Lessons for Survivors Read online

  “Not at all.” Jonty smiled, dispersing all worries about people fiddling with his personal property. “Better safe than sorry.”

  Orlando shuddered at the thought of wasps, smoke, or worse still, porters interfering with his letters. “I think I’ll just nip my post up to my study, if there’s any risk of arthropod intervention.” He smiled as if he’d made a wonderfully witty joke, and the porters indulged him with a chuckle. Naturally, it was human intervention that would have bothered Orlando more than the other two.

  “It shouldn’t happen again, sir.” Summerbee was conciliatory. “We think we’ve got shot of all our unwanted visitors. A shame we can’t employ the same techniques when we get waifs and strays from the college next door in here.”

  The college next door—how every true St. Bride’s man loathed it. Often, although not always, with good cause. A den of plagiarists, scoundrels, cads, and cheats, or so every good Bride’s man swore. The archenemy, camped at the gates. Jonty always said every dark cloud had a silver lining, and maybe he’d be proved right. All the great and the good of the mathematics department had been called to attend an urgent meeting on Thursday morning to discuss a case of possible plagiarism by one of their members, which was not an enticing prospect. But at least the suspect was someone from the college next door.

  “Maybe you could get your man with the smoke to make a secret raid on Dr. Owens’s lodge and see if he dislodges something worse than wasps.” Orlando sniffed, clutching his post to his chest as if Owens, head of the much-reviled institution and thief-in-chief, was going to sneak around and purloin it. He’d stolen things from St. Bride’s before and had even tried to get his hands on the notorious, precious, and totally befuddling Woodville Ward papers. Those papers had provided the key to solving a mysterious disappearance that had puzzled scholars for centuries. “Shall I put your letters somewhere safe, Dr. Stewart? Just in case you lose them halfway up King’s Parade?”

  Jonty sorted through the pile of correspondence, picked out two items to put in his inside pocket, then handed over the rest. “If you’d be so kind, Dr. Coppersmith. They’ll make a terrible bulge in my jacket otherwise. Two whole papers to check through and both of them on King Lear, so that’ll be a bundle of laughs. I’ll hang about the Old Court while you do the necessary.”

  Orlando nodded and swept all the letters and papers to safety before any more wasps—or porters—could get at them. He was too consumed with thoughts and worries about the forthcoming ceremony to entertain any curiosity about the letters in Jonty’s jacket. As he came down the stairs from his room, he found Jonty lurking by the entrance, looking concerned.

  “I was just a bit worried that you’d lock yourself in and refuse to take part.”

  “Don’t tempt me. The thought’s crossed my mind several times.” Orlando hated fuss. Although there was more than that; he was distinctly miffed that he couldn’t be Orlando Coppersmith, Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics, as he’d always had a fondness for real analysis and Fourier series. But short of assassinating the present incumbent of the post—who looked like he had a good few years in him yet—there seemed to be little chance of him getting the job. So Forster Professor of Applied Mathematics he would be, and if anyone noticed that the title had been endowed by his almost-sister-in-law in honour of his almost-mother-in-law (courtesy of the handsome inheritance Lavinia had received), then they were too polite to mention it.

  “You deserve this position. Completely and utterly. If anyone so much as hints otherwise, I’ll belt them one. Anyway, you weren’t even the first person to hold the post.” With that, they began a slow, stately walk over the college lawns.

  “True.” Orlando had been in the trenches of France when the chair had first been created. The honour of being the original professor had gone to someone from the college next door, shoehorned into the post by that toad Owens, who had probably used blackmail to get his own slimy way in terms of the appointment. “Your Lavinia said Professor Mann was almost a gentleman, even if he came from such a disreputable place.”

  “Did she? Well, the old girl’s always had good sense when it comes to getting the measure of someone, so I suppose we must give him the benefit of a rather large doubt.” Jonty grinned, the great scar on his cheek—his souvenir, along with two medals, of the Great War—tipping up and giving him a piratical air. “She didn’t arrange to nobble him, did she?”

  Professor Mann had come to a sticky end, literally, falling into a vat of flour and egg when on a visit to a biscuit factory to observe particle and liquid flow through hoppers and tubes. He’d developed a phobia of machinery as a result and had retired to Devon a broken man. The professor elect wouldn’t do anything as rash.

  Orlando was pleased they’d not brought the motor car. Sauntering along King’s Parade with Jonty at his side and not a cloud in the piercingly blue sky, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that the shades of Helena Stewart and Grandmother Coppersmith were walking alongside him as well. He wasn’t sure he believed in God or heaven, even though Jonty was enthusiastic about both, but the thought of the two formidable women who had so shaped his life for the better being in cahoots in some ethereal realm, bossing the angels and telling Gabriel off for going around without his vest on, made the day even brighter.

  All he needed now were two things. The first was for the ordeal of the next few hours to be over swiftly and without incident. Please God, his dodgy Achilles tendon, which hadn’t given him any gyp this last five years, wouldn’t decide that today was the day it had its revenge for presumed maltreatment and gave out, sending him arse over tip in the face of the congregation. The second was for his guardian angels, if they did exist, to send him a nice juicy problem to solve. And if they couldn’t manage a murder (which didn’t seem like the sort of thing to be praying for), then some other mystery, maybe one that had evaded all solution for years on end and that he and Jonty alone could master.

  “Are you thinking about violent crime of some sort?” The perky voice at his side cut into Orlando’s daydream of knives, victims’ backs, and convoluted inheritances.

  “How did you know?” How did Jonty Stewart always seem to know what was going on in his brain? Did it read like ticker tape all over the Coppersmith fizzog?

  “You’ve got that look in your eye. The one that only comes when it’s been too long between cases.” Jonty grinned, and Orlando had to admit he was right. Time was when he would have bitten anyone’s hand off at the chance of a nice, complicated crime to investigate. Maybe those times were returning at last.

  While there’d never been lean years, there had been the odd stretches of lean months when nobody had come forward with so much as a telegram gone astray that needed to be tracked down, let alone an unsolved murder for him and Jonty to get their brains about. They didn’t count the war years, when they hadn’t felt any need to investigate anything; Room 40 work had kept their wits occupied long enough with cryptography and the like, and when they’d been at the front, they’d shut all curiosity off. If ever there’d been a time when Orlando hadn’t wanted to think too deeply, that had been it.

  “Is it too much for a man to want a little diversion when he’s got such weighty matters as an important lecture on his mind?” Orlando tried to sound as if he believed passionately in every word he said. “It would help oil the wheels of contemplation. Working on one would aid the other, naturally.”

  “You talk such rot at times. I hope you don’t stuff that lecture with such obvious lies.” They stopped to let an idiot undergraduate from the college next door—instantly recognisable by the vile college colours he adorned himself with—hurtle past on a bike. “That reminds me of something Dr. Panesar was saying in the Senior Common Room about the circulatory system. A clot may be transported in many ways.”

  Orlando groaned, rolling his eyes. “And you have the nerve to accuse me of speaking rot.”

  “At least I don’t deny doing it.” They carried on walking, safe for a while from being i
mpaled on anyone’s handlebars. “You just won’t admit that you miss the thrill of the chase. You’re like a foxhound. You’ve smelled blood once and now you have to have your share of it. Regularly.”

  Orlando stopped, eyeing his friend closely. “And are you saying you don’t?”

  “Of course not. There’s nothing I’d like more than a mystery. Been too long.” Jonty’s expression was rueful; their last case had been in the spring and solving it had been bittersweet. “It would prove to me that everything was back to normal. That the last five years hadn’t spoiled the world forever.”

  They walked on in silence, each with his thoughts.

  “Do you really think that the world’s been spoiled?” Orlando hated to hear his friend so glum. This wasn’t the Jonty Stewart he knew, loved, and sometimes had the overwhelming desire to murder. Especially when he changed cars and became besotted all over again with some metal monstrosity.

  “It’ll certainly never be the same. I feel we’ve all passed through the fire.” Jonty slapped Orlando’s shoulder. “Still, there’s no point in grumbling. Some things are above and beyond the passage of time and the cruelty of the world affecting them. Maurice Panesar still tells appalling jokes.” He lowered his voice to barely more than a whisper. “And we still love each other. Which is a miracle in itself when I consider what a miserable swine you are.”

  Orlando grinned, finding the insult a welcome sign that the old Jonty was back. “And you’re still the cheekiest toad in Cambridge.” If they’d been home at Forsythia Cottage, sod would have been substituted for toad, but that wasn’t appropriate for King’s Parade.

  “Toad, am I? Then I might not feel inclined to give you the little treat I have here.” Jonty patted his jacket through his gown.

  “A reward for getting through this afternoon without strangling the vice-chancellor?” Orlando eyed the thick material, as if the layers might become as glass and yield the secrets of the inner pocket.

  “Something like that. But you’re not going to find out unless you stop frowning. Do try to smile at least once.”

  “Will whatever it is be worth it?”

  “Oh yes. Trust your Uncle Jonty. It’s even worth rousing a smile for Dr. Owens.”

  “You survived, Professor Coppersmith.” Jonty cuffed his friend’s shoulder. All the solemnity and ceremony was done, Orlando had smiled at least three times and not snorted at anyone, and at last they could relax and enjoy some light refreshments. It might not have been champagne and lobster, but tea and finger sandwiches totally fitted the bill. The hall at St. Bride’s had been especially spruced up for the occasion; even the tiniest indications of a lobbed sprout or a flicked black currant had been removed, and all traces of dunderheads with them. Jonty wondered whether they’d had the place fumigated, just in case.

  “I did.” Orlando broke into his fourth smile. “Not quite like going over the top, but it had its similarities.”

  “Comfier uniform, certainly. I suspect . . .”

  Whatever Jonty suspected was interrupted as Dr. Panesar ran up to them. Or as close to running as an academic gown, the solemn occasion, and the press of people allowed for.

  “Dr. Coppersmith.” He clasped his hands to his mouth. “Professor Coppersmith.” He shook Orlando’s hand, pumping up and down enthusiastically. “I’m so pleased for you.”

  Orlando beamed. Maurice Panesar—fellow of St. Bride’s, mechanical engineer and budding astrophysicist, inventor of prototypical time-travelling devices and one of the nicest men you could care to meet—was among the elite group of people Orlando labelled ‘friend.’ As he’d confessed to Jonty, he’d never once regretted it.

  “Thank you, Dr. Panesar. I got your note. It was much appreciated.”

  “I wanted to wish you all the best. I knew I wouldn’t get to talk to you beforehand.” He turned to Jonty, who’d managed to sidle through the throng right at the start and hadn’t budged since from his rightful place at Orlando’s side. “He’s done the college proud, hasn’t he?”

  Jonty slapped Panesar’s shoulder, then gave him a big hug. It was probably inappropriately affectionate for the occasion, but clearly Jonty was beyond caring. “He’s a credit to us all. It’ll be your turn next, Dr. P., when they’re filling the engineering professorship.”

  “The Chair of Mechanism and Applied Mechanics?” Panesar shook his head. “I’d like to think I had a chance, but I doubt my abilities are up to it.”

  “Nonsense!” Orlando cuffed Panesar’s other shoulder. The poor man was buffeted about like a punching bag under the weight of affection. “You’ve more brains than all the dons down at Ascension College put together, although that’s not saying a lot.”

  Panesar lowered his voice. There were a few Ascension men lurking about, and you could never tell if they were going to turn nasty. “Even Nurse Hatfield has more brains than the whole company of Ascension. Junior and senior members combined.”

  Jonty wanted to say that Nurse Hatfield, doyenne of the St. Bride’s sickbay, had more bosom than all the figureheads in His Majesty’s navy combined, but thought better of it. There was still a persistent rumour that Dr. Panesar sometimes was allowed to rest his head on that soft and expansive cushion, and so the subject had to be avoided if one wanted to escape a black eye. He sipped his tea and smiled to himself.

  “I’ll restrain my hopes, though. I suspect they wouldn’t dare elect me. I’m too likely to blow up half the laboratories if they give me free run of the department.” Panesar smiled, having hit on at least part of the truth. He was generally regarded—almost literally, the way his inventions had a habit of exploding—as a loose cannon. People who visited his laboratory were liable to hover at the door or don a steel-lined bowler hat if they had to enter the room. However, even if he hadn’t been such a force for mayhem, he still might not win any promotion; whether Cambridge was entirely ready for someone of his humble background and Punjabi race to take an elevated position was a whole other issue.

  “Will you come up to Forsythia Cottage for dinner?” Jonty wondered whether to invite Nurse Hatfield while he was about it, but thought better of that too. No one was supposed to know. “I wish we could invite you at some point over the next few weeks, but all parties and frolicking have been put on hold until Doctor . . . Professor Coppersmith has finished writing, and then delivering, his lecture. We’ve planned a celebration in three weeks.”

  “It might well be a funeral wake for my career if I can’t get the thing written.” Orlando studied the contents of his teacup, as if inspiration might lurk there.

  Jonty and Panesar exchanged knowing looks and ploughed on, ignoring the doom-mongering. “We’ve our old friend Matthew Ainslie descending on us with his business partner. Mrs. Ward and her granddaughter will be doing the catering.” Jonty’s plans for the dinner party were escalating in proportion to Orlando’s pessimism. Mrs. Ward might well grumble when informed, but she’d be secretly thrilled and her granddaughter would be delighted at the thought of a decent-sized company to try her developing culinary skills on. He gave Panesar another hug. “And I can promise you something a bit more exciting than the spread here.”

  “I’d be delighted to attend. Matthew Ainslie is a most entertaining man, and I’d like his opinion on a communications device I’ve been thinking about.” Panesar’s eyes lit up with enthusiasm as he spoke of his latest creation.

  “A communications device? Dr. Sheridan would be interested to hear about that, as well.” Jonty tried to look keen, but experience had taught him never to overestimate the capabilities of one of the good doctor’s devices. Orlando should have been grateful that he only had automobiles to contend with. Those weren’t likely to take out half of the university in one enormous blast. Still, maybe one day Panesar would make a breakthrough that would change the world.

  “Dr. Sheridan will be there too? And his good lady wife at his side?”

  “How could we invite him and not her?” Jonty pretended to be horrified. “It’s always
a delight to have Mrs. Sheridan gracing an event. Stops it being just a bucks’ do and keeps us all in line.”

  “Dinner it is, then.” Panesar made an elaborate bow and backed through the crowd, almost sending the dean of St. Thomas’s College flying.

  “Dear Dr. P. He doesn’t even know what day the party is or what time he’s supposed to be there.” Orlando shook his head indulgently, more than pleased to see the dean nearly come a cropper. He’d never liked the man and suspected his views on Fermat were fundamentally unsound.

  “Doesn’t know what day the party is? I’m not sure he knows what day of the week it is today.” Jonty eyed the assembly with indulgence. “And I suspect the same could be said of most of those present.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any different.” Orlando nodded. “Cambridge, in all her glory. Old-fashioned, out of touch with the times, a bit stuffy, but wonderful.”

  “Sounds just like you. No wonder you love the place so much.” Jonty was pleased to be amongst such a crowd that Orlando couldn’t whack him for the insult. “As for Dr. Panesar, we can leave a note in his pigeonhole, assuming the wasps don’t eat it.” Jonty lightly tapped his friend’s arm. “Come on, we’ve a bit more meeting and greeting to do before you can honourably make your departure. As you said, not quite like going over the top but near enough.” Now they could almost bear to joke about the war or to use phrases lightly in conversation that, even a few months ago, would have been too close, too painful.