Ring of Terror (3 page)

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that you might dismiss him.’

‘You can put that idea right out of your head. What? Get rid of the best head keeper I’ve ever had and at the beginning of the shooting season? That would, indeed, be cutting off my nose to spite my face.’

Sir George paused for a moment, then added, ‘In fact you may well be wondering why I should be bothering my head about a boys’ quarrel. But there’s more behind it than you think.’ He got up and walked across to the window. ‘There’s a dangerous spirit abroad in the land. An evil spirit. It comes creeping up like one of our fen fogs. One moment the sky’s clear. The next you can hardly see your nose on your own face.’

As he spoke he was looking out across the expanse of lawn to the line of wind-stripped beech trees which guarded the far end. Luke realised that he was really talking to himself.

‘God alone knows what propagates this evil, or why people encourage it. Radical politicians, do you think, trying to make a name for themselves in the House? Agitators stirring up trouble, so that they might find pickings in the chaos they create? You can see the symptoms of it everywhere. Workers starting to combine against their employers. Tenants against their landlords. Everyone who fancies that he has too little of this world’s goods trying to snatch something from those who have more than he has. And one sign of it is very clear. The growing and open disrespect of the lower classes for the class above them. Every time an example of it occurs, whether in big things or in small things, the upper class
must
stamp on it. If they fail to do so, they are acting as traitors to their caste.’ Sir George swung back on Luke. ‘So now you know why I was upset.’ He gave a short grunting laugh. ‘Really, you’re apologising to the wrong person. It’s Oliver you should be addressing yourself to. I don’t mean for stopping him from using illegal snares. Maybe you were within your rights there, though it might have been done more respectfully. What was unfair was taking him unawares when he wasn’t expecting it and tripping him up.’

Luke said, ‘If that’s what he told you, he was lying.’

There was a long silence. The boy would have given anything he possessed to take the words back. If he had been only a few years older he would have realised that up to that point he was winning. He had only to keep his mouth shut to consolidate his gains. Now he had thrown everything into the discard.

He waited for the storm to break, but there was no storm.

What happened was almost worse. Addressing him coldly and impersonally, as though he was delivering a judgement from the Bench, Sir George said, ‘One thing is clear to me. You are totally unfitted to be a clergyman of the established Church, in any shape or form or any place. Should you try to pursue your intention of so doing I should regard it as my duty to use all means in my power to prevent you from getting further.’

Having said this he sat down to continue with his writing and Luke went out of the room, closing the door quietly. He was leaving behind him something that had been part of his life for the last three years.

As he shut the study door, the door next to it opened and a young man came out. Luke knew him by sight, though he had rarely met him. It was Sir George’s elder son, Julian. Unlike Oliver he did not accompany his father on his sporting forays and never seemed to put in an appearance at church. Also he was much away from home. Until recently at Eton and now at Cambridge.

When the village discussed him they called him either ‘odd’ or ‘modern’. The terms, which were not really intended as insults, were almost synonymous and arose partly from Julian’s appearance, but more from his occasional visits to the village pub. Here it was his custom to order drinks all round and having thus ensured himself a captive audience, to lecture it on current political topics.

He now grabbed Luke by the arm and said, ‘Come inside. I want to talk to you,’ and dragged him into his room.

Luke offered no resistance. He was not frightened of Julian, assessing him as a less formidable opponent than his younger brother.

Also the room, which he had never been in before, was intriguing. The pictures on the wall would have supported the village verdict, being daubs of colour, apparently applied at random to the canvas. One of them Luke saw was entitled
Womanhood Observed,
but turned out, disappointingly, to be a composition of blue and crimson triangles and circles.

And there were books: shelves full of them, piles on the window ledge and a heap of what was evidently Julian’s current reading on the table by the small sofa. Luke was more interested in books than in pictures. A careful course of English literature, as prescribed by the Rector, had recently embraced both poetry and philosophy. As he was being hustled past the pile on the table he had only time to look at the top one. He recognised the name of the author, Bernard Shaw, whom he knew to be an exciting and much criticised playwright, though this one could hardly be a dramatic work, being entitled
The Common Sense of Municipal Trading.

‘We can’t talk standing up,’ said Julian. ‘Come and sit down over here.’

He dragged him to an armchair and sat down beside him. The chair was a large one, but not really broad enough to accommodate two people and Luke found himself pressed against Julian who increased his discomfort by putting one arm round his shoulders.

‘I thought I must tell you this. There’s not much goes on in Dad’s study that can’t be heard in here. So I got the full force of his standard lecture on the
trahison des clercs.
Not that I needed to listen too hard. I knew it by heart.’

‘What did you call it?’

‘
Trahison des clercs.
That’s a French expression. There’s no exact equivalent for it in English. It means that if you belong to a certain class you should stand up for it and defend it if it’s attacked.’

‘That seems sensible.’

‘It’s all right if you don’t imagine, as Dad seems to do, that it applies only to
your
class. Perhaps I shouldn’t talk about my father like this, but you’re a sensible kid, I know.’ He gave Luke’s shoulders a squeeze. ‘He’s really just a silly old buffer. As old-fashioned as the Tower of London and as difficult to shift. What he refuses to accept is that the lower classes have every right to their own sort of solidarity. The right to combine for war against their superiors. Why shouldn’t a group of tenant farmers gang up to force their landlords to lower the exorbitant rents he’s charging? Why shouldn’t workmen combine to secure a rise in their wages and strike if they don’t get it?’

‘Reasonable,’ said Luke. Julian’s body was pressed so tightly against his that he could feel the warmth of it coming through.

‘But he’s quite right when he says that it’s not only the big things. Little things matter, too. Like workmen not remembering to call the boss “sir” and tenants failing to take off their caps when the landlord passes them. And you not knuckling under when you realised that it was Oliver – I offer no excuse for his conduct – who was setting illegal snares. You can realise now why he was forced to tell lies about Oliver being treacherously attacked by you. What he couldn’t get away from was the fact that Oliver finished up on the ground. You
must
have cheated to put him there. Otherwise you were a better man than he was, which was unthinkable.’

‘You may be right,’ said Luke. ‘All the same, I shouldn’t have said what I did. Your father’s gone out of his way to help me in the past. I should have thought about that and held my tongue.’

‘I disagree. Most emphatically I disagree. It’s always right for the under-class to speak out against the over-class. I’m only sorry that in this particular case it worked so much to your detriment. You’re such a nice kid. Everyone in the place likes you. I know that. If only there was something I could do to help. Anything at all.’

Julian had shifted his position slightly and his face was very close to Luke, who could see the sweat starting up on his forehead and a tiny dribble at the corner of his mouth.

He wants to kiss me, thought Luke. Am I going to let him? To stop him, I should have to hit him. And if I hurt him, that will make more trouble.

The problem was solved for him by Sir George, who chose that moment to give tongue from the next room.

‘I don’t know who you’re talking to,’ he bellowed, ‘but just stop gossiping and come here. I’ve something I want to tell you.’

The alacrity with which Julian responded rather contradicted the disparaging way in which he had been talking about his father. He jumped up and trotted to the door. Luke extracted himself from the sofa and followed him. When they were out in the passage he muttered a quick, ‘Goodbye. I’ll be thinking about what you said,’ and was through the green baize door before Julian had got into his father’s room.

He realised that what he needed most was time. Time by himself; time to think things out before he talked to his father and the Rector, both of whom would probably be waiting for him at home. Above all, time to plan. In spite of his haste to get clear he realised that it would be a mistake to slide out without saying goodbye to Mrs Parham, though he was sorely puzzled about what he could say to her. Another problem, in a day of problems. When he got there, the housekeeper’s room was empty.

He caught sight of one of the maids coming out of the kitchen and said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’

‘I’m Debbie.’

‘Well, Debbie, would you be kind enough to give Mrs Parham a message from me. Tell her I looked in, but her room was empty. I’ll try to see her later.’

‘Do anything for you,’ said the girl, with a slanting look out of her dark eyes. ‘And pleased to do it, I’m sure.’

Luke looked after her as she scuttled back into the kitchen. Evidently she liked him. Fine. He liked people to like him. Just so long – he grinned as he thought of Julian, squeezing down beside him on the sofa – just so long as they didn’t start liking him too much.

He found his father and the Rector waiting for him and gave them as truthful a report as he could manage.

‘Until that moment,’ he said, ‘everything seemed to be going pretty well. He’d no hard feelings against you, Dad. In fact, he described you as the best head keeper he’d ever had.’

‘I can see from your face,’ said the Rector, ‘that that’s where things went wrong. What happened?’

‘What happened was I lost my head. He accused me of cheating, of catching his son unawares and tripping him up. Heavens above! If he could have seen it. Oliver announced that he was going to teach me a lesson and came rushing at me, his arms going like a windmill. I did what I’d been taught, stretched my arms straight out so that he couldn’t reach me and when we clinched, rolled him over.’

‘Good,’ said his father, the light of old battles in his eyes. ‘Good.’

‘Good that you defended yourself,’ said the Rector. ‘Bad that you accused Sir George of lying. For all you knew he was only repeating what Oliver had told him.’

‘That’s just it. I didn’t accuse
him
of lying. What I said was, if that’s what Oliver told him,
he
was lying.’

‘Just as bad,’ said the Rector. ‘It was the honour of the family that you were attacking.’

‘I can see that now,’ said Luke. He had no wish to pursue the matter. It was sterile. What was done was done. It was the future that mattered. It was clear that his father thought so, too.

‘You’ll not enter the Church,’ he said. ‘That road’s barred. So what are you going to do?’

‘I’ve got an idea about that. I haven’t had time to think it through. But one thing seems clear. I didn’t ought to throw away—’

‘Ought not.’

‘Sorry, Rector. I ought not to throw away all that you’ve been teaching me for the past three years. There must surely be some way of using it.’

The Rector said, ‘My mind’s been moving in the same direction. You’ve learned the fundamentals of mathematics and though your English grammar is still sometimes faulty, no doubt it’ll improve. And you’ve a good grasp of the Classics. There are schools that would welcome you as an usher.’

‘Not Eton or Harrow?’

‘Not Eton or Harrow,’ agreed the Rector with a smile. ‘Nor even my own old school at Winchester. But I’m told that there are board schools and village schools looking for teachers. In three years’ time you’d walk into a job. Meanwhile you’d be living at home, helping your father and I could lend you books so that you could carry on with what I’ve tried to teach you.’

Luke said, ‘What I’d really like to do is master a modern language.’ Sensing the Rector’s disapproval, he added hastily, ‘I don’t mean dropping the Latin and Greek, sir. Just to have something to go alongside them.’

‘Good,’ said his father. ‘That’s good. Two strings to your bow.’

The Rector said, ‘Yes, a good idea. But what languages had you in mind? And how are you going to do it? I’m afraid I shouldn’t be much use to you as a modern language teacher, even if Sir George allowed me to do it.’

‘I thought I might start with French. Some of your parishioners – ones who work in the spinning mills at Lavenham – they came from France, didn’t they?’

‘Originally, yes. Huguenots who came over to avoid the repression and massacres in France. But since their families have now been here for two centuries or more, I imagine they will have forgotten all the French they ever knew.’

‘But there must surely be younger ones. People who have come over recently and only just begun to speak English. If you could find one of those, I could teach him English while he was teaching me French.’

The Rector thought about this. Then he said, ‘Even better if we could find some sort of job in the mills. It’d be unskilled work, but it would bring you in a few shillings. Enough to pay for your food and lodging with one of the families.’ Seeing the look on Hezekiah’s face he added quickly, ‘Of course, you’d come home every weekend.’

‘Aye, I’d be glad of that. The boy’s a great help to me.’

‘If we pick the right family, one with young folk in it, newly come from France, it should work very well.’ The Rector’s eyes kindled with enthusiasm. ‘You were quick to pick up dead languages. You’ll pick up a living one fast enough. I warrant that in a year or two you’d be bilingual. Then we could add another language. German, perhaps, or Italian. Why, by the time you were eighteen, you could set your sights as high as you liked.’