The Oxford Inheritance

by Ann A. McDonald

  “Lead the way.”

  They started jogging, and soon fell into a slow, steady pace as they headed down the street and across the bridge to where the river wound away from Raleigh in the opposite direction of the route Cassie had been taking. This wasn’t as secluded as her usual path: they passed museums and parkland, but still the early morning silence was draped over the city, muffling distant traffic with birdsong and the gentle lap of the river on its banks.

  Evie chatted easily as they jogged, about her upbringing in the leafy north Hampstead suburbs, her private schooling, her dramatic French mother. She had studied for her undergraduate degree in history and literature at Cambridge and made the move to Oxford to work on her thesis at the site of Raleigh’s activities. Her parents were retired now, idling near a vineyard in the South of France, while Evie happily pursued her master’s digging through dusty Elizabethan research and drinking dry gimlets in the elegant city bars.

  It was a world away from Cassie’s own upbringing, but she found herself enjoying the gentle chatter and glamorous stories all the same, like an anthropologist hearing reports from a foreign tribe. Unlike some of the other students she’d encountered, who boasted loudly about their foreign houses and extravagant vacations, Evie was simply being friendly, and she peppered her own stories with questions about Cassie’s life. Cassie evaded as much as possible and repeated her cover story about a lifelong fascination with Oxford.

  “Is it everything you imagined?” Evie asked, when they took a break to rest by the Botanic Garden. The glass hothouses sat neatly by the riverbanks, manicured lawns winding with trimmed pathways. Cassie could see the lush green and vibrant colors of the exotic plants housed within.

  “Oxford?” Cassie paused a moment, catching her breath. “I don’t know yet. I built it up so much in my mind, I’m not sure anything could have equaled the vision I had.”

  This was true. She’d imagined Oxford to be a mythic place, full of answers, where she’d finally come to know the truth about her mother, but instead . . . It was just a city: beautiful and old, yes, but still a real place, the same as any other, full of darkness and mystery but also the buzz of traffic, wet autumn rains, tourists clustering the streets.

  “It never quite matches what we had in our minds, does it?” Evie replied softly.

  Cassie looked over, surprised by the disappointed note in Evie’s voice.

  “My degree.” Evie gave a bashful shrug. “I thought it would be . . . not easy, but clear. That I’d know exactly what to do, the way I always do. Things make sense to me, they always have, but now . . . I just can’t find the answers I’m looking for.”

  Cassie gave her a sympathetic smile. “You just need a plan,” she said. “Be methodical, and you’ll figure it out. Step by step.”

  Evie nodded. “Hey, thanks. For listening; I know I can babble on.”

  “No problem.” Cassie smiled. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

  They turned back to the college. As they jogged slowly along the river, a familiar figure drew closer—the young man Cassie had seen out running before. His brown hair was ruffled by the wind, ears tipped red from the chill. As he approached them, he gave Cassie a wide smile. “You again,” he called. “What are you, stalking me now?”

  Cassie didn’t reply. She waited for him to pass them by, but instead he slowed, then jogged backward as they kept moving toward him. “I’m Charlie,” he told her, brown eyes alive with amusement. “I figured it was time I introduced myself.”

  “I’m Evie,” Evie volunteered. “And this is Cassie.”

  “You students?” Charlie asked, still jogging backward.

  “Postgrad,” Evie replied. “At Raleigh.”

  “Fancy,” he teased. “You know, I’m always looking for a running buddy,” he added, attention still fixed on Cassie. “If you’re worried about keeping up, I promise I’ll go slow.” He grinned, broad and cocky.

  But Cassie wasn’t looking for whatever this man had on his mind. Romance, dating—they were foreign concepts to her, and she had bigger things on her mind. She gave him a withering stare and lengthened her pace, speeding up to leave him there by the bridge. Evie caught up with her a moment later. “What’s wrong?” she asked, panting. “He was cute.”

  “I’m not interested,” Cassie said, feeling a flush of embarrassment.

  “Sorry,” Evie said quickly. “I figured you guys had, I don’t know, a friendly runners’ thing. He seemed to like you,” she added.

  “Trust me,” Cassie said. “Men are the last thing on my mind right now.”

  “Then I’ll say no more.” Evie mimed locking her lips shut. “God, this is why I don’t exercise; I’m burning up inside. Want to stop by Harvey’s for a breakfast bap on the way back in?”

  “Sure.” Cassie tried to relax, checking the path behind them to see if Charlie was gone. “Sounds good to me.”

  Her information pack listed a couple of libraries outside the college that could be used for her classwork, so after showering and changing, Cassie struck out across the city to see if one of them might hold any clues about her mother. There was an official university archive housed in the Radcliffe Camera, an eighteenth-century domed building set off Brasenose Lane. A flow of tourists posed for photographs out front. Inside, Cassie used her Raleigh ID to register for a reader’s card and filled in the request slip for the records she needed.

  “The official record for every college?” The clerk looked over his fashionable black glasses frames at her. He was in his twenties, his hair slicked back, his fingertips paint-stained. He frowned at Cassie’s cursive script. “For nineteen ninety-two—”

  “And ninety-three, and ninety-four,” she finished. “Is that a problem?”

  “No,” he said, but he sighed with a mournful air. “Wait here. I’ll have the first batch sent up in a minute.”

  Cassie spent the day tucked away in the upper reading room, systematically working her way through the books that the clerk called up for her in batches, each time greeting her request slip with the same weary sigh. Here, the crowd was older than at Raleigh: grad students, the occasional professor with his half-moon glasses and worn leather elbow patches. They built forts with their research materials, blocking off corners of their desks to keep out prying eyes, and it was easy for Cassie to blend in: just another reader, researching some old, faded records in the pools of afternoon sun.

  She broke only for lunch, which she bought from a café in an old converted church across the square, and ate in the shade of its leafy courtyard, among tourists and their cream teas, and clusters of blue-rinsed pensioners gossiping over fragrant lemon cake. It was a sea of strange faces, save one: Professor Tremain, deep in conversation across the courtyard. He saw her from across the courtyard and gave a wave, almost knocking his tea to the ground.

  He was a curious man, Cassie thought, waving back. A relic, an oddity in his tweed and absentminded concentration, he seemed as if he could have been transplanted from fifty or a hundred years ago. But then again, that was Oxford: its cobbled streets unchanged, the lampposts still old-fashioned wrought iron even if the bulbs inside were new.

  This was an odd, timeless place, a city out of step with the rest of the world, where walking down an empty backstreet along the snaking line of an ancient college’s walls, Cassie could almost forget which century she was in—until a cluster of noisy undergrads spilled out of some back-alley pub, with their modern fashions and noisy buzz of cell phones breaking the spell.

  It was still strange for Cassie to think of her mother here. She would have loved it, Cassie knew: the bustle of the city center, with its collision of old worlds and new: the old Tudor row houses and college walls, the modern office buildings and traffic that snaked through the winding streets, the horizon of turrets and curving spires. To have seen her there, immersed in such literature and tradition . . . It was a fantasy, impossible, Cassie knew, but as she searched through the old college records, expecting to see Joanna’s nam
e on every next page, she could almost glimpse it. That laughing smile, that glow of possibility.

  What had happened to her, to strip away all that great potential and leave her so broken, so full of rage and sorrow? Or had it been inevitable, the time bomb in her delicate DNA: the threads of instability woven deep, and only surfacing later, when it was already too late?

  The DNA they both shared. Cassie shivered and turned back to her books, but the thought lingered. For years, she’d known that she’d inherited too much from her mother; not her blond hair or blue eyes or perfect singing pitch, but the darkness lingering beneath the surface. A poison of sorts, running in her veins. Her mother’s sickness had been the manic episodes, the heightened emotions, the dizzying, knife-edge depths.

  For Cassie, it took a different form.

  She’d been a kid still when they started. Tantrums, disapproving teachers would call them, but to Cassie, they were anything but a choice. The anger would take her over in a heartbeat, a pounding, furious storm that she was powerless to control. People used the term blind rage so casually, but Cassie knew from the inside exactly what it meant. She would lose track of herself, overcome with a red-hot fury that demanded release, until finally something broke through the fever or it ebbed away, leaving nothing but wreckage behind.

  It terrified her, losing control. She feared that she was becoming her mother, only worse. Sharper, more dangerous. Her mother only screamed and cried in the grip of her episodes, but Cassie . . . Cassie wanted to burn the whole world down.

  Her mother knew the signs. She held fast against doctors and medication until there was no ignoring the damage. But instead of submitting Cassie to the drugs that she swore numbed her to the world, Joanna taught Cassie her own coping mechanisms, making out like it was just a game. Hold on to the magic pendant, and count; imagine they were lying on the trampoline in the summer sun. Safe thoughts. Careful numbers. Keep the furious hunger at bay.

  Cassie knew the pendant was nothing more than chipped stone, and the simple meditation techniques designed for stress, but it was all she had. She focused that wild fury, boxed it up in walls of whispered chanting until she was safe, until it was contained.

  It didn’t always work. There was an incident with bullies when she was eight years old, the time on the school bus when she was twelve. Broken bones, black eyes, a trip to the ER, and little Cassie in the middle of it all, unharmed and unremorseful. They took her out of school in the end—it was just safer that way—and away from the daily battle of other kids, taunting and not understanding, she found it easier to keep control. A calm life, a simple one; that had been all Joanna wanted for them both.

  But it hadn’t worked out that way in the end.

  By the end of the afternoon, Cassie had found nothing, so she packed up her things and left the hushed confines of the library. After so many hours sitting cooped up in a study carrel, her muscles screamed for activity, so instead of heading back to Raleigh she struck out in the other direction, exploring the city center as the crowds of shoppers and after-work commuters filled the darkening streets with bustle and movement. Everyone at Raleigh might act like the college was the center of the Oxford universe, but it turned out there was a whole world waiting beyond the sandstone walls. Cassie discovered a covered marketplace, filled with tourist stalls and produce vendors, where you could buy cheap key chains alongside cuts of meat from the local butcher stand. Farther down St. Giles, in the Jericho district of town, she found an art-house cinema that screened foreign movies on its small, velvet-fringed screen, and a tiny ice cream shop where students clustered despite the cold weather.

  She was walking back toward Raleigh, worn out from her roaming, when the skies opened, drenching the cobbled streets. Cassie ducked inside a nearby storefront to take shelter, gasping against the icy water, but it was only as she shook off her coat and looked around that she realized she shared a name with the cramped, old-fashioned bookstore: Blackwell’s.

  “Are you in or out?” a grumpy-looking man demanded, trying to open his umbrella as he passed.

  Cassie stepped deeper into the store. It was a world away from the cavernous chain stores back in America: set in a row of crooked buildings, the wood-beamed walls housed thousands of texts. Remembering her essays, still yet to be written, Cassie collected an armful of economics textbooks and settled in the corner of the café upstairs, watching the rain fall through the iron-paned windows as she sipped a coffee and watched the bustle of students and tourists ebb and flow through the cozy rooms.

  She was deep in theories of microeconomic preference when there was movement at the table beside her; it was the clerk from the Rad Cam library, Cassie recognized: dark hair slicked back in a retro, fashionable style, black-rimmed glasses faintly fogged from the cold. He pulled off his thick winter coat and draped it over the back of one chair, strewing a scatter of sketchpads and pencils across the table to stake his claim before heading for the café counter across the room. Cassie thought for a moment of the irony: leaving his day job among the library stacks to come here, surrounded by yet more books. But that was Oxford, she supposed: home to bibliophiles. Several times in the Rad Cam she’d seen browsers bend their heads to the pages of an old book and inhale deeply, almost as in prayer. Not for them, the sterile touch of a smooth screen, or the sacrilege of electronic books that could be bought at the click of a button, and just as easily deleted.

  Cassie turned back to her textbook, making brief notes for her tutorial the next morning, but she was interrupted by a sudden jolt: the table shuddering as the clerk tripped against it, his coffee spilling over Cassie’s book. She cursed, leaping up.

  “Oh, shitface!” The clerk abandoned his drink and grabbed a clutch of paper napkins. Cassie dabbed quickly, and eventually the liquid disappeared, leaving only the faintest stain.

  “Thank God,” Cassie exhaled with relief.

  “Sorry,” he said, sounding wholly unapologetic, “but you shouldn’t have left your bag out like that.”

  “This is my fault?” Cassie bridled. “You nearly cost me . . . fifty-six pounds?” She checked the price on the back cover and gaped.

  “Welcome to the rip-off that is the educational textbook market,” the clerk replied in a sardonic voice. He folded himself into the seat beside her and looked mournfully at his half-empty cup. “Fuck, I really needed that. Someone had me chasing college records all over the place.” He unwound his scarf and relaxed back into the seat, giving her a meaningful look. “You know, every old book you call up, I have to go hunt down from the vaults? Sixty-seven steps, there and back.”

  Cassie opened her mouth to object, but then stopped; there was a sarcastic glint in his eye. She pushed over her plate, with the remainder of her cookie. “Bygones?”

  “I’d say my forgiveness can’t be bought so cheaply, but I’d be lying.” He broke off a corner of the chocolate pastry and offered his other hand. “Elliot.”

  “Cassie,” she replied.

  Another crowd of undergraduates crammed in at the next table, armed with textbooks and glossy carrier bags spilling new college scarves and sweatshirts. Elliot sighed extravagantly and edged his seat closer in Cassie’s direction. “So what in God’s name are you looking for down there? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Nothing much.” Cassie shrugged. “I’m just interested in the history of this place, that’s all.”

  “Fine, be mysterious.” Elliot rolled his eyes. “At least you’re not having me fetch up every edition of Mills and Boon romance novels.”

  Cassie laughed. “People do that?”

  “Oh yes.” Elliot sent his eyes briefly to the ceiling. “We’re a copyright library, so we have every book published down there somewhere. There’s a grad student who swears it’s for research, but she just sits in the Lawler room all afternoon, reading and chewing on her hair. At least, I hope that’s all she’s doing.”

  Cassie relaxed. “Are you a student here?” she asked.

  “I was.” El
liot didn’t look thrilled at the thought. “Fine art, which as you can so plainly see, perfectly equipped me for the modern job market. I graduated a few years ago but haven’t quite got around to leaving yet.”

  “It’s a beautiful city,” Cassie commented, nodding.

  “It has its appeal . . .” Elliot’s gaze drifted over to a boy in the corner; he was blush-cheeked with a freshman glow, wrapped in a scarf of black and white: Magdalen colors. The boy met Elliot’s eyes and looked away quickly, flushing hard. Elliot turned back to Cassie with an amused smirk. “Give him another term, and he’ll be dancing on the tables down at the old Firehouse.” He took in her blank expression and explained, “It’s a gay club, over near Park End. You really are new.” Pausing, he eyed her again. “Let me guess, Wadham. No, St. Hilda’s. Some dreadfully dull thesis on feminist theory or some such.”

  “Raleigh,” Cassie corrected.

  “Really?” Elliot dragged out the syllables. “Well, forgive me for not doffing my cap, m’lady.” He mimicked the gesture, bowing as low as the narrow seat would allow.

  Cassie laughed. “So it’s not just me?” she asked. “I figured everyone here was, you know . . .”

  “Posh as a pheasant?” Elliot finished. “No, we all are, but Raleigh students are blue through and through. Blue-blooded,” he added. “Tell me, is it true they serve caviar for formal hall every night, and fire the waitstaff if they dare to look you in the eye?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t really go to those things.” She caught Elliot’s disappointed expression, so she mustered what shred of gossip she could recall. “But they were serving sauterne like it was lemonade at the president’s tea. I counted at least a dozen bottles out for pouring.”

  Elliot clucked in delight. “Bastards,” he said fondly. “I’m only jealous because I couldn’t get in. It was a blessing, I suppose. God knows I’m not so high and mighty as that lot.”