Archive of Our Own

The strange and wondrous thing about Blackstock College was that it was so precisely what one expected it to be before one got there. Thomas -- who had been swithering between Oberlin and Swarthmore and Cornell, and finally chosen Blackstock by the simple measure of pinning all of his acceptances up on a dart board, closing his eyes and letting fly -- was inclined to think that blind chance had favored him.

Because here he was, on a bright autumn day, after having emerged from what felt like a frenzy of ridiculous orientation activities, walking for the very first time to his very first college class -- and the sky was that brilliant shade of blue that came with fall sometimes, and made you believe that winter would never dare to set foot or snowfall on the scene. "Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfullness, my ass," he muttered to himself. "Maybe Keats should have moved here for his health, gotten rid of that nasty cough." Why did people never die of consumption, any more, anyway? Maybe he ought to have thought more seriously about an English major and worked some of this out, he thought with a rare moment of doubt. Still, there was time and more, and surely one literature course a term would sufficiently soothe his savage beast. Besides, novels and poems and plays would be there waiting for him, when he emerged from the morass of government and poli sci, ready to change the world.

He breathed in the air - still warm in the sun, but with just a hint of sharp crispness to it. Odd how this time of year made him think of sharpened pencils, and blank notebooks and beginnings of things, when everything around was actually dying in a welter of fallen leaves.

We're like a strange alien race, he thought, our year always starts now, in September, while the rest of the world celebrates in January. And his would for at least three more turns. And then? Who knew?

As he hurried into Huntley Hall, he spied a very tall woman striding out of the building; scurrying students seemed to move out of her way with haste and dispatch, while she seemed to ignore their presence altogether. She was wearing a long green cape, the precise shade of the ivy covered walls, and her hair was a deep berry red streaked with sooty black. Or perhaps the other way around.

It was Professor Medeous, from Convocation, Thomas realized. And she was, as he had thought from the first time he saw her, a little weird. He had already heard some of the scuttlebutt about the Classics department from his brother, but she was something else, Thomas thought, as an odd shiver went up and down his spine. Actually, this whole place was a little weird, but in a bonetinglingly familiar way. Academics, as his physicist mother was always saying with fond exasperation to her two sons, no other people in the world like them.

And then he promptly forgot all about it as he walked through the door into the classroom, and a new world.

After the dart had decided for him, Thomas had thought very seriously about whether his choice ought to be invalidated. Did he really want to be known far and wide as Kit's little brother? But that had been the case all through high school, and that hadn't been so bad, and Blackstock was known for swallowing whole families. Besides, Kit hadn't been home in so long, that he wasn't even sure if he'd be seeing much of him in college anyway, even if they did go to the same place. Vacations at home were a thing of the past, with Kit doing classics, and always off to some library or retreat or something in the breaks between terms.

And anyway, Thomas could still remember hearing Kit's first stories about college and realizing that they sketched out, for him anyway, a sort of Platonic ideal of what the experience should be like. So if that was what he wanted, it only made sense to go there.

As he'd suspected, Kit -- who'd always been a fairly hands off older brother anyway -- appeared out of nowhere with some of his friends on the first day, and helped Thomas lug his boxes of books and clothes up the stairs, and set up his typewriter for him, but other than that mostly left him to discover things on his own.

Which was fine, except when as was the case at the moment, he needed advice.

Running Kit to earth was always something of a challenge -- phone messages went unreturned, and somehow he balked at the idea of trying to send his brother notes through campus mail -- but Thomas finally managed it by the expedient of staking out his single in Eliot (Thomas himself was living in a triple the size of a shoebox in Taylor as befitted a lowly freshman) and simply waiting for him to show up.

When he finally did, he seemed unsurprised to find Thomas waiting for him. Calmly, he ushered him inside the door, sat down at his desk, and waited for Thomas to unburden himself. Heaving a huge sigh, Thomas flung himself across Kit's bed, and stared up at the ceiling.

"Well," Kit said, finally. "What is it?"

"I'm wondering if I should just buy myself a green carnation and call it a day."

Kit laughed.

"No, seriously. Those guys in poli sci are insane. I can't figure out if they think they've all got something to prove because they're in the humanities and not studying real manly subjects like physics or engineering or what, but it's a jungle in there, and they've all got something to say about my pretty face. And both my roommates are in Govy 10 with me. It's horrific."

"Poor Thomas," Kit said. "The love that dare not speak its name. Is it true?"

"No," Thomas said straightforwardly. "Would it matter if it was?"

"I'm the last to say so," Kit said. "Just curious. So, no girls in there or too many of them falling in love with you or what?"

"I don't know about falling in love with me," Thomas said. "There're some in there. But either way, that just makes it worse. Besides there was Mary back home, and I think I've had just about enough of falling hopelessly in love for a while."

Kit smiled to himself -- like a cat, their mother always used to say, licking a great big secret. and then said, "Audentes fortuna iuvat."

"I hate when you talk to me in Latin like I don't understand it," Thomas snapped. "What exactly are you saying I should do? Switch to classics?"

Almost unnoticeably -- if Thomas hadn't known him so well, it would have escaped him completely -- Kit stiffened. "No," he said. "Don't do that. Stick it out, Thomas. Be your obstreperous self. Be bold. They'll come 'round."

It was a week or so later, when Thomas was half way up the smokestack, white-knuckled and blitheringly nauseated with fear, with the rest of the freshmen down below on the ground like sensible men, that he thought perhaps his brother might have meant something different when he'd told him that fortune favored the bold.

But the guys in history and poli sci were all so puzzled by him, and his quotations, and his affection for Shakespeare, and "fairy-esque" things like drama -- which had never been a problem for him back home -- that he'd felt obliged to put in some effort at the task of not seeming too bizarrely different.

And where had that got him? Up here, with the wind whistling around him with a screeching banshee like keen, and stealing the breath out of his mouth like some sort of ghoulish kiss of life. If he ever got out of this, he thought to himself, he'd be damned if he would ever do something quite so stupid ever again.

What with one thing and another, September turned into October, and Thomas began to shake down into his new environment. He wasn't as dazzled as he'd expected to be -- changing the world and making history behave itself still seemed removed and far away from the miseries that attended him on account of his cohort -- but there was his literature course, Spenser with Brinsley, keeping him happy, and Thomas thought longingly of an English major every time he walked in and out.

He took to taking long, solitary walks in the Arboretum, hoping to get his fill of exercise before the snow set in, and it was on one of those, that another weird thing happened.

People often went to the Arboretum for what could, if you were punning, be descibed as shady purposes. Several of the botany majors had mushrooms -- of a special variety -- planted there, and probably other stuff too. Thomas, who was mostly unbothered and uninterested in such stuff, usually just noted it and moved on. But if he'd spent any time on thinking about it, he would have suspected that it was too cold for people to be out wearing as little as the small group of people entangled with one another under a shrubbery were.

He averted his eyes courteously, however -- after doing theater in high school, small groupings of this kind held no mystery or particular allure for him -- and tried to walk past, but one of the laughing girls, extended a hand to him, presumably to invite his participation. He smiled and shook his head, and then they all stopped what they were doing to look straight at him, which was a little embarrassing.

Thomas, a little bemused, tried to walk past, and one of the other girls, whose head was comfortably ensconced in another man's lap called, "Taking up virtue, Johnny?"

"I'm not--" he tried to say, but then another one leapt to her feet and planted a kiss on his lips, only then seeming to realise that he wasn't who she thought. But she didn't seem embarrassed by it at all either, just calmly turned her back, and returned to what she'd been doing. In fact, they all went merrily back to ignoring his presence, and after a moment, Thomas continued on his way, extremely puzzled.

That night, in Dunbar for dinner, Thomas saw Kit sitting across the hall and dashed over to join him, armed with his macaroni and cheese and two apples.

"Is there someone here who looks like me?" he asked hurriedly, before sitting down, and seeing that his brother was with someone... who did indeed look a lot like him. Even more so than Kit, who at least was dark to Thomas's blond.

"Speak of the devil," Kit said lazily. "Thomas Lane, meet Johnny Lane. Freshman poli sci, junior classics. Johnny's a cousin of ours. Distant."

"Oh," Thomas said, wondering why he'd never heard of him before. "Hello."

Johnny arched an eyebrow at him, almost as if he could hear his thoughts. "Pleased to meet you, Thomas," he said, and he felt another one of those shivers go up and down his spine. That was getting to be a habit. Thomas was beginning to think that he might actually like the feeling, which he found rather alarming.

It was a pretty sad world, when struggling through Spenser's tortured meter and riculously pastoral poetry was his only intellectual comfort, Thomas often thought to himself, as under Brinsley's direction, he and the rest of the class waded their way through the cantos of the Faerie Queene.

"What's the matter, young Tom 'o Bedlam?" one of his classmates said to him, after one particularly tough day.

"Just getting through this, and wondering if I picked the wrong major when this is the highlight of my week. Why? Am I being maudlin?"

"Aha," Colin crowed. "I knew it! Someone who knows his literature. Dicky-boy, come quick -- I've found an Edgar for you." As Rich Robinson raised his head in response to Colin's call, aside to Thomas he explained, "We're playing Lear at Ericson Little Theatre in the spring, and we've been looking for an Edgar. You do act, don't you?" And Thomas was forced to agree that he did. So that was how he met Colin Tooley and Rich Robinson, who turned out to be classics majors. No surprises there, they were certainly crazy enough.

Colin was a senior, and had a young brother at home called Nick who was hoping to come to Blackstock as well -- ("How does he know that already?" Thomas would ask, remembering his own indecisiveness and Colin would laugh and reply with vague, inconsequential statements like, "Because four years isn't nearly enough time.") and although Thomas found him both frustrating and incomprehensible, he was someone to talk to.

Especially when Thomas wanted someone to complain to about Spenser, who Colin and Rich seemed almost vindictive about.

"Querulous, pompous, sheep-fucking horse's ass," Rich would say -- the words seeming even more shocking coming out of his delicate, almost girlish mouth -- as Thomas tried to unparse yet another lengthy sting of adjectives describing some shepherdess or other.

And yet, after another afternoon of opprobrious epithets, Colin suddenly became serious, and said, "And yet, I'd forgive him much for that proem to the second canto."

"Where is that happy land of faerie," Thomas quoted. "It's not bad, certainly."

Colin looked past him, as if staring into some great, unimaginable distance. "Later times things more unknowne shall show," he said softly. Then he underwent one of his odd mercurial shifts in temperment, and leapt to his feet. "Enough of this. Let's go and get some beer at the Cave."

But it was despite all of this, and perhaps even because that Thomas chose to go down a certain road one Hallowe'en night, and changed his life forever.

The guys in Govy 10 were throwing another party, and had decided upon his room as the optimal location for the evening's debauchery, and Thomas, desperately afraid that it would end in something worse than climbing the smokestack, decided he'd had enough. So he decided to go horseback riding -- a nice, athletic activity that he could do alone. And hopefully, on a horse, he'd be far away from any madness like the kind he'd inadvertently stumbled upon in the Arboretum.

So he went to the stable, there to find unsettling Johnny Lane, despite all the excellent advice offered to him was neither to hold nor to bind -- and fell off the horse and down the rabbit hole, possibly never to return.

It was after he'd fallen off the horse, and Medeous had taken him up beside her, frightening him more than he'd ever been in all his years, and then taken him to the party under the willows, by the bend in the river, and the bonfires blazing, that he realized his brother was there too, squashed with some girls between Colin and Rich. And somehow, he fit amongst all these strange, pale, beautiful people -- their cheekbones high and their eyes distant and merry and mad.

They were alien somehow, and now he was with them, which was some place he'd always longed to be, and never wanted to return to.

But somehow he knew he was caught, and it was too late, always and ever after too late, and maybe had been since he first flung that dart into a letter, or even thought longingly of his brother's adventures.

When Medeous told Johnny to take him out of there, he let his eyes catch Kit's pleadingly, and even though those eyes didn't look human -- perhaps they never quite had -- it was still his brother, still familiar, even in green velvet and a feathered cap, and Kit got lazily to his feet, pushing the girl next to him aside, and came up to Thomas.

"I'll walk with you, if I may," was all Kit said, as if Thomas hadn't silently begged him to do so, as if he weren't leaving what looked like a hell of a party and they, Kit and Johnny -- both of whom had tried to warn him -- escorted Thomas back out of the Arboretum, one on each side.

Days afterwards, when Janie Schaeffer had spent another hour or so trying to convince him to switch his major to Classics, which Thomas was still determined not to do -- although changing the world was beginning to look like a dimmer and dimmer prospect -- and still in the grips of an enormous and irrational fury over the whole thing, which he knew was all his fault anyway, he spent several hours writing down the whole episode, in detail, and all his suspicions about everyone he'd met in the Classics department, including Johnny Lane who he was positive now was not some distant cousin, but instead some sort of great grand-uncle or something of the sort.

He took the sheafs of paper to his brother's room, and shoved them at him. "Read that," he ordered.

Kit raised an eyebrow at him, and then looked over the pages. "Your handwriting's terrible," he observed when he had done.

"Is that all you have to say?" Thomas shouted.

"What more do you want me to say?"

"Is it true?"

Kit handed the papers back to him. "You'd better put it in rhyme, Thomas.

"Thomas More? You're giving me Thomas More? Are you telling me there's no reason to any of this?"

"How can there be?" Kit asked. "It's beyond reason. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact. Hence the rhyme."

"What should I do?" said Thomas plaintively, feeling his voice crack.

"You're in the garden now, little brother," Kit said. Thomas, who knew his voice like he knew his own, could hear the slight shading of regret in it. "Might as well eat of the fruit."

Thomas looked at Kit, who for all of his life had been there -- slightly disinterested, but always kind, someone who Thomas' first baby steps had been to toddle after, someone he had always tried to emulate and chase after in every way... and who had now, somehow, led him here to this.

His eyes were still alien, but now they seemed shadowed slightly with sorrow.

"The garden?" Thomas asked. "Is it Eden or Hell?"

"Both?" said Kit.

Thomas nodded once, sharply. "They want me to switch to Classics," he said. "Want to help me with my Greek?"

Kit smiled. "Fair enough," he said.

___

Author's notes: The frame of this story is, of course, the old Scottish ballad of Thomas the Rhymer. Other texts used include references to: John Keats' Ode to Autumn, Oscar Wilde/Lord Alfred Douglas, Virgil's Aeneid, The Ballad of Tom' O Bedlam and its reply Mad Maudlin's Search, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Thomas More [who upon being given a mediocre book by a friend suggested that his friend put in rhyme -- when the friend did so, remarked, "Ay! ay! That will do, that will do. 'Tis rhyme now, but before it was neither rhyme nor reason."]. Richard Robinson is another actor in Shakespeare's company, The King's Men and is mentioned in the last will and testament of Nicholas Tooley ['Colin' like 'Nick' is another Renaissance-era short for Nicholas] as forgiven for a debt of £29 13s.