No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [38]
Beecher glanced at it and smiled. “Eugene Onegin,” he explained.
Joseph was surprised. “Here?”
“No, St. Petersburg. The world is smaller than you think, isn’t it! And Carmen.” Beecher indicated the picture at the bottom of the page. “But apparently they’ve revived Boito’s Mefistofele at Covent Garden, and they say it’s very good. The Russian Ballet has Daphnis and Chloe at Drury Lane. Not really my kind of thing.”
Joseph smiled. “Nor mine,” he agreed. “How about a sandwich or a pie and a glass of cider at the Pickerel?” It was the oldest public house in Cambridge, just a few yards along the street, across the Magdalene Bridge. They could sit outside in the fading light and watch the river, as Samuel Pepys might have done when he was a student here in the seventeenth century, or anyone else over the last six hundred years.
“Good idea,” Beecher agreed immediately, rising to his feet. The room was a pleasant clutter of books. Latin was his subject, but his interest lay in the icons of faith. He and Joseph had spent many hours positing theory after theory—serious, passionate, or funny—as to what was the concept of holiness. Where did it move from being an aid to concentration, a reminder of faith, into being the object of reverence itself, imbued with miraculous powers?
Beecher picked up his jacket from the back of the old leather chair and followed Joseph out, closing the door behind them. They went down the steps and across the quad to the massive front gate with its smaller door inset, and then out into St. John’s Street, and left to the Magdalene Bridge.
The terrace outside the Pickerel was crowded. As usual, there were punts on the river, drifting along toward the bridge, silhouetted for a moment beneath its arch, then gone as they turned and followed the stream.
Joseph ordered cider and cold game pie for both of them, then carried the provisions to a table and sat down.
Beecher regarded him steadily for a moment or two. “Are you all right, Joseph?” he asked gently. “If you need a little more time, I can take some of your work. Really—”
Joseph smiled. “I’m better working, thank you.”
Beecher was still watching him. “But?” he questioned.
“Is it so obvious?”
“To someone who knows you, yes.” Beecher took a long draft of his cider, then set the glass down. He did not press for an answer. They had been friends since their own student years here, and spent many holidays walking together in the Lake District or along the ancient Roman wall that stretched across Northumberland and Cumbria from the North Sea to the Atlantic. They had imagined the legionaries of the Caesars who had manned it when it was the outer edge of empire against the barbarian.
They had tramped for miles, and sat in the sun staring over the moors in the light and shadow, eaten crusty bread and cheese, and drunk cheap red wine. And they had talked of everything and nothing, and told endless jokes, and laughed.
Joseph wondered whether to say anything to Beecher about his father’s death and the fear of a conspiracy of the magnitude he had suggested, but he and Matthew had agreed not to speak of it, even to their closest friends.
“I was contemplating the ugly situation in Europe,” he said aloud, “and wondering what sort of future lies ahead for the men who graduate this year. Darker than for us.” He looked at his cider, sparkling a little in the long amber light. “When I graduated, the Boer War was over, and the world had all the excitement of a new century. It looked as if nothing would ever change except for the better—greater wisdom, more liberal laws, travel, new art.”
Beecher’s slightly crooked face was grave. “There are shifts of power all the time, and socialism is a rising force—I don’t think anything can stop it,” he said.
“Nor should it. We’re moving to a real enlightenment, even votes for women in time.”
“I was thinking more of the crisis in the Balkans,” Joseph said, taking another bite of his pie and talking with his mouth full. “That’s what many of our students are worried about.” He said many, but he was thinking