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‘Make haste,’ Vimal called over his shoulder. ‘Give the girl some wine.’
Glasses were handed round; port was poured. Soon Robin was very pleasantly drunk, head buzzing, limbs floating. He leaned against the shelves, slightly out of breath from waltzing with Victoire, and basked in the marvellousness of it all. Vimal was now on the table, dancing a vigorous jig with Minna. On the opposite table, Matthew Houndslow, winner of that year’s most prestigious postgraduate fellowship, was inscribing a silver bar with a match-pair that caused bright spheres of pink and purple light to bob around the room.
‘Ibasho,’ said Ilse Dejima.
Robin turned to her. She’d never spoken to him before; he wasn’t sure if she’d meant to address him. But there was no one else around. ‘Pardon?’
‘Ibasho,’ she repeated, swaying. Her arms floated in front of her, either dancing or conducting the music, he couldn’t tell which. For that matter, he couldn’t tell where the music was coming from at all. ‘It doesn’t translate well into English. It means “whereabouts”. A place where one feels like home, where they feel like themselves.’
She wrote out the kanji characters for him in the air – ??? – and he recognized their Chinese equivalents. The character for a residence. The characters for a place.
In the months to come, whenever he thought back on this night, he could only grasp a handful of clear memories – after three glasses of port, it all turned into a pleasant haze. Vaguely he remembered dancing to some frantic Celtic tune on tables pushed together, then playing some kind of language game that mostly involved a lot of shouting and rapid rhyming, and laughing so hard his sides hurt. He remembered Ramy sitting with Victoire in a corner, doing silly impersonations of the professors until her tears were dry, and then until they were both crying from laughter. ‘I despise women,’ intoned Ramy in Professor Craft’s severe monotone. ‘They’re flighty, easily distracted, and in general unsuited for the sort of rigorous study that an academic life demands.’
He remembered English phrases rising unbidden to his mind as he watched the revels; phrases from songs and poems that he wasn’t quite sure on the meaning of, but which looked and sounded right – and perhaps that was just what poetry was? Meaning through sound? Through spelling? He couldn’t remember whether he merely thought it, or if he asked it out loud to everyone he came across, but he found himself consumed with the question ‘What is the light fantastic?’*
And he remembered sitting on the stairs deep into the night with Letty, who wept furiously into his shoulder. ‘I wish he would see me,’ she kept repeating through her hiccups. ‘Why won’t he see me?’ And though Robin could think of any number of reasons – because Ramy was a brown man in England and Letty the daughter of an admiral; because Ramy did not want to be shot in the street; or because Ramy simply did not love her like she loved him, and she’d badly mistaken his general kindness and ostentatious verve for special attention, because Letty was the kind of girl who was used to, and had come to always expect, special attention – he knew better than to tell her the truth. What Letty wanted then was not honest counsel, but someone to comfort and love her and give her, if not the attention she craved, then some facsimile of it. So he let her sob against him, soaking the front of his shirt in tears, and rubbed circles in her back as he murmured mindlessly that he didn’t understand – was Ramy a fool? What wasn’t to love about her? She was gorgeous, gorgeous, she made Aphrodite herself jealous – indeed, he intoned, she ought to feel lucky she hadn’t been turned into a mayfly already. This made Letty giggle, which stopped her crying somewhat, and that was good; that meant he’d done his job.
He had the oddest feeling of disappearing as he spoke, of fading into the background of a painting depicting a story which must have been old as history. And perhaps it was the drink, but he was fascinated by the way he seemed to drift outside himself, to watch from the awning as her hiccuping sobs and his murmurs mingled, floated, and became puffs of condensation against the cold stained-glass windows.
They were all very drunk by the time the party broke up – except for Ramy, who was drunk anyway on exhaustion and laughter – which was the only reason it seemed a good idea to wander through the cemetery behind St Giles, taking the long way round north, to where the girls lived. Ramy murmured a quiet du’a, and they traipsed through the gate. At first it seemed a great adventure as they stumbled against each other, laughing, as they picked their way around the tombstones. But then the air seemed to change very quickly. The warmth of the streetlamps dimmed; the tombstone shadows stretched long, shifting, as if belying some presence that did not want them there. Robin felt a sudden, chilling dread. It was not illegal to walk through the cemetery, but suddenly it seemed a horrific violation to trespass these grounds in their state.
Ramy had felt it too. ‘Let’s hurry.’
Robin nodded. They began weaving faster among the tombstones. ‘Shouldn’t be out here after Maghrib,’ Ramy muttered. ‘Should have listened to my mother—’
‘Hold on,’ said Victoire. ‘Letty’s still – Letty?’
They turned around. Letty had fallen behind several rows back. She stood before a tombstone.
‘Look.’ She pointed, her eyes wide. ‘It’s her.’
‘Her who?’ asked Ramy.
But Letty only stood there, staring.
They doubled back to join her before the weathered stone. Eveline Brooke, it read. Dearly beloved daughter, scholar. 1813–1834.
‘Eveline,’ said Robin. ‘Is that—’
‘Evie,’ said Letty. ‘The girl with the desk. The girl with all the match-pairs on the ledger. She’s dead. All this time. She’s been dead for five years.’
Suddenly the night air felt icy. The lingering warmth of port had evaporated with their laughter; now they were sober, cold, and very scared. Victoire pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. ‘What do you think happened to her?’
‘Probably just something mundane.’ Ramy made a valiant effort to dispel the gloom. ‘Probably she fell sick, or had an accident, or overexhausted herself. Could be she went skating without a scarf. Could be she got so wrapped up in her research she forgot to eat.’
But Robin suspected Evie Brooke’s death was about more than some mundane bout of illness. Anthony’s disappearance had left hardly a trace on the faculty. Professor Playfair seemed by now to have forgotten he’d ever existed; he’d not uttered a word about Anthony since the day he’d announced his death. Yet he’d kept Evie’s work desk undisturbed for five years and counting.
Eveline Brooke had been someone special. And something awful had happened here.
‘Suppose we go home,’ Victoire whispered after a while.
They must have been in the graveyard for quite some time. The dark sky was slowly giving way to pale light, the chill condensing into morning dew. The ball was over. The last night of term had ended, had given way to endless summer. Wordlessly, they took each other’s hands and walked home.
