Oxford Shadows

by Croslydon, Marion

  “I just want to go home.” Madison forced herself to meet her opponent’s gaze, and willed the anger to desert her voice.

  “I just want to go home.” The guy in front of her mimicked a high-pitched, squeaky version of her words.

  “Keep it up and I’ll cancel your birth certificate,” she barked at him and felt the familiar tingling of a fireball growing inside the palm of her hand. But she couldn’t betray her powers. Not here. Not now. Advertising her secret wasn’t the best idea.

  Three to one. Three to one.

  Arms grabbed her waist from behind and pulled her backward. She crashed against one of the men’s chests and wriggled to escape his grip. He smelled of sweat and greasy food, and his BO made her wretch.

  “Let me go.”

  “Let me go.” Same stupid mimicking.

  “You jackass.” She elbowed him deep into his stomach. His moan sent a shot of triumph through her. She propelled herself from his grip, but he held onto the handles of her bag. He jerked it toward him, and Madison had to let go.

  The third man shouted, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They exchanged quick glances. The one in the center nodded, prompting his partners to move on.

  “Give the bag back to the lady.”

  A male voice echoed in the night from the other side of her attackers. Madison couldn’t see her savior, but the Southern drawl in his command disqualified a police intervention.

  “I repeat, give the bag back to the lady.”

  The man’s order had split the muggers up and they were now circling him. Madison took a glimpse at the newcomer. Rugged face. Dark hair. Wide chest.

  “Or what?” The question came from thug number one, in the center.

  “Or I’ll skin you alive.” The man’s hand darted inside his leather jacket and emerged grasping a knife. Not just any knife: an I-wrestle-freakin’-gators knife, jagged and glistening.

  Madison’s bag crashed to the sidewalk. There was some more swearing, but the road cleared within seconds.

  Crocodile Dundee parted the flaps of his leather jacket and slid the knife into his belt. In a few steps he had picked up her satchel and handed it back to her. He put his hand forward. “I’m Sam.”

  Still adrenalin-fueled, Madison didn’t move. Undeterred, he kept his arm extended.

  She whispered a meager, “Thank you,” then extended her hand. “Madison.”

  His skin against hers was warm and comforting. He kept hold of her hand, gave it a quick squeeze and released it. From close up, and with the halo of the streetlamp above them, the washed-out blue of his eyes caught her attention. His complexion was dark, not a tan but a bronze shade suggesting Native American blood.

  “One o’clock. On your own. Big soccer game. Men out to get hammered. Like trouble or what?”

  No need for him to state the obvious. She already felt as dumb as a post. She had let herself be vulnerable, just like at New Year’s Eve in Pierre Part with that douche bag Tarquin.

  “I’m not the guilty one here.” She was trying damned hard to convince herself. Not only for tonight but also for the time back in Louisiana.

  “Of course not.” He stood straight, towering over her, and cast his gaze downwards.

  “Ungrateful” wasn’t a label she wanted to go by. “Thank you, Sam.” She instilled warmth into her words this time.

  A smile spread across his face. Despite the hero aura oozing from the guy, there was a teddy-bear quality to him that softened the square angles of his shoulders and jaw. “Can I walk you back to your place?”

  She wanted to reply that her dorm was only two minutes away, but Sam’s denim-blue eyes told her he didn’t expect her to say no. She nodded and they started strolling together. But having just got out of one stupid situation, she wasn’t going to let him know where she lived so easily. She’d lead him close to Christ Church College, but not quite there. Her heart rate returned to its normal pace as her breathing began to steady. Spatial awareness slowly returned to her. Apart from a car turning at the Carfax Tower roundabout, Oxford had plunged into the darkness of a weeknight. Students, academics, workers, they were all Morpheus’s pals.

  Sam broke the silence. “Did you go out clubbing?”

  “I had dinner with my boyfriend and his parents.”

  Sam threw her a sideways glance. “Your man lets his girl walk back home in the middle of the night?” He gave a shake of his head that Madison translated into What a tool.

  She thanked the heavens Rupert wasn’t there at that very moment. He took his role of knight in shining armor to the nth degree. She sized up Sam’s muscular mass. Yes, that would have turned into a battle of the superheroes.

  “I needed to be on my own.”

  “Trouble in paradise?” Teasing was apparently another one of Sam’s skills. She should put him in touch with Jackson in the anti-Rupert league.

  Breathe in. Breathe out. Change the subject. “So, you’re from the States? The South too?”

  “New Orleans.”

  A pang of nostalgia knocked at the door of her homesick heart. The longing for Louisiana’s sticky, muggy air tugged at her soul and the temperature of the English night dropped. Goosebumps rose on her forearms.

  “I’m an hour away from Bat’ Rost,” she said.

  Sam extended his fist, pumped the air with it, and she giggled. The muscles of her stomach relaxed.

  They reached Great Tom, the loudest bell in Oxford, lodged in the towering entrance to Christ Church College. The gothic shadow never failed to overwhelm Madison. She didn’t want to be alone anymore. Between the bloodthirsty ghost and the thugs, her insides were all mushy. She pushed further down St. Aldate’s so he wouldn’t assume she lived in Christ Church.

  “So, Madison, you going to take better care of yourself from now on?”

  Sam didn’t wait for her reaction but leaned forward to drop a light kiss on her cheek. There was no jolt of electricity at his contact, no lingering of his lips, but the kiss ignited a need inside her. Not the sexual fire she felt for Rupert, just something sweet and weirdly familiar.

  “Later.” Sam was already walking away from her.

  She took a step after him. “Wait. Will we see each other again?” She hadn’t meant to sound so flirtatious.

  Sam swiveled around and a wicked grin broke the fierce look on his face. “Sure. I’ll keep an eye on you, Pumpkin.”

  Her jaw tightened. The term of endearment grated on her nerves, but Sam was already out of earshot by the time she could come up with a witty reply. I’ll keep an eye on you. Who in the name of the Virgin Mary did he think he was? Freaking Batman?

  4

  THE NEXT DAY, the late afternoon offered Madison her first glimpse of English spring. She wouldn’t be in need of air conditioning quite yet. She dismounted her bike and put its front wheel into the secure grid in the bike shed. After locking the chain, she headed toward the steps leading up to the entrance of the detached Victorian house her aunt had moved into three days before.

  Aunt Louise’s arrival in Oxford had come as a complete surprise. Her transfer from Baton Rouge to the Ursuline Preparatory School in Oxford had happened while Madison was staying with Rupert in Pierre Part over half term.

  Whether she was happy or uneasy about her aunt’s move, Madison couldn’t quite yet decide. Yes, on one hand it would be good to reconnect with the woman who had made Madison’s Ivy League dreams possible by giving her a place in boarding school. On the other hand, Madison could have done without a family member looking over her shoulder when there was so much to figure out about herself and her whacko heritage. Madison had wanted to do it on her own, but now, after the bloody-ghost drama of the previous night, maybe she would take any help she could get.

  Madison knocked and within seconds a bony woman opened the door. “Good afternoon, Sister Madeleine. I’m here to see my aunt, Sister Louise.”

  Sister Madeleine stepped back and gestured for her to enter. “She’s in the prayer room wit
h a guest.”

  A guest? England was Louise’s first foray outside the U.S., and she had never mentioned any acquaintance in Oxford.

  The prayer room was a tiny space with a simple crucifix hanging from a whitewashed wall. Chairs were arranged in three tight rows. Through the crack in the door Madison could see her aunt, although her back was turned to the entrance. Louise sat in the first row of chairs, her spine rigid, her shoulders held tightly together.

  Madison’s gaze settled on Louise’s visitor. The woman was tall and curvaceous. Her ebony skin glowed in the prayer room that now basked in the fading afternoon light. The flamboyant material wrapped around her head in the traditional African way contrasted with her dark and strict clothes. She was listening to Louise, whose hushed words contrasted with the jittery movement of her hands. Madison couldn’t hear their words, but she could see that her aunt was trying to press home a point. Agitation wasn’t Aunt Louise’s normal state of mind.

  When the black woman noticed Madison, her eyes narrowed and she tilted her head as if to acknowledge the newcomer, but the flicker of a smile on her face wasn’t enough to relax the tension in Madison’s shoulders.

  Louise followed her visitor’s gaze and turned toward the door. Instead of welcoming her niece, Louise’s head played ping-pong between the woman and Madison. Once. Twice.

  “I don’t want to interrupt,” Madison ventured.

  Louise didn’t react.

  “I was about to leave.”

  The woman’s voice reached Madison, the tone low, the accent French and sensual. Madison couldn’t take her eyes away from her, like a deer under the spell of a rattlesnake. The woman stood, and her height made Louise appear even smaller than she already was.

  “Please come in, sweetie.” Louise seemed to have finally remembered her manners. No welcoming gesture accompanied her words. “This … this is … euh …” She stumbled over her words as she turned toward her guest. “This is an old friend of mine, Aurélie.”

  The woman looked strangely familiar to Madison.

  After grabbing her bag from the floor, Aurélie walked toward the door. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Madison. I’ve heard so much about you.”

  Her handshake was strong; the contact of her skin against Madison’s warm and almost electric. Madison shivered and only managed a faint smile. After the woman left, she took the seat Aurélie had occupied. She arched her eyebrows in an unspoken question.

  Louise failed to see—or chose to ignore—the plea. “You weren’t supposed to come today.”

  Welcome to me. If Madison hadn’t known her aunt’s kind nature better, she would have taken offense at the veiled reproach. Placing her hands flat on her lap, she muffled her disappointment. “I needed to see you, Aunt Louise. Something happened last night at the concert I went to with Rupert’s parents.”

  Her aunt straightened up, surprise sketched on her face, the features of which were so similar to Madison’s own: same wide, domed forehead, and same full upper lip and thick eyelashes.

  “You were with him last night?”

  “Rupert wanted to introduce me formally to his father and stepmother. I’d only met them at the wedding two months ago. Did I not tell you?”

  “No, you didn’t.” Louise’s concise answer fell flat.

  Was Madison reading too much into her aunt’s mood? Guilt seeped inside her because she knew she had been less than forthcoming herself regarding Rupert. Did her aunt approve of her having a boyfriend? The premarital sex chat wasn’t one she wanted to have with an Ursuline nun quite yet. Or ever.

  “This relationship is getting serious. He visited Pierre Part at Easter, and now you’re meeting his family.” The South had crept into the flow of Louise’s words and stretched her vowels like the twang of a banjo. “Don’t you think it’s moving too fast? You hardly know the boy.”

  Good heavenly days. Madison had expected her aunt to express some concern but she could have waited to meet Rupert before acting like an overprotective dad on a prom night.

  “Mom and Mamie liked him very much.” And he stayed at a motel every single night. She could still feel the frustration stirring inside her; the moments of almost-touching, almost-kissing sending hot waves through her memory. Rupert had insisted on finding a room in a hotel against Madison’s initial wishes.

  “Your mom and Mamie always think short term. What will you do when he leaves you?”

  The question slapped Madison across the face. Her cheeks burned with shame. If she hadn’t been seated her legs would have given way.

  Her aunt hadn’t said “when the two of you break up” or “when it’s over.” No, she had implied Rupert would leave her. She had assumed Madison’s fate would be the same as every LeBon woman before her.

  Aunt Louise leaned forward and seized Madison’s hands to give them a light squeeze. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, sweetie. But isn’t he an earl or something? Your mom kept babbling about it the last time we talked.”

  “His father is.” Madison didn’t elaborate. Commoners married princes these days. That was all over the English tabloids, for heaven’s sake. Rupert wasn’t even a prince, only an earl. Or rather, he would be one day, but not anytime soon, judging by Hugo’s rugged health.

  Louise dismissed Madison’s answer and stood. “It’s unlikely that boy will be able to understand the complications of our family situation.”

  Madison wanted to scream, but the peaceful prayer room was hardly the place for an outburst. “That boy” was the reason she was able to face her own family situation. Rupert would keep her sane. He would come to her rescue just like he had when Peter had struck last month. He would always be ready to put his own life on the line to protect those he loved. He had done that for his best friend Monty, and he had done that for her when Peter had tried to kill her.

  Her eyes locked with Louise’s, the genuine, wholesome light in the woman’s eyes contrasting with the harshness of her words. She knew her aunt hadn’t meant to hurt her. Swallowing the anger that burned in her throat, Madison shifted the conversation away from Rupert and the embarrassing LeBon ability to see the dead.

  “I’m starving. Can you put a sandwich together and feed your favorite niece?” The attempt was clumsy but enough to distract her aunt from more foraging into Madison’s love life.

  “You’re in luck. I just bought some fresh bread and pastrami.”

  Madison stood and wrapped her arms around Louise’s neck, splashing a kiss on her cheek. They walked together out of the prayer room and headed for the kitchen in the basement. Madison had helped her aunt move in and knew her way around the place.

  Halfway down the stairs Louise swiveled toward Madison. “Sorry, sweetie. I completely forgot to ask you. You said something happened last night. Nothing bad, I hope.” Concern made her aunt bite her lower lip.

  The ghost and its blood-smeared face imposed itself over Louise, over her reassuring smile and caring eyes. The shock of the image almost threw Madison off balance. She grabbed the railing along the wall of the narrow staircase. She so wanted to tell her aunt everything. She needed to. But a shadow of a doubt prevented her from the full-on confession that was on the tip of her tongue. After the prickly conversation they had just had, another heavy exchange was more than Madison was ready to face.

  “You would have loved the music. We should definitely go together.”

  Sharing the burden might have prevented the ghost from infiltrating her dreams. Because he would come back. They always did.

  5

  Florence ~ July 1508

  THE COLORFUL CROWD is dense on the Piazza della Signoria; Florentines love mingling and jesting. Today they are eager to bask in the late afternoon summer light. I am one of them, and the warm glow of the sun matches my joyful mood. I enjoy my illicit freedom. My maid by my side, I stand next to the statue of David Michelangelo, created four years before. The artwork rests on the location where Friar Savonarola was burned at the stake. I was a mere infant at the tim
e of Friar Savonarola’s death and cannot remember those atrocities. Now, at the age of sixteen, all I have known is the increasing grasp the Medici have over the affairs of our city. I shake my head to chase away these preoccupations.

  “I knew you would come.”

  His accent makes my heart flutter. I swivel to face him, and a delicious heat tingles my skin.

  “I always keep my promises.” Sheer pride inspires my fierceness.

  The foreigner is so handsome. He wears his hair loose and it is topped by a hat with a turned-up brim. His dark doublet contrasts with the blue of his sleeves. Black stockings surround his powerful legs. A rush of desire threatens my balance, and I almost swoon.

  He leans toward me to whisper, “You look so beautiful, Liliana.”

  His warm breath brushes against my ear. The rounded bodice of my rose-colored gown bites into my waist and I resent the barrier of my shoulder cape. I long for a rain of his kisses to fall over me. The fire in his eyes betrays his own lustful thoughts. I want to be his; neither shame nor virtue plays a role in my plans. Since our paths crossed during the carnival, I live for these stolen moments. Soon he will ask my father for my hand. Soon we will be wedded and I will follow him to England.

  He slides a flower between my fingers. “A lily for Liliana.”

  Its white petals glow in the sun. I inhale the light scent of the flower and breathe in his love for me. We start moving, my maid following behind.

  When Italian eludes him, the foreigner grasps for French, of which his knowledge is firmer. Our conversation is a colorful blend of languages.

  “Why did you choose this piazza to meet?” He gazes around at our surroundings. “It is an awfully busy spot. Are you not scared you will be recognized?”

  “Our house is so close that my absence will not be noticed.” A giggle escapes from my lips. “I can always pretend we met while I was taking a stroll. Being found in a more secluded place would be more difficult to explain.”