Epilogue
Eight years later
On a bright morning, the carriage traveled the last mile to Oxford as John watched the towers grow closer and pretended his stomach wasn’t acting up.
“No chocolate at bedtime,” Felix said from the facing seat, as calm as ever—father for all that mattered.
“I won’t, I promise.” Maisie stroked the curve of her belly through her pelisse.
“You’ll come home when the baby arrives, right? ”
“I’ll come home as often as I can,” John said, and reached for her hand because it felt wrong not to.
He called her Mother now. Not because he had forgotten the woman he’d started with, but because a life can hold more than one truth.
More love. Soon, more family. The house had been whole this summer—Nurse Wendy ruling Cloverdale House like a benevolent tyrant, Uncle Alfie forever repairing a window latch, Andre declaring a chair unfit for human posture, and Deena so busy at the practice she came home smelling of clean towels and pride.
The carriage jolted over a rut. He thought he’d kept the flinch inside. Apparently not, judging from his parents’ pinched lips and sad smiles.
“I’m afraid I won’t fit in again,” he said, and only knew he’d spoken when the words sat in the air between them.
“You don’t need to fit in anywhere if you know your place,” Felix answered, mild and sure.
John let it land. Know your place. Not as the world meant it. As Felix did: the place you make by being useful and steady, by keeping your word when no one looks.
He looked out at the quad’s edge. He wanted what was ahead—lectures, the reading rooms, the quiet thrum of academic work.
He wanted the law and understood how to use it like Felix’s sharp tools.
Uncle Alfie had taught him that law was like a muscle, the way it could bend toward fairness if someone insisted or punch justice if it was abused.
And there was the estate; Uncle Alfie had carried more than his share for years.
On their last tour of cottages and fields, John had said he’d take on the ledgers himself this term. He meant to keep that promise.
The carriage turned by the gate and followed a path with a few puddles. A porter stood with a squeaking pen and a ledger that looked older than half the undergraduates. Bells marked the quarter hour. A boy in a coat too big for him wrestled a trunk up the steps and pretended he wasn’t losing.
And when the carriage door opened, John could almost smell the changed air. He was going to study here, among others who’d be his peers. But he was Marquess already and wasn’t preparing for a future riddled with responsibilities—he was trying to catch up.
Felix got out of the carriage first and offered Maisie his hand; she laughed at herself when she took it and held her belly as if to keep the unborn baby safe under her heart. John followed, boots on stone.
This is Oxford.
“Write when you settle,” Felix said, straightening a sleeve as if it were urgent work. “And when you need books. And when you don’t.”
“I will.”
Maisie tugged him in. “Eat properly. Sleep.” Her voice dropped. “And be kind. That’s the only rule that never fails.”
“Yes, Mother.” He wished his voice didn’t falter when he said goodbye to her.
He hugged them both hard. It wasn’t graceful and didn’t need to be.
Felix’s arm came down to his back with the pressure that said I’ve got you.
Maisie kissed his forehead. She now smelled faintly of soap and ginger tea, the new favorite because it eased her.
They didn’t ask him to be anything he wasn’t.
They never had. And their love had always been unconditional.
And before he could blink again, his parents returned to the carriage with a nod.
Oxford was for him, for peers of the realm, for gentile aristocrats—not for Jews.
It stung to think of his parents not belonging anywhere he did because they were inseparable—if not in person, then in their hearts.
And that’s why he swallowed that lump in his throat when he saw Maisie pat her eyes with a handkerchief, not the dainty lace one but the sensible ones Felix carried in his coat pocket.
John inhaled deeply, hoping to make room for courage, and set down his valise and crossed in front of another boy offering to help with trunks. “Take the strap; I’ll have the heavy end.”
“No need, sir—students don’t carry. Leave the portage to the lads,” the porter called, pencil squeaking over his ledger.
Somehow, he felt as though he’d been watched.
“It’s my heavy luggage; he can help to carry it—and I’ll take the other end,” John said without looking up.
The boy blinked, surprised into a grin. “Cheers.”
“This way?” John said, and they heaved together. Two steps, then four, then the landing in front of the dormitory for new students.
“Name?”
“John Spencer, Marquess of Stonefield,” he offered, and didn’t care what the porter thought. The man ran a finger down the ledger and nodded him through. It felt like something opening.
They left the trunk at the door, and John turned back to his parents.
Maisie had pushed her face through the open carriage window and waved with the already saturated handkerchief; Felix was saying something to her that made her mouth twitch in an unwilling smile.
John savored the sight and then made himself move, because standing still never helped.
The quad spread neat as a bookplate: clipped grass, pale stone, the long shadow of the library tower laid like a ladder across the flags.
He stopped before he entered the building—not to gawk, but to mark it.
People like my parents couldn’t have stood here as students, not when they were young.
Oxford’s doors had been shut to Jews. They’d built lives anyway.
I can walk in. I can ask questions out loud. He could use this for good. He would.
“Go on, milord,” the boy said behind him, as if he’d heard the thought.
“I’m going,” John said, and meant it, but he couldn’t shake the sensation that someone was following him. Or why else were the tiny hairs on his neck pricking up?
He turned back once more because he couldn’t help it. Maisie pressed her hand to her heart. Felix tipped the brim of his hat with two fingers, and the carriage moved through the gate and out of sight.
He waved until he was certain they couldn’t see him anymore, but the tight place under his ribs squeezed.
“Is the library open?” he asked the boy, who’d set down the strap.
“Yes, milord. Shall I wait for you here?”
“Please set this aside, I’ll return soon.” John crossed the quad with his hand on his chest and a list of instructions clattering pleasantly in his head: come home often; write first, worry later; eat; sleep; be kind.
The porter’s pen squeaked faintly as he mumbled to another new arrival behind John. Geese argued somewhere beyond the wall. John looked up at the great windows of the library, bright as Maisie’s polished silver candlesticks in the sun—
—and caught a flicker from the inside.
Blond hair, quick as a match-flare. A profile turned half away. A book held close to a blue-clad chest. The slightest tilt of a mouth, as if a private joke had just landed.
It was a breath, no more. Enough to set the air inside him humming in a most unfamiliar way.
A swift beat rose where the ache had lived. Good, off to the library. Begin the work, he thought, and the tempo evened as he allowed himself to explore a little.
He entered the library and found a staircase open to a dark tower. Perhaps that’s where she is.
He climbed. The old treads answered each boot with a hollow thud that sounded like a secret he needed to uncover.
At the landing between two floors, where the windows faced the court, he paused one last time and looked back across the court.
Carriages delivered more new students to the new dormitory, but he was already at the library.
John smiled and went up to where he’d seen the blonde girl.
The room he found at the end of the staircase was small and bright.
A desk with a nick in one corner. A window overlooking the court.
Books in an uneven stack, a blue shawl slung over the chair back, a mug ring on the sill as if someone had been here often and in a hurry. Someone lived in this forgotten corner.
“What are you doing here?” The voice came from the shadow near the shelves—clear, bright, with a faint lilt that felt instantly like home. Like how Maisie and Deena sounded after a long spell of German.
Hm. Curious.
“I didn’t know there were girls in the library,” John said, turning toward the sound. Another ridiculous rule. Why should girls and Jews be barred from rooms built for thought? In his house, both owned half the shelves.
“I saw you arrive, you’re new,” she said.
“You watched me with my parents?” he asked.
A shape moved. She stepped into the shaft of light: fair hair pinned as if it refused to behave, a blue dress that matched the quick glance he’d caught from the quad, ink on the side of one finger.
His heart leaped once—clean and startling.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” she said, chin up, eyes steady. “You’re right about that. What are you going to do about it?”
Three thoughts arrived at once. One, kiss her and keep the secret. Two, tell on her—nonsense. Three, say something clever—nothing came.
“I’m John,” he managed. “I’ll keep your secret if you…” He searched for terms and found honesty. “If you let me sit in this room sometimes. And if you don’t vanish before you tell me your name.”
A quick smile—gone almost at once. “Names travel. In here, we use subjects.”
“Then give me one.” He had grown up bickering with Deena, so this was a well-practiced game.
“Latin prose. And another: people who think titles outrank sense.” She tipped her chin toward the stairs. “And you?”
“Law,” he said. “And whether kindness is optional.”
“That will do.”
He moved a step closer to the desk, careful not to crowd. “You were watching.”
“Yes.” She glanced toward the window. “Your parents are the first I’ve seen to escort you with tears, hug you, and return to the carriage.”
He’d already shown that his family was different and hoped it wouldn’t matter at Oxford, but of course, it would. John’s mouth went tight, not from offense. From recognition. “That’s accurate.”
“You helped the boy with your trunk.” She nodded toward his cuff. “And got dust on your sleeve. The porter will hate that.”
John looked at the blot on his breeches and didn’t brush it off. “It was my heavy luggage. He could barely carry it. Why not help?”
“That question will not make you popular here.”
“That’s not what I’m here for. I’d rather be useful than popular.”
She considered him, then the empty chair. “Very well, Useful. Sit. Five minutes. The porter walks past the tower on the quarter.”
“You know his route?”
“I know every dull habit around here.” Her eyes warmed, then cooled again, practical. “If anyone asks, you didn’t see me.”
“Understood,” he said, meaning that he had seen her and it had done something to him he couldn’t quite name. “But I’d like to see you again.”
A small breath. Not quite a laugh.
“I watched you,” she said, as if it were the simplest answer. “From the window. You caught my attention.” She spoke as though she was so much more than a girl hiding in the library tower, and he was aching to find out who she was.
Heat moved through his chest; not the old ache. A quick, sure beat.
“Good,” she said, as if that settled something. “Then you’ll do.”
“Who are you?” The question slipped out. Why are you hiding here?
“Not today.” A small smile. “If you want to see me again, come when the bells strike the quarter.”
“I’ll keep your secret.”
“Come alone,” she said. “I’ll teach you one lesson—how to keep a secret when it hurts. Are you ready for everything Oxford has to offer?”
“I am.” John was ready to give his studies everything—time, energy, the long nights—and to give his cause the weight of his title and his steady support.
Yet as the moment between them settled like a dream turned reality, he thought this girl—whatever her name—might be the one he was ready to give his first kiss, and perhaps his heart.
On the quarter, I’ll be here. I’ll do the work. And if she returns, I’ll ask her name—and, if she’ll let me… more.
Mind open. Heart awake. Ready for all of it.