Grievous

by H. S. Cross

  —Riding, he said, second bell.

  There were still the basins to do. He resorted to shaking. Riding growled. The shoulder felt hot. If someone was ill, you had to fetch a prefect. He fetched Pearce.

  —Riding, Pearce barked, get up.

  Riding squinted. Pearce whipped back the covers.

  —What on earth…?

  Halton nearly gasped. Riding had gone to bed in pajama top and school trousers, as if he’d fallen asleep half-changed. But Pearce, rather than jawing, touched his forehead. Riding flinched away.

  —Halton, Pearce said, wait here and take Riding to the Tower.

  Then he spun off to harangue someone else without saying who would do the basins if Halton waited.

  No one knew what happened to Riding. He’d been in bed when they came up last night, and when they’d tried to speak with him, he’d cursed a blue streak. This morning he moved like an old man. He was sore, that much was obvious, but had he been injured, too, as Mainwaring had? Halton had heard the crash outside the barn when he dashed in to get what he got, but he hadn’t seen what happened after.

  He was still tired even after a full night’s sleep. Detecting took it out of you. No one ever told him that fagging for a tyrant would sharpen his instincts, but he’d started winning at last. Pearce and Mac made sure he knew where every one of their wretched things belonged: ink pots that shelf, not this; this end, not that; letter paper under envelopes not on top or beside; cricket bat this angle, photo bracket Hobbs at Lords not one speck of dust; these and a thousand other painful offenses had etched a memory of their little pit of hell, and nowhere in that picture were football boots. Football boots went beneath bench in changer, not wrapped in muffler under envelopes, left drawer.

  They hadn’t been smoking at McKay’s barn—though they’d smoked earlier, which Pearce might have discovered if he’d made them empty their pockets—but Halton had admitted, when pressed by the JCR, that the place had smelled of cigarettes. Next day, his own ledger cleared by the cane, he could afford to torment Pearce: What if the smell had been Farmer McKay’s pipe? What if someone else had been at the barn before them?

  The school had been gated. A search was planned. Football boots did not belong in desk drawers. His bed was near the dormitory door. When Pearce went, he followed.

  There was a window below the Tower that got them past the gates. On that moonlit night, not a soul awake besides the sheep, Pearce, bless him, took to the road. You’d never cut across Abbot’s Common during the day, Malcolm said, unless you wanted five sightings by local busybodies forwarded to the Head by teatime, but in the middle of the night, only someone entirely lacking imagination would slog the longer way of the road. Unless Pearce was headed elsewhere—tryst? contraband?—which Halton briefly hoped he was. When they arrived at the barn, he’d felt hot disappointment, and a racing fear that Pearce had come to take the thing he himself had glimpsed. But Pearce, after some rustling, had sat inside doing nothing. The barn’s shadow had drifted across the track, and eventually, hours later, Pearce departed. Halton had dashed inside, admonishing himself against hope, but there, when he trained his torch on the place—how long had it been since luck was on his side?—not only was there something, but the thing he thought he’d seen: a nameplate, T. Riding, tarnished but legible. Nameplates did not float in midair or affix themselves to a rotting beam; they marked, and this one gilded the latch of a varnished box.

  Pearce had gone by the road, so he took to the Common. A wooden box could not simply be tucked under arm for cross-country trots, but with luck on his side, he’d got it and himself through the hedge and back in the window; then he’d stashed it under the towels in the changer and regained his bed before Pearce came crashing back to the dorm.

  The drawback of luck, real luck, was that you couldn’t tell anyone. That morning Malcolm was as shirty with him as ever, Fletcher treated him as a moron, and White remarked that he looked wearish and that he mustn’t overdo it on the wanking front. Moderation in all things, Infant. Everyone had found this the peak of wit.

  Riding wasn’t at breakfast, and neither was Mainwaring. Someone said Grieves had hauled them out of their dorm in a fury. Someone else said they’d been sick in the night. He cut French to take care of the box. There was a place by the choir room, an alcove no one knew. As the Third drilled verbs, he, Timothy Halton, surveyed his prize.

  He hated reading and did it as little as possible, but once he’d glimpsed the treasure, he couldn’t stop. It gave him a headache and made him hungry. He read the letters to envy, for a father like that, and like Wilberforce. If any letter to him had ever said a hair of what these said in manes, and to Riding, that ill-tempered, stuck-up swot, sidekick to the horrible Mainwaring, one who toyed publicly with Pearce and got away with it—it defied fairness. But luck, gorgeous luck, had turned her face to him. She, with her lily-of-the-valley scent, showed him the true treasure. Grieves had told them of pharaohs’ tombs, filled with cheap display to throw robbers off the hoard. This wasn’t a hoard, but once he’d pried up the bottom and read what was beneath, he saw with panicked excitement why the whole thing had been stashed in a broken barn.

  He intended blackmail, but real luck took such things off the table. When the bell rang the end of French, he hid the box where no one would find it. He didn’t have words for what it did to him. He was stiff and rattled, and a tantalizing dread breathed down his collar.

  He put a note in Riding’s pigeonhole, and then later, Riding and Mainwaring still missing, he realized more was needed. Espionage was harder than detecting. He detected Riding’s uniform hanging in the changer. It was easy to stay behind cleaning basins, but putting the second note in the trouser pocket felt more indecent than anything he’d done. Real luck brought power all at once; if you wanted her to stay, you had to use her gift wisely, bold but cool, ruthless and impartial.

  * * *

  It had been a late night and an early morning. Kardleigh was not on form. Stanford in G needed two of the three broken stops, and although he’d found a way around it, yesterday a different stop failed. The so-called organ was being held together with string and sticking plaster. He’d been warning the Headmaster for years, but it would probably take a complete collapse before the Board would agree to professional repairs. At least Halton would be ready with the solo, provided Kardleigh could rehearse him this afternoon. The boy knew the piece, but he needed to stop pushing and let the note release like the expression of joy it was meant to be.

  Mainwaring was finally packed off with his uncle and aunt—cousins?—so the commotion could end, too. Burton-Lee, for unexplained reasons, had taken charge of arrangements. There had been a telephone call to Mainwaring’s mother, who sounded resentful and helpless, and then at some point a string of relations had telephoned, and one way or another, a man and a woman had roared up at dawn in their Oxford Six, disturbing God’s good earth with their Klaxon, until Fardley emerged and opened the gates to them. Mainwaring was still unsteady, but he went with them willingly enough. When Kardleigh offered to telephone the family physician, the couple had looked as though he’d said something déclassé.

  Burton had also briefed him on Riding’s fate: remaining and dealt with. The explanation had seemed complete at the time, but once Mainwaring had left, Kardleigh wondered what was meant by it. Why had Burton taken it under authority when both boys were in Grieves’s House? And why, after pestering him all day about Mainwaring, had Grieves gone A.W.O.L., to the point of saddling Kardleigh with his goddaughter?

  Doubtless in time all would be revealed. But now, before he’d even made himself a cup of tea to take the edge off the night and the couple in the Oxford Six, now young Halton was careening into the exam room, having evidently taken the stairs three at a time.

  —If you’ve bad news, Timothy, I don’t want to hear it.

  The boy gulped breath and struggled with Kardleigh’s tone.

  —If you’ve come to tell me you’ve lost your voice, you’ve
got a lot of explaining to do.

  The boy finally cracked a grin.

  —Not me, sir, Riding.

  —Oh?

  —Can’t say a word. Pearce told me to bring him, but there’s still the basins to do, sir, and—

  —Off you go, then. I’ll see you at one. At the organ, I think, not the choir room.

  Riding was taking his time on the stairs. If he intended to malinger after landing himself in hot water, he could think again, but the sight of him put lie to the idea. He had a fever, and efforts to speak yielded only whispers. Throat red but not spotted. Kardleigh examined him for concussion: negative. Attempts to be jocular about the medicines of justice were met with red silence. It was too early in the morning for this. He gave the boy aspirin and told him to lie down in the dayroom. Anxiety crossed his face, and he craned to see the ward.

  —You’ve missed Mainwaring, I’m afraid.

  —What happened? the boy whispered.

  —Invalided back to Blighty. Don’t look so stricken. You did fine with the stretcher bearing, Lieutenant.

  Not a glimmer. He handed the boy a nightshirt, but the look of anxiety only sharpened. The whole affair was irregular.

  * * *

  Uncle John missed breakfast again, but one of the masters, with the thick-bottle spectacles, told her it wasn’t unusual. Lives on air and the Hundred Years’ War, does our Grievous. She didn’t know what the man meant by it, but she felt it was probably true.

  After breakfast, Mrs. Firth let her read the paper in her sitting room. Her mother disapproved of newspapers, but here they took The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and even the Daily Mail. Mrs. F brought her all three from the staff room, yesterday’s date, along with a fresh copy of The Times. Mr. Grieves would want it, she said, and there wasn’t time to iron it again, so she was to take care to fold it up when she was finished.

  The Times teemed with debates about widows and orphans, which she supposed ought to stir her sympathies. It claimed that the first test of a long-distance telephone had occurred between Japan and the United States, but who in America even spoke Japanese? There was a photograph of a new railway station in Milan and a story about the Fascist Clock, a contraption that marked not only hour, minute, and second, but also phases of the moon and day of the week and month. The word fascist came from the word for face, she deduced, for when the clock struck, pictures of Signor Mussolini and the King appeared. She could speak French well enough to navigate Paris, she thought, and everyone said that Italian was nearly the same. Perhaps in the summer they could go to Rome!

  She’d had to take the bandage off her hand to wash in the morning. There wasn’t much to see, but there was a feeling inside her palm, an ache and a buzz, memory of the wood that had lodged there. It was her writing hand, the wound personal and wrong.

  Perhaps Uncle John had fallen ill last night. Some people took spirits as medicine. It might explain everything.

  The NUT at Yarmouth did not concern walnuts but rather lady teachers and some unsightly disputes over pensions and the leaving age. She was beginning to see why her mother avoided the papers, but then at the end of another boring column, this on the Thirty-ninth Annual Conference of the Incorporated Association of Head Masters, Dr. Sebastian’s name leapt from the page, as thrilling as the time Miss Pankhurst came to her school. J.A.S. Sebastian, Head Master of St. Stephen’s Academy, will be speaking at Charterhouse this evening about the Public School Hymn Book. Their own Dr. Sebastian, who had touched her shoulder that way, black and white in the columns of The Times!

  She folded the paper to put that part on top. Mrs. F had told her to leave it on Uncle John’s desk, and the door needed shoving to open. The room smelled carmine as it did before. Unlike in their own sitting room, the mantel had been tidied, glasses cleaned and returned to their spots. She heard a door in the corridor close. The walls were not thick. Last night the other men had already gone, which left Uncle John alone with that boy, and though she’d never heard such sounds before, they did seem … But her newspaper swain! Her prisoner in the tower! He was not at breakfast either. When Mrs. F came to stir the grate, she asked her if those boys had been sacked. Mrs. F looked affronted, which meant that they weren’t, and then she said to mind her knitting, which meant no one could speak of it.

  * * *

  There was a wireless in the dayroom and Kardleigh left it playing. Some kind of music, slow and old, soft and lost, like the marshes at night. Are you going to die?—We all die someday.

  Say it isn’t true. Say all this will last and be always and ever and the ground that doesn’t move. Say it won’t be wasted. Say dying is for other people. Say we aren’t alone. Even in the marsh, fireflies! Say of the sweet and the sad and the still-remembered, they will one day come back, ocean crossed, curtain torn bottom to top, and all that looked broken will stand and rise and be there to touch.

  Later, even after that sword had cut his father away, even then he didn’t seem lost forever. He would wait in the window seat, curled like this, to hide and be found by whomever wishes could call. Footsteps would come, scuff to a stop, lights ping, rush of air, and Morgan would be there, window seat in one hand, cushion in another. If he didn’t move, he’d pull him out, and whatever it had been that had driven him there, Morgan would find it out, and when he was finished, things would be warm and brave and put back together.

  Say it isn’t true. Say it only seems that way …

  Last night, ambush, just when he thought he’d escaped. More than he’d expected, more than anyone got, unsparing … but unjust? He had gone to the barn, not once but habit. He had lied as if virtue. And he’d written—only words, but words could take on life—written, kept, festered, by his own grievous fault. He’d imagined he could turn those men to his will. Dishonest, self-willed, naive. It would need something daunting to restore him. This had been daunting, but nothing was restored.

  Perhaps if it hadn’t been an ambush, he would have acted better. One minute, he was lying and getting away with it, and then Dr. Sebastian was denouncing him as a liar and other things, things people only whispered, and suddenly he was on the verge of dismissal for those things, so he started telling the truth, and then things were falling around him, he wasn’t being disposed, he was surging with gratitude and relief, and before he was ready to think of the restoring, the Head was leaving and the cane had come out and that man, like some backwards dream, was speaking as he’d never done, and he was in the middle of something new, a ruthless, bitter disdain, and all the ways he knew to cope were failing until they stole him away and locked him underground, in the dungeon below the dungeon, and the man in the room was dead in his heart.

  Except, on the way out she’d seen him. She’d blocked his path with the horror good people felt for wicked things. She saw not a person to joke with, to smile at or climb through windows for, but a beast, dishonest, self-willed, naive. There had been water on his face—though from choking, not blubbing!—but she would have thought him a coward. A lying, selfish funk.

  She was the first good thing to happen, good in a way he couldn’t explain, but now she was gone, knowing full well how bad he was. Like that day in the changing room: Wilberforce is leaving. When? At the weekend. Two days? Called up early to bat for the dark blues! He didn’t want to be like the other people Morgan paid attention to. Morgan was the only one who had seen all the wounds and would look, for them and at them. What are we going to do with you, boyo? Almost a father, but (he’d blurted it once through tears) better. He’d even begun to believe this was the window after the closed door, but then, before it was time, news came through the changing room, told as if good news and he the last to know. In its way worse than when his mother told him it was over, because at least he’d known that was coming and even secretly wished for it because the gray face and sounds behind the door were too much, and he was scarcely there in the end. But to hear about Morgan, the worst news brought forward, leaving for Oxford almost a whole term early, and then going to Mo
rgan to demand the lies be squashed, only to find out they were true, and that Morgan was happy.

  15

  She didn’t know any prayers, not real ones like they said. At her school, there was Meeting every morning, a quarter of an hour when they sat waiting on the Light. Sometimes people stood up and spoke, trembling with the Spirit. When a person had troubles, you Held them in the Light, which meant you imagined them surrounded by rays, like when you opened your eyes after sleeping in the sunshine. Here in their chapel they spoke to God the Almighty and Everlasting. There was no place for silence, no time for waiting.

  Her mother’s letter arrived Monday morning. It filled two sides and chatted of characters in the hospital, but the handwriting faltered, more like Grandmama Drayton’s had been than the script that filled her mother’s letters for the starving German children. But writing in the hospital must be slapdash at best. Hospitals weren’t peaceful, and they were never silent.

  Mrs. Kneesworth had been visiting every day, but now that she’d gone on holiday, there was no one to check or ask or soothe. No one to hear if he had come home, if he’d written, if he was asking for her. No one to open his letters if her mother wouldn’t, to coax her into hearing, to tell him where she was.

  They called their God the author of peace and lover of concord. Could it be so wrong to speak to him, even if she had to kneel like a slave?

  * * *

  The throat looked normal, the fever faded, but Riding still couldn’t speak. Kardleigh didn’t think he was shamming exactly, but his sneezes revealed a voice. Patient’s demeanor obedient but withdrawn. Liked wireless, declined reading, the last abnormal for a constitutional bookworm.

  The boy’s friend had gone home, and his Housemaster did not visit. While ordinarily Kardleigh would not expect a Housemaster to slog to the Tower over someone’s sore throat, given the melodrama surrounding Riding and Mainwaring and given Grieves’s demonstrated concern, Kardleigh kept expecting to hear the man’s shuffle on the stairs. But the only visitor was Moss, Grieves’s Prefect of Chapel, who stopped by Sunday night. Riding was asleep (or pretending to be), so Moss left the paperback he had brought. There was a bizarre coda in which Moss returned with a handkerchief full of boiled sweets, which he claimed he’d forgotten to leave before, sent by a friend of Riding’s, which one, he couldn’t recall. When Kardleigh asked Moss point-blank what was going on in his House, Moss flushed down to the collar and declared himself ignorant of any goings-on. The House, like the rest of the school, had seen its gating lifted after tea that evening. The search of McKay’s barn had proved unremarkable, or so the four JCRs had been told by Burton-Lee, who’d overseen the expedition that snowy afternoon. Kardleigh confessed it hard to imagine Burton-Lee stomping through snowdrifts, but Moss reported that Fardley had driven all four Housemasters to the site and waited while they trekked, alpine fashion (though possibly without ropes and axes), on their errand. In any case, the matter had officially been closed, and the school had turned its attention to hourlies, due to afflict them in three days’ time.