He left it hanging there and to his great relief Flora nodded.

“Och, I suppose it’s best,” she said thickly. Her accent always got worse when she was emotional, which was thankfully rare. “But I’ll miss you, Tom. You were different,” she said.

He glanced at her with surprise and warmth as he reached for his shirt. Different! Damn right he was different. He liked cow-like Flora a little better now that she had said that.

“I’ll see you at supper, chérie,” he said, kissing her on the cheek and making good his escape. As he strode back to his rooms, top button rakishly undone so everybody would know what he had been doing, Tom made a note to himself. Flora was a good girl, he thought, a little complacently. He would call the Massot showroom in Bond Street and have them send her a gift. Something plain, but valuable; a brooch, perhaps. He remembered a fine spray of gold with antique seed pearls and pink sapphires; his mother had pointed it out to him last year. He would send her that, with a note: “A token of my esteem. Until we meet again. Thomas.”

Yes, that would do very well. He smiled complacently. That was stylish, and it was incumbent on him to develop style, the style that becomes a man of property and business. Parting from Flora had been mercifully easy. He hoped the college would be as accommodating.

“I have letters here from your tutors.”

Mr. Butters was the Senior Censor of Christ Church, and Tom wondered if he had ever disliked anybody quite so much. Why, the academic was pacing up and down in front of him like a general in front of an unruly subaltern. What were academic salaries in England these days? He would be surprised if the man made eighty thousand euros a year. And he was dictating to him, Thomas Massot, heir to many millions and future controller of one of Europe’s great fortunes?

He said nothing.

“They report that your work has been most unsatisfactory.”

“My last essay got a Beta plus,” Tom responded, with a touch of defiance all his struggles couldn’t suppress.

“Indeed, but Mr. Hillard tells me you have a fine mind, the type that ought not to be satisfied with Betas of any sort.”

Tom was amazed. Hillard had said that?

“That’s very kind of him.”

“On the contrary, young man,” Mr. Butters said, staring at him with those piercing hazel eyes, “he is quite disgusted with you. Ignorance is forgivable, laziness is not. You have no hope, no hope at all of a first if you carry on in this manner. You do understand that?”

Tom regarded Butters’s threadbare waistcoat and ill-fitting trousers, and the red pinching mark his spectacles made on the bridge of his nose. He felt uncomfortable with this line of questioning and told himself it was both impertinent and irrelevant.