Term started on the second of October and she saw him on the fifth, in a seminar room on the first floor of the history faculty, four seats along.
She had not been looking for him. That is the part she found hardest to explain to Wren, afterwards, and hardest to believe herself: she had spent eleven weeks in a basement with three photographs and had built an entire cathedral of theories, and then term had started and there had been reading lists and a landlord problem and Wren's crisis about a lab partner, and she had genuinely, for four days, not thought about it at all.
Dr Faraday said, "Right. Historiography. God help us," and went round the table.
"Selena Hart."
"Priya Deshmukh."
"Tom Ellery."
"Cassian Sinclair," said the boy four seats along, and Selena Hart looked up.
He was better looking than the photographs, which she had not expected, because photographs of handsome people from a hundred years ago generally flatter them.
He was about twenty-one, dark, in a grey jumper that had been washed a great many times, and he sat the way he stood in the 1901 photograph — chin slightly down, entirely still, not performing anything at all for anybody.
He did not look at her.
That was the thing she noticed within about ninety seconds, and it stayed with her for the rest of the term, because in a seminar of nine people everybody looks at everybody eventually; you cannot spend an hour and a half in a small room and not. He looked at Faraday. He looked at the window. When Priya said something clever about Herodotus he looked at Priya, and said something back that made Faraday put his pen down.
He did not look at Selena once.
She spent an hour and a half with her heart going like a hammer, doing arithmetic.
Afterwards, on the stairs, Priya said, "Where's he been? He's not been in anything all last year."
"He's new," said Tom.
"He's not new, he's on the third-year list."
"Then he's a returner. Illness or something."
Selena said nothing at all.
She went back to her room, and got out her phone, and opened the photograph she had taken of a photograph in a basement in July, in breach of clause four — the rowing eight of 1901, third from the left, chin down, looking very slightly to the left of the lens.
She held it up next to the seminar list on the noticeboard in her head.
Sinclair, C. E. Matriculated 1899. Went down 1902.
"Right," said Selena Hart, to an empty room. "Okay."