carved in linen-fold, and above all its chattering, well-meaning people. He longed to escape toward the river.
He started across the narrow arch of the Bridge of Sighs with its stone fretwork like frozen lace, a windowed passageway to the fields beyond. He would walk across the smooth grass of the Backs, stretching all the way from Magdalene Bridge past St. John’s, Trinity, Gonville and Caius, Clare, and King’s College Chapel toward Queen’s and the Mathematical Bridge. Perhaps he would go as far as the millpond beyond, and over the causeway to Lammas Land. It was still warm. The long, slow sunset and twilight would last another hour and a half yet, perhaps more.
He was on the slow rise of the bridge, glancing out through the open lattice at the reflections on the water below, when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned to see a young man in his early twenties. His face was beautiful, strong-boned, clear-eyed, his brown hair bleached gold across the top by the long summer.
“Sebastian!” Joseph said with pleasure.
“Dr. Reavley! I . . .” Sebastian Allard stopped, his fair skin a little flushed with consciousness of his inadequacy to say anything that matched the situation, and perhaps also that he had missed the funeral. “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how bad I feel.”
“You don’t have to,” Joseph said quickly. “I would far rather talk about something else.”
Sebastian hesitated, indecision clear in his half-turned shoulder.
Joseph did not want to press him, yet he felt Sebastian had something to say, and he could not rebuff him. Their families had lived in neighboring villages for years, and it was Joseph who had seen the promise in young Sebastian and encouraged him to pursue it. He had been his mentor for the last year while they had both been at St. John’s. It had become one of those friendships that blossomed so naturally he could not believe there was ever a possibility it would not have happened.
“I’m going for a walk along the Backs,” Joseph said. “If you want to join me, you are welcome.” He smiled and began to turn away, so as not to place an obligation on the younger man, as if it were a request.
There were a few moments of silence, then he heard the footsteps quickly and lightly on the bridge after him, and he and Sebastian emerged into the sunlight, almost side by side. The air was still warm, and the smell of cut grass drifted on the slight breeze. The river was flat calm, barely disturbed by three or four punts along the stretch past St. John’s and Trinity. In the nearest one a young man in gray flannel trousers and a white shirt stood leaning on the pole with effortless grace, his back to the sun, casting his features into shadow and making an aureole around his head.
A girl with red hair sat in the back looking up at him and laughing. Her muslin dress looked primrose-colored in the fading glow, but in the daylight it could have been ivory, or even white. Her skin was amber where she had defied convention and allowed the long, hot season to touch her with its fire. She was eating from a basket of cherries and dropping the stones into the water one after another.
The young man waved and called out a greeting.
Joseph waved back, and Sebastian answered as well.
“He’s a good fellow,” Sebastian said a moment later. “He’s at Caius, reading physics. All terribly practical.” He sounded as if he were about to say something more, then he pushed his hands into his pockets and walked silently on the grass.
Joseph felt no need for speech. The slight splash of punt poles and the current of the river slurping against their wooden sides, the occasional burst of laughter, were a wordless communication. Even grief could not entirely mar its timeless peace.
“We have to protect this!” Sebastian said suddenly and with fierce emotion. His voice was thick, his shoulders tense as he half turned to stare across the shining water at the buildings beyond. “All of it! The ideas, the beauty, the knowledge . . . the freedom to think.” He drew in his breath. “To discover the things of the mind. We are accountable to humanity for what we have. To the future.”
Joseph was startled. He had been letting himself sink into a sort of vacancy of thought, where emotion was sufficient to carry him. There was a glory here like the best music, filling everything. Now he was jerked back by Sebastian’s words. He deserved a considered answer, and it was apparent from the passion in his face that he needed one.
“You mean Cambridge specifically? What do you think endangers it?” Joseph asked, puzzled by the heat in him. “It’s been here for over half a millennium, and it seems to be growing stronger rather than weaker.”
Sebastian’s eyes were grave. His fair skin had been caught by the sun, and in the burning amber light now he looked almost made of gold. “I don’t suppose you’ve had time to read the news,” he answered. “Or the inclination, for that matter.” He turned his head away, not wanting to intrude into Joseph’s feelings, or else hiding his own.
“Not much,” Joseph agreed. “But I know about the assassinations in Sarajevo, and that Vienna is unhappy about it. They want some sort of reparation from the Serbs. I suppose it was to be expected.”
“If you occupy somebody else’s country, it is to be expected that they won’t like it!” Sebastian responded savagely. “All sorts of things come to be
There could be no argument. It was the aim not only of philosophy, but of Christianity as well, and Sebastian knew Joseph would not deny that.
“Yes,” he agreed. He sought the supreme comfort of reason. “But there have always been conquests, injustices, and rebellions—or revolutions, if you prefer. They have never endangered the heart of learning.”
Sebastian stopped. A burst of laughter came up from the river where two punts almost collided as young men drinking champagne tried to reach across and touch glasses in a toast. One of the boys nearly overbalanced and was perilously close to falling in. His companion grasped him by the back of his shirt, and all he lost was his straw boater, which floated for a moment or two on the shining surface before someone from the other punt caught it on the end of his pole. He presented it to its owner, who took it, dripping wet, and put it back on his head, to shouts of approval and a loud and hilarious guffaw.
It was so good-natured, a celebration of life, that Joseph found himself smiling. The sun was warm on his face, and the smells of the earth and grass were sweet.
“It’s not easy to imagine, is it?” Sebastian replied.
“What?”
“Destruction . . . war,” Sebastian answered, looking away from the river and back at Joseph, his eyes dark with the weight of his thoughts.
Joseph hesitated. He had not realized Sebastian was so deeply troubled.
“You don’t think so?” Sebastian said. “You’re mourning a loss, sir, and I am truly sorry for it. But if we get drawn into a European war, every family in England will be mourning, not just for those we loved, but for the whole way of life we’ve cherished and nurtured for a thousand years. If we let that happen, we would be the true barbarians! And we would be to blame for more than the Goths or the Vandals who sacked Rome. They didn’t know any better. We do!” His voice was savage, almost on the point of tears.
Joseph was frightened by the note of hysteria in him. “There was revolution all over Europe in 1848,” he said gently, choosing his words with care and unarguable truth. “It didn’t destroy civilization. In fact, it didn’t even destroy the despotism it was supposed to.” This was reason, calm history of fact. “Everything went back to normal within a year.”
“You’re not saying that was good?” Sebastian challenged him, his eyes bright, assured at least of that. He knew Joseph far too well to suppose he did.
“No, of course not. I’m saying that the order of things is set in very deep foundations, and it will take far more than the assassination of an archduke and his duchess, brutal as it was, to cause any radical change.”
Sebastian bent and picked up a twig and hurled it toward the river, but it was too light and fell short. “Do you think so?”
“Yes,” Joseph replied with certainty. Private griefs might shake his personal world, tear out the heart of it, but the beauty and the reason of civilization continued, immeasurably greater than the individual.
Sebastian stared across the river, but unseeingly, his eyes clouded by his vision within. “That’s what Morel
