Wilberforce (23 page)

A knock interrupted REN's diatribe. The laboratory door had no glass; they heard rather than saw the intruder.

—Pardon, sir. The Head to see Wilberforce.

REN perked up at the ominous announcement.

—Off you go, Wilberforce.

Morgan's stomach sank.

—Put your things away, REN told him cheerfully. I shouldn't think you'll be back.

A low chortle from the form, this time not with him, but against him. He closed his exercise book and deposited it on the shelf.

—Lines at Primus, REN chirped. Wouldn't want to have to double them, would we?

Morgan ignored the gibe and with iron dread departed REN's chlorine-scented realm. He shuffled down the corridor, through heavy doors, and—

Spaulding.

Fire.

Spaulding.

Spaulding gestured to the chapel and disappeared up the stairs.

It was real.

He wasn't naïve.

Everything good was real.

He dashed up the stairs and found Spaulding beside the panel that guarded the Hermes Balcony.

—Wasn't sure how you'd jimmied it, Spaulding said.

Morgan sprang the lock. They ducked inside. Spaulding sat down. Morgan sat down, fought for breath.

Then Spaulding was pushing him against the railings and opening his trouser flies. Morgan reached for him, but Spaulding pushed him onto his back. He lay there, heart racing, cock hard—immediately, immediately—thrill at being overpowered, at allowing himself to be overpowered. Spaulding pinned Morgan's free hand, his other imprisoned in the sling. Thus bound, Morgan surrendered himself to Spaulding and whatever he wanted to do.

*   *   *

Time cut loose. For a spell, he felt nothing besides Spaulding's knee in the palm of his hand, Spaulding's green eyes upon him, and Spaulding's fingers doing what they were doing. He thought of nothing besides the one thing his brain could think:
I want it.

—Don't, Spaulding warned. Not until I say.

Spaulding held him still, warm, strong, smelling of something Morgan knew but couldn't name. Just as the torment began to ease, Spaulding touched him again:

—I'll tell you when.

He spoke sharply, but the kaleidoscope of his eyes darted in and out, green rings flecked with brown, an amber fire warming that most human miracle. Morgan wanted wholly to please him, to honor him with obedience, to encourage him in this and everything by playing entirely along.

—When? Morgan groaned.

—Hold still.

Warm, wet, flicking the spot that pushed him with the force of every temptation onto the edge. Straining, hungry for the next stroke. Then the warmth withdrew.

—I said I'll tell you when.

Spaulding grinned, looming over him.

—Please? Morgan begged.

Spaulding was enjoying this, perhaps even more than he was. Morgan reached again, but Spaulding took his hand and held it down.

Nothing had ever been this good, not even in his imagination.
I couldn't have dreamed you up
, Morgan wanted to say. Who could have guessed a person would exist to conquer him so? This wasn't Silk. This was free and joyful surrender, to something more thrilling than the world had ever before shown him. Nothing had the power to kill it now that he knew it, and nothing he could do, nothing he could say—

—Now.

Now. A thousand, rushing—
now!

*   *   *

Lungs, air, in, out, green-and-brown still trained upon him. Even now, when no eyes should look, they looked on him. They looked on him because they desired him, even as he lay conquered and drained. The ruins of the Hermes Balcony lay around them, relic of another age. This green-and-brown lion had crashed through every wall, not to savage, but to sit as he did now, with the one he had wanted all along. Shadows, trenches—all swept aside by this new and real life.

Green-and-brown still held him in its ray, even as Spaulding took a handkerchief and did what one used to do to oneself, in the age when one didn't look. A wave of sleepiness brushed across him, but he clung to the green-and-brown, which burned on him now with a homecoming he had craved as long as he knew.

Spaulding did up Morgan's flies and buttoned his jacket, those hands straightening his tie, those fingers brushing against the stitches in his chin, a minuscule kind of pity.

Time, having nearly perished in the deep, regained its stay. From the steeple above, it tolled, a terrible pulse that wrenched them back to the morning hour, to the school, to the damp and dreary March of their year.

Spaulding looked up, no longer as he'd been, and as he slid off Morgan's knees, an abysmal sorrow stabbed. This harbor did not belong to him. Spaulding was preparing to depart, to cast the green-and-brown on another, on that most loathsome creature the earth had ever belched up.

—What about Rees?

Spaulding's face darkened. Morgan wished he could take back the question and the sour voice that asked it. Spaulding looked away, pulled away, leaving Morgan unweighted and cold.

—He says he'll …

—What?

Spaulding moved to the corner of the balcony and peered over the rail, his whole self consumed with Rees.

—Who cares what the brute says? Morgan protested. He'll say anything under the sun, and none of it true. You should've seen him doing Guy Fawkes in class. It was enough to make you sick.

Spaulding looked back at him, pity, sorrow, disappointment:

—He says he'll hang himself.

Morgan caught his breath, at Rees's nerve, at Spaulding for believing him and for looking at Morgan as though—

—Has he got any rope?

Spaulding drew back. The crass weight of material fact had apparently not occurred to him.

—Just what is it he wants you to do? Morgan asked.

Spaulding blushed:

—I don't fancy trekking back to the barn just now, with everything.

—Good.

—But if I don't go, he says … that's where we …

Morgan's tongue soured. The vileness that followed pleasure now pounced, clamping him in its jaws all the harder for having been delayed. Spaulding and Rees were We, and they went to lengths far greater than the Hermes Balcony to achieve it. The balcony was cold, drab, and scruffy, the green-and-brown a figment of his imagination.

Morgan got up and dusted his clothes.

—You're clever, Spaulding said. What would you do?

—I would never have messed about with Rees in the first place.

Spaulding winced:

—I know.

It didn't sound like affirmation. It sounded as though he knew Morgan lacked some essential human capacity.

—Still? Spaulding said.

Spaulding stood between the broken chairs, a gray-suited schoolboy, mostly grown yet unprepared for what stalked him. His humility and his need melted everything, until Morgan was weak again before him.

—I don't know what I'd do, Morgan said at last. But if you give in to him today, he'll only carry on with it tomorrow and the next day, as long as he likes.

Spaulding's shoulders tightened:

—I know.

*   *   *

The morning was interminable, but at least it had spared them yesterday's trials. John's classes behaved themselves. S-K had not yet made an appearance, and John wondered, not for the first time, what would happen if the man became seriously indisposed. Burton-Lee normally stood in when the Headmaster was obliged to be elsewhere; he would surely serve as Deputy Head if S-K fell ill for an extended period, a notion, once conceived, that stirred John's unease. While it was true that Burton shared John's ambition to elevate the intellectual attainment of their pupils, rather than the usual public-school aim to churn out good sports with good manners, John suspected that Burton unleashed would make life unpleasant for everyone, most especially for him. Burton's vision for the Academy would certainly be filled with athletic and disciplinary excess, a vision unmoored in its enthusiasms from the Academy S-K was trying to conserve. Not that John approved of the Academy as it operated presently, but when he had first come, a mere seven years previous, S-K's Academy had still lived and breathed, a world of loyalty and faith, one that would accept a pacifist into its midst not because it in any way approved of his pacifism, but because it respected his having withstood attacks on the basis of conscience.

The Lower Sixth were writing a short essay. A knock at the door revealed Rees, looking flushed and worse for wear.

—Head to see Spaulding, sir.

His voice was raspy, as confessing a secret in stage whisper. John gritted his teeth at the manufactured melodrama of it all. He had no notion why S-K should want to speak with Spaulding—John would have interviewed several others in the Lower Sixth first—but apparently Rees had himself been confronted. John regretted ever having made Rees the center of attention. It had only egged him on, and now he was attempting to drag Spaulding into his misfortunes. Hopefully S-K had rattled Rees, if not on the grounds he deserved. John bade Spaulding go and waved Rees back to wherever he belonged.

John was inordinately hungry. Had he remembered to eat breakfast before departing his digs this morning? There had not been anything, he remembered now. He had returned much later than planned, the shops had been closed, and—he simply couldn't keep track of housekeeping details in the face of midnight visitors, improvised bonfires, unexpected duty hours, complex bicycle arrangements, not to mention the ever-shifting developments each day seemed poised to inflict.

The lesson was almost over. Shortly luncheon would bring relief, provided S-K hadn't again mandated a meal more Spartan than inmates could expect in York Castle Prison. He ought to mark at least two more exercise books in the eight minutes that remained. Why did he set so much written work? Here before him was the mere tip of the iceberg, the Fifth's prep from last night, their surely unsound arguments on the evidence for Guy Fawkes and his apostasy (short answer: fat chance). He couldn't do it. Not just now. Tonight he would do it. He was off duty tonight. He would return to his digs in time for tea. He would purchase biscuits. He would even, he decided, treat himself to shepherd's pie and parkin at the Keys. Then—post steeplechase, post shower, post parkin, nursing a pot of tea in the warmth of the Keys—then he would storm through the abysmal pile of compositions. He would work like the motor of a Halford Special. He would dust through the Fifth and consign memory of the entire Guy Fawkes lesson to the bin; then he would devour the tepid study questions of the lower forms and the tangled paragraphs of the Sixth. In fact, he vowed he would not turn out the light until his satchel was fully addressed, and tomorrow night he would cycle home unladen! He could hear his Magdalene supervisor now: He ought to make a start on the pile in the last moments remaining to the morning. To refuse would be to encourage the demon sloth. Even if he only skimmed the contents, it would be easier to face them later. His supervisor had been correct in everything (save his disapproval of pacifism), but still, John felt the urge to sulk in the face of this man summoned by mere thought. John sighed aloud and opened the top book in the pile. It belonged to Lydon. John flipped through it but did not find the assigned composition. Joy blended equally with outrage. He tossed the book aside and addressed the next: a mere five sentences! He would savage it later. The next four revealed equally paltry efforts. In the final minutes of lesson, he surveyed the entire pile from the Fifth and discovered only five that required marking, the remainder having declined to complete the assignment. Among the five he was pleased—disproportionately pleased—to find Wilberforce, who usually numbered himself amongst the idle. For Wilberforce to have done the prep last night indicated genuine effort, especially as Pearl and Lydon had returned blank books. Wilberforce's composition (and on quick glance it appeared worthwhile; at least it stretched to two sides) felt to John a vote of confidence. Wilberforce was saying to him, in the only language available,
The things you teach us matter, sir. I understand you.

*   *   *

Morgan was starving. He had by stroke of genius deflected Nathan's and Laurie's horrified interest in his summons to the Headmaster. It was, he told them, another of the Academy's howlers. S-K hadn't sent for him; Matron had sent for him, to administer one draft in advance of the other directly before lunch. Who could make sense of it? He wasn't supposed to be lying to them anymore, but he couldn't get into Spaulding, especially not with the glance Alex was throwing him across the queue (
keep your arse out of other people's changing rooms
), threatening to puncture his composure and leave him spewing the truth (
I couldn't have dreamed you up!
). But then S-K materialized, led silent procession into the refectory, and pronounced grace with record coldness. Morgan glimpsed Spaulding three tables away: flushed, distrait, and blasting him with the green-and-brown.

How was he meant to survive this cloak-and-dagger of glances? Noise exploded through the hall, harsh and nauseating. It didn't help that the soup was greasy, that Laurie made lavatorial jokes about what was floating in it, or that an aroma of onions pervaded the air. Morgan scanned the hall for Rees; he'd been absent from the last lesson and was absent now. Morgan hadn't seen him in the Tower when he'd gone for his aspirin just before the meal. He choked down the soup and pulled himself together. Only in the pages of a penny dreadful would Rees go and hang himself. Obviously he was sulking somewhere.

Madness could not reign unchecked forever. Even the Jews got out of Babylon eventually. The trick to an impossible mess, his mother taught him, was to begin in one place and refuse to be discouraged by the enormity of the thing. He couldn't repel a whole army of evils, but he could, if he chose, take Rees down a peg and curb his infernal nerve. He could do it easily. Rees would collapse like a matchstick tower in the face of the technique. Given quarter of an hour and some privacy, Morgan could put an end to Rees's infuriating threats and beat back the column of insanity.