The Lost Sisterhood

by Anne Fortier

  As academics went, James was an unusually attractive specimen. He had somehow managed to defy the old maxim that being first in line for brains inevitably means ending up last in line for looks. Stuffed with more than your average quota of gray matter, his head was nevertheless crowned with a profusion of chestnut hair, and even at thirty-three his face remained a spotless vessel of boyish charm. As if that were not enough, his father, Lord Moselane, owned one of the finest collections of ancient sculpture in the country. In other words, of all the men I had met, James was the only one who was more prince than frog.

  “Diana gave a talk today,” Professor Kent informed him. “I am still trying to extract the title from her.”

  James gave me a knowing sideways glance. “I heard it went well.”

  Grateful for the rescue, I laughed and wiped a bead of moisture from my temple. It was sweat from the fencing mask, still trapped in my hair, but I hoped James would see it as evidence of a recent shower. “You’re too kind. What’s new with you? Any more suicidal love letters from your students?”

  Just then the dinner bell rang, and everyone started filing out through the common-room door. Conversation was temporarily suspended as our small procession made its way downstairs, crossed the back quad in drizzling rain, and entered the grand college hall in solemn pairs.

  The students all rose from their benches while we proceeded up the aisle to the High Table that was perched on a podium at the back of the hall, and as I sat down on my designated chair I was only too aware of all the eyes staring at me. Or, more likely, they were staring at James, who sat down right next to me, looking exceedingly handsome and remarkably at ease in his black gown, not unlike a Tudor prince at court.

  “Cheer up, old girl,” he said under his breath, while the steward poured wine. “I have it from an excellent source that there was nothing wrong with your talk today.”

  I looked at him hopefully. By common agreement James was an academic superstar, and his publication list alone made most of his peers look like small moons locked in dying orbits. “Then why didn’t anyone say anything—?”

  “Such as?” James dug into his starter with relish. “You assault them with perspiring warrior women in furry boots and chain-link bikinis. They’re academics, for God’s sake. Be happy there were no coronaries.”

  I laughed into my napkin. “I should have made it a slide show. Might have finally gotten rid of Professor Vandenbosch—”

  “Morg—” James looked at me with those eyes. The eyes that told me I was seeing only the tip of his thoughts. “You know Professor Vandenbosch is four hundred years old. He was here long before we came, and he will be here long after you and I have gone to the happy punting grounds. Stop pulling his whiskers.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “I’m serious.” Once again, James’s hazel gaze cut right through our merry banter. “You’re extremely talented, Morg. I mean it. But you need more than talent to succeed around here.” He smiled, perhaps to soften his criticism. “Take it from a seasoned chef: You can’t boil soup on the old Amazon bones forever.” With that, he raised his wineglass in a conspiratorial toast, but he might as well have tossed its contents into my face.

  “Right.” I looked down to hide my anguish. The words were not new to me, but coming from him they cut straight to my heart. “I understand.”

  “Good.” James swirled the wine a few times before drinking. “Too young,” was his final verdict, as he lowered the glass. “Not enough complexity. What a bloody waste.”

  James and I had been born practically within an apple’s throw of each other, but in two completely separate worlds. All we mortals ever saw of the Moselane family were expensive cars with tinted windows going far too fast through our quiet village and pausing for a few seconds while the automated gate to their infinity driveway swung open. That and, occasionally, through the bramble thicket encircling this private Eden, a glimpse of faraway people playing croquet or lawn tennis in the manor park, their laughter carried by the breeze like empty caramel wrapping.

  Although everyone in town knew the names and ages of Lord and Lady Moselane’s children, they were as removed from us as characters in a book. Because they were all in boarding school—the best, of course, in the country—young master James and his sisters were never around during the academic year, and almost all their holidays were apparently spent with school friends in remote castles in Scotland.

  Little more than an orb of auburn hair in the front pew at the annual Christmas service, Lord Moselane’s son and heir had nevertheless lived a perfectly full-fledged life in my daydreams. Whenever I was out for a Sunday walk with my parents—and, for a while, my grandmother, too—I would skip ahead through the forest hoping to encounter him on horseback, his imagined cape fluttering nobly in the breeze … even though I knew very well he was away at Eton, and later Oxford, and that there was no one around but me and my frivolous ideas.

  But I was not entirely alone in this imaginary world of mine. For as long as I could remember, my mother had been pining to become intimate with the Moselanes, who were, after all, our neighbors. By her calculations, the fact that my father had held the post as headmaster of the local school ought to have placed us in high esteem and thus made us visible even from the manor on the hill. But after spending most of her married life waiting in vain for a dinner invitation with that embossed crest at the top, she was eventually forced to acknowledge that our lord and lady lived by quite a different social abacus than she did.

  It was always a mystery to me why my mother—true-blue American that she was—never lost her craving for that sweet manor house, even after all the bitter disappointments. So many years of volunteering for Milady’s charities in the hope of recognition; so many years of meticulously pruning some twenty feet of Ligustrum hedge that happened to separate the remotest part of the manor park from our backyard cabbage patch … all for nothing.

  By the time I moved to Oxford for my doctorate degree, I was so sure she and I had long since been cured of our fruitless nonsense that it took me over a year to grasp her secret agenda in coming up to visit me every three weeks or so and insisting we explore the wonders of Oxford together.

  We had started out by seeing every single college in town and had actually had quite the grand old time. My mother could never get enough of those Gothic quads and cloisters, so unlike anything she had known growing up. Whenever she thought I wasn’t looking, I could see her bending down to sneak little souvenirs into her handbag—a random pebble, a lead pencil left on a stone step, a twig of thyme from an herb garden—and I was almost embarrassed to realize that, after so many years, I still knew very little of what went on in her inner universe.

  After our round of the colleges, we began going to concerts and events, including the odd sports affair. My mother suddenly developed an unnatural interest in cricket, then rugby, then tennis. In retrospect, of course, I should have seen that these seemingly impulsive pursuits were very much part of a campaign that had always had but one single objective.

  James.

  For some reason, it never occurred to me how perfectly systematical our movements around town had been, and how determined my mother had been to map out our routes beforehand and stick to them regardless of the weather … not until the day she finally grabbed me by the elbow and exclaimed, in the voice of a crusader face-to-face with the grail at last, “There he is!”

  And indeed, there he was, coming out of Blackwell’s on Broad Street, balancing a stack of books and a cup of coffee. I would never have recognized him had it not been for my mother, but then, I had not spent the last ten years keeping current with the maturing process of our target through binoculars and gossip magazines. To me, James Moselane was still a pubescent prince in an enchanted forest, while the person emerging from the bookstore was a perfectly proportioned adult—tall and athletic, though completely unprepared for the ambush awaiting him.

  “What a coincidence!” My mother strode across Broad Stree
t and cut him off before he saw her coming. “Didn’t even know you were at Oxford. You probably don’t recognize Diana …”

  Only then did my mother realize I was not right beside her, and she twisted around to shoot me a grimace that said it all. I had never been the spineless sort, but the horror of suddenly understanding that this, precisely this, was what we had been chasing for so long nearly made me turn and run.

  Even though James could not see her livid expression, he most certainly noticed her frantic wave and my own crushed demeanor. Only someone uncommonly slow would not have read the situation within the blink of an eye, but to James’s credit he greeted us both with perfect cordiality. “And how are you enjoying Oxford?” he asked me, still balancing his coffee on top of the books. “I’m sorry, what was your name again?”

  “Diana Morgan,” said my mother. “As in Lady Diana. Here, let me write it down.” She dug into her handbag and pulled out a scrap of paper, oblivious to my nudges and muttered pleas. “And her college, of course—”

  “Mommy!” It took all my willpower to prevent her from jotting down my telephone number as well, and she was extremely cross with me for pulling her away before we had exhausted all her brazen hoopla.

  Not surprisingly, we saw neither hide nor hair of James after that. In all likelihood I would never have met him again, had it not been for Katherine Kent. Just before Christmas the following year, she invited me along to a reception at the Ashmolean Museum—a reception, as it turned out, in honor of a recent donation of ancient artifacts from the Moselane Manor Collection.

  “Come!” she said, pulling me away from an exquisite statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis and spearheading our path through the exclusive crowd. “I want to introduce you. The Moselanes are very useful.” Being a woman of little patience, Katherine had perfected the art of swooping right into a conversation and stealing away her prey of choice. “James! This is Diana. Extremely talented. She wants to know who bleached your Isis.”

  After nearly choking on his champagne, James turned toward us, looking so tantalizingly handsome in his suit and tie that my fantasies of yore came galloping back in a heartbeat.

  “I was merely admiring her,” I hastened to say. “Whoever found her and brought her to England must have incurred quite the Pharaonic curse—”

  “My ancestor. The first Lord Moselane.” Astonishingly enough, James looked as if he had completely forgotten our previous encounter. In fact, his smile suggested I was precisely the sort of woman he had hoped to meet that evening. “Died peacefully in his sleep at ninety-two. At least we like to think so.” He shook my hand and was in no hurry to let it go. “Delighted.”

  “Actually”—I reluctantly withdrew my hand—”we met last year. In front of Blackwell’s.” Before the words were even out of my mouth, I winced at my own treacherous honesty. It took only a few seconds for the cogwheels to click into place in James’s head, and it was not a pretty process to behold.

  “Right,” he said, slowly. “Right, right, right …”

  But the word written in his hazel eyes was quite the opposite.

  Indeed, in the months to come, whenever we would dutifully meet for coffee—always prompted by Katherine Kent—James’s opening question, “How is your mother?” would set the tone for our conversation and remind me why our coffees never turned into lunch. He was attentive, certainly, and would occasionally give me a look that sent hope fluttering through my body. But by and large he kept treating me with unfaltering chivalry, as if I were an untouchable maiden he was sworn to protect.

  Perhaps it was all because of my mother. Or perhaps it was partly due to James’s being born—as my father had once so very aptly phrased it—with a silver spoon up his arse. Keeping the blue blood pure and all that. In which case I could groom my plume as much as I liked; it would never occur to Lord Moselane’s son that we were the same species.

  I was stirred from my High Table reverie by a hand taking away the plate with my untouched starter. Next to me, James sat with his head bent as if in prayer, checking his phone underneath the starched dinner napkin. Reaching discreetly into my handbag, I pulled out Mr. Ludwig’s photograph and held it toward him. “What do you make of this?”

  James leaned over to look. “Approximate dating?”

  “I’d say about ten days,” I joked, “judging from the bent corner and frayed edges. As for the inscription … your guess is as good as mine.”

  He squinted, clearly intrigued. “Who gave you this?”

  “A mysterious man,” I said, with deliberate drama, “who told me this picture is proof the Amazons did exist—”

  “What is that?” Katherine Kent reached over to pluck the photograph from my fingers and study it in the light of a candle. “Where was this taken?”

  “No idea.” Happily surprised at their interest, I quickly drew up the high points of my bizarre encounter that afternoon. When I circled back to Mr. Ludwig’s claim about the undeciphered Amazon alphabet, however, James sat back in his chair and groaned.

  “How vexing!” Katherine gave me back the photo with a puzzled frown. “This could be anywhere. If only we knew the name of his foundation …”

  I shrank under her glare. Clearly, she was blaming me for not extracting more information from Mr. Ludwig, and she had a point. “I think they have an office in Amsterdam,” I said. “Because that’s where he wanted me to go.”

  “Does it really matter?” James cut in. “Obviously, you’re not going—”

  “Actually,” I countered, unable to resist the temptation to bait him a bit, “I came rather close to saying yes. It’s not every day some stranger in the street offers me five thousand dollars—”

  “Precisely.” James gave me a look of censure. “Some stranger in the street. And what does that make you?”

  I smiled, flattered that he took it all so seriously. “Curious.”

  James shook his head and would likely have thrown in another derisory comment, had not Katherine—exercising the privilege of genius—held up a hand to silence us both. “And he said he would meet you at the airport?”

  Perplexed by her gravity, I cleared my throat. “I believe so.”

  James could remain silent no longer. “Surely,” he intervened, squeezing his napkin into a ball, “you’re not encouraging Morg to actually take off with this … Mr. Ludwig? God knows what he’s up to—”

  Katherine sat back with a jerk. “Of course not! Don’t be absurd. I’m merely trying to figure out what’s afoot … who these people are.”

  Anxious to restore our amicable tone, I laughed and said, “I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it’s one of my lazy students—”

  James looked at me sternly. “I don’t see the humor in this. You’ve been targeted, and I don’t mean by some sort of student prank. Make sure to lock your door tonight.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  In the face of a true friend a man sees, as it were, a second self.

  —CICERO, De Amicitia

  IT WAS STILL RAINING BY THE TIME JAMES WALKED ME BACK TO MY rooms across the quad, carefully steering us both around the inky puddles on the cobblestone pavement. He had never escorted me home before; if nothing else, at least I could thank Mr. Ludwig for this pleasing development.

  “Now, Morg”—James held up an arm to shield me from the rain as I stopped to take out my keys—” I don’t think you should leave college for a few days. At least not on your own. You never know—”

  I stared at him, hardly able to believe his sincerity. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “If you want to go out,” he continued, rain dripping from his hair and winding its way down his noble face, “call me and I’ll come with you.”

  Not just the words, but the deep tone of his voice crept right into my ear of ears and reverberated through the caverns of my hibernating hopes. Hungry for more I looked into his eyes … but rain and darkness blurred the moment. After an awkward pause I finally managed a stiff “That’s very kind of you,” to w
hich James merely replied, in a voice as breezy as ever, “Rubbish. We’ve got to take care of you, don’t we?”

  And then he walked away, hands in his pockets, whistling a perky tune, while I retreated into my rooms at last. Or rather, the grand, tastefully furnished office apartment was not technically mine; it belonged to the esteemed Professor Larkin, who had conveniently been invited to spend the year at Yale. I had not been the only candidate vying for the one-year lectureship created to replace him, but I was a woman, and the college faculty had long been short on that particular variety of man. At least, that had been Katherine Kent’s argument in favor of them hiring me.

  I was not paid a full salary, but taking over Professor Larkin’s office had afforded me a chance to quit my dank apartment and live in college. The only snag to the lectureship was the workload. My days were so jam-packed with tutorials I had almost no time left over for my own research. And without a selection of fresh, head-turning publications to my name there would most certainly be no college fellowship awaiting me at the end of the year; I would be back in my basement on creepy Cowley Road, writing uninspired job applications and flicking mice off my crumpets.

  As I filled up the kettle for a cup of bedtime tea, my mind wandered through the events of the day and ended up—not surprisingly—at Mr. Ludwig. In a matter of minutes this strange man had presented me with a dazzling cornucopia of temptation: academic glory, adventure, and enough money to buy me half a year’s freedom, devoted to my own research. Maybe I could even squeeze in a trip to Istanbul, to look up Grigor Reznik in person and talk him into showing me the Historia Amazonum—the only original document on the Amazons I hadn’t read. My mind bubbled with possibilities.

  In return, however, Mr. Ludwig had asked for a week of my precious time, and even if I had been reckless enough to consider his proposition, there was no way I could justify that sort of absence hardly a month into my new lectureship. It would have been one thing if he had shown me some official document, stamped and signed, outlining precisely what his foundation was asking me to do and how marvelous it would look on my curriculum vitae … but as it was, the whole thing was just too vague, too risky. Indeed, as both Katherine Kent and James had made amply clear over dinner, one would have to be absolutely insane to fly off like that, into the unknown.