On those occasions, Rawlins had watched his father turn on the charm, play the part of the responsible adult, and easily dispense with the concerned authority figure before shutting the door and turning his newly inflamed rage on the traitors who had betrayed him: his wife and children. Rawlins had learned that the consequences of showing your dysfunction to the world were only terror and pain.
All of which contributed to his gift for…well, it was not necessarilydeceptionso much ascompartmentalization.The sorting of facts and truths into different buckets, airtight and hermetically sealed.
The challenge was the question of whetherEllsbethcould keep a secret. There was no basis for trust between them, and he had no reason to assume she had any gift for guile. Her attempts to maneuver him through flirtation when they had met at The Frayed Page had been utterly transparent, hardly suggesting a temperament suited to subterfuge.
Of course, he had to concede that those clumsy efforts had elicited a certain…reaction.A flare-up of desire that caught him quite off guard. But it was not somethingshewas in control of. His attraction to Ellsbeth was primal, but it was also something he could easily suppress and ignore, and he was confident that it would blow over soon.
The building that housed thefaculty offices for the College of the Arcane Arts had been grand when it was constructed in the 1890s. At that time, Gilded Age money flowed freely into the department; the arcane was viewed then as a helpful ally to the burgeoning industrial economy, which had not yet supplanted it for virtually all commercial purposes.
But what had seemed grand a century ago—arched entryways, thick-paned windows, heavy-beamed ceilings, dark wood everywhere—now only enhanced the sense that the building was a relic of another era.
Rawlins entered the Penrose Conference Room, joining the meeting ten minutes after it had begun. His tardiness, while unintentional, was hardly uncommon. Among the perks he enjoyed, as a result of his fame in the field of the arcane arts, were certain indulgences; Lennox shot him an irritated look at the interruption, but did not comment.
The conference table was crowded already with the College of the Arcane Arts’ eleven professors—four tenured, the rest adjunct—all in attendance at the meeting. Fortunately, Paul Gallway, the blandly handsome alchemy professor, slid down a seat, making room for Rawlins. “Late night?” Gallway whispered with a knowing cock of his eyebrow, no doubt implying that a hangover was to blame for Rawlins’s late arrival rather than hours of troubled rumination about the study of illegal magic. Rawlins merely shrugged. He found Gallway’s guys-like-us camaraderie grating, but the path of least resistance was to blithely go along withit.
Dean Lennox led the meeting from a seat in the middle of the table. No doubt she eschewed the position at the head in an effort to ingratiate herself with the faculty, to signal that she was not a hierarchical leader so much as a fellow scholar who happened to be charged with governing them all. But in conjunction with the clipped, efficient way in which she made her way through her agenda, she came off more as a beleaguered bureaucrat.
Lennox had become a middle manager for magical education. Rawlins was almost unable to believe how highly he had once esteemed her. “Tonight’s the opening dinner of the Denton Colloquium,” she said, “and many of our donors will be present, so please, help the department out? Dress to impress, share some funny anecdotes, flatter appropriately, et cetera.”
She looked around the room, seeking nods of support. But many of the senior faculty members frowned in irritation; Babbs Tran scratched at her notebook and offered a sotto voce retort: “The colloquiumused to bean academic affair.”
“It still is and always will be,” said Lennox. “But we won’t be able todoanyof this without funding. Undergraduate enrollment is down by ten percent, and the number of freshmen declaring as majors has dropped even more. While we are told that our funding is untethered from such factors, this coincides with a roughly commensurate cut in our budget, so I’d like to juice our numbers before next semester.”
“I would be happy to help grease the wheels of funding with the administration,” said Gallway, scratching at his nose. “But I’m not sure there’s much we can do about a generational indifference to the arcane arts.”
“I’m only suggesting we try to appeal to our students on a more personal level,” Lennox replied. “We’re firming up the course list for next year, and it would be nice to list a couple of new courses that might have more general interest. Nothing gimmicky, of course. I’m merely offering the opportunity for any of you to step up and help the department. It would certainly be noticed.”
Rawlins watched the adjunct faculty sit up straighter at the tacit offer of tenure consideration in exchange for coming up with a more popular course. He smirked, grateful to be free from such concerns—but then Lennox turned to him. “The Arcane and the Ordinarywas quite popular in its day. I’m sure plenty of prospective students would still love to study it.”
Rawlins felt his neck prickle with irritation. For years, he had taught an undergraduate course named for and based on his career-founding book. It had been exceedingly popular, drawing students from every major at the university and burnishing his reputation as a charismatic teacher. But he had gradually become aware that while students loved the course, other academics quietly sneered at anyone who taught their own work; at a conference, one speaker joked about “professors who sell their books by making them required texts,” and though Rawlins’s students were a drop in the bucket of his book sales, he had taken the remark personally. As soon as his tenure was granted, he abandoned the class.
“My introductory class is full every year,” Rawlins said. “I assume that suffices for my undergraduate responsibilities.”
“Most tenured faculty teachtwoundergraduate courses, Thaddeus,” Lennox said. He could feel the glares of the other faculty, who made less money than he did while teaching more courses.
“I’ll think about it,” Rawlins said, looking down. He could sense Lennox was letting it go for now, but he knew she would press him on the matter later.
Across the table, Dr. Gaines gently waved her hand, signaling a desire to speak.
Lennox nodded to her, and she leaned forward over the table, drumming her fingers on a notebook as though playing chords on a piano. “I’m wondering how we should handle things with our students, in terms of Roberta Storer?”
Rawlins tensed up at the mention of Ellsbeth’s sister, suddenly self-conscious, as though everyone were looking at him for his reaction. But no, of course no one knew of his new student’s connection to the tragedy; it was merely a major event that had occurred on campus.
“I’m just not sure what you mean,” Lennox said. “I mean, it’s tragic, of course, but it’s been…”
Gaines’s voice rose, a manic edge creeping in. “The students are stillquiteupset. I’ve had two students request delays in their first assignments because they’re still processing their grief. It was a trauma!”
Rawlins felt his chest tighten; he could tell that Gaines, for all her faux-outrage, was secretly delighted by having a bloody scandal on campus. Her prurient enjoyment rankled him, sending his mind back to the weeks following the Maxwell Keene incident. The ubiquitous, public outpourings of grief from people who had never even heard the names of the victims until they were dead. TherageRawlins had experienced years ago at witnessing all that performative mourning came bubbling back up as Gaines carried on. “It happened in Perkins! Some of my students lived in that hall! It’s no wonder they’re still traumatized. And we have a responsibility to try to understand what they’re going through.”
Rawlins spoke up before he was even aware he intended to: “You think her parents would want that? For you to still be rubbernecking at the tragedy of their dead daughtermonthslater—you think that’s the responsible thing to do?”
Gaines opened her mouth as if to debate Rawlins, and then shut it again. Lennox broke the tense silence with a more tactful addition: “It’s a sensitive matter, and if students need to discuss what happened, please refer them to the school’s mental-health resources.”
From the opposite end of the table, Michael Portnoy, a long-tenured and liver-spotted professor desperately holding on to his job and his corner office, piped in unhelpfully: “I heard the girl was sleeping with one of her TAs. AfemaleTA, matter of fact.”
Rawlins cleared his throat, his indignation growing. “Are we honestly going togossipabout this?”
“I heard that, too!” Gaines said, ignoring Rawlins. “And it was when the TA ended things that Roberta…you know.”
