And so it was to be, lesson by lesson. Ingilby’s bible was Nicholson’s Guide to Carpentry, General Framing and Joinery, from among whose patterns Caspar chose to make a simple Jacobean-style occasional table. Its only joint was a tenon, stopped and haunched for the top, tongued and pegged at the legs. It took him all term to make and polish. Then he looked up its price in Ingilby’s other bible, The Preston Cabinet and Chair-maker’s Book of Prices Agreed upon July 1802 and found this table was worth but five shillings and sixpence.
“That’s not much, is it, Mr. Ingilby?” he complained.
But Ingilby only smiled. “Now, now,” he chided. “That’s no way for a master’s son to be thinking.” And his eyes twinkled as he spoke.
***
Their times in Langstroth filled only a portion of their free hours at Fiennes. With their schoolfellows they spent many afternoons rambling over the dales; their compulsory morning run up Whernside did nothing to blunt their appetite for those wild, open places, swept with the keen, clean air.
In fact, in connection with that break-of-day run Caspar had the honour of founding a new school tradition that very first term. He fretted at being so slow to descend Whernside after he had reached the cairn at the top of the run. Being athletic, he could run uphill quickly enough, but the way down was so steep that mere length of leg could always carry the race, and the wheezing and panting boys he had passed on the way up could, if they were taller, easily regain their advantage on the way down.
Then one day—this was during his third week at school—he was hanging around the gasworks shed, hoping to cadge a raw carrot off Purse as soon as he had finished filling the gas retorts with coal. Caspar loved the pungent, tarry, sulphurous smells of the place and often wished there was a pudding with just such a flavour. (Once, on one of Stevenson’s workings, he had watched some scaffolders heating a drum of coal-tar creosote, and one of them had told him the dark liquid was their pudding. He had been mortified when they had failed to invite him to share it, for no pudding had ever smelled more appetizing, and the truth had almost broken his heart. Now, all his life, he knew he would be haunted by a lost, never-attainable gastronomic delight.)
He dipped the corner of his handkerchief in the tar that floated on the water that sealed the gasholder. Tonight, he thought, already savouring the pleasure, he could lie in bed and sniff at it through the cloth.
“Thou’rt fond o’ yon tar, I can see,” Purse said.
Caspar noticed that Purse was about to put some beautifully curved pieces of wood on the retort fire. “What’s those?” he asked.
Purse looked at them. “Staves off an old barrel. The hoop’s rusted, see thou.”
Until that moment a barrel had always been just a barrel to Caspar; his mind’s eye had never dismantled it into hoops and staves. He held out his hands. Purse gave him the stave he had been about to burn.
Delighted with its shape, he turned it over and over in his hands, marvelling at the skill that curved and formed it. And then it suddenly came to him that this was exactly what he needed to get quickly down Whernside of a morning. He begged three of them off Purse—one to mess up, one to get perfect, and one to spare—and ran all the way to Ingilby’s, where he drilled a hole in the toe of one and threaded it through with stout hemp cord.
Next morning he was delighted to find that it took very little practice to go skimming—or “staving” as everyone quickly called it—down the slopes that led back to school. The best way, he found, was to stretch one foot ahead as a sort of brake; light sideways flicks with the heel of this foot would also correct the course if need arose. It took both hands to haul on the cord and keep the toe of the stave from digging into the ground and sending the “staver” tumbling headlong.
“Wheeeee!” he screeched as he staved down through thickets of stumbling legs.
“Whee-hee-hee!” he cackled as runners leaped aside and stood and watched and marvelled and cheered.
And “whooo-oa!” he called in an altogether different tone as he saw himself headed for the tall, blond, burly frame of the headmaster, standing legs apart, arms akimbo, right in his path.
“Can’t stop, sir!” Caspar yelled, longing to shut his eyes against this nightmare, but not daring even to blink.
Chief was prudent enough to step aside before Caspar could scatter him like a solitary ninepin. Caspar came to a chill, dusty halt about five yards beyond. He turned to see chief’s beckoning finger curling and straightening with ominous deliberation.
His approach was as curved and as sidelong as the stave he held in his hand. Chief stretched forth his vast pink paw; the piece of wood seemed a mere toy when he grasped it.
He turned it this way and that, looking at the cord, then at the slope, then at Caspar. Meanwhile a knot of boys had collected around.
“Don’t ban it, sir,” one of them pleaded, a boy called Spier, from chief’s own house.
“Yes, please don’t, sir!” several others joined in. Soon the chorus was quite general.
Chief patted his palm with the stave. Suddenly his free hand shot out and grabbed Spier by the arm. Grinning fiercely, he began pulling the boy to him and then thrusting him away—back and forth, back and forth—a favourite trick of his.
“I won’t ban it, Spier!” His tone was vehement, as if they had all been begging him to impose a ban. “D’ye know why, Spier?”
“No, sir,” Spier gasped, being almost tumbled off his feet with each thrust and pluck of that brawny pink arm.
“Because, Spier, when your team played mine last Saturday, Spier, it was the most lacklustre, Spier, spineless, Spier, bottomless, Spier, puny, Spier, wet, Spier, performance I have ever seen, Spier.” He let poor Spier go and began to grab indiscriminately at others in that laughing, squirming pack, which grew larger by the second. “It seems, Boyce, that our new system, Boyce, is producing, Wilkinson, young gentlemen, Wilkinson, of no fibre, Moss, no spirit, Moss! Mmmm, Aylsford, what say, Aylsford? And so, Aylsford, a few knocked heads, Fowler, a few grazed knees, Churley, a broken arm or two, Davies, a cracked skull or so, Abercrombie, may teach ye that pain don’t signify! Mmmm? Say?”
The conclusion was drowned in cheers as boys dashed off to the stone baths, eager to get through their ablutions and chores so that they could scour the place for barrel staves. Within two days every spare stave within five miles (and many more that had not exactly been spare) was at Fiennes. Never had boys climbed Whernside with such vigour, nor descended with such élan. And it was as chief had said—grazed knees, twisted ankles, even a broken arm (though, fortunately, no cracked skull), but none of it daunting enough to send the stavers back to the old pedestrian way of life.
Even Lorrimer, who was back in school three weeks before the end of term, joined in with glee. When he met Boy for the first time after he was up and about again he walked by with a wink. Boy thought it uncommonly decent of him.
***
On Saturday afternoons the whole school played football if the state of the ground permitted. It was a vast, sprawling, anarchic game that covered almost the whole length of the Whernside valley, the “goals” being medieval walls about four miles apart. Chief and Cossack were the team captains (and referees) but they saw their main function as “levellers”—that is, they would trap the ball away from older boys and make sure the younger ones got their share. House pharaohs acted as whippers-in, allowing no strays or slackers. When the ground was too boggy, boys were free to go on walks or runs over the countryside.
Boy was never to forget his long walks over Whernside, Widdale, Baugh, Abbotside, and a dozen other fells, during these times. The unseasonable snows of late October had soon given way to an equally unseasonable warmth. Almost always Boy went out with de Lacy and a fellow from Agincourt called Moncur, whose parents had sent him a copy of Charles Kingsley’s new book, Westward Ho! The three would go out to some sheltered hollow—a dry ghyll or
a shallow cave in a scar—where, when the sun shone, they could almost imagine it was spring. And there they would take turns reading aloud, spellbinding one another with the amazing adventures of Amyas Leigh and his crew.
“And it’s all true!” Moncur would swear. “Kingsley’s a professor of history, you know.”
They became a new Brotherhood of the Rose and spent long evenings, before lockup, drawing plans of the ship and charts of her voyage.
They wept when Rose herself was killed—not one of them could read the chapter through without suffering at least a certain huskiness of voice. How they came to hate the very name Spaniard! How eagerly they rechristened their ship Vengeance! How stirring it was to be Protestant! How grand to be English! They ran screaming up and down the fells, brandishing bright swords of gorse root, and taking it in turns to be the Inquisition and get killed.
Secretly Boy took the white girl raised by Indians, Ayacanora, into his lonely fantasies. He saw her always sprawling drowsily in tropic groves banked around with gaudy flowers whose soporific perfume (which was also, somehow, her perfume) made the zephyrs heavy and excitingly perilous. He tried to picture her Indian-English skin, her eyes lustrous and huge; but she was too dangerous to imagine all at once. Only bits of her. An ear lobe, clear and sharp, with blurred hair, soft jawline, slim neck, shining eves, and again the perfume of her. An elbow—the inside of it, the soft part—and next to it, the sheen of skin that rippled softly over her ribs, and above it, fruits of flesh, lemons of all softness. Two. The thought of them could spurt through him like incendiary blood. And at climax, the thigh lifting from thigh. Where did the rest of her go then? Just thigh, lifting, away from thigh, in a black tropic jungle. The black marked the space between heavenly thigh and heavenly thigh. What is in that space? But before he could see, there always stole upon him that delicious, melting, throbbing ending, and it didn’t matter any more. The images had done their magic and could be put away, along with their dark mysteries, for another night. “Ayacanora,” he would breathe, thrilling himself to drowsy sleep again. “Ayacanora. My girl, girl, girl.” He came to love the word girl.
***
“I shall be a soldier,” Caspar told Causton and Swift mi one day. “My poor bro will have to see to family affairs, but I shall cover our name with glory.”
He never talked of business or trade, always “family affairs”; chaps at Fiennes were not keen on commerce—even Causton and Swift mi, both of whose people were in trade, never spoke of it.
Causton’s people had been amazingly careless about the matter of a career, so, though he was all of twelve years old, he had not yet the remotest idea of what he should be in life. He decided that he, too, might as well aim at the army. Swift mi knew he was going to the East Indian part of the family’s tea business, but the idea of soldiering suited him better at this stage, so he joined Caspar’s army, as well.
No one could quite explain why it was Caspar’s (or, rather, Stevenson mi’s) army. As its youngest member he ought, by all the rules of a place like Fiennes, to have been the very last to claim it as his. And, to be fair, he never once called it “my” army—always “ours.” But everyone else knew it as “Stevenson mi’s.” Perhaps it was because, thanks to his father’s playful training, Caspar could draw a map that looked a dead copy of a real one from the Ordnance Survey, right down to the puzzling little compass roses and strange messages like Mag var 19º 33’ that decorated the borders. Maps like that gave everyone confidence.
Perhaps it was that Caspar made the best medals. For a while that term there was quite an enthusiasm for making gorgeous medals, cut out of ticket card, and then awarding them to one another with grand ceremony. Caspar had discovered the scene painter’s trick of dabbing in bold highlights and shadows, giving a powerful effect of sculptured relief to his designs; his crosses and stars looked as solid and chunky as the real things. He made a whole chestful and often stood before the boot-room looking glass frowning sternly; as he saluted himself in the styles of a dozen armies. (This particular enthusiasm waned when Barley, the fat boy who had shared Caspar’s first Barn beating, took to awarding himself such ridiculous decorations as The Most Noble Grand Cross of the Thibetan Buttered Beauty, fifth class, and The Purple Liver, with the motto For Soaks across its face.)
Or perhaps it was just that Caspar always seemed to fit best at the centre of things. When there was a charge to be led up the sheer face of a scar, Caspar always broke the skyline first; his restless body, nimble in its speed, demonic in its energy, always drew the eye. Without a weapon of any kind he put so much vim into his wars and made them so blood-curdling that there was a special thrill to the climax of every battle as, naturally, he and his regiment overran the defenders’ lines and took no prisoners.
And when wars grew weary, Caspar always had his treasured Dart to bring out and steam. In the half-dark of the gaslights, when its steam hung in wreaths on the evening air, it looked especially realistic and always drew a great crowd, which often included pharaohs.
In the last week of term Causton got his new slide-valve engine, the Achilles, and at once issued a challenge to Caspar. Its double-acting cylinders gave full power on both forward and backward strokes of the piston, so without a handicap it would have beaten Dart every time. it took two days to establish what the handicap should be. Blenkinsop, despite his dislike of Caspar, was a great enthusiast of steam engines and helped both youngsters to push theirs to the limits of their safety valves. It was he who set the final handicap for the big race, which was held on the next to last day of term. And it was he who, on that day, helped Caspar to fire up the Dart. Caspar was delighted that Blenkinsop had at last forgiven him; his one great dread had been that the senior boy would regain some official position in the House or school and so be able to make his life intolerable.
News of the Grand Train Contest spread through the school. Chaps came to the Old School cloisters from every House to watch; over a hundred and fifty had gathered by the time the races began. Someone said that more than £300 was laid in bets, with Achilles the favourite. Blenkinsop told Caspar he himself had a fiver on the Dart, which quieted Caspar’s last lingering suspicion that Blenkinsop’s real game might be to make Dart lose the race.
It was quite dark when the time came for the first of the three runs that would decide the contest; Dart was to go fifteen paces, Achilles twenty-one. Swift ma was the starter. On the first run he delayed so long that Dart’s safety valve began to weep and tremble, and Caspar thought his neck would twist off, what with turning back to watch Swift and forward to look anxiously at the hot little bomb whose wheels he held in check.
At last there was Swift’s cry of “Off!” The wheels thrashed the air, spun on the stone, gripped, and the Dart was away, true to its name. After that Caspar could not touch it except to correct its direction with a sideways poke of his stick. A great roar went up from the boys who stood on, sat on, leaned on, or peered through the cloister balustrade.
“On Achilles! On! On!” they howled.
“Forward now, Dart! Keep forward!” they bellowed.
And Dart kept forward. Swift’s delay, by raising the steam pressure to its very limit, now stood the little engine in good stead so that it reached the finishing line an easy two seconds ahead of the more powerful Achilles and still had steam to spare. The cheer was deafening, but Causton was not the least put out; he grinned broadly as he picked up the laggard (and now clearly misnamed) Achilles.
“Beginner’s luck,” he scoffed. “The next two are ours. We are about to reverse the legend.”
“Words!” Caspar sneered.
“I’ll give you ten to one.”
“He’s up to no good,” Blenkinsop said, worried now at Causton’s confidence.
Caspar ought to have delayed his “ready” signal until the safety valve began to tremble once again, but impatience led him to guess the pressure was almost there and to give the
signal early.
Again they were off. And again the Dart surged ahead of the Achilles—or was that a false impression, fostered by the six-pace handicap? Surely not. Caspar, looking beneath his arm, watched the gap narrowing, narrowing, narrowing. Quicker than last time? He skipped in frustration on the flagstones and blew futile draughts down at Dart, whether in hope of fanning its fire or just generally wafting it forward he could not have said.
By the three-quarter mark it was clear that, barring a miracle, Achilles was set to overhaul Dart well within the distance. As indeed she did, exactly reversing the margin by which Dart had taken the first round. The cheer, now running with the money, was even greater.
“A fine handicap you set!” Caspar said bitterly to Blenkinsop as they went back for the third and final run. Blenkinsop merely grinned. “Got us the right odds, though,” he answered. “And I’ve a trick yet to serve. You wait—you won’t lose.”
“What odds?” Caspar asked. “I haven’t bet anything.”
“More fool you, then.” Blenkinsop knelt beside Caspar as he blew into the firebox to raise the steam more quickly. “Giddy?” he asked.
Caspar nodded.
“Let me,” Blenkinsop said as he edged Caspar aside. Every breath laid an incandescent gold on Blenkinsop’s strangely knobbled face. He blew and blew until the safety valve wept and shivered.
“Shall I give the ready?” Caspar asked, certain of a “yes.”
“Just one more thing.” Blenkinsop drew a number of wooden spills from his pocket and popped them in his mouth, rolling them around like a humbug. Then he spat them out and poked them swiftly into the firebox.
“Hey, they’re wet!” Caspar protested.
Blenkinsop winked. “You’ve enough steam now and they’ll soon dry. Then you’ll just see!”
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