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Act 3, Scene 10
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If We Were Villains, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fate vs. Free Will
Identity and Disguise
Love and Sexuality
Theatre and Corruption
Summary
Analysis
Oliver, James, Alexander, and Filippa arrive back on campus on December first. Meredith is on her way, but they haven’t heard from Wren. Oliver meets with Dean Holinshed, who’s found a way for Oliver to stay by taking loans, using a scholarship, and doing a work-study cleaning the Castle. Oliver gets to work lighting a fire in the library and overhears two men in the dining room: Colborne and Ned Walton. Colborne tells Walton that he wants to look around the building. He also reveals his suspicion that the other students didn’t like Richard while he was alive.
Colborne seems to have realized more than he let on during his questioning of the fourth-years, demonstrating both his canniness and his ability to mask his reactions. The group he’s suspicious of are all actors, and it looks like he has this in common with them. Almost every major character in the story is hiding things—which makes it all the more useful that Oliver now has a work-study position.
Themes
Colborne lays out the sequence of events he’s gathered from the fourth-years’ accounts of the night Richard died. He tells Walton that he doesn’t know yet why Richard was drinking alone, but he suspects it might have been relationship trouble. Also, he suspects that Meredith and Oliver were doing more than talking in her room that night. He deduces that Richard might’ve gotten violent with Wren based on James’s story. Colborne tells Walton that the hours between three and six are the crux of the mystery: no one knows exactly where Richard was or what he was doing until Alexander found his body. He says that he doesn’t trust the fourth-years because they’re actors. The two men decide to look through the woods for evidence and leave.
Colborne has deduced enough to know almost as much as Oliver does—at this point, the major question in Richard’s death is, as he said, what happened between three and six, which Oliver also doesn’t know. Given that the fourth-years were trying to cover up Richard’s violent behavior in the period leading up to his death, it’s also surprising that Colborne figured out that he attacked Wren. It indicates that James might’ve had difficulty keeping it together under scrutiny, or that he talked about Wren quite a bit while giving his statement.
Themes
