My father had the decency to blush as well. He cleared his throat.
“Yes,” he said, opening the drawer. “Yes, of course.”
He took out the letter and handed it over. I had no doubt at all, from the way he avoided my gaze, that he had read the whole thing. It was not in its envelope. I took the letter and returned it to the pocket of my skirts. I went to the door.
“Thea…” said my father. “I’m … I am sorry about all this.”
And he did sound sorry. Wretched, even. But he wasn’t sorry enough to give me my papers back. Not sorry enough to offer me a place to stay. His wretchedness was of no use to me. I kept walking, and Dominic shut the door behind us.
We retraced our steps in silence, through the beautiful library, down the paneled staircase. Through the stone archway and down the stone steps that led into the green quadrangle, past the questioning, hostile stares. Back out the imposing gate, into the street where we belonged.
The sun was already setting. A gloomy mist had fallen, thick enough to obscure the turrets of the college gate before we had gone a block. It wasn’t until we were halfway back to his mother’s flat that Dominic noticed I was lagging behind him and offered me his arm. A well-bred young man would have offered it at once. Will, for instance, would never have allowed the opportunity to pay me a kind attention pass by unfulfilled.
No, Dominic wasn’t well-bred. I didn’t like to think of myself as a snob. In this respect at least I fancied myself as good a republican as Will, as skeptical of aristocracy as he was and always ready to listen to his eloquence on the subject of the common man. And yet I had been very aware of Dominic’s lower-class status, and close to dismissing him for it. His barely erased slum accent, his unrefined table manners, hourly wage, and underground, street-facing flat—they had all counted against him in my mind, even if I wouldn’t have admitted it.
And yet now he was taking me in when my own well-bred father had turned me out. He’d protected me from Bentivoglio when Vellacott wished to pretend nothing had happened. He walked with his head bent toward the ground, and his arm was stiff and uncomfortable under mine, but when I slowed he glanced down at me with real concern, and a rush of fondness toward him flowed through me along with an unwelcome urge to weep.
“Just about there, Miss Hope,” he said.
I nodded. The narrow, dim street we turned down looked familiar. Dominic pointed down the street, and in a few dozen more yards we stepped off the street and went down into his mother’s flat. Dominic produced a basin of water, and I washed the blood from my hands.
“You might want to rest. Best to lie down a bit, for your head,” said Dominic. “There’s, ah, there’s only two bedrooms. You can have mine. Just give me a minute—it’s a bit of a mess.”
Dominic vanished into a very low door off the tiny kitchen and the sounds of hasty tidying emerged: a chair being pulled along the floor, things being tossed. Dominic returned a few moments later looking rueful.
“It’s still a bit of a mess,” he said. “I wish I had somewhere better to offer you.”
“It will be fine,” I said. “Please don’t worry about that. It’s terribly kind of you.”
“It’s nothing,” said Dominic, and shifted his weight. He hovered on the edge of saying something else for a moment, his mouth slightly open. Then he shook his head. “You take some rest. I’ll go get your things from Tackley’s.”
I thought of him lugging my trunk down High Street and was ashamed.
“I’m sorry about all this, Dominic,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to do any of it.”
“No, I’m sorry,” said Dominic. “I’m sorry about Mr. Vellacott. This isn’t how I would have hoped he’d act.”
“You don’t have to apologize for him.” Now I was the one staring at the floor. “He isn’t your father.”
Dominic cleared his throat. “No,” he said. “But he’s my boss. He gave me a chance no one else would have, for no reason except he thought I might have promise. I … I thought better of him than this.”
I didn’t have a reply for that. I went to the door of his room, and he went out and up the stairs.
Dominic’s bedroom was small, dark, low-ceilinged, and, as he had warned, still messy. It had no window, so I left the door open to allow the faint light from the rest of the apartment to filter in. I dropped onto Dominic’s short pallet of a bed. With my body’s collapse came another interior one. I was too exhausted, too shaken to guard against it any longer. I wept long and hard.
I was still weeping when Dominic returned.
He pulled the trunk up to the door of his room and then stood there, uncertain. I tried to stop sobbing, but I had broken my defenses by letting myself cry. I couldn’t put them back up quickly.
“I’m sorry,” I wept. I turned my face into the pillow to at least muffle the mortifyingly broken sounds.
“No, don’t be,” said Dominic. He hesitated in the doorway a moment, then walked away with rapid steps. He reappeared holding a lit oil lamp. He set it down on a table in the corner, stacked with books and a ghoulish shape that made me gasp and sit upright.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at what looked like a human skull.
“What?” He looked. “Oh. It’s … ah … it’s a skull.”
“A real one?”
Dominic nodded.
The shock of finding myself in a room with someone’s former head had knocked the sobs out of me. I took long, shallow breaths and looked from Dominic, to the skull, to Dominic.
“Why?”
“Memento mori,” he said. “It was my grandfather’s.”
“That’s your grandfather’s skull?!” I asked in disbelief.
“No, no,” he said. “I mean—yes, he owned it, but no, that wasn’t his head. He was a weaver. Kept it on his mantle to remind him, well…”
“That he was going to die?”
Dominic nodded again. He sat on a three-legged stool by the table and leaned toward me, his elbows on his knees.
“I shouldn’t think that would be easy to forget,” I said.
“Easier than you’d think,” said Dominic. “If we all remembered death and judgment are coming, we’d be more careful how we live. Maybe I should give my skull to your father.”
I looked at him. He knew it, and I knew that he knew it. But this was the first time it had been acknowledged between us.
“I can’t believe you sleep in a room with a human skull,” I muttered.
Dominic looked behind him, then around his dark hole of a room.
“I guess it’s pretty gloomy in here,” he said with a frown. “Not good for much of anything but sleeping.”
And not much good for that, either, though I didn’t say so.
“I don’t think I can sleep,” I said.
“It’s close to suppertime. We could go to a pub. Are you hungry?”
I wasn’t really. I felt spent and my head ached, but Dominic was right about his room, and I itched to get out of it. I rose from the pallet; answer enough.
“You’ll want to change,” said Dominic. “I’ll get your trunk.”
When he had closed the door behind him, I opened the trunk and sorted through my dresses by the light of the oil lamp. I had gathered by now that my stylish Parisian clothing raised eyebrows here in Oxford. The fabrics were too light, the layers were too few, and the whole effect was much too foreign. My simplest dress by far was the one I wore now, the gray round dress, but it was bloody. I pulled out an embroidered white muslin, the second simplest. Everyone was wearing gowns like these in Paris now. Floaty cotton muslin was seen as natural, unaffected, unaristocratic. Naturally all the aristocrats had adopted the fashion. I put on the dress and my green bonnet and was aware despite the dim light and lack of looking glass that I did not look like an Oxford lady. I sighed, picked up the lamp, and went out of the room.
Dominic stood by the front door, waiting, hands in his pockets. He looked up as I emerged, and his eyebrows lifted.
“French?” I supplied with a sigh.
“Well … yes,” he said. “Maybe a shawl?”
I agreed, and Dominic produced a brown knitted thing from his mother’s room, which decidedly dampened the stylish effect of the outfit. When we climbed up to the street, I was glad to have it. The misty twilight had turned into a damp and gloomy evening. I pulled the shawl tighter, and we went west, away from Oriel College, through narrow gaslit streets. Not far away, but shrouded in thick fog, an even taller, even more aggressively walled fortress rose above us.
“Which college is that?” I asked, pointing to the highest of its towers.
“That’s not a college. It’s Oxford Castle. Used as a prison now.”
We went around the castle and over the old moat that had been dug into a canal. Tenements and shabby storefronts lined the waterway. Bargemen pulled a loaded vessel along the canal from the footpath. There were no undergraduates here. Dominic noticed my look and bit his lip.
“I hope it’s all right with you, coming over this side of the canal,” he said. “The pubs by the colleges are all full of students at this hour. I thought you might be tired of them.”
I was. We went toward a square, three-story brick building that spilled a smell of mutton over the musty scent of the canal. A sign hanging over the door read NAG’S HEAD, with a rough picture of a work horse under it.
I had never been to an English pub, of course. My mother had spoken of them occasionally, without fondness. She said the food was greasy and yet dry, and that no civilized person drank beer when they could have wine. I resolved to enjoy whatever the Nag’s Head had to offer.
Dominic opened the door for me, and I stepped into a room not very much brighter though much warmer than Dominic’s sleeping hole. A big brick fireplace was the central feature, with the bar to its side. Tables were sequestered by wooden beams that made each one its own little room. The wooden benches and low ceilings enclosing each table put me in mind of the cabin of a schooner. Dominic led me to the table closest to the fire, then went to the bar and ordered in a low voice. The bartender nodded my way and asked about me. Dominic murmured a reply I did not try to hear. He would surely find some way not to lie about me, but still, I was in no mood to hear any further half-truths to explain away my inconvenient existence.
My head ached. I lowered it onto my hands and pictured my father, little though I wanted to. Poring over my notes. Decoding them, perhaps. And giving them to Bentivoglio. Cold horror pricked down my arms, despite the fire, and I clutched the shawl tighter over my shoulders. Dominic sat down across from me and his eyes widened with alarm at the look on my face.
“Are you unwell?”
“Dominic—do you believe me?” His forehead furrowed in confusion, and I continued on. “Do you believe me, that Bentivoglio is going mad? About the curse?”
Dominic looked away, back toward the bar.
“I don’t give much credit to curses, Miss Hope,” he murmured. “I believe you about your mother. And the professor isn’t himself, sure enough. But a curse on alchemy…”
“What happened to my mother isn’t natural. I didn’t credit curses, either, but it’s like you said: what we try to do is magic, and we believe it can be done because great alchemists have gone so far in the past—”
“You believe it can be done,” said Dominic, shaking his head. “I don’t. As for the madness, maybe it’s something to do with the metals, with the smoke, something of that kind. But whatever drove your mother mad, there’s some kind of explanation.”
“No,” I said. “You didn’t see her. There was no natural explanation for that. It wasn’t just madness. She was strong, stronger than her patron. Nature can’t do that.”
Dominic looked away again. “Maybe … the shock of it…”
Hopelessness gnawed at me. If even Dominic didn’t believe me, I wouldn’t convince anyone. Bentivoglio would work from my notes, following the same process that made my mother mad. There was nothing I could do.
“I’ll talk to your father tomorrow,” said Dominic. “See if I can get your notes back for you, at least.”
“He’ll have copied them by now,” I said. At the thought of it, anger stabbed at me, fine and sharp as a needle. “And you don’t have to call him my father. He isn’t really. He didn’t know I existed before yesterday, and he isn’t going to acknowledge me.”
“He might. He could change his mind. Come around. Realize what he’s doing.” Dominic glanced at me, then quickly away. “You’re the spit of him, you know.”
“That only makes me more of a problem,” I said bitterly. “Harder to hide our relationship. He doesn’t want anything to do with me, nor I with him. As soon as I get my papers, I’ll go to London.”
“What’s in London?”
“A friend,” I said.
Dominic waited for more, but I did not give it. Our meal came: cold mutton, brown bread, and two pints of watered ale. Despite my resolve, I began to doubt my ability to enjoy the pub’s humble fare. I took a few bites, and a long sip of the weak ale.
“We moved here for the canal,” said Dominic. “My father was a digger.”
“A canal digger?”
Dominic nodded. “Then they finished the work, two years ago. There wasn’t enough barging work for all the diggers. And he—ah—he wasn’t the most reliable of them. He went back to London, said he’d send for us when he had work.”
Dominic hunched over his platter, a knife in one hand and a fork in the other.
“I gather he didn’t,” I said.
“No,” he said. “But I went after him anyway. Thought I could work, too, help him save up faster. Turned out he wasn’t saving up anything, because he spent every half-penny on gin.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
We fell silent and ate to the sound of forks scraping the pewter plates.
“Not sure why I told you that,” said Dominic after a few moments. He sounded almost angry at himself.
“You’re telling me you understand what it’s like to have a disappointing father,” I said. “It’s kind of you.”
“I suppose that’s right,” said Dominic with a sigh. “But my father drank himself to death last winter. He doesn’t get any more chances. And even though I waited for him, and nothing came of it … Still, I’d give him another chance if I could.”
My eyebrows shot up.
“You think my father deserves another chance?” I asked. The question came out sharper than I meant it, and Dominic looked up.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not that he deserves it. Just that you might want to give him one anyway.”
“I don’t.” I set my fork down on the table and leaned back against the wooden wall.
“Give him a week,” said Dominic. “Please. I think he’ll change his mind. I know, it probably seems an eternity to stay in our place…”
“It is an eternity,” I said sharply. “Not to stay in your home, I don’t mind that, but to wait on someone who doesn’t want me, who has already rejected me—”
“That’s your pride talking.”
“Of course it is! Why shouldn’t my pride have a say in this, if it will keep me from any further humiliations?” I demanded. “I have enough experience giving chances to a parent who doesn’t deserve them and will only use them to hurt me!”
Dominic stared down at his plate. I bit down on my lip, regretting my outburst of emotion. Dominic would think I pitied myself, which was the last thing I wanted anyone to think. I opened my mouth to take it back, somehow, but he spoke first.
“You mean your mother,” he said quietly.
I considered brushing it away, but Dominic was looking right at me, for once, with a calm sort of sympathy in his eyes. It wasn’t pity, and I found I didn’t mind it. So I nodded.
“Was she like that before she went mad?” he said.
“Oh yes. The madness had nothing to do with it, if that’s what you mean,” I said.
“She was simply…”
I trailed off. There was no single word to describe Marguerite Hope. She wasn’t simply anything. I sighed.
“She is brilliant,” I said. “The only well-known woman alchemist in the world. She had to be ruthless. She never had time to be patient with anyone’s weakness.”
“Not even yours,” Dominic said.
“Especially not mine,” I said. “I had to be as good as she was, from before I could remember. Anything less wasn’t good enough. And of course I was usually less. But then, once I started to be more—”
Dominic nodded like he understood. But he didn’t, not really. Even I didn’t fully understand what had happened. Why my mother had turned on me.
“There was a time when I was simply a part of her,” I said. “And she was hard on me because she was hard on herself. I understood that. I didn’t mind it so much.”
“But something changed?” Dominic asked.
“Yes.”
I knew who had changed things, though not why he had changed them. It shouldn’t have come as such a terrible shock to her that I, at sixteen, would find her charming young apprentice fascinating. She had thought Will was worthwhile enough to employ when he came to us and asked to learn from her. But the moment she caught me expressing an idea that had come from him instead of her, she started to look at me with horror. Like her own hand had started grasping things of its own accord, and without her consent. Finding us together that morning had only been the excuse. Mother had wanted to banish him from the first time I had smiled at him when she had not.
“She discovered that I wished to belong to myself, instead of her,” I said. “And she found that unacceptable.”
“When was that?” Dominic asked.
“About a year ago. I thought it might get better, over time.”
After she threw Will out, I was angry, of course. Rebellious. As harsh as she was, sometimes. But I repented, too. I offered abject apologies more than once. I still remembered the smug expression with which she received them, and then stored them up to fling back at me the next time we quarreled.
“I humbled myself,” I concluded. “And she only used it to make me more ashamed.”
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