Swing, Swing Together

CHAPTER 34

Harriet’s white muslin skirt embroidered with pansies had creased hardly at all in the travelling case. Once she had decided on that for her appointment with Mr. Fernandez, she was bound to put on her plain navy blue velvet jacket, worn with the blue striped blouse and the matching hat. Her thoughts strayed to the hummingbird hat, still in its box in her room at college. It would have been nice to have worn it this morning; after the things Jane and Molly had said about it, she would never wear it again to church, but it was still a beautiful hat. She turned away from the mirror and buttoned her boots, high-lows that clicked noisily on the hotel steps as she went out. She hoped she had not been seen; Melanie would have guessed everything at a glance.

Fernandez greeted her at the Bodleian with a compliment about her clothes. He was well-turned-out himself, in a biscuit-coloured suit and boater, although Harriet did not presume to say so.

He had arranged for a dozen or so books to be displayed on a table in a room adjoining the upper reading room. Most contained maps of great antiquity, scarcely recognizable as the outlines Harriet knew from her atlas. Great fish and sea monsters enlivened the maritime areas, looking capable of biting chunks from the land masses. Fernandez encouraged her to play the game of identifying countries, praising her successes and confessing that he would not have known the others himself unless he had spent years studying the history of maps. He went on to talk with quiet authority of the problems of early navigators, the impossibility of relying on the mappae mundi and the consequent development of the portolani, the pilot books of the Portuguese, and the less sophisticated ruttiers used by the English.

In the hour and few minutes they spent there, Harriet began to understand what it might mean to study at a great university with a tutor to guide her, not a Miss Plummer reciting her Notes for Teachers in Training Colleges on each topic decreed by the inspectors, but an authority with the ability to bring her close enough to a subject to apprehend its purpose and feel its power to inspire. Interestingly, Fernandez spoke without the tendency to arrogance she had noticed before in his statements. Instead of airing his expertise, he spoke with reserve, in terms calculated more to clarify than impress.

He ended by showing her one of the treasures of the Bodleian, Marco Polo’s Les Livres du Graunt Caam, with its lavishly illustrated pages. “The first of the illustrated travel books, and still the best, I think,” said Fernandez, as he returned it to its box. “And now, Miss Harriet-if I may call you that-I should be honoured if you would join me for luncheon.”

“For luncheon?” Harriet blanched. She had not been taken to luncheon by a gentleman in her life. She doubted whether it was proper. “I was not expecting such a thing. Of course, it is exceedingly generous of you. You have already been uncommonly kind to me-”

“Then it is settled!” said Fernandez. “The least you can do to repay my kindness is grace my table at the Clarendon.”

“A hotel?” said Harriet, hardly able to voice the word.

“The best in Oxford, my dear. Frequently patronized by royalty. Ah,” said Fernandez, touching his fingers on the back of her gloved hand, “I should have realized. You are concerned about the propriety of visiting a hotel in the company of a gentleman. I shall take you instead to Mr. Stanford’s Restaurant in the High.”

It seemed unmannerly to refuse after he had been so considerate as to alter his arrangement on her behalf, so Harriet presently found herself sipping Chianti and telling Fernandez about the geographical excursion with the gardener and his son last summer, while a waiter helped her to an escalope de veau au romarin. Nobody at Elfrida would believe this was happening to her. On Monday they always had cold beef and boiled potatoes.

“I was thinking how remarkable it is that I should have met the one person in Oxford who could show me the books I saw this morning,” Harriet told him. “I suppose all the important moments in our lives are governed by chance. If I had not met Melanie-Mrs. Bonner-Hill-and offered to accompany her to Merton College Chapel yesterday, I should never have learned what treasures the Bodleian contains.”

Fernandez smiled. “And if I, in my turn, had not recovered from a bout of laryngitis, I should not have been at Morning Service, nor had the delight of your company now. A rationalist-and we have a number of those at Oxford-would tell you that these are chance occurrences, that life is a sequence of unpredestined events to which we are too often tempted to ascribe a significance. I prefer to think that such meetings as ours are governed by more than mere chance.”

“I am sure you are right.” Harriet blushed at the truth of this, thinking of the ways she had manipulated mere chance. She hoped Fernandez would suppose the wine was making her warm.

“To pursue the point,” he went on, “if I had not had my laryngitis, I should have gone out with Bonner-Hill on Saturday morning as I invariably do-”

“And you might have been murdered!” said Harriet.

“I had not thought of anything quite so dramatic. I was projecting that poor Bonner-Hill might not have suffered the fate he did, because two of us would presumably have been better able to defend ourselves from attack. But then the chain of events which led to my meeting you would not have been forged. Even the death of a close friend has brought its compensation. Won’t you have some more asparagus?”

Harriet remembered why she was there, realized that an opportunity was about to slip through her fingers. “No, thank you. Forgive me for suggesting such a thing, but has it not crossed your mind that whoever killed Mr. Bonner-Hill may have intended to murder you?”

Fernandez put down his knife and fork. “A chilling thought, my dear. What put it into your head?” He refilled Harriet’s glass.

“Melanie told me about your custom of going fishing on Saturday mornings. She said her husband had only recently taken to going with you. He had not been out on the river alone before. It seemed to me that if that were the case, nobody could have expected to find him alone. If, on the other hand, they did not know Mr. Bonner-Hill had started accompanying you, they would expect to find you alone. It suggests to me that they must have mistaken him for you.” She tipped a large amount of wine down her throat. “Had it not occurred to you, Mr. Fernandez?”

“I should be happier, my dear, if you used my first name, which is John. I am sometimes called Jack in Merton, but I prefer the name my parents gave me.”

“Then you must call me Harriet.”

“That will be a special pleasure. Well, Harriet, your perspicacity is remarkable. Of course, you are absolutely right. Mine is the body that should be undergoing a post-mortem examination this morning. Bonner-Hill, unfortunate fellow, was murdered, as you correctly surmised, because he was mistaken for me.”

“But why, John? Why did somebody wish to murder you?”

Fernandez emptied the last of the wine into their glasses. “That I shall explain, Harriet, but it is a story I should prefer not to relate in a public restaurant. With your permission I shall take you after lunch to Magdalen Bridge, where we can hire a punt and take it up the Cherwell to a place I know where a man might speak in confidence.”

“I’m not sure whether that is-”

“First, we’ll have coffee with liqueurs. Have you tried Benedictine? Then you must.”