“Hunters,” Piers bellowed. “It is time.”
In the hours they had been drinking, the streets had emptied. The tourists back to the train station, the market sellers driving home. The city was left quiet and cold.
“Next stop, the Swan,” cried Piers.
Piers had named a pub near the river. It was a clear run from the Turnbull Clubhouse if you took Scholar’s Road. But on an open path, the Turnbulls would outrun her. No, this required cunning. Emma sifted through side streets in her mind.
Piers raised his hand. “Foxes, on my signal.”
Emma tensed. Piers blew a long blast on a hunting horn.
The girls raced into the cold dark. The scattered drumbeat of high heels on stone echoed from buildings and statues. Julia was the first of the pack, outpacing them all with a runner’s easy stride. She swerved into a side street, her gown a blood-hued flicker in the dark. Venetia tore off her fox ears with a savage smile and sprinted straight down Scholar’s Road. The other girls scattered like a shoal of nervous fish. Emma watched them flit into one side street and another.
She was already tired. Her lungs stung in the icy air. Perhaps she could leave the Turnbulls to their games. Then the tinny cry of the horn came again.
The boys were coming.
Her pulse thrummed. She was the only one left hesitating. She would be the first to be caught.
An idea came to her with the suddenness of divine inspiration. She doubled back. The Senate House was locked at night, but the gates were low enough that a child could climb over. She might even get to the pub first.
Just one drink,she promised herself,and then home.
Nat would be watching a film in his room. He’d already been muttering about his costume forThe Life of Tolstoy’s cast party. She suspected he was in front of a Werner Herzog classic, attempting to cut out a Russian military cape in the style of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. Perhaps she could even be back in time to stop him from slicing off a finger or two. She set a steady pace, and the pillars of the Senate House soon loomed before her.
It was dark and echoing inside the colonnade. Generations of scholars had added carved plaques and marble statues until the whole complex looked like a strange stone menagerie. Emma shuddered as she skirted a man with a boar’s head, a screaming deer. A towering merman reminded her of the bearded statue on the riverbank, from the first time she’d been out with Jasper.
And then Jasper was there. Not in the rolled-up jeans and bare feet of her memory. In the red coat and white breeches of a hunter.
He leaned against the statue with a satisfied grin.
“How did you know?” asked Emma. Her words echoed off stone eyes, stone horns, stone tails.
“I guessed. I was lucky.”
“Aren’t you going to call the other hunters?”
“No, silly. I haven’t had you alone all night. Come here.”
“What about the game?”
He gathered her to him. Gone was the scent of cotton and clean boy. There was wine on his breath. There was cologne on his skin,a cloud so thick she finally recognized what it was. It was money, that smell. The dark wood of paneled studies in stately homes. The leather of a luxury car, gleaming new. The smoke at the end of a cigar. It made a stranger of him. Someone older, more assured.
“Caught you,” he slurred.
He surged forward and mashed his mouth against hers. The column was ice against her back. Emma closed her eyes, tried to summon the golden magic of the cathedral roof, the way his fingers had felt like small flames flickering across her skin. It was no use.
“Stop,” she said. “Sorry, I’m sorry, could you stop a moment—”
“Em-ma,” he moaned into her neck.
Now she felt the way her neck was twisted, with his hands holding her head in place and pressing her into the column. She couldn’t breathe.
“Jasper. Jasper, wait.”
“Fine, fine.” He lifted his hands in exaggerated obedience, releasing her. “You’re confusing me, Emma. I thought this was what you wanted.”
She looked down, uncomfortably aware of the blank where she should be feeling desire. Or embarrassment. Or anything except a tired longing for bed. Her own. Alone.
