by H. S. Cross
The trouble, of course, was that Pearce never knew when to stop. At tea, he bruited his adventures up and down the Sixth Form table. Moss had to physically restrain him from leaving his seat to petition Burton-Lee about the other fags mixed up in the business. Once the Head dismissed them, however, there was nothing to stop Pearce buttonholing the Dean of the Upper School, dizzying Burton-Lee with overwrought blathering. Moss soon lost sight of them, but he knew well enough what was happening. He didn’t need to be present in Burton-Lee’s study to smell the cherry tobacco and to see Pearce perched on the edge of the rust leather wing-chair, pawning his nauseously earnest tale. Moss had no doubt Burton-Lee would summon and execute his fags on the spot, likely with Pearce in attendance to cut short any equivocating from the little worms, but Burton was also likely to take more interest in Mainwaring and Riding than Grieves had done. (Whoever trusted Mainwaring two inches needed his head examined.) Moss didn’t especially care what became of those two, but if the business stirred up animosity between Grieves and Burton-Lee … Swinton offered Moss their flask and advised him to contemplate soothing things. Their Housemaster was ever a trial; their duty as JCR was to run the House and keep Grievous on a more or less even keel. It had ever been so and would yet be so tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow …
6
John did not have prep duty that evening, but he felt it would have been better if he did. One hundred and five minutes confronted him, and although he had compositions to mark, not to mention the ever-reproachful basket of correspondence, he felt at a loss. His study door had no lock, though in damp weather, which was to say most days, it was swollen enough to require heavy pushing. He gathered up the papers from the armchair and piled them on the mail table. After shouldering the door fully into its frame, he collapsed into the seat and allowed his head to fall onto his hand.
Meg had never asked anything of him. There were the thousand things that weren’t really things, all unspoken when he was with them, but nothing like this. He had thought the request was simply Mrs. K’s loopy notion. There was no reason for him to Take Cordelia, as if his goddaughter were a puppy that required minding while its owner attended urgent business. The girl had friends and neighbors, including Mrs. K herself; Meg was nearly family to the Meeting in Saffron Walden. Only a harried woman such as Mrs. K could commit to telegram the suggestion that John summon his twelve-year-old goddaughter hundreds of miles north to St. Stephen’s Academy, a male society undisturbed by the opposite sex, notwithstanding matrons and a pair of staff daughters under the age of three.
Besides which, Owain was bound to turn up.
But Mrs. K had made it clear that Owain’s premises were locked and that no one could locate him or the young lady he employed. Mrs. K herself would gladly keep Cordelia except that her son expected her on a long-ago-booked holiday and Meg insisted she depart as planned. As for the myriad friends and neighbors, Meg had given Mrs. K a verbatim message, which the woman read to John down the telephone. Darling, will explain, believe me no alternative, please. Those words illuminated little but quickened John’s pulse. Mrs. K whispered a gloss into the receiver—Margaret was desperate that nobody know. —Her illness or her husband’s disappearance? —Surely both, Mrs. K avowed. No alternative would Meg entertain. She drifted in and out of consciousness, and whenever she regained herself, she repeated the same plea: John.
It was not humanly possible to refuse her. John had given Mrs. K the train details. It would have been better for the Headmaster to decide to allow the girl to come. A better man than John would be able to conduct the conversation so that Jamie believed her arrival was not a fait accompli, but everything John imagined saying spun off incoherently as he prepared for Jamie’s reaction. He needed sleep, a full night’s rest untroubled by dreams or heartburn or noises or restless legs. He needed a clear mind, an invigorated body, a supple will, and charm.
Someone had turned up the gravity and his body stuck in the chair. Meg had asked for him. Now, in this year—sixteen after he’d lost her to Owain—she was summoning him, message bound to a prize-winning bird, one lost in the winds but now come home, feathers warm in his palm. We must go back to the book and ink out our errors, Moss was telling him. Moss needed the docket book from his desk. There had been mistakes, things done in salt water when they should have been done in fresh. But John told Moss, You are Prefect of Chapel and mistakes are all part of it. The book has never been changed as long as we’ve kept it. Let the errors stand. Moss had departed, and the Bishop had joined John in his study, pouring them each a brandy and soda, and John was explaining that he took only soda with no more than half a splash of brandy, less than a drop of blood, not so much as the Bishop had poured him, but the Bishop was telling John what he’d come to say, that all this time he’d been working for John’s promotion. Every position he’d held, the Bishop had engineered. The ambulance corps? The Bishop had gone to Parliament to keep John out of prison. St. Stephen’s? He’d told the previous Headmaster to engage him. Housemaster? Everything. John was filled with remorse that he had so long considered himself passed over, when in fact this man, who he thought had abandoned him, had been moving pieces around the board to his advantage. And now the Bishop refilled his glass and asked if he was certain he wanted to adopt this child. All these years he had not wanted a child, and now was he certain? John told him yes, yes, he was certain. It was true children took your time, devoured it, and he had so little, all these boys— Yes, the Bishop asked, weren’t they enough? But John, heart full, told him no. Children took everything, your freedom and your hours, but what was he doing with all his hours? Children gave shape to time, gave it purpose. And if he could find Meg, wherever she had gone, they could do just that. Somehow, someone ought to be able to find her, Margaret Drayton, Margaret Líoht—no one could hide forever if you looked hard enough. The world was enormous, but it was finite.
Except then he remembered the body and the funeral, and he thought it was possible—no, true—that she had died. He had found her dead in their bed, and there had been a burial, and now she was nowhere to be found anywhere in this world. And he fell on the floor sobbing, Lord, have mercy, and then the bell was ringing, far then near, that clang for the end of something, metal alarm, Prep, and he was clutching his forehead in the chair by the door, sobbing without tears, salt or fresh, his mother dead these twenty-seven years, his wife twelve, Meg in hospital, the school seething outside, rain splatting his windows, the chapel bells jangling and calling them to Prayers.
At Cambridge, John used to slip into King’s to hear evensong from time to time. Of course, he’d thought he didn’t believe any of it, that the church, its creeds, and even great swathes of the Bible failed to convince him and quite possibly, if he had taken the time to examine them, offended. But evensong at King’s was a thing that drew him as a bucket drew water from the bottom of a long well. You’d have to be a stone not to be moved by the beauty, he would say to anyone who discovered him there.
Now, he was obliged by contract and custom to kneel each morning and night on the tamped-down kneelers, to recite the creed, the confession, the responses, to listen to the lectionary, and to sing, as this evening, from the hymn books whose spines had let go their bindings.
Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways;
Reclothe us in our rightful minds,
In purer lives thy service find …
A hymn, after all, written by a Friend sometime in the shadows of another century, when they walked and sought and waited on the light.
Nothing had physically changed since Jamie had become the Academy’s Headmaster, yet anyone could see that it was a different school than it had been. The blind turmoil of Jamie’s first year; the large-scale removal of boys, masters, and staff—called in popular mythology the Great Clear-Out; the transformation of arbitrary justice into a system of dockets, sorted each night by Housemaster and JCR, addressed with a cool head after the offense, with firm limits on t
he coarser forms of discipline; Kardleigh’s arrival and resurrection of the choir; all combined with a re-cultivation of beauty and purpose in their daily gatherings. Jamie wasn’t moralistic, at least not compared to his predecessor, but he quickly and with few words projected a seriousness towards matters that had been allowed to atrophy.
John was still a Quaker, but on evenings such as this—Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils—on such a night he found little to offend him and much to comfort. He even, behind the veil of the confession, unburdened himself to whatever ear would listen.
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done—we have hoped for those we ought not to have hoped for—there is no health in us.
He needed to catch Jamie directly after Prayers. After that, marital duties rendered the Headmaster unavailable save emergencies, and John did not want this to be an emergency. On the way out of the chapel, though, John encountered Lockett-Egan and followed him back to his House for a quick Soda & B. He told the Eagle about the boys and the barn. The Eagle listened and at the end asked if John had informed the Head. John got up and announced his intention to do just that, but rather than proceed to the Headmaster’s house, John stopped by his own House and dropped in on dorm rounds. Pearce he found corralling the Lower School, patience short. John’s appearance awed them. He told the juniors to get into bed. He proceeded to the washroom and exercised the same chilling influence over the Remove, but when in the corridor Pearce thanked him, John realized that he had undone whatever advances Pearce had won that day.
He headed to the Tower, where he found Kardleigh at his desk, having just turned the lights out on the ward, which, Kardleigh reported, was nearly empty after the outbreak of vomiting earlier that week. Kardleigh, too, listened to John’s tale of the barn, though unlike the Eagle, he hadn’t yet heard it. He was displeased to find Halton mixed up in it.
—I shouldn’t worry, John said, he should be back on form for choir practice tomorrow.
But it was Halton’s company the choirmaster disliked, not his misadventures. Kardleigh did not think Halton needed friends like White, certainly not with the Stanford coming up Sunday. John expressed his baffled admiration that Kardleigh had managed to train Halton to the choral repertoire given the boy’s near illiteracy in the classroom.
—I’ve no idea what they tried to teach him in the colonies, John said, but none of it stuck. He’s thick as two planks.
But Kardleigh found Halton bright enough, though he suspected the boy couldn’t read much music and got it mostly by ear. And so they talked about the choir and about the boys, as usual, and by the time they left off, it was too late to see Jamie. It was also too late to see his JCR about Pearce. So John returned to the Eagle, who took one look at him and told him he’d better come in. The drop in John’s soda was rather larger than usual, and the Eagle confessed that Burton-Lee had been by; the man was wound up, he wanted the barn torn down, and he planned to speak to Jamie in the morning. John agreed about the barn, but, he wondered aloud, if Farmer McKay hadn’t torn it down yet, why would he now? And as for the Headmaster, John didn’t see why a case of Third Formers trying it on, duly thwarted by a prefect, ought to be blown out of proportion.
—Burton doesn’t see it that way.
After midnight John took his leave, not having mentioned the thing that was making his stomach burn.
But the Lord sometimes had a way of blowing a curtain aside, a napkin off the table, an exercise book open when John had ceased hoping; and now, as he crossed the quad to return to his House and face an adversarial night with his bed, now a light came on, literally, in the window of Jamie’s study where it had not been. And so, trembling with relief and awe and also dread, John turned into the cloisters and towards Jamie’s door.
7
Someone had shouted in his sleep, and now Gray lay heart-poundingly awake.
Things hadn’t seemed bad at lights-out. They were heroes in the Remove, not only because of the exploit itself, which Trevor had embroidered to suggest that they had rescued the fags from the predations of Pious Pearce, but also because of their cool indifference in the face of the lines Burton-Lee gave them for disseminating said embroidery at Prep.
Trevor had done his lines, but Gray had advanced Valarious two days’ journey on his quest, through Magnus Marsh, where dwelt hags who told him lies disguised as fortune, into the mists of Fulsom Fell, whose stones bedeviled his compass, leading him farther and farther astray until he collapsed in a thicket of heather, his gabardine pulled tight against the rain.
His own lines would have to be done tomorrow during French or just before tea. He should have done them at Prep, but after Valarious, an idea had come to him about Napoleon, a parallel between Napoleonic Code and Dr. Sebastian’s regime at the Academy. Grieves would demand more evidence than Gray could provide, but that was precisely why he’d presented it as some might say. Grieves, as a rule, did not stand for some-might-say, but if the notion intrigued him—Wipe that smirk off your face. In the study, Grieves had treated him like a magsman whose trick was known. (What smirk even?) Trevor said Grievous had believed them, or at any rate he’d let them go, which Trevor deemed a top-hole outcome. But Trevor was native to Stalky, not an imposter like Gray. What kind of book could ever revolve around Gray? He was failed material for a character.
Halton had got six and then had the nerve to bait them, his elders and betters, before half the school. He’d got it from Pearce, of unknown reputation, but bets on vindictive. Gray had only taken six once, and not until this year. The difference between four and six had not been trivial. Halton clearly had a grudge against them, or at least against him. Whose foot had he trod?
A mind like Trevor’s would press him to say what he’d actually observed from the loft of the barn. What could he swear to in a court of law? Squeezed by Pearce, Halton had turned his head in the direction of their cache. He was close enough to see inside, m’lord. The expression on his face had changed. Oh, he could hear the barristers cross-questioning him—Were there not any number of things to change the expression of a boy in hot water?—but given Halton’s remarks in the changing room, in the cloisters, could Gray ever allow himself to imagine they were safe?
If he were the writer rather than merely an observer from above, of course Halton would have seen not only the worn spines and tattered covers of Gray’s penny dreadfuls (testifying to a regular occupancy of the barn), not only their original Stalky (the Complete was above in the loft), but seen also deep into the crevice, where light from the sun, having broken through cloud—except it had started raining again by then, hadn’t it?—light from the sun, filtered through cloud, passing on express purpose through the dirty windows of the barn, straight into that crevice until it collided with the silver nameplate, which would reflect the light and send it out again until it met the next object, the cornea of Halton’s eye. It was simply too inefficient for Halton to find himself in the Keep, to be threatened almost beyond endurance by cruel and wicked Pearce, and for him not to see the treasure. Enemy hands, enemy eyes, the thing he ought to have burned years ago.
Halton would have stood cold and hungry before the JCR. An inquisition more probing than their Housemaster’s would have rolled forth: the barn, their habits, the smoke. Whatever Halton had said, it had not caused Trevor and Gray to be summoned, but it had inspired the JCR to the maximum penalty. Had Holton gone first, according to school practice that saw boys dealt with in order of seniority, or had he been made to wait in the corridor? Gray knew the churning fear, the slowing and speeding of time. Halton would be told to bend over. He’d remove his jacket and lean across the back of the JCR chair until his head touched the seat. Feeling a stretch in the back of his legs, he’d lock his knees. One of the prefects would take up the cane—Carter if he was lucky, Swinton if he wasn’t, but, right, in this case Pearce, still hot with anger. He’d
do what they always did, flex it as he paced, building suspense, working the nerves. When he saw a sufficient trembling, Pearce would back away from his target, raise the cane, and cut through the air with a swish-and-crack.
Halton would gasp. He wouldn’t be able to help it, and as his breath returned he’d feel the burning, stinging ache. Nothing for him in the world besides this bottled breath, this room upside down between chair rungs. If Pearce had learned anything over the past five years, he would strut back to the mantel, giving Halton time to think. Halton might wonder how many he could take without yelping; he might decide the exploit hadn’t been worth it; he might reconsider silence for no cause. Pearce might not know what Halton was thinking, but he would certainly know what he was feeling when he delivered the second cut with a force and precision equal to the first. Halton would gasp again and brace himself for the third, already slicing through the air. With it no thought, just pain, more pain, three to go.
If Moss was giving it, or Swinton in a mood, you’d know they wanted you to stick it; and even if later the shame bit, in that window when it was happening, they might if they were decent (most weren’t, but if they were) make you feel they were on your side. But with one who hated you, one who kept going—and then afterwards, no matter who had given it, you’d be altered. It was grafted to you, whatever you might pretend, like the marks that changed color, reminding you, even after it hardly hurt anymore.
But all that had happened to Halton, not to them. He oughtn’t be lying awake to demented hours. They had got away with it. There was no reason for Grieves to have done anything but thank them for rescuing Pearce. Instead, their Housemaster had released them under a cloud. It would have been one thing if he’d made them return on their own, dragged them formally over the coals, told them to their faces that he didn’t believe them, but to send them away with an air of disgust? You must remember to use your eyes, his father said. If you close your eyes, it grows bigger, stronger, monstrous. What if Grieves didn’t suspect him of anything? What if he simply didn’t care? Grieves had liked Wilberforce, at least Gray remembered Grieves treating Wilberforce with a warmth he showed no one else. Was the man incapable of loving, or was it merely that no one could ever love—