The Headmaster’s Binding (The Six Chairs #1)

1. Thomas

Thomas

The cab dropped me at the bottom of the drive because the driver said he didn't go past the gates.

Not couldn't. Didn't. He took my money with the window half up and had the car turned around before I got the second suitcase off the gravel, and I stood there in the first week of a New England September watching his taillights get small, and I said, out loud, to nobody, "Okay."

I have a notebook. Green, spiral, three dollars.

It's my fourth. I go through about one a year because I write everything down.

My mother called it a memory, my ex called it a tic, and a disciplinary committee once called it documentation, extensive, which is the only nice thing that committee ever said about me.

Standing at the gates of Ashgrave College with two suitcases and a job I could not afford to lose, I took the notebook out and wrote the first item of the semester.

Item one: cab drivers don't go past the gates. Ask why. Or don't.

Then I walked up the drive, and Ashgrave did the thing it does, which nobody warns you about, which is that it arrives.

The trees along the drive are old enough to meet overhead, so you're walking in a green tunnel with your luggage wheels going off like gunfire on the gravel, and then the tunnel just — stops, and the college is standing there looking at you.

Gray stone going gold where the light hits it.

Towers with actual crenellations, because apparently at some point in the 1800s somebody thought, what this teaching institution needs is battlements.

Ivy with a century of tenure. A chapel spire with a verdigris roof, lawns striped like somebody combed them, and behind all of it, where the ground drops toward the water meadows, a long white shelf of fog.

Sitting there. At two in the afternoon. In September.

I'd like the record to show I noticed the fog on day one.

It was beautiful. That's the thing I want to be honest about, because a lot of what I wrote down later got dark, and it's all true, but this is true too: it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen in my life, and I stood at the top of the drive with my heart racing with a kid's first-day excitement, because it was mine now.

I got to teach here. Me. The guy whose last college wouldn't put his name on the commencement program.

A porter came out of the gatehouse for my bags: sixties, built like a door, face like weather. The brass plate on the gatehouse said CROFT.

"Dr. Mercer," he said. Statement.

"That's me. How'd you—"

"Corbett House. Third floor." He had both suitcases already and was walking, so I followed, past the chapel, along the edge of the big quad, and this is where I met the thing I never got used to, faster than I met anybody's name.

People looked at me.

Fine. Normal. New face on a small campus, first week of term, everybody looks.

Students looked up from their phones and looked back down.

A woman in a gown said "welcome" like she meant it.

Two kids playing Frisbee on the sacred grass said "sorry" and snatched the disc off the lawn, which told me the grass was more forbidden than I knew.

That's the normal kind of looking and I know what it feels like.

Then there was the other kind.

A groundskeeper straightened up off his rake and watched me the whole length of the chapel walk.

Not curious. Checking. The way you watch weather come in over water when your boat's still out.

A window on the second floor of the long gray building to the east had a face in it, and the face didn't move when I clocked it, which faces do.

You catch someone looking, they look away; that's the whole social contract.

This one just kept on. Middle-aged man, glasses. Counting me.

And by the kitchens, where the path cuts between two staff doors, a woman in an apron was carrying a steel tray of glasses, and she looked at me, and stopped. Full stop, tray and all, glasses chiming. She shifted the tray to one arm, and crossed herself.

Small. Fast. Automatic, like sneezing. Then she was moving again and gone through the second door.

I stopped walking. Croft did not.

"Hey — did you see—"

"Third floor," Croft said, ahead of me, not turning around. "Key's in the door. Dinner's at the Lodge, Wednesday, seven sharp. Headmaster does the welcome."

Item two: a kitchen porter crossed herself at me. At ME. I have been on this campus eleven minutes.

Item three: three people so far have looked at me one beat too long. Counting.

I want to say I sat with that. Honestly, though?

I unpacked, I found the good coffee place on Main Street in town, I spent two days walking the paths and learning the noticeboards and being looked at, I ironed a shirt on a towel on the floor because Corbett House does not believe in ironing boards, and by seven on Wednesday I had talked myself most of the way around.

New guy. Small place. Old institutions are weird about outsiders.

My last college had a bell nobody was allowed to ring and a turtle with a faculty ID. This was fine.

This was fine.

* * *

The Lodge is the Headmaster's house, which nobody told me, so I spent the first ten minutes of the welcome dinner thinking it was a weird name for a faculty club and admiring the man's bookshelves before I understood they were his.

It's a long low house on the west side of the quad, older than the towers, and the long room runs the whole back of it: candles down a table for forty, portraits of dead men in robes, sherry that tasted like raisins that had done something wrong, and fog standing at every window like the house had been wrapped.

A hand took my elbow inside the door. Small, certain, attached to a woman about fifty with the eyes of someone grading you kindly.

"You're the new Letters hire. Mercer."

"Thomas. Guilty."

"Elena Vasquez, history. I'm adopting you," she said. "It's decided, don't fight it. You'll want to know: the fish is safe, the sherry is a hate crime, avoid the Provost until he's eaten, and the man by the fireplace is your Headmaster, whom you should meet last."

"Why last?"

"Because he's the only interesting one," she said, "and you should eat first."

Item four, I did not write, because I was holding a sherry, but I filed it: everyone in this room knows where the man by the fireplace is standing without looking at him.

They did. It was a physical thing, like the room had a slope to it. Forty academics balancing plates, all of them tracking one fixed point with the backs of their necks.

I ate. I met the Provost (pre-food: confirmed mistake).

I met a chaplain, two deans, a woman who ran the library like it was a small country, and a physicist who told me the fog was "a cold-air pool, perfectly ordinary" in the tone of a man who's been asked before.

I drank one sherry to be polite, which was one more than the sherry deserved.

And at some point the room's slope tilted me, the way it was always going to, to the fireplace.

Look. I'd seen the photo on the college website.

Silver-templed, mid-career-distinguished, A.

THORNE, HEADMASTER, fine. Website photos are taken by committees.

What the website had not conveyed was that the man was six foot something of quiet in a dark suit cut the way suits are supposed to be cut and mostly aren't, standing with a glass he wasn't drinking from, watching his party like a harbormaster watching the tide, and that when the crowd opened and he turned to me, the eyes were the gray of the stone this whole place was built out of, and about as easy to move.

"Dr. Mercer." His hand came out. "Adrian Thorne. Welcome to Ashgrave."

I shook it. Dry, warm, the grip of a man who has never once had to insist on anything.

Here's what happened in my head, verbatim, because the notebook got it that night in full:

Item five: the Headmaster's hands.

Item six: delete item five.

I'm thirty-two years old. I have a doctorate.

I have testified, under oath, essentially, before a committee, about the specific ruin that follows when you let yourself want somebody who has power over your paycheck.

I watched a man I loved read a statement about me that his lawyer wrote, and then I moved four hundred miles with two suitcases.

I have exactly one rule, it's written in scar tissue, and it is: never again with a boss.

So I put my glass down, and I looked at the most quietly attractive man I had ever stood in front of, my actual literal employer, and I did what I do when the ground's not safe.

I led with the geometry.

"Can I ask you something impertinent?"

"You may ask."

"Your east range." I tipped my head at the windows, where the east side of the quad was a gray suggestion behind fog. "It's off. Two degrees, maybe three, from everything else on the quad. I noticed on the walk in and it's been irritating me all afternoon."

His face did a thing then. Nothing moved; I'd swear in that same court that not one muscle moved. It happened anyway, like a lamp coming on behind a curtain.

"The college was built in stages," he said. "Over two centuries. By committees."

"By people who couldn't agree on north."

"That," he said, "is a fair summary of the institution."

And I laughed. Too loud for the room. I heard it go up into the beams and felt forty gowned heads turn, and I did not care even slightly, because his mouth had done a thing at the corner, a thing that was gone before it landed, and I had made it happen with two degrees of bad Victorian surveying.

Item six is under review.

"Consolation literature," he said, like we'd been talking about it all evening. "Your monograph. The committee's report called it 'unusually alive.'"

"That's committee for 'we expected it to be boring.'"

"It is." He turned his glass a quarter turn on the mantel, squaring it to an edge only he could see. "I read it in August. Your chapter on Boethius is wrong."