Read Online The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story by Theodora Goss - Free Book Online Page A

Oxford. She’d always taken risks. There were times when he’d been frightened for her. But you couldn’t stop Isabel. It was just … the way she was.
    When he’d been offered a position at Bartlett College, in Coleville, Virginia, he had worried that she would be bored. But she’d thrown herself into riding and the local horse scene, with its dressage shows and foxhunts.
    Until the accident. He looked down at her, so pale, with tubes running into her arms and throat. His father’s death had been so different. One morning he had simply dropped dead in the bookstore. Congestive heart failure, the doctors had said. Afterward, Brendan sold the bookstore to a chain. He’d never wanted to set foot inside it again.
    “Are you all right, Dr. Thorne?” asked the nurse.
    “Yes, I’m fine,” he said, turning to go. “I’ll be back on Thursday.” But when he got back to his office at Bartlett, Michael Fitch, the department chair, told him there was a candidate interviewing on Thursday. An Evelyn Morgan.
    “I’d particularly like you to be there, Brendan,” he said. “Her doctoral dissertation is on the Green Man legend in Europe, and you’re our resident expert. We need her, of course. School starts in a month, and we don’t have anyone to teach Randolph’s classes. But I want to make sure her research is, you know, what we would want in an associate professor. Here’s a copy of her CV.”
    Evelyn Morgan. Could it be her? B.A. from Harvard, with a semester at Oxford. Ph.D. from Columbia. It had to be. And in her list of publications—it couldn’t be, but it was:
Green Thoughts
. She had run away from him, but still she’d written a poem about
The Tale of the Green Knight
.
    H e arrived late for her presentation. He’d read the article she had included as a sample of her scholarship. It was good—very good, in fact. He knew she’d spent the morning interviewing with Michael and several of the other professors. He would have been one of them if he hadn’t been teaching a summer course to pay Isabel’s hospital bills. Evelyn was probably relieved that only her presentation was left.
    He entered the room as quietly as possible and sat in the back.
    She recognized him. He could tell because, for a moment, she paused. A long moment, and he waited, holding his breath, worried that she had lost her place because of him. But no, she went on. “Any more questions?”
    “Dr. Morgan, I realize this is beyond the scope of your study, but are you claiming that the Green Man and the Magical Woman originated in pre-Christian fertility rituals? And do you have any evidence for this hypothesis?”
    “The texts themselves support such a hypothesis. The Green Man is clearly an embodiment of the changing seasons. In
The Tale of the Green Knight
, for example, Gawan’s armor is made of green metal shaped like leaves. The Magical Woman—in this case, Elowen—is most likely what remains of an ancient fertility goddess, a goddess of life and death. But the same pattern is found in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
. Of course, it would take me another dissertation to explore all the permutations of this particular theory.”
    There was polite laughter. More questions that she answered clearly and, he thought, cleverly. She had changed in the years since he’d last seen her. She seemed confident in her work—confident in herself. But beneath her gray suit, she still looked the same: the auburn hair, now pulled back with a barrette, and the straight,slender figure that had climbed up the hill to Gawan’s Court.
    “Well, I think Dr. Morgan would probably like some lunch,” said Michael. And then she was shaking hands and being escorted out the door, and Brendan was afraid he wouldn’t have a chance to see her before she left.
    He waited in the faculty parking lot. She had probably driven from Richmond, so it was safe to assume that the only compact car in the lot was her rental.
    She didn’t notice him until she was