“Slow,” Cossack judged. “It’s a slow specimen. Cold-blooded, I shouldn’t wonder. Perhaps it goes faster in the fine weather.” He turned to the class. “They do, you know, these cold-blooded things in the pond.” The class grinned and giggled, glad it wasn’t them.
“But where does it swim in the pond? In the scum at the top, hmmm?” He glared at Caspar; his hands round Caspar’s waist were growing hot. “Or in the dregs and sludge at the bottom?” He glowered at the class, who roared back their delight. “Pockets, sir!” someone shouted.
“Yes, look in his pockets,” others took up the cry.
Cossack looked sternly at Caspar. “What does it keep in its pockets?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Nothing! Nothing? I expected at least a million pounds. But let us see…ahah!” And his hand pulled forth from Caspar’s jacket pocket a greasy string of bacon rind. It surprised Caspar far more than it did the beak, who grinned knowingly. “Nothing, eh? Except its lunch—which it has brought to school with it!” The class roared again.
The next thing to appear was a broken top, then a large humbug, covered in fluff. “And its pudding!” Cossack said. “So this is how our new rich eat!” Then there was what looked like a marble but was, in fact, a glass eye. It rolled lugubriously on Cossack’s desk, staring at the whole world impartially. Each item was held up for inspection by the class—“Nothing!…More nothing!” and so on, easy sarcasm. The class howled back their simple delight.
At first Caspar thought that Cossack was producing these things the way a conjuror pulls ribbons and pennies from people’s ears and lapels; but soon it was clear that everything was, indeed, being turned out from his pockets. He looked around the class and realized: They had put these things there. In that confused mêlée in the Barn, just before chief had sent for him, hand after hand had dipped into his pockets, each depositing its pretext for Cossack’s ridicule. He remembered thinking that the horseplay had been rather too exuberant. Of course—it had been a cover for their planting.
Cossack knew it, too. Caspar could tell that from the way the beak held up each item and accepted their laughter. Thank God, he thought, there was nothing but a handkerchief in his trouser pockets. He’d surely have felt it if they’d put anything in there.
The last item in his jacket was a folded page cut from a magazine. Cossack carefully unfolded it. His hands were covered in down, like the hairs between a pullet’s feather stubs. The page was from a fashion journal; it showed a lady in a new patent hoop—with some crudely added modifications. Caspar saw, and also sensed in Cossack’s sudden rigidity, that this was a new feature of the pocket-picking ritual. It bordered on the impermissible. For a long moment the beak hovered between the game and an outburst of rage. The game won, but only just. However, having decided to go on with the game, Cossack threw himself into it with all his former relish.
“And what has it in its trouser pockets?” he asked, plunging both hands firmly in.
To Caspar’s relief there was only the handkerchief. He watched it emerge with reptilian slowness, tugged inch by inch in Cossack’s fastidious thumb-and-finger grip. It was almost free when another folded sheet of paper fell out. He knew he had not put it there. For a moment both ignored it. Cossack’s other hand was warm and heavy on Caspar’s thigh. The fastidious hand plunged back into the other pocket. Both hands lumbered heavily around in those narrow confines, seeking further booty. Cossack’s breath howled in and out through the labyrinth of his nostrils and sinuses, very pepperminty. Close up, Caspar could see each scarlet vessel on the man’s cheeks and nose. The colour was intense.
He tickled. “No holes, hmmm?” Caspar squirmed and giggled under the fevered probing of those huge hams, closing over his thighs and slipping down into his groin. “No secret little ways, hmmm?” The class laughed; this was obviously the climax of the show.
“Bit of paper dropped, sir,” one lad called.
“Read the paper!” several others chorused.
The fastidious hand went on delving while the other dangled, ape-like, to the floor and retrieved the folded sheet between two knuckles. The single hand unfolded it and laid it flat upon the desk. The message was upside down. Caspar turned it around. It said: Why doth the Cossack so chiefly go about to undermine our trouser pockets?
Caspar gulped and tried not to breathe. Cossack read the message several times, until the entire class had fallen into a hush. Only then did he look up. His eyes raked the ranks and files of boys; their eyes dropped as corn before the scythe. This time there could be no doubt: Someone really had gone too far.
“Swift minor,” Cossack said, his eyes resting on one boy.
The boy looked quickly up and down again, trying not to smirk.
“Yes, I thought so. A poor piece of homage to your illustrious namesake, Swift, if I may say. Let me give you something better. From Gulliver’s Travels, I adapt slightly: ‘You are the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.’ Well, Swift, is that not more apposite!”
“Yes, sir,” Swift mi grudged.
“Or ibidem: ‘I am amazed’”—he transferred the paper from his ape hand to his fastidious one—“‘how so impotent and grovelling an insect as you could entertain such inhuman ideas.’ Is not that more to the point, Swift?”
“Yes, sir.”
Hail fellow, well met
All dirty and wet:
Find out, if you can,
Who’s master, who’s man.
“From My Lady’s Lamentation. Are you, by chance, in any doubt, Swift, who in this room is master, who is man? Because if you are, we may easily arrange for my young man’s lamentation!”
“No, sir!” Swift hastened to reassure him.
Cossack tipped Caspar unceremoniously off his lap. “Down there, sir, where I may see you.” He pointed to an empty seat in the front rank and then returned to Swift. “Since you seem so fond of that illustrious man—who had the misfortune to bear your name, but the fortune to die before you came along to besmirch it—you will come to my chambers before lockup and I shall give you his Imitation of Horace, one hundred lines of which you will put into Latin iambic dimeter.”
“Yes, sir,” Swift said miserably.
Cossack began again to quote:
I’ve often wish’d that I had clear,
For life, six hundred pounds a year…
His voice petered out and his eves strayed toward, then lingered on, Caspar. His lips smiled but his eyes were cold.
“You can’t ever get the better of Cossack,” Causton later told Caspar. “He knows everything. He’s a sod, though. Literally, I mean. He’d bugger you as soon as beat you. Blenkinsop used to be a great favourite.”
Caspar had no idea what this meant, but he stored the incomprehensible facts away.
They had only two parts of public school that day. The idle boys liked public school. Since the classes varied between one and two hundred in number, any individual was unlikely to get singled out too often. And, naturally, the masters would concentrate on their more able pupils—all except chief. In thirty minutes of divinity lesson, he could fire off fifty questions to as many pupils, striding among them, cracking his fingers, pulling ears, shouting, “Mmm? Mmm? Eh?…Come on, m’boy, come on!” No one dared to feel the luxury of neglect in chief’s class.
The rest of the day was taken up with private work-study and tutorials. For study periods boys in the Houses went back (naturally) to their studies, while those in Old School went to their messes in Langstroth. So, too, did the hundred and twenty boys in Hospice, which was identical in every way to Old School except that its members were housed in a different building, the former monastic hospice.
All tutorials were private—that is, parents were billed for them as extras and boys were, theoretically, free to choose which tutors they attended.
In practice the end-of-term report hung over them all, severely qualifying that freedom. Tutorials, where the classes were down to a manageable thirty or forty boys, were held in the pupil rooms; in summer they would sometimes be held out on the moor. There were two tutors who were not on the public school staff. They had come as private tutors accompanying individual boys at some time in the past, had picked up a popular following because of the high quality of their lectures, and had stayed on after their original charges had left. Mr. Cheetham was called Chiz; Mr. L. St. John Peach was called Sinner. Chiz had a small stipend as warden of the Hospice, now a mere sinecure; Sinner had no official standing. Both relied entirely on tuition fees, which, in turn, depended absolutely on the size of their classes. The fee was three and a half pence per boy per tutorial, or £2. 11s. 6d. a term, of which two guineas went to the tutor, the remaining 9s. 6d. being kept by the school for the hire of the pupil rooms, coals, gas, etc. The four established masters (chief, Whymper, Carter, and Cossack) also held private tutorials under the same system and charges.
Without these extracurricular lessons no serious learning could have been imparted at the school—at least, to boys of an average laziness. Yet the ten poor boys from Langstroth who attended by right (and after all, it was for their supposed benefit the school had been founded and, at the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry viii, endowed) had only the fifteen half-hours of public school to rely on their instruction, though it was their presence alone that justified the name “public” school.
Caspar fell in with one of these lads, Ingilby by name and a year his senior by age, as he went back over the causeway, intending to do some private study in his mess. He had a feeling that Ingilby had been waiting for him.
“What do you think of Cossack then?” Ingilby asked.
“Hells scaring,” Caspar said.
“See who can throw a snowball farthest!”
The competition ended with their pelting one another around Langstroth market square, only becoming allies again when a miscast snowball struck a farmer in the back. They both ran, laughing and fearful, up one of the alleys. Ingilby pulled him into one of the cottage doorways.
“I live here,” he said.
They peeped out into the lane. No one was following.
“Come on in. Our dad wants to meet you. He knows your guvnor.”
“My guvnor?”
“Aye. He called here, that day he came to see chief. Our dad used to work for your guvnor before his accident.”
“Wipe feet,” Mrs. Ingilby said mechanically as they crossed the threshold. The kitchen was identical in layout to the Oldroyds’ and almost identical in its contents, except that Mrs. Ingilby was obviously a cheesemaker on more than a domestic scale, for two cheese presses, one iron and one of wood, both on wheels, stood near the back door.
At the moment, though, she was baking havercakes—large, soft pancake-like rounds of oaten bread. She was in the middle of separating one from the hot “bakstone” with a knife. Then she lifted it with the shovel-like baking spittle and turned it in swirling wraiths of aromatic steam. When Caspar opened his mouth to introduce himself, a fountain of saliva shot half across the room.
Ingilby was sidling innocently toward the cake stool before the fire, where a havercake stood drying. But his mother well knew what he was at and caught him a sharp whack with the baking spittle before he could break off a chunk. He yelped, more with indignation than pain.
“Everything comes to them as waits,” she said with a smile, not taking her eyes off Caspar while she dealt the blow.
“I’m Stevenson minor, m’m,” Caspar said, wondering if the townsfolk recognized such names.
She certainly recognized the Stevenson part, for her smile doubled.
“Oh, you’re very welcome, Master Stevenson.” She wiped her floury hands on her apron and then did not know whether to offer one to be shaken.
Caspar stepped to her, holding out his hand. She shook it uncertainly; her skin was warm and soft.
“Your master was here…” she began, and then laughed at her mistake.
“Father!” Ingilby sneered, unfortunately drawing attention to himself just as he was trying again for the cake. Still laughing, she clouted him even harder and pushed him toward the back door. The handle of the cheese press against his hipbone doubled his punishment. He ran out of the back door rather than let Caspar see the tears he could not suppress. Outside someone was hitting at wood with a mallet.
“You may ’ave some cake, Master Stevenson,” she said.
“Oh, no thank you, m’m,” he answered politely.
Her face fell. “Oh well, suit yourself,” she said, not understanding the convention. Then she saw his disappointment and, smiling again, broke him off a corner of the cake that lay drying on the stool: “Thou near lost that,” she said. “Offers aren’t doubled hereabouts!”
The cake made a delicious, crusty porridge in the saliva around his tongue.
“Good an’ claggy!” she said, watching him chew the glutinous mass. “Aye. Thy father were ’ere—eay, two month back. My man were a Stevenson man, thou knows.” She lifted the cooked havercake on the spittle and draped it from the “flake”—a sort of horizontal drying rack just below the ceiling near the back door. “They don’t bake it this way in these parts.” She wrinkled her nose at Caspar as though joining him with her in something not quite proper. “But I’m from Wensleydale, so it’s my way.”
Wensleydale was half a day’s walk away.
“Go and see ’im,” she said, nodding toward the yard, where the hammering was still going on.
A snowball stung his cheeks and eyes as soon as he poked his head out the door. Through the ringing of his ears he could hear Ingilby’s staccato giggle. That was to teach Caspar for seeing him cry.
“Nay!” A roar came from the shed across the yard. A stocky, raven-haired man with a full beard came to the doorway and shouted something in a dialect so thick that Caspar, who could understand anything said in the East Riding of Yorkshire, could not decipher a single word. Ingilby turned huffily and leaned over the wall of the pigsty to scratch the sow.
“Master Stevenson!” the man said with a smile that was shrewd rather than broad. He held out his left hand for Caspar to shake. “Come in out the cold.”
The shed was a carpenter’s workshop, so well organized it seemed twice as large inside as out. A gluepot mewed and gurgled on a small coke brazier near the window. Mr. Ingilby—for it was obviously he—guided Caspar to a space beside its warmth. Only then did Caspar notice that he had no right hand. Instead his right forearm was bound up in a leather harness that had all kinds of straps and bindings, one set of which now held fast a mallet; when the man had stood at the door Caspar was certain he held the mallet in his hand.
He saw Caspar’s fascinated stare. “Art right-handed?” he asked.
“Aye,” Caspar said, flexing the fingers of his right hand as if that proved it.
“Did’st ever think as how the right hand is the idiot of the pair?”
“No!” Caspar said; nor could he believe it.
Mr. Ingilby smiled knowingly. He took up a scrap of timber and clamped it under the bench holdfast; then he laid a round mallet and chisel down beside it and wafted Caspar an invitation. “I’ll prove it to thee,” he said. “Cut me a square pocket in that wood.”
Amused, Caspar picked up the tools. “How big?”
“One chisel-width will serve.”
Caspar placed the chisel as perpendicular to the edge of the wood as his eye could judge it and set to tapping with the mallet, cutting cross-grain first.
“Now, see thee,” Mr. Ingilby said after Caspar had made several cuts. “Which hand is doing precision work, and which is doing slave’s work?”
Caspar thought and then chuckled in disbelief of his own eyes. “Maybe you’re right, sir,” he said as he lai
d down the tools.
“Aye,” the other affirmed. “Happen I am.”
“Did you lose your hand…?” Caspar began. “I mean…how?”
“Aye.” Mr. Ingilby answered the unspoken part of the question. “On a Stevenson job. The very last week in Bramhope Tunnel. Eighteen forty-nine. A runaway wagon, it was, and me the fool that stopped it! But not before it had squandered that bit of me.” He waved the vanished hand with a flourish. “But I have a Stevenson pension to be thankful for. To see me out. And Missus, if she overlives me.” He began to tighten the straps that bound the mallet; then he stopped as if a new thought had struck him. “Thy father”—he spoke like an oracle—“is a great man. But even rarer”—now he looked searchingly at Caspar—“he’s a good man, too. I’ve known men would die for ’im.” He looked away. “Nay, I’d die for ’im.”
Caspar felt tears pressing at the back of his eyelids, and a lump grew in his throat; this tribute was so unexpected. Mr. Ingilby had perhaps said more than he intended. At all events he now caught some of Caspar’s embarrassment. He cleared his throat. “Anygate,” he said, “I’ve a deal of respect for thy father. If I may do aught for thee by way of service, thou needs but ask on. I’ll do it gladly.” Fussily he resumed the work he had been at before Caspar and his son arrived, a plain coffin of deal boards.
Caspar had once heard his mother say to his father, “I never see a crow fly overhead without thinking ‘how may I put that crow to our advantage’!” The moment the words left her lips he knew he was of the same company. Yes! he had thought. That’s the way to be. That’s me too!
So now he thought feverishly for some service Mr. Ingilby could render him. All he could think of on the spur of the moment was that he might need a good, stout study cupboard; but even before the thought was complete he turned it down. Study cupboards were of little use to a roe, for as long as he was in the place he remained at every pharaoh’s beck and call. No, he’d think of something.
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