Wilberforce (48 page)

—Sometimes I imagine people.

—Here?

Morgan nodded.

—This person, the Bishop asked intently, is he, or she—

—He.

—Is he part of the battering, or is he inside the gates with you?

Droit lounged on the swing, running a damp handkerchief across his brow.

—Inside.

The Bishop received the news somberly. His gaze drifted to the space Droit occupied, not that he could see him. Other people couldn't see figments of your imagination. That was what made them figments. No one could barge their way into your mind unless you let them.

But sometimes he said things he didn't mean to say. Words came off his tongue before he even noticed. Was it possible for Droit to escape his bounds and wander, free, in the world?

—I go where I like, Droit whispered, do what I like.

—But you're mine, Morgan told him.

—You've got your pronouns jumbled, Dicky. Just watch—

—Stop calling me that.

—What have I called you? asked the Bishop.

Never had Morgan been more aware of the surface of his skin. Every minute something contrived to send his blood rushing, superheating his face, his chest, the back of his neck, any place blood could flow.

—Let us not waste time, the Bishop said. Explain, please, how I've addressed you.

—I didn't mean to say that out loud, sir.

—See, Droit hissed.

The Bishop set down his glass.

—Would it help if I were direct again?

Morgan couldn't endure anyone else being direct. But he wasn't a coward. How much worse could it get?

—You asked what was to be done with you, and while I quibble with your phraseology, the question does need answering.

Morgan cast his gaze to the ground, feeling as though he might be on the verge of a soothingly familiar interview.
What's to be done with you, Wilberforce? I don't know, sir. Of course you do, touch your toes.

—But before we can answer it, the Bishop continued, you are going to have to stop behaving like a sullen schoolboy who exerts no agency and yet submits to no authority but his own.

The remark stung like a slap.

—Which do you want me to do? Morgan replied. Take action or submit to someone's authority? Because I'm not exactly clear how I'm to do both.

—That is the sullenness I was speaking of, the Bishop said, and I've had enough of it, thank you. It's doing nothing to diminish the danger of your situation.

Danger?

—And the impertinence isn't attractive. You're better than that.

—I shouldn't think so, sir.

—Self-pity is even less attractive.

The Bishop spoke mildly as if discussing the design of his garden, but his very lightness gave his remarks the snap of the sharpest cane.

—When are you going to tell this number what he can do with his disapproval? Droit murmured. Perhaps if he plunged that ancient cock of his somewhere nice, he'd stop fixating on schoolboys he'd never met before yesterday.

—I don't want to be this way.

—No, the Bishop said.

Morgan waited for clarification, but it didn't come.

—My father's going to arrange for me to go somewhere.

—And then?

—I don't know. I suppose I'll be sent to one of my uncles. I suppose they'll find something for me to do. I suggested the navy but …

He couldn't bring himself to repeat his father's response or even to summarize it. If not the navy, then perhaps the army, or the shipyards. He'd never given any thought to his future as it had all been so fixed: school, university, the firm, marriage, children, carrying on until … he couldn't think that far into the future. Now, though, the itinerary was canceled.

A clarity dawned. He was being banished. This shame would continue until it ran its course, one year, five, ten. His punishment would be to endure it and to absent himself from society until everything wore off. They hadn't even expelled him to his face. S-K had at least summoned him repeatedly after Spaulding, berating him, bullying him, and generally letting off steam by shouting at him. They, by contrast, had treated him as a pariah. Burton had disarmed him, extracted the hideous confession, and then exiled him to the corridor. Grieves had stood as far from him as possible, looking as though something precious inside had been shattered. Dr. Sebastian for his part had treated him, he now realized, as a prisoner under transport. If Dr. Sebastian had explained nothing, it was because criminals forfeited the right to explanation. Morgan had been so consumed by vexation that he hadn't until this moment recognized the ignominy of his position, but here it was: His father and the Academy were disposing of him. He would endure the exile alone, without father or mother, without Nathan or Laurie, without Grieves, without any of the irksome citizens of the Academy, without anyone at all.

—Not quite, Droit smiled.

Morgan inhaled sharply.

—You're undergoing an ordeal, the Bishop said. You've been undergoing it for some time, I think.

Words like a puff of air from the shade.

—You aren't entirely alone, though.

—Oh, don't worry, sir, Morgan said bitterly. I've got company enough.

—I wasn't referring to him, the Bishop said.

—He had better not speak of me that way, seditious old—

—I was referring to myself.

Morgan couldn't speak.

—You needn't face this ordeal alone, the Bishop said. I could stand with you. If you wish.

—I do wish.

He'd spoken before thinking, and now Droit was closing his fingers around Morgan's wrist to stifle his pulse. The Bishop sat forward and looked at him, his gaze a dog spike, his will driving it into the sleeper, as if with mere eye contact he could secure Morgan's entire being.

—Mr. Rollins, Your Grace.

Mrs. Hallows had materialized beneath the gazebo, a man at her side.

—Yes, very well, the Bishop replied.

—What's to be done with this one? Mrs. Hallows asked.

Morgan tried to stand, but the Bishop snatched his wrist, the very wrist Droit had been strangling.

—Your Grace! Mrs. Hallows protested. Doctor …

His wrist shackled, Morgan looked to the Bishop, who had turned pale. The doctor told Morgan to step aside, but the Bishop kept hold of him.

—Mrs. Hallows, said the Bishop with effort, please see that young Wilberforce has a bath and some lunch.

—Of course, Your Grace, but—

—He may have run of the library, and please find him some writing materials.

He was still holding fast.

—
Batter My Heart
, he said to Morgan, copy it out six times, three copies with each hand.

The Bishop's voice was gravelly. The doctor stepped forward and loosened his grip on Morgan's wrist. As the doctor eased the Bishop into his chair, Mrs. Hallows swatted Morgan back to the house.

 

37

She led him testily upstairs and began to draw a bath. Sunlight streamed in the bathroom, and from the window Morgan watched the two figures in the gazebo.

—Mrs. Hallows, he asked, is something wrong with the Bishop?

—There is nothing wrong with His Grace. Only the last thing he needs is to be disturbed by helter-skelter visits from Master Jamie and ill-mannered boys who are nothing to do with him.

Her surliness was not mere unsociability, then. His behavior offended her. His behavior offended even himself. She mumbled something about His Grace not exerting himself.

—Has His Grace been unwell?

—His Grace last month suffered a heart attack, she declared. He's only home from hospital a fortnight.

—Crikey! I mean, I'd no idea. Dr. Sebastian didn't—

—He wouldn't. And neither would His Grace. Impossible, the pair of them.

She got him down a towel.

—Doctors tried to send him to Wight to recuperate, but His Grace wouldn't have it. The Dean took a strong line, but best they could get was His Grace's blessing to take on more curates and his promise to rest at home until Michaelmas. Of course, he's still buzzing over his archdeacons like heaven-knows-what, but Miss Lucy fends them off when she can, and I do my best. Lord knows it's a poor lookout.

Having delivered herself of this, Mrs. Hallows turned off the taps and announced she would leave him in peace. He would find lunch in the conservatory when he was ready. He thanked her, and she left exuding motherliness for the first time.

He lowered himself into the water. She'd made it cool enough for summer, but not so cool as to chill his muscles, which had tightened after two runs. He leaned forward and rubbed his calves.

The Bishop, who had seemed a titan of strength, far more robust than Morgan felt himself, was actually in poor health. He was supposed to be resting, not taking on desperate cases. How then had he managed to grip Morgan's wrist so hard? Hard enough, in fact, that he'd left a mark. (Or had that been Droit?) (Could Droit leave a mark?)

He didn't know what to think, so preposterous was the line of inquiry. There he was in the bath with Droit again. Of course, physically he was alone in the bath, yet somehow Droit inhabited it, too. Not quite inside him, but perhaps after all …

He needed to stop treating fancies as reality. He'd fallen into the habit and it was confusing him. He was not, like Laurie, an artistic character. He did not even hold eccentric attitudes, like Mr. Grieves. All told, he considered himself a realist and an entirely ordinary specimen of English boy—man. Though if he was a man, why had he been abducted from school, and why was he now incarcerated as a child in the Bishop's house? He could feel his mind whizzing down this line of argument. (He wouldn't be treated that way!) (Yet plainly he was.) (He would resist!) (To what end?) (Soon people would come to their senses and he would be allowed to return to ordinary life.) Although he knew all the ways and reasons he should reject what had happened today, most especially what had just happened in the summerhouse (Nothing! Nothing had actually happened!), he kept coming back to the Bishop's holding his gaze as he had held his wrist.

He was exhausted; that was why such thoughts seemed attractive.

But, oh, to be always weak. To have no recourse against that atmosphere, to be free to indulge in it, or compelled to submit to it—was there so much difference between the two? Certainly, he ought not to indulge, even now beneath the bathwater, in the memory of the Bishop's … what to call it precisely? Not exactly his gaze or his touch or his words, but some thickness in the air when he turned all three upon Morgan, as if emitting an electrical-magnetical field.

He needed to pull himself together and stop bandying metaphor with a clergyman who was (a) unwell, (b) abrupt, (c) by profession steeped in grand ideas, (d) too quick to form attachments to strangers, and therefore (e) to be avoided. Morgan knew everything he needed to do. If he was to survive all of this intact, he needed to stop being a child and get on with it—
it
meaning what he needed to do!

The layers of muscle refused to flex. The bath cooled. A mantel of bereavement swept across him, scraping against everything he had lost, and everything he had now to renounce. He felt small, eyes full, chin weak. He got out of the bath and dripped on the mat.

 

38

Library
was something of a misnomer. The room contained books, but not so many as the Bishop's study. Its primary purpose seemed to be leisure, judging by the chairs, settees, fireplace, and end tables positioned throughout. Mrs. Hallows had provided foolscap, pen, and ink at a writing table Morgan considered feminine. Perhaps it had once belonged to the luscious Miss Flynt. He could easily imagine her setting her stack of papers down upon it, slipping herself into the slender chair, and completing her correspondence, perhaps with the very pen he was to use!

Mrs. Hallows decamped before he could ask for clarification of his task. The Bishop had said to copy out that poem of the Eagle's,
Batter my heart
something, six times. (At least he had not offered witticisms re six of the best, ho-ho, thank you very much.) Hadn't he, though, included a peculiar instruction to make three copies with each hand? Did the Bishop suppose him ambidextrous? He'd never written anything with his left hand. How could he copy out a poem of unknown length using a maladroit hand?

It was too hot to stay indoors and write lines for which he lacked a text. He unlatched the window and let himself out to the garden. Soon his shoes and socks had come off, his trouser cuffs been rolled up, and his feet were dangling off the platform into the smooth canal. If he got in, would there be an undercurrent, or snapping turtles? How long could he resist plunging beneath the water?

No one was summoning him. Back at the Academy they'd be—like steel to think of that place; he resolved never to think of it again.

Yet, he mourned it. St. Stephen's Academy had witnessed the greatest and the most dire moments of his life. Once he'd felt that Grindalythe Woods was expecting prodigious things of him. But little boys felt all sorts of things. That didn't make them true.

And what of the wish slips? That, surely, must have been the height of his young lunacy, believing that the balcony he had discovered had belonged to Hermes, and that the dusty box of wish slips therein had belonged to that fabled Old Boy, and further that Morgan's three wishes were indeed heard and received by some power competent to grant them. He couldn't bear to think of what he had wished. Perhaps if he refused to think of it, he would at some point in the future cease to remember.

The Rectory canal bank was not St. Stephen's Academy, and any boy possessing a holiday to himself in summer ought to consider himself king of the world. In all the bunking off Morgan had done over the years, he had never found himself master of such a day. Anyone else would consider it ideal. But no one else had done what he had done and broken what he had broken. No one else occupied such an uncertain position: captive? guest? criminal? orphan?