Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Caspar, delighted at this stratagem, turned to give the “ready” to Swift.

  “Here, you must hold it.” Blenkinsop handed him the engine.

  “Off!”

  This time there was no doubt. The Dart thrashed away as it had never thrashed before, not even on its hardest trials. It was actually going as fast as Achilles, despite the difference in power between them. Caspar danced and skipped in triumph as the distance between the two held and Causton began to look really worried.

  Blenkinsop’s ruse with the damp firing worked, too. Caspar saw the now-dried kindling flare into life, hotter and brighter than any of the gas flares along the cloister. It gave a hellish, flickering joy to the cheering faces that thronged the balustrade, and it punched Caspar’s dark, exultant shadow on the vaulted arches above.

  Suddenly there was a deafening explosion that left the cloisters ringing with a painful high note. A burst of sparks replaced the Dart. A broad, vicious crack split the paving slab on which it stood—or had stood, for there was now nothing there but one bent wheel and a few small sherds of unrecognizable copper and brass.

  Where was the Dart? Even Caspar in the depth of his shock knew these few bits were only a tenth of that once magnificent machine. It had simply vanished into the air.

  He laughed. What else could he do? It was that or tears. Everyone laughed then as Achilles steamed on through and collected the prize.

  “Hard lines!” Causton said, holding up the triumphant Achilles, letting its wheels thrash the air to exhaust the steam. He was genuinely disappointed at Caspar’s bad luck; it was not the way he had wanted to win. “Where’s the rest of it?” he asked, looking at the cracked stone and the few scraps left around it.

  “We’ll have to search tomorrow,” Caspar said, looking vaguely out through the thinning crowds and into the dark of the courtyard.

  And then he froze. And his heart rose up into his throat. And his stomach lifted and turned over. For there on the far side of the courtyard he saw that the window of the pupil room, the window with some of the oldest stained glass in Yorkshire, was shattered beyond any repair. And Cossack was at that moment in the act of opening the remains of one of the frames. Even that careful movement was enough to send several more once precious fragments clattering down, no more valuable than the cheapest coloured cullet.

  “Who is the culprit?” Cossack’s voice boomed out over the courtyard.

  “I’d better own up,” Caspar muttered, full of dreadful fears.

  “And Blenkinsop,” Causton said. “He’s in it, too. Where’s Blenkinsop?”

  The cry went up: “Where’s Blenkinsop?”

  He was nowhere to be found.

  On feet of lead Caspar walked over the courtyard to the beak. When he stood before him he could see no feature inside the intense black of the silhouette, but he could sense an almost ungovernable fury in the way the man breathed and swayed.

  “I’m extremely sorry, sir. The pressure built up too much and it just exploded,” he offered.

  Only that terrifying breathing.

  “I’m sure my father will make what financial reparation may be…”

  “Silence, sir!” Cossack barely spoke. His voice was threaded precariously on a tremble. “You! You think…you think that money—can…Well, you come here, sir, and I’ll show you! I’ll show you, sir. I’ll show you. I’ll show you indeed. I’ll show you what money can’t. I’ll speak to you in your own ruffian tongue.” He could hardly get out some of the words.

  Miserably Caspar turned and began the long trek around the cloister, through the courtyard, the Barn, the passages, and so up to the pupil room. All the way people patted him on the back and commiserated. “Hard lines, mi!”…“Hard cheese!” But all Caspar could think about was the three sharp cuts still on his bottom from a House beating a few days ago; Cossack would surely see the marks and lay his own on top, where it would he more painful.

  For Cossack hated him. Caspar knew that. He was always picking Caspar out in sarcastic asides. He would say, for instance, in giving out a sum: “A man buys lands at seventy pounds…or, in your case, Stevenson minor, seventy thousand pounds…” Caspar was at a loss to understand why Cossack did it, for the sarcasm never brought much of a laugh; it bewildered the other boys as much as it did Caspar. Money was not made much of at Fiennes. But these constant digs left Caspar in no doubt that Cossack hated him. He had often wondered why Cossack never thrashed him. Well, he was going to make up for it now!

  In the last of the passageways he met Blenkinsop, who smiled at him broadly.

  “Oh, Blenkinsop, thank God! You’ll come and see Cossack with me, of course?”

  The smile grew even broader and more reassuring. “Don’t worry. I’ve just seen him and explained everything; you’ll be all right, young ’un!” Playfully he whacked Caspar with an imaginary cane.

  With much lighter heart and tread Caspar went up to the study door. Only when he heard the beak’s dreadful “Come!” did his confidence in Blenkinsop’s reassurance begin to fade.

  One look at Cossack was enough to shatter the rest. Whatever Blenkinsop had said, it had done nothing to improve the man’s anger.

  “I’m waiting,” he said before Caspar was even inside the door.

  “Sir?” His voice sounded like a stranger’s.

  “I’m waiting to know why I should not flog you within an ace of your life, Stevenson minor.” Anger made him slur the words.

  “But, sir!” He felt panic beginning to claim him. “Did not Blenkinsop explain? The wood? The damp wood, which he put on the…”

  “Enough! Do not seek to shift the blame, sir!” Cossack boomed. His voice alone was a physical assault. “I am talking of this.” He held forth a shattered fragment of the Dart. “What is this?”

  “My engine, sir. I was saying, did not Blenkinsop explain that he…”

  “This, sir! This!” Cossack’s unsteady finger pointed to the safety valve, half-buried in the mangled copper plate of the boiler. “This!” He thrust it inches from Caspar’s nose. “What is your explanation for this!”

  “It’s the safety valve, sir.”

  “And in it, sir. What is in it? What is that…stuff, inside it?”

  Caspar peered into the recess and his bewilderment only increased. There was something in the safety valve. Greeny-white stuff. Limestone fur? Had the boiling water deposited it there? Was that why it had exploded? “I don’t know what it is, sir.”

  Cossack smiled thinly, a ghastly, disbelieving grimace. “It is blotting paper. And well you know it.”

  “I, sir?” Even Caspar could hear how insincere his terror was making him sound.

  It merely confirmed all that Cossack knew, or (in his drunkenness) thought he knew. “Enough, sir. You shall take your medicine. But first you shall know what illness you are to be cured of. What you have done this evening is more heinous than anything any boy has ever done. Oh, yes! Don’t look s’prised! You have cheated in the vilest way, because you could not bear the thought of losing. Oh, you may wipe that puzzled frown from your face. That angelic innocence does not move me one jot.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Silence, sir!” Cossack thundered, almost falling over. “Every word you seek to interpose from this moment forth merely augments your punishment. You sought to win a large sum of money by the vilest of underhand means. By plugging this—this safety-thing”—Cossack grew even darker in his fury at lacking the right word and thus losing the authority of his “proof”—“you sought to win by a fraud. You are the sort of cheat to whom money is more important than honour—if you even know what honour is!” He reached for the cane with the gleaming silver ends. “You are one of this new breed of modern men for whom money is a god. ‘I’m sure my father will make financial reparation’!” he quoted with a sneer.

  Anger began to replace Caspar’s fear. He s
tood still as a stone carving, but his eyes no longer meekly avoided those of the master.

  Cossack saw the change and was startled. He began to bluster, trying to regain his former total ascendancy; he wanted Caspar’s eyes rooted in his boots. “Your father!” he snorted. “He may think money a god, too, for aught I know. He may have taught you that all means, fair or vile, are sufficient to gain it—God knows, it’s a common enough belief nowadays. He’ll probably be proud of you for this evening’s foul…underhand…Yes! These new moneybags!” Still those piercing eyes would not lower themselves. “You Stevensons are just moneygrubbers!”

  “You may be sure, sir,” Caspar said, “I shall take the earliest opportunity to acquaint my father…” At that his courage ran out.

  He forgot how he had begun the threat and so did not know how to end it. Only his dumb, seething anger remained. He began to plot exactly how his father would tear this odious tyrant apart.

  Cossack took his silence as victory enough. “Do so!” he sneered. “The last boy I flogged as I’m about to flog you ran away snibling”—he struggled—“sniv-el-ling home. And he came back with a ticket round his neck reading ‘Same Again!’ and signed by his mother.”

  Perhaps it was the memory of that, or the sight of Caspar staring up at him defiantly, speechless in anger, but something in Cossack snapped at that moment. Shivering in a lunatic fury he thrust Caspar down over his leather-topped desk, not bothering to take down his trousers.

  It was a mercy too small to weigh.

  Outside, the cloisters were crammed with boys, gleefully watching through the hole once barred by the oldest stained glass in Yorkshire. A unique chance, for there was no rule (there had never needed to be a rule) forbidding anyone to watch a beak’s beating from the cloisters.

  “Aaach!” Blenkinsop cried in disappointment. “He hasn’t even made him take his breeches down!”

  Others laughed. They counted the strokes aloud to begin with. At eight they began to tail off into a whisper. By twelve no one counted aloud any more, not even Blenkinsop, whose voice had been the last to tail off.

  In fact, they lost count as they watched that appalling torment of one of their smallest go on, and on, and on. And on. Some said it was twenty-eight. Some said thirty. One swore to thirty-five. Sometime near the end Swift ma broke free from the trance that had gripped them as they watched Cossack’s bloated, implacable face and heard the repeated swish and thwack of the cane.

  “I’ve got to stop this,” he said.

  But before he reached the broken window, satiety must have claimed the beak, for he halted and then stood, looking in seeming bewilderment at his hand, at the cane, and at the motionless frame of the little boy bent over the table.

  “You may go,” he said gruffly.

  Caspar did not move. He heard the words. He knew vaguely that the most terrible thing in the world had stopped. But another pain, even more terrible, now crept in under it. He could not move.

  “Enough of this shamming!” Cossask grabbed his collar and yanked him upright.

  Caspar trembled like someone in an ague. His muscles would not heed him; like every other fibre of his mind and body, they clamoured to be elsewhere—anywhere. He would gladly have changed with the meanest and second most wretched of the earth’s creatures at that moment.

  “What can I do?” he asked in a voice that meandered through an octave. “What can I do?” His arms would not drop to their sides.

  If Cossack had any idea that he had done something truly monstrous, he gave no sign of it. “Do? You may go down, sir. Go down from this place and reflect on the vile trick that brought you to this retribution. God is not mocked. He found you out!”

  When Caspar still did not move, Cossack looked uncomfortably away. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a sixpence. “Perhaps I was a mite hard,” he allowed. “Here, take this and cheer up!” Roughly he thrust Caspar out through the door.

  For some reason the movement brought not relief (relief was a dream beyond dreaming) but a kind of hot-cold numbness that was different from the outrage that racked every shrieking angle of him. Beyond the door stood Boy, and Swift ma, with de Lacy just behind. Swift caught Caspar under the arm. “All right?” he asked.

  Caspar looked at him. “What can I do?” he implored. Then, for the first time, he burst into tears.

  Swift made a bitter, determined grimace as he gently passed Caspar on to Boy and de Lacy. “Take him up slowly,” he told them. “Christ! His skin is frozen!” He himself went straight into the pupil room, not even bothering to knock.

  When they reached the top gallery Caspar’s trembling was so violent that he seemed on the point of shaking himself to bits.

  “Caspar!” Boy cried out in alarm, as his brother slipped from his grasp for the umpteenth time. “Please, Caspar!”

  Caspar looked piteously at Boy, as if he might know some trick for stopping this dreadful palsy. Then, mercifully, he passed out.

  Mercifully—for the first thing they had to do was to lay him face down on his bed and gently peel off his trousers. Had he been conscious, they would never have managed it. Every boy in the dorm who saw Caspar bare cried out in pity and covered his eyes—and these were veterans of savage floggings who had boasted and gloated over their and others’ wounds for years.

  Boy now found himself trembling almost as violently as Caspar, but with rage. He went at once to his bed, took a hammer from his drawer, and set off for the gallery. It was Lorrimer who barred his path. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “What d’you think I’m going to do! I’m going to pulp Cossack’s right hand. He’ll never do this again.”

  Lorrimer shook his head and put out his hand. “Leave him to Swift,” he said firmly. “Give me that hammer.”

  Anyone but Lorrimer, Boy would have hit. He gave up the hammer and broke down into tears.

  “Save that until you’ve helped your bro,” Lorrimer sneered. The scorn was enough to jerk Boy out of his crying fit and send him back to Caspar’s bedside.

  They bathed him gently and rubbed him with goose grease. He did not wake.

  Swift came back. In his hand he held the fragment of the Dart that Cossack had thrust under Caspar’s nose.

  “He’s drunk,” he said. He gave the broken engine to Boy. “Says your bro had fifty quid on the race and bunged up the safety valve with blotch.” He pulled a face. “Even so…”

  Everyone knew what he meant. By the standards of even ten years ago what had happened to Caspar was only a little excessive; but those ten years had seen a subtle shift of feeling in such schools as Fiennes. By now such a thrashing seemed almost barbarous.

  “He wouldn’t bet fifty pence!” Boy said. “He wouldn’t even think of it.”

  “All the same he did bung up the safety valve.”

  Boy looked at the irrefutable evidence of this in the fragment he held in his hand. It puzzled him; he wouldn’t have thought Caspar capable of such cheating. Yet Caspar did love to win—that couldn’t be denied.

  De Lacy took the broken engine and looked into the safety valve. “Is it green?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The blotting paper.”

  No one could be sure in the dim light; they had to bring a candle and have a really close look. But they all agreed it was green.

  “Then that’s who did it!” de Lacy said triumphantly.

  “Who? Who?” they asked.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, who uses green blotch?”

  “Blenkinsop!” someone said.

  And then everyone remembered and agreed, even boys who had never seen Blenkinsop’s blotting paper, that he did, indeed, use only the green.

  Swift went out to the balcony. “Blenkinsop!” he roared without actually checking that the boy was in sight.

  But within the minute a frightened and s
heepish Blenkinsop stood in the doorway of the upper dorm. “I didn’t know Cossack was going to do that,” he said defensively. He made no attempt to deny what he had done. “I thought he’d just get an ordinary swishing. Just to pay him out.”

  “But why the hell did you bung it up?” Swift asked.

  “He wanted to blow it up,” Boy said. “That’s obvious.”

  “He had fifty quid on it with me,” Lorrimer said.

  “So!” Swift’s disgust was heavy. “That lie has the same signature.” He grabbed Blenkinsop’s arm. “You’re coming back to Cossack with me—if he hasn’t drunk himself sodden by now.”

  When they had gone, Boy suggested sending out for the doctor. But Lorrimer said no, let Caspar sleep on. The doctor could see him tomorrow. Boy was about to argue when Moncur, of Agincourt, came into the dorm. He stopped just inside the door.

  “Can I see him?” he asked.

  No one said yes, but no one made any move to turn him away.

  “A lot of us saw the flogging,” he said. “Chaps from Agincourt. And Crecy. We’re going to barricade chief until he agrees to change things.” He looked around, finding a sympathy that fell some way short of open support. “We’re fed up, being flogged all the time like common soldiers,” he added.

  Boys at Old School knew how fierce life was in the new Houses, without the compensations of unsupervised lockup to lighten the harshness of the new discipline. But what had they to gain from a rebellion? Chief might ease the load a bit, but he’d certainly demand that the rebels submit to a thrashing before he conceded—otherwise he could kiss farewell to good order forever. In spite of what had happened to Caspar, this was not really their fight.

  Moncur was about to redouble his argument when Boy lifted the sheet from Caspar.

  “Christ Almighty!” Moncur had to steady himself against the pile of boxes. When he had recovered somewhat he looked at Boy. “Surely you agree, Stevenson?” he said.

  In a general way Boy did agree; but he saw this affair as Stevenson vs. Cossack, not as a spur for a general school rebellion. And, in any case, he wasn’t going to be the only boy from Old School to get caught up in such a rising.