The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [276]
‘My wife thinks I have been sitting in Boldre for too long,’ he assured the grateful Tottons just as firmly as if it had been true. ‘She positively insists I accompany you. Remember, I was up at Oxford myself, so to visit it again is nothing but a pleasure to me.’
With the vicar as their companion there could be no doubt of the girls’ safety. ‘Indeed,’ as Fanny reminded Louisa, ‘it is really a great honour for us to travel with such a distinguished man.’ And so, in high spirits they had set off in the Albions’ best carriage to Winchester and thence up the old road that led, due north, the forty miles to Oxford.
By mid-morning they were installed in one of the city’s best inns, the Blue Boar in Cornhill, the girls sharing one room, Mr Gilpin taking another. And promptly at noon Edward Totton called for them.
Having embraced his sister and his cousin, bowed and expressed his honour that Mr Gilpin should have accompanied them and seeing that they were all eager to explore the city, Edward suggested they should make a tour forthwith.
What a delight the city was. With its broad, cobbled main streets, and its curious medieval lanes, ancient Gothic churches side by side with splendid neoclassical façades, the university had been quietly growing there for more than five centuries. Its streets were busy with all kinds of people. Tradesmen and farmers from the countryside around mixed with clerics and poor scholars, rich young men with powdered hair, stern professors in academic gowns and visitors like themselves. Here they would pass a stately gateway and porter’s lodge, like the entrance to a palace, and look into the huge cobbled quadrangle behind; there, down an alley, they would peep into some dark little yard that appeared to have been forgotten since medieval monks had used it four hundred years before.
Edward was very cheerful, the girls in high spirits; but Fanny did not fail to notice, with admiration, the role that Mr Gilpin assumed. He accompanied them in the most companionable way, but said little. Occasionally – when they came to the Bodleian Library, for instance, or the classical perfection of Sir Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre – he would step forward and point out quietly, in his deep voice, a few of each building’s finer points. Not to do so, after all, would have been failing in his duty. When they visited his own college, Queen’s, he naturally took them round. But apart from these occasions he seemed to prefer to bring up the rear, letting Edward conduct the tour and not even allowing a hint of a frown to cross his distinguished brow when Edward got things wrong. Indeed, he seemed to be enjoying himself just as much as they were, as he poked his head into familiar old nooks and crannies with a delighted ‘Aha’, to find them just as they had been fifty years before. They visited mighty Balliol College, stately Christchurch, pleasant Oriel and, at towards three o’clock, came to Edward’s own college, which was Merton.
‘We say we are the oldest college,’ he informed them.
‘Disputed.’ Gilpin chuckled.
‘The first to be built, at least,’ Edward responded with a smile. ‘In 1264. We are very proud of ourselves. The Master of the college is known as the Warden.’
Merton was certainly delightful. Its quadrangles were not large and grand, but more intimate and suggestive of its antiquity. Its chapel, however, was a very imposing affair, at the west end of which were a number of monuments and memorials. They had paused in front of a rather fine one to a Warden, Robert Wintle, who had died some decades before, and Gilpin had just begun to say, ‘A fine scholar, I remember Robert Wintle well,’ when Edward interrupted him with a happy cry: ‘Ah, here he is! I told him he’d find us at Merton.’
And to their