value can it be to my readers to be informed of such matters? And yet the case provides so striking a demonstration of the methods by which Scholarship, when applied even to such trifling questions, may dispel Error and reveal Truth that it will perhaps afford not only instruction to the public but much needed encouragement to other scholars. I have accordingly been persuaded, despite my misgivings, that it would not be right to withhold an account of it.

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