Wilberforce (13 page)

Of course they thought he did it. How could they think anything else? Inside their hearts he was bled out and stiff.

—Perhaps there's a simple explanation, Laurie said to Nathan. Perhaps Wilberforce has a simple explanation.

—A simple explanation? Nathan repeated.

—A simple explanation for why he had a short night. A simple explanation for why there was no one in his bed when we looked into it. A simple explanation for why he saw and heard nothing of a pack of cads roaming the school, bunging up locks—

—Drugging Fardles and Matron.

—What? Morgan gasped.

The place. The place!

—Unless you turned invisible in the night, Nathan hissed, then we'll go on believing what our eyes told us, you lying sodding liar!

A punch. Tense and sickening silence.

—Ah, Morgan breathed at last, that.

Sock back in his mouth, technique stage three. He stopped struggling, stopped yelling except what he couldn't help, and reminded himself that the interval wouldn't last long. This was the encouragement. After the subject agreed to cooperate, he was given encouragement to continue.

When they removed the sock again, every part of him screamed. He caught his breath:

—I haven't exactly been going to the Tower during Prep.

—Obviously, Nathan retorted.

The place! Morgan howled.

—Did you think we wouldn't check? Laurie asked. With Alex in the Tower as well?

The room did not seem level.

—Are you planning to tell us where you have been going?

Would they believe him?

—The Keys. Obviously.

—And why's that?

—Needed some time to myself.

—That awful, are we?

—No!

—Who did you meet there? Nathan demanded.

No longer icy, Nathan's face flushed, too.

They misunderstood him so entirely! First they supposed he'd colluded with Alex, and now they thought he'd absconded from Prep with another boy, inducted this foreigner to the poacher's tunnel, brought him to the Cross Keys, and then returned home to lie about it. He opened his mouth to protest, but Nathan returned his knuckle to the place:

—Don't lie.

In fact he had met someone there, but Grieves was not what Nathan had in mind.

—It's …

His throat sore, tongue sticky.

—It's difficult to explain.

Knuckles.

—Ah!

The
place
.

—Stop! I'm not … Stop!

Laurie's knees slackened and he reached for Nathan:

—A word?

Miraculously, Nathan let go. Not only let go, but stormed out the study door.

—Don't move, Laurie commanded.

Vise slack, weight lifted, Laurie followed into the corridor. Morgan's shoulder pulsed, icy stabs.

Lessons were canceled. Games were canceled. Even meals were canceled. He had no desire to experience stage four of the technique, let alone stages five through ten. But where to start unraveling the truth?

A tendril of thought wrapped around his brain: It made little difference where he began. He might start by revealing that during Prep he had met Grieves at the Cross Keys, their heretofore private oasis. He might start with how he'd run away from the Academy without so much as a farewell note, or how he'd spent the early morning in Grieves's squalid rooms, blubbing like a girl. Perhaps he would like to tell his friends how Grieves had abetted his return to the Academy, or how he had observed Spaulding climbing in the Tower window? He might like to confess that he had lately invaded a foreign changing room to confront Spaulding, clothed and unclothed, on vague grounds, or that he harbored intent towards Spaulding, that he harbored memories of Silk that were not as black as he painted, that—

Laurie returned:

—JP's gone to the bogs.

Morgan sat up before Laurie could—

—Just tell me, Laurie said. I won't tell Nathan the blue bits.

Morgan stared.

—I have as well, Laurie continued. Obviously.

A cluster of freckles was coming up on Laurie's cheeks.

—You mean you've…?

—Practically everyone has, except JP.

—You never told me.

—You never asked.

Morgan did not know what to say, at all.

—It doesn't mean anything, Laurie said.

Curiosity grew in him like hunger.

—It passes the time, Laurie concluded.

—But who? When?

Laurie shrugged.

—I'd rather not gossip. But, Thorne, presently.

Morgan stiffened even though he had never given Thorne a second glance.

—How'd you manage to…?

Laurie examined the ceiling:

—I have a certain reputation.

—But!

—But indeed, Laurie said seizing control of the conversation. We aren't here to talk about me. We're here to listen to your confession so we can sort out what to say to JP and then sort out what to say when yon bunglers make it round to inquisition us all.

And through the mist of the day's breathtaking insanity, an idea occurred to Morgan—pristine, irrational, with all the clarity of perfection.

—There are things I can't explain, he said, but I'm telling the truth when I say I had nothing to do with the locks or the fire, and I don't know anything about them. Last night I … wasn't here.

—Why not?

No side.

—I had a mad idea of running away.

Laurie's eyes widened.

—But then I came back. Please don't ask any more. It's irrelevant.

—I don't call running away from us irrelevant!

—It's irrelevant to this business.

Laurie frowned into the middle distance, as he did when forestalling tears:

—The Fags' Rebellion, they're calling it.

—Who says the fags were behind it?

—The fags are behind everything.

The pristine idea began to shimmer.

—Two questions, Morgan said. What's this about drugging Fardley and Matron?

—They'd have to, wouldn't they? Laurie said. Fardles hears everything, and what he doesn't hear, Matron does. Someone bunged things up right under their noses, and they didn't hear a thing.

—That doesn't mean they were drugged.

—Fardles was bleary this morning, even by his standards.

Pristine, shimmering, glowing like the dawn.

—Question two, Morgan said. How can I get to the Tower?

*   *   *

Laurie explained in a way that made Nathan agree to the plan.

—It's going to have to be real, Nathan warned. Are you sure?

—Yes, Morgan said.

Nathan bent down to pick up a cushion that had fallen and then, without warning, stood into a heavy uppercut to Morgan's chin. At the same moment, Laurie tore the shelf off the wall, sending photographs crashing to the floor.

Kilby was at the door in moments, frothy and demanding explanations. Nathan daubed Morgan's face ostentatiously.

—Wilberforce was trying to get a book down, and he fell.

—I don't know what you three think you're playing at, Kilby began.

—For heaven's sake, Nathan protested, waving the bloodied cloth, he's gushing something chronic.

—And his arm, Laurie said.

Morgan moaned from the floor.

—Matron will lose her stack if we don't get him to the Tower right now!

Kilby hesitated. Nathan smeared blood artfully across Morgan's jaw.

—Do you have another nose rag? he asked Kilby.

Kilby did not, at least not one he was willing to sacrifice to Morgan's gore, so, keen to escape either blood or Matron's wrath, he allowed them to go to the Tower.

*   *   *

—I've no idea what you've been up to, Matron declared, but if a bookshelf did this, I'm several Dutchmen.

Morgan hung his head.

—Right, Lydon, I'll take things from here. Back to your study, and tell Pearl to wash his knuckles with soap if they've split open.

Laurie left flabbergasted. Matron shook her head:

—Whatever it was, Wilberforce, I feel sure you deserved it.

In the end she decided his chin needed two stitches, which she said he could take and be grateful it wasn't worse. He breathed to keep the pain and his mind under control. He was there to observe her, not to feel sorry for himself, and certainly not to dwell on the dizzying transformations his friends had undergone in the last three-quarters of an—

—What do you make of this locks business, Matron?

—Don't try to draw me, Wilberforce. I don't gossip with schoolboys.

He felt the insult. She began to clean his face with antiseptic. It stung like a train whistle.

What had made him imagine he could cadge his way into the Tower, pump Matron for evidence of Laurie's wild drugging theory, cross-examine Alex (if he was still there), and by day's end solve the mystery of the so-called Fags' Rebellion?

—Hold still, wretched boy.

The fumes from the … iodine? carbolic something? were making him hot and sick. Matron gave his chin a final, searing daub:

—Back to your study, and no more nonsense.

Failure.

He'd got Nathan to break open his chin and bloody his nose for nothing. There would be no chance to do anything now besides languish in the study, claustrophobic with memory of the technique and of suspicions still not dispelled—nothing to do besides languish in a study
tedious
beyond description, while the JCR and other
drivelers
in authority failed to get to the bottom of anything!

He got down from the table, wavered, clutched the wall. His stomach brought up breakfast.

Matron put a bowl to his mouth and a chair to the back of his knees. He collapsed, his insides squeezing as if they would push out whatever was making things wrong. His eyes streamed. She took the bowl away but then brought it back as he retched again.

When it finally ceased, Matron led him to the ward and sat him on a bed. She gestured for him to undress, fetched him a nightgown, and helped him into bed like a feeble old man. She returned moments later with a glass of something. He gagged at the smell, but she made him swallow it. At last she left him to close his eyes, chin smarting, place aching, arm unfettered, unprotected, ungoverned, without its wrappings. A mummy disintegrating in the light of day.

 

11

Inquisitions, as S-K labeled them, were proceeding apace. John imagined the Third subjected to the rack and felt a wistful sort of satisfaction. He had been deputized to keep order in the refectory. Housemasters were evidently too oppressed by the robes of their office to bother themselves with niceties such as how a hundred-odd boys were to be kept sedated in the same room for over two hours (thus far!) without breaks for air or water. Other masters drifted in and out, but none had a sense of what ought to be happening. S-K had mandated that absolute silence be maintained, but he had plainly not considered how this might be accomplished by the one man at the Academy whose beliefs precluded corporal punishment. John did his best: He sent the first five offenders directly to their Housemasters; their rapid and much subdued return calmed the waters. Next, he sent for supplies, dictated a passage from the newspaper, and commanded them to copy it twelve times. Finally, he instructed them to put their heads down on the tabletops while he read to them from the only semi-suitable volume in his satchel that day, Thucydides's account of the plague. He permitted them to visit the lavatory one at a time, exchanging the baton (written permission from him) wordlessly. By eleven o'clock, he wondered how much longer he could carry on with it all.

A pleasing vision crossed his mind, of corralling them into their changing rooms and then leading them on a vigorous cross-country run. In lieu of any better idea, and in half-desperate attempt to remind S-K of his existence, he dashed off a note to the Headmaster:
Dire straits here. Run?
He sent the missive with a bookish boy from the Remove and then concentrated on ignoring the low-grade murmuring that had grown since he'd left off, parched, with Thucydides.

Before very long, S-K materialized under the arches: harried, old, ex-majestic.

—Silence, he boomed.

The murmur died down, though not with the alacrity S-K typically commanded. Still, John thought, you had to give the man credit for gumption. S-K drew himself up with Victorian posture, swept into the chamber (such as he could with the tired gait that favored his left hip), and placed his hand on John's tabletop, as much to steady himself as to convey dominion. When the eyes of the room had fixed upon him, S-K removed from his inner pocket a piece of paper, expensive cotton rag, folded lengthwise. Perching his spectacles on the bridge of his nose, the Headmaster scanned the page.

—The following boys, he intoned, will attend my study.

He read out eight names (alphabetically, mixed Houses, all from the Third Form). A frisson rippled through the room. They did not dare whisper, but John could see them itching.

—The rest, S-K continued after a pause, will proceed to the changing rooms in silence, and I mean silence, and prepare themselves for a double dix with Mr. Grieves.

John could feel if not hear their astonishment and vague alarm. A dix was Academy code for the circuit of ten farms that served their steeplechases. A double dix was a training exercise reserved for the Upper School no more than twice a term. The Third would be hard-pressed by a single dix, never mind a double. After a night without sleep, John himself would be pressed to complete it.

Still, he reasoned, anything would be better than this imprisonment. Perhaps when they returned, showered, and changed, lunch would even be served?

S-K nodded his dismissal. John braced himself. They rose.

—Oh, yes, said S-K glancing back at his sheaf as if detecting a footnote, the following will attend Mr. Burton-Lee in his study.

He read out eight more Third Formers, again assorted, alphabetical.