The Inheritance

by Charles Finch

  CHAPTER NINE

  The friendship between the two boys stretched from September to January. Those were often happy times for the two of them—by a long stretch Leigh’s happiest at Harrow, as he bluntly admitted. But in January, after a smoother autumn, Leigh’s troubles had begun again in earnest.

  Though he attempted to conceal it, it had been obvious from the third or fourth time they spoke that Leigh’s single locus of joy at Harrow was Miss Emily Farquhar. This was the school nurse, a rosy-cheeked young Scottish woman with a soft demeanor and an easy, quiet laugh. He was not alone in this—there were few other feminine presences at the school, and none so becoming—but he might have been alone in the degree of his ardor.

  When they returned from Christmas, it was to find that Miss Farquhar had been replaced. Engaged, was the rumor. For Leigh, who had stood at many a twilight near the chapel steps, hoping merely to get a glimpse of her as she walked the short distance to her little cottage on the school grounds, it had been a profound blow. It was already the worst time of the year, when the days seem to last only an hour or two, and the wind seems stronger than your will, the classroom a mausoleum.

  One Tuesday after Miss Farquhar’s departure, Leigh had missed out on all of his classes. Lenox went by his rooms to check on him—such an absence was so out of the ordinary that all of the students had noted it immediately, for all of Leigh’s usual invisibility—and found his friend sitting on a rug in front of a tall fire, drinking from a bottle of stout.

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Having a day off.”

  Lenox had taken a biscuit and then gone and sat down in the armchair near him. “You’re going to get walloped.”

  “Let them.” Leigh kept his eyes on the fire. “Did you hear back from the solicitor?”

  “Not yet. Any day, I’m sure.”

  They had finally settled on three “suspects,” the two of them. At times Leigh seemed to take the whole thing as a lark. The MB had become a running joke, so that for instance if they were let out early from games (which Leigh loathed, other than the school’s indoor racket game, squashers, at which he possessed a certain angular talent), Leigh would say to Charles with a grin, “The MB has stepped in, evidently.”

  But at other times he seemed to pin some obscure hope on the matter.

  The first of their suspects was Townsend, of course. The second was Leigh’s uncle, his mother’s brother, Robert Roderick, Earl of Ashe. When Lenox had first proposed this uncle, Leigh had been scornful. In the first place it was one of the poorest earldoms in Britain. In the second, there was a longstanding quarrel between brother and sister, dating to before their father’s death, and what was more, his uncle had enormous gambling debts and all of the family’s ready money was tied away from any use, his father having known his son’s character.

  But Leigh had gradually come around to the idea. He was fifth in line for the earldom, after another brother and his three sons. It wasn’t impossible that he would inherit Ashe Hall one day. Perhaps some family feeling had awoken in his debauched uncle, in the last fifteen years?

  What amazed Lenox about this was the way it showed how little Leigh seemed to care for the opinion of the other chaps at school. There was tremendous snobbery at Harrow, and if the other boys had known that he was so closely related to an earl—any kind of earl, even a modest one—they would have found space for him in the social hierarchy of the place, one way or another. But Leigh didn’t care in the slightest, the same way he didn’t care when he got a rip, or when he skipped class to drink beer, or spent two hours staring into a tidepool as if he didn’t have lines from the Aeneid due the next day.

  Lenox had written to the family’s solicitor in London, inquiring whether it was “to the Earl himself that my friend Gerald Leigh ought to address his thanks for the opportunity of studying at Harrow School (where he is flourishing).” As he had written this letter it had seemed to him surpassingly polished, confident, and elegant, the last word in cosmopolitanism; he had very nearly been expected to receive a job offer by return post. But as yet they hadn’t had a response.

  Then there was their third suspect, Brewster. He was more elusive, but had become Lenox’s own personal favorite candidate—an older bachelor in Cornwall, who had been paying unremarkable but steady court to Leigh’s mother since she had emerged from her first mourning. The case for him was very slender: It rested upon one conversation he and Leigh had had two summers before, but a conversation that had concluded tellingly, Lenox thought, with Brewster saying to the lad something like “I hope that you know you can always count me a friend,” a final word to which Lenox, deeply absorbed in his detective stories, had ascribed what he freely acknowledged was perhaps too great a deal of significance.

  “No letter ever, I’d bet,” Leigh said, dejectedly.

  “Chin up,” Lenox had replied.

  “Mm.”

  The fallout from this day Leigh had taken “off” was immediate and ugly. He had been caned by both his housemaster and the headmaster, and warned that he was on thin ice.

  “Thin ice,” he said bitterly that weekend, as he and Lenox walked across the countryside together. He had asked if they might get off the grounds—a rare request—and seemed to want to give his feelings their full liberty. “You would think the whole school was built on a sheet of ice a millimeter thick, for all the times I’ve heard those words.”

  “You are on thin ice, though.”

  Leigh pursed his mouth tetchily. “Not you, too.”

  “You don’t want to be sent down, Gerry.”

  “Don’t I?”

  Leigh stooped down suddenly after saying that. They were in a field, its ground still frosty though it was midday, the pale sun above them throwing off no warmth. Very tenderly, he picked up something. “What is it?” asked Lenox.

  Leigh opened his cupped palms. Within there was a pinkish young field mouse, shivering, its eyes closed. Leigh pulled a bit of biscuit from the pocket of his hunter and put it to the mouse’s lips, but the creature made no movement toward it, expressed no recognition. “My father could spot these from five hundred yards. A wood mouse, we call them in Cornwall.”

  “Are you going to keep him?”

  Leigh wrapped the mouse carefully in his handkerchief. “Yes.”

  They traipsed toward the town, and after Leigh had ventilated all of his emotions about the fools in charge of the school, their talk turned, as was customary, to the three wise men, as they called their suspects for the role of MB.

  Lenox would realize later that it had been a singularly incompetent investigation—but not one without energy, to the credit of his younger self. They had gone and tried to talk the school’s registrar into giving them information; had inquired into whether Townsend used a London bank, since Harrow accepted its fees only from London banks or in cash; Leigh had asked in one of his letters home if his mother thought her brother might have softened and become “a friend.” She had replied that anything was possible, though in a way that sounded much the same way that you might argue it was possible a gargoyle from Westminster Abbey might sprout wings and fly to Liverpool.

  They had uncovered precisely one genuine clue, Lenox would later see. At half-term, Leigh had lost his Greek dictionary. When he returned there was a new one waiting for him—used, from a bookstore in Truro.

  Lenox had thought of that over the years.

  On the afternoon of their walk, Leigh’s mood had grown increasingly dangerous. He wasn’t the sort to get violently or passionately angry, but he could grow very acidic, indeed. “If Townsend is paying to send me to this hellhole, he’s had it over on my family twice,” he said, just as they reached the school gates.

  Lenox winced. Sometimes he thought about how it would feel for four galloping horses and a heavy carriage, taking a corner at speed, to hit you. He hoped that Leigh’s father—who sounded as if he had been so full of life—had been killed instantly. “You have to turn it to your advantage,”
he said.

  “You can’t take any turns on thin ice,” said Leigh.

  The next day the Fifth Form had Tennant’s Latin. It started directly after chapel, and Leigh was late. Lenox had felt his heart fall as the minutes ticked past eight o’clock, and Leigh still didn’t appear.

  Tennant was a smart young buck recently up from Cambridge, who had studied at Marlborough and considered himself a great favorite among the lads—which he was, if you counted only a certain swaggering sort, who did indeed follow his style and slicked their hair to the side and dropped their gs and said “ain’t” a great deal.

  “Lenox, where is your friend?” whispered someone from the next row.

  Lenox had scowled. “Shut up.”

  Tennant, at the blackboard, was writing out the page numbers they were to translate that day. He turned. He had heavy eyelids and a drawling voice. “That you, Lenox Minor? Well, where is Leigh?”

  Edmund was Lenox Major. “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Well. The paddle isn’t going anywhere.”

  A few of Tennant’s favorites snickered.

  Just then, Leigh came in. Everyone gasped: for he was without his hat. The effect couldn’t have been more jarring if he had come in without trousers on. The first and last rule was that you kept your hat upon your head at all times—the gates of heaven could open above, and you would clasp a hand to your hat as you ran toward your savior. They all knew that.

  Tennant had reddened. At first his eyes widened, and then he got a dangerous look on his face. “Where is your hat, Leigh?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Go and find it. Don’t come back until you have it.”

  Leigh had turned, tiredly. “Yes, sir.”

  Tennant, shaking his head and turning to the blackboard, had said, distinctly enough to be clearly heard, “Going to the dogs it is, here, since they started letting in these provincials.”

  The boys on the right side of the room had laughed. Leigh paused, with a look of pure hatred on his face. Lenox tried desperately to will Leigh to catch his eye, but to no avail. His friend turned and left.

  What was maddening was that Leigh would never, ever point out to the other boys that Tennant’s own people were in no way particularly distinguished, and certainly not in comparison with Leigh’s—but they did have money, making the master particularly suited to the kind of snobbery he had just demonstrated.

  Fifteen minutes later the door opened again. Tennant started first at the sight of what came in. All the boys had been doing their translations, but they looked up—and then, though they resisted at first, a tide of giggles rolled over the room, stifled at first, then transmuting into uproarious laughter, impossible to turn back.

  Leigh was wearing four hats, one on top of another. Beneath them he had Tennant’s slick hair; he was also wearing a pink tie, the master’s signature, and profoundly against school rules. He had on his look an absolutely perfect imitation of the sneering and complacent resting expression Tennant had on his face.

  “Get those off,” Tennant said furiously. “Get over here. You need a caning.”

  “Shaaaan’t,” said Leigh lazily, in perfect imitation of the master’s drawl.

  “Get over here.”

  Lenox, who was laughing too, was amazed. Leigh had never been a mimic. “Shaaaaan’t.”

  Tennant started toward the door, but indecision stopped him—then he said, “Right,” and grabbed Leigh by the collar and jerked him forward. Leigh didn’t resist. “We’re going to the headmaster. Continue your translations. They’d better be on my desk finished when I return or you’ll all have Sunday detention.”

  In that single moment, Tennant’s reputation had been permanently damaged. He knew it; you could tell from the rage in his behavior. Nobody returned to their work after Leigh and Tennant had gone, needless to say. They had already begun reliving Leigh’s rebellion, as they would do until it passed with almost no waiting period into Harrow’s highest pantheon of myth and legend.

  When his day was done Lenox ran breathlessly to Leigh’s room. Nobody was there. He knocked on the door across the hall, where a large, oxlike, amiable ginger named Craycroft lived. “What’s happened to Leigh?”

  “Expelled.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mrs. Allison had died two years after Lenox left Harrow; the news spread quickly around Oxford, where many old boys had gone on to study, bearing to its gates fond memories of her. The reported cause, given out with a few minor permutations, was that she had taken a heavy tumble at the greengrocer’s, picked herself up and declared herself fine, gone home, fallen asleep, and never woken. Not the worst death by any means.

  When in later days Lenox thought of school, it was often Mrs. Allison’s little kitchen that popped into his mind, oddly enough. He’d gone there at least every other week for four years. Thinking of it was strangely stirring, perhaps because the kitchen belonged so firmly to a world that he had watched vanish, the world of both Mrs. Allison and of his parents. The England of his boyhood; 1845, 1846: So much had changed since then in utterly irreversible ways, much of it good, to be sure, and yet some of it, too, fraught with the tiring ambiguities of all modernization.

  Take the laundress herself. She had been around sixty when Lenox came to Harrow, which meant that she had been born within a few years on either side of 1785. In those ensuing decades she had likely never traveled more than five miles from her home—almost no Briton had, then. Her husband had been a laborer on a nearby farm, where he was granted a small plot for his own use. He had also sold firewood to the school, because he had the right, bestowed by uncountable generations of tradition, to gather it from his squire’s land. This he could do in one of two ways—it was strictly forbidden to cut it down, but he could fetch any dead branches from the trees with a hooked stick, or he could pick up any fallen wood with his walking staff: could gather it, as the saying went, by hook or by crook.

  Their life had been simple, rural. They had kept a few pigs and chickens to the side of the house. In the kitchen Mrs. Allison had brewed her own beer, from scavenged local barley. Nearby they had cooked over an open fire, never in an oven. They had pumped water for themselves, and for the laundry. They had certainly never seen an electric light.

  It was only when the rails were finished in 1850 that this had changed. Before then food, letters, and people moved no more quickly than a horse could bear them down a road.

  Afterward, suddenly and without warning, it was different. You could send a telegram from London to Leeds in the time it took to have a cup of tea. Trains transported fresh fruit, fresh milk, the day’s newspapers, and the catch of the Atlantic all over England by each morning’s end. (In Lenox’s earliest days, fish had been the delicacy of a squire’s streams and ponds; by the time he reached Oxford, it had become the most popular workingman’s treat in the country, when it was fried together with chipped potatoes, doused in vinegar, and served in a twisted sheath of newsprint.) Almost all at once, in other words, on the stroke of old Mrs. Allison’s death, they had entered Victoria’s era.

  That meant progress, which was a wonderful thing. Parliament began to notice distant problems more quickly—no, of course no child ought to work in the mines or factories; yes, of course there ought to be decent schools; no, they couldn’t have orphanages full of starving charges ruled over by a fat corrupt old miser. It was an unalloyed good that such things had changed. In the north, the boom of industry meant that there were continually new jobs. Above all, life became more interesting, more open-ended. You could travel to the seaside on a whim. More and more people picked up sticks and moved from their villages to the great cities. There were thrilling opportunities to be had for any venturesome youth, who in an earlier time might have seen only a few dozen faces in his entire life.

  And yet, of course, something had been lost too, as it always was when one generation relinquished the world to another.

  The Allisons’ country existed no more. Theirs had been
a small, communal life, unchanging and companionable: the church, the green, the two pubs (where her husband spent his evenings, but which she would only visit at the back door, to fetch beer), the apothecary, the butcher, the dressmaker. The midwife who delivered their five sons. The gatherings at the well whenever a person was sick or in love.

  Lenox could picture their lives in full, because they were the same lives that the laborers upon his father’s land had lived. It had been simpler, truly. That didn’t make it better—but progress didn’t make things better without exception either, and when Lenox thought of the countryside in which he had grown up, its empty lanes and enormous blue skies, the local accents ten times stronger and the beer twice, none of the noise and fug of coal, the emerald fields tilled for their eight-hundredth autumn, when he thought of these things it was hard not to think that it had been at least in some senses a more peaceable world, gentler in its pace, unrushed, milder in its ways.

  It was to Mrs. Allison’s that Leigh had gone when he was expelled, in order to fetch the clothes he had with her.

  Word had gone around the school rapidly that he was simply waiting to be gotten by his mother. (The school, fearing he would run away, refused to let him take the train back home, though he had done it alone for term breaks.) He was now half prisoner in a little stone house next to the apiary, by Grove Wood, watched over by the ancient widow of an old master. He wasn’t even seen at chapel services, and Tennant made it known very quickly that anyone attempting to see Leigh would, themselves, be in serious trouble. He had been a dissident and malign influence upon this school, Tennant told them the day after it all happened, in tones of awesome gravity.

  You could have heard a fly’s wings beating as he used these words, it was so silent in the room. Later that evening, Lenox’s older brother, Edmund, had stopped him outside of chapel. “You’re not going to try and see Leigh, are you?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  Edmund had frowned. This had been probably the least likable six-month period of his entire life, forward and backward—full of the eminence of his position, in the first cricket eleven, sitting the Oxford exam soon enough and a cinch to pass into Balliol. “Now see here. They’ve told us that anyone who goes to see Leigh will be sent down. Do you hear that? Sent down. What would Father make of that?”