“In hall, at high table?” I felt terribly underdressed and pulled at the hem of my silky black top.
Matthew tilted his head back and laughed. “I avoid hall whenever possible. And I’m certainly not taking you in there, to sit in the Siege Perilous and be inspected by the fellows.”
We rounded the corner and turned toward the Radcliffe Camera. When we passed by the entrance to Hertford College without stopping, I put my hand on his arm. There was one college in Oxford notorious for its exclusivity and rigid attention to protocol.
It was the same college famous for its brilliant fellows.
“You aren’t.”
Matthew stopped. “Why does it matter what college I belong to?” He looked away. “If you’d rather be around other people, of course, I understand.”
“I’m not worried you’re going to eat
me
for dinner, Matthew. I’ve just never been inside.” A pair of ornate, scrolled gates guarded his college as if it were Wonderland. Matthew made an impatient noise and caught my hand to prevent me from peering through them.
“It’s just a collection of people in a set of old buildings.” His gruffness did nothing to detract from the fact that he was one of six dozen or so fellows in a college with no students. “Besides, we’re going to my rooms.”
We walked the remaining distance, Matthew relaxing into the darkness with every step as if in the company of an old friend. We passed through a low wooden door that kept the public out of his college’s quiet confines. There was no one in the lodge except the porter, no undergraduates or graduates on the benches in the front quad. It was as quiet and hushed as if its members truly were the “souls of all the faithful people deceased in the university of Oxford.”
Matthew looked down with a shy smile. “Welcome to All Souls.”
All Souls College was a masterpiece of late Gothic architecture, resembling the love child of a wedding cake and a cathedral, with its airy spires and delicate stonework. I sighed with pleasure, unable to say much—at least not yet. But Matthew was going to have a lot of explaining to do later.
“Evening, James,” he said to the porter, who looked over his bifocals and nodded in welcome. Matthew held up his hand. An ancient key dangled off his index finger from a leather loop. “I’ll be just a moment.”
“Right, Professor Clairmont.”
Matthew took my hand again. “Let’s go. We need to continue your education.”
He was like a mischievous boy on a treasure hunt, pulling me along. We ducked through a cracked door black with age, and Matthew switched on a light. His white skin leaped out of the dark, and he looked every inch a vampire.
“It’s a good thing I’m a witch,” I teased. “The sight of you here would be enough to scare a human to death.”
At the bottom of a flight of stairs, Matthew entered a long string of numbers at a security keypad, then hit the star key. I heard a soft click, and he pulled another door open. The smell of must and age and something else that I couldn’t name hit me in a wave. Blackness extended away from the stairway lights.
“This is straight out of a Gothic novel. Where are you taking me?”
“Patience, Diana. It’s not much farther.” Patience, alas, was not the strong suit of Bishop women.
Matthew reached past my shoulder and flipped another switch. Suspended on wires like trapeze artists, a string of old bulbs cast pools of light over what looked like horse stalls for miniature Shetland ponies.
I stared at Matthew, a hundred questions in my eyes.
“After you,” he said with a bow.
Stepping forward, I recognized the strange smell. It was stale alcohol—like the pub on Sunday morning. “Wine?”
“Wine.”
We passed dozens of small enclosures that contained bottles in racks, piles, and crates. Each had a small slate tag, a year scrawled on it in chalk. We wandered past bins that held wine from the First World War and the Second, as well as bottles that Florence Nightingale might have packed in her trunks for the Crimea. There were wines from the year the Berlin Wall was built and the year it came down. Deeper into the cellar, the years scrawled on the slates gave way to broad categories like “Old Claret” and “Vintage Port.”
Finally we reached the end of the room. A dozen small doors stood locked and silent, and Matthew opened one of them. There was no electricity here, but he picked up a candle and wedged it securely into a brass holder before lighting it.
Inside, everything was as neat and orderly as Matthew himself, but for a layer of dust. Tightly spaced wooden racks held the wine off the floor and made it possible to remove a single bottle without making the whole arrangement tumble down. There were red stains next to the jamb where wine had been spit, year after year. The smell of old grapes, corks, and a trace of mildew filled the air.
“Is this yours?” I was incredulous.
“Yes, it’s mine. A few of the fellows have private cellars.”
“What can you possibly have in here that isn’t already out there?” The room behind me must contain a bottle of every wine ever produced. Oxford’s finest wine emporium now seemed barren and oddly sterile in comparison.
Matthew smiled mysteriously. “All sorts of things.”
He moved quickly around the small, windowless room, happily pulling out wines here and there. He handed me a heavy, dark bottle with a gold shield for a label and a wire basket over the cork. Champagne—Dom Perignon.
The next bottle was made from dark green glass, with a simple cream label and black script. He presented it to me with a little flourish, and I saw the date: 1976.
“The year I was born!” I said.
Matthew emerged with two more bottles: one with a long, octagonal label bearing a picture of a château on it and thick red wax around the top; the other lopsided and black, bearing no label and sealed with something that looked like tar. An old manila tag was tied around the neck of the second bottle with a dirty piece of string.
“Shall we?” Matthew asked, blowing out the candle. He locked the door carefully behind him, balancing the two bottles in his other hand, and slipped the key into his pocket. We left behind the smell of wine and climbed back to ground level.
In the dusky air, Matthew seemed to shine with pleasure, his arms full of wine. “What a wonderful night,” he said happily.
We went up to his rooms, which were grander than I had imagined in some ways and much less grand in others. They were smaller than my rooms at New College, located at the very top of one of the oldest blocks in All Souls, full of funny angles and odd slopes. Though the ceilings were tall enough to accommodate Matthew’s height, the rooms still seemed too small to contain him. He had to stoop through every door, and the windowsills reached down to somewhere near his thighs.
What the rooms lacked in size they more than made up for in furnishings. A faded Aubusson rug stretched across the floors, anchored with a collection of original William Morris furniture. Somehow the fifteenth-century architecture, the eighteenth-century rug, and the nineteenth-century rough-hewn oak looked splendid together and gave the rooms the atmosphere of a select Edwardian gentlemen’s club.
A vast refectory table stood at the far side of the main room, with newspapers, books, and the assorted detritus of academic life neatly arranged at one end—memos about new policies, scholarly journals, requests for letters and peer reviews. Each pile was weighted down with a different object. Matthew’s paperweights included the genuine article in heavy blown glass, an old brick, a bronze medal that was no doubt some award he’d won, and a small fire poker. At the other end of the table, a soft linen cloth had been thrown over the wood, held down by the most gorgeous Georgian silver candlesticks I’d ever seen outside a museum. A full array of different-shaped wineglasses stood guard over simple white plates and more Georgian silver.
“I love it.” I looked around with delight. Not a stick of furniture or a single ornament in this room belonged to the college. It was all perfectly, quintessentially Matthew.
“Have a seat.” He rescued the two wine bottles from my slack fingers and whisked them off to what looked like a glorified closet. “All Souls doesn’t believe that fellows should eat in their rooms,” he said by way of explanation as I eyed the meager kitchen facilities, “so we’ll get by as best we can.”
What I was about to eat would equal the finest dinner in town, no doubt.
Matthew plunked the champagne into a silver bucket full of ice and joined me in one of the cozy chairs flanking his nonfunctional fireplace. “Nobody lets you build fires in Oxford fireplaces anymore.” He motioned ruefully at the empty stone enclosure. “When every fireplace was lit, the city smelled like a bonfire.”
“When did you first come to Oxford?” I hoped the openness of my question would assure him I wasn’t prying into his past lives.
“This time it was 1989.” He stretched his long legs out with a sigh of relaxation. “I came to Oriel as a science student and stayed on for a doctorate. When I won an All Souls Prize Fellowship, I switched over here for a few years. When my degree was completed, the university offered me a place and the members elected me a fellow.” Every time he opened his mouth, something amazing popped out. A Prize Fellow? There were only two of those a year.
“And this is your first time at All Souls?” I bit my lip, and he laughed.
“Let’s get this over with,” he said, holding up his hands and beginning to tick off colleges. “I’ve been a member—once—of Merton, Magdalen, and University colleges. I’ve been a member of New College and Oriel twice each. And this is the first time All Souls has paid any attention to me.”
Multiplying this answer by a factor of Cambridge, Paris, Padua, and Montpellier—all of which, I was sure, had once had a student on their books named Matthew Clairmont, or some variation thereof—sent a dizzying set of degrees dancing through my head. What must he have studied, all those many years, and whom had he studied with?
“Diana?” Matthew’s amused voice penetrated my thoughts. “Did you hear me?”
“I’m sorry.” I closed my eyes and tightened my hands on my thighs in an effort to keep my mind from wandering. “It’s like a disease. I can’t keep the curiosity at bay when you start reminiscing.”
“I know. It’s one of the difficulties a vampire faces when he spends time with a witch who’s a historian.” Matthew’s mouth was bent in a mock frown, but his eyes twinkled like black stars.
“If you want to avoid these difficulties in future, I suggest you avoid the Bodleian’s paleography reference section,” I said tartly.
“One historian is all I can manage at the moment.” Matthew rose smoothly to his feet. “I asked if you were hungry.”
Why he continued to do so was a mystery—when was I not hungry?
“Yes,” I said, trying to extract myself from a deep Morris chair. Matthew stuck out his hand. I grasped it, and he lifted me easily.
We stood facing each other, our bodies nearly touching. I fixed my attention on the bump of his Bethany ampulla under his sweater.
His eyes flickered over me, leaving their trail of snowflakes. “You look lovely.” I ducked my head, and the usual piece of hair fell over my face. He reached up as he had several times recently and tucked it behind my ear. This time his fingers continued to the base of my skull. He lifted my hair away from my neck and let it fall through his fingers as if it were water. I shivered at the touch of cool air on my skin.
“I love your hair,” he murmured. “It has every color imaginable—even strands of red and black.” I heard the sharp intake of breath that meant he had picked up a new scent.
“What do you smell?” My voice was thick, and I still hadn’t dared to meet his eyes.
“You,” he breathed.
My eyes floated up to his.
“Shall we have dinner?”
After that, it was hard to concentrate on the food, but I did my best. Matthew pulled out my rush-seated chair, which had a full view of the warm, beautiful room. From a minuscule refrigerator, he removed two plates, each with six fresh oysters nestled on top of a bed of crushed ice like the rays of a star.
“Lecture One of your continuing education consists of oysters and champagne.” Matthew sat down and held up a finger like a don about to embark on a favorite subject. He reached for the wine, which was within the wingspan of his long arm, and pulled it from the bucket. With one turn he popped the cork free of the neck of the bottle.
“I usually find that more difficult,” I commented drily, looking at his strong, elegant fingers.
“I can teach you to knock the cork off with a sword if you want.” Matthew grinned. “Of course, a knife works, too, if you don’t have a sword lying around.” He poured some of the liquid into our glasses, where it fizzed and danced in the candlelight.
He raised his glass to me.
“À la tienne.”
“À la tienne.”
I lifted my own flute and watched the bubbles break on the surface. “Why are the bubbles so tiny?”
“Because the wine is so old. Most champagne is drunk long before this. But I like the old wine—it reminds me of the way champagne used to taste.”
“How old is it?”
“Older than you are,” Matthew replied. He was pulling the oyster shells apart with his bare hands—something that usually required a very sharp knife and a lot of skill—and chucking the shells into a glass bowl in the center of the table. He handed one plate over to me. “It’s from 1961.”
“Please tell me this is the oldest thing we’re drinking tonight,” I said, thinking back to the wine he’d brought to dinner on Thursday, the bottle from which was now holding the last of his white roses on my bedside table.
“Not by a long shot,” he said with a grin.
I tipped the contents of the first shell into my mouth. My eyes popped open as my mouth filled with the taste of the Atlantic.
“Now drink.” He picked up his own glass and watched me take a sip of the golden liquid. “What do you taste?”