Chapter 1
A movement to my left caught my eye. Above me, a man standing in a second-story corner window was looking down on my mini-circus. He was middle-aged, with dark hair and a beard, and wearing a tweed jacket. He didn’t smile or frown. He could have been the poster boy for an Oxford don. I chuckled to myself, wondering what the uniform for female faculty entailed.
I paid the taxi driver and crawled out onto the sidewalk. A four-hour plane ride to Pittsburgh, followed by the hour-long taxi ride to Wicklow, had left me stiff. The driver pulled my bags from the trunk and set them down. I gripped my purse and computer bag. At that point, two porters emerged from the building.
“Dr. Robinson?” one asked.
“Yes, I’m Dr. Robinson.”
“This way, ma’am. The stuff you shipped ahead arrived yesterday.”
I looked up, and up, at the three-story Gothic Revival building in front of me. I had dreamed about working on that campus, teaching there, and my dream had come through.
I followed the porters up the broad front steps with a metal railing in the middle, then through a high, pointed archway. A long, wide, paved breezeway open to the sky ended at another arched opening. Doors were regularly spaced off the open arcade on both sides. There weren’t any windows on any level.
To my surprise, the porters immediately turned right through the first of two doorways next to each other. A small brass plaque—shiny and new—on the open door read, ‘Savanna Robinson, PhD.’
A short hallway with a table on one side and a wardrobe on the other led to a fairly spacious room—as large as my whole apartment in Oakland. It was furnished with heavy wood-and-leather couches and chairs, and two heavy coffee tables. One wall was covered with empty built-in bookshelves that ended at a window overlooking the street where the taxi had let me off. In front of the built-in bookshelves sat the boxes I had shipped from the West Coast. My books, tools, clothing, and the rest of my few personal effects.
Next to the window, a massive stone fireplace covered half of that wall. The other walls were covered in deep red wallpaper above walnut wainscotting. All of the trim around the doors and windows, the crown molding, and the baseboard were a deep, rich walnut color.
The room would have been very dark, except the wall opposite the entrance hallway was almost all glass, with a view to the outside. That was south, I realized. I could plant herbs and flowers along the windows.
Along the wall to my left, there were three doors. The porters came out of the middle one, handed me a set of keys, bade me good day, and left. I wandered over to the room they had come out of and found a bedroom with an attached bathroom. The claw-foot tub looked inviting, but my first thought was whether there would be enough hot water to fill it. In Oakland, I had learned to shower very quickly.
The doorway next to the outside door revealed the kitchen. Not the fanciest or the largest kitchen I’d ever cooked in, or the most modern, but if the appliances all worked, I decided it would do. There was only one window, looking out over the back porch and stairs down to the garden.
The kitchen was stocked with everything except food. The cabinets were filled with dishes, pots and pans, and tableware. Everything looked rather old but in good shape, from the floral-designed china and formal tea service to the cast-iron pans and the Dutch oven.
I walked to the wall of windows and gazed out into an herb and flower garden contained within a space between a wall on the street and the building that extended beyond my apartment. The door between the windows and the kitchen opened to a stairway leading down into the garden. The narrow path through the garden led to a greenhouse. That brought a smile to my face, and I immediately opened the door, walked down the wooden stairs, and wandered among the plants.
Looking back to my apartment, I saw windows on the two floors above mine, and I wondered who lived above me.
I felt like dancing, but I didn’t know who might be watching. Perhaps more dour professors, like the one who watched me arrive.
A nice salary, with a free place to live included, was more than I could have hoped for at any of Wicklow’s rival institutions. On the whole, quite satisfactory. And Wicklow College of the Arcane Arts was the oldest, most prestigious institution of arcane study in North America. In fact, other than two colleges in the United Kingdom and one in France, there wasn’t a school remotely resembling Wicklow.
I decided I didn’t care who might be watching and danced down the pathway, singing to myself. I had hit the jackpot!
~~~
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