The Oxford Inheritance Read online

  Cassie finished her food and reluctantly began to mingle. She had stopped to examine a row of stern-faced portraits on the wall when a gravelly voice behind her announced, “Kit Marlowe.”

  Cassie turned to find the master of the college himself beside her. He was dressed in an old-fashioned navy pin-striped suit, with a shiny balding head and a face made stern by the heavy lines of age. “He was one of Raleigh’s dearest friends, of course,” he continued. “We have a first edition set of his plays in the library archive. You’re welcome to look, but sadly, we had to preserve them against decay, so you won’t be able to browse the pages as he intended.” He held out his hand. “We’ve yet to be introduced. Sir Edmund Castle.”

  “Cassandra Blackwell.”

  The master’s handshake was firm, his expression friendly. “I take from the accent you’re one of our transfer students.”

  “Yes, I am. Junior year abroad,” Cassie explained. “From Smith.”

  “Excellent college.” Sir Edmund pumped her hand again. “Welcome, welcome. How are you finding it so far?”

  “It’s . . . kind of overwhelming,” she replied, then added quickly. “The college has such beautiful grounds, and so much history.”

  “Finest in Oxford,” he agreed. “But I may be a little biased. You know I was a student here myself, eons ago. And taught here, too.”

  Cassie nodded. She’d been fixated on Raleigh for years now, and there wasn’t much she didn’t have filed away in her notebooks and research file. Sir Edmund had distinguished himself as a mathematician and published several books before leaving academia for the rewards of the private sector. He’d made his fortune in hedge funds, then been knighted for services to the country’s economy and finally had returned to Raleigh to serve out a genteel retirement padding the college endowment and playing host to visiting dignitaries. “I read your book on game theory,” she told him, in an effort to make conversation. “I found your thesis fascinating.”

  “Did you now?” Sir Edmund looked at her afresh. “Are you a mathematician?”

  “No,” she answered quickly. “I was just reading for my own interest. I came across your work while I was researching the college.”

  “Very thorough.” He assessed her with interest. “So what drew you to our fair shores, Miss Blackwell? It’s a long way to come, and the slots for foreign students are mighty competitive.”

  Cassie took a breath. This was the question she’d prepared for and had been asked several times over during the application process and alumni interview back in Boston. “It’s always been a dream of mine,” Cassie said. “My parents traveled a little in England when they were young, so I grew up listening to stories about the city, and all the colleges. I think they had an Oxford calendar pinned above my bed before I learned how to read,” she added, with a casual laugh.

  Sir Edmund chuckled. “Well, they must be very proud of you.”

  “Oh, they are.” Cassie smiled fondly, as if at a memory. “They’re already planning their visit.”

  Sir Edmund looked away, catching sight of someone. He raised his voice. “Tremain! Come meet another of the Americans. Cassie, this is Matthew Tremain. He’s in charge of all you study-abroad folks, pastoral care, and the like.”

  They were joined by another man, this one in his forties, perhaps, and with none of Sir Edmund’s polished style. He had a cautious, absentminded look about him, with two-day stubble and unkempt chestnut hair; his crumpled pin-striped shirt trailed from worn corduroy trousers.

  “Pleased to meet you.” Cassie reached to shake his hand, and, after a moment jostling his teacup and plate of biscuits, the professor managed to reciprocate.

  “Blackwell, Blackwell . . .” Tremain’s gaze darted over her, curious. “Oh, yes. Smith. PPE,” he added, using the Oxford term for politics, philosophy, and economics, Cassie’s chosen field of study. “You’ll be taking philosophy with me this semester. I left a note in your pidge.”

  “Pidge?” she asked, hearing the strange word again.

  “Pigeonhole,” Sir Edmund clarified for her. “I forget how it all sounds to a foreigner. The wooden cubbies, in the porters’ lodge. We use them for mail.”

  “Oh, right.” Cassie added the term to her library of curious Oxford phrases.

  “The professor here is a Raleigh institution,” Sir Edmund explained. “He was a student of mine, back in the day. How long ago is it now . . . ?”

  “Almost twenty-five years,” Tremain supplied, and Cassie could swear she heard a note of resignation in his voice.

  “Good student, too,” Sir Edmund continued, “except he’d always leave things until the last minute. When was that time you pushed an essay under my door just ten minutes before your tute?” He warned Cassie, “You won’t get away with that kind of thing.”

  Tremain’s eyes met Cassie’s for a moment with a faintly impatient expression. It was clear that these anecdotes had been told many times before. Nonetheless, Sir Edmund continued reminiscing. “Where does the time go?” He let out a dramatic sigh. “Feels like only last week I was marking essays and telling you all off for making too much noise in the bar. We’ll all be in the grave before long. What do you say, Tremain; they should dig out a corner of the meadow for us, ensure we never have to leave.”

  “Quite,” Tremain replied.

  “Were things very different here, when you were a student?” Cassie asked.

  “Well, there was no Internet, for one thing,” he said, scathing. “At least, not like there is now. If you wanted to plagiarize something, you had to copy it out of the book yourself, not just cut and paste from Wikipedia.”

  “No, I mean the student experience,” Cassie pressed. “The culture.”

  Tremain smiled, a thin, almost rueful look. “Nothing ever really changes in Oxford. Especially here.” He turned to Sir Edmund abruptly. “We should circulate. Miss Blackwell, perhaps we can set up that chat, go over some of the academic details?”

  Sir Edmund shook her hand again. “A pleasure. I hope your time here is very productive. And be sure to take a look at the Marlowe manuscripts, but no touching!”

  They moved off, Tremain quickly putting distance between them and striding to the other side of the salon while Sir Edmund landed on a new group of students and began shaking hands. Cassie lingered a moment longer, then, restless, slipped out of the room.

  To her right was the main entrance foyer, echoing with stilted laughter, so she turned left instead and wandered deeper into the house, her footsteps light on the polished wooden floor. Away from the party, the hallway was still. She explored the rest of the rooms in turn, finding a cloakroom with an old porcelain sink, and a formal dining room—a table set for sixteen, with gleaming candlesticks and heavy leather place mats. It was like wandering a museum, but this was somebody’s home: a place to live and work, surrounded by all these brocade-trimmed ghosts of time gone by. At the end of the hallway, she opened a heavy oak door on a dim room presided over by a large mahogany desk and ceiling-high bookcases. This must be Sir Edmund’s study.

  Cassie wavered a moment on the threshold. This was surely out of bounds, and somebody would soon miss her absence from the main group, but curiosity won; she stepped inside, leaving the door slightly ajar to hear anyone approach in the hall.

  It was a large room, paneled with wooden inserts on the walls, and set with somber oil paintings in heavy, gilt-edged frames. Cassie drifted to the desk. It was laid with papers and a row of matching fountain pens, the wood covered with a dark leather blotter. Old habits took over, and she rifled briefly through the papers, but they were basic administrative correspondence: memos on a pay dispute with the groundsmen, a survey on the structural integrity of the cloisters. Her fingertips traced the grained wood and thick papers; she smelled sandalwood, and something darker and acrid: the faint scent of tobacco smoke, lingering in the air.

  It was another world. Even at Smith, with all its history, the older buildings had dated back only a hundred and fifty
years, dwarfed by new lecture halls and dorms. Here, half a millennium at least echoed in the sandstone walls. Cassie moved to the bookshelves, lining the wall behind her. They were filled with clothbound volumes: first editions, weighty tomes. Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Wilde. And there, on the far wall, Cassie found the Raleigh College Records, a collection of yearbooks dating back as far as 1952, pristine as the day they were sent from the printers, their spines stiff and uncracked.

  She ran her finger across the embossed leather until she found 1994 and pulled it down from the shelf, taking the large book closer to the window for a glimpse in the afternoon sun. She browsed reports from the chaplain, accounts of building projects and funding drives, interspersed with a roll call of student achievements and “in memorandum” tributes to deceased former members. Cassie turned each page impatiently, but even when she reached the list of first-year students admitted to the college, there was no sign of what she was looking for.

  Footsteps came, heavy and unhurried in the hallway outside. Quickly, Cassie slammed the volume shut, replacing it on the shelf just as the door swung open and a strange man appeared in the doorway.

  Cassie froze. He was older, in his seventies or eighties perhaps, dressed in an immaculate dark suit. He had a shock of white hair and a deeply lined face, but it was his eyes that chilled her to the very bone: their blackness seemed to pierce right through her.

  “What are you doing here?” the man demanded. “This is private.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I was looking for the bathroom,” Cassie covered quickly.

  He didn’t move, his gaze shifting slowly from Cassie to the desk and back again.

  “I got distracted by the building,” Cassie added, stepping away from the bookcase. “The original design. . . . It’s all so beautiful.”

  The man’s gaze raked over her, and Cassie felt a rush of thanks that she was still dressed up in her robes, like any other new freshman, just one of the crowd. “Your classmates are leaving now, for the ceremony,” he said icily.

  “Thanks.” Cassie took several quick steps toward the door. “I’m sure I’ll catch another; you guys probably break out the Latin every week.”

  She was aiming for a joke, something to break the tension, but the look on the man’s face was anything but amused.

  “You think it’s funny?” He said sharply. “That we’re all just parading around in our robes for no good reason? Our history is everything.” He glared at her with a harsh, flinty stare. “Tradition is what makes us who we are, and if you think you’re above it, then perhaps you’re in the wrong place.”

  Cassie bit her tongue. The parades and photographs and formal teas? This wasn’t history, this was a costume play. They were all pretending in dress-up, while the modern world outside the sandstone walls kept spinning, unconcerned by their robes and rituals.

  But instead of retorting, Cassie forced herself to look contrite. “I’m sorry. I understand, about tradition. It means the world to me, too. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  The man’s lips pressed together in a thin line.

  “It’s why I’m here,” Cassie offered. “Family tradition. History. I guess I’m still a little jet-lagged,” she gave a weak smile. “I’m sorry if you misunderstood me.”

  For a moment, he didn’t move. Cassie’s skin prickled, her heart beating fast. Then, finally, he gave a curt nod. “Your group is leaving now, you better catch up.”

  She felt his eyes on her, trailing every step down the long hallway. Luckily, her group was being ushered out and replaced with a new crop of students, so Cassie fell in line, her pulse still racing from her near miss as they emerged back into the cool afternoon sun.

  The group veered right, skirting the lawn, but Cassie ducked away in the other direction instead, into the cloisters and down a side passageway, emerging in the shadow of a grove of willow trees set back by the college walls. The small garden was bordered by a low stone wall spilling over with pansies and late-flowering chrysanthemums: an oasis away from the main college bustle and completely private.

  Cassie paused there in the silence, breathing in the fresh scent of cut grass and blossoms. It had been a mistake sneaking into Sir Edmund’s office like that; she’d risked everything, and for what? Her first day, and already she’d drawn attention to herself—threatened to expose her secrets, the secrets that she’d come all this way to untangle for good.

  Because for all Cassie’s easy chat about her family back in America—her childhood gazing up at the dream of Oxford and its many academic splendors, her parents’ enthusiasm and support—her life was nothing like the happy picture she’d painted for the college.

  She hadn’t been raised with stories of academic greatness. Her path to Raleigh hadn’t been a smooth and foregone conclusion.

  Everything she’d told them was a lie.

  3

  DAWN MISTS HUNG OVER THE COLLEGE THE NEXT MORNING AS Cassie zipped her hooded sweatshirt and turned off the pathway away from her new dorm. After the tea, she’d been too tired to do anything but drag her bags up to her room and crash, sleeping through the rest of the afternoon and night. She’d woken early, her limbs screaming with new energy only an early run would satisfy.

  It looked like she was the only one. As she walked briskly along the neat pathways, the Raleigh campus was still and silent in the dawn light. Cassie stretched, then skirted the back wall until she found a path down to the river. She broke into a jog, her sneakers pounding the dirt as she headed deeper into the lush green of the college grounds.

  As she settled into her usual stride, Cassie felt her tension ease for the first time since boarding the plane back in Boston. She loved this time of day. It gave her a moment to think, a space that was all her own. A certain hush fell over a city in the early morning, and she could see now that Oxford was no different; it was a swath of calm broken only by gentle birdsong and the low rumble of traffic out beyond the college walls. October had just begun. The mists hung low over dewdrop lawns, and her only company was a flock of swans gliding gracefully along the dark waters of the river.

  Cassie turned out from the back gates and ran along the scenic walk that wound out from Raleigh’s manicured lawns, her strides lengthening as she followed the path of the river out past the gardens and into the wilderness of the woodland beyond. With every footstep she felt the years fall away, stripping back the winding journey that had brought her here, halfway across the world—years when home had meant the contents of her duffel bag, and success simply enough cash to pay the rent that month. When Oxford was just a distant city, as arbitrary a destination as a pin pushed randomly into a creased old map.

  Until the day the package came.

  Cassie had found it propped outside her door one icy morning three years ago. The foreign stamps were peeling, and the original Oxford postmark was smudged and faded, the labels pasted in turn, redirecting the box through old apartments and past crimes all the way back to the original recipient.

  Her mother.

  Cassie had turned the battered manila envelope over in her hands, wondering how the package had found its way to her at all. She was in Providence, Rhode Island, that month, renting a room above a Polish restaurant, the air smoky with the scent of paprika. She paid cash to a wizened old woman in baggy knit cardigans, who would pluck the skin on her bony wrists in disapproval and leave Tupperware containers of dumplings and broth outside the door. But aside from this well-intentioned babula, Cassie remained invisible. She didn’t appear on any electoral rolls, had no credit or store cards, and kept any cash locked in a heavy tin fishing box slipped into the ventilation shaft above her bed. Deleting herself from the record of everyday life had been a conscious, careful decision. As far as Cassie was concerned, in the eyes of the world, she didn’t exist.

  She’d been wrong.

  You can’t hide the truth forever. Please come back and end this for good.

  The note was simple, written in small, blocked letters and tucked inside the
package along with a collection of mysterious items.

  Cassie had sat down with a thump on the top step of the staircase and reached for her pendant, the only thing of her mother’s she had been able to keep. Joanna had been gone for nearly ten years now, and the rose quartz cameo was chipped with age, the strange, twisted design of the gold setting faded and peeling. Still, Cassie couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. It was the only anchor she had to her past, and a warning of everything she could become, if she wasn’t careful.

  Her fingertips traced the familiar cracked pendant as she wondered what the note could mean. Her mother had stayed friendless, drifting; Cassie had never even seen her write a letter, let alone speak of anyone she stayed in contact with. And surely, any friend she’d had would know by now of her passing.

  Ten years was a long time.

  What did the note mean? And, after everything, should Cassie even care? It had taken her years to sand her life down to its current frictionless state. Did she really want to dig up painful memories and disturb the ghosts that had barely been laid to rest?

  The answer seemed obvious.

  No.

  Cassie had crumpled the letter back into the package and pushed it deep into the back of her closet, ignoring the questions dancing in her mind for the rest of the week. She sidestepped the creeping whispers of curiosity, filled her every waking moment with screens and pages and a constant stream of noise from her headphones, but still, the question wouldn’t go away. Soon, she was waking at three A.M. in a cold sweat, shaking from dark, desperate dreams that saw her trapped in her childhood house, searching, racing through the shadows trying to find something that always stayed just out of reach. She took to running, pounding the empty downtown streets in the early morning darkness, but her mother’s poetry began whispering in the fog-breathed air, stanzas and whole sonnets Cassie hadn’t even known she’d learned by heart. She tried to medicate the curiosity away with pills and weed and glinty-eyed strangers in dive bars, but nothing helped.