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“Look at that boy in the scholar's gown, Peter.”
Her husband made a mild, interrogative noise. A characteristic noise, Harriet thought, indicative of his general personality and outlook.
“Don’t you think he has a look of Bredon about him?”
Peter considered the young undergraduate, his head slightly tilted to one side, like a sand-coloured spaniel pondering a ball. The cornsilk of his hair had turned to silver at his temples, and Harriet longed to run her hand across it, to smooth it back behind his ear.
But this was Oxford, and such a thing could not be contemplated: not in a college chapel, and certainly not in sub fusc, not even if one happened to be Duchess of Denver. She satisfied herself in pleating the edge of her MA gown between her fingers while Peter regarded the young man seated in the tenor section.
“You are quite right, of course, Harriet. Something about the nose, and those particularly light eyes.”
“Like seaglass.”
“One spot of green, and all the blue of heaven—yes, blue as well, I fancy—though you can judge far better than I.”
Peter’s own eyes—light and ironical as ever—were these days faintly clouded, as though their colour was somehow far away, like the wistful background of a painting: a Florentine landscape glimpsed between the arches of a classical arcade, while in the foreground some merchant’s wife or burgher’s daughter condescended to sit and have her portrait made.
The vaulted hall rang with applause as the conductor, in white tie and academic dress, flapped his way along the nave. The choir rose, and Harriet watched the young man’s sharp countenance lift in readiness, musical score held at elbow-height before him. She resolved to look out for him at the inevitable drinks reception.
He had an interesting face. She collected interesting faces.
The assembly poured itself out into the cloisters, where drinks were served, and thence onto the grass, an act which always gave Harriet the thrill of committing a minor sin. Peter was waylaid by an acquaintance, and after a while Harriet sighted the young man in the scholar’s gown, standing at the edge of the crowd, holding a glass of lemon barley water.
She approached him, beginning with some well-worn remarks about the beauty of the college in the evening sunshine, with which he politely agreed.
“You sang very well,” she said.
“Oh.” He raised a defensive hand, brushing the side of his neck. “Thank you.”
“Not many undergraduates stay at Oxford in the summer—are you working on a research project?”
“No,” he said, “just… working. At the OUP.”
In her younger years, Harriet would have flushed or stammered; now she looked at him steadily and said, “I see.”
A grammar school, then—for all his flattened, careful vowels—as well as a scholarship. She supposed that made things rather difficult. Oxford did not readily tolerate difference, even in these enlightened days.
“And I prefer it to going home,” he added.
Curiouser and curiouser, Harriet thought, but she said, “My son Paul is just the same—he’s off traipsing around the Hebrides at the moment, much good it will do him. He’s at Balliol, reading history.”
“Lonsdale,” said the young man. “Greats.”
“Enjoying it?”
“Yes.”
“And how do you find Oxford? I suppose your people are very proud.”
Harriet was surprised to see an unguarded flash of bitterness pass across his expressive face. She was suddenly, painfully reminded of Peter in the years before they married: Peter in the visitors’ room of Holloway Gaol; in her dead man’s rooms at Mrs. Lefranc’s; sitting in the lounge of the Egotists’ Club with his two cracked ribs. She shook unwelcome memory away.
“It’s something for my stepmother to tell the neighbours,” he said colourlessly.
Harriet felt rather sorry for him: an awkward, fledgling boy in his scholar’s gown. If only he were a friend of Paul’s—she wanted absurdly to invite him to spend a week at Denver, to let him bury himself in the library, or hurl himself out into woods and streams of the park: whatever he liked, whatever might lift that unseen weight from his shoulders, from the soft crown of his head. But noblewomen could not invite strange young undergraduates to stay at their country estates, no matter how unlikely a noblewoman she may be.
She settled for a slight smile, which she hoped was conciliatory.
“I don’t suppose you know,” said the young man, after a moment in which neither of them spoke. He was looking across the quadrangle,where Peter stood in conversation with a patrician-looking Fellow. “Whether that’s—”
Harriet laughed. “Professor Tolkien? Yes, I believe it is.”
“Oh, no.” He shot her a quick sideways glance. “I meant the other man—is that Lord Peter Wimsey?”
Harriet fought hard to keep her countenance. “I think so,” she said carefully. “Although he’s the Duke of Denver these days.”
“Yes—of course.”
“Are you an admirer of his work?”
“I don’t have much time for novels any more,” he said, “but those accounts of his cases—the fictionalised ones, you know. I read them when I was at school. They’re really very good.”
Harriet smiled into her glass.
“Much better than—well. Lots of people like Agatha Christie,” he added quickly, as if he thought she might be offended.
“Agatha Christie is very popular,” she said evenly.
“But Harriet Vane’s books—well, they’re much better in my opinion. She was a student here, you know.”
“Indeed?”
“I suppose most people of note were either here or at Cambridge.”
“Oh, you mustn’t call it that, you know,” she said. “Not on these hallowed grounds. It’s the other place—they do the same for us there.”
“Oh.” He absorbed this.
Harriet regarded him for a moment and then, looking up, saw Peter moving towards her through the crowd. “Thank goodness, Harriet,” said he, reaching her side as a swimmer gains the shore. “By thy great mercy defend me from all perils of Romish philologists.”
“Peter, darling—”
“I admire the man greatly, but once buttonholed it is next to impossible to make good one’s escape—he holds him with his glittering eye and whatnot.”
“Peter,” she said quellingly, and Peter was duly quelled. “Allow me to introduce you to my young friend.” She turned to her undergraduate. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”
“Morse,” he managed, pink to the finely-cut heights of his cheekbones.
“Peter, this is Mr Morse. Mr Morse, this is my husband Peter, Duke of Denver.”
They shook hands solemnly; or, at least, Morse was solemn, head a little bowed, and Peter his habitual keen, convivial self.
“Morse, hm? Any relation?”
The young man stared. “To… Samuel, Your Grace? Not—not to my knowledge.”
He knows the proper form then, thought Harriet. And yet, is that very surprising, in a well-read grammar school boy? It was just the sort of thing she herself would have known at his age.
“No, of course not,” Peter was saying. “He was an American, wasn’t he?”
“I was telling Mr Morse how much we enjoyed his singing,” said Harriet. “He, in turn, is an admirer of my books.”
Morse’s colour rose even further. “If I’d known—” he began in an undertone.
“I am sorry,” said Harriet, “I hope you aren’t terribly embarrassed.”
He shook his head, looking down at his shoes. “Only glad I said nothing more incriminating, Your Grace.”
She laughed at that, and Peter, with his unerring talent for smoothing over the smallest of social stumbling blocks, embarked upon a highly entertaining story of finding himself, as an undergraduate, obliged to shin up a college drainpipe and effect a sortie through a second-floor window.
“In this very quadrangle, in fact. You can still see the mark in the lead where I started falling and had to cling on for jolly old dear life—yes up there, I fancy, just to the left of the sundial.”
In the end, they took Morse to dinner.
Harriet felt he’d earned it. And besides, he looked as though he could do with a nice square meal. She popped into the porters’ lodge just before they left, and found Bunter drinking a companionable cup of tea.
“At ease, Bunter,” she said. “We’ll toddle along to the Randolph under our own steam—I’d rather not have the Daimler frighten our companion away.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
They made their way along the High together: Harriet’s arm looped through Peter’s, and Morse on her other side, walking with his hands in his pockets. The evening was still warm, and the air smelled of heated stone slowly cooling. As they rounded Carfax, the city’s bells began to ring.
Towards the end of the following decade, Harriet returned to Oxford.
A funeral at Shrewsbury, and worrying whether academic dress was expected, and how to wear her hair, and falling quite to pieces at the memory of Miss de Vine and her pins like the White Queen. All funerals were bloody, but never so much as these days, since Peter—
When it was over, she escaped towards the Broad, thinking of Bodley and the balm of its quietude, but was waylaid outside Blackwells, where she stood for a long while looking into the window. She found she disliked most of the covers, and did not recognise very many of the authors. There was a Christie for Christmas, of course, but it was one of those rather uneven thrillers, with no proper detective.
Someone came out of the shop, passed her, and then came back. He was a youngish man, wearing a dark striped scarf, with something in a carrier bag tucked under his arm. She looked up into his light eyes—like seaglass—and the name came shimmering back to her. “Mr Morse.”
He inclined his head. “It’s kind of you to remember me, Your Grace.”
“Oh, please don’t bother about that,” she said. “I was only a true duchess for a short while in the grand scheme of things.” The Dowager Duchess was a title she disliked: she felt she were usurping her late mother-in-law or, far worse, turning into Helen.
“I was very sorry to hear—”
“Thank you,” she said, wanting to put an end to the subject before they began. “Now, what are you doing with yourself? Still in Oxford, good. But—” she considered him “—not an academic. You’re not dressed the part.”
“Not smart enough?” He plucked ruefully at his mackintosh.
“Quite the contrary—much too smart. And besides, you don’t have the general atmosphere of despair most dons cultivate.”
His mouth twitched at its corner. “I’m a policeman.”
“Oh, good,” said Harriet, meaning it. “I have a great deal of respect for policemen—especially the clever ones.”
He looked quietly pleased at this, eyes meeting hers before sliding quickly away.
“Are you still singing?”
“Yes—with the Oxford Chorus.”
“Well, don’t stop,” she said. “So many people let that sort of thing go fallow, but you mustn’t.”
“I won’t.” He showed her the carrier bag, which was emblazoned with the Blackwell’s monogram, and produced a modest selection of long-playing records: Purcell, Tallis, and Bach.
Harriet thought Peter would heartily approve, and said so. They crossed the Broad together and went up the steps to the Sheldonian, following their feet through the Schools Quad and out into Radcliffe Square. Morse offered her his arm as they navigated the cobblestones, and she took it gratefully. She wondered if they looked like a student and his visiting parent—but probably they were both too old.
Brasenose, and St Mary the Virgin, and down Magpie Lane towards Lonsdale, at which point Morse spoke with the gravity of one making a confession. “I didn’t finish my degree.”
“Oh?”
Grove Walk, Merton Field, and onto the Broad Walk, where they found a bench in a patch of winter sunshine.
“You won’t be too cold?” He extended a hand as he asked: an old-fashioned, courteous gesture. She wondered if he used it often in his work, putting worried lecturers and skittish clippies at their ease.
Harriet, who had wrapped layer upon layer for the graveside, shook her head. “Which was it,” she asked, “the work or a girl?”
His hands were folded in his lap. “Both—but mostly the girl.”
“And I suppose she married someone else?” He looked at her sharply—wounded. Harriet laid a hand on his forearm, applied pressure. “Poor boy.”
She told him about the Shrewsbury funeral, the Dower House and the flat she’d kept in town, how Bredon was getting on: how he was managing the farms and the fenland, husbanding Denver rather better than his father or uncle had ever done. The witterings of an old woman, but he did appear to be listening.
“Thatʼs how it happened, you know. You reminded me of Bredon—Peter thought the same.”
Morse said nothing, but tipped his head to one side, pulling at his earlobe. She remembered his mentioning a stepmother; remembered, too, her own urge to take him home.
The bells of Lonsdale chapel chimed the three-quarter hour, bright in the clear air.
Apparently on impulse, Morse reached into an inside pocket and brought out a notebook and pen. Writing quickly, he tore out a leaf of paper and gave it to her. E. Morse, it said, in a blue-black scrawl, and an Oxford telephone number.
“That’s the station. I’m not—not terribly settled anywhere at the moment, but the duty officer will know where I am. If there’s ever…” His eyes met hers briefly. “If there’s ever anything you need.”
“Thank you.” She was touched: by his thoughtfulness, by the intent behind the act. “Now, this E,” she said, smiling, bringing her writer’s brain to bear upon the problem. “It can’t be merely Edward, or Edmund, or you’d have made it out in full.”
He shook his head, amused and embarrassed, like a schoolboy.
“Even something ungainly like Edwin or Eric wouldn’t be so dreadful as to preclude you writing it down. Is it one of those peculiar saint’s names—Enodoc, or Eardwulf? Or something Ancient Greek?”
“Everyone just calls me Morse.”
“All the time, without exception? If I put that in a book no one would believe me. There would be letters.”
Morse was watching her, weighing her up—assessing her, she thought, as he might assess a suspect.
“Endeavour,” he said at last.
“Oh.”
He made an indeterminate noise, looking down at his hands. “You see why I don’t use it.”
“If it’s any consolation,” she said, “one of Peter’s names was Death. To rhyme with teeth, rather than breath—but that scarcely matters when one sees it on a gas bill.”
They rose and walked again, turning towards the Botanic Garden, its saplings wreathed in sackcloth for the winter. Magdalen Tower was unchanged, as always: gaunt and beautiful against the mottled sky. Bunter would be loitering somewhere with the car, his unerring, mystic sense of where he was needed still ticking over, even after all these years.
“I shall go and stand on Magdalen Bridge,” Harriet said, making up her mind. She would stare at the empty punts, and send her love to London river. “Would you—if you wanted to, of course—write to me? It needn’t be more than a line or two, just to let me know how you’re getting on.”
“Of course,” he said at once.
“Letters to the Dower House at Denver will always find me.” She could already picture it: a small, rumpled envelope, and her title immaculately rendered in that blue-black scrawl.
They regarded each other without speaking, though she felt—without knowing how the impression came upon her—as though words were welling up in him, somewhere close under the surface. That interesting face, so legible, and yet so obscure. He did look like Bredon, even through the passage of the years: something about the translucence of his skin, the hawkish nose, those changeable eyes.
She wondered if she ought to kiss his cheek, or whether he would attempt to kiss hers, but in the end they shook hands, as equals.
“Goodbye, Morse”
“Goodbye, Your Grace.” She lifted her eyebrows, and he lightly squeezed her hand. “Harriet.”
From the vantage of the bridge, she watched him walk away along the High: a slight, diffident figure, hands in his pockets again. She saw her younger self beside him in her Canterbury cap and MA gown, and then herself and Peter— before the war, right at the beginning of it all—standing outside the antique shop, peering through the window at a set of ivory chessmen. And further back: Harriet the country doctor’s daughter, with her school trunk and her too-small shoes, travelling by taxi from the railway station, gazing up at Magdalen Library and the Examination Schools—the High like a great skein of memory, doubling and tripling on itself, until the threads of forty years lay indistinguishable, side by side.
But that was the trick of Oxford. There was something in the stone, and in the water too. A single oarsman sculled silently beneath her on the slate-grey Cherwell.
When she looked for him again, Morse had disappeared.