Wilberforce

by H. S. Cross

  —Interesting that, Alex replied. No one noticed anyone out of bed last night?

  He was supposed to be interrogating Alex, not the other way round! Morgan always believed he’d escaped Silk in the end, but had he actually escaped him, now as he faced Alex, longing more than anything to tear the nightgown off him and show him—

  —Did you drug the whole school?

  —Drug? Alex protested. It’s possible there was more than the usual bromide in the cocoa, but beyond that, I’m not deranged.

  He needed to keep his mind on the chat at hand. He needed to isolate the past from the present, and in fact the previous night from the disordered stream of recent time. Alex’s plan hadn’t affected him because he hadn’t gone for cocoa last night, because … because he’d been too agitated by Nathan and Laurie and their supreme unpleasantness. If they hadn’t been so unpleasant, he would have gone for cocoa, in which case he wouldn’t have woken in the night and done the preposterous things he’d done.

  —I don’t know where you get your scruples, Alex said. You do what you like, when you like. What’s it to you if we break a few rules as conscience demands?

  —What gets under my skin, Morgan said, are these tedious insinuations.

  Alex again met his gaze.

  —If you’ve something to say, Morgan continued, why not come out and say it?

  —Cave! came the alarm across the room.

  Alex thrust aside the curtain.

  —Matron’s coming, Carter hissed. And S-K!

  Alex leaned in so Carter couldn’t hear.

  —You’re a hypocrite, he whispered fiercely. You’ve got everything—XV, study, everyone likes you. You stalk who you want to stalk. You shag off through the poacher’s tunnel, day or night. But you don’t look, you don’t see, you don’t hear, and you don’t understand.

  With that, Alex slipped back to his own bed and pulled the covers over his head. Morgan’s heart pounded.

  Footsteps.

  S-K appeared in the doorway, be-gowned and winded. He patted his face with a handkerchief. Matron was at his elbow, and seeing the curtains around Morgan’s bed open, she shut them up again. S-K murmured something, and they moved to the corridor. Presently, she returned and rustled Alex along to her sitting room.

  Morgan didn’t see, didn’t hear, didn’t understand? What had he failed to grasp? He wasn’t the kind of person who turned from the truth. His eyes and ears were wide-open!

  After The Fall, when Emily and Captain Cahill had taken him home, drugged beyond sanity, he had waited in a stupor for his father to return. He had always imagined his father as a knight, in rough armor perhaps, but valiant. Despite involuntary memory of the plunge down stairs, despite fear, self-reproach, and the fog of medicine, he had clung to the certainty that his father would put things right. His father would come to his room, subject him to the burning light of judgment, and wrestle from him the truth of everything that had transpired at school. Even though life at home had changed unrecognizably, he knew that with enough time and will, his father could untangle him from what bound him: what he had done, suffered, courted, and allowed. When his father at last came to see him—arm, head, chest wrapped in bandages—the man seemed to have shrunk in size. He joked mirthlessly about the perils of rugby football, and when he asked if Morgan wanted to tell him anything, Morgan had said no. His father accepted his answer. His last hope for rescue, mauled.

  S-K limited his interrogation of Alex to four minutes. Matron returned for Carter, as he evidently could manage nothing, not even a dressing gown, with bound hands. S-K kept Carter longer than Alex, but soon Matron ushered Carter back to bed and bade Morgan prepare for the Headmaster.

  Numb, almost carefree, Morgan eased his arm into a dressing gown, crammed feet into too-small slippers, and followed her, observing his fate like a wisp above the sea, passionless, empty, on air.

  * * *

  He was certainly getting old. He was already thirty, perhaps halfway through his life span. John’s lungs and legs protested the double dix, protested mightily as he remembered them protesting his last steeplechase at Marlborough, the one he’d run after a highly inadvisable night imbibing with others in his year. They’d all been impaired, so he hadn’t fared as badly in the finishes as he might, but John remembered regretting his excess. Now, in the Yorkshire March of his maturity, he could blame his ill condition on nothing besides age and insomnia. It seemed unfair to be punished for things over which he had no control. His windpipe and calves opposed every incline, his knees every downward slope. Most of the boys perked up after the doldrums of the three-mile mark, and John had deputized four members of the Remove to sweep up stragglers. He suppressed the urge to retch upon reaching the gates, though others did not. He waited there, skin steaming, until the last of the small fry had staggered inside. Shivering, he repaired to Burton-Lee’s changing room.

  It was not his choice to patronize Burton’s House, but S-K had long ago assigned him that changing room, an atavistic reminder of his early efforts to make John assistant master there. Burton-Lee’s House was physically the largest, and its changer well-appointed, which was to say the tiles adhered to the stalls of the shower, the showerheads pointed where aimed, pegs and benches withstood the weights allotted them, and most of the lightbulbs worked. It was, by the standards of the Academy, a palace of luxury.

  John got under the showers. Most of Burton-Lee’s had dressed and were claiming that a meal of some description could be found in the refectory. John allowed himself a moment’s respite beneath the hot cascade, its needles melting the stiffness in his neck. He decided he would have a proper bath that evening no matter what it took. His landlady provided one Saturday evenings, but she had in the past taken pity on him and, for a price, drawn the tin tub outside of schedule.

  Dolefully, he turned off the tap, buffed dry, and dressed. The changing room had emptied, leaving John alone amidst pensive drips. He rinsed his running togs in the sink and took them into the drying room, which was cold and ripe. His stomach writhed in a way he knew indicated hunger but which felt like cramp. He hoped the rumors of lunch were true. How could they not be? If S-K was going to send boys out running, he couldn’t withhold food or he’d have a mutiny on his hands, from masters first of all. John chided himself for having taken the Headmaster seriously even for a moment. S-K hadn’t carried out a full-fledged threat in years, although he had a nice line in the partially executed. That, combined with a thespian’s power to entrance, had kept the hyenas at bay. Thus far.

  John leaned against the thick door of the drying room as if it were an old friend he could sigh against and confess his weariness. It budged beneath his weight, admitting the murmur of voices without.

  On instinct, he froze. The voices were locked in heated but hushed conversation just around the partition.

  —Certainly not tonight, one voice insisted.

  —But it’s perfect, the second voice replied. No one will dare get up to anything now.

  —We never should have gone before.

  The first voice was baritone, familiar yet unrecognizable. It dawned on John how difficult it was to identify a voice without its face. Would he know any voice disembodied, even those most intimate to him?

  —Don’t say that, the second voice pleaded. You—

  —Leave off, One snapped.

  A bump, as someone knocking against a bench.

  —You care too much what people think, Two said. This place is a wreck, full of the most—

  —Will you stop talking, please?

  —You’re the only person who’s ever made things worthwhile.

  John recognized the second voice now, and the recognition brought a sensation like cold mud oozing down his back. It was Rees, the butt of every joke in the Fifth and possibly beyond. Rees had certainly put up with a lot during his time at the Academy, but he’d likely brought much of it on himself with his graceless personality.

  —Look, the first voice said savagely, I’ll think about
it, but if you ever speak to me in public again—and I mean this—I will knock your front teeth in.

  Rees sounded unfazed by the threat:

  —If you don’t want to be spoken to in public, then turn up where you’ve promised to turn up.

  Another clatter, louder this time, as of a bench tipping over with someone on top of it. A grunt, and then one set of footsteps stomped away and out the door. John hesitated, realizing that he couldn’t reveal himself now. He ought to have announced himself at the first moment, unmasked the two interlocutors, and demanded an explanation of their rendezvous. Since he’d failed to do this, he was prisoner to the drying room until the other footsteps departed.

  He waited, shoulder trembling with the strain of holding the door, not daring to move lest it creak and give him away. At last, after an aggrieved sigh, came the sound of a bench being righted and a second set of footsteps trudging out of the changing room.

  John slipped from the drying room and retrieved his jacket, shoes, and cuff links. When he’d finished dressing, he actually scuttled across the changer and peered into the corridor before emerging with performed nonchalance into Burton-Lee’s House. He was annoyed to find himself unsteady, whether from the furtiveness imposed upon him or from the unexpected conversation, he couldn’t say.

  Evidently, Rees was carrying on with someone in the House. That someone possessed a fully changed voice and, despite Rees’s peculiar air of command, struck John as Rees’s social superior. Of course, most of the Academy were Rees’s social superiors, but John had the distinct impression that Rees’s interlocutor was older, someone in the Sixth. Not a prefect, as none of Burton-Lee’s JCR (and John knew and disliked them well enough) would have permitted Rees to speak to him that way. Reviewing the roster of Burton-Lee’s Upper School, John could not think of a single boy who fit the bill. Who would carry on with Rees?

  To be perfectly fair, Rees wasn’t bad looking if you ignored his personality—but who could do that? He was fit enough to aspire to success at Games but maladroit enough never to attain it. If he was lucky, he’d rise to the Second XV by his last year. If only he didn’t care so much, something could be made of him, John thought. In the history classroom, a certain literalness and mental rigidity hampered his progress. He could memorize facts, but the point seemed always to elude him. Again, a lighter touch would have served Rees well, but as it was, the boy expended too much energy wrestling with the injustice, as he saw it, of exerting himself without reward. Since he couldn’t grasp nuance, Rees found John’s lessons difficult and irritating. He resented the irrationality of history, and John found his resentment tiresome.

  John knew that Rees was the sort of boy he ought to try to win over, but really, if he took a hard look at his rosters, there were any number of boys more in need of winning over and more deserving of John’s efforts, deserving because they … well, John couldn’t with Quaker mind say why one boy ought to be more deserving than another, but he felt that some were. Morgan Wilberforce, for instance, could be colossally lazy, willfully resistant to a gift for perception, flippant, and disobedient, yet John found him worthwhile, more worthwhile perhaps than any other boy at the Academy. He could not say why. He did not think it was merely Wilberforce’s good looks and talent at Games.

  He reached the refectory and was cheered to find a meal in progress. The boys looked glum, however, and the meal proved to be only broth, bread, and water. Not even butter. He was famished, and surely the Fourth and Remove were as well after a double dix. He approached the servants to inquire about second helpings. Apparently the supply of broth was ample, but the Headmaster had decreed only once slice of bread per boy. When John inquired into the Headmaster’s whereabouts, the kitchen staff declared such matters beyond their purview and frankly an unwelcome distraction to the onerous task that faced them of feeding two hundred boys after having spent an entire morning undoing the damage of vandals.

  Eventually, John deduced that the Headmaster could likely be found in his study. He jogged across to the Headmaster’s house, where S-K’s housekeeper informed John that her master was not at home. When pressed, she admitted that he’d last been seen accompanying Matron to the Tower.

  John, stifling the urge to slap someone, jogged across the cloisters, across the quad, and up the spiral stairs of the Tower. His legs dragged and his head spun as if he’d drunk too much rather than failed to eat enough. Matron was not at her desk, and the ward was empty save for two Third Formers asleep in their beds. John eyed the closed door of Matron’s sitting room, and before catching his breath or losing his nerve, he knocked.

  Matron cracked the door and looked at him askance.

  —Is the Headmaster with you? he asked.

  She assured him icily that the Headmaster was, and furthermore that he was not to be disturbed. John felt as indifferent to peril as Hercules. Perhaps it was the light-headedness, or his overboiled frustration at the day, or merely an urgent feeling of responsibility for the boys, but he swept past Matron into the room.

  —Sorry to interrupt, he announced. It’s the matter of lunch.

  S-K drew himself up in horror at John’s impertinence. And sitting on a straight-backed chair was Morgan Wilberforce, who leapt to his feet at John’s arrival.

  * * *

  Mr. Grieves showed not the slightest sign of intimidation before Matron or the Headmaster. With a bow of the head, he unfurled his demand: that the Fourth and Remove, having returned from a most grueling double dix, be given more to eat than one slice of bread and broth, unless Matron wanted masses of collapsed boys on her hands.

  This elicited a flurry of conversation in which Matron visibly restrained herself from rebuking the Headmaster. Instead, she demanded that Morgan and Mr. Grieves leave the room and wait in the passageway. Never was Morgan more eager to obey her. They decamped, and the door closed behind them.

  So commanding a moment ago, Mr. Grieves now seemed lost for words. Morgan adjusted his dressing gown. Mr. Grieves took in his appearance and squinted at his chin.

  —Did my bicycle do that to you? he asked anxiously.

  —Oh, no, sir. This was later.

  Morgan hesitated, surprised at the urge to tell Mr. Grieves the truth.

  —Did you have difficulty getting back?

  —Oh, Morgan stammered, yes, I mean, no, that is …

  What could he admit without mentioning Spaulding?

  —That eye’s coming up nicely.

  Mr. Grieves tilted Morgan’s head to examine his injuries.

  —It’s nothing, sir.

  —A colorful nothing. Did anyone see you return this morning?

  —No, sir.

  —And did you see any of this business in progress?

  —No, sir, Morgan answered confidently.

  —Then why the interrogation?

  Morgan’s face prickled as it had in Mr. Grieves’s rooms, his wretched heart displaying itself for any fool to read.

  —S-K’s talking to everyone, sir.

  —A routine interview?

  The remark dripped sarcasm.

  —Not exactly, sir.

  The voices behind Matron’s door had died down. Mr. Grieves’s mistrust stung, but then his expression changed:

  —Can I give a hand at all?

  Morgan was seized with the physical urge to fall upon his knees, to lay his arms and his head across Mr. Grieves’s lap as he used to with his mother when the world threatened, and to feel Mr. Grieves’s hands on his head showing him he would never abandon him.

  Matron emerged and ordered Morgan back to bed. She told Mr. Grieves that the Headmaster would accompany him to the refectory and revise his instructions regarding the boys who had run with him that morning. Why in heaven’s name had Mr. Grieves gone along with such a scheme in the first place? If he imagined for an instant that she would approve, then he was as bad as—

  —Now, Wilberforce!

  Morgan retreated to the ward, listening to Matron’s clatter advertising to anyone withi
n half a mile her overflowing displeasure at everything St. Stephen’s Academy had that day begot.

  * * *

  —You are an inordinately awkward young man, S-K complained as they strode across the quad.

  —Please, sir, John said, I’m on your side, but I’m scrambling just at the moment to understand what that means.

  —I don’t need your criticism, thank you very much.

  John had the sensation of handling a prickly Sixth Former. S-K was unhappy with him, but was it merely because John had disrupted his interview with Wilberforce? Or had the Headmaster discovered something compromising about John himself?

  —Sir, have there been any confessions?

  —None, S-K replied curtly.

  It was important not to leap to conclusions. He ought not to imagine S-K’s tone was anything to do with him.

  —Any hints who was behind it?

  Even if it could be.

  —Or why?

  —Nothing concrete, S-K replied. It’s something to do with the Third, but they’ve put up a stone wall the likes of which I’ve never seen.

  Apparently it wasn’t anything to do with Wilberforce, then, or with his highly unorthodox sojourn in John’s rooms. In the light of day, John couldn’t imagine what he’d been thinking to take Wilberforce in and entertain him for hours. It had been ruinously unwise.

  —Sir, what do you have in mind for this afternoon?

  S-K stopped abruptly under the arcade and began to cough. John made a futile gesture of assistance as the Headmaster hacked into a handkerchief, eyes watering, looking even more frail than before. The man was not yet seventy-five, John knew, but he looked older. His hair was thinning to the point that he couldn’t hide it, dark pockets hung beneath his eyes, the heel of his left shoe was worn down, likely a result of his bad hip. John knew S-K had been battling influenza all term. From the sound of his cough, John wondered if it had turned into something worse.

  —Sir, are you sure I can’t—

  S-K waved him away and regained control of his breath. The form rooms had been opened, he informed John. They would resume lessons after lunch. Later, the Headmaster would make an address.