The two teams shook hands with each other. Well, everyone except Mr Wilmot, who had sprained the index finger of his right hand in trying to catch Luke's last shot. He went off with Matron to get his hand seen to.
Luke and Ned found themselves next to each other. This was the closest Luke had been to Ned since the time in his office before the half-term holiday. They shook hands.
"Well played, Brownlow," Ned said.
Ned usually did address Luke by his surname when they were in school situations, but Luke found it somehow jarring in the informal surroundings of the cricket field, as if Ned was determined to keep a distance between them by using the name given to Luke by his other father.
Ned turned away to shake hands with Wharton. "Well played," he said to the Viking.
Luke walked back to the pavilion with Wharton, coming to terms with the fact that he was getting precisely the level playing field he'd asked Ned for. The headmaster was simply treating him exactly the same as every other student. Luke supposed he should be pleased, but he found he had lost some of his pleasure at winning the match.
Luke re-joined the Randalls and Brownlows and was surprised to find that Meredith was with them. It seemed that Julia had taken the American under her wing when she had been abandoned by Ned for the cricket match. Luke respected Julia's generous-heartedness, but wished that she could turn it off sometimes. The atmosphere in the small group was not as relaxed as it had been at lunchtime and Luke noticed that Meredith had positioned herself as far away from Elsie and Molly as it was possible to be. Pagan had found a length of twine from somewhere and was showing the twins how to do cat's cradle.
Ned arrived shortly after Luke did. He shook hands with the Brownlows and made polite conversation about the cricket match with them, before whisking Meredith off to supervise tea in the marquee. He paid no attention to Luke at all.
Luke's mum walked beside him as the party wandered back towards the marquee.
"What did you make of Meredith?" Luke asked her.
"She hasn't changed much, as far as I can see. Still thinks she's a cut above the rest of us, still wearing incredibly expensive clothes, still doesn't like small children."
Luke looked behind them, where Pagan, Luke's dad and Julia were walking in line abreast, holding hands with Elsie and Molly in between the three of them, counting "One, two…three!" and swinging the girls up off the ground on the 'three' so that their feet dangled in the air and they squealed with delight.
"Did she talk about going back to the States?"
"Yes, I think she's going back next week," replied Suzanne.
"I mean with Ned," said Luke.
"What?" Suzanne, stopping dead and then hurriedly stepping sideways so that the twin-swing behind them could carry on ahead. "Ned's not going back to the States, is he?"
Luke shrugged. "That's what Meredith told me," he said. "But Ned hasn't said anything to me about it." Mostly because he isn't talking to me at all, he added to himself.
Over tea, Julia told the Brownlows about the display on the school's history which Luke and Wharton had put together. Pagan volunteered to take the twins for a walk in the grounds while the others went to admire Luke's work. Luke hadn't given it any thought since he and Wharton had shown the finished display to Mr Thomas the day before. He stood beside it as his parents read the captions and looked at the news stories and photographs. There seemed to be some sort of disturbance going on outside the front of the school. Students and their parents were beginning to gather at the windows and point.
"Isn't that Mr Wilmot?" Julia said. She was looking at the 1998 part of the display.
Luke pulled his attention back to the panels and saw that the newspaper cutting and Paper Dart story had been added to the boards since Mr Thomas had approved them the day before. Someone had already inked a goatee beard onto Mr Wilmot's teenaged face. Julia was giggling at the story and Luke could only feel grateful that Mr Wilmot's sprained finger meant that he was unlikely to see what Wharton had done.
In the meantime, Pagan, Elsie and Molly had been doing a tour of the outside of the main school building. As they rounded the back of the school they ran into Wharton and two older men. One was smoking and complaining loudly about having to be at the Speech Day.
"We're here to support your brother. We'll go soon enough," said the other man. Pagan felt a shock of recognition and fear as she realised that the smoking man was the acne-scarred mugger who had attacked Luke in Regent's Park the previous summer. She shook her hair over her face so that he wouldn't see her and quickly walked past him towards the marquee. There, she made straight for Ned, who was laughing with Meredith over a cup of tea.
"Ned, I need your help," said Pagan, taking hold of Ned's elbow as she came up to him.
"I think you mean 'Mr Kelly'," interrupted Meredith, looking haughty. Pagan paused long enough to give Meredith a scathing glance, before turning back to the headmaster.
"Ned, the mugger's here. The one who attacked Luke. You've got to call the police."
Ned put his tea down. "Meredith, you watch the twins. Keep them in the marquee. Come with me, Pagan."
As they walked away, Pagan explained the situation to Ned, with one glance back at Meredith, whose mouth had opened into a perfect O of outrage. Ned dialled the local police, telling them to meet them in his office.
"They're on their way," said Ned, ending the call. He looked across at Meredith, who was evidently struggling to keep control of Elsie and Molly and was already resorting to offering them cake. "You meet them at the front of the school and direct them to my office," Ned told Pagan. "It's up the main staircase, on the first floor. I'll go and round up the Whartons and take them up there by one of the side stairs."
Luke was distracted from the history display by an increase in noise levels in the hall. He looked around to see Pagan escorting two uniformed men through the door and pointing them up the stairs. Silence fell again as the officers marched purposefully up the stairs, their progress followed by every pair of eyes in the room. Luke recognised them as the same two stab-vested men who had visited the school after the fire alarm incident in December.
Pagan rushed towards Luke and Julia.
"You'll never guess!" she began, excitedly. "The mugger's here, the one who cut Luke's face!"
Oh no, thought Luke, Wharton's going to kill me.
Luke's mum cut across Pagan's excitement, saving Luke from having to come up with an appropriate response. "Where are Elsie and Molly?"
"Meredith's looking after them," Pagan reassured her. "They're safe in the marquee."
Suzanne looked distinctly unreassured.
"We'd better go and rescue Meredith from the twins," said Andrew. "Or vice versa. You wait here, Luke, we'll be back in a minute."
More and more people were congregating in the hall, pretending to look at the displays, but really wanting to find out what the police were doing there. Their curiosity was soon satisfied; Ned and Wharton's father accompanied the two officers as they marched Wharton's brother down the main staircase between them. His hands were cuffed in front of him and one of the men was carrying a clear plastic evidence bag containing the curved knife which Luke and Pagan remembered all too well. They went out to the police car at the front of the school, leaving a rising tide of conversation and speculation in their wake.
Luke was distracted by a jab to his shoulder. He turned to see Mr Wilmot behind him. The index finger of the housemaster's right hand was bound with gauze to the next finger and he looked as though he was about to explode with rage. Word about the history display had clearly found its way back to his ears.
But before he could say a word in his defence, there was a shout from the staircase behind him.
"Brownlow, you BASTARD!"
Luke turned his back on Mr Wilmot to see Wharton running down the stairs. The Viking pushed through the groups of people who had been watching his brother's arrest. He reached Luke, pulled back his fist and, with all his weight behind it,
threw it as though it was a cricket ball, straight at Luke's chin.
Luke instinctively ducked sideways and Wharton's hand connected instead with Mr Wilmot's nose. The already-injured housemaster collapsed in a crumpled heap on the floor while several spectators let out frightened screams. Julia jumped into the space between Luke and Wharton, grabbed hold of Wharton's upper arms and said, in a quiet but forceful voice: "Benjamin, behave yourself!"
"You called the cops, you bastard," Wharton's voice was more of a sob than a shout now. Julia put her arm around the Viking and pulled him to one side. Oliver Samuels was standing behind her.
"Oliver, go and get Matron for Mr Wilmot," she said, as she led Wharton away to her office, just behind them. Oliver went running off and Mr Wilmot staggered unsteadily to his feet in front of Luke, the eyes of everyone in the hall upon him.
At that moment, Ned walked back indoors, having sent the police car off. Seeing Mr Wilmot with his bloody nose, standing right next to Luke, he leapt to an understandable but inaccurate conclusion. He strode through the gaping crowd towards them.
"What have you done NOW?" he roared at Luke.
At Ned's shout, Luke felt as though Wharton's fist had successfully made contact with his own face instead of Mr Wilmot's. He had to get away. He ran out through the western door and into Julia's garden. All his happiness at winning the cricket match had faded away. Ned thought so little of him that he believed he was capable of punching Mr Wilmot, and now it looked like he was back where he had started with Wharton. Luke dropped onto the bench at the back of the garden and wondered if he still had any sort of future at the school.
Back in the hall, Pagan tackled Ned.
"It was Wharton," she yelled at him. "He went to punch Luke but hit the other guy instead. Why do you always think everything's Luke's fault?"
Ned looked around for Wharton and Pagan pulled him over to Julia's office. Wharton was sitting in one of the chairs, looking devastated and nursing his right hand.
"Right," said Ned, trying to regain control of the situation. "Wharton, go and wait for me in my office."
Wharton uncurled himself from the chair and slouched out of the room.
Ned turned back to Pagan. "Pagan, can you see if you can find Luke? He just took off…"
"I think it's you who needs to find Luke, Ned," interrupted Julia. "He's been desperately unhappy ever since Meredith told him that you're going back to America with her."
"She told him what?"
Pagan and Julia exchanged a puzzled look.
"Meredith told Luke that you and she are planning to start a family and that you'll be moving back to the States," Julia explained. "It was the day she drove him to the village."
"And none of you thought to check with me that this was true?"
"We had no reason to believe that it wasn't," Julia replied, defensively. "I thought you would tell Luke and us in your own time. I didn't want to interfere."
"I did," put in Pagan. "I bullied Luke into interrupting your date with Meredith that night. He didn't want to, but I didn't want you to go back to America."
By now Ned was frowning so ferociously that Pagan shrank away from him.
"I'm sorry," she said in a small voice.
"Don't be," said Ned, patting her shoulder. "I just wish you'd talked to me sooner. Julia, can you keep an eye on Wharton for ten minutes? I need to find Luke."
"Look in the vegetable garden," Julia suggested. "He likes going there for some peace and quiet."
Ned soon tracked Luke down. Luke ignored him as he approached.
"Can I join you?" Ned asked.
Luke raised one shoulder in a hint of a shrug.
Ned sat next to him. "I'm sorry about just then," he began. "I honestly thought you'd just punched Mr Wilmot in the face and that I was going to have to expel you."
Luke lifted his head at this and followed the logic through. "You're not going to expel Wharton are you?"
Ned blinked. "I thought you hated him."
"He's not that bad," said Luke. "And he didn't mean to hit Mr Wilmot: he was aiming at me and I ducked."
"I gathered that after Pagan screamed it in my face," said Ned.
He cleared his throat. "I've had a talk with Julia and Pagan and they've set me right on a number of things. I've been assuming that it was you who was acting atrociously recently, while it seems that in fact it was mostly Meredith."
Luke nodded.
"I'm not going back to America with her, Luke. I'm afraid you're going to have to put up with three more years of me here at Hawley Lodge."
A few minutes later, Luke and Ned went back into the school. The first person to meet them was Meredith. Her delicate hat had been knocked sideways on her head and there was clear evidence of her ten minutes of enforced childcare in the form of cake crumbs and jam on her previously immaculate white dress. She did not look happy.
"Meredith, I do apologise for all the excitement," Ned began. "Speech Day isn't usually quite this eventful."
"I cannot believe you left me in charge of those, those brats," spat Meredith.
"Well at least they didn't jam an ice cream into your cleavage," commented Luke.
He enjoyed watching Meredith's face as the connection between the tall teenager and the annoying child of Ned's neighbours became clear to her.
Ned laughed out loud. "I'd forgotten that you two had met before!"
Meredith did not smile. "I'm sorry, Graham," she said. "But I'm afraid I'm not willing to take on your new family. It was good to see you again."
And with that she turned her back on Ned and Luke and left the building.
"Direct and to the point, as usual," murmured Ned.
Before they had a chance to digest Meredith's abrupt departure, Mr Wilmot pushed his way through the milling groups of relatives. He now had a dressing on his nose as well as the one on his hand. In his good hand he was holding the offending items from the exhibition, which he now waved in Ned and Luke's faces.
"Headmaster! Have you seen what this boy put on this display board? It's outrageous. He's a threat to school morale and discipline. He's-"
Ned held up his left hand to stop Mr Wilmot's tirade and put his right arm over Luke's shoulders.
"I'd be careful what you say next, John. That's my son you're talking about."
Ned raised an eyebrow in Luke's direction.
Luke responded with another shrug.
And a smile so wide it could barely fit on his face.
The End
###
Acknowledgements
The knife on the cover was adapted from an image shared on the web with a Creative Commons licence: https://www.flickr.com/photos/brenda-starr/3488040778/. Grateful thanks to Brenda, for making it available.
You can read more about Hawley Lodge at https://hawleylodge.com/.
The Viking and the Vendetta Page 16