Chapter 15
Eleven Years Earlier
Chloe, Sean, John, and Akiko were sitting in the theater, along with a dozen other cast members, finishing the table read for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chloe twisted her ring, and Sean looked across and raised an eyebrow.
“So have you discovered who your Imp is yet?” he asked, giving her a knowing smile. For someone who wanted to remain anonymous, he certainly enjoyed bringing it up.
“I am forever indebted to the Imp,” she said, giving him a playful nudge. “But if the Imp wants to stay hidden in the shadows, far be it from me to haul him into the light.”
“Isn’t the Imp supposed to do mischief, rather than good?” asked Emma, twirling a strand of her wispy blonde hair around a pencil.
“Maybe the Imp deserves a chance to rewrite history. Maybe he’s been much maligned,” suggested John.
“Maybe it really was the ghost of the imp,” suggested Akiko. “You can’t live in a place this old and not cross paths with a few spirits.”
The conversation turned to superstition and legend, then too many drinks in the bar. Only when they all got back to college did Chloe realize she was without her scarf.
“Oh no, my scarf, I left it!” she said as they turned onto Turl Street.
“Want me to go back with you?” Sean offered.
“No, it’s okay. Someone will hand it in,” Chloe said, too tired to face walking back through town to the playhouse. “I’ll just get it tomorrow.”
But when she woke up the next day, her scarf was folded outside her door, with a handwritten note. The Imp doesn’t want you getting cold. She smiled, hugging the scarf to her chest.
After that, the Imp’s good deeds became more frequent. Small, thoughtful gestures appearing when she least expected it. Postcards appeared in her postbox, with lines from poets she hadn’t read before but whom she came to adore. There were original haikus too:
Bear naps in the sun.
Imp draws whiskers on his snout—
Sharp paw, Imp is gone.
These amused her in a way it was impossible to explain to anyone else. When spring arrived, she found a jam jar of snowdrops and daffodils outside her room with a line from an Oscar Wilde poem.
And all the flowers of our English Spring,
Fond snowdrops, and the bright-starred daffodil
x—the Imp
She carried the jar of flowers into her room and turned to Aloysius, who was sitting on her bed. His scratched glass eyes made him look permanently tired, so it was the best place for him. “I think someone knows us rather well, Aloysius,” she said, breathing in the smell of her favorite flowers.
After the opening night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she found a bottle of red wine from the Puck winery waiting outside her door. Congratulations, from one Imp to another.
These gestures from Sean surprised and confused her.
She knew, from the way she caught him looking at her sometimes, that there was something unspoken between them.
He sought her out first in any room, he hugged her just that bit too long.
But he had never articulated it, and she didn’t want him to.
It would change everything, and she didn’t want anything to change.
Maybe the Imp was Sean’s way of showing her how he felt, without having to risk what they had.
So, she stopped mentioning it, let it be something secret, unspoken. What harm was it doing?
The loveliest gesture came at the end of Hilary term, just before they broke up for Easter.
She’d been talking to Akiko at formal hall, telling her how Easter always made her think of her grandmother.
Valerie used to lay these elaborate Easter egg hunts with fiendishly cryptic clues.
The hunts could take hours, most of her cousins would give up, but for Chloe the harder the clues, the more she appreciated the chocolate egg at the end.
“Isn’t it a shame that we get too old for these things?” she told Akiko, leaning her face on her palm.
“Who says we’re too old?” Akiko said indignantly. “Delight and wonder aren’t confined to childhood.”
Sean must have been within earshot, or perhaps Akiko told him about the conversation later, because the next day she found a small painted egg sitting in her college letter box.
It had “crack me” written on it in beautiful calligraphy.
She felt a hum of adrenaline. The egg was so pretty, she was loath to break it, but she did.
Inside, she found a tiny scroll with the words Love is a smoke raised with the fume of this bridge.
A Shakespeare quote, “Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs”—the Bridge of Sighs.
She ran through town to the famous bridge, scanning the walls for a clue, and there, in a crack, she found a small, fluffy chick, with a scroll clamped in its beak.
She laughed, delighted, as she unwrapped the clue: In the fifteenth century, you would watch a cockfight, but if you wanted a coffee, where could you get your flat white?
She had to ponder this one. The Pret a Manger on the Cornmarket was in a building from the fifteenth century, but when she walked down there, she couldn’t see anything on the walls outside.
She went in and asked a barista if they knew anything about a treasure hunt.
The teenage boy grinned and handed her a paper cup with a clue written on it, in the same cursive script.
And so her quest unfurled, with clue after clue taking her all over town.
To her favorite book in the library (Brideshead Revisited, of course), her favorite tree (the sycamore by All Souls), and even her favorite cake (the mille-feuille at the bakery on the Cowley Road).
The final clue led her back to Lincoln, to the stone imp in the stairway beside Deep Hall, and a chocolate egg lay wedged between the bars with a note: You are never too old for treasure hunts. Happy Easter. Love, the Imp.
It was, without a doubt, the nicest, most thoughtful thing anyone had ever done for her.
She loved the artistry in the details, the personalized clues…
But as she clasped the final note in her hand, she felt confusion stirring alongside her pleasure, sediment muddying clear water.
For someone to take this much time to re-create a cherished childhood memory—it didn’t feel like just a sweet gesture from a friend.
It felt like a quiet, deliberate declaration of love.
As much as she loved the Imp, delighted in his notes, cherished their contents, when she was with Sean she just didn’t feel that kind of connection with him.
And now she felt a small thrum of dread, because it felt like this was building to something, and she couldn’t see how it was going to end well.