by H. S. Cross
The Fifth dragged their feet into his classroom and drooped into their seats as if their slumbers had merely been interrupted by the bell. John had planned on reading to them, but as he greeted them, he had to admit that his throat was parched after reading to the abominable Third. That group’s smug composure had all but proven their responsibility for the night’s chaos, and now they had departed to oppress someone else, leaving him with the more intractable Fifth, bored beyond repair with everything His Majesty’s realm could offer.
—Please take a sheet of impot paper and tear it neatly in two, he heard himself say.
Some errant lobe of his brain had taken command and was instructing the form to write the name of a historical figure on one half, and on the other half a personal secret.
—You mean a secret that person had, sir?
—How are we to know anything like that?
—Don’t be so literal, he scolded. Write a name on one side, and some secret, related or not, on the other. Don’t share with your neighbor. Yes, of course you should fold it up. Don’t be a nitwit.
John produced two tins from his desk and dumped their contents unceremoniously into the drawers. He passed tins down rows, directing the Fifth to place names in the blue tin and secrets in the red.
—What’s this got to do with history, sir?
—Are you going to make us write something?
—We couldn’t possibly write anything, sir, after the lunch we had.
—What if someone finds out our secret? Then what, sir?
—Don’t put a real one, idiot! Holland’s secret’s real!
John refused to let verbal disorder rile him. They were awake now, and although he would surely have cause to regret it, the errant lobe declined anxiety. It sailed forth in the lee of its brilliant idea.
—Right! John said pitching his voice to the back of the room. The game is called Chairs.
Groans.
—Sir!
—Can’t we have independent reading, sir?
—Chairs, John repeated. Last to bring his papers to me—
This as he strode down the aisle and retrieved the tins.
—will be It.
A pause in which they translated his command, then they rushed his desk, elbowing one another to get their papers in the correct tins. Rees was still cogitating in his usual constipated manner. He would easily be the last. And now, having resumed their seats, they were indeed waiting for him.
—Never mind now, Rees, John said. You’re first in the Chair.
Cries of mock horror accompanied Rees’s march to the front, in which he affected martyrdom but accomplished only a priggish gait. Capitalizing on the sense of drama, John swept his desk chair forward and gestured gallantly for Rees to sit. With a look of supreme disgust, Rees sat. Applause broke out. John raised a hand and made it cease. With the elegance of a court butler, John offered Rees first the blue tin, then the red. Rees opened one slip from each as if expecting scorpions.
—Read silently, John instructed. Say nothing.
Rees read them and passed them to John. Without satisfying his own curiosity, John tucked the papers into his waistcoat.
—The Chair is now occupied by a historical figure. He—or she as the case may be—in addition to possessing an eminent biography, also possesses a personal secret, which may well be unknown to this very day. Your task is to unmask both. Right! Roundheads—
He gestured to the right-hand row of desks.
—and Cavaliers.
He gestured to the left. The Fifth sniggered. John was perfectly aware of the anatomical usages of the terms, but he pretended ignorance.
—Each side will take turns asking a question of the Chair. The answer may not exceed one sentence, so ask with care. The Chair must answer truthfully but may not mention his or her identity or secret directly. If, upon hearing your question answered, your side wishes to essay a guess as to the Chair’s identity or the Chair’s secret, you may. Incorrect guesses will forfeit a turn. Correct guesses will earn the side five bonus points in the next examination.
John had played this game, or something like it, at student parties in Cambridge. They did it with historical and literary figures, but the addition of the secret—where had that come from? The game was challenging enough, he recalled, merely guessing the Chair’s identity if the Chair played along, which he doubted Rees could; but to introduce an alien element, a secret that likely had nothing to do with the actual figure in question, wouldn’t that muddy already murky waters to the point of nonsense?
Sense was overrated. Forty minutes remained to his enforced society with these creatures, and the lobe had determined they would spend it guessing Rees’s secrets—fiction or fact, who actually cared? Alea iacta est!
—Are you a man or a woman? a representative from the Roundheads asked.
Rees curled his lip into a sneer:
—A man, you impertinent scoundrel.
Oohs rolled through the room. The Cavaliers’ first questioner stood:
—When were you born?
Rees consulted the ceiling:
—As the Great Regent was assassinated. Cruelly, I might add.
This was just the type of arcana Rees was wont to latch onto without having the slightest notion of its implications. It was also the type of showing off that went such a long way towards alienating his peers. John could see none of them followed. A few faces cottoned on to the general period, but even John had to think before working out the year to which Rees referred, and even longer before it struck him who had been born then. By this time, several more questions had passed, establishing that the Chair had died a painful death; that he had escaped at least part of the death to which he’d been sentenced; that he had fought as a soldier; and that he had been born in England.
Despite his irritation at Rees’s ornate display of historical minutiae as well as his artificial acting style, John could not deny that Rees had thrown himself into the role. And once John had worked out who it was, he had to admit that Rees’s performance was canny. He strung them along, growing more irate with each turn, taking on more and more the resentful psychology of a misunderstood martyr. Yes, he had endured torture. What of it, worms? No, he had not been burned at the stake, not precisely. A brilliant red herring, John realized. He was in fact—and the Chair assured them this was not merely his own vast opinion of himself—among the renowned of history.
And on it went, until the Roundheads put it together and named him: Guy Fawkes, in the flesh. Rees managed a disdainful nod but remained in character, for there was still the secret to guess, and John had garnered no clues during the first part of the examination as to what the secret could possibly be. He tried to predict the imagination of the class. Would it be violent? Whimsical? Depraved? John felt sure their imaginations ranged across every spectrum, but what would they dare write upon anonymous papers on such a day as this?
The sides closed in with rapid questioning. Was his secret generally known? It wasn’t. Was it a sin? Fawkes confessed that it was. Did it involve a woman? It did not. Did it involve murder? It did not. Theft? Blasphemy? False witness? None of the above. John watched the class grow bolder as they suggested crimes of increasing vulgarity: fornication? lying with a beast? Greek love? Rees grew incensed in his denials, his face turning red, his voice rising in strident disavowal, to the point that John began to wonder how many of the denied crimes Rees had ever perpetrated, or at least contemplated.
—Where did you commit this crime?
John thanked God for Morgan Wilberforce, who had the self-command to haul the conversation out of the gutter and ask a pertinent question.
—Under torture, Rees/Fawkes replied after a ghastly pause.
Furious whispered conference amongst the Roundheads, and then Wilberforce raised a hand to indicate a guess from his side.
—Did you apostatize? Wilberforce asked.
Rees dropped his head in shame, resigned before his executioner. Like Iago, he said no more,
holding his posture dramatically until it dawned on them that Wilberforce’s guess had been correct, and the Roundheads had won both points. Rejoicing broke out across the form. John allowed them some celebration and then offered his hand to Rees, still frozen in tableau.
—Well done, Rees.
Rees held his pose a moment too long before raising his head, still cloaked in the aura of Fawkes.
—Thank you, sir.
John felt the remark as reproach. Rees was looking as if he saw into John’s errant lobe. Rees set his jaw as if to say, You think you can take me for granted as everyone else does. You think you can orchestrate clever games and cast me in the role of despised and that I will not notice. But I do notice. If you cut me, do I not bleed? I expect their scorn, but yours, sir?
Rees looked away, and John realized that the form had, in his reverie, begun chanting rhymes about the fifth of November, demanding a penny for the Guy and suggesting Rees’s immolation.
John had done this. He had introduced into his classroom a game whose object was to put Rees on the spot and see what he did. He hadn’t chosen Guy Fawkes or apostasy, but as with all wicked deeds, fate had intervened to help it along. What would S-K do if he found out—not only that John had been playing games in lessons on such a day, but that—Lord, help him—he had permitted a mob mentality to gather momentum and make mockery of the Gunpowder Plot, mockery that turned even now to riotous celebration of the morning’s bonfire in the … What had he been thinking?
—That will do!
John raised his voice. His heart raced.
—I’ve no idea, he projected carefully, what on earth you imagine you are about. Sit down.
His scathing tone worked. They shut up and sat. He turned to someone he could reliably bully:
—Lydon!
—Sir?
—Perhaps you can recall for us what the Headmaster said very clearly at lunch about his expectations for your conduct this afternoon?
Lydon shuffled and looked at the floor.
—Well?
Lydon summarized S-K’s threat.
—In that case, whatever possessed the lot of you to behave as you just have? Most especially when I had gone out of my way to offer a lesson that diverged from the ordinary, knowing the weight under which you have all labored today?
They did not answer him. John’s voice developed a lofty, offended tone as he made it clear that taking advantage of his generous nature was the type of thing he would have expected only from selfish wretches, or beasts. What’s more, he was quite beside himself to discover that they would make light of the repugnant vandalism that had been perpetrated only hours before. The Fifth mumbled but appeared too depleted to do more under rebuke.
—You may well mutter now, John persisted allowing his reproof full range, but it’s all a bit late, isn’t it? How do you imagine it felt for Rees, having gamely played his role, forced to sit there listening to the lot of you carrying vindictively on?
Morgan Wilberforce raised his hand:
—Please, sir. We were wrong, but it was only in fun.
John would not, he told them, dignify such an excuse by bothering to tear it to shreds as it deserved. In fact, he would waste no further words upon them. For the remaining minutes of the lesson they could begin their prep—
—But, sir, we’ve already got prep in Latin and Chemistry!
Their prep, which would be an essay of no less than two hundred fifty words outlining precisely what evidence existed to support or to refute the notion that Guy Fawkes could have renounced his faith. Due tomorrow, no exceptions.
The form looked daggers at him, but he did not care. He told Rees as gently as possible to return to his seat. Maddeningly, Rees seemed bent upon maintaining his role and moved with a steely arrogance that made John want to strike him quite firmly across the face. How they would, any of them, finish this execrable day without finishing one another off, he had no idea.
* * *
The aspirin had worn off. Lunch had worn off. Yet another lesson remained in the day, the one at which Nathan and Laurie would expect a full report on Alex. But what he was at liberty to say about Alex would fill one side of a postcard, and the person he had been while interrogating Alex had—he realized—expired.
Now he was a person Spaulding considered worth notice. Earlier in the balcony he had not realized the fundamental conversion under way, and when Spaulding had said he did not feel sorry for him, Morgan had flushed with disappointment. But if Spaulding did not feel sorry for him, why had he unbuttoned his clothing? He could only have done it by express intent, a free and full will. Spaulding wanted Morgan not out of pity but out of desire for what Morgan was. He wanted him for himself, because of himself. Spaulding reached for him—Spaulding who was everything and had everything. If Spaulding could desire him, who knew what kind of person he might secretly be, or become?
They arrived at French, where Hazlehurst began to interview them in various tenses on various topics. Soon he would instruct them to interview one another, and Morgan would have to deliver his account to Nathan and Laurie. He had no desire to revisit a single moment of the Tower, and he had every desire to revisit the Hermes Balcony, its blueness, the ghost of incense, and the ticklish, utterly—
—What on earth’s the story with Alex? Nathan demanded.
Morgan reported the bare facts from the Tower, not facts about the bare, of course, but facts stripped of unnecessary detail, not that he ought to be thinking about stripping while speaking sotto voce with his friends—he had to concentrate with every muscle or he would—Hazlehurst drifted near, forcing them into the conditional tense. If they traveled to Monte Carlo, Laurie would hire a motorcar and traverse the Alps. Nathan would relax himself by the seaside, encounter some young ladies, and dine at a restaurant. Morgan would make the games, play at cards, and win many francs to construct his castle in Alsace-Lorraine.
Quickly he finished his report: Covenant, bromide, wax, gunpowder, revolution. Nathan looked ill. Hazlehurst passed by again. Laurie would perhaps mount a sailboat and travel with some friends to Italy, where they would speak Italian. Morgan would promenade the countryside, discover a daughter at a farm, and buy her milk. Nathan would kill animals.
These two had no inkling of the revolution that had occurred within him! They spoke as if he were the same person they had always known, a person concerned with explosions, locks, the residents of the Tower. Laurie claimed to know the bandaged fag, at least by name:
—Carter. He did that sonnet about snow, in the poetry competition last term.
Morgan and Nathan regarded him, dumbfounded.
—Little weed can hurl a couplet like a lethal weapon.
Morgan couldn’t spare an inch of his mind for poetry, for bandaged fags, for Alex, or for the things that excited his friends. He needed aspirin. He needed food. He needed to see Spaulding, meet his eye, and know—that Spaulding saw him, wanted him, and knew him, for his secret true self.
14
After a tea that scratched at their hunger, they repaired to the study for Prep.
—First business, Laurie announced, the fags.
Nathan excavated the last of their biscuits and some tinned pilchards that proved inedible once exposed to light and air. Laurie installed himself on the window seat and called for bright ideas. What were they three to do about Alex, about the Fags’ Rebellion, and about the Headmaster’s resolve to get to the bottom of it?
—What do you imagine there is to do? Morgan protested. They’ve got their wretched Covenant, and Alex can look after himself.
Laurie could not accept such logic. If this was Morgan’s position, then he was blinded by exhaustion and lack of exercise. Morgan lay on the floor and stretched his shoulder while Nathan and Laurie examined the matter. They discussed stealing here, dashing there, conferring with this one and with that; they considered emergencies, contingencies, tendencies, every cies under the sun except the pertinent point—that it was not their concern. After much
heated verbiage, it dawned on Morgan that the problem for Laurie was that the Fags’ Rebellion actually wasn’t his affair. He knew the truth of it, but he had not abetted the crime. He was not even under suspicion. The most sensational caper in Academy history had been pulled off without Laurence F. Lydon, victor of the Great Prank War (1923). As for Nathan, he seemed torn between a desire to shield his brother from harm and a desire to see him get the lambasting he deserved. Barring expulsion, Nathan hoped Alex would be made to suffer in a way he’d remember a very long time, or at least the remaining ten days of term.
They debated like a useless parliament. Morgan wondered if other studies were similarly wittering or were confining themselves to complaint and gossip, freed from the ambition of Doing Something.
—Alex should own up, Laurie argued, not only for our sakes, but for his own.
—S-K’ll crucify him, Nathan said.
—He won’t dispose him, Laurie replied. S-K never disposes anyone. Can’t afford to.
—Still.
—Your brother won’t be able to sit down for a week after S-K has finished with him, but he’ll earn people’s respect.
—The fags’ll idolize him even more than they already do, Morgan broke in. How will that help?
With this, Nathan grasped what Morgan had known from the start:
—There’ll be no living with him!
—It’s a good reason to own up, Laurie reasoned. Think of it, hero and martyr.
