Page 1 of The Headmaster’s Binding

Chapter 1

Thomas

The cab dropped me at the bottom of the drive because the driver said he didn't go past the gates.

Not couldn't. Didn't. He took my money with the window half up and had the car turned around before I got the second suitcase off the gravel, and I stood there in the first week of a New England September watching his taillights get small, and I said, out loud, to nobody, "Okay."

I have a notebook. Green, spiral, three dollars. It's my fourth. I go through about one a year because I write everything down. My mother called it a memory, my ex called it a tic, and a disciplinary committee once called it documentation, extensive, which is the only nice thing that committee ever said about me. Standing at the gates of Ashgrave College with two suitcases and a job I could not afford to lose, I took the notebook out and wrote the first item of the semester.

Item one: cab drivers don't go past the gates. Ask why. Or don't.

Then I walked up the drive, and Ashgrave did the thing it does, which nobody warns you about, which is that it arrives. The trees along the drive are old enough to meet overhead, so you're walking in a green tunnel with your luggage wheels going off like gunfire on the gravel, and then the tunnel just — stops, and the college is standing there looking at you. Gray stone going gold where the light hits it. Towers with actual crenellations, because apparently at some point in the 1800s somebody thought, what this teaching institution needs is battlements. Ivy with a century of tenure. A chapel spire with a verdigris roof, lawns striped like somebody combed them, and behind all of it, where the ground drops toward the water meadows, a long white shelf of fog.

Sitting there. At two in the afternoon. In September.

I'd like the record to show I noticed the fog on day one.

It was beautiful. That's the thing I want to be honest about, because a lot of what I wrote down later got dark, and it's all true, but this is true too: it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen in my life, and I stood at the top of the drive with my heart racing with a kid's first-day excitement, because it was mine now. I got to teach here. Me. The guy whose last college wouldn't put his name on the commencement program.

A porter came out of the gatehouse for my bags: sixties, built like a door, face like weather. The brass plate on the gatehouse said CROFT.

"Dr. Mercer," he said. Statement.

"That's me. How'd you⁠—"

"Corbett House. Third floor." He had both suitcases already and was walking, so I followed, past the chapel, along the edge of the big quad, and this is where I met the thing I never got used to, faster than I met anybody's name.

People looked at me.

Fine. Normal. New face on a small campus, first week of term, everybody looks. Students looked up from their phones and looked back down. A woman in a gown said "welcome" like she meant it. Two kids playing Frisbee on the sacred grass said "sorry" and snatched the disc off the lawn, which told me the grass was more forbidden than I knew. That's the normal kind of looking and I know what it feels like.

Then there was the other kind.

A groundskeeper straightened up off his rake and watched me the whole length of the chapel walk. Not curious. Checking. The way you watch weather come in over water when your boat's still out. A window on the second floor of the long gray building to the east had a face in it, and the face didn't move when I clocked it, which faces do. You catch someone looking, they look away; that's the whole social contract. This one just kept on. Middle-aged man, glasses. Counting me.

And by the kitchens, where the path cuts between two staff doors, a woman in an apron was carrying a steel tray of glasses, and she looked at me, and stopped. Full stop, tray and all, glasses chiming. She shifted the tray to one arm, and crossed herself.

Small. Fast. Automatic, like sneezing. Then she was moving again and gone through the second door.

I stopped walking. Croft did not.

"Hey — did you see⁠—"

"Third floor," Croft said, ahead of me, not turning around. "Key's in the door. Dinner's at the Lodge, Wednesday, seven sharp. Headmaster does the welcome."

Item two: a kitchen porter crossed herself at me. At ME. I have been on this campus eleven minutes.

Item three: three people so far have looked at me one beat too long. Counting.

I want to say I sat with that. Honestly, though? I unpacked, I found the good coffee place on Main Street in town, I spent two days walking the paths and learning the noticeboards and being looked at, I ironed a shirt on a towel on the floor because Corbett House does not believe in ironing boards, and by seven on Wednesday I had talked myself most of the way around. New guy. Small place. Old institutions are weird about outsiders. My last college had a bell nobody was allowed to ring and a turtle with a faculty ID. This was fine.

This was fine.

* * *

The Lodge is the Headmaster's house, which nobody told me, so I spent the first ten minutes of the welcome dinner thinking it was a weird name for a faculty club and admiring the man's bookshelves before I understood they were his. It's a long low house on the west side of the quad, older than the towers, and the long room runs the whole back of it: candles down a table for forty, portraits of dead men in robes, sherry that tasted like raisins that had done something wrong, and fog standing at every window like the house had been wrapped.

A hand took my elbow inside the door. Small, certain, attached to a woman about fifty with the eyes of someone grading you kindly.