Page 3 of This Vicious Hunger
“A female student,” the driver murmurs to himself when we are long out of the city. “Well, I never.”
“Yes,” I say hesitantly. “I know it’s unusual.”
“Stranger things have happened, I’m sure. Though I’ve never heard it.” The driver chuckles. “What are you going to study? Nursing or something?” I rankle a little at his suggestion. This Dr. Petaccia is a doctor of medicine, true, but just because I am a woman doesn’t mean the care of others is what I’m best suited to.
“Botany, actually.” I hide a smirk at his blank look. “It’s the study of plants. Ascience. And maybe I’ll take some classes inmedicine too,” I add, although the idea seems absurd. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“What’s your husband have to say about that?”
I glance down at the ring I’m still wearing on my wedding finger—half because I know it will be easier to avoid attention as a widow than as a spinster, but also half because this is the last reminder I have of my father. I left all his plants behind this morning, and the small gold band was purchased with my dowry, money my father scrimped and saved for many years for my future. Madame could have asked for it back, but she seemed only too happy to get rid of it—along with all other evidence of my existence.
“My husband has nothing to say,” I reply coolly. “He’s dead.”
The driver sinks into silence, eyeing me warily but asking no more questions. I turn my gaze back to the road ahead, delighting in the way the scenery changes as we draw away from the roll of open fields.
We first pass the small chapel used by the villagers, and then the market square and a tavern—silent at this hour. My father said that the village existed long before the university, but as we approach I am not sure how that can be possible. The village looks lived-in, the stone buildings old and heavy enough, but it exists entirely in the shadow of the St. Elianto campus.
The truth of the university is somewhere between my father’s stories and my lonely dreams. It is a collage of white columns and twisted terra-cotta spires above pale flat roofs embedded in the hillside. It is dust rolling up around the wheels of the pony cart and flourishing fields behind us.
We leave the village and it isn’t long before the only sound is once again the beat of the pony’s hooves and my driverhaughingandhmphingto himself. It is late morning and the sun is fierce, the air baked and green scented; as we approach the campus the air grows cooler, though, an oasis of dusty shade.
The driver guides the pony trap through the gates, scrolling text above giant columns, and along a lane lined with trees. Ahead I can make out what may be a clock tower, though all I can see are a turret and bells. I crane my neck back to read the words above the gate as we trundle beneath the arch, the hairs rising on my neck and arms as the temperature dips.
Doctrina est vita aeterna, the same words my father once muttered to me like an oath. Learning is life eternal.
I straighten my expression, wary of the excitement that flips in my belly. I may no longer be in mourning dress, but I’m not foolish enough to assume that the people here won’t gossip about my arrival the way they would back home. I still wear the shorn hair of sorrow—though of course how are they to know I gave more of it to my father’s cradle than to my husband’s?—and I’m sure many of them would have opinions about my being allowed to study here in the first place, widow or not.
The driver stops the trap at the end of the lane. There is a grand central square ahead, a handful of robed scholars crossing with their heads bent together and bundles of books dangling from string. They look hardly old enough to be away from home. One shades the sun from his eyes with his hand, but I’m invisible, not yet one of them, and they don’t pay me any mind.
“S’far as I go.”
The driver’s gruff voice startles me and I clamber down as gracefully as I can manage without taking his hand, my thick skirts swirling dust over my boots. Sweat drips down my spine. There’s no way I can manage to carry all my luggage alone, oreven one of the individual trunks, but most of it came from the house I shared with Aurelio, clothing and jewellery I never had a chance to wear during our marriage. I don’t wish to be ungrateful, I’m lucky Aurelio had so many things made for me after all, but still I feel no attachment to any of it.
I leave the luggage on the edge of the stone steps and cross the square empty-handed.
The room I have been allocated isn’t with the majority of the students here at St. Elianto. Generally the scholars and professors are men, educated in serious subjects—philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics—and the few women on staff are of the serving class, happily boarding in mixed accommodation.
Although I no longer possess the social rank I did before Aurelio’s death, somebody, somewhere, obviously decided I was not a poor enough relation to share the fate of the staff. Mind you, I’m not rich enough (or poor enough) for my risk to the morals of the young male scholars to be ignored either; instead, the room that is to be my home for as long as the university will have me is a good walk—or, apparently, preferably a short trap ride—from the main halls, classrooms, and two libraries boasted by the central campus and its square.
It is a thin, tall building that looks something like an old miniature mill, with dozens of windows and small balconies. It hardly matters to me what it looks like, but I appreciate that it is quiet.
The day has been a blur of paperwork, of dim, smoky reception rooms and men who all look the same to me. My arrival is clearly a bit of an inconvenience to most of them, though I haven’t encountered any downright hostility yet. For the most part theyseem glad that I am somebody else’s problem and have been content to point me onwards to get me out of the way.
I arrive at my rooms just as dusk is settling over the turrets and casting long shadows on the flat roofs below. In the distance the hills are hazy, purple and willow green. There is the softly distant sound of laughter, and I imagine the gentle rattle of clinking glasses and scratch of once-expensive cutlery on worn china in the dining hall, though this is pure fancy as I’ve yet to see the place. My own evening meal is waiting for me in my new room, or suite of rooms, which comprise a cramped sitting room with a desk pressed tight against the only window and a stove on the opposite wall, and an even smaller bedroom—washstand in the alcove that perhaps once housed a wardrobe, and another tiny window.
My luggage is already here. I try not to feel disappointed, but it looks about as out of place as I feel; the cream leather is flecked with dried mud and stands stark against the terra-cotta tiles. I press my back to the door, feeling the last of the day’s warmth seeping away. The sigh that escapes my body might as well be the fleeing of my spirit.
This morning I was full of zest. Everything had seemed like a fresh start, even the maps and papers, the list of dos and don’ts, the warnings about summer storms and promises of isolating winters when the campus is closed to all except the year-round boarders. After the last hours in the baking heat of the administration office, no ocean breeze to take the edge off, not even a whiff of snow-scented air from the hills able to infiltrate the campus, the warnings of winter never seemed farther away and I am almost ready to turn tail and run.
The reality is I have nowhere to go. The feeling weighs me down like a sack of soil, crushing the air from my lungs. Fighting it seems impossible.
It is one thing to dream of this place, to replay the stories in my mind, but the truth of it is something entirely different. This room, isolated from the scholars and the staff alike, is a reminder: I am not welcome here. I may have been invited, but I am not favoured. I am not a scholar, not a student, nor a professor. I am not here because I have earned my place. I am a widow, here by sheer chance because my father once received an offer from a friend in the right place, and my mother-in-law couldn’t wait to get rid of me.
Still, beneath the heavy exhaustion, my heart flutters. I feel sick with guilt, Aurelio’s memory large in my chest, and yet I’m also giddy with excitement. Tomorrow I will meet Dr. Petaccia. A professor of botany—a tenured and respected academic whose work has no doubt been published throughout the country, maybe even the world.
By all the criteria I have been taught since I was old enough to think, my life is over. I have nothing but Aurelio’s name and the clothes and jewels he once bought for me; I have no prospects, no social skills, nobody to broker another match, and nothing to offer in my favour even if I did. I am a charity case, standing here in rooms smaller than any woman my class should consider her own…
And yet, somehow, I am staring down the barrel of an education with one of the most well-regarded botanists in our fair world.
