Page 44 of Apt to be Suspicious
Saturday, May 22nd
Pen had curled up in her window seat— an oddity of her sitting room, but a welcome one. She’d spent the day working on her actual assignments, though she was still fighting with one problem to discuss in her next tutorial. She had most of the solution, but it wasn’t remotely elegant, and she was certain she was missing something specific.
Now, however, she felt she could take a few hours for her more personal project. Magister Lefton had written to say he hoped to have time to speak to her in the next week. It would be excellent to have an actually organised form of what she’d been thinking about ready.
She didn’t know how one made a copy for him, but presumably Edmund knew that. She knew some people who couldn’t see, or not well, had someone read to them. There were other forms. But she wasn’t sure how they worked, or if perhaps they’d changed since some of what she’d seen when she was tiny and Grandmother had been helping clean out someone’s house. That had involved raised letters, which didn’t seem the sort of thing Pen could do on her own. At any rate, starting with a version for her use would be a help, so that was what she was doing.
Or at least, that was what she was attempting to do. She’d gone through five different sets of scrap paper, sketching out how to organise it. There was the version that laid out the problem and then the rest of it, like a geometry proof. None of the edges fit, though, and the logic didn’t flow smoothly, so she’d discarded that one.
The next, a plain list, was even worse. She kept wanting to draw lines with little annotations. The third time, she’d given in and added footnotes and organising symbols, but that just made a clutter of information and about three ink blots. The fourth had involved columns, which meant she’d had to rummage for her straightedge and clear space on her desk.
That had not improved anything. Now she was back in the window seat, using a large hardbound book as a lap desk, and trying something that might, in dim light, pretend to be a diagram. What she wanted to do was weave everything together, so that it could be unwoven differently, and she didn’t know how to make it go onto paper at all.
She was maybe three pieces into this attempt when there was a knock on her door, and then another, ten seconds later. “Come on, Pen. It’s Saturday evening. You can’t work all the time.”
“Yes, I can.” Pen called back, but then sighed and got up to undo the warding. Much simpler than Edmund’s, she’d been thinking that since Thursday. It made her wonder what he had to protect, whether there was a reason he was so cautious, and well, whether she ought, perhaps, to be more so. Outside, in the hallway, were Vesta and Audrey, but they had come bearing what looked like a tin of Ovaltine, miracle of miracles. Vesta disappeared to go fill Pen’s kettle, while Audrey settled on the floor. Pen reclaimed the window seat, setting her notes aside. “Neither of you have plans tonight?”
“Gossiping with our friend,” Audrey said promptly, then tilted her head. “Or is that too raw?” Vesta came back right then, and set the kettle to boil.
“Vesta, you go to the archaeology lectures.” Vesta was reading Classical Archaeology, with a particular hope that someone doing something at, near, or related to Knossos might have an interest in her in due course. She actually had a lovely hand in archaeological illustration, along with her other virtues. She could sometimes be persuaded to do wickedly accurate caricature sketches if she were in the right mood.
Vesta settled in the easy chair, her slippers off and her feet tucked up under her. “Yes, obviously. Any I can.”
“What do you think of Edmund Carillon? I mean, no. What’s he like there? When he’s, I don’t know. Reading Greats.”
Vesta snorted, amused. “As opposed to all the other times? There are reasons I’m not. Greats is an all-consuming mistress, jealous of any other interest.”
Pen was entirely certain that Edmund had more capacity than the ordinary sort, but she had no idea how he managed it either. “I mean. I’ve talked to him— yes, danced with him— but I don’t know what he’s like around other people when I’m not there. The quotidian things.”
“You just like the word quotidian and look forward to chances to use it,” Audrey said.
Pen shrugged, because it was true, why argue with it? People who did cryptic crosswords liked puzzles, but many of them— the ones she liked anyway— also liked words that way. Turning them in the light of the mind, this way and that, to see what colours flashed or shapes reflected on the floor. She’d never tried to explain it to anyone else other than Aunt Agnes, but she knew it was true. She just looked at Vesta.
“He’s, I don’t know. What you’d expect of someone reading Greats and taking it seriously. He comes in, often with one or two other people, but not always the same ones. From there, it depends. If we’re at the museum, it’s all standing around awkwardly, balancing our notebooks on our arms. But he’s doing the Homeric Archaeology informal course with Miss Gray.” Vesta shrugged. “He finds a seat; he takes out a notebook. That’s the sort of thing you want?” Pen nodded, and Vesta went on. “He doesn’t sit front and centre. Well, not like I do. So I don’t always see him during class. And if I moved, people would gossip.”
“Please don’t provoke gossip on my account. That’s not at all necessary,” Pen said immediately. “Does he ask questions? What, um, category of questions, I guess that’s what I want to know.”
Vesta had to think about that one for a moment, long enough that the kettle sang. Audrey grabbed the Ovaltine tin to measure out spoonfuls and stir them into the water in each cup. Once they each had a mug, Vesta said, “He asks about one question each lecture. More than some people, less than some. Again, me. His are specific. What a particular site suggests about how things worked there, or how the building fit together. He knows more about buildings than I would have expected, actually?”
Pen was not sure how you measured how much someone ought to know about buildings. But she supposed that spending some years living in an actual castle, coming up on its millennia, might incline one to be interested in a building. The Carillons had buildings. An estate and more. And it wasn’t as if Oxford lacked architecture of some interest. Maybe the question was— and Dad would agree with this— why more people didn’t think about buildings properly. “And he’s, I don’t know. Not rude?”
That was the thing. He’d made an offer, if a cautious one, ready to retract it. She wasn’t sure what the friendship of someone like Edmund Carillon meant. Not what it meant to him, not what it meant for her. Certainly, she didn’t feel she knew what it might oblige her to.
Vesta tilted her head. “Come on, Pen, why are you asking?”
“He might,” Pen took a breath and let it out. “We were talking about something he thought I could help with on Tuesday. And maybe I did. He— I don’t know. Rather skilfully, now I think about it, suggested that we could be friends, but only if I wanted to. The same thing with using first names. He trusted me with some information he didn’t need to, when I’d been a bit, um. Rude, maybe. Standoffish, certainly.”
“Do you want to be friends with him? I mean, you’re going to make a number of women entirely jealous. He’s kept most people at arm’s length. Not the men so much. He’s all hail-fellow-well-met, had you noticed? Though he gives the Bullingdon a wide berth. Even if I think he might have got an invitation if he had indicated he wanted one.”
The Bullingdon was one of Oxford’s most exclusive, infamous, and prone to vandalism clubs. They had a particular inclination toward drunken destruction of property at least once a term. The sort of destruction where the men involved— just men— simply paid up on the spot. Pen snorted. “Didn’t go to the right school for that set.”
“No, but he’s got money, and he’s posh enough. It drips off him when he’s— actually.” Vesta paused. “That’s the thing he doesn’t do in lectures. He’s not taking up extra space. Just the same amount as anyone else. He doesn’t hang back, being condescending about knowing everything. He doesn’t insist that he knows better than the rest of us. He’s deliberately in the middle. Even though I think we can all agree that whatever else he is, he’s clever, and he does exams extremely well?”
Pen had to laugh. “I mean, he’s wearing the evidence of that every time he puts on a gown this term. There weren’t as many firsts awarded as some years, I heard. Though I’ve no idea if that’s true.”
“Depends on how you define the numbers, I gathered.” Vesta said, waving a hand. “I’ll get the details for you, and you can do whatever statistics magic pleases you on them. Anyway, yes, getting a first still is quite a trick. He is obviously clever and has a good head on his shoulders. And no, he’s not rude or unpleasant. It’ll just make people gossip if you’re seen more with him. Do you mind that?”
“I mean, I’m scarcely the sort he’d look for anything serious with. Also, he is too annoyingly, I don’t know, together, sometimes. No one our age ought to look that polished all the time.”
