The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict

by Trenton Lee Stewart

  And then she was gone.

  And Nicholas was out.

  Nicholas was so exhausted the next morning, he almost drowned. Sunday mornings were bath mornings for the orphans. Four bathrooms with tubs were attended by four of the orphanage staff, who sentenced each child to four minutes in the cold water with a scrub brush and soap. The entire business was accomplished in an hour, but it was a very early hour. A chaplain came to Rothschild’s End on Sunday mornings to lead a brief service before returning to his own church in Pebbleton, and all the orphans were to be seated in the schoolhouse, clean and well dressed, when he arrived at seven o’clock.

  It was six-thirty when Nicholas, the last in his group of boys, stumbled blearily past Mr. Pileus into the appointed bathroom. He had already been awake for over an hour—he was still on larder duty and had been dispatched early to the farm—and he had slept precious little before that, for after he and John had gotten back last night, he had returned the mop and broom to the utility closet and headed straight for the library. He had guessed something about the Hopefield girl (something he hadn’t yet shared with John) and felt a powerful impulse to do some research in anticipation of meeting her again. Two hours later he had emerged from the library, barely conscious, and dragged himself upstairs just in time.

  Nicholas closed the bathroom door, undressed hurriedly and miserably, and plunged into the tub. The water was not cold anymore, but neither was it altogether clean, for a dozen boys had gone before him, and the water had been changed only once. Naturally, there was to be no wasting of water at the Manor. The soap was strong, though, and Nicholas scrubbed furiously. Before long he had rendered himself pink and squeaky clean, and he was about to climb out of the tub when he remembered that as the last bather, it was his duty to pull the plug.

  This was where the trouble began. The tub was unusually deep, and though he tried his best, Nicholas could not pull the plug with his toes. He was compelled to hold his breath and go under the murky water. He didn’t want to, but he had to. Down you go, he told himself. Glub glub glub and nothing for it.

  Down he went. Glub glub, he thought again, suddenly drowsier than he had been an instant before—in fact, very much drowsier, so drowsy that he was scarcely aware of it. He fumbled around the drain with clumsy fingers. Glub tug on the tub plug, he thought. A most humbling fumbling…

  The next thing he knew, Nicholas was lying on the bathroom floor, coughing and spitting, with a terrible taste of soapy water in his mouth and a terrible realization that he had swallowed a fair quantity of it. A rough towel had been thrown over him, and, opening his eyes, he saw a horrified Mr. Pileus, who, after banging repeatedly on the door, had entered to find Nicholas unconscious under the water.

  “Thank you, Mr. Pileus,” Nicholas said feebly. “I was only examining the bottom of the tub, but I understand your concern.”

  Mr. Pileus stared at him bleakly. He was trembling, and his shirt was soaked through from having hauled Nicholas out of the water. Without a word, he turned and left the bathroom. Nicholas sat up, trembling himself. It was rather upsetting to think he had almost drowned in a bathtub—upsetting and humiliating. He was glad Mr. Pileus was so quiet. At least the incident would not be broadcast.

  Covered from head to toe with goose bumps, Nicholas got up quickly and began to dry off. The towel was stiff and coarse as a floor mat, and it did not absorb water so much as move it around. Nicholas shook his head in disgust. What a way to start the day. And to think he’d disliked taking baths before.

  The morning did not improve. The late-summer heat was at its peak, and the schoolhouse was already warm by seven o’clock. By eight o’clock, when the chaplain’s service concluded, the schoolhouse was sweltering, and the children staggered out through the old stable doors as dazed as if they had been clubbed about the ears. Then followed morning chores, of which there was an extra helping on Sundays.

  But there was also extra free time on Sunday afternoons, and for once Nicholas joined the two or three girls in the library in blissful sleep. John had agreed to keep an eye on him, though it hardly proved necessary, for Mr. Collum was supervising from his office by means of the entranceway mirror, and the Spiders never even peeked in. Nicholas slept the entire time with his face behind a book, just out of Mr. Collum’s view, and despite the unusual length of his nap, it was perfectly dreamless and blissful. He awoke feeling refreshed and eager. He couldn’t wait for the night.

  Wait he must, however, for many long hours. And when midnight finally arrived, Nicholas found himself waiting yet again, this time for John. It was another cloudy night; the park was immersed in inky blackness. The oak branches overhead tossed in a strong wind. Nicholas, in his impatience, seemed to be mimicking their frenetic motions—he paced and waved his arms about and bounced on the balls of his feet. The wait was made all the more maddening by the knowledge that it might be for nothing. John might not even come. He had warned Nicholas that he might not manage to escape, for Mr. Collum was on duty in the dormitory, and Mr. Collum—despite those enormous nostrils—did not snore.

  A quarter of an hour had passed, and Nicholas was on the verge of giving up, when at last John came creeping up, his footsteps masked by the sounds of the branches and the wind. The boys greeted each other in silence, a relieved handshake and an excited clasping of shoulders, and John pulled on the boots Nicholas had brought him. Then, still under cover of darkness, they found their way through the undergrowth to the path, where Nicholas lit his lantern with some difficulty—the wind was problematic—before starting up the hill.

  Giant’s Head looked the same as it had the night before. But Nicholas knew at once that someone had been there. He was not sure how he knew, but he did. He held his lantern before him and stalked toward the door, with John following silently behind him. The observatory was empty. There was no sign of anything having been altered. So why did Nicholas think someone had been there? He moved further into the room, his senses on high alert.

  “What’s the matter, Nick?” John whispered. “You’ve got me spooked.”

  Suddenly Nicholas knew. “There was a candle in here,” he said. “It smells different. I almost couldn’t make it out over the lantern oil and the smoke.”

  John sniffed the air. “I can’t make it out. You’ve got quite a nose.” He grimaced. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  Nicholas waved him off. “I know what you meant. You really can’t smell it? To me, it’s… Wait. Something else is different now.”

  John, who had noticed nothing, moved away from the door just the same. Tense and silent, the boys watched it.

  A shadow appeared. Then the shadow became a form, and the form took on features. Work boots, a long, plain dress, pale hands—one gripping a heavy stick—a canvas bag thrown over a shoulder, and two wary eyes reflecting the lantern light. The girl hesitated in the doorway. She looked fierce and grim, and there could be no doubt that the stick was a warning. But presumably she had come to make friends, not enemies, and Nicholas, with a cry of delight, set down the lantern to welcome her.

  “I’m so glad you’ve come!” he exclaimed. “I wanted to ask you something!” And he began moving his hands and his fingers in a deliberate manner in the air before him.

  The girl’s jaw dropped. The stick fell from her hand and struck the ground with a thud.

  John could scarcely have been more surprised himself. “You know sign language, Nick?”

  “I found a great thick book on it in the library last night,” Nicholas said matter-of-factly, still moving his hands, “but I’m not very good at it yet.” His facial expressions, which shifted rapidly as he signed, did not match the words he’d spoken aloud, and for a moment or two, John was bewildered.

  “Wait a minute, are you talking to both of us at the same time?”

  “Sure I am,” Nicholas said, now motionless as he awaited the girl’s reply. He was watching her intently. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t?”

  “But how did you even know
she was deaf?” asked John, looking excitedly back and forth between Nicholas and the girl, who, having recovered from her shock, was now positively beaming. Her hands and fingers flew, and her expressions shifted rapidly as she shaped her responses to Nicholas’s words.

  “It was a few different things,” Nicholas said, speaking slowly as he concentrated on the girl’s movements. “The fact that she didn’t hear us coming on the bluff. The way she looked at us when we spoke—she was trying to read our lips, see, but it was hard to do in the dark. The fact that she didn’t even flinch when we screamed last night. And, of course, she never spoke. My guess is that—sorry, hang on a minute. She’s asking you to face her so that she can see your lips when you talk.”

  John obeyed with an apologetic look, and the girl gave him such a smile that John could not help but respond in kind. “I’m John,” he said, with a friendly nod. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Her name’s Violet.” Nicholas was watching the girl’s hands. “She’s glad to meet you, too. Both of us, actually…” He snickered and flicked a glance at John. “She wants to know what we thought we were doing, going out onto her bluff without permission.” He paused, concentrating. “And she wants to know where I learned sign language. She says I’m awfully clumsy.”

  As Nicholas moved his hands and changed his expressions in reply, the girl scowled and shook her head disapprovingly.

  “She doesn’t believe me,” Nicholas explained. “I told her the truth. I figured there’s no point in hiding it if we’re going to be friends—and surely we’re going to be friends, right, Violet?”

  Violet raised an eyebrow and looked at John. She had been watching Nicholas’s lips.

  “It’s true,” John said to her. He jerked his thumb at Nicholas. “He’s a genius. Ask him something you wouldn’t expect him to know—I’ll bet you anything he’ll know it.”

  Violet pursed her lips and regarded John doubtfully, as if she suspected a trick. Then she turned back to Nicholas and addressed him in sign language.

  “She’s asking me the name of the British artist who painted The Hay Wain.” Nicholas grinned and shrugged. “That’s easy—John Constable! He was a famous landscape painter. I’ll bet you thought of him because he painted places that are a lot like where we are right now—you know, wooded places and farm scenes—and maybe also because you’ve just met someone named John. Am I right?”

  Violet gaped at him. Her hands, poised in the air before her, remained motionless.

  “See what I mean?” John said to her. “Believe me, I was just as surprised as you are. What do you say, do you believe us now?”

  Slowly Violet nodded. And then she smiled, delighted. And her hands and fingers began to fly again.

  For the next hour the three of them talked at a furious pace, with Nicholas translating Violet’s words to John. Except for a few occasions when the boys’ spoken words needed clarification, Nicholas did not speak in sign language himself, for Violet was an excellent lip-reader and he was still quite awkward with his hands. He also had much to learn, but he deduced the meaning of a great many unfamiliar signs from context, and the rest Violet explained to him as soon as she saw the questioning look in his eyes. Within thirty minutes Nicholas’s vocabulary had grown so dramatically (his questioning looks coming less and less frequently) that Violet grew skeptical again and had to be reassured that he was not playing some elaborate ruse.

  Do you promise you didn’t already know sign language? she signed. You aren’t just pretending to learn as we speak?

  By this point Nicholas was already in the habit of translating everything instantaneously for John, and as he did so now John laughed and told Violet he knew exactly how she felt.

  “Quote everything back to her,” he suggested to Nicholas. “Like you did to me over breakfast that time.”

  But Violet stopped Nicholas before he had gotten properly under way.

  No, I believe you. Some of the signs I’ve used are signs my mother and I made up, signs no one else knows. But you obviously learned them instantly, because I’ve used them several times and you only needed them explained once. I’m just amazed, I suppose.

  “It takes some getting used to,” John said upon hearing Nicholas’s translation. “To tell you the truth, I’m still not used to it myself.”

  Without further ado, but with an eagerness they all held in common, the three of them launched back into their involved conversation. The boys told Violet a little about themselves, but mostly they peppered her with questions, and she was perfectly willing to give them elaborate and detailed responses.

  Like her mother, Violet had lost all of her hearing when she was a young girl. Starting at an early age, therefore, she had learned English from her father and sign language from her mother, who as a girl had attended a school for deaf children in Stonetown. Violet herself had not attended such a school, as the circumstances of her life had prevented it, but her mother had kept all of her old school materials and proved an excellent teacher.

  And Violet, for her part, was a quick and ready learner. She had excelled at the grade school in Pebbleton, from which she had graduated the year before with an eighth-grade diploma. In the Pebbleton area, such a diploma represented the pinnacle of educational achievement, for the nearest public high school was in the next county, and there was no bus service. Few local children attended high school. Most simply continued to work on their family farms or else found jobs in Pebbleton or elsewhere.

  Violet was one of those who continued to reside on the family farm. She could communicate easily with her family—though only with her family. To express herself to anyone else in the area, she required pencil and paper. This was one reason she felt so excited to make friends with Nicholas and John.

  Another reason, Violet signed—more tentatively, with an expression of great seriousness—is that my older brother died in the war.

  Nicholas hesitated, taken aback by the solemn turn in the conversation. He was at a loss what to do or say.

  Violet frowned. Tell him, she signed.

  Nicholas collected himself and related what she had said. John’s expression grew troubled. He nodded and asked Violet to go on.

  She and her brother had been very close, Violet said, and she missed him desperately. She grew tearful as she began to describe how it felt, then quickly broke off what she had begun to say. But you’re both orphans, she signed. So you know.

  Nicholas, of course, did not know—not exactly, anyway. John did, though, and he responded to Violet’s words with a brief, halting, equally emotional account of losing his parents. It was clear to Nicholas, observing and translating, that a current of understanding and sympathy had passed almost instantly between Violet and John; and strangely, though he had suffered no such painful loss, his role in expressing their sadness somehow made Nicholas feel it himself, and much more keenly than he would have thought. As he translated and clarified their words, he was compelled to steel himself against the emotion, to shove it down in his mind, for fear it would send him off to sleep.

  To his relief, they soon moved on to other, less somber topics. And yet the entire conversation remained strangely intense, for reasons as complicated as Nicholas’s unexpected emotions. For it is a curious fact about secret meetings that a bond almost always forms among the participants, a bond that can feel both mysterious and powerful. What is more, when the participants’ personalities and experiences fit together well, this bond of secrecy can transform quite naturally into real friendship. Such was the case with the boys and Violet, and all of them knew it. They could all feel it.

  “You used to come up here often, didn’t you?” Nicholas asked Violet. “Just to look around, I guess? It was you who made that old track.”

  Yes, Violet signed. My brother and I would come together. She paused. But I haven’t come at all since he went away.

  Nicholas asked Violet if she knew when the telescope had been stolen. She nodded and told him that it had happened just before her
brother went off to war. One day they had arrived to find the door broken down and the place empty. The observatory had not been used in years, she said—she had always known it to be overgrown with vines and weeds—but finding it in such a state had upset them, regardless. They had begun to think of it as their own, even though they had never entered it, and they were outraged by its shocking mistreatment.

  Violet looked around the room in approval. She was glad, she said, to see that they had cleaned up the place. In her view it revealed a lot about their character.

  “My character, at any rate,” John remarked wryly. “Nicholas only cleaned because I made him.”

  “I resent that!” Nicholas cried, crossing his arms. “I was going to clean… or, that is, I probably would have, anyway. I mean, I might have. Eventually.” He grinned. “But I did help, after all. Once you suggested it.”

  Violet was laughing. Her laughter was mostly silent, but her shoulders shook, and her breath came out in audible bursts, and her face—not an especially lovely face, by most measures—took on a wonderful radiance, the likes of which Nicholas had never seen. It lifted his spirits amazingly.

  I think I know something about your character, too, Violet signed. And reaching into her shoulder bag, she produced a tightly rolled sheet of paper and handed it to Nicholas, who unrolled it with no small curiosity.

  It was a drawing—an exceedingly skillful drawing—of a boy on a bluff.

  Nicholas looked up with a start. “Why, this is… me!”

  Violet was grinning. Finally it’s your turn to be surprised, she signed. I saw you from my window. I spend a lot of time at my window when I can’t sleep. The moon was beautiful that night.