Cynthia Bailey Pratt (23 page)

The other purpose was to get the coat for Hammond and then see him go on his way without saying any of the things she wished she could say. Cudgel her brain as she might, Jocelyn could think of no way to begin the conversation she wished to have with him. She considered saying, “Hammond, could you . . . ?” Or perhaps, “Would you . . . ?” Or even “Might you . . . ?” She could get no further.

Her task was the more difficult because Jocelyn could not even be certain herself what she wanted. She only knew they must not part without something said on her side or on his. Jocelyn was afraid that if she did not begin, he would not, and he would go, leaving this empty space inside her.

As they came up a hill, the horses slowing, they passed a great ruined building created of closely piled gray stones, tall and dour. Jocelyn looked up, fascinated. A square block with a mansard edge protruded from one corner of a long and high wall. Tiny windows peered blackly from the wall like old, blind eyes. Her spirits damp as wet gunpowder, Jocelyn dared to reach for Hammond’s hand. He returned the pressure she gave it but did not cease to look forward. The light of the dawn spread out from beneath low clouds, like fingers lifting a drapery.

“The Castle,” Arnold said sepulchrally, sitting up. “Mother’s . . .” he yawned. “Mother’s very interested in it, she said.”

They came down the hill and clattered across a bridge. Jocelyn saw that the foundation stone date was 1771. Mr. Fletcher gradually slowed the horses. Stopping, the horses steaming in the cool air, he jumped down and came to the door. “It will be full light in a few minutes,” he said to Hammond. “Shall I drive to Tom’s?”

“It’s early yet,” Jocelyn said. “Tom’s not one to rise first, I’m afraid.”

“Breakfast,” Hammond ordered, with a cheerful yawn. His eyes shifted right and left as he searched the streets. Few people were about yet, although apprentices were taking down the shutters on shop fronts. “I think our first action should be to eat. I’m hungry. Aren’t you, Jocelyn?”

“Breakfast!” Arnold exclaimed eagerly.

“Breakfast!” Mr. Fletcher said in disgust. “I don’t want to eat! I want to find Helena!”

Now Hammond smiled at his companions. “What better way to find her than to go to the most popular inn and order breakfast. Certainly the thought of food will occur to His Lordship. You’re an Oxford man. What’s the best inn?”

They ate their breakfast at the Marigold, a bustling inn near the turnpike. Every few minutes, even while the sun’s beams were level through the narrow streets, fast coaches pulled up before the door. A huge shout would come through the noise of the gathered passengers as the driver called the coach’s name.

“Who’s for Bew’s?” A rush for the door, ale half-swallowed, a piece of toast still between sticky fingers, crying babies in tow. “Burford, Witney, Oxford and Trane Fly! Ten shillings!” Coins rattled across the table toward the potboy, or barmaid, too many packages grasped in a single hand, and a coat only half on.

Jocelyn, Arnold, and Mr. Fletcher sat in the midst of this manic activity, half-empty plates before them, Arnold still ate. Jocelyn watched the people as they entered or left, laughing at their folly or pursing her lips in sympathy over their difficulties. She looked on in amazement as a driver, huge in his many-caped coat, ate an entire breakfast, enough to feed the Luckem family, in the five minutes between pulling up and driving off.

Mr. Fletcher, however, never took his grim gaze off Hammond, who was trying to talk to a maid who stood behind the bar. She shook her capped head vehemently in answer to his questions, while expertly circulating trays stacked with mugs under a tap. Hammond touched her arm, acquiring for just one second the woman’s full attention. Fletcher knew exactly the look on Hammond’s face then. It would be compounded of an appealing twinkle in the eyes, and a debonair smile that said he wished there might be more time to talk. Fletcher often used it himself, finding it most useful when the woman wasn’t particularly attractive. It was a common trick, and just then Fletcher felt it to be a cheap one.

He could see the barmaid’s broad face turn pinker as she handed the tray over to another girl. Empty-handed for a moment, the barmaid ran her hands over the crisp white apron that outlined her firm figure. She licked her lips as she spoke, giving Hammond a sidelong look as good as an invitation. Hammond leaned forward, his elbows on the bar, nodding. Watching, Fletcher tried to hold his impatience in check for a few more minutes.

The other maid stood over him, and he looked up, surprised. She held the weighty tray easily on one hand and asked, “D’you or the lady want ale?” Smiling at Jocelyn, she added, “We got small beer.” Jocelyn returned the smile but signaled refusal.

“No, no, take it away.” Fletcher waved impatiently and tried to look around her to watch Hammond. The other man was gone from beside the bar. “Damn!” Fletcher said, slamming his hand onto the table, making the plates jump.

The maid sniffed and said clearly, “I wouldn’t have him for nine hundred pounds,” before walking away with a switch of her generous hips.

“What is it?” Jocelyn whispered across the table.

“Hammond! He’s done us, again!”

“Done us?” Jocelyn said faintly. She glanced around for Hammond but did not see him. “Where . . . ?” she began to say.

Fletcher flew across the room, pulling his purse from his pocket. Jocelyn put on her coat and bedraggled bonnet, sighing. It seemed His Majesty’s servants were never allowed a peaceful meal. “Come on, Arnold.”

Coming back to the table, Fletcher said, “You’re ready; good! Look, he can’t have gone far. We’ll see if we can follow him. Come on!” They forced their way through a press of people entering the inn from a large, muddied coach just arrived from London. The passengers, tired and hungry, did not take kindly to Mr. Fletcher’s impatient shoving and curses burst in the air around Jocelyn’s head. She felt like a beaten egg by the time she stood outside the inn. She settled her coat once more on her shoulders and tightened her grasp upon Arnold’s hand.

The wheels of the numerous carriages rattled over the cobbles like dice in the hands of mad gamblers. Mr. Fletcher stood at her elbow, breathing hard. He looked up and down the street, Jocelyn’s head turning to follow his gaze. She saw no sign of Hammond. Neither, apparently, did Fletcher.

He began to stalk up the street, his coat open and thrust behind him. People gave him strange looks as they passed. Jocelyn and Arnold could only try to keep up. Then he stopped, stared across the street in disbelief, and ran out into the middle of the road.

The driver of a dray packed with hogsheads stood up with the effort of halting his huge shire horses before they ran over the tutor. The driver called after him in wounded inquiry. People stopped and stared after him, and the consensus was that he was one of the insane men who belonged to the college.

Catching her breath, Jocelyn saw what Mr. Fletcher glimpsed through the crowd. A coach stood on the other side of the broad street. A coach with a green and gold coat of arms upon the door.

Jocelyn put one foot out to follow Mr. Fletcher off the pavement. But her waist was grasped by strong hands, and she was lifted and swung around. Only one man’s touch ever filled her with such joy. Hammond, with a face full of laughter, put her down. “Come on,” he said. “Fletcher’s on his way to his happiness. Now it’s time for mine.”

She and Arnold followed down a dark alleyway. The boy copied him in vaulting a low wall. Jocelyn stopped. “Hammond,” she said. “I have followed and will follow you nearly everywhere. As you pointed out before, however, I am not in boy’s clothes now.”

“I’d forgotten that,” he said, coming back over. Gently he picked her up and set her on the wall. Then he sprang over once more and as gently lifted her down. “And very fetching your dress is, too,” he said. “What I can see of it in that coat. Speaking of coats ...”

“Oh, yes,” Jocelyn said, her spirits falling from the high level the touch of his hands around her waist had created. She began to walk up the alley. “Yes, let’s go and find my cousin. I’m not at all acquainted with Oxford, so I don’t know exactly which is his college. I’ll recognize it when I see it, I think. Two years ago, at my birthday, he gave me a lovely series of prints of views around the university.”

They came out into the sunshine. Jocelyn gasped with pleasure at the sudden change of scenery. Here grass shone brilliantly green in wide lawns, and buildings of gray stone rose in fretwork towers. As she hurried along behind Hammond and her youngest cousin, her head turned ceaselessly from side to side. She saw many small gardens glimmering through iron gates that she wished she could stop and investigate. Catching quick glimpses of quiet rooms through arched windows, she sighed. “I didn’t know Oxford was like this. It’s so . . . peaceful.”

Hammond said, “I’m a Cambridge man, myself.”

Up the road milled a large group of scholars wearing sleeveless gowns of some material with a faint sheen. They wore flat caps on their heads with tassels, some short, some long, hanging over the edge. In the center of the group stood an older man, stooped over, the light of great intelligence in his narrow face. The front of his gown was faced with satin of French blue.

The younger men around him were listening to an argument between two of their company. Jeers and taunts vied with a chorus of acclaim after each statement of a particular point of view. They created an incredible bedlam that did not lessen when the two debaters escalated their argument into fisticuffs.

Arnold dived right into the midst of the crowd. Hammond took Jocelyn’s arm as they approached and prevented her from making her way through.

“All universities, it seems, are the same. Wait a moment, and they’ll finish.”

Impatiently Jocelyn freed herself. In the shifting group, she saw a tall boy, his mortarboard pushed to the extreme back of his head, revealing bushy wheat-colored hair. She waved her hand and called, “Tom—Tom Luckem!”

Her voice went unheard in the animal roar that rose when the smaller debater again launched himself at the larger. The crowd of boys formed itself into a wide ring to give the combatants room. Her eldest cousin stood on the outside, quite near to her. She went over and touched him.

Tom looked around and down. “Oh, hullo, Jocelyn. Just let me get this wager down.” He reached under his gown and brought out a wallet. Passing two coins to another boy, he said, “Put this on Arabin for me, would you? I’ll collect in chapel. Course he’ll win; look at him! Go to it, old fellow!” The short, plump boy had his adversary down and was pummeling him blindly.

Tom laughed and Jocelyn looked at him with affection. He was a handsome boy, very tall and broad. Not only the odds-on favorite in the annual horse race, but the students generally considered that if he rowed for Oxford, Cambridge would lose with considerable humiliation. Being a Luckem, he never lacked for self-confidence, but, unlike Arnold, he never pushed in where he was not wanted, and, unlike Granville, he never assumed more superiority than demanded by his rights as an Englishman. As a consequence, he had been well liked from his earliest days at the ancient university, and this added polish to a friendly nature.

Jocelyn drew him out of the crowd and introduced him to Hammond. Tom shook hands with a nod, then said to his cousin, “Let’s get out of this.” He led them up stairs through a Gothic doorway just as the other boys lifted the small debater onto their shoulders and began to carry him around the courtyard, shouting, “Arabin! Arabin!”

“What about Arnold?” Jocelyn asked, looking back.

“Is he here? Oh, somebody’ll shove him along to my rooms.”

The dim hall’s silence was intensified rather than broken by a distant voice droning on somewhere else in the building. Jocelyn looked around with interest at the vaulted ceiling and the burnished wood before becoming aware her cousin regarded her with rather an odd, almost a calculating, expression.

“So,” she said brightly. “What was the argument about?”

“I don’t know. Something to do with the lecture we attended. Rights of Man, or the place of God in Society. I wasn’t listening particularly.”

Tom’s manner became hesitant. His eyes wandered to Hammond, standing beside his cousin with an air of expectancy. “I say,” Tom said. “I don’t mean to play elder brother, and if I’m being rude, please tell me to bridle up, but have you—er—run away?” The quick glance he shot at Hammond made his meaning clear.

“Tom! What a revolting idea! Certainly not!” Jocelyn said, perhaps a little more emphatically than was nattering to Hammond.

“I thought not. That is, you’d hardly come running to me if you had. Just wanted to be certain. And yet, that is to say, I thought you were going to stay at Libermore with my brothers while Mother and Father were in London.”

“I found it necessary to change that plan. We’ve a new housekeeper.’’

“Oh?” said Tom. “Er—?”

Jocelyn expected Hammond to demand at once the blue coat with the letter in it, but he seemed willing to lean against the wall and let this conversation continue at its own pace. Jocelyn decided to request the coat herself. “Have your parents come up from London yet?”

“Yes, they arrived yesterday. Father, as you might have guessed, has spent every minute in either Bod or Ash. Mother went right to the Castle, and I don’t know if she’s come down yet. If you want to see them, they’re coming to my room before Hall.”

“No. That is, of course I’d like to see them; however, we’re more interested in what they brought you.”

“They didn’t bring me anything.”

Now Hammond came to life. His arms uncrossed, and he pushed away from the wall. Jocelyn tensed, preparing to throw herself between him and her cousin if Hammond roared into violence as he had with her when balked in the recovery of the coat. Hammond didn’t move toward Tom. He only turned his eyes on Jocelyn, and she hurried into her next question. “Didn’t they bring you your lucky coat?”

“Oh, I thought you meant a present.”

“Then they brought it? You have it?”

“Yes. Damned glad of it, as you can ...” Tom stepped back as his plain cousin and the man she had in tow yelped with joy. The man picked Jocelyn up and spun around with her in a fashion never before seen in the peaceful halls of Academe. From the stair came the sound of footsteps. A gray-faced lecturer looked down upon them and said in a stern whisper, “Mr. Luckem, you are aware, are you not, that ladies are not allowed in the college? Kindly ask her to stop making that noise and then remove her.”