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We dudn’t know ye were coming, now did we? Not if ye don’t post yer ticket.”
    Lucy explained that the porter had just sold her this, and she assumed it was good for breakfast.
    â€œThat it is, that it is, but not the breakfast fer today. And besides, ’tis after half past, too late to be seated anyways.”
    Just fine, thought Lucy, as she fled the portals of Braithwaite some time later and walked into the faint sun of the English morning, guidebook with map of Oxford in hand. Lucy spent the rest of the day sightseeing and snapping photos, half-distracted by the thought of the performance ahead. The Acolyte Supper. For god’s sake, let’s hope they don’t ask me anything.
    She started primping at 5:30. She combed out her often frizzy dark-red hair that the English humidity had made limp and oily looking. Lucy wore a conservative billowy black skirt, her one formal change of clothes, black stockings, and a white blouse; not far, she noticed, from the official sub fusc Oxford undergraduate uniform. She timidly checked in at the All Souls porter’s lodge, punctually at 6:30. She was given directions to a wood-paneled upstairs room, where only three people had arrived.
    Along the walls of this study were trophy cases displaying a variety of eclectic things, including three Nobel prizes, a reverend member’s pipe, a wager on parchment written in Latin in the 1500s, a silver chalice, each, Lucy imagined, with its own venerable story to qualify for the cabinet. Elsewhere it was an elegant room of fox-and-hounds pictures, a sword above the fireplace, a long, dark-stained mahogany table loaded down with bottles and glasses, and two wordless servants awaiting the guests’ pleasure.
    â€œYou must be Miss Dantan,” said Dr. Whitestone, a tall patrician gentleman in a minister’s collar, Anglican Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s. “John Shaughnesy wrote that you were taking Father Ratchett’s place, yes?” He clasped her hand with clammy fingers.
    Relieved, she placed herself in his control and he escorted her to meet the guests. Lucy was introduced to a Dominican brother, Father Philip Beaufoix of Montréal and the American University in Cairo. Father Beaufoix was a short, compact man in his sixties, Lucy estimated, with a soft olive face with a large Gallic nose pitted by a life of convivial drink, which made him seem approachable and wise. Beside him was Sister Marie-Berthe, possibly fifty years old, a Josephine Sister from Québec as well, lately of the Sacred Heart Academy in Toulouse, France. Dr. Whitestone went to fetch a tray of liqueurs.
    â€œBon soir, mademoiselle,” Father Beaufoix said, bowing, then the next moment wondered, “Dr. Whitestone tells us you are somehow associated with Patrick?”
    â€œI’m from the University of Chicago. One of his … students, you could say.”
    â€œAre you over here,” asked the sister, “assisting Patrick?”
    â€œWell, no.”
    â€œWorking on some book of your own perhaps?”
    â€œUh, no.”
    Sister Marie-Berthe glanced anew at Father Beaufoix and suppressed a smile. Oh, Jesus, thought Lucy, they think I’m his mistress now.
    They moved along. “We’re the Canadian contingent tonight,” whispered the sister, in a perfect, nasal English. “Whatever tonight I say, Philip, you will agree with me, non? ”
    â€œWhy should I make an exception tonight?”
    The door opened and more Acolytes were admitted. Local scholars mostly, Lucy decided. One gratingly fey man, Dr. Crispin Gribbles, was introduced, a man in his late forties with a mouth that formed white foam at the edges. He was a scholar attached to St. Ann’s College and was currently cataloguing the relics at St. Aloysius, the most popular Catholic church, he commenced to tell, for all the foreign students:
    â€œOh, it’s dreadful, Vicar,” Gribbles was saying to Whitestone.