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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Epilogue

  Also by Gillian Linscott

  Copyright

  Introduction

  OTHER WOMEN TEND TO BE ASKED ABOUT THEIR first kiss. In my case it’s my first murder. As it happened, kissing came into it as well but then that was inevitable because we were young, confident and pleased with ourselves. Younger in some ways than we had any right to be – considering that we were mostly in our twenties after all. Pleased with ourselves to an extent that, looking back, seems both enviable and infuriating because we were so sure that the world was waiting just for us with our brains, education and advanced opinions to keep it turning. Confident – in that first summer of the twentieth century and what proved to be the last summer of Queen Victoria’s reign – that as the world turned our lives and most other things would go on getting better and better. It was that confidence that took a blow early one morning in July in a river meadow to the north of Skiddaw when a horse named Sid came galloping out of the mist with a dead man on his back.

  Chapter One

  I WAS IN PARADISE AND IT WAS ANNOYING ME. The sky was a deep navy blue with the first stars coming out at the end of a long hot day. The scent of gently crushed grass and lake water was all around us, with the occasional waft from the honeysuckle and roses winding themselves lovingly up the college walls. There were two swans on the lake, one with its head tucked under its wing, the other with its head in the water and neck bent into a hoop. A stage had been built on the lawn at the lake edge surrounded by candle lamps and big pale moths were circling round. Altogether Oxford in June was much as I’d dreamed it would be in damp rooms of German cities on foggy November days or wandering on my own around scorching Spanish streets at siesta time. I only wished it would be a little less perfect so that I didn’t feel guilty for not appreciating it enough.

  There was nothing to complain about in the human landscape either. Two of the best friends I’d made since coming back to England were sitting on the grass beside me, Imogen with her head bent and her fair hair flopping forward, Midge with her hat off and her brown hair untidy as usual, laughing so that her eyes screwed up and the freckles met over the bridge of her nose. She was laughing at something one of the men had just said, Alan probably because he was doing most of the talking. He was sitting cross-legged on the other side of Imogen, his right knee in its grey silk stocking almost touching her dress, no more than a hand’s breadth between them. He was at least as easy to look at as everything else in the college garden, only if there was a hint of imperfection it was that the stockings were wrinkling round his calves. He was conscious of that and every now and then he’d smooth them with both hands, up from the ankle then slowly round the knee. I noticed that Imogen’s eyes – hidden from him by the screen of her hair – were following the movement until she saw me watching too, blushed and looked away. A waste, because Alan looked good in Elizabethan costume. His hair was only a few shades darker than Imogen’s own primrose-pale swathes and his face that seemed too pale and fine-boned by day was sharp and intelligent in the half-light. His friend Kit sitting alongside him was less convincing as a Renaissance grandee. It wasn’t a period that suited his small, wiry stature and you could more easily have imagined him as one of Robin Hood’s band swinging down from trees or running through the forest. He was a better actor than Alan, especially in comedy, but for this production was condemned to walk on as an attendant lord and make do with what was left in the college’s theatrical wardrobe when the leading actors had finished with it. Pink stockings, clumsily darned, sagged round his calves and the black velvet doublet was meant for broader shoulders. In spite of that, he was more to my taste, considered from a purely aesthetic point of view, than the conventionally handsome Alan. Kit had dark eyes and a way of looking at people very directly then looking away, as if his stare might take from them more than they wanted to give. He had a wicked sense of humour, wrote good poetry and played lawn tennis like an avenging demon. We’d been partners once in carefully chaperoned mixed doubles and beat the opposition so thoroughly that nobody would take us on after that. But if I’d hoped – and perhaps I had hoped a little – that the acquaintance might ripen off the tennis court, I’d been disappointed. Perhaps height had something to do with it. I stand at five foot seven in my tennis shoes so overtopped him by a couple of inches and men are sensitive about these things. Alan and Kit had been friends since their schooldays, both went to the same college to read classics and were usually together. They were both competitive with other people but so far not with each other. Alan was hard-working and probably heading for a respectable second-class degree while Kit was brilliant and almost certainly destined for a first.

  The five of us had been sitting there on the grass and talking all the long interval while the stage was being prepared for the torchlight masque in the last act of Love’s Labours Lost. We’d been discussing whether it was Shakespeare’s best comedy, general verdict going against. From all around us the murmuring voices of other groups like ours rose gently upwards and mingled with the just-audible screeches of swallows taking their last looping flights of the day, out over the lake and back over the lawn. Perfect surroundings, company of friends, intelligent conversation – what more could I possibly want? The annoying thing was, I didn’t know.

  * * *

  I can see now that in that first summer of the twentieth century I was coming, belatedly, to the stage where the endless possibilities of being young narrowed down to the question of what you intend to do with your life. It wasn’t entirely my fault that I hadn’t got there until the age of twenty-three. My parents had been whole-heartedly in favour of education for women. In fact, they’d been in the vanguard of almost every advanced movement in the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century. Whatever you cared to name – socialism, Ibsenism, mixed bathing or rational dress reform – if it annoyed the majority we were in favour of it. So it had been taken for granted that I’d go up to Oxford when I was eighteen and study for a career.

  What went wrong was that my father, a doctor, died in a diptheria epidemic when I was seventeen and my mother took to travelling. She said it was because living was cheaper on the Continent and since my father had never been attracted to rich patients we had to be careful with money. But the truth was, it was the only way she could cope with missing my father. As soon as the novelty of a place wore off her sense of loss would come back, sharp as ever, so for three years we zigzagged across and up and down Europe in search of the place where the food and the beds were clean, cheap and wholesome and there wasn’t a space at the table where my father should have been sitting. In the en
d, the nearest thing we found to it was in Athens, where my mother met a German professor of archaeology. They did their courting around the Acropolis, married in a Protestant church and set up home in a tent on a site he was excavating.

  I wished them joy with all my heart and went back to England to take up the place at Somerville College that I’d wanted so much through all our wanderings. That had been almost two years ago and things had gone well enough. I’d made friends, managed to smooth the idiomatic French, German and Italian I’d picked up on our travels into something more polished and academic. But my disorderly life had left me with a restlessness that wouldn’t go away and nights like this made it worse, because it seemed like ingratitude.

  * * *

  ‘Oh, you’re so lucky.’

  That long sigh from Imogen was directed not at me, who deserved it, but at the two men. She now had Alan’s plumed hat in her lap. One of the ostrich feathers had got bent and she was trying to straighten it, running her long fingers through the clinging fronds. Both Alan and Kit seemed mesmerised by it.

  ‘Aren’t they lucky, Nell?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They’re going to spend the long vac scholar-gypsying in the Lake District.’

  Midge said, more prosaically, ‘They’re getting up a reading party in July. Healthy open-air life, reading ancient Greek and discussing philosophy.’

  Midge is a mathmetician, so sceptical. Kit gave her a long look, not liking being teased.

  ‘Not philosophy the way the examiners mean it. We want to step back from the world for a while and discuss what’s wrong with it and what we should be doing about it.’

  ‘Will you be like the men in Love’s Labours Lost?’ Imogen asked. ‘You’ll swear to eat only one meal a day and sleep three hours a night and have nothing to do with women.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Alan said. His voice sounded strained. Perhaps it was from having to pitch his lines in the first act against the quacking of mallards on the lake.

  ‘Why not necessarily?’

  ‘We thought you might like to come with us.’

  There was a sudden silence among our little group. Imogen stopped stroking the feather.

  ‘We beingz…?’

  ‘You and Nell and Midge and anybody else you like.’

  He tried hard to make it sound light, but he knew he’d probably gone too far. The fact was that even sitting here in the twilight and talking we were at or beyond the outer limits of what our colleges would regard as acceptable behaviour between male and female students. The limits weren’t often stretched as far as this because, more than twenty years after women students had first appeared at Oxford, most undergraduates still chose to regard us as freaks of nature that might go away if ignored. The fact that Alan and Kit were sitting here on the grass with us on friendly terms, as if we were something normal and acceptable like other men’s sisters, was explained by two things. The first was that Alan and Kit took a pride in being advanced men in politics and social matters, a cut above the mindless sportsmen and natural conservatives who made up the majority of the student population. The second thing was Imogen’s beauty. It was a fact of Oxford life that couldn’t be ignored even by the most crass of the sporting hearties who pretended that women students were all frights and blue stockings. Those two things might save Alan and Kit from the heavy-footed jokes of their colleagues but they wouldn’t have helped us if our college authorities had seen us. Behaviour that was just about acceptable for men would, on our part, give rise to gossip, provide ammunition for people who argued that women at university would only cause trouble and set back the cause of women’s education for generations. We’d only been allowed out unchaperoned for the play on the grounds that it was Shakespeare, therefore educational, and I being two years older than the others was a responsible person. We’d been told to be back by ten. Since it was past nine already and the play was running late, that would mean missing most of the last act. I could see that Midge was already fidgeting. In the circumstances, Alan’s modest proposal that we should join their reading party was like suggesting a little afternoon outing to storm the Bastille.

  ‘We couldn’t,’ Midge said.

  ‘Give one logical reason why not.’

  Imogen said, ‘They’d throw us out, that’s why not.’

  ‘Your college? They needn’t know.’

  ‘Oh, so we start deceiving people, do we?’

  I was pleased with Imogen for being so sharp with Alan. She’d shown signs recently of being altogether too impressed by him – especially since he’d sent her a rather laboured sonnet cycle tucked in a small basket of roses. I worried sometimes that rivalry over Imogen might threaten Alan and Kit’s long friendship. As far as Midge and I could tell, Alan was the favoured one but she hadn’t taken us into her confidence and it was hard to be sure because there weren’t many opportunities for men and women to meet. No question, of course, of Imogen being alone with either of them. Safety in numbers was the motto of various college authorities as far as they tolerated any social contact at all between the sexes. But at any of the occasions where we were allowed to mix, chatting for a few minutes on the pavement after lectures or at plays or concerts like this, you’d usually find Imogen with Kit on one side and Alan on the other, the two men staring at her or each other with that little crackle of electricity in the air that means storms ahead. We’d got through to the last week of Trinity term with no thunder and lightning but I could tell from the way that Kit was glancing from Alan’s face to Imogen’s and back that this business of the reading party mattered to him as well.

  Before Alan could answer, the toe of a brown brogue nudged his grey silk knee and a voice above our heads said, ‘You’re wanted, both of you.’

  Unlike the other two Nathan was in modern dress, in his case flannel trousers that looked crumpled and grass-stained even in the half-light, a tweed jacket with wood shavings clinging to it, a soft collar and a tie worn in a loose loop with a tight knot so that it looked more like a noose. Even by student standards he was not a fussy dresser. He was tall, plump and bear-like. Unfashionably, he wore sideburns and a bushy beard, ginger brown in colour, so that his round face was framed in a mass of hair that seemed a perpetual fire risk in view of his fondness for pipe smoking. He was short-sighted and his thick-lensed glasses were often smeared with paint, as now. His excuse for being even more untidy this evening was that he was scene builder and property master for the play. Nathan had been baptised Nathaniel, but nobody used the name, any more than they expected Midge to answer to Millicent. If there hadn’t been storms between Kit and Alan, Nathan was probably the reason, the best-tempered one of their trio, less brilliant than Kit and not as serious-minded as Alan with a love of practical jokes and conjuring tricks. Nathan would go to endless lengths to get a friend out of trouble – then more lengths to climb into his room and sew his pyjama legs together or serve him sausages that squeaked when he dug a fork into them. He’d have rather gone to art college than Oxford but his father had insisted and he was studying theology from – as he put it – a safe distance. The distance was so safe that in two years he claimed not to have learned the way to the lecture halls and the man assigned to be his tutor had bumped into him in The High without recognising him. By his own account the only reason he’d survived so far was that theology dons were the laziest creatures this side of the South Seas and it would have been too much trouble to send him down. That might have been true, or it might simply have been that everybody liked Nathan. Alan twitched his knee away.

  ‘Already?’

  ‘If you don’t get a move on it will be pitch-dark before we get to the Masque of the Worthies and all my lovely work will be wasted.’

  Kit was on his feet already, in one supple movement. Alan followed more slowly and Imogen gave him back his plumed hat. The two of them flourished the hats at arms’ length then held them over their hearts in a courtly bow to all of us. Imogen watched as they walked away.

  ‘May I j
oin you, ladies?’

  We nodded and Nathan sat down on the flattened grass where the other two had been. Midge asked him, ‘Are you going on this reading party with them?’

  ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world. I’ve never met a centaur in the flesh before.’

  Imogen, ignoring his nonsense, said, ‘He invited us to join them.’ I was surprised she’d bothered to mention it.

  ‘Jolly good idea. We can swim in the river and help with the haymaking and have all kinds of larks.’

  I pointed out that haymaking would be over by the time they got there but nobody took any notice. Midge was still trying to make sense of his earlier remark.

  ‘Do they have centaurs in Cumberland, then?’

  ‘Not sure about the plural. As far as I know, Alan’s uncle is the only one.’

  ‘Alan’s uncle?’

  ‘Great uncle, I think. Old as the hills and as mad as King Lear.’

  ‘And half horse?’

  ‘At least half, from what Alan says. He’s got this stud of Arabians. Only thing he cares about. The story Alan heard from his father was that the old boy kicked around the world a lot when he was younger, native wars, piracy on the high seas and goodness knows what. Anyway, at some point he fetches up in the desert, saves the life of some sheik or other high-up and gets presented with a stallion and two mares as a reward. So he ships them back to Southampton and sets up a stud in Hampshire.’

  ‘I thought you were going to the Lake District?’

  ‘Hampshire was about twenty years ago. The Centaur’s a migratory beast. Apparently he keeps quarrelling with his neighbours and having to pack up his saddlebags and move on because he’s made the place too hot for himself. He’s used up most of England now and is within sight of the Scottish border. It’s the very last bit of the Lake District he’s in, overlooking the Solway Firth.’

  ‘I know where you mean. It’s the view when you’re looking north from the top of Skiddaw.’

  They all looked at me, wondering why I thought that added to the story, and of course it didn’t. The fact was I loved the Lake District but hadn’t dared set foot in it since I’d come back to England. It was where we’d spent family holidays when my father could tear himself away from whatever city he’d been practising and politicking in at the time. My brother Stuart and I had walked for miles with him over the fells, rowed on Ullswater, learned to climb on the crags at Dungeon Ghyll. Suddenly and sharply, I wanted to be back there on Skiddaw’s slatey summit looking out over the Solway to the Scottish hills.