Wilberforce (15 page)

—If you must know, Alex said, I didn't touch a single lock last night.

—But you planned it. You supervised the whole thing.

Alex gave the abashed grin of one embarrassed by a compliment.

—It looks to have been a simple affair, Morgan said coolly.

—Like hell! It took weeks. You can't imagine what's involved getting platoons from every House to enlist for a thing like that. And not only enlist, but join the Covenant.

—Covenant?

—It was the only way. Otherwise someone would've spilt.

—You think S-K isn't getting anywhere downstairs?

—Of course he isn't, Alex said. Why d'you think he wants to see me and Carter?

—Because he has got somewhere, I'd have thought.

—In that case, he wouldn't have asked for Carter. Little weed had nothing to do with it.

Alex looked at Morgan with a defiance that made him stiff, challenging him as he had in the form room but without audience now. Would Alex drive him past reason, as he had driven Silk outside the Hermes Balcony?
Show me what's in there.
Refusing not once, not twice, such necessity, such folly. A change had come across Silk, revealing something Morgan had sensed before but never seen. Silk had not spoken, not in words. Arm twisted, face against panel, pressed as if for the technique, but then fumbling at buttons, furious, contaminating in a breath the other thing, the thing pursued in private, in concert, now here in wrath at the top of a public—Morgan had summoned this creature, compelled this alteration. When he twisted and broke free, it was only right that he fell, back, down, out.

A chasm opened now in the Tower, tempting him to hurdle reason and plunge into it. Only inches away, behind the fabric of a nightgown, Alex was naked.

Morgan pulled up the covers and leaned back with as much weariness as he could feign:

—Why go to so much trouble for a rag? What's the point?

—The point, Alex said, was to show them that we aren't going to take it lying down.

There were so very many things to take lying down.

—Take what?

—All of it! What fags have been taking since time immemorial.

If Alex had taken what Morgan had taken, would he have wished what Morgan wished in the Hermes Balcony that day, finding the wish slips and wishing three things?

—The serfs didn't take it,
le peuple
didn't take it, the Americans didn't take it, and we're not taking it. It's the Guy Fawkes of the Cad!

Alex actually raised a fist in triumph at the final, rehearsed declaration. He appeared to have paid attention to one minute in a thousand of Mr. Grieves's history lessons and combined what he had heard with the melodrama of his father's latest novel.

—Are you telling me that you and the entire Third planned for weeks to sneak through the Cad and pour soss into a lot of locks so everyone would know you don't plan on fagging anymore?

Alex looked angry and insulted:

—Not the entire Third, I told you. Everyone joined the Covenant, but only the cadre did it. And it wasn't
soss
. It was specially prepared, quick-setting wax.

—Presumably what was being brewed up in the lab when it exploded?

—We'd finished already, but some duffer failed to turn the gas off properly.

—You could have burned down the whole school!

Alex shrugged, seeming to think it a minor snag.

—You didn't mention the best part, Alex said.
La justice.

—Where's the justice in bunging up locks?

—Keep up! Alex exhorted. The point wasn't the locks.

Morgan couldn't keep up at all.

—We bunged the locks so no one could douse the bonfire.

—In the quad?

—Every rod in the school consumed in flame!

Morgan felt cold as the logic of the campaign became obvious.

—That's what you call justice?

—We were planning to burn a few canes all along, but then the JCR went and whacked the entire Third yesterday—

—With reason—

—So we cindered them all. Gunpowder, treason, and plot!

The fist again. Morgan flushed.

—Gunpowder?

—You didn't think I gave up all of it, did you?

The chasm yawned, no place to stand.

—For a sure, quick fire, Alex said, you want gunpowder.

—But … there was no bang.

Alex grinned:

—Flour-water paste plus gunpowder, smear on canes, dry, fuse, instant inferno.

Morgan reeled.

—Don't you see?

The only thing he saw was a face that had never been shaved and a lip he'd quite enjoy splitting.

—What now? Morgan retorted. Presumably they'll pour hot water into all the locks and unbung them.

—Of course they could, Alex scoffed, but they'll stick from now on.

—That isn't funny. What if people get locked in places?

—If REN weren't such an idiot, he'd realize what we'd used and tell 'em what solvent to try. It wouldn't hurt the doors at all. As it is …

Alex chuckled in satisfaction.

—they're making a dog's breakfast of the whole thing, just like S-K is making a dog's breakfast of his giddy investigation.

Anarchy walked amongst them and had done for some time.

—What
exactly
are you hoping for? Morgan asked. And why bung the form rooms?

—Someone got enthusiastic.

—For God's sake!

Don't take the Lord's—quite an account you've rung up
—concentrate.

—Let's see if I'm keeping up, Morgan said acidly. Doors get opened one way or another, S-K finds no culprits, yet somehow everyone knows the Third were behind it and so accept that the Revolution has begun, you're all let off fagging, the whack is abolished, everyone can do as he likes, and the Cad becomes some sort of daft modern girls' school where people run about naked, painting murals and dancing with scarves.

Alex fumed:

—I'd have thought that you, of all people, would understand.

—I don't understand? Morgan balked. Which part have I got wrong?

Alex looked him sharp in the eye:

—I wouldn't have expected the Heir of Hermes to take a line like that.

No one was supposed to know the Heir of Hermes, and if one did, one was never to speak of it. Alex kept looking at Morgan as if he had the means and the wherewithal to destroy everything that mattered. Morgan sensed he had fallen into a professional trap.

—How did you manage? he asked, rearranging his pillows. All those people traipsing through the school, stealing canes, pouring quick-setting wax, and the rest of it. You'd sent Matron and Fardles off to Neverland, but how is it no one else saw a single one of you out of bed?

—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?