9
DESPITE SETTING HER ALARM, CASSIE WOKE LATE, AND SHE HAD to scramble to arrive at her philosophy tutorial in time. She’d wanted to be poised and prepared, but instead she found herself hurrying across the Raleigh campus with her shirt hanging loose and an empty growl in her stomach. As the chimes of the college clock boomed out nine strokes, she turned the corner to the cloisters.
Cassie heard laughter as she rushed up the stairs, and when she opened Tremain’s door she found the professor handing out cups of coffee to the two other students. “Sorry,” she apologized, as the chimes faded away outside the window.
“Miss Blackwell,” he said coolly. “Good of you to join us. I’d ask how you take your coffee, but I’m afraid refreshments are only served to those who make it promptly to class.”
Cassie took a seat, confused. Tremain had never seemed like a stickler for punctuality; last week, he’d been the one to show up ten minutes late, with jam staining his shirt collar.
The other girl, Julia, gave her a sympathetic smile. She was slight and dark, her hair pinned neatly up behind her head, her blouse starched beneath a mint green cashmere V-necked sweater. Across from them sat Sebastian, a large, athletic-looking boy slouching on the leather wingback chair with one leg propped over the other and a smug expression on his face.
“Who wants to start?” Tremain folded himself into his rickety chair and looked around. “Miss Blackwell, perhaps.”
Cassie felt a tremor of nerves, followed with sharp relief when Sebastian spoke over her. “I’ll go first.”
“Works for me,” Cassie breathed quickly. Julia said nothing at all, simply waited with her pen held, poised for action.
“Very well.” Tremain nodded, rifling through his papers before pulling out what Cassie assumed to be the boy’s essay: a thick stack of papers, printed with dense black type. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Sebastian cleared his throat. “Does Descartes show that he is not a body?” he began. “How does Descartes think mind and body are related?” He launched into a discussion of empirical thought that left Cassie struggling to keep up. The essay question had seemed straightforward enough to her in the dim light of her midnight attic, but now Sebastian was dissecting theories of authors she had never read, devoting whole paragraphs to different interpretations of a single phrase.
“Good work.” Tremain rewarded Sebastian with the briefest of nods. “Now, about distinctness and separation,” he continued. “Did Descartes think that the mind and body were potentially or actually separate?”
Julia took in a breath. “Actually?”
Tremain turned. “Is that a statement or a question?”
Julia checked back through her notes. “A statement,” she responded, her voice becoming surer. “Descartes thought that if two things could be separated, they were distinct, whether or not they were apart.”
Tremain doled out another approving nod. “As Margaret Wilson noted in her critiques.”
“But that whole argument rests on an assumption of the existence of a God to separate them,” Sebastian argued, and soon they were engaged in fierce debate, with barely a thought for Cassie, silent on the end of the couch. Not for the first time, Cassie was glad to be left unnoticed, watching the clock on the mantelpiece count down to her escape.
“Miss Blackwell.”
She snapped her head up to find Professor Tremain arching an eyebrow at her. “What do you think about Descartes’s thesis that he is solely a thinking thing?”
“I . . .” Cassie glanced down at her notebook, as if the crosshatch of aimless lines would hold some answer. In other rooms—other lives—she would have relished the chance to bluff and argue, but all her usual confidence had fled, and even she recognized that she was out of her depth. Just as her silence was becoming unbearably awkward, the bells began to chime ten o’clock. Tremain gave a nod.
“That’s enough.” He closed his leather-bound file. “We can explore the meditations more next week. Perhaps an essay on error and the will; check Williams again, maybe some Carriero too.”
The others collected their things and exited, but Cassie was stopped by a sharp summons. “Miss Blackwell?”
Cassie turned, bracing herself. Professor Tremain held her essay paper aloft, gripped between his thumb and forefinger as if dangling something particularly distasteful. She approached him and took it, expecting a river of red ink, but to her surprise, there was not a single notation on the pages. No comments, or angry strikeouts. Cassie looked back at him in confusion.
“I think we both know it would be futile to bother with that.” Tremain’s eyes bored into her, coal black with derision. “I’d rather you turned in nothing at all than something so amateurish.”
Cassie felt her cheeks flush. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I was getting the hang of it, but I guess I’m still finding my feet here. I’ll do better next week.”
“That’s what I thought last time. I let your lackluster effort slide then, but two weeks at this level is unacceptable.”
Cassie felt the sting of criticism. “I’m sorry,” she murmured again, feeling like a failure. She bundled the offending pages in her bag and turned to make her escape.
“I read your file,” Tremain added, stopping her short. “I sit on the Raleigh scholarship committee. I had my concerns then about awarding you the place. Raleigh is an exacting academic environment. Filling it with substandard candidates does the rest of us a disservice. Your classmates, for example, should have enjoyed another perspective in their debate, instead of . . . what was it you brought to mind? An addled spectator at Wimbledon.”
“I can do better,” Cassie protested. “Now I’ve seen the way you expect—”
Tremain cut her off. “Some things can’t come with practice. Either you have a grasp of the fundamentals, an intuition for argument, or you don’t. To pretend otherwise is a foolish error. Let’s not forget your place here is dependent on your grades. If we don’t see progress, and fast, we may have to terminate your scholarship.”
Cassie took a breath, opening her mouth to respond, but Tremain was already looking away, flipping through a stack of papers on his desk. She was clearly dismissed.
As she made her way back through the cloisters, Cassie burned with anger. What gave him the right to speak to her like that? She’d dealt with her share of high-minded professors at Smith—the patronizing, the world-weary, the men too wrapped up in their own quest for academic glories to bother with something so lowly as teaching mere undergraduates—but she’d never in all her years of education come across one as dismissive as Professor Tremain. Weren’t tutors supposed to teach, to nurture and encourage? Her mind was to be molded, her potential realized, but Tremain had only looked at a single essay—no, before that, her application file!—to decide Cassie wasn’t worthy of his time and expertise.
But as quickly as the anger swept through her, it receded, leaving Cassie with a new fear. She hadn’t realized her study-abroad place could be rescinded. She could be sent back to America empty-handed. Locked out of the hunt for her mother’s past for good—and just when she was beginning to find answers.
She couldn’t let that happen.
Cassie felt worn-out by the time she arrived back at the attic. She found Evie yawning, wearing a crumpled nightshirt, a phone trapped between her bare shoulder and ear. “Want to grab breakfast?” she whispered, dark shadows under her eyes. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
“I’ll jump in the shower,” Cassie agreed, glad for the chance to recover from her tutorial ordeal. She ran the water as hot as she could bear, and stood, head bent, under the torrent. The bathroom was old-fashioned, equipped with a claw-foot bath and mustard tiling that had survived decades, if not longer, but the shower was blissfully modern and soon filled the small room with a haze of steam. Cassie let the water beat into her tired muscles, trying to send her tension and unease away. One bad tutorial, that’s all it had been. Professor Tremain was simply trying to sc
are some diligence into her. She would have to put her research into Margaret aside, give herself more time with the next assignment.
She lost track of time under the fierce heat of the water. When she remembered Evie and their breakfast date, Cassie wrenched off the faucet and wrapped a towel around her body, piling her wet hair on top of her head. “Sorry,” she called, emerging from the bathroom. “Just let me grab some clothes, and I’ll be ready.”
“Don’t feel the need to dress on my account.” The voice was male and edged with wry amusement. Cassie froze, two steps into the living room, and found herself staring into piercing dark eyes.
It was him.
Blond hair, angled cheekbones. He lounged on the couch, relaxed and totally self-assured. Cassie’s heartbeat quickened as she took him in, remembering their strange encounter in the midnight courtyard, and his predatory stare at the mixer.
He rose from the sofa and approached. “Hugo Mandeville,” he introduced himself, those dark eyes trailing over Cassie’s naked shoulders, still dripping wet. She paused a moment, clutching her towel. Her mind raced. Had he tracked her down somehow?
“You must be the roommate we’ve been hearing so much about.” He smiled. “Evie is . . . Well, I don’t know where she went, but the door was open, so she can’t be far.”
Evie. They were friends then, that was the reason he was here, Cassie realized, not to accuse her over the break-in at the vaults.
Cassie breathed in relief as Hugo extended a hand and reached slowly to shake hers. His fingers were cool and long, like a concert pianist’s, but his skin seemed to burn against hers. Cassie snatched her hand away almost immediately, bringing it back to clasp her towel tight around her chest. She was painfully aware of her body, naked under the thin towel.
“How’s your hand?”
Cassie blinked. “What?”
“You hurt your hand, that night.” Hugo looked at her curiously. “I didn’t recognize you for a moment, without the . . .” He gestured to his eyes, to indicate the layers of eyeliner and mascara Cassie usually wore. “You should leave it off more often,” he added, his lips curving in a smile. “You’re prettier this way.”
She stared, thrown by the comment. Up close, Hugo’s eyes were lined with thick lashes, flecked with a gold that gave a strange halo to those fathomless dark irises.
“Did you want something?” Finally, Cassie found her voice. “I can tell Evie you stopped by.”
A flicker of amusement crossed Hugo’s face, as if he could tell how unsettled she was. “I’ll wait.” As he spoke, he sat back down on the sofa, completely at ease. “Aren’t you going to offer me tea—or a coffee, perhaps; that’s more American, isn’t it?”
Before Cassie could reply, Evie piled through the door, laughing. “He didn’t!”
“I swear it, right on the floor at Annabelle’s.” Another voice trailed her in, followed a second later by its owner, the girl who had so unceremoniously ejected Cassie from her first dorm room. Olivia.
“Hugo!” Evie lit up. She had pulled a men’s black cashmere sweater over her nightshirt and applied a slash of bright pink lipstick. “Perfect timing. This is my new roommate; she just had a tute, poor thing. Remember those days?”
“Remember?” Olivia hugged Evie from behind, kissing her cheek affectionately. She was wearing black jeans and an elegant white T-shirt slouched off one shoulder, a tangle of gold chains Cassie recognized as belonging to Evie twisted around her neck. “I have finals this year; I have nothing but bloody sleepless nights ahead.”
Hugo. Cassie looked back at him and realized Olivia had been calling to him in the stairs at Carlton Hall when she’d evicted Cassie from her room. They must be related; there was a definite resemblance in the honeyed tone of their hair, and the sharp angles of their profile—not enough to be siblings, perhaps, but bound by blood in some way.
“Please,” Evie giggled, rolling her eyes expressively. “Until you have thesis advisers on your back all day, you don’t get to complain.”
Hugo laughed. “I hate to pull rank, but I’ve been pulling all-nighters and thesis meltdowns for seven years now, so none of you know my pain.” He sauntered over to Evie and dropped a casual kiss on her lips. “Ready to go?”
“Cassie?” Evie turned, expectant. “Coming?”
Cassie faltered. She’d been looking forward to breakfast with Evie, but the prospect of a group trip—with this effortlessly elegant clique, and Hugo’s smirk of watchful amusement—was different. “I don’t know . . .” she demurred. “I still need to get dressed—”
Olivia tugged on Evie’s arm, brandishing her cell phone. “Evie, come look!”
Evie crowded around to see. “No!”
“Ladies!” Hugo sighed. “Can we perhaps move this somewhere with coffee, before I grow old and weary and have another five years in this place pass me by?”
“It’s your own fault, cuz.” Olivia thumped his arm good-naturedly as she passed. “Daddy says if you’d just finish the damn thesis and graduate . . .”
“Ah, but why would I do that, when there are so many delicious distractions around?” Hugo swept Evie into a hug, burying his face in her neck. She squealed, protesting, but it was clear from her smile that she was delighted. Hugo’s eyes met Cassie’s for a moment over Evie’s head. He gave her an arched, teasing smile, a small, private expression that, to Cassie, felt dangerously intimate. She turned away.
At last, with Hugo’s urging, the group hustled out into the stairway. Evie turned back almost as an afterthought. “Cassie, do you want to come? We can wait down in the lodge, if you want. I need to check my mail.”
“No, it’s fine.” Cassie forced a smile. She was already backing away in the direction of her room, anxious to put a locked door between her and Hugo. “I’m too tired. I’m just going to crash.”
“Okay, then come out with us tonight,” Evie insisted, still flushed and bright-eyed. “We’re getting drinks at Freud’s; you must come.”
“No.” Her reply was sharp, but Cassie quickly softened her tone. “I have an appointment. Some other time.”
“Oh! I forgot to ask.” Evie blinked at her. “How was the essay?”
“Fine,” Cassie answered quietly. “It went fine.”
“Okay, sleep tight!” Evie blew a kiss, and then was gone, her laughter echoing in the stairwell and up through the open windows as the group emerged in the courtyard below. Cassie moved to the windows and watched them go, Olivia and Evie with their arms linked, still bent over Olivia’s cell phone, while Hugo matched their pace. The sunlight caught in their hair, glowing and vibrant; their voices rang with happiness.
For the first time in a long while, Cassie felt a pang of loneliness.
10
SHE ONLY MEANT TO REST BRIEFLY, BUT WHEN CASSIE WOKE, THE light was fading outside her windows. She slowly swung her feet to the floor. She’d dreamed of Indiana again, playing in the orchard while her mother shelled peas for dinner and sang along to the radio. Now, in a cold, empty room, her loss was something real and solid in her chest, a longing for the past Cassie had relentlessly kept at bay all these years, folding it into a smaller and smaller space in her heart, out of the way of her everyday life.
Disoriented, she shook off the cobwebs of slumber. She was due at the Radcliffe Camera to cover for Elliot.
When Cassie reached the library, she found Elliot pacing impatiently by the front desk.“You’re here, great, okay. Let me give you the tour.”
He led her back through an arched passageway into the hidden depths of the building. Behind the scenes, Cassie discovered that the library facilities were far less grand than the front rooms; what funds they had were clearly spent on the upkeep of the elegant reading room furniture and the plush carpets of the curving stairs, not the warrenlike maze of maintenance and storage rooms kept out of sight of the library guests. Elliot quickly showed her around the endless twisting stone corridors and perilous spiral staircases to the echoing vaults beneath the ground level
. It was like the Raleigh vaults, only on a much grander scale: stadium-sized warehouse rooms filled with hundreds of thousands of books, the packed shelving stretching deep into the distance.
“Take the request slips, check the system log here, then go fetch,” Elliot explained, checking his watch. “A trained monkey could do it, no offense.”
“None taken,” Cassie replied. There was a hush in the library, a warm glow from the lamps on the walls. It was cozy and felt like a safe retreat, far from Raleigh and Hugo’s piercing gaze. “I’ll be fine. You should get going for your hot date.”
“Okay.” Elliot looked around. “That’s everything, I think. I’ll be back to close at midnight. Oh, and I forgot, I looked into that friend of yours, Margaret.”
“You did?” Cassie caught her breath, her heart suddenly racing. “Did you find anything?”
“Just call me King of the Vaults,” Elliot preened. He pulled a slim file from under the circulation desk. “Some of my best work, if I do say so myself, considering the time limits.”
Cassie snatched the folder, eager. “Thank you,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”
“Let’s just hope my date is worth it,” Elliot replied. “Try not to burn the building down while I’m gone.” He left her with a salute.
Cassie took a seat behind the desk. The evening library was still and silent, even the dedicated academics of Oxford having a better way to spend their Friday nights than locked among the dusty stacks. She was alone with the past.
True to his word, Elliot had done a thorough job. He’d started with the most readily available source: the same Raleigh yearbooks Cassie had fruitlessly searched. Now, with Margaret Madison as the subject, Elliot had found more: her mother’s face, sandwiched in the back of a group matriculation photo—lined up beneath the Raleigh tower just as Cassie had stood on that first day of term. Margaret’s name, listed as part of the girls’ hockey team; news of an award for English composition, and a poem, published in the dense record, to accompany photographs of the college grounds in winter. There were richer details too, which Elliot had dug from sources Cassie didn’t even know existed: copies of the Raleigh student rolls, broken down by subject group, and dormitory listings showing Margaret had occupied rooms above the West Quad. Tutor names, sporting activities. Newspaper clippings mentioning her team achievements, and a photo of her in a group of girls wearing matching fancy dress outfits, breathless from some charity run.
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