CHAPTER 3
The party was a stressful blur. A wall of lenses pointed at her, and people asking questions.
Her own voice, talking from very far away.
The Beaufort College conference center was dizzyingly bright, a kaleidoscope of chrome and glass and multimillion-pound design.
But at least, in a black velvet dress that guarded her rib cage like armor, Emma finally felt the part. That was all due to Nat.
The day after her interview, she had met Nat for breakfast as usual. The wisteria-clad Great Hall at Gabriel College was famous for its beauty. Morning sun played over fluted stone. The smell of toast and butter rose to the rafters.
Nat had slurped at his fourth coffee. “So, you won your dream funding. And yet this is not a happy face?”
Emma groaned. “It’s that launch party. Those people will take one look at me and know I’m not meant to be there, with their Tatler photographer and their dressage clubs. I’m nothing like them. I’ve never shot a pheasant. Or shopped at Harrods. I’ve never ridden a horse, Nat.”
“I’m not sure that will be required, Emma,” Nat murmured, with exquisite delicacy, “at a cocktail party.”
Emma took the mature route and did not stick her tongue out at him.
“Em, it doesn’t matter, that elite nonsense.
I spent years with these people, at an extremely exclusive boarding school, no less.
And it only gave them enough time to decide I wasn’t ‘quite their sort.’ They met you once, and they’ve already given you a cartload of money and a golden invitation. Maybe they like you.”
Emma pushed her food around her plate. “But you should have seen how they dressed at the interview, these girls. I have nothing to wear.”
“We’ll just get Helena to lend you something,” said Nat, briskly scooping Emma’s uneaten hash browns into his mouth. “She was all about society soirees and glossy ‘it’ girlfriends when she was here. And she has more clothes than she could ever wear.”
“I love your sister, but—” Emma said.
“Everyone loves my sister.” Nat heaved the long sigh of the martyr. “Alas, even me. Trust me, she’ll be excited about this. I’ll message her.”
And Helena Oluwole had come through. She had not sent just one dress, but a whole box of gowns and jackets and jumpsuits with labels Emma barely recognized, almost all the right length. Helena was tall, too.
Emma could tell that in her own clothes, she would have felt small and ashamed in front of the girls at this party.
They looked as though they had never questioned money; always had so much that it had sunk into their skin.
They all had the same coin-like shine, the crisp edges of a banknote.
There was china-doll Venetia Kent, leaning against a steel sculpture in an attitude of complete boredom.
Julia, a bright jewel in a crimson jumpsuit, shaking the University chancellor’s hand.
Across the room, Imogen Baldock was vamping at one of the journalists.
The other fellows flitted about, glowing in front of the cameras.
Batted around a gauntlet of photographers, Emma thought the night might never end. But as the last of the champagne dried up, so did the crowd. The journalists fled for the train back to London. Soon only Julia’s little clique remained.
Emma looked down at herself. Just one in a row of girls perched on the tables in the empty conference center, legs swinging, passing a champagne bottle. She wondered why she couldn’t remember ever feeling so happy.
“What next?” asked Elizabeth Lim, the fellow for history. Regal in a column of cloudburst silk, she was so beautiful that Emma could hardly look at her directly.
“The party at St. Dunstan’s, surely,” purred Antonia Viacelli, granddaughter of an Italian contessa, and the fellow for music. “Where else, darlings?”
An excited murmur shivered through the row of girls.
“Jasper Balfour’s first party of the year,” said Imogen, nudging Elizabeth in the ribs. “Let the scandal commence.”
“The Jasper Balfour?” piped up little Tabitha Mountbatten, the youngest fellow.
“Yes, and he’s just as wicked as you’ve heard.” Antonia’s smile curled like steam from hot chocolate.
“I haven’t heard he’s wicked.” Tabitha was blessed with complete imperviousness to innuendo.
“My brother Hamish said he’s already on the Olympic sailing team.
Or the reserves, anyway. And Hamish was at Eton with Jasper, and he says one of the geography masters was always giving them stupid homework, so Jasper took his car apart in the parking lot, then put it back together on the roof, the whole car!
And he was on Hamish’s ski trip in Courchevel, and Mummy said he was so charming, he was the kind of boy that just looking at him’d make you walk funny for a week, although I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, and—”
“Gods spare us the views of the entire Mountbatten clan,” Venetia muttered. “Someone muzzle the virgin.”
Imogen shoved her. Venetia shoved right back.
As the group swirled into motion, grabbing bags and shoes, Emma stood uncertain.
“Are you coming?”
Julia had turned back at the door.
“Me?” Emma found her hand had fluttered up to her chest. She pushed it down. “I mean, of course I’m coming. Let’s meet this Jasper you’re all so impressed with.”
She was worried for a moment that she’d overdone it. But the group laughed. And as they poured onto the sloping cobbles of River Lane, she felt Julia’s elegant hand clasp her shoulder.
The girls hurried along the river path. A hint of fog hung over the water now. Autumn, only a breath away. The river lay quiet in its bed, with barely a sign it had been capable of flooding a whole city just a week before. The crenellations of St. Dunstan’s College rose in the distance.
The group quieted as they shuffled through the college gatehouse.
The silence they walked into had a weight to it.
St. Dunstan’s was the oldest and richest of all the University’s colleges.
Its students had the reputation of being the best-heeled in the University.
Emma’s father had gone here. She had seen the few photos her mother had kept.
There was one of them picnicking in the St. Dunstan’s gardens.
Diana with her striking eyes and Greenpeace T-shirt, hair flowing past her waist. Hugh Pelham, blond and laughing, shoulders broad in a hand-tailored blazer.
A strange match, even in a photograph. He had already been engaged then, of course, to his now wife.
But Emma liked to look at the photographs and pretend.
That there had been no other family for him.
No one to leave her for. When she’d applied to the University, Emma had once had a vision of him showing her his old rooms at St. Dunstan’s and parading her in front of the porters.
This is my daughter, he would have said, pride spilling from his voice. Going here too. Chip off the old block.
But visions and reality rarely aligned when it came to her father.
And so the real Emma had found her home at Gabriel College and had never seen St. Dunstan’s up close.
It had the flavor of a medieval keep, she thought.
Troops of gargoyles grimaced down, faceless from years of acid rain.
Emma shivered, missing the jovial angels and chubby deer that framed the doorways at Gabriel.
Julia waved them on, and they passed through lushly planted cloisters and an endless parade of formal gardens.
The yew hedges were clipped into the shape of dragons, the college’s mascot.
Twilight had pulled itself swiftly over the city in their wake, and now it overtook them.
Emma could barely make out the shapes of the farther trees.
Only a whisper to the left told her that the river was somewhere near.
All this time, Tabitha had been peppering the girls with questions about the party’s host. Emma listened with one ear, half-sick of the sound of his name already.
Whoever and whatever Jasper Balfour was, he seemed likely to be as puffed up as a bullfrog.
The way they talked about him. Such praises of his curling hair and broad shoulders; such tales of the private jet he packed with his friends.
Most of all, the whispers about the hopefuls throwing themselves at him.
Even models and celebrities. Even mothers.
Regal Elizabeth Lim stooped so far as to giggle, and Tabitha’s cheeks were pink.
Emma found herself gritting her teeth. “Who else will be at this party?”
A cluster of surprised faces turned to her.
Julia recovered herself first. “Oh—well, there’s his roommate. Richard. They share a set of rooms, so they’re both throwing this party, really.”
Venetia snorted.
“Richard is a little quieter than Jasper,” Julia added. “That doesn’t mean he’s—”
“Boring.” Venetia flashed white, wolfish teeth.
“No, no,” protested Julia, in distress. “When you talk to him, you find he’s really—”
“Boring.” Venetia flicked her hair over one shoulder. “Honestly, Julia.”
Emma felt a first stirring of interest. Quieter.
Next to the oafish Jasper—she could already picture the rugby-field bellow and leering smile—she saw an unpretentious, friendly face.
He would be perhaps a little slimmer across the shoulders, with less of the Eton swagger.
Perhaps he also found it hard to talk about himself, at first. She found her step quickening.
“But apart from that?” squeaked Tabitha, breathless as much from excitement as from trying to keep up. “Who else will be there?”
“Most of the Society, I should think,” Imogen said absently, checking her makeup in her phone’s camera.
“What society?” asked Tabitha, eager-eyed.
Sharp looks telegraphed around the remaining girls. Elizabeth Lim hissed in a breath.
Imogen pulled up short, wearing a rather guilty look. “What? Oh…”
“And Imogen does it again,” drawled Venetia, with a slow clap that lost nothing of its viciousness as it echoed off the fountains of St. Dunstan’s. “You’ll have to tell her something now, won’t you?”
“Ah—hm. Tabitha, it’s just Jasper and some friends. It’s like a—a University-wide club. Mostly drinking and dinners and stuff, but it’s properly old and historic. Anyway, there’s not much you need to know, it’s just a night out.”
“But what is this club?” pursued Tabitha. “What’s it called? Can I join?”
“No, you can’t. Boys only, I’m afraid. And it doesn’t have a name. At least, it does, but not one you can know. And you can’t tell anyone about it. Not even that you know it exists.”
“So it’s a secret,” Tabitha breathed, round-eyed. “Cool. My older brother Hamish will be so impressed I know a secret society now.”
“You can tell your older brother Hamish—” Venetia began silkily. But before she could finish whatever crushing statement she had planned, most of the group had doubled over.
“What is that?” choked Elizabeth Lim. Beside her, Antonia Viacelli retched into a box hedge.
“It is the worst—”
“—I can’t breathe—”
“—disgusting—”
A wall of rot curled up from the darkness to their left. It rose around them, foul and overripe. Emma felt it coat her tongue. Nausea shuddered through her throat.
It smelled of dead things.
“It’s—I think—the sunken garden—” coughed Imogen.
Emma’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. The garden below was a maze of rotting rosebushes, sagging with late blooms. Every rose blackened through; every thorn softened to mush.
“It must have been the flood. It drowned them.”
“It’s awful.”
Even as she gagged, Emma found herself wondering if the flood had carried some contaminant, to leave the roses so damaged. A waterborne pest, perhaps? Her mother would have known.
But that was not what held her body rigid, a field mouse scenting an owl, scanning the garden.
Something was there. It was a ridiculous thought.
But for an instant, the fallen roses seemed like plucked eyeballs, pupils of rot rolled up to watch her.
Then Julia tugged her arm, and Emma gladly stumbled away with her, toward the light at the end of the gardens.
They emerged in a vast, brightly lit quad, and Emma’s macabre imaginings loosened their claws on her brain. She was rather inclined to laugh at herself.
“Old Hob Quad,” said Julia, finally lowering her sleeve from her face. “The most beautiful student rooms in the University.”
“But by God, they make you walk for them,” growled Imogen, storming past in a blaze of red curls. She leapt up the first staircase and hammered on the door at the top. With one last look at the rot-scented darkness behind them, Emma followed.