A Golden Fury

saying something else for a moment, his mouth slightly open. Then he shook his head. “You take some rest. I’ll go get your things from Tackley’s.”
I thought of him lugging my trunk down High Street and was ashamed.
“I’m sorry about all this, Dominic,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to do any of it.”
“No, I’m sorry,” said Dominic. “I’m sorry about Mr. Vellacott. This isn’t how I would have hoped he’d act.”
“You don’t have to apologize for him.” Now I was the one staring at the floor. “He isn’t your father.”
Dominic cleared his throat. “No,” he said. “But he’s my boss. He gave me a chance no one else would have, for no reason except he thought I might have promise. I … I thought better of him than this.”
I didn’t have a reply for that. I went to the door of his room, and he went out and up the stairs.
Dominic’s bedroom was small, dark, low-ceilinged, and, as he had warned, still messy. It had no window, so I left the door open to allow the faint light from the rest of the apartment to filter in. I dropped onto Dominic’s short pallet of a bed. With my body’s collapse came another interior one. I was too exhausted, too shaken to guard against it any longer. I wept long and hard.
I was still weeping when Dominic returned.
He pulled the trunk up to the door of his room and then stood there, uncertain. I tried to stop sobbing, but I had broken my defenses by letting myself cry. I couldn’t put them back up quickly.
“I’m sorry,” I wept. I turned my face into the pillow to at least muffle the mortifyingly broken sounds.
“No, don’t be,” said Dominic. He hesitated in the doorway a moment, then walked away with rapid steps. He reappeared holding a lit oil lamp. He set it down on a table in the corner, stacked with books and a ghoulish shape that made me gasp and sit upright.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at what looked like a human skull.
“What?” He looked. “Oh. It’s … ah … it’s a skull.”
“A real one?”
Dominic nodded.
The shock of finding myself in a room with someone’s former head had knocked the sobs out of me. I took long, shallow breaths and looked from Dominic, to the skull, to Dominic.
“Why?”
“Memento mori,” he said. “It was my grandfather’s.”
“That’s your grandfather’s skull?!” I asked in disbelief.
“No, no,” he said. “I mean—yes, he owned it, but no, that wasn’t his head. He was a weaver. Kept it on his mantle to remind him, well…”
“That he was going to die?”
Dominic nodded again. He sat on a three-legged stool by the table and leaned toward me, his elbows on his knees.
“I shouldn’t think that would be easy to forget,” I said.
“Easier than you’d think,” said Dominic. “If we all remembered death and judgment are coming, we’d be more careful how we live. Maybe I should give my skull to your father.”
I looked at him. He knew it, and I knew that he knew it. But this was the first time it had been acknowledged between us.
“I can’t believe you sleep in a room with a human skull,” I muttered.
Dominic looked behind him, then around his dark hole of a room.
“I guess it’s pretty gloomy in here,” he said with a frown. “Not good for much of anything but sleeping.”
And not much good for that, either, though I didn’t say so.
“I don’t think I can sleep,” I said.
“It’s close to suppertime. We could go to a pub. Are you hungry?”
I wasn’t really. I felt spent and my head ached, but Dominic was right about his room, and I itched to get out of it. I rose from the pallet; answer enough.
“You’ll want to change,” said Dominic. “I’ll get your trunk.”
When he had closed the door behind him, I opened the trunk and sorted through my dresses by the light of the oil lamp. I had gathered by now that my stylish Parisian clothing raised eyebrows here in Oxford. The fabrics were too light, the layers were too few, and the whole effect was much too foreign. My simplest dress by far was the one I wore now, the gray round dress, but it was bloody. I pulled out an embroidered white muslin, the second simplest. Everyone was wearing gowns like these in Paris now. Floaty cotton muslin was seen as natural, unaffected, unaristocratic. Naturally all the aristocrats had adopted the fashion. I put on the dress and my green bonnet and was aware despite the dim light and lack of looking glass that I did not look like an Oxford lady. I sighed, picked up the lamp, and went out of the room.
Dominic stood by the front door, waiting, hands in his pockets. He looked up as I emerged, and his eyebrows lifted.
“You look very…”
“French?” I supplied with a sigh.
“Well … yes,” he said. “Maybe a shawl?”
I agreed, and Dominic produced a brown knitted thing from his mother’s room, which decidedly dampened the stylish effect of the outfit. When we climbed up to the street, I was glad to have it. The misty twilight had turned into a damp and gloomy evening. I pulled the shawl tighter, and we went west, away from Oriel College, through narrow gaslit streets. Not far away, but shrouded in thick fog, an even taller, even more aggressively walled fortress rose above us.
“Which college is that?” I asked, pointing to the highest of its towers.
“That’s not a college. It’s Oxford Castle. Used as a prison now.”
We went around the castle and over the old moat that had been dug into a canal. Tenements and shabby storefronts lined the waterway. Bargemen pulled a loaded vessel along the canal from the footpath. There were no undergraduates here. Dominic noticed my look and bit his lip.
“I hope it’s all right with you, coming over this side of the canal,” he said. “The pubs by the colleges are all full of students at this hour. I thought you might be tired of them.”
I