Jen Lyon

    I met a girl tonight. She said her name was Catharine,

    but she seemed more like a Cate to me.

    I think we could be friends.

    I guess we’ll see.

 

Journal Excerpt, Nathalie Comtois

Brasenose College, Oxford

 

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Chapter One

 

The bright clang of a bell cut through the laughter and chatter beneath the canvas awnings, but the boy in front of Catharine paid it no mind.

“It’s Women’s Single Sculls… who cares?” He brushed off the finish line result and swiped two tall glasses of Pimm’s from a passing tray without sparing half a glance at the server. “So, “ he continued to pester, “this weekend?”

Catharine’s attention was on the river. Over his shoulder, she watched the boats coast to a stop, finishing less than a length apart. The umpire’s flag was raised toward Berkshire Station, signaling the rower from Cambridge had beaten Durham to win the women’s Challenge Cup.

“Are you even listening to me?” Annoyed at her preoccupation, the boy pressed the drink into her hand.

It was unsurprising, his lack of interest in the women’s races. For one thing, his own crew had lost to Harvard the day before after putting in a poor showing in the men’s eights, which meant—to him—the rest of the competition was irrelevant. And for another, he’d made it clear he didn’t believe women belonged on the water. Never mind that Catharine herself rowed stroke seat, or that his older sister was a two-time FISA World Rowing Champion.

The truth was, Edward Arthur Haverfield III cared nothing about anything if it wasn’t about himself.

“Yes, I heard you.” Catharine tried to disguise her annoyance behind a deep sip of the cocktail. The summer air was muggy, promising afternoon showers, and a breeze toyed with the brim of her straw hat. Around them, spectators were abandoning lawn chairs to wander toward the luncheon tent as the next race got underway.

“And?” he demanded, draining his glass.

They both knew the following evening’s formal Regatta reception wasn’t the question. It was expected she would attend with him. Same as it had been expected of her a month earlier to attend the May Ball on his arm. No different than the pressure she’d felt to acquiesce to his request for a date the week after they’d been introduced in the Great Hall at the beginning of her first term.

All of it was expected. After all, he came from the richest family in North England. Her father was the wealthiest businessman south of the Thames. They both attended Christ Church, arguably the most prestigious college in Oxford.

They were—as everyone was frequent to point out—made for each other.

He was captain of the rugby team.

She was the sole heir to a global shipping enterprise.

They both rowed crew.

It was not unrealistic to assume he would achieve his goal to become prime minister, and—as he’d pointed out the night of the white-tie Christmas Ball, sliding his hand from her knee to her thigh beneath the dinner table—she was too pretty not to be a PM’s wife.

If the comment was intended to be a segue further up her skirt, he’d missed the mark. The last thing she aspired to be was a pompous politician’s trophy bride.

Still, she’d let him kiss her in front of the Christmas tree in the center of the quadrangle and ignored his sullen glower when she’d insisted on returning to her hall alone.

But that was six months ago, and now his patience was wearing thin.

“I already told you—I’ll be there.” She took another sip of Pimm’s as the first heavy raindrops pelted onto the lawn.

“Catharine.”

It needled her the way he could turn her name into an admonishment—no different than her father had always done. But Edward wasn’t her father. As bold as he was, she wasn’t obligated to be at his command.

“Come on, I want to look at the art gallery.” She discarded her glass on a vacant table. Her hair was getting wet, and she didn’t want to continue this conversation.

He didn’t budge. “Stop dancing around the topic. You know what I—”

On the other side of the lawn, a face in the crowd caught her attention—a face she’d been searching for all morning.

“Nathalie!” She seized the opportunity of the distraction to pull free of the arm Edward had slipped around her waist, putting a handful of steps between them. The young woman across the enclosure waved enthusiastically.

Catharine had almost given up on her, but there she was—albeit late, as always—swimming upstream through a sea of boldly fashioned blazers heading for the cover of the marquee. The rain was coming down in earnest now, but Catharine forgot all about her desire to stay dry.

“You invited her?” Edward hissed, following her gaze. “Here?”

“Of course.” Catharine feigned ignorance. “Why wouldn’t I?”

She, of course, didn’t need him to give her an answer. The question wasn’t absurd. They were in the Stewards’ Enclosure at the Henley Royal Regatta. An exclusive members-only viewing area for the most prestigious rowing event in the world. The patrons surrounding them were all of a certain class. A certain status. The brightly colored guest badge swinging from the young woman’s blouse didn’t make her one of them.

But Catharine didn’t care.

Nathalie was her closest friend. Different from anyone she had ever known. Sneaking her name onto the guest list under the guise of her father’s membership was a risk she’d been more than willing to take to avoid spending an afternoon with Edward alone.

“She’s wearing trousers!”

It was a jumpsuit, but Catharine didn’t bother to correct him. Nathalie had wound her way around the rapidly unfurling umbrellas and approached them with a smile.

“I’m sorry I am late.” Her melodic Bordeaux accent matched the warmth in her glittering brown eyes. “The trains were positively packed.” She cast a quick glance toward Edward, undoubtedly aware of his disapproving stare, but paid him no further mind.

It was something Catharine admired about the French girl. She was unapologetically herself—cowing to no one. In the eight months they had known each other, Catharine had never once seen her put on an air. No part of her fit in with the circle of stuffy trust fund students surrounding Catharine at Oxford—which was one of the things she loved most about her.

“You’re just on time!” Catharine looped her arm through Nathalie’s, turning toward the river. “Thames Women’s eight just started against Leander! They’ll be passing Fawley by now.”

“Am I supposed to know what that means?” Nathalie’s laugh was rich, her damp skin warm through the sodden cotton of Catharine’s sundress.

“No—you just have to cheer for Leander!”

“Catharine.”

Catharine cast a quick glance over her shoulder, shooting a forced smile at Edward. “Don’t tell me you’re rooting for Thames, Edward. Your sister would never forgive you.”

“I’m not playing this game, Catharine. It’s pouring. I refuse to stand here in the rain waiting for the women’s eight to slog by.” He jerked his head toward the tent. “It’s almost time for lunch.”

“Then how fortunate are we to have a gentleman like you to save us seats at the table?” said Nathalie, offering him a level smile.

He ignored her. “I’m going inside, Catharine. Are you coming?”

Catharine hesitated. She could feel Nathalie’s fingers press her arm. Down the river, the first shouts and whistles came from the general public in the Regatta Enclosure. The eights were coming into view, the steady stroke of the battling crews cutting across the water.

“No.” She didn’t have to look back to feel his anger boiling over. “I’m going to watch for a while.”

She only released her breath when she heard his oxfords tramping furiously away through the puddles.

“You shouldn’t tease him, you know,” she said quietly, watching Leander pull ahead of Thames.

Nathalie leaned against her. “And you shouldn’t allow him to treat you the way he does. You are too good for him.”

 

Another glass of Pimm’s and three races later, Catharine dragged Nathalie away from the river and into the ladies’ lavatory. She was soaked to the skin, her satin gloves sagging off her fingers, but between the alcohol and ineluctable buzz she always got in Nathalie’s presence, she didn’t notice the chill that had rolled in with the clouds.

“Admit it—you’re having fun,” she laughed, tugging on one of Nathalie’s long mahogany locks of hair. “This time next year, I’ll have you rowing with me in the women’s doubles!”

“Please,” Nathalie offered a mock tsk of disapproval, “if you think anything is going to get me out of bed at four in the morning, you’re completely crazy. Never mind that I hate the water.”

“Yet here you are,” Catharine goaded, flashing her a coy smile.

“Yet here I am,” Nathalie mimicked the lilt of Catharine’s English accent with unerring accuracy. Her own smile was furtive, matching the subtle arch of her brow. “You can be very persuasive, Cate Brooks.”

Feeling a flush of color tinge her cheeks, Catharine busied herself pulling off her sodden gloves. She loved when Nathalie called her Cate. Never in her life had anyone called her anything other than Catharine. There was something behind the moniker that made it feel special—something just between them.

And it thrilled her—the casual, unpretentious way Nathalie showed her attention. It wasn’t the fawning flattery she received from the boys at uni, or the adulatory doting that came from the circle of girls aware of her family status and keen to make her their friend. Nor was it the intentional, possessive ingratiation she’d come to expect from Edward, who she knew only wanted one thing.

Nathalie was simply different.

Despite Catharine having been ferried around the globe by her parents—her existence a simple afterthought to her father’s business administrations—and educated by the finest tutors money could buy, the Frenchwoman somehow made her feel provincial. At nineteen, Nathalie was two years older than she was, with a confidence and courage Catharine wasn’t certain she would ever achieve. She admired the way Nathalie knew exactly what she wanted. The way she had her future mapped out down to the most minute detail.

She was going to be an actress. When she graduated Oxford, she would move to Paris and train with Jacques Lecoq. She would master Sophocles and Plautus, Marlowe and Molière, and then forge her way onto the world’s grandest stages. She would perform Shakespeare at The RSC. Play Roxane in Cyrano at Palais Garnier. She would bring audiences to their feet for her portrayal of Nina at The Bolshoi in Moscow. And move them to tears as Francesca at La Scala in Italy.

Catharine didn’t doubt her for a minute. It didn’t matter that Nathalie came from modest circumstances. That her mother was employed as a vineyard worker, and her father died in a harvesting accident when she was only eight. Nor was it relevant that Nathalie was the first of her family to attend university, or that her tuition was covered by the London financier who owned the vineyard where her father had lost his life. The tenacious French beauty would succeed at whatever she put her mind to—it was just who she was.

And to the fifth-generation Oxford student and daughter of the esteemed business tycoon Colonel Benjamin William Brooks, Nathalie Comtois was the most captivating individual she had ever met.

Tossing her soaked gloves onto the basin, Catharine turned her attention to the full-length mirror.

“Oh my God,” her thoughts were immediately curtailed by the disheveled image staring back at her. “He’s going to kill me.” Her hands flew to her hair, unkempt and tangled from the rain, lying loose across her shoulders from beneath her soaked hat. The straw brim drooped below her ears, its peach ribbon saturated to a deep coral. Pointlessly, she dabbed at a streak of mascara that had run down her cheek like an inky tear, smearing the makeup further.

“For what?” Nathalie stepped behind her, reaching to tuck a strand of golden hair back behind Catharine’s ears. “Staying to watch rowing at a regatta? Isn’t that the entire purpose of attending?” Her fingers trailed to one of the cap sleeves on her dress, smoothing out the cotton material from where it had become folded under in the rain. “It’s not like you can control the weather.” Nathalie smiled over her shoulder, catching Catharine’s eye in the reflection. “Though I imagine your set might try.”

Nathalie loved to tease her about her highbrow circle, but there was never any real malice in it.

Catharine’s focus was torn between her dismay of knowing what Edward would say when he saw her—or even worse, her father—and Nathalie’s fingertips still lightly pressed against her skin.

There was something there—she knew it. As sheltered, as naive, as cloistered as she was to the ways of the world outside the gilded cage from which she’d been raised, she wasn’t oblivious to the current she’d felt flowing between them. She knew it probably should have bothered her that on more than one occasion, she’d wondered what it would be like to kiss Nathalie. What exactly that would feel like? But it just wasn’t a trouble at the forefront of her mind.

Nathalie had been with women. That wasn’t a secret. It was something she’d casually slipped into conversation the first night they’d met. A week into her new life at Oxford, Catharine attended a guest dinner at Brasenose College with a friend. She wanted to get to know the other colleges within the university, beyond her classmates at Christ Church. Nathalie, also a freshman, had been seated across from Catharine, and when she discovered the girl from London was fluent in her native language, her interest had been piqued. They’d chatted about the Maastricht Treaty, the challenges of the French government being in a state of cohabitation, and the scandals surrounding Mitterrand. The evening had evolved to talk of movies, opera, theatre.

Catharine learned Nathalie was studying English Language and Literature at Brasenose since the university failed to offer a degree in drama, but felt the student-led Oxford University Dramatic Society provided plenty of opportunities to hone her craft.

“And what will you do when you graduate?” Catharine had asked.

“Briller sur scène,” Nathalie said, staring at her as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Shine on stage.

Catharine laughed at the sheer certainty behind the answer.

“Do you doubt me?” Nathalie’s dark eyes held a challenge beneath her raised full brows.

“I don’t.” And she didn’t. She could picture the girl on stage with her Renaissance beauty, her heart-shaped lips, and bright, cunning gaze. She had a charisma that was meant for an audience. A magnetism that would resonate.

“Good.” Nathalie’s expression shifted into a smile. “Because I will. I am going to win the hearts of Paris. New York. Mulan. Tokyo. Sydney. Vienna.”

“London?” prompted Catharine.

“Most definitely.”

“And no doubt a boy in every city to keep you entertained.” Catharine didn’t even know why she’d said it. She wasn’t the gossiping sort. Unlike the other first-year girls who talked nonstop about the boys they’d met and who they had their eye on, Catharine cared little for the uni matchmaking game. At the time, she’d yet to even be on a proper date. But it had just seemed the sort of thing college girls were meant to talk about, and had slipped out of her mouth.

“Boys?” Nathalie laughed—a deep, musical sound that filled the hall. “No thank you. There will be only women for me.”

The challenging stare had returned, her gaze unblinking as she held Catharine’s eye. She was waiting for her reaction. But Catharine was too well-bred, too well-mannered, too ingrained with the habit of hiding her emotions, to let on her surprise.

“Lucky them,” she’d said instead, plastering on a convincing smile as she raised a spoonful of tomato bisque to her lips.

“And what about you?” Nathalie asked, scraping mint sauce off her lamb.

“Oh,” Catharine choked on the soup, all of her prized etiquette dissolved into a round of coughing as she was forced to clear her throat. “No—I—I’m not, I mean, I don’t…”

“I meant what are you studying?” Nathalie’s eyes glittered. Whatever the contest had been, Catharine was certain she had lost.

“Sorry.” She cleared her throat one final time, dabbing at her lips with a cloth napkin. “Economics and Management.”

“How boring.”

Catharine shrugged, unable to find herself affronted. “I’m good with numbers. They’re only boring when you’re bad at maths.”

“Touché.” Nathalie speared a roasted potato on her fork. “And what do you want to do with these numbers when you graduate?”

“I’ll work for my father.”

The potato hovered at Nathalie’s lips. “That’s what you want to do or what you’re told you’ll do?”

Catharine pushed around the smoked salmon on her plate. Touché indeed. She’d have preferred to go back to choking on the bisque.

“So, Lady Macbeth or Blanche DuBois?” she diverted the conversation, racking her brain to arrive at the two most coveted roles she could think of for women in the history of theatre.

Instead of pressing her, Nathalie accepted the shift in topic, though Catharine could tell she’d recorded her non-answer as another touch on the board in whatever silent bout they were playing.

“Phèdre, actually.” Nathalie waited, apparently keen to test Catharine’s knowledge of classical French drama.

She was relieved she knew the answer. For whatever reason, she’d wanted to impress the French girl. To appear more worldly than she was.

“Jean Racine.” She nodded. “Based on Euripides’ Hippolytus and Seneca’s Phaedra.”

“An Englishwoman with a modicum of culture. I’m impressed.” The corners of Nathalie’s mouth lifted. “I was made to play Phèdre. What could possibly be better than playing the part of a woman consumed by her passion, exploring forbidden love, guilt, and despair?”

“If Racine had written Hippolyte as Phèdre’s stepdaughter instead of her stepson?”

The jest clearly caught Nathalie off guard, and Catharine immediately regretted it. It wasn’t like her to be crass. To step that far out of bounds. But then Nathalie laughed again, her smile brilliant, bringing color to her soft, fluid features.

“Tu me prends de court, Mademoiselle Économie,” she acknowledged, her expressive eyes glowing. “Tell me,” she popped another potato in her mouth, “what are you doing Friday night?”

“Studying.”

“Pfft. You have all weekend to study,” said Nathalie, brandishing away the word with a wave of her empty fork. “I’m playing Jill Mason in Equus. It’s not the lead, but still…” She hiked a shoulder. “Have you seen it?”

Catharine would have lied even if she had. “I haven’t.”

“I’ll leave a ticket for you at the Playhouse.”

And so, not yet a full fortnight at university, their friendship had begun. A friendship unlike any Catharine had ever known.

She stared a moment longer at Nathalie’s reflection in the mirror behind her, before reaching forward to collect a hand towel. “Rowing comes secondary to socializing, let me assure you,” she said, dampening the linen to work at the mascara stained down her cheeks.

Nathalie was perceptive enough to recognize her anxieties and refrained from teasing her, knowing she was flustered. She was aware Catharine was terrified to disappoint her father. Edward. Anyone and everyone who kept her on a short leash.

“You look fine, I promise,” she said gently, adjusting one of Catharine’s pearl earrings. “Flowers only grow more lovely in the rain.”

Catharine tried to laugh. “Tell Edward that.”

Behind her, Nathalie didn’t smile. She would tell Edward, Catharine knew, if Catharine would let her. Nathalie would have liked to tell him many things. But for the sake of their friendship, she kept quiet.

“Come on,” Nathalie said instead, plucking the towel from Catharine’s hand and tossing it in the bin. “We wouldn’t want to be late to afternoon tea.”

“Luncheon,” Catharine ribbed.

Nathalie rolled her eyes, holding the door for her. “Same boring thing.”