Free Girl Takes The Oath (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 5) by Jacques Antoine

considered whistling as if they were a taxi, but thought better of it, though she still couldn’t resist playing with them just a little bit, and crossed the cobblestone street. When she got within a few yards, she could see the driver shaking his head in disbelief. A tap on the window got him to lower it.
    “Hi, Ed,” she said, with a big smile plastered across her face. “I’m glad you guys have got my back.”
    “This is serious business, Miss Tenno.”
    “Can I assume there’s no extradition order yet?”
    Braswell growled under his breath.
    “Look, fellas, I don’t mean to give you a hard time. Well, maybe I do a little bit. But, here, let me make it easy on you. I’m heading up to St. John’s to hear a lecture on Romantic Poetry, and then I’m meeting friends at the Ram’s Head—that’s over on West Street.”
    Fully pleased with herself, she turned her back on them and strolled along the last block of Prince George Street, which led directly to the broad front walk of the college. The former Governor’s Mansion, now McDowell Hall, one of two classroom buildings, loomed at the top of the hill, dominating the front campus, three stories of brick topped by a belltower with a gold dome—though the gold had been replaced by yellow paint in a more budget-conscious era. Lawns on either side of the patterned brick walkway rolled gently away into the twilight, anchored by romanesque buildings. The north lawn had been the scene of two ignominious defeats for her company in comically over-publicized croquet matches, at the hands of shaggy college students dressed in straw hats, seersucker pants and Hawaiian shirts. The decades-long tradition of those matches, at its best a congenial and mutual mockery, eventually led to a warming of relations between the Brigade and the Johnnies, as the students were commonly known.
    The quadrangle on the far side of McDowell overlooked the back campus, an enormous lawn stretching all the way to College Creek, flanked on one side by an ancient-looking gymnasium and on the other by a low-lying, modern structure. The steady stream of students and faculty, and perhaps even a few townies, heading down the steps to Mellon Hall, and Francis Scott Key Auditorium, showed her the way.
    ~~~~~~~
    “ ‘Bacchic night falls, full of stars, and but little concerned about us’—these are the poet’s words,” said the lecturer, a younger man than Emily expected, in a dark, ill-fitting suit, probably the only one in his closet. “Night is Hölderlin’s word for our spiritual isolation in the world, for the feeling of abandonment, that the gods have left us. But the night is full of stars, which is to say, it shelters the light that might eventually illumine our days. It is dark and darkening, but not marked by despair.”
    In the low light of the auditorium, a little more than half the seats filled, Emily could see her fellow lecture-goers clearly, some paying close attention as the lecturer explained that the night shelters our spiritual aspiration, others whispering among themselves, attention wandering to less somber subjects. Her own attention faded for just a moment as she considered the sloping floor of the hall, and wondered how it might sound if pranksters dropped a few hundred marbles in the back row and allowed them to roll freely.
    “If philosophy is understood as the rational exploration of human values—in other words, if it restricts itself to cheerful, daylight assumptions about human possibilities—it may not be able to appreciate the full meaning of Night.” The lecturer paused to look up from his notes, and seemed to lose his focus for a moment, scanning the audience until he met Emily’s eyes. After a moment, she made a face at him and he turned back to his notes, flustered. Off to her right, on the end of the curving row in which she sat, a hint of movement and a whisper—when she turned to look, two Asian girls, students she supposed, giggled and turned away,