Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “No plates! You mean you eat out of hollows scooped in the tables?” they said, with vastly overloaded disgust, as they complacently fingered their own china and plate.

  “Locked in from eight till next morning? And no grown-ups at all?”

  “And anybody just builds fires wherever they like?”

  “And are you telling me you can’t wash or clean your teeth after this ‘lockup’?”

  “So the only hours you are actually compelled to attend school are the seven or so hours of public school each week! For the rest you may please yourselves, just as long as you can please your tutor at the end of term? It seems to me, my lad, that you have been sliding along on the benefit of Mr. Morier-Watson’s teaching this term—and that your good report is more due to him than to anything you have gleaned at Fiennes.”

  “It sounds as if all the real care you get is thanks to Mrs. Oldroyd—who has no connection with the school at all. As far as Fiennes is concerned, you boys in Old School could as well be rotting in some old woodshed. Has anybody from the school, to your knowledge, ever inspected Mrs. Oldroyd’s, or any of the other places, to see that they furnish suitable messes?”

  “Messes! It’s the word right enough!”

  Boy grew more and more annoyed. The women were right, of course—but only from their outside point of view. Fiennes was sloppy and negligent and unfeeling and cold and dirty and barbarous and all the other things they called it. Yet it worked! It suited boys, or most boys. For him and Caspar it was a marvellous place.

  He told them about the new Houses that chief was trying to bring in. Everything there was just as his mother and Winifred would like it. Yet all the boys who lived under the House system, even the pharaohs, envied the boys who lived in the anarchy of Old School and Hospice. But it was no good; neither of them would, or could, see the point.

  Then Caspar came down, trembling from the pain each step cost him, a frail ghost in a nightshirt. It shocked Nora and Winifred, whose sarcastic greeting to each utterance of Boy’s had turned into a comic, unfeeling game.

  “Popsie, you must go back to bed,” Nora said, getting up and running to him; but she pulled him in front of the fire and rubbed his shivering arms. “Why aren’t you sleeping? And where’s your night nurse?”

  “I want to be sent back to Fiennes,” he pleaded. His lip trembled as he begged her with his eyes.

  “After this! How can you say it?”

  “You see!” Boy told Winifred. She pouted.

  “I want to, that’s all,” Caspar said.

  “I’m going there tomorrow. I want to see what sort of place could do that to a child for accidentally breaking a window.”

  “But you won’t take me away? Please! Oh, please!”

  Nora stared at him in bewilderment.

  “Please don’t. Please, please…” His desperation alarmed her. She didn’t want to be blackmailed into a promise she might regret, but she wanted to offer him all the comfort she could. Against better judgement, she said: “I won’t keep you at home if I find it at all suitable.”

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth she knew it had been a mistake to make even so conditional a promise. Abigail, the born pessimist, would have taken Nora’s words to mean the worst. Clement would have decided either way—worst or best—but would have changed his mind in half an hour. Young John and Winifred, her two level-heads, would have been guardedly relieved. But Caspar had a grasp on human nature which, in her more honest moments, she had to admit came straight from her. He now behaved in every way as if she had promised unconditionally that, come mid-February and the start of the new term, he and Boy would go back to Fiennes. She had given the emotional inch, and he, true to his blood, had taken the full span; from now on he would allow no question but that she had promised.

  “You promised, Mama!” She could already hear the plaintive whine, see the bitter tears sprouting, the frank reproach of his gaze. Mercifully those blandishments lay two months away as yet. John might be back by then.

  Chapter 9

  Next day, as her train sped northward, Nora tried to compose her thoughts and feelings about the school. Word had come from the stationmaster at Ingleton to say that Dr. Brockman was expecting her arrival. Young John’s defence of Fiennes had made a deeper impression on her than she had realized at the time. She had thought his enthusiasm rather jejune, his judgement all out of proportion. She had watched the frustration grow in him, the way it grows in all youngsters when a grown-up cannot see what they are driving at, and she had longed for him to hit on something she, too, could imagine herself enjoying, so that she could respond—as much as to say “You see! There are things I can share.”

  But the more he said in praise of Fiennes, the more deplorable the whole place sounded. True, their tutor’s reports had been excellent (though Whymper’s comment on Caspar, written well before Cossack’s onslaught, had been unfortunate in the circumstances: “The little fellow has come out extraordinarily this term,” he had said. But how could one trust reports, good or bad, from such a dreadful place? She would have to get Mr. Morier-Watson to examine them both after Christmas; that would show what sort of progress they had really made.

  And then, just as Young John’s account of the school had confirmed all her worst fears about the place, Caspar had come downstairs in such extremes of agony, not because of what Fiennes had done to him, but because he might not be allowed back! Young boys were extraordinary creatures. She had lived in poverty herself, in a turf hovel near Manchester, after her father had died. Over the last sixteen years she and John had built a fortune, in large part so that their children might be spared the terrible experience of poverty. And now here were her two eldest boys revelling in the sort of life young orphans in a slum rookery might lead—airless rooms, blocked chimneys, no supervision, no washing facilities, loathsome food served with less taste and care for cleanliness than in any workhouse or prison; and when they were not praising all this, they rejoiced in the degree of civilization to be found in the humble cottages of coachmen and carpenters! And, if that were not enough to have to swallow, she and John had to pay for these delights merely because a certain proficiency in Greek, Latin, and divinity was conferred in those conditions! It was insupportable. John simply could not have seen the place—or else he had been hoodwinked by being shown one of the new Houses.

  Of course she would withdraw them from the school, and Dr. Brockman could whistle for his fees in lieu of notice; she didn’t think he’d want the conditions at his school to come out in court. The press would make a jolly picnic of it. And, naturally, John would support her, once he understood how he had been deceived. As soon as she reached that point of resolution she closed her mind to any thought of her encounter with Dr. Brockman; there would quite simply be no argument. The boys would leave and that would be that. In fact, this visit was mainly to persuade John that she had not made the decision lightly but had travelled all the way to Yorkshire and had given the school every chance to vindicate itself.

  She fell to worrying about John. She had had a letter from Arabella Thornton saying that Walter had written to tell her how furiously John was throwing himself into his work in the Crimea. It worried Walter and it worried Tucker, the Stevenson agent out there. And, naturally, it worried Nora, too—the more so in that she was not there to see it, so her imagination served up nightmares that were probably worse than the real thing. She had known from the start that John was going to make himself ill on this job; it was his form of patriotism—a form common enough among men who, for one reason or another, do not wear uniform yet who burn to serve their country.

  On their first contract, Summit Tunnel on the Manchester & Leeds, he had been able to work eighteen or twenty hours a day without harm to his health. But that had been sixteen years ago. Five hundred contracts ago. Four million pounds ago. Command had been new, the work new, every problem new. Every day a new face and
a new challenge. Now? There wasn’t anyone in the business he didn’t know, hadn’t worked for, or who hadn’t worked for him. No type of rock he had not cut, bored, or blasted. No kind of terrain he had not beaten. No weather he had not survived. No timetable he had not met. No treachery he had not outdone. No challenge he had not mastered. The Crimea would offer nothing he had not faced and beaten in a hundred disguises. What challenge did it leave him but the formidable adversary of his own constitution? And he would defeat that, too. She could do nothing except worry and hope he would spare enough of himself to savour that ultimate triumph.

  ***

  The seasons were upside down. October had dealt the snows that belonged to Christmas, and here was December looking like March. It was a surprise, almost, to see no lambs in the fields. After Leeds the train rattled around the edge of the dales through fierce, blustery showers of hail and slushy rain that beat almost horizontally. She could see sheets of water hanging in slanted festoons from ink-black clouds. Between showers the sky would clear to an azure blue across which raced wisps of cloud too thin to dim the sun. In these intervals the fields and woods seemed to smile and relax.

  At Ingleton she thanked her engineer and fireman and told them to be ready to steam back to Leeds at about five o’clock. It was now after lunchtime. She would hardly need the whole afternoon to set a flea in Brockman’s ear, but it was best to allow for any unforeseen difficulties. Then she went to pay her respects to the stationmaster. He told her that while he had been at the school the previous evening, in response to her telegraph, he had run into Dr. Brockman and had thought it best to say straight out why he was there.

  “How did he take the news?” she asked.

  “Not happy,” the stationmaster confessed.

  “Well, I’ll not improve that mood. You know what he did to our boy?”

  “Aye, m’m. It’s the talk of Langstroth.”

  “What are they saying? Does that mean such a flogging is uncommon at the school?”

  “Nay, I’d not say that. But the lad is known here and there in the town, and seemingly well liked. But that place is noted for hard floggings.”

  By the time she returned to the platform her coach had been lifted down and two horses from the local livery stables were being coupled to it. They were fresh enough to take the hill without requiring anyone to dismount. Mademoiselle Nanette peered glumly out at the gaunt landscape they were now entering, made even more gaunt by the fact that the lush pastures and woods of the lower lands were still in sight, less than a mile away but already far below.

  “There is nothing like it in France,” she said with a theatrical shudder. She spoke in French. She and Nora always spoke French when they were alone. Nora owned a lot of property at Deauville, which she hoped one day would become a fashionable seaside resort. Also she and John had friends and connections in France, chiefly in iron and in railways. There were many reasons for keeping her French more polished than most English people would have considered proper or necessary.

  “There is,” Nora contradicted. “The Dordogne. Parts of it are like this. And Pic du Midi.”

  Nanette gave that eloquent French shrug which involves eyes, eyebrows, lips, jaw, neck, elbows, and hands as well as the shoulders. “I don’t know them,” she said.

  Nora smiled to herself. Of course Nanette knew them; she had been to both areas with Nora on several visits. What she meant was that those places were not really France. For her, France began and ended in lower Normandy.

  “Poor children! The English are mad!” Nanette said. Her word for it—fous—was an explosive Last Judgement where the bland English word “mad” would have been a mere comment. Nora looked out at the sheep-razed slopes, the cold stone walls in whose barren crevices nothing had lodged or rooted in five hundred years, the bare stone caps to the hills, the dispirited boggy land to their left, and she thought, The girl is absolutely right! We must be mad to banish our boys to such a limbo as this.

  A heavy shower caught them as they entered Langstroth. People vanished from the street. The town closed its doors and windows and huddled against the stair-rods of water that gushed down out of the skies. The coachman pulled into a narrow street, sheltering somewhat in the lee of the houses. But it was soon over and moments later they trotted along the causeway looking in astonishment at the school.

  The bright sky glistened on every slate, stone, and cobble. And the place was huge—much bigger than Nora had expected. Her sneer to John about “Dotheboys Hall” had conjured up a decrepit academy, the size of a vicarage, built against a workhouse, which, in turn, abutted on an ancient abbey. What she saw was a haphazard arrangement of ancient buildings, ecclesiastical and secular, for all the world like the lopped-off remnant of a medieval city huddled on the vast flank of the hill.

  Their arrival was obviously expected. No sooner had they entered the arched gate than Purse stepped forward, touching his hat. Nora pulled down the window.

  “Percy Oldroyd, m’m,” he said. “I’m to conduct you to Agincourt.”

  To his surprise she got down from the coach. “I’ll walk with you,” she said. “I’ve heard champion things about you. Purse, isn’t it?”

  He smiled, “So they have it, m’m.”

  “It was your wife who first tended young Caspar. I owe you both thanks for that.”

  The smile vanished. “We never wanted thanking less, I tell thee.”

  She relished that friendly “thee.” He had heard the Yorkshire in her. He continued: “When I fetched him off yon brow”—he nodded toward Whernside—“I near went to that Cossack…”

  “Where?” Nora interrupted. “Why did you fetch him off the hill?”

  “Did’st thou not know? Morning after it happened, the little fellow climbed yon brow. Five in the morn, it were. He couldn’t rest, see thee. Dr. Brockman and me, we carried him off it. That’s how he come to in our house.”

  Nora looked up at Whernside with new eyes. She tried to imagine how it might have been that morning…dark and windy, perhaps. Wind moaning around the stones and soughing through the heather. And little Caspar, racked beyond endurance with the pain, struggling up there in the dark and cold—it looked forbidding enough now, what had it been like at five of the morning? Her anger returned with all its primal force. Oh, she would make some dent on this place in the next hour!

  But she had done enough battling in her life to know that a hot head needs a cool mind for a tenant if either is to win. So, outwardly calm, she turned back to Purse. “Well, now tell us, Purse, what has been happening here since? Is this Cusack man here? He’s the one I really want to see.”

  “Nay, m’m!” Purse said with relish. “He were out on his ear that same day. He’s gone for good, he has.”

  “And Dr. Brockman?”

  Purse was puzzled at this. “Doctor’s still here…” he began.

  “Yes, of course,” she interrupted impatiently. “I mean how…has he changed…has he said anything?” She floundered. How could Purse know the answers to these questions? “Did he say aught that morning?” she asked. “When you…” She pointed at Whernside.

  “Well now he did say one thing.” Purse spoke as if he had just remembered it. “He said, ‘This’ll never happen again!’ Aye, that’s a fact. ‘This’ll never happen again!’ I didn’t know, like, if he said it to me or to the little mite. Not that he could hear him, being passed out like. But them were his words—‘never happen again.’”

  “D’you believe him?”

  “Oh, I do, m’m. It’s my opinion he were right shocked, Dr. Brockman.”

  This brief talk with Purse in no way dispelled her anger but it did blunt the very sharpest edge of it—enough to prevent her from getting off on a disastrously wrong foot with Dr. Brockman. Also, more subtle influences had been at work as she and Purse had walked among the school buildings. The ancient walls, the worn steps, the pleasantl
y protective cloisters and yards, the stone water cisterns—she saw them all with a mind’s eye that had been softened by Young John’s eulogy. It was not hard to understand how such a place could grow on you.

  Brockman did her the honour of coming to his gate as soon as he heard the carriage approach; he was embarrassed to see Nora walking ahead of it, so that he had to meet her cool gaze all the last thirty paces of her approach, from the moment Purse turned back to show the coachman where to take the horses.

  “Mrs. Stevenson? I trust you had not too uncomfortable a journey,” he said.

  She took his hand for the briefest moment. “I’ve had very little comfort, Dr. Brockman. Young Caspar has had less.”

  “Indeed!”

  She could see his eyes appraising her—not as men’s eyes usually appraise a woman and as she was used to seeing men’s eyes appraise her. Brockman’s saw into her, seeking something within to weigh and to judge. “May I offer you some refreshment?”

  He spoke as casually as if she had merely called upon him while on an errand elsewhere; she was not going to let him turn this into some chance meeting. “My time is short,” she said. “And I wish to see this school before I go. It will be best if we walk and talk.” She turned and faced the way she had just come. Nanette was getting out of the coach.

  “As you think best,” Brockman said curtly. “And your companion?”

  “Since she is neither a defenceless child nor legally in your care, I assume she will be safe from assault under your roof, Doctor?”

  It was a prepared rebuke but she had not imagined herself smiling as she said it, not even an acid smile. She did not know why she had smiled.

  He did not smile. There was now a tight-lipped wariness in his attitude toward her. She asked Nanette, in French, what she preferred to do; Nanette answered that she had some letters to write. Mrs. Brockman had come halfway down the path when her husband opened the gate to let Nanette through. He introduced his wife to Nora, though Nora was clearly her junior. Nora then presented Nanette as her companion.