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I made some polite and noncommittal noises, and quickly drew the session to a close. As I left the Temple precincts I tried to tell myself that Margery had not answered my question; however, I knew that she had.

* * *

TWELVE

Sunday, 9 January-

Thursday, 13 January

Man for the field and woman for the hearth:

Man for the sword and for the needle she:

Man with the head and woman with the heart:

Man to command and woman to obey;

All else confusion.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

« ^ »

I left the next morning for Oxford with a strong sense of brushing the dust from my boots. I would push it all from me, all the upset and confusion of Margery’s apparent duplicity and, behind it, the impossible occurrences of Thursday night. Not for me the tugs and pulls of Right Action, the flattery of being Margery’s personal tutrix, the courtly intrigue of the Inner Circle, the plotting and animosity of Marie. I did not feel any urge to take up my copy of Mysticism and find what Miss Underhill had to say about the physical side effects of mystical rapture, the bodily manifestations that could occur when the soul joined the Divine in a state of ecstasy. Like a child sick on too much chocolate, I wanted nothing more to do with it, and so I turned my back on London and returned to my own country.

The truth of it struck me as soon as I saw the spires of Oxford beginning to glimmer into solidity through the mist. This was, indeed, my home, as no other place was, or had been, or would be. I would buy a house here, I thought. What did I need with London? Or with Sussex, for that matter? Sussex could be for me what it had been for my mother, a summer cottage where I might play at farmer, but here, in this fold of earth between the rivers, this collection of buildings at once ethereal and human, was where my heart lay. Boar’s Hill, perhaps, or Marston. Holmes did not need me; far better to take the initiative and remove myself from his irritated, and irritating, presence. I would speak to an estate agent—after the twenty-eighth.

I crawled into my books and pulled the pages up over my head, emerging only when I was thrown out of Bodley in the evenings. It was too dark to read by the light of the street-lamps, so I had a quarter hour or so of simple, mindless movement in the cold, wet, dark air to my rooms. In the mornings, I carried an umbrella, that I might read while walking back to the Bodleian, and each day I slipped into the library’s miasma of old leather and damp wool with the incredulous relief of a caught fish being put back into its pool.

Even a fish must eat, however. On Wednesday, I rose briskly from my table to check a reference and was swept by a wave of nausea and dizziness. I grasped the edge of the table until it passed, and it dawned on me that I had not had a proper meal since—when, Saturday, Friday? And then, as if my body had been waiting for one sensation to push its way through to the surface, I was made immediately aware of dire thirst, the need to visit a WC, a stiff back, an incipient headache, and a corpselike sluggishness of all the muscles in my legs and arms. I dropped my pen and took up my coat and made straight for the nearest pub that served decent bar food: I couldn’t even bear to wait while a proper meal was cooked.

The crowded pub was sprinkled with black gowns. I pushed my way in with determination, until halfway across the room a hand came up from the level of my waist and imperiously bade me stop. I focused on the people at the table and saw three familiar faces looking up at me with amusement at the grim set of my features, as well as with a flattering amount of welcome and bonhomie. I do not make friends easily, but these three were more than acquaintances.

“Mary, just the person! Reggie, go get her a pint,” said Phoebe. The two of them were an unlikely pair, she big, brusque, and horsey, he small, neat, and quiet, but they were both brilliant in their shared field, which was cellular biology. I had met them two years ago in an