The Oxford Inheritance Read Online Free PDF Page B

light filtering through spaces between the carved stone gargoyles that perched atop the edge of the walls. The faint sound of laughter and passing traffic hummed in the street below, but here Cassie was high above the city, and completely alone.
    She quickly unpacked and retrieved a thick file from the bottom of her suitcase. She brewed herself a cup of tea, found a pack of stale biscuits in the cupboard, and finally settled at the wide dining table in apool of midday sun. Opening the folder, she laid out the familiar contents in front of her like a fortune-teller setting out the tarot.
    First, the note. You can’t hide the truth forever. Please come back and end this for good.
    Then the rest of the contents of that mysterious package.
    A ticket stub. Plymouth to New York, by boat, in the spring of 1995.
    A rose quartz pendant, just like the one she always wore.
    And a photo. Her mother, looking impossibly young. Dressed in a white blouse and long black skirt, a black ribbon tied at her neck. She was smiling, her teenage face alive with laughter, sandwiched with another girl between two boys in matching formal costume, the three-quarter-length robes around their shoulders trailing wide bands of material in the breeze.
    Cassie had spent the previous afternoon in an identical outfit, surrounded by such boys. She would know the setting for the photo even without the unfamiliar scrawl on the back.
    Raleigh College. 1994.
    She stared at the evidence, as she had a hundred times over since opening that package. Taken separately, they were fragments, a mystery. But together . . . ?
    Cassie had tried, and failed, to make these new facts somehow fit the story of her life. Her mother, Joanna, who had never talked of college, not once even mentioned leaving America, had come to England to study, had been a student here at Raleigh, one of the most prestigious and elite schools in the world. She had walked these same stone pathways, perhaps even clambered the stairs in this very building, and she had not uttered a single word to Cassie about it.
    Cassie remembered every cruel, furious taunt, and every sobbing entreaty. She’d been on the receiving end of her mother’s wrath for fourteen years, blamed for every missed opportunity and sacrificed dream. If her mother had even once hinted at this previous life of hers, Cassie would have known. It had been a secret Joanna took to her grave.
    Special, they had called her mother. Fragile. As if Joanna was a rare butterfly or exquisite vase. But for Cassie there had been nothing fragile about the fits of rage that blazed through her childhood, leaving her mother weeping on the kitchen floor in a pool of exhausted tears. Cassie had been born when Joanna was only twenty, and there had been no family around; her mother never spoke of Cassie’s father except to say he had gone, that we were better off without him, so Cassie was left tiptoeing alone through her childhood in a constant state of alert, doing her best to keep the peace.
    But there was always something that slipped past her watch. Sour milk turning in the fridge, a button fraying on Cassie’s grade-school blouse—her mother would ignite at the smallest tinder, a wildfire of inexplicable anguish that would sweep through the house, raging for hours about the sacrifices she’d made, the great poet she could have been without the drudge and toil of domesticity dragging her down. Cassie soon learned to hide from her wrath, racing for the one lockable room in the house at the first sign of temper, crouching, hidden, behind the bathroom door in a tight ball of fear as she counted under her breath. Five hundred. Six hundred. Sometimes she would clear a thousand before the house would fall silent. Eventually, often hours later, Cassie would emerge with an aching head and empty stomach, to find nobody there—or, worse, a plate of grilled cheese waiting on the kitchen counter and that terrible look of shame and guilt in