I looked upon my new school with apprehension. I, like everybody else, had seen Harry Potter, and I knew what went on under those gabled arches—in those shady, echoing, oak-paneled halls. For the past fourteen years, I had fought, played and studied—sometimes—in the wide, airy spaces of the American educational system. Now, at the age of seventeen, I had been transported here to something more ancient and terrible than I could ever have imagined—the Anglo-American School at Oxford, in England. It stood coolly aloof with its ivy-covered gray stone, its leaded windows and many tall chimneypots and ignored me.
I looked back at the Jeep I’d just climbed out of. Through the open passenger window, I could see Rosie, as English as tea and muffins. She was pretty, demure and drop-dead gorgeous. And, at twenty-five, disturbingly young to be my brand-new stepmother.
Terrifyingly, she winked at me and said, “Go knock ’em dead, Jake.”
I watched the car disappear down the road, shouldered my bag then made my way through the great iron gates and down the short gravel drive between the perfect English lawns on either side. Keep your head down, I told myself, and with any luck, nobody will notice you.
But this was a school that specialized in diplomat’s kids or the children of international businessmen and women, and their population was mainly transient. The norm for them was new faces that hung around for maybe a term or two then disappeared again. Mine was just another unremarkable face, passing through. I spent the morning in grateful anonymity, trying to get my bearings, and at one o’clock, I was wandering down a long, oak-paneled corridor, elbowing my way through talking, laughing, milling crowds, trying to find the canteen.
“Norgard, isn’t it? The new chap.”
The voice made me stop and turn. He was about my age, tall and well built with an easy smile. He was holding out his hand. I took it and we shook.
“Pendrake, Sebastian Pendrake.”
“Hi, yeah, I’m Jake… Jake Norgard.” I hesitated.
He said, “You look lost.”
I smiled. “I guess I am. I’m looking for the canteen.”
“You mean the Luncheon Hall. Come with me. We’ll eat together and I’ll tell you all about this place—whom to befriend and whom to avoid like the plague.”
The Luncheon Hall was as vast as it was old. It had a high, gabled ceiling with ancient wooden beams. The walls were oak-paneled, like most of the school, and students sat at long oak benches and helped themselves to food from a buffet. You had the feeling that you wanted to call everything ‘venerable’. Sebastian led me to the venerable buffet and handed me a venerable tray.
“Don’t have the lamb. It’s dreadful here. I’ll take you to Glorfindel’s in town if you’re partial to lamb. Damned good. Have the beef. Cook’s a dab hand with beef. Spuds are good, too, though his mash is lamentable. And you must have the sticky toffee pudding. It’s traditional. You chaps haven’t got it over there.”
“Would you call it ‘venerable’?”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “Venerable sticky toffee pudding? Indeed, I would.”
We sat and he waved his fork around, looking in the general direction of the ceiling. “One of Oxford’s newer buildings—only about five hundred years old but said to be on much older foundations. The original monastery that stood here may be Norman.” He glanced at me like he wasn’t sure I knew what that meant then added, “That would make it—”
“I know who the Normans were, Sebastian. It would make it nearly a thousand years old.”
He smiled. “Don’t take offense, old chap. Even the English are forgetting their history.” He sat back, dabbing his mouth with his paper napkin. “Nobody, for example, remembers that the Normans were not French—thank heavens—but Danish Vikings. And incidentally, you yourself must have Viking roots with a name like Norgard.”
The beef was as good as he’d said, so I wasn’t paying much attention to what he was rambling on about. I spoke absently, to my plate, “I do? I didn’t know that—”
But before I’d finished, he was talking again. “Ah, that’s the chap to avoid—him and his crony.”
I looked up and followed his gaze. Two guys had just walked in. They were built like what Sebastian would probably call brick loos. The biggest was probably six foot six with shoulders like a gorilla. His neck was as wide as his head, and he had a hard jaw and real short white-blond hair. I couldn’t see from where I was sitting, but two got you twenty he had very pale-blue eyes. His pal was just a smaller version of him.
Sebastian was saying, “Enter the Fourth Reich. That’s Freddy ‘Brutus’ Muller. He’s the captain of the American football team, and his nasty sidekick is Darren Barry Engels, otherwise known as DB.”
I knew the type. I’d lived with them since I’d started school. Every school kid does, except the Brutuses of this world. They go on to become attorneys—and sometimes presidents. I shrugged. “If you ignore them, they usually ignore you.”
He grunted. “I had a run-in with him once. He broke my nose”—his eyes glazed and he gave a funny smile—“but he sang soprano in the shower for a few weeks after that. Now we avoid each other.”
I looked at Brutus. He was pushing to the head of the line at the buffet. I said, “You mean you kicked him in his brains?”
He took a spoon to his sticky toffee pudding, still smiling. “You could say that.”
The pudding was everything he had said it would be. And as I cleaned the bowl, I thought maybe I could grow to like Harry Potter land.
* * * *
The afternoon passed quickly, and before I knew it, I was shouldering my way through milling crowds toward the exit. That’s when I saw her. You read about all that stuff that’s supposed to happen—your heart skips a beat, time stands still, you know it’s your destiny that you are soul mates, there will never be anyone else…yadda yadda yadda. And you laugh and mock and stick your fingers down your throat.
Wrong. When it happens, it happens just like that. It’s all true.
I stood like a total chump and stared at her. She was the cutest thing I had ever seen. Everything about her was kind of wrong, but the way she put it together was perfection. She had red hair that was just auburn enough to look good. She had pale skin and freckles on an elfin face that made your belly burn like you’d been eating Carolina Reapers for breakfast. Her eyes were green and she had a cute little body that had exactly nothing wrong with it.
My heart skipped a beat. Time stood still. I knew.
She had stopped at the top of the stairs that led down to the drive and she seemed to be waiting. I was about to go over when I saw her smile at someone. I looked and my heart sank. Brutus and his sidekick DB swaggered over to her. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but by the leer on his face, it wasn’t anything you’d say to your Great-aunt Hilda. I watched her face for her reaction and willed her to slap him, but she didn’t. She laughed like she thought he was funny. He winked at her and I read, “Catch you around,” on his lips as he strolled away. I felt sick.
I told myself girls just don’t understand what jackasses guys can be, steeled myself and sauntered over to her with a big, friendly smile. “Hi, I’m Jake. I’m new here.”
She kind of smiled then waited, like she wanted me to come to the point. I asked, “What’s your name?”
“Ciara,”
I thought I caught a soft brogue and asked, “Is that an Irish accent?”
“It might be. Is yours American?”
“Yeah. I’m from San Francisco originally. How about you?”
Was it a twinkle in her eye or was it just contempt? She watched me for a beat with a shadow of a smile and said, “No, I’m not from San Francisco.” Then she said, “There’s my ride,” and she was skipping down the steps.
I called after her, “I’ll see you around…”
She glanced over her shoulder at me with that odd, indefinable look that could be either a brush of Irish lips or a kick in the nuts and said, “You might.”
And she was gone.
A strong hand rested on my shoulder and Sebastian’s voice brought me back from hell. “Now, that was unwise, old chap.”
“Who cares?” I said with feeling.
“To be wise and love exceeds man’s might.”
“Who is she?”
“All you need to know about Ciara Fionn is that Brutus wants her, and if you stand in his way, he will do terrible things to you.”
I saw Rosie’s Jeep pull up outside the gate as Ciara climbed into a Jaguar across the road and drove away. I turned to face Sebastian, who was watching me with a smile that only the English know how to do. I said, “I know. But you know what?”
“I fear I do. You don’t care, do you?”
I shook my head and told him, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Sebastian. Hang loose.”
We drove in silence for a while and I tried not to squirm. Having a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old stepmom when you’re seventeen, even if you’ve just fallen helplessly in love for the rest of your life, is not easy, especially when she keeps looking at you with a cute smile on her face. That was what Rosie kept doing now.
She said, “So…?”
I glanced at her and had no idea what to say.
She added, “Did you meet any cute girls?” I swallowed and squirmed. “I bet they were queuing up for a handsome young devil like you, weren’t they?”
I made a noise that started out full of good intentions to be a laugh, but ended up horribly strangled in my nose. When she heard it, she was compassionate enough to change the subject, and said, “You remember your father and I are having drinks with the dean this evening, so you’ll be at home alone until about nine.”
I struggled to master my vocal chords and said, in a voice that was ridiculously low and gravelly, “Yeah, sure…”
She pulled up outside our house. I fell out of the Jeep and bolted for the door.
I’m fairly sure they stopped building in Oxford somewhere about the sixteenth century. Certainly, anything they did build after that was not considered good enough for anyone with money, because anyone with money in Oxford lives in a house that is at least five hundred years old. And if you’re super rich, it’s even older than that. If Bill Gates was from Oxford, he’d live in a cave.
Our house was, I guess, pretty cool. Rosie told me it was late Tudor, which meant it was built around the time that Elizabeth I was beating up on the Spanish and stealing all the gold they’d stolen from the Incas. It had been renovated since then, but it was still all ancient oak beams, and part of the roof was still thatched. The door was original, five-hundred-year-old oak with massive iron-studded hinges, and the fireplace in the drawing room was so big you could stand in it.
The house was listed now, so you couldn’t change it, but back in the thirties, someone had put French windows in the drawing room, so you could step out onto the landscaped garden. When I went in, the house was silent and very still. The French windows were open, so I stepped out onto the lawn to try to stop having inappropriate thoughts about Rosie and indulge in some very appropriate ones about Ciara. There was a stone-flagged path through the rose garden and I followed it, stopping to smell the buds and thinking of her curious smile and the soft sparkle in her eyes. At the end, it came to an arbor at the back of the garden, where a weeping willow bowed over the pond. Dusk was closing in, and a blackbird on the chimney was singing into the failing September light. I wished it was a nightingale or at least a lark. That’s the kind of mood I was in. A blackbird’s song is easily as beautiful as a nightingale’s, but when you’re in love for the first and last time in your life, it has to be a nightingale.
What you really don’t want is an electromagnetic portal to a parallel universe to open over the garden bench in your arbor and a nine-foot Irish gnome to appear, chewing on a leg of lamb. You really don’t want that to happen, but it happened to me on my first day in Oxford, the city of dreaming spires.
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