Kate nodded. “Do you think Rowan would like to join us?”
“We could ask him. What time are you planning to go out?”
“In about an hour,” said Kate, glancing at her watch. “Shall I come and get you when we’re ready to leave?”
“Yes, do. I’m in Room 307.” She made a face. “Susan, being her usual impossible self, insisted that we change rooms because there’s a light outside her window that she was sure would disturb her sleep.”
Kate wrote the number on the back of the sweatshirt bag. “Okay, 307. Got it. I’ll see you around seven. Where do you suppose Rowan is?”
Elizabeth paused at the foot of the stairs. “Try the bar.”
After dialing the guide’s room and surveying the lounge where cream teas were served, Kate did indeed extend her search to the downstairs bar, where she found Rowan Rover seated at a tiny wooden table, blowing smoking rings like the Wonderland caterpillar.
“Hello, there!” said Kate, blushing a little at the memory of their last solitary encounter. “Mind if I join you?”
“Not at all,” he said graciously, glad for any distraction from the scenario in his mind.
“We were wondering if you’d like to go out to dinner with us in about an hour.”
Rowan raised his eyebrows. “We?”
“Yes, Maud and I. And Elizabeth. We thought you might be able to recommend a good restaurant. We thought we’d treat you to dinner.”
This enabled Rowan to recollect any amount of acceptable restaurants in the vicinity of Oxford. He spent several cigarettes detailing the virtues of each establishment and recounting stories of escapades at many of them during his student days. Kate listened with a wide-eyed expression of awe that he found almost as gratifying as the Scotch. Perhaps, he thought, if the Susan problem resolves itself neatly, I can forego my vow to Mrs. Thatcher after all.
As he finished his recital of restaurants, Kate glanced at her watch. “Golly!” she said. “It’s twenty to seven and I still have to change. Would you mind going up to get Elizabeth? I promised her we’d stop by, but I’m running late.”
“Certainly,” said Rowan, mellowed by the pleasant interlude with his favorite sedatives. “What is her room number?”
Kate’s lovely face went blank. “I forget. But I wrote it down somewhere.” She picked up her packages and began to examine them for pencil marks. “Let’s see… I met her in the sweatshirt shop. Here it is! Room 307.”
“Right. I’ll go and get her,” said Rowan, striding briskly away, as he wondered why that number sounded vaguely familiar. Finally, recognition overtook him and he stood for one frozen moment to let the calamity sink in. An instant later he was running down the hall toward the stairs, trying frantically to remember the first-aid treatment for electrocution. And what should he do if he knocked on her door and received no answer? It would look awfully suspicious to panic on so little provocation. He couldn’t ask for the passkey again.
“Hello. Rowan! Yoo-hoo!”
With a sigh of exasperation the guide turned around. “Not now,” he began. “I’m in a hurry.”
“All right,” said Elizabeth, waving him on.
Rowan stared. “It’s you!” To cover his gaffe, he said the next thing that came into his head. “You look ghastly.”
“So would you if you’d just been zapped by a light switch,” she murmured. She was about three shades paler than usual. She looked as if she might fall down at any second. “I came down to report it to the desk clerk.”
“Go and sit down,” said Rowan. “I’ll see to it.”
Later that evening at dinner, Elizabeth told the story of the vicious light switch to her table partners with considerably more aplomb and self-deprecation than she had felt at the time. “And to top it all off, it wasn’t even my room!” she concluded with a laugh. “It was Susan’s, but she made me swap with her because she didn’t like the view. Just my luck!”
No, thought Rowan with a heavy heart. Just
The next morning, Rowan endeavored to be cheerful during breakfast, but his thoughts were elsewhere. His face was beginning to show the strain of too much planning and too little success. He had got very little sleep, and he made only a perfunctory show of paying attention to the conversation of his breakfast partners, the Warrens. Fortunately, since they were pontificating about their children, his long lapses into silence went unnoticed.
At ten o’clock he downed his coffee and signaled for the last of the stragglers to finish their meals and prepare to depart. “You will need coats today,” he warned them. “It’s rather windy.”
“I’ll just be a minute,” said Frances Coles, scooping up the uneaten pastries from beside her plate.
Eyeing Frances’ slender figure, Nancy Warren sighed. “Where does she put it all?”
“In her bag,” snapped Rowan.
A short time later the troop marched down the front steps of the Randolph and set off to see the dreaming spires of Oxford. To everyone’s quiet amusement, Susan had appeared wearing her newly acquired navy coat, identical to Martha Tabram’s. As predicted, however, Martha appeared oblivious to the occurrence, although she did manage not to walk in the vicinity of Susan.
Oxford really was a perfect town for a tour, Rowan reflected, as he led the procession: compact, picturesque, and with historical associations for every taste. There were plenty of photo opportunities for Charles. Mystery readers like Susan could visit Balliol College, alma mater of Peter Wimsey, and scour the campus for scenes from the Edmund Crispin novels. Elizabeth MacPherson could see the cross in the street marking the place where the martyrs were burnt, and the church where Amy Robsart was buried. For Kate, the TV buff and moviegoer, he could offer vistas from
He marched them out to Somerville College, which boasted Dorothy L. Sayers among its graduates. That venerable institution for women was not located in the cluster of other colleges, but was a good distance away from the city center-and scarcely worth the walk when supplemented by Susan’s droning recital of the plot of
“And it wasn’t her best book to begin with,” muttered Maud Marsh.
They admired the Radcliffe Camera and the Sheldonian Theatre, while Rowan fantasized about the possibility of throwing Susan out a window of either one. They walked through the Bodleian courtyard and into the churchyard of St. Mary the Virgin, where Elizabeth instituted a search for the final resting place of Amy Robsart. A clerk in the church gift shop told her that a small plaque in the chancel was the only trace of the ill-fated lady of Leicester.
Susan kept saying that she didn’t see how students could get any studying done at Oxford, since all the colleges bordered on streets that hummed with incessant traffic. The others contrived to ignore her remarks.
“It isn’t like the American university system,” said Rowan. “Traditionally, tutors made assignments entirely on an individual basis.”
“But suppose you don’t want to learn anything?” asked Elizabeth.
“Then you don’t,” Rowan replied.
Elizabeth considered it. “What about graduate school? Did it take you two years to get your master’s?”
The guide sighed. Trust her to ask. “At Oxford, a graduate is automatically awarded a master’s degree upon graduation if he pays an additional fee.”
“What?” howled Elizabeth. “You mean the only difference between a B.A. and an M.A. at Oxford is fifty bucks?”
“Less than that in my day, I believe,” Rowan admitted.
“I am going to drown myself,” Elizabeth declared. “Now you tell me! After I’ve spent umpteen months of my life writing term papers for that gang of pedants in Virginia! Honestly!”
“Typical,” sniffed Maud Marsh. “Did I tell you about their so-called lemonade over here?”
The tour continued past Braesnose and looped back past a cordoned area of renovation work beside the library.
