Free Unlikely Traitors by Clare Langley-Hawthorne Page B

thought was of Oxford. It was the first door to Lord Wrotham’s past that she needed to unlock.

CHAPTER FIVE
    BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
    Ursula decided to let Samuels drive her up to Oxford in ‘Bertie’ rather than risk breaking-down en-route in the Bugatti. Although she managed to leave via the servants’ entrance to her Chester Square home without undue harassment, the journey took longer than anticipated after Samuels spotted a reporter following them just as they approached High Wycombe. It took a lengthy detour and some ingenuity on Samuels’ part to evade their follower and resume their course towards Abingdon and Oxford.
    It was with some trepidation that Ursula left for the journey to Oxford. She felt tainted by the scandals that had dogged her since she left Somerville College and unworthy of returning. Although the main aim of her visit was to investigate the relationship between Wrotham, Smythe, McTiernay and Balliol college, she could not help but be wistful on her own account—for what might have been. She had taken her finals in the end of Trinity Term in 1908. Back then the world held such promise. Her father was alive and she still believed she could convince him to let her make her own way in the world as a political journalist. Sitting in the back seat of Bertie she heaved a sigh as she remembered cramming one night for her finals, a cup of hot cocoa steaming in one hand, a torch in the other and a copy of Homer’s Iliad propped up on her knees. Seated on the narrow bed in the airless room that had been her home for the past three years, she had been was content to switch off her torch and watch the moonlight inch its way across the page as the night drew on. She had felt so restful at that moment, held in the eternal spell of stone and mortar, that she had felt as if, were she to close her eyes for even a moment, she would drift into an infinite, book-filled sleep, never to awaken.
    Now, as they drove up Headington Hill and caught the first glimpses of Oxford’s shimmering spires, those memories seemed little more than a cruel illusion, sent to taunt her with images of all that the world could have been. A vision of innocence, in which she had all the promise of a future career and love, untouched by scandal, untouched by death.
    Samuels with a quick glance round, slowed the motor car. “Would you like me to stop, Miss?” he asked.
    “No,” Ursula replied, falling back against the leather seat. “Not this time.”
    For the first two years, Ursula had arrived in Oxford by train, lugging her trunk along the platform and joining the chattering hordes of other young men and women calling for porters and embracing their fellow students who were also returning. In her final year, however, Samuels would drive her to Somerville, and pull over, just about now, so Ursula could jump out, climb the stile on the fence by an old farmhouse and take in her first glimpse of Oxford.
    Now she contented herself with the view from the car window, slumped in her seat, feeling the cool winter air seeping in through her shoes and stockings. There were still traces of frost on the hedgerows after a cold night but the recent spell of milder weather had beckoned a few hardy spring flowers to venture forth, pushing up through the hard ground along the edge of the rutted road. They passed St. Stephen’s House and headed over Magdalen Bridge before turning down Longwall Street. Ursula noticed that nothing seemed to have changed since her last day at Somerville; the students still weaved their way along Holywell Street on their bicycles, and the gates of Balliol were as graceful and imposing as ever.
    She asked the porter at the lodge if she could to be shown to Professor Prendergast’s rooms at the college. As a Senior Fellow of the college he had rooms at the back of the old quadrangle looking out over the Fellows’ garden. The head porter escorted her as they passed beneath the two archways that led through the small