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‘And,’ Jem went on, ‘you’re as rich as anyone. Aren’t you? You went to Winchester!’
‘My father is reasonably well lubricated,’ Nicky agreed. ‘It doesn’t mean I can have everything I want.’
Jem stared ahead, at the white cupola of the Sheldonian Theatre, faint and orange-tinted by the gaslights of the street. He thought he could feel Nicky’s breathing, the tiny added pressure every couple of seconds to the connection where his body and Jem’s rested against one another. He was aware he was slightly drunk, and that he had to say something, and that he didn’t know what. He didn’t know if he was permitted to say,Do you want Toby?or whether he could bear it if Nicky said yes.
‘I don’t think—I don’t think, whatever the reason you can’t have something, I don’t think it’s a good thing,’ he managed. ‘I mean, if it’s something other people could have because of their birth or their—their nature. I wouldn’t be here if I was happy to look at the dreaming spires and think, well, that’s not for my sort. I took the scholarship examination to get this for myself. I don’twantto admire things from afar.’
‘Nor do I, Jeremy,’ Nicky said, and his voice sounded harsh. ‘Sodding hell. Nor do I.’
He tipped up the bottle, then passed it to Jem, who drained the last mouthful. Toby probably would hurl it over the parapet, he thought. He could almost understand the urge. Just to see it rise and arc and tumble and fall. Just for the thrill of it, before the crash.
He didn’t, because he was Jem who thought about things like broken glass in the quad below and the danger of hurting someone. Because he feared consequences. So he didn’t throw the bottle, and he didn’t ask Nicky what he wanted in case Nicky asked him that in return, and it was a relief—he was sure it was—when his companion rose.
‘Come on, it’s dark. Let us grope our way downstairs and try not to be caught.’
After two days trying to make an appointment to see Ella, or discover her address, Jem gave up. She guarded her privacy, clearly, and, even if he took her by surprise, she had always been one of the most self-possessed people he knew. And if Aaron was protecting her still, if they were maintaining their fiction of an alibi, might he not even have written to warn her?
He looked up the trains to Hertfordshire instead.
The village of Aldbury proved to be a mile from Tring station. Jem arrived at around eleven on a bright, cold November day, and walked the distance for the sake of the sparkling-fresh air, even if he’d be aching later. It was bitterly cold, with the grass and leaves in shadow still rimed with the night’s frost, and his breath steamed out in front of him in feathery plumes.
He thought of Prue as he walked. The girls had been close ever since they’d roomed together in the first year, but he had sometimes wondered if Ella had selected her as a friend because she was there. Prue had given Ella a woman to talk to; Ella had given Prue the chance to be more than another bluestocking.
Toby hadn’t seemed to resent that friendship at all. He’d encouraged Prue’s ambitions, insisted on her trying for the starring role inCymbeline, and lavished her with the irresistible charm that had them all following more or less helplessly in his path. Naturally, she had fallen in love with him, with the sort of hopeless adoration that had made Jem flinch away because he didn’t want to see it. Had Ella considered that as a disloyalty from her sole female friend?
Toby hadn’t reciprocated Prue’s affections, and she’d doubtless have grown out of those feelings in time, but she’d undeniably loved him. How had she married so quickly after his death?
Jem’s thoughts kept him distracted as he walked what proved to be a country mile to Aldbury. He had always been good at immersing himself in study to the exclusion of outside distraction and bodily need, but he regretted it as he reached the village green and realised that his hip was aching with a steady beat of pain. He’d walked too fast, or it was the cold. He’d need to find a conveyance back.
He stopped in the centre of the little village to look around. It was entirely unimproved by modernity, with a cluster of low red-brick or Tudor-beamed cottages around a central pond, next to which stood an actual set of stocks. Jem’s ankles hurt just looking at them.
Prue lived, he knew, on Toms Hill Road; he would have to find that but felt in need of a sit-down first. There was an antique-looking public house facing the pond, a Georgian building called the Greyhound Inn; he went inside, relishing the enveloping blast of heat from the blazing fire. He ordered a half of ale and perched on a stool, the better to talk to the woman behind the bar, whose air of authority suggested she was the landlady. She gave him directions to Toms Hill Road, which was apparently just round the corner, and added, ‘Any particular reason, sir? You’re not from these parts, I think?’
‘I live in London. I’m looking for Mrand Mrs John Warren.’
‘John Warren? Oh, dear, sir. Were you a friend of his?’
‘Uh, no. He’s dead?’
‘I fear so, sir, four years or more. Lockjaw, it was, terrible thing. Poor MrsWarren, she’s had a great deal to bear.’
‘This is MrsWarren who was Miss Prudence Lenster?’ Jem said. ‘I am extremely sorry to know it. Will I find her at home, do you think?’
‘In another half an hour or so, sir. She’s the schoolmistress here, did you not know?’
Jem had not. He thanked the landlady, and sipped his ale, thinking of Prue, eyes shining, centre of them all inCymbeline, or shrieking and kicking after being elected treasurer of the Women’s Association, as Hugo lifted her onto a plinth in the gardens. A widow teaching in a village school.
He’d wondered once if he could be happy with Prue. She had adored Toby, but in those last days of his life she had been white-faced and desperate, as though she’d finally understood the impossibility of her dream, and, since Jem had been just as desperate in his own way, he’d given serious thought to proposing as a way of escape for them both.Let’s pretend it never happened,he’d wanted to say.Let’s escape from this damned place where neither of us is wanted, let’s make a sane life, a reasonable one, without grand passion.
It probably wouldn’t have worked, but perhaps he should have tried, because ten years on he still hadn’t escaped Oxford’s terrible pull. He wondered if Prue had.
He set off for Toms Hill Road when the clock struck and the landlady nodded to him. He walked slowly, almost reluctantly, and wasn’t sure why. He was quite sure that Prue, of all of them, was not the guilty party.
She might have had the time to kill Toby, and even the desire. She had returned to Anselm Hall via Park Road, and would have had plenty of time to slip through the garden gate to Toby’s room. She wasn’t the sort of woman that people noticed in a crowd, not like Ella, who several people had seen. She’d loved him, and Jem knew all too well how easily love could curdle into hate. But he simply didn’t believe that such a short woman could have driven that knife up through Toby’s flesh to pierce his heart. She might have had the moral force; she lacked the physical.
Her cottage was small, and not smart. It didn’t betray severe neglect, but Jem’s mother had been houseproud, and he knew what a listlessly kept home looked like because he lived in one now. The brass on Prue’s doorstep was unpolished, the rosebush left to straggle, the windows dusty.
He knocked and, after a few moments, the door opened.
