Moth to the Flame

MOTH
TO THE FLAME

MOTH
TO THE FLAME

Maxine Barry

British
Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

This eBook edition published by AudioGO Ltd, Bath, 2012.
Published by arrangement with the author.

Epub ISBN 9781471307249

U.K. Hardcover ISBN 978 1 405 64134 0

U.K. Softcover ISBN 978 1 405 64135 7

Copyright © Maxine Barry 2001

Maxine Barry has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

Jacket Illustration ©
iStockphoto.com

CHAPTER
ONE

Paddington Station on a cold and draughty February morning was not, Davina Granger thought wryly, her favourite place in the whole wide world. As she made her way to the platform she wanted, she could feel many interested male eyes boring into her.

At thirty, she knew that her slender and extremely fit body still moved very well, though not provocatively. She'd never sashayed to attract a man in her life, and wasn't about to start now. Her extremely short cut of spiky blonde hair drew all eyes to her delicate, elfin-shaped face, and she was well aware that men found her very full lips fascinating. Her huge green eyes even more so.

She pulled her heavy, green woollen coat tighter around her, shivering slightly, and tried not to remember that she'd been in Bali just a fortnight ago. She tried, even harder, not to dwell on where she was going now, and why.

The upper body muscles on her five-foot-seven-inch figure contracted fluidly as she hefted her heavy case up some stairs. She usually worked out with weights every morning, enjoyed swimming regularly, jogged whenever the weather permitted, and knew she'd never been fitter. She'd also just recently finished a year of self-defence classes with the
judo-master
husband of her best friend.

She walked to the electronic board, found the departure time for the train she wanted, and headed towards the ticket office.

Something, in the back of her mind, told her it would be much better to turn around and go home. Much safer. Much easier. But Davina Granger wasn't always sensible. She knew that, and lived with it. She knew all about truth and consequences. Oh yes. She knew all about that.

She stood dutifully in line for the ticket counter, thinking about Bali, and all the other places she'd been as she wandered the world in search of inspiration. Any student of human nature would have picked her out of the crowd immediately. It was not her unusual looks or her air of aloofness that made her so different from all the rest, but a sad kind of aloneness that seemed to encompass her.

As she approached the arched window, the ticket seller looked up, his tired brown eyes widening slightly. The woman was stunning. Such big green eyes. Such a striking face. He didn't usually like these close-cut spiky hairdos on women. He preferred his females with long, long hair that a man could run his fingers through. But, somehow, this woman was different.

‘A ticket to Oxford, please.' Although the voice didn't snap, wasn't impatient or demanding, he found himself suddenly
jumping
to attention. Blushing. Feeling oddly guilty for staring at her. He lowered his eyes, fiddling with the machine at his elbow.

‘A return ticket?'

Davina felt her lips twist into a grim smile. Her large green eyes seemed to glow, just for a second. The ticket seller found his breath catching in his throat. For one instant there, he'd thought that she looked almost feral. Then Davina's smile seemed to flicker out, like a candle being snuffed in a breeze.

‘No,' she said, her voice a dull tone. ‘Just one way.'

For some reason, the ticket seller shivered. There was something ominous in the way she'd said that.

As she took the ticket, it felt oddly cold in her hand. She glanced down, a little surprised to see that her hand was shaking. She tried to stop a fine trembling from invading her body, but it was hard. For this really was strictly a one-way trip. In more ways than one.

She took a seat and waited for her train to be designated a platform number, taking calming breaths. She wanted nothing to distract her for the next few months. She had to get herself under control.

She supposed it would have been easier to take her car, a well-preserved, bottle-green E-type Jaguar. But she'd decided that, since she was going to Oxford, she might as well go the whole hog. She'd buy a bicycle when she
got
there, and cycle around the city instead. It was important that she fitted in. She had to project the right image.

Davina knew quite a lot about projecting images. In one way or another, she'd been doing it all her life.

When her train came, she noted the no-smoking carriages with approval and found an empty seat. She settled herself down, ignoring the man opposite, who kept flickering looks at her from behind the papers he was reading.

Davina watched the graffiti-bedaubed walls and depressing grey cityscape rush by, with eyes that took it all in and processed it, almost automatically, into words. Words were her lifeblood. Words were her best friends. And, sometimes, her worst enemy. Words, she was sometimes convinced, were the only thing she was good at.

Twenty minutes later, grazing horses and swan- and coot-filled rivers took over. For all her travels, there was still no place like England. No place like home.

Home. Davina's lips twisted in a sudden, surprised grimace of pain. No. She would not think of home.

Once it had been a warm place, a hectic, unfashionably decorated house in Hastings. Home had meant her mother and David. Her mother, who'd always encouraged her in her ambition, and David, her much younger stepbrother, full of cheek, charm and mischief.
Now
home was no longer hectic. No longer warm. It was just a house where her mother grieved, and David's ghost haunted every room.

She still felt guilty at leaving her mother behind, all alone. But she'd had no other choice. If she'd told her what she was planning, she'd only have tried to talk her out of it.

Davina saw the green fields blur into a velvet mist, and realised she was on the verge of crying. Again. Grimly she blinked. Focused. Deep-breathed. She itched to snatch up some paper and write a scathing, hot and bitter poem about repressed grief. But she didn't, of course, and the world slowly righted itself.

Then, nearly an hour to the minute after leaving London, the train pulled into Oxford Station.

She was wearing a long lilac skirt, a cream camisole which hugged her gently-swelling breasts, topped with a loose linen overskirt in a darker shade of lilac. She was slender-waisted, but had a powerful elegance, as she lowered her case from the overhead rack, that caught her fellow passenger's attention.

She glanced at the man staring at her, but the expression in her large green eyes was not what he was expecting. It was neither the pleased look of a woman who dressed to be admired, nor the scornful look of a man-hater. The woman looked at him . . . well, with a kind of blank indifference.

Davina
slipped into her long, warm woollen coat, and left the train.

A nineteen-year-old student, who was just getting on the train as she was stepping off, suddenly did a comical double-take. The student, a woman with long black hair and china-blue eyes, hesitated visibly, one foot on the train, one foot on the platform. She was in her first year of a three-year BA course in English literature, and Davina's challenging, clear-eyed, defiant face was familiar to anyone who read modern poetry.

For a moment, Alicia Norman wanted to forget about the train, and her weekend trip home. Instead, she wanted to rush after the greatest living poet (in her opinion) in the country and . . . what? Alicia laughed at herself. Ask for her autograph, like some starstruck fan? She shook her head and stepped into the train, telling herself to act her age.

But as she took a seat, she craned her head to watch the striking blonde woman walk up the platform with a ground-covering ease that Alicia really envied. Like a fox, the woman looked as though she could lope along for miles without even thinking about it. Alicia herself was too short to be able to glide that smoothly.

Unaware of her silent fan club, Davina stood at the top of a short flight of steps, and looked around. The city heaved with traffic, and seemed, from this angle, like any other
modern
city, anywhere in the world. So much for dreaming spires, punts on the Isis, mellow stone colleges and scatty, absent-minded academics in black gowns and mortar boards, she thought with a self-mocking laugh.

She had never gone to university, had never wanted to. At sixteen she couldn't wait to leave school, being too eager to taste real life and all it had to offer. Besides, why study what other people had written, when all she cared about was what she could write herself? Davina smiled at the gullible, naive, shallow, hungry and greedy little teenager she had once been. Well, she'd seen life all right. And learned all that it had to teach her.

She walked to the taxi rank, and shouted over the noisy rattle of the engine. ‘St Bede's please.' The taxi driver gave her a lifted hand to indicate he'd heard her, and pulled away. Davina looked around her with little interest. She was too nervous, thinking about what lay ahead of her, to pay much attention to her surroundings. What if it all went wrong? What if she couldn't think of a way of seeing justice done? She shook her head. One thing at a time. She was tough, clever and resourceful. She would find a way.

She forced herself to relax, to study the famous city unfolding all around her. After all, she was going to have to live here for the next four months.

The cab pulled up at traffic lights, where the
Randolph
Hotel stood to her right, facing the Ashmolean Museum on her left.

Davina's eyes glimmered as she looked at the pale, Gothic columns of the museum. Now that was more what she expected of Oxford. Class. Elegance. Old-World style. Across the road was the Martyrs' Memorial, with its flock of appreciative pigeons, and beyond that, the pale facade of Balliol. And, suddenly, she felt the city begin to charm her.

Without warning, as the Carfax clock chimed midday, Davina realised that she wasn't in a city that could be just any other old city in the world. She was in a city that could only be Oxford.

The taxi indicated left and turned up St Giles. In the autumn, she knew, it played host to a famous, centuries old, fair. She recognised the modest building that was St Cross, one of the smaller of Oxford's thirty-plus individual colleges. They passed Browns, the famous restaurant, and on up the Woodstock Road. Trees grew everywhere. Nestled amongst shops and offices were glimpses of cloisters, crenellated walls, ancient mullioned windows. The very air seemed to breathe a sense of history. Her sensitive, writer's soul felt a frisson of kinship. Here, famous figures throughout history had lived, studied, loved, died.

The cab slowed to a crawl. And there, sandwiched between Somerville College and
the
Old Radcliffe Hospital, was the ancient, arched, oak gateway to St Bede's itself.

Davina got out and tipped the driver heavily. For a few long moments she stood on the pavement, looking at the huge double gates, and the smaller gate set within it that was open, and admitting a steady stream of visitors. So. This was it.

After weeks of wangling, planning, worming her way in, she had finally arrived. The lair of the enemy.

Davina picked up her case and stepped carefully inside, her chin held high, her lips set in a grim determined line. Immediately to her left was a huge arched stained glass window, and a building that was so ecclesiastical it could only be the College Chapel. To her right was a much smaller, modern building, the porter's lodge. She stepped inside, smiled, and asked if she could leave her suitcase there for an hour. She was cheerfully informed that she could. She left hastily, aware that the receptionist had recognised her name and had been on the verge of offering a gushing speech of welcome.