The Lost Sisterhood (2 page)

Awed by her splendor
Stars near the lovely
moon cover their own
bright faces
when she
is roundest and lights
earth with her silver.

—S
APPHO

M
OST OF THE COLLEGE FACULTY WAS ALREADY GATHERED OVER
drinks in the Senior Common Room by the time I arrived. Because of my mad dash to the fencing club I had been in too much of a hurry to freshen up, and as I entered the room I could hear a few mumbled comments about Miss America being late for dinner again. But I merely smiled and pretended not to hear them. For all they knew, I could have been at the library, comatose over an ancient manuscript in some dusty corner—a perfectly valid excuse for showing up, as they themselves were wont to do, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, looking as if one had stumbled right out of the Renaissance.

Sadly, I was fairly sure the appellation “Miss America” was not intended as a compliment. While it might be true that I was half a head taller than most people and equipped—as my father pointed out whenever I unleashed my blond curls—with a deceiving angelic exterior, the nickname was almost certainly a comment on my breeding, or perceived lack thereof. It would seem I could never run away from the fact
that my mother was American, and that her vocabulary had ruled my childhood home. Even though my father was perfectly British, and I had been surrounded by Brits growing up, there were moments when American expressions came more naturally to me. Evidently, some of the senior faculty members had overheard me turning dustbins into trash cans—or possibly even seen me jogging past college for no other purpose than the rather vulgar desire to stay in shape—and had immediately made up their minds that further investigation into my personality was unnecessary.

“Diana!” My mentor Katherine Kent summoned me to her side with an impatient wave. “How was the conference?”

As always, her machine-gun manner caught me off-guard, and I felt my courage running for cover. “Not bad at all. Quite a good turnout, actually.”

“Remind me of your topic?”

“Well …” I tried to smile. There was no safe way of phrasing the fact that I had ignored her advice. “I was in a bit of a rush—”

Katherine Kent’s eyes became arrow slits. Set in a face marked by mental discipline and framed by hair cropped so short it might have been mistaken for a fashion statement, her eyes were always strikingly vivid, a rare, incandescent turquoise, like crystals set in pewter. More often than not these were sparkling with irritation, but I had come to appreciate this as her natural mode of interaction with people who had, in fact, earned her respect.

Just then, a surge of enthusiasm went through the room. Relieved to find Katherine momentarily distracted, I turned to see who had managed to arrive even later than I and still be the toast of the party.

But of course. James Moselane.

“Over here!” Katherine’s arm went up once more, with the impatient flick that never took no for an answer.

“Kate.” James greeted the grande dame with the handshake she expected. “Thank you for the review in the
Quarterly.
I am sure I don’t deserve it.” Only then did he notice me. “Oh, hello, Morg. I didn’t see you there.”

Which was just fine by me. Because whenever James Moselane entered
a room, it always took me a few minutes to rein in my frontal lobes. At a ripe and responsible twenty-eight, it was dreadful to find oneself scrambling to come up with a morsel of sophistication, and—even more distressing—I was fairly sure everyone around me noticed my rosy cheeks and drew exactly the right conclusion.

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 Street 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—”