‘You’re late,’ the man said, shovelling a forkful of peas into his mouth. He had a rolling stomach and two stick-like legs tucked below the table. Glasses sat on a squat nose guarded by heavy jowls. ‘You were due to come at noon.’
‘The train was late.’
‘To bow to the train’s faulty schedule is to give in to chaos. Punctuality, you will come to understand, is strictly adhered to in this house.’
‘Your uncle is very fond of schedules,’ Aunt Piety said, leaning back in her chair. ‘You can expect a proper greeting when mealtime ends in’ – she looked up at the clock – ‘thirty seconds.’
The man scowled, but buttered his bread, some crumbs falling into his beard as he ate. ‘Quite right. For, how many times have I said it, Piety? Timeliness is the foundation of orderliness, and orderliness is the foundation of civility itself.’
Just then, several clocks clanged at once, all with different chimes. At that sound, the cook came in and began to clear plates. The man dabbed his face with a napkin before standing up and extending his hand.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Elwyn Bramble, I am Timothy Blackwell. You may call me Uncle, despite the obvious lack of blood relation. I’m pleased to meet you.’ And he did look pleased, smiling at Elwyn, untroubled by or unaware of his nephew’s unkempt appearance. Elwyn set the cake box down and shook his uncle’s hand. ‘In handshakes, always be firm, but never too firm, Nephew,’ Timothy corrected. ‘An overly firm handshake is a sign of aggression. Aggression is a sign of weakness.’ He saw some gesture imperceptible to Elwyn out of the corner of his eye and turned around to his wife. ‘This is my project, Piety. How I instruct the boy is none of your concern.’
‘I didn’t say a thing,’ she said, then turned to Elwyn, still in her seat, and extended her hand. ‘I am Piety Blackwell, and that’s what you may call me.’ When he shook her hand, she said his handshake wasn’t nearly firm enough, and he couldn’t tell if she was joking.
‘I brought you a cake,’ Elwyn said. ‘My mam sent it, to thank you. To thank you both.’
‘What kind is it?’ Piety had eyes that seemed to be reading everything – like Whim’s, but much less forgiving.
‘Not one I’ve ever had before. She said something about pepper-honey? She said you’d know.’
‘Wasp cake,’ Piety said, smiling, but not happily. ‘It used to be a favourite of mine.’
‘Your aunt doesn’t eat sweets,’ Timothy said, taking the cake box and handing it off to the maid. ‘But you can write to your mother later and let her know that the gesture was greatly appreciated. It is, after all, the gesture that matters.’
‘Timothy will surely appreciate it.’ Piety nodded towards Timothy, who watched the cake leaving the room.
‘All things in moderation,’ Timothy said. Elwyn was also watching the cake and plates still full of chicken disappear. His stomach rumbled. ‘Let me show you to your room, then we can get down to business at, say, quarter to five.’
‘Do you think I can have something to eat first?’
‘You will have to learn to listen more closely to conversation, Nephew. I think it has already been firmly established for you that mealtimes are to be strictly adhered to. This household, like all places of order and reason, has a schedule. You will soon learn it. But for now, the preliminary things. I have everything prepared for your lessons. Come along. I’ll take your things.’
‘Lessons? Won’t school begin in the fall?’ Elwyn asked. But his uncle had already picked up Elwyn’s buckskin bag. Timothy held it far from his body as though it held a hive, and gestured with his other hand that Elwyn follow him out into the hall.
As Elwyn left the room, he turned back to look at his aunt. The grey eyes were watching him, her hands folded before her. Whim said you could tell everything you want to know about a person by looking at their hands and their eyes. Piety’s hands were pale and unworked, that was easy enough to see. But as for her eyes, Elwyn thought at first that they looked bored, but the next moment he thought they were laughing.
CHAPTER 5
Devotion
THE BLACKWELL HOUSE was an old place. It had winding halls, deep closets and narrow, skylit rooms. The idea of building houses into hills had originally been a humble impulse, but wealthy families like Timothy Blackwell’s soon discovered an advantage: when ostentatiousness is out of fashion, it’s handy to have a home whose size no one can see. And the Blackwell house, bought generations ago with Blackwell money, was a sprawling, well-kept place. For over a hundred years, the floors had been trod on and cleaned and waxed. The clocks were kept wound, faces clean.
The strangest thing about the house, Elwyn discovered, was that it was divided in two. The original owners, husband and wife, often quarrelled, and so they made every arrangement to live as separately as possible while retaining respectability. This tradition, it seemed, had either been maintained or renewed, because one half of the house was clearly Piety’s, the other was Timothy’s, with the dining room and a formal parlour in the middle. Timothy gave a quick tour, naming the rooms as they passed them: Piety’s study, Piety’s bedroom, Piety’s sitting room. Piety’s library, Piety’s parlour. There were fewer clocks in her side of the house, different paintings, different sorts of books.
The house was not what Elwyn had imaged. He had been told that his mother and his aunt had both left the Hill farm where they had grown up, his mother to marry his father, his aunt to get an education. Mirth had wound up poor, while Piety married into a rich old family. Rich. Elwyn had pictured her house as a place with crystal chandeliers. Gold leaf on the wallpaper. Velvet cushions, silk pillows. Instead, there were clocks. And rugs. And rooms. Sturdy antique furniture wet with polish. They were, in fact, fine things, but not the sort Elwyn knew how to value, and he was vaguely disappointed.
Elwyn’s room was in Timothy’s half of the house, the northern side, where less sun slanted through the heavy glass. It was an austere room with a well-built desk, a well-built bed, thick sheets. If anything, it was plainer than the rest of the house, but stepping inside, Elwyn felt overwhelmingly grateful. He had never had a room all to himself.
‘A bath has been drawn for you in the washroom down the hall,’ Timothy said. ‘Be sure to be at my study at exactly half past four. No later.’ His heavily browed eyes looked over his glasses at Elwyn. ‘Remember, Nephew: punctuality is the foundation of orderliness and—’
‘“Orderliness is the foundation of civility”. I remember,’ Elwyn said, opening the wide armoire doors and putting the few things he had inside. Then he bathed and dressed and went where he was told. The airless little study was not far from Elwyn’s room. He sat in a heavy chair as his uncle selected books from the shelves that covered the small space. The room smelt of those books; most of them were thick with unintelligible names like Critical and Theoretical Underpinnings of Pedagogical Epistemologies.
On the wall across from Elwyn was a large clock, its pendulum as long as his arm. In the glass face, Elwyn could see his own reflection. There was only one small mirror at his house in Badfish Creek, and Elwyn’s sisters had pilfered it up to their room years ago. He found excuses to go up there and admire his face, the strong line of his jaw, his lively expressions. His sisters were constantly teasing him for it, but he didn’t mind much; nothing was wrong with a little vanity where it was deserved. But even though his reflection looked just the same there in the study as it did in the mirror back home, something about it wasn’t right. There was a dissonance.
Timothy closed the book he was perusing, cleaned his glasses and smiled. ‘Let’s get right to the core of it, Elwyn.’ The look on his face was that of someone about to give a gift. ‘Not only have I given you permission to stay here and offered to supervise your schooling – I have decided to devote myself to it. Your education will be my particular project. But it will require a great deal from you. It will require your full attention. Full devotion.’
‘Devotion to what?’
‘Attention,
Nephew. Devotion. You will need to decide if you want to commit to this now. Because if you are unwilling, there is no point in our going any further.’
‘I’m sorry – further in what?’
‘In this project. Our project.’ Timothy’s jowls shook with emphasis. He didn’t seem annoyed. He looked happy to have the opportunity explain himself, his work. Timothy lifted a notebook. ‘Do you see this?’ he asked. Elwyn nodded. ‘This is where I will be keeping notes on our progress. June the third,’ he read. ‘Elwyn arrives. Appearance: dishevelled. Vocabulary: moderate. Introduction to instruction begun.’ Elwyn looked blankly at his uncle.
‘You see, I used to work in academia. Social and educational research. I was working on studies that asked schools to incorporate the agricultural population by mandating that rural students be brought into schools in town centres three days a week. A highly successful experiment. It had been thought by many that it couldn’t be done, that poor rural people shouldn’t be given the same education as our more privileged citizens. My analysis countered that assumption and became quite sought after, not only within academia, but in government as well. For a while I was getting invitations to speak nearly every week…’ Timothy’s eyes glistened behind their thick spectacles, but then the gleam faded.
‘That was all before my heart gave out – strain and overwork, you see. I was encouraged to take an early retirement. And of course it was a blessing. I had been putting off starting a family for quite some time. I met your aunt, we settled here in my old family home in Liberty – a fine town, quite sought after. I now have time to get involved in civic leadership – planning commission, education initiatives and so forth. And ample time for leisure.’ Elwyn’s uncle said this last word with barely veiled displeasure.
‘But,’ Timothy continued, ‘when your letter arrived, it all became very clear. Why not get back into my old research? Take it a step further? If rural Hill folk could be educated, why not Foresters? I could write a first-hand account of it, of our work here, our success. An account of what a young Forester may become, given the proper guidance and instruction.’ Uncle Timothy looked down at his notebook with tenderness, as though it were a child. ‘The university will be clamouring to have me back,’ he added, more to himself than to Elwyn. Then he looked up. ‘Do you understand any of this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Elwyn said, truthfully. He was a little light-headed with hunger.
‘Well,’ Timothy said, brightness returned to him, ‘all I need to know from you is: are you willing to do what is necessary? To surmount any obstacles that come in your way? To devote yourself fully to your success?’
‘Of course I am,’ Elwyn said. ‘I give myself fully to everything.’ Timothy wrote something down in his notebook.
‘That’s what success is really about, right?’ Elwyn went on. ‘It isn’t being good at what you do. It’s about throwing yourself into something. And then the next thing and then the next until something sticks.’
But Timothy was scribbling away in his notebook and didn’t seem to hear his nephew at all; Elwyn’s attitude was hardly one his uncle would have agreed with. ‘Now, the first step on the road to an educated life,’ Timothy said, finishing what he was writing and closing the notebook, ‘is becoming literate.’
‘I know how to read,’ Elwyn replied.
‘Pardon?’
‘I said, I know how to read.’
Timothy looked puzzled, but before he could say anything, there was a pounding at the front door, loud and determined enough to be heard down the hall. They waited for someone else to answer, but the knocking didn’t stop.
‘Piety? Boaz? Can one of you get the door? We are discussing our lesson plans,’ Timothy shouted – shouting across rooms was forbidden in the Blackwell house, but this didn’t seem to bother Timothy when it came to his own behaviour. ‘We have this time scheduled. We mustn’t be bothered.’ There was no answer. ‘Of course, she had to choose this afternoon to go for one of her long walks…’ Timothy muttered to himself. ‘Excuse me one moment, Nephew.’ He got up and left the room, then a few minutes later an angry voice filled the hall. Elwyn went to see what the fuss was about, and once he was in view of the front door, a slender, red-faced man pointed furiously at him.
‘That’s him! That’s the forest trash that stole Miss Rhoad’s goat!’
The man pushed past Timothy and lunged sloppily at Elwyn. Elwyn had spent his life hunting; his reflexes were sharp. He dodged, and the man tripped on the carpet, landing face first on the floor.
CHAPTER 6
The Goat Girl
ELWYN BENT DOWN OVER THE MAN.
‘Oh dear. I think he’s dead.’ Timothy pulled at his beard anxiously. ‘I did nothing to provoke him. He was out of his mind.’
‘He’s not dead,’ Elwyn said. ‘He smells like he’s been drinking. He hit his head on the floor.’
Timothy adjusted his glasses.
‘Help me move him to the couch,’ Elwyn said. They heaved the body over, bumping into several pieces of furniture, Timothy nearly dropping his side more than once. The man’s shoes were caked with mud. ‘Who is he?’ Elwyn asked.
‘Said he worked in the stables of Cronus Rhoad, but I can hardly believe that. Rhoad’s running for the Chancellorship. He would be more careful who he hires.’
‘Why is he here?’
‘Just like you said. Drunk. And in the middle of the day, too. He was raving about some goat he’s boarding that belongs to Rhoad’s daughter.’
‘Goat?’ Elwyn felt light-headed again.
‘Why Rhoad’s daughter would have a goat is beyond me. Unruly animals.’
Elwyn walked back out the still-open door, where the air smelt of grass and the sun shone on the stone street. He shaded his eyes to try and catch a glimpse of the animal that had followed him on his walk from the station, but he saw nothing. So he went back inside, and got the slightly chewed shirt he was wearing when he arrived. He threw it out the door and watched.
‘What are you doing?’ Timothy said. Elwyn put a finger to his lips, but kept his eyes on the shirt on the stone path. Sure enough, after a minute or two the animal came cautiously over and began to chew on what was left of the buttons. Elwyn grabbed the goat around its shoulders and used the shirt as a makeshift collar.
His uncle came out of the house, squinting in the sunlight and looking up and down the street.
‘Where does this Rhoad live?’ Elwyn asked.
‘Down the road a mile or two… the big place, over the river. But, Elwyn, our lesson time is of utmost importance. We have a schedule to adhere to,’ Timothy said, his pink face turning back towards the house. ‘This man is clearly unbalanced. I don’t see any reason to believe this is actually Miss Rhoad’s goat.’
‘I’m not going to let anyone think I’m a thief,’ Elwyn said. Timothy hesitated, flustered. ‘Over the river?’
‘Yes,’ Timothy consented. ‘To the north, impossible to miss. It’s his summer residence, gaudy as anything, even for a businessman and aspiring politician.’
‘I’ll be back soon. If the man wakes up, let him know where I’ve gone.’ Elwyn started leading the goat north. He was hungry and annoyed about the accusation of goat-stealing, but he couldn’t resist giving the animal a scratch between the horns. The sun was hot and breezeless, and Elwyn walked as quickly as he could. On the streets, people again stared. A child walking with his mother pointed at Elwyn and began to say something before she hushed him and rushed away. ‘This is all your fault, you know,’ Elwyn said to the goat as it reached its neck out to try to get a bite of Elwyn’s trousers.
The Rhoad house was as easy to find as Timothy said it would be. It was a great, gleaming place, built on top of a hill instead of under it. It sat like a crown on the north side of the river, massive white walls studded with windows. The front door had swirling decorative glass set into the wood, and there was a button beside it with the words PUSH HERE on a brass plate. When Elwyn pushed, he could hear a ringing i
nside the house – not just an ordinary bell, but several of them, playing out a tune.
Elwyn was surprised when the woman who opened the door was very old and frowning. He expected the inhabitants of the house to be as glamorous as its exterior. She stood before Elwyn, a chandelier twinkling from the ceiling behind her.
‘Hello,’ Elwyn said. ‘You must be Mrs Rhoad. I’ve come to return your daughter’s goat.’
The woman cackled, exposing a large gap where teeth were missing. ‘Mrs Rhoad! I haven’t heard that one before.’
Behind her, Elwyn could hear music playing. The woman was still laughing, but Elwyn’s gaze went from her into the hall beyond, where he could see large vases of hothouse flowers and gilded frames. It was a glimpse, only a glimpse. But Elwyn felt immediately bound to the house, whether by desire or destiny, he didn’t know. He wanted to see more, wanted it desperately. He had this feeling that his future was somewhere in those halls. The goat strained on its makeshift collar, trying to get inside.
‘You know, I’m really thirsty from the walk over.’
The old woman laughed again, but there was a bit of malice in her voice. ‘I bet you are. Want to come inside, don’t you? I’ve seen little Forester thieves like you before.’
‘I’m not a thief, I’m trying to do the right thing. I…’ Elwyn began. ‘Is this your goat or not?’ He unwrapped his shirt from around the animal, ostensibly to give the woman a better look. But as he did, the goat ran around her legs into the house. The woman went into panic about the floors.
Elwyn didn’t hide his smile as he went in, trying to help the woman chase down the animal. All houses are their own small worlds, contained and complete, and Elwyn got to see inside a new one as he scrambled after the goat. He saw gleaming brass phonograph horns, massive paintings, and everywhere, glass, glass, glass. Perfect, clear glass bringing light in.
The Collective Page 3
