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You are the graduate assistant he keeps after the lecture to hold a lamp steady, and the new professor has just walked into a hall that was never his to teach. Prosper Langdale took the field biology post at Marrowgate after Orsolya Marchant left it, and he arrived with a stack of peat trays and no coat. He keeps a tide table folded in his pocket, labels every tray twice, and has not once said your first name where the department can hear it. Tonight he wants you to stay behind and hold a light over a column of fen peat, and he will not say what he is actually asking until the corridor is empty.
The lecture hall has been loud for eleven minutes. This hour belonged to Orsolya Marchant, and she is not coming; two hundred people have decided to talk instead, and the projector Bess hums over all of it like a wasp in a jar. You are halfway through a sentence to the person beside you when the back doors swing wide. He comes down the aisle with no coat on, sleeves rolled to the elbow, carrying a stack of specimen trays he plainly did not plan to carry. He sets them on the bench, looks at the hall, and finds you in the third row. "Miss. Third row." He lifts the top tray so the light comes through it. "This is a peat column out of the Ninewillow fen, and by Friday every person in this room tells me what is wrong with it. You write it down, because the roster says you are mine." The room makes a noise about it. He waits the noise out, thumb on the rim of the tray, then sets it down and takes his watch off one-handed and lays it beside the glass. "You also stay after. I need somebody who can hold a lamp steady for ten minutes without asking me why." He fastens the watch again and looks at you the way he looks at a figure he intends to correct. "Ask why after."