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How could Nicky have borne to translate this? Maybe it had been cathartic, except there was no hope or relief to be found in the poem, not even the relief of an ending.
Sorrow be to those who live
in longing for those they love.
SIXTEEN
Jem barely slept that night. Partly he was hungry—he hadn’t been able to finish his meal, with a nausea at the idea of food that was all too familiar from his days of nervous prostration. He’d got too thin then. He’d need to be careful now, to make himself eat, but—that damned poem.
The damned poem, the damned letters.
The letters ought to arrive today; he could hardly expect any response for at least a day or two, if he got any at all. He didn’t, in the cold light of morning, entirely believe they would have any effect. Was it really plausible that someone in their group had committed a crime worth reporting to the police? That they had a secret worth killing over?
It had to be plausible, he reminded himself, because one of them had done it.
He thought it through as he lay awake and alone and hungry in the dark, and, by the time he finally drifted off to unsettled sleep, he’d had a couple of ideas.
The next morning, he got hold of a directory of Anselm Hall’s faculty in Blackwell’s, then walked up Park Street to save a penny on the bus. The newspaper-sellers all shouted about the tottering government; Jem couldn’t summon the energy to care. It was a misty morning again and the air was cold and wet. He hunched his shoulders against it, knowing he would look like a drowned rat by the time he got to the Hall.
He hadn’t tried to make an appointment; it wasn’t as though he knew what he was doing anyway. He’d simply play the cards as they fell.
Anselm Hall had been a new building in his day. The bright, patterned red brick had weathered over the last decade, but it still stood out, glaring in its modernity. Jem put in a request at the Lodge to see Miss Keele, and, somewhat to his surprise, was informed she would see him in an hour. He wasn’t permitted to roam around the women’s college unaccompanied, so he retreated to wait in the Natural History Museum down the road, to avoid the rain rather than out of thirst for knowledge.
He’d forgotten the beauty of the museum’s interior, with its slender, soaring columns. He’d used to meet Prue here, to wander around the Pitt Rivers anthropological collection, squinting at African masks and Indian musical instruments and Sussex witch bottles, talking about mathematics and books and anything else that came to mind. He wished, so hard it felt like a blow, that he could have wanted Prue as a man ought to want a wife. If they’d only been able to stand together, they could have stood, he was sure. But Prue had loved Toby, and Jem had loved Nicky, and there had been no more to be said.
Miss Keele gave him tea in her room. She had been Ella and Prue’s ‘morality tutor’, there to provide wise guidance in case of trouble. All the women had had one. There hadn’t been any such thing for the men.
She looked almost exactly as she did in his memory, a thin woman with her hair in a bun and thoughtful eyes. A little greyer now, more lined, still upright, as though she couldn’t risk relaxing by a single degree.
‘I’m pleased to see you again, MrKite.’ She poured tea and offered him a biscuit. ‘It’s been many years. Is this your first return to Oxford?’ She nodded along with him. ‘One can see why you might not have wanted to, ah. Yes. I have often thought of the business, naturally. One sees Feynsham’s name in the scientific journals. I have followed her career with interest. A remarkable woman.’
‘Have you heard from either of them? Ella, or Prue Lenster?’
‘No. Lenster left before sitting the Examination of Women, of course. I understand her, ah.’ Her reluctance? Her reasons? Miss Keele had always had that trick of not actually voicing the final word. Jem had a sudden vivid memory of Prue reducing them all to hysteria with an imitation in which she replaced every word exceptandandthewithah. He had to bite his lip against an unexpected bubble of laughter.
‘But Feynsham was a credit to the Hall and remains so,’ Miss Keele went on. ‘One should have liked her to remain more involved with us. Perhaps in time she may become able to look beyond the, ah.’
‘The murder?’ Jem suggested.
‘The unhappy past.’
‘Do you remember much of that time, Miss Keele?’
‘Naturally,’ she said somewhat drily. ‘It sticks in the mind.’
‘Do you…’ Jem tried to feel his way. ‘As the morality tutor, did Prue speak to you? For advice?’
Her face closed up. It wasn’t a dramatic change of expression, but the muscles froze, in the way Nicky’s face sometimes did. It was the reaction of someone who was used to thinking,I mustn’t show what I feel. ‘If she had done so, about any matter, it would be very wrong of me to discuss it with anyone else.’
‘Did you tell the police about it?’ Jem asked.
‘Certainly not. Discussions with students are confidential.’
Jem felt his nerves quiver, knowing he had to play this just right. ‘But, with Toby’s murder?—’
‘Lenster was not suspected of the murder at any time, nor should she have been. The idea is absurd.’
Noahwhile she was defending her student, Jem observed, and felt a rush of warmth towards the woman. ‘I wasn’t suggesting otherwise,’ he said. ‘Of course she didn’t kill Toby. But—confidentially—I have reason to wonder if the, uh, the other business might have been relevant.’
