My stomach twisted when I thought of it, and I could not stop myself from thinking of it, no matter how I tried. Fear had taken root inside me, and guilt with it. I knew that the fear was as much for myself as for my mother, perhaps more. The doctor had said these things ran in families, especially in females. She overexcited herself, he said, with her dreams and her experiments. And if one has a family tendency to such imbalances …
I’d dismissed him at the time. He spoke as if total madness were a natural result of a woman pursuing rigorous scientific endeavors, as if he had seen it many times before. He hadn’t. My mother’s change was utterly strange, utterly uncanny. This was no common madness, not something for him to sigh over as if she could have prevented it only by listening to him. And yet, something had caused it. And I could not deny that madness might be a family trait, as I knew nothing at all of my mother’s family. The more I pushed my fear down, the more it grew. I could think of nothing worse than to become what my mother was now.
The spires of Oxford came into view, pulling me from my anxious reverie. Domes, peaks, and turrets cut through the mist, like the oldest castles in France intermixed with its most beautiful gothic churches. Yet these were not churches, but houses of learning, of science. For all my mother’s fame as an alchemist, she had never been welcomed into the universities and academies of France. And where my mother could not go, I could not, either. I touched the window and stared at the town with rising excitement. That was where my father lived, amid those cathedrals to science. He had made a place for himself there. A place for his work.
I drew my mother’s letter to my father from my satchel, not for the first time. It was the letter the Comte had insisted that my mother write before her illness, the one she had written and never sent. I had been on the point of opening it more than once on my journey, and most likely would have if I had some way of sealing it again before giving it to my father. I am not a person who lightly invades the confidence of others. But these confidences in particular—confidences from my unpredictable mother, about me, to my mysterious father—these I struggled to respect. This letter would be the first knowledge my father ever received of me. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to let my mother make the introduction.
In the town, the streets were dark with recent rain and crowded with tall stone buildings, the halls of the colleges mixed with the humbler brick dwellings of the townspeople. In the center of town, the carriage rolled to a stop next to a towering wooden gate built into the medieval stone walls. The gate was adorned with flowers and crests at the top and triangular patterns lower down. The coach driver opened my door.
“Oriel College, miss,” he said, and went to the back to unload my trunk.
I stepped out of the carriage, pulling my shawl more tightly around my shoulders. The walls of the college rose up above me. They were several stories high, made of stone, and topped with pointed facades on the side and a crenellated parapet at the top. It looked like, and perhaps was, a medieval fortress. I could imagine archers aiming down from the battlements. Together with the tall, dark gates, it all sent a clear message of exclusion. I squared my shoulders and knocked on the door.
An elderly man opened the gate. He stooped, and I saw he had huge, bushy brows that obscured the eyes beneath them. He peered at me, my obvious girlhood, slightly foreign clothing and trunk, with a mild, quizzical glance.
“I am looking for Professor Vellacott. He is a fellow here, I believe.”
“Vellacott?” repeated the porter. “Yes, he is that, miss. Might I ask what your business is with him?”
His eyes went from my trunk to my green bonnet. The Comte had bought it for me not long ago. It was the latest in Parisian fashion, and the porter clearly found it out of the ordinary. I tried not to imagine what conjecture he might be making.
“I am—” But I could not say I was his daughter, when as yet the professor did not know he had one. “The daughter of a friend of his, a very old friend. I’ve had a very long journey, sir, and I really must see him. It is important. I have a letter—”
I pulled it from the pocket of my gown, a robe à la polonaise, and it occurred to me to wonder whether this, too, might not be a common fashion in England. The porter had glanced askance at my rather thin chemise, which the robe did not fully cover in front.
“He’s in the dining hall now, at high table,” said the porter. “But I’ll ask him—what’s your name?”
“Thea—Theosebeia Hope.”
“Theabee—?”
“Thee-ah-see-bya. Miss Hope.”
With his bushy eyebrows raised, the porter reluctantly invited me into the gate house. He pulled in my trunk, and I stood beside the fire. It was a pleasantly warm, wood-paneled room, and while I waited I looked around at the various seals and coats of arms that hung on the wall. They all signified some king or earl or the like, some rich and powerful man who had cast his beneficence here.
The porter returned not much later, not with my father, but with a slight young man with untidy dark hair and terrible posture.
“Master Dominic, this is Miss Thee—Miss Hope.”
Dominic inclined his head and didn’t meet my eyes.
“Miss Hope,” he said. He had a low, raspy voice that I liked. It seemed older than he was.
“Are you a student of Professor Vellacott’s?” I asked doubtfully.
“Something like,” said the boy. “Is he expecting you?”
“No,” I said, and a nervous laugh escaped me. Dominic looked at my trunk, confused. He did not know what to make of me any more than the porter did.
“I have a letter of introduction,” I said. “I think—I think he will want to know I’m here.”
It was the best explanation I could manage under the circumstances. Dominic’s eyes flicked to my face, and then away again.
“I’ll take you to the dining hall.” There were traces of an erased lower-class accent in his speech. He dropped his h’s and his l’s were nearly w’s. “It’s just across the quad. We can try to get his attention from the back.”
Dominic went out abruptly, without another word. I followed, too nervous to mind his poor manners. The walls opened onto a grassy square lined with carved stone buildings. We crossed to one that glowed from the inside. The door was ajar, and high-spirited masculine voices rang out into the chilly evening, along with the smell of roasted meat and hot butter. I followed Dominic through the stone door into a small hallway. To our left were two archways, looking in on a handsome, crowded dining room. The ceiling soared up into wooden beams arching crosswise across the length of the hall. Three long rows of gleaming wooden tables were filled with young men, eating and laughing and belonging there. A few of them caught sight of me and stared. I ignored them and looked to the front of the hall at the head table, slightly elevated above the rest. Ten older men sat there, talking with a little more dignity than their students, but no less contentment. I scanned the table, quickly ruling out the oldest of the fellows, until my eyes rested on a dark-haired, carefully dressed man in his midthirties. He was sipping wine and looking at home.
“Professor Vellacott is there, third from the left,” murmured Dominic, confirming what I instinctively knew. I stared at him, hungry to take in every detail I could. He was tall, or else very long-waisted, judging from his seated height relative to the other fellows. He looked young—younger than I had pictured him, though not quite as young as my mother. His curly dark hair was elegantly cut, as were his clothes. He held himself rather carefully as well. Straight-backed. His smile to his dining companion was restrained. He looked out across the hall, and his eyes caught mine. He set down his wine glass, and the smile vanished.