The Oxford Inheritance (3 page)

It was another world. Even at Smith, with all its history, the older buildings had dated back only a hundred and fifty years, dwarfed by new lecture halls and dorms. Here, half a millennium at least echoed in the sandstone walls. Cassie moved to the bookshelves, lining the wall behind her. They were filled with clothbound volumes: first editions, weighty tomes. Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Wilde. And there, on the far wall, Cassie found the Raleigh College Records, a collection of yearbooks dating back as far as 1952, pristine as the day they were sent from the printers, their spines stiff and uncracked.

She ran her finger across the embossed leather until she found 1994 and pulled it down from the shelf, taking the large book closer to the window for a glimpse in the afternoon sun. She browsed reports from the chaplain, accounts of building projects and funding drives, interspersed with a roll call of student achievements and “in memorandum” tributes to deceased former members. Cassie turned each page impatiently, but even when she reached the list of first-year students admitted to the college, there was no sign of what she was looking for.

Footsteps came, heavy and unhurried in the hallway outside. Quickly, Cassie slammed the volume shut, replacing it on the shelf just as the door swung open and a strange man appeared in the doorway.

Cassie froze. He was older, in his seventies or eighties perhaps, dressed in an immaculate dark suit. He had a shock of white hair and a deeply lined face, but it was his eyes that chilled her to the very bone: their blackness seemed to pierce right through her.

“What are you doing here?” the man demanded. “This is private.”

“I know, I'm sorry. I was looking for the bathroom,” Cassie covered quickly.

He didn't move, his gaze shifting slowly from Cassie to the desk and back again.

“I got distracted by the building,” Cassie added, stepping away from the bookcase. “The original design. . . . It's all so beautiful.”

The man's gaze raked over her, and Cassie felt a rush of thanks that she was still dressed up in her robes, like any other new freshman, just one of the crowd. “Your classmates are leaving now, for the ceremony,” he said icily.

“Thanks.” Cassie took several quick steps toward the door. “I'm sure I'll catch another; you guys probably break out the Latin every week.”

She was aiming for a joke, something to break the tension, but the look on the man's face was anything but amused.

“You think it's funny?” He said sharply. “That we're all just parading around in our robes for no good reason? Our history is everything.” He glared at her with a harsh, flinty stare. “Tradition is what makes us who we are, and if you think you're above it, then perhaps you're in the wrong place.”

Cassie bit her tongue. The parades and photographs and formal teas? This wasn't history, this was a costume play. They were all pretending in dress-up, while the modern world outside the sandstone walls kept spinning, unconcerned by their robes and rituals.

But instead of retorting, Cassie forced herself to look contrite. “I'm
sorry. I understand, about tradition. It means the world to me, too. I didn't mean to offend you.”

The man's lips pressed together in a thin line.

“It's why I'm here,” Cassie offered. “Family tradition. History. I guess I'm still a little jet-lagged,” she gave a weak smile. “I'm sorry if you misunderstood me.”

For a moment, he didn't move. Cassie's skin prickled, her heart beating fast. Then, finally, he gave a curt nod. “Your group is leaving now, you better catch up.”

She felt his eyes on her, trailing every step down the long hallway. Luckily, her group was being ushered out and replaced with a new crop of students, so Cassie fell in line, her pulse still racing from her near miss as they emerged back into the cool afternoon sun.

The group veered right, skirting the lawn, but Cassie ducked away in the other direction instead, into the cloisters and down a side passageway, emerging in the shadow of a grove of willow trees set back by the college walls. The small garden was bordered by a low stone wall spilling over with pansies and late-flowering chrysanthemums: an oasis away from the main college bustle and completely private.

Cassie paused there in the silence, breathing in the fresh scent of cut grass and blossoms. It had been a mistake sneaking into Sir Edmund's office like that; she'd risked everything, and for what? Her first day, and already she'd drawn attention to herself—threatened to expose her secrets, the secrets that she'd come all this way to untangle for good.

Because for all Cassie's easy chat about her family back in America—her childhood gazing up at the dream of Oxford and its many academic splendors, her parents' enthusiasm and support—her life was nothing like the happy picture she'd painted for the college.

She hadn't been raised with stories of academic greatness. Her path to Raleigh hadn't been a smooth and foregone conclusion.

Everything she'd told them was a lie.

DAWN MISTS HUNG OVER THE COLLEGE THE NEXT MORNING AS
Cassie zipped her hooded sweatshirt and turned off the pathway away from her new dorm. After the tea, she'd been too tired to do anything but drag her bags up to her room and crash, sleeping through the rest of the afternoon and night. She'd woken early, her limbs screaming with new energy only an early run would satisfy.

It looked like she was the only one. As she walked briskly along the neat pathways, the Raleigh campus was still and silent in the dawn light. Cassie stretched, then skirted the back wall until she found a path down to the river. She broke into a jog, her sneakers pounding the dirt as she headed deeper into the lush green of the college grounds.

As she settled into her usual stride, Cassie felt her tension ease for the first time since boarding the plane back in Boston. She loved this time of day. It gave her a moment to think, a space that was all her own. A certain hush fell over a city in the early morning, and she could see now that Oxford was no different; it was a swath of calm broken only by gentle birdsong and the low rumble of traffic out beyond the college walls. October had just begun. The mists hung low over dewdrop lawns, and her only company was a flock of swans gliding gracefully along the dark waters of the river.

Cassie turned out from the back gates and ran along the scenic walk that wound out from Raleigh's manicured lawns, her strides lengthening as she followed the path of the river out past the gardens and into the wilderness of the woodland beyond. With every footstep she felt the
years fall away, stripping back the winding journey that had brought her here, halfway across the world—years when home had meant the contents of her duffel bag, and success simply enough cash to pay the rent that month. When Oxford was just a distant city, as arbitrary a destination as a pin pushed randomly into a creased old map.

Until the day the package came.

Cassie had found it propped outside her door one icy morning three years ago. The foreign stamps were peeling, and the original Oxford postmark was smudged and faded, the labels pasted in turn, redirecting the box through old apartments and past crimes all the way back to the original recipient.

Her mother.

Cassie had turned the battered manila envelope over in her hands, wondering how the package had found its way to her at all. She was in Providence, Rhode Island, that month, renting a room above a Polish restaurant, the air smoky with the scent of paprika. She paid cash to a wizened old woman in baggy knit cardigans, who would pluck the skin on her bony wrists in disapproval and leave Tupperware containers of dumplings and broth outside the door. But aside from this well-intentioned
babula,
Cassie remained invisible. She didn't appear on any electoral rolls, had no credit or store cards, and kept any cash locked in a heavy tin fishing box slipped into the ventilation shaft above her bed. Deleting herself from the record of everyday life had been a conscious, careful decision. As far as Cassie was concerned, in the eyes of the world, she didn't exist.

She'd been wrong.

You can'
t hide the truth forever. Please come back and end this for good.

The note was simple, written in small, blocked letters and tucked inside the package along with a collection of mysterious items.

Cassie had sat down with a thump on the top step of the staircase and reached for her pendant, the only thing of her mother's she had been
able to keep. Joanna had been gone for nearly ten years now, and the rose quartz cameo was chipped with age, the strange, twisted design of the gold setting faded and peeling. Still, Cassie couldn't bring herself to throw it away. It was the only anchor she had to her past, and a warning of everything she could become, if she wasn't careful.

Her fingertips traced the familiar cracked pendant as she wondered what the note could mean. Her mother had stayed friendless, drifting; Cassie had never even seen her write a letter, let alone speak of anyone she stayed in contact with. And surely, any friend she'd had would know by now of her passing.

Ten years was a long time.

What did the note mean? And, after everything, should Cassie even care? It had taken her years to sand her life down to its current frictionless state. Did she really want to dig up painful memories and disturb the ghosts that had barely been laid to rest?

The answer seemed obvious.

No.

Cassie had crumpled the letter back into the package and pushed it deep into the back of her closet, ignoring the questions dancing in her mind for the rest of the week. She sidestepped the creeping whispers of curiosity, filled her every waking moment with screens and pages and a constant stream of noise from her headphones, but still, the question wouldn't go away. Soon, she was waking at three
A.M.
in a cold sweat, shaking from dark, desperate dreams that saw her trapped in her childhood house, searching, racing through the shadows trying to find something that always stayed just out of reach. She took to running, pounding the empty downtown streets in the early morning darkness, but her mother's poetry began whispering in the fog-breathed air, stanzas and whole sonnets Cassie hadn't even known she'd learned by heart. She tried to medicate the curiosity away with pills and weed and glinty-eyed strangers in dive bars, but nothing helped.

After ten straight sleepless nights, the gray winter weather finally broke. Trees unfurled with cherry blossoms on the hills above town, and Cassie retrieved the package from its dark hiding place and began her quest for answers.

A noise broke Cassie from her memories. Another runner was approaching
from the opposite direction on the path in the Raleigh woodlands. He was in his late twenties, with fair hair peeking out from under a knit cap, and dressed in dark sweats with earbuds snaking up from under his shirt.

Cassie moved to the far side of the dirt track to let him pass, but instead the man slowed and pulled out one of his earphones. “Careful up ahead,” he told her, with a friendly smile. “There's still ice on the path.”

She nodded her thanks, but then waited until he'd disappeared behind the next bend before slowing to a stop. She caught her breath, feeling her heart beat fast. In the distance, church bells began to ring out across the meadows: five, six, seven. Cassie looked ahead to the inviting curve of the path; she would happily run for another hour, out, away from the confines of the libraries and first tutorials that awaited her, but she had work to do.

The mysterious package had sent her here for a reason, and there was no time to waste.

HER NEW ROOMS WERE IN CARLTON HALL, A STATELY BUILDING
at the back of the college more like a country mansion than a student dorm. Cassie let herself in and climbed a flight of wide, creaking stairs to the second floor. The rest of the world was waking up now, and the building clattered with distant chatter as her fellow students set about their days. The noise filtered under doorways and down the hallway as she passed. It would be an adjustment, sharing space, and a bathroom, with other people; she had been on her own a long time.

She reached the second floor and turned down the hallway, then stopped dead. Her door was ajar, and her suitcase was tossed haphazardly in the hallway outside with a couple of boxes; her books and winter coat were draped carelessly to the side.

Cassie quickly stepped inside the room. It was three times the size of her old studio apartment back in Providence: a sitting room and a separate bedroom with bare floorboards and pale blue walls edged with white corniced trim—and a neat stack of matching luggage in the middle of the polished floors where only an hour ago Cassie's own case had been. A butter-soft leather jacket hung over the back of a desk chair, and in the bedroom, a pile of linens sat waiting to replace the bedding the college had provided. Cassie ran her fingers over the soft cotton, smooth and soft. Expensive.

There was a noise from the hallway, and moments later, a young woman backed into the room, her arms laden with bags. “Careful with that box, Hugo,” she was calling. “Those are antique lamps in there.” She turned and stopped, seeing Cassie beside the bed.

“Excuse me.” She arched an eyebrow, sweeping Cassie with an icy stare. “Who are you?”

Cassie tensed. She'd met her share of wealthy people; life in Cambridge, and New Haven, and Providence made sure of that. There were a dozen breeds—oblivious old money, brash immigrant fortunes, younger, disheveled kids who thought they could mask the family name with thrift-store denim and clove cigarettes. But what gave them away every time was the confident tone to every syllable, an innate superiority that was born and nurtured through prep schools and summer trips, an entire life spent cocooned in a marvelous certainty that they belonged, that this—grades, or jobs, or lovers, whatever it was that took their liking—was theirs by rights.

This girl was one of them. Beautiful in an angular, aristocratic way, she had piercing blue eyes and a sweep of glossy blond hair. She wore tight black jeans and an aged suede jacket, and had smudged eyeliner, but there were pearl studs at her ears and the bags looped over each arm were crafted leather and clearly designer.

Cassie knew she was sweaty and disheveled in her sweatshirt and leggings, but she held her ground. “I think you've got the wrong room. This is mine.”

The girl glanced at the heavy wooden door, marked with dull bronze numbers. “Five eighty. Sorry, you're the one who's mistaken.” She dropped her bags to the floor. “We'll need the rugs,” she called outside the door. “And tell Parker to bring up that cabinet, the one . . .” She stopped impatiently. “Hugo? Hugo!”

There was no reply, and the girl gave an exasperated sigh. “I can help get the rest of your things together,” she offered Cassie. “The office will sort out a new room.”

“No thanks,” Cassie replied stubbornly. “I'm good here.” She sauntered over to the window seat and sat down, lounging back in the narrow seat. Beside her, the view stretched all the way to the riverbanks, grassy and bright in the afternoon sun.

She shouldn't be causing a scene, but Cassie couldn't help it. She had learned the importance of territory in her first group home, where the kids had squabbled over a few feet of bedroom space. She certainly wasn't about to give up her claim to this vast spread of gleaming honeyed floorboards and smooth, cool walls.

The girl looked at Cassie again, as if sensing her steely determination. Her frown smoothed into a wide smile, and suddenly, her face was transformed to something warm, even friendly. “I'm so sorry,” she exclaimed. “Where are my manners? I've been lugging boxes all day for the move. I didn't even ask your name.”

Cassie introduced herself, cautious.

“Lovely to meet you.” The girl smiled. “I'm Olivia, Olivia Mandeville. I'm sorry to cause you all this bother.”

“Like you said, it's probably a mix-up.” Cassie stood her ground. “I'm sure the office will be able to sort you out another room.”

Olivia laughed, a musical sound. “You're a transfer?” she asked.

Cassie frowned. “What does that matter?”

“It matters because these are the finalist rooms. Third years.” Olivia gave an apologetic shrug. “We drew a ballot last year for rooms; my friends and I all picked Carlton. Foreign students are over with the freshers in Hartwell, round the back, by the kitchens.” She turned away to bellow out of the door. “Hugo!” Her voice rang, strong and arch, and then she was gone, back out into the maze of creaking hallways and dusty stairs, the air above her baggage drifting with golden particles of dust, as if even the ripples she left in her wake were gleaming with some certain touch of wealth.

Cassie's territorial instincts proved to be no match for Raleigh's official
dorm policy; back in the porters' lodge, Rutledge confirmed that Olivia was right: Carlton Hall was for upperclassmen only. “Let's see what's left . . .” He hummed, clicking through his records on the old computer.
“I could put you with the rest of the freshers if you want, but they can get rowdy. First time they've been away from home,” he added, with a weary look on his well-lined face.

Cassie grimaced at the thought of all-night dorm parties and freshmen running wild. “Is there anything else?”

“I've got it.” Rutledge turned behind him and plucked a new key down from the board. “Up in the attics. You'll be sharing, but it's a cozy little flat. The other girl's a grad student, seems a sweet girl.”

“I'll take it,” Cassie said gratefully, eager to just be done with the whole mix-up.

“I can help you with your bags, if you want—” Rutledge offered, but Cassie cut him off.

“I'm fine, thanks.” She was almost out the door again when she paused, turning back. “If I wanted to do some research about Raleigh, where should I start?”

Rutledge paused. “What kind of research?”

“Just general stuff.” Cassie shrugged casually. “College history, old students, that kind of thing.”

Rutledge narrowed his eyes at her for a moment, and Cassie felt a flutter of unease. Then his expression cleared. “Well, there's the library, that's a good place to start. But if you want the real stuff, you'd be best off trying the vaults.”

“The vaults?” Cassie repeated.

“Down below the cloisters.” Rutledge nodded. “Everything gets filed away down there sooner or later. They keep talking about getting an archivist, sorting out a proper filing system, but for now, if it happened here in the last hundred years, it's in there somewhere.”

“Thanks.” Cassie smiled. “I'll check it out.”

Her new—and she hoped, final—room was over in the East Wing, a
corner of the college filled with wood-paneled study rooms and more of
those wide, creaking stairs. There were no other residence rooms in the building, and the place was silent and still as Cassie dragged her case up two flights. In the top corridor she found a square-set, iron-barred door.

“Hello?” Cassie unlocked the door cautiously, peeking her head around to peer in. “Anyone here?”

According to Rutledge, Cassie would be sharing with another older girl named Genevieve DuLongpre, a grad student. There was no sign of life, so Cassie pulled her things inside and let her load fall on the table with a sigh of relief before she took a proper look around.

It was nowhere near as grand as Carlton Hall, that much was clear. Cassie was standing in a large, hexagonal-shaped living room, furnished with a long dining room table and mismatched chairs. Two musty, worn couches sat on the other end of the room in front of a bare-brick fireplace; threadbare rugs lay on the wooden floor. A short, narrow hallway led off to a galley kitchen in one direction and a bathroom in the other, both tiled in old-fashioned shades of mustard and green. The ceilings were low, slanted into the attic eaves, and although one side of the living area was lined with deep windows cut into the stone walls, the effect was hemmed in, almost claustrophobic, some might think.

Cozy, Cassie decided.

The door was open to one of the bedrooms, showing it strewn with a carpet of loose notes and discarded sweaters, so Cassie took her things into the other room. Again it was small, with the slanted ceilings and wooden built-in shelves lining one wall, the other set with her bed and desk. She went to the window and opened it wide to air out the room, glimpsing afternoon light filtering through spaces between the carved stone gargoyles that perched atop the edge of the walls. The faint sound of laughter and passing traffic hummed in the street below, but here Cassie was high above the city, and completely alone.

She quickly unpacked and retrieved a thick file from the bottom of her suitcase. She brewed herself a cup of tea, found a pack of stale biscuits in the cupboard, and finally settled at the wide dining table in a
pool of midday sun. Opening the folder, she laid out the familiar contents in front of her like a fortune-teller setting out the tarot.

First, the note.
You can't hide the truth forever. Please come back and end this for good.

Then the rest of the contents of that mysterious package.

A ticket stub. Plymouth to New York, by boat, in the spring of 1995.

A rose quartz pendant, just like the one she always wore.

And a photo. Her mother, looking impossibly young. Dressed in a white blouse and long black skirt, a black ribbon tied at her neck. She was smiling, her teenage face alive with laughter, sandwiched with another girl between two boys in matching formal costume, the three-quarter-length robes around their shoulders trailing wide bands of material in the breeze.

Cassie had spent the previous afternoon in an identical outfit, surrounded by such boys. She would know the setting for the photo even without the unfamiliar scrawl on the back.

Raleigh College. 1994.

She stared at the evidence, as she had a hundred times over since opening that package. Taken separately, they were fragments, a mystery. But together . . . ?

Cassie had tried, and failed, to make these new facts somehow fit the story of her life. Her mother, Joanna, who had never talked of college, not once even mentioned leaving America, had come to England to study, had been a student here at Raleigh, one of the most prestigious and elite schools in the world. She had walked these same stone pathways, perhaps even clambered the stairs in this very building, and she had not uttered a single word to Cassie about it.

Cassie remembered every cruel, furious taunt, and every sobbing entreaty. She'd been on the receiving end of her mother's wrath for fourteen years, blamed for every missed opportunity and sacrificed dream. If her mother had even once hinted at this previous life of hers, Cassie would have known. It had been a secret Joanna took to her grave.

Special, they had called her mother. Fragile. As if Joanna was a rare
butterfly or exquisite vase. But for Cassie there had been nothing fragile about the fits of rage that blazed through her childhood, leaving her mother weeping on the kitchen floor in a pool of exhausted tears. Cassie had been born when Joanna was only twenty, and there had been no family around; her mother never spoke of Cassie's father except to say he had gone, that
we were better off without him,
so Cassie was left tiptoeing alone through her childhood in a constant state of alert, doing her best to keep the peace.

But there was always something that slipped past her watch. Sour milk turning in the fridge, a button fraying on Cassie's grade-school blouse—her mother would ignite at the smallest tinder, a wildfire of inexplicable anguish that would sweep through the house, raging for hours about the sacrifices she'd made, the great poet she could have been without the drudge and toil of domesticity dragging her down. Cassie soon learned to hide from her wrath, racing for the one lockable room in the house at the first sign of temper, crouching, hidden, behind the bathroom door in a tight ball of fear as she counted under her breath. Five hundred. Six hundred. Sometimes she would clear a thousand before the house would fall silent. Eventually, often hours later, Cassie would emerge with an aching head and empty stomach, to find nobody there—or, worse, a plate of grilled cheese waiting on the kitchen counter and that terrible look of shame and guilt in her mother's eyes.

Still, for all the ragged-nail anxiety of the fever dreams, Cassie preferred them to what came after: long months of lethargy, when her mother seemed to forget she was a person at all, and all Cassie could do was bring her slices of dry white toast, cover her with blankets where she lay unmoving on the couch. They moved around so much that nobody noticed her permission slips were signed with a vague scrawl, and that her mother's attendance at parent-teacher events was only at best sporadic.

Eventually, a mix of medication and maturity evened out her mother's more extreme attacks, until Joanna's dark days—as she called them with a nervous laugh—only came once or twice a year. They moved for the fifth and final time, settling on a tree-lined street in a city in the middle of Indiana. Her mother kept her poetry volumes packed away, found a job, and even married. Cassie had almost begun to believe things would be normal again when the fever dreams returned, and her mother opened her wrists one afternoon in the cracked enamel bathtub, bleeding to death with a half-empty bottle of pills beside her to underscore her final act.

Cassie's brief glimpse of stability was gone for good. The husband lasted another few months before dying, drunk, with the house burning to ash around him. Social services took Cassie into care, but after bouncing around the foster system until she turned sixteen, she took herself off the grid. After that came years of cheap motels and diner coffee as Cassie drifted, skittish, from one town to the next: dealing fake IDs and prescription pills to get by, and circling ever closer to her mother's fate until she found a currency more lucrative than most.