The Oxford Inheritance by Ann A. McDonald

served to those who make it promptly to class.”
    Cassie took a seat, confused. Tremain had never seemed like a stickler for punctuality; last week, he’d been the one to show up ten minutes late, with jam staining his shirt collar.
    The other girl, Julia, gave her a sympathetic smile. She was slight and dark, her hair pinned neatly up behind her head, her blouse starched beneath a mint green cashmere V-necked sweater. Across from them sat Sebastian, a large, athletic-looking boy slouching on the leather wingback chair with one leg propped over the other and a smug expression on his face.
    â€œWho wants to start?” Tremain folded himself into his rickety chair and looked around. “Miss Blackwell, perhaps.”
    Cassie felt a tremor of nerves, followed with sharp relief when Sebastian spoke over her. “I’ll go first.”
    â€œWorks for me,” Cassie breathed quickly. Julia said nothing at all, simply waited with her pen held, poised for action.
    â€œVery well.” Tremain nodded, rifling through his papers before pulling out what Cassie assumed to be the boy’s essay: a thick stack of papers, printed with dense black type. “Whenever you’re ready.”
    Sebastian cleared his throat. “Does Descartes show that he is not a body?” he began. “How does Descartes think mind and body are related?” He launched into a discussion of empirical thought that left Cassie struggling to keep up. The essay question had seemed straightforward enough to her in the dim light of her midnight attic, but now Sebastian was dissecting theories of authors she had never read, devoting whole paragraphs to different interpretations of a single phrase.
    â€œGood work.” Tremain rewarded Sebastian with the briefest of nods. “Now, about distinctness and separation,” he continued. “Did Descartes think that the mind and body were potentially or actually separate?”
    Julia took in a breath. “Actually?”
    Tremain turned. “Is that a statement or a question?”
    Julia checked back through her notes. “A statement,” she responded, her voice becoming surer. “Descartes thought that if two things could be separated, they were distinct, whether or not they were apart.”
    Tremain doled out another approving nod. “As Margaret Wilson noted in her critiques.”
    â€œBut that whole argument rests on an assumption of the existence of a God to separate them,” Sebastian argued, and soon they were engaged in fierce debate, with barely a thought for Cassie, silent on the end of the couch. Not for the first time, Cassie was glad to be left unnoticed, watching the clock on the mantelpiece count down to her escape.
    â€œMiss Blackwell.”
    She snapped her head up to find Professor Tremain arching an eyebrow at her. “What do you think about Descartes’s thesis that he is solely a thinking thing?”
    â€œI . . .” Cassie glanced down at her notebook, as if the crosshatch of aimless lines would hold some answer. In other rooms—other lives—she would have relished the chance to bluff and argue, but all her usual confidence had fled, and even she recognized that she was out of her depth. Just as her silence was becoming unbearably awkward, the bells began to chime ten o’clock. Tremain gave a nod.
    â€œThat’s enough.” He closed his leather-bound file. “We can explore the meditations more next week. Perhaps an essay on error and the will; check Williams again, maybe some Carriero too.”
    The others collected their things and exited, but Cassie was stopped by a sharp summons. “Miss Blackwell?”
    Cassie turned, bracing herself. Professor Tremain held her essay paper aloft, gripped between his thumb and forefinger as if dangling something particularly distasteful. She approached him and took it, expecting a river of red ink, but to her surprise, there was not a single notation on