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He remembered her weeping, that dreadful day: the heaving, sobbing howls of a woman destroyed. And she’d married ten weeks later.
She seemed to be the only one who’d married, as far as he could find. Not that he’d expected Nicky to. Nicky, like Hugo and Aaron, had sat his Finals in the middle of the chaos, and won the top First in the university as Toby’s body cooled, and he was now senior lecturer in Anglo-Saxon at StAnselm’s.
He hadn’t even left the college. Prue had fled a couple of days after Toby’s death, Jem after that first dreadful examination paper, and the others had gone after Finals, he supposed, but Nicky had stayed on. Jem found himself wondering where he lived. In college? In Front Quad, where he and Toby had roomed in their first year? Old Quad, looking out into the courtyard whereCymbelinehad come to its calamitous end? Summoner Quad, where Toby’s blood might still stain the floorboards?
Nicky would see StAnselm’s and Toby around him every day of his life. Jem had spent ten years trying to forget them both.
TWO
Michaelmas Term, 1892
‘Hey. You, with the limp. Grammar boy.’
The voice was upper-class, commanding, with a sneer in it, and Jem turned swiftly and incautiously. The ill-fitted mortarboard he wore, caught by the air, flew off his head. He lunged for it, just a short step, but he stumbled anyway, and the hot rush of humiliation made his clumsiness even worse. His fingers scraped the edge of the brim, couldn’t grasp it, and he saw the black square tumble towards the paving slabs.
A hand swiped it up before it hit the ground.
‘I say.’ His rescuer straightened, holding the mortarboard. He was of medium height and build, which made him substantially larger than Jem, and strikingly good-looking, with a square-jawed, open face and an extraordinary head of wavy red-gold hair. The early-autumn sunlight caught at its strands, turning the mass to a blaze. ‘Is this yours?’
Jem mumbled thanks and reached for the mortarboard. The redhead smiled, wide and happy. ‘Good afternoon. My name’s Feynsham. Are you one of us?’
‘Hardly,’ interjected the fellow who’d startled Jem in the first place. ‘It’s the scholarship boy. Some creeping toady from a grammar school, at Anselm’s. I call it a disgrace.’
‘Quite right,’ came a third voice, a tall, lean blond, standing a little behind Feynsham. He was no older than the rest of them judging by his face, but his drawl suggested a decadent, world-weary forty-year-old. ‘It’s an outrage. Here you are, Lewis, ready to drink champagne and smash up other people’s property, and instead you find yourself forced into company with an intelligent and hard-working scholar. At Oxford, of all places! They’ll be asking you to read books next.’
The offensive man, Lewis, reddened. ‘I say, Rook?—’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ the blond man said over him. ‘There are still plenty of ill-mannered braying clodpoles who are only here to vomit in the wellspring of education. You’ll fit right in.’
That left Lewis speechless with indignation. The blond waved a languidly dismissive hand at his splutters, and turned to Feynsham, who was grinning broadly. ‘And with the formalities concluded, do introduce me to your new friend.’
‘I’d love to if I’d got so far as his name,’ Feynsham said cheerfully. ‘Starting again, I’m Toby Feynsham.’
Jem stuck his mortarboard awkwardly under his arm, and shook the proffered hand. ‘Uh, Kite. Jeremy Kite. Pleased to meet you.’
‘And this is Nicholas Rook, don’t mind him. He’s determined to make a reputation as the rudest man in Oxford.’
‘No determination required. It’s effortless.’ Rook held out his hand in turn, giving Jem an assessing look. His eyes were brown, strikingly so against his fair hair and pale skin. ‘I take it you are indeed the gentleman from the Midlands, of whom we have heard so much?’
Jem had hoped that nobody would know of his origins. The scholarship award had made him famous in his small factory town as the first there ever to go to the great university at Oxford, but he had not expected to make the slightest ripple here, nor wanted to. His coldest fear, lying awake in the summer nights while he’d waited for autumn to come, had been to be singled out as the grammar school boy, the lone plebeian among gentlemen of breeding; the odd one. He’d spent so long being different; all he’d wanted was to be unnoticed, and he’d failed at that on his first day.
It had been inevitable. He didn’t look right here, in the magnificent sixteenth-century quadrangle with its gables and gargoyles and wrought-iron gates, and the perfect lawn with its great oak. Feynsham and Rook and even Lewis seemed perfectly at home among the ancient glory, as comfortable in their flowing black gowns as any academic. Jem’s gown looked new, ill-fitting, wrong.Helooked wrong.
He swallowed, knowing his accent would betray him even if he tried to lie. ‘Yes. That’s me.’
‘Excellent,’ said Feynsham with enthusiasm. ‘I was hoping we’d meet you, and here we are.’
Rook rolled his eyes. ‘A welcoming committee. Do you know anyone here, at all? No? Well, you haven’t missed much. Place is full of Etonians, God help us.’
‘Oh, Nicky.’ Feynsham took Jem’s arm, a confident, casual gesture, as though they’d been friends for ever, and started walking towards an archway. Jem, taken entirely off guard, hopped to keep up. ‘I have high hopes of at least a few bright sparks. We decided, you see, that we’d collect the interesting people.’
‘Collect?’ Jem repeated.
‘Exactly. Rather than mingle with all the men one went to school with?—’
‘As though one hadn’t seen enough of them for a lifetime,’ Rook put in.
‘—we thought we’d look out the fellows with something different to them. Something new. I say, Kite, is your foot all right? You’re limping.’
