Wilberforce (6 page)

It was essential that he think of something else: Tudors, Stewarts, Plantagenet intrigues, the cosine of 60, the meter of
Endymion
, the
passé
simple
of
aller.

—
Il allé?

—
Alla. Alla
, idiot boy!
Le passé
simple est simple!

—Sorry, sir, but
Est-ce que je peux aller aux toilettes?

Personal Exercise urgent. If he couldn't defeat the high tide, he'd have to resort to getting caned just to stop himself going mad.

That night at Prep, he excused himself from the study, again pleading pain too sharp to endure. With calculated gait he crossed the quad, but inside the Tower, rather than mounting the stairs to Matron's rooms, he used his penknife to spring the latch on the supply cupboard. Taking care not to disturb the mops and brooms, he let himself out the window to the grass beneath. A jagged dash across the playing fields, a stabbing squeeze through the poacher's tunnel, and a swift stalk through Grindalythe Woods brought him mercifully to the Cross Keys, where Polly, the landlord's daughter, brought him the usual.

—How're you keeping, pet? she asked. Still badly?

He allowed her to touch his hair while he mouthed flirtations. She was affectionate to him, but he didn't desire her. Laurie considered her plain, and Nathan declined her advances out of respect for Julia, a girl he claimed to have had during the holidays. Morgan classed Polly as a child.

He drank half the pint in one go. It calmed the back of his throat and sent an agreeable pulsing through his jaw and temples. He swallowed the rest and nodded for another.

He would drink the next more slowly, he told Polly. His shoulder would stop hurting halfway through the second pint, and by the third, the high tide would be well out to sea … if that's what happened to tides? The point was that the entire visit was medicinal, and anyone who said otherwise was a moralist.

Morality was something invented by old men who wished upon the young a life as desiccated as those they lived themselves, he told Polly. If he left the Academy to take a peaceable pint in lieu of Prep, he was merely making more of the evening than his fellows, who were in any case occupied consuming home brew, placing wagers, venting their frustrations on the younger generation, doing anything, in fact, but attending to the worthless tasks their masters had assigned them knowing full well they wouldn't even try.

—You have got a lem on, Polly declared tousling his hair.

She went to pull his second pint and winked as she placed it on the bar. Perhaps she wasn't such a child after all. As a matter of fact, she seemed to have recently …
Yesterday you were a child, Now a blooming blushing virgin; Female passions warm and wild
—

He dragged himself to the bar and exchanged his glass for the new one full of soft, thick, perfectly foamed bitter. Two gulps, three, cooling the gills, opening passages, oiling his joints as he turned back to the room—into the path of Mr. Grieves.

*   *   *

A mere six feet between them and the room changed color—warm yellow to a buzzing brown. Mr. Grieves wore a pullover, shirt open at the collar, fingertips at his trouser pocket as if he were about to remove a handkerchief.

—I think you'd better sit, Wilberforce, before you spill any more down the front of yourself.

Morgan righted his glass. Grieves produced the handkerchief, but Morgan pointedly used his own.

The brown moment continued, regardless of sense. Grieves fetched a mug of tea, which he placed on Morgan's table. He sat down. Morgan eyed him.

—What are you doing here, sir?

—I might ask the same of you.

He gestured to the stool Morgan had been occupying. Morgan dragged it to the opposite side of the table and sat.

—Last I checked, Grieves said, it wasn't out-of-bounds for an undermaster to take solace at the Cross Keys. Fifth Formers, however …

Morgan's heart beat in his throat with the buzzing fear, the hunger he used to know when there were men who could hold him to account, so painful and essential that he could hardly breathe.

But Grieves was not one of those men, not anymore. Grieves was an undermaster in a time when nothing mattered. Grieves, in fact, was nothing but a nuisance, taking it upon himself to interrupt the remedies Morgan had come all the way to Fridaythorpe to attain. Grieves needed taking down a peg.

—Are you going to tell S-K? Morgan asked flatly.

The man met his gaze, unthreatened and oddly unthreatening, as if capturing a pupil at the Cross Keys were an occasion for curiosity rather than indignation.

—I should, Grieves replied at last. I can't think how you've managed to skive off Prep, but please don't tell me.

—I wasn't going to, sir.

—What interests me, Grieves continued, is why you're here.

Morgan did not reply.

—The second night in a row, and without Pearl or Lydon.

Morgan took a slow swallow of his drink.

—Don't look so shocked, Grieves said mildly. You normally come together, don't you, Saturday evenings?

Morgan's head thumped, and he could feel his veins rushing blood to his heart, as if some agent were summoning it from the outposts of his body.

—I can see I've undermined your illusions, Grieves said.

—How long have you known, sir?

—September, if I recall.

Morgan took another drink.

—Of your Fourth Form year, wasn't it?

And choked.

—Careful.

Three years? He'd known for
three years
?

—Who else knows, sir?

—None that I'm aware.

Morgan drained his glass and signaled to Polly. Mr. Grieves nodded for another mug of tea.

—Drinking alone is never a good sign, you know.

—I suppose I'm turning bad, sir.

Mr. Grieves sighed and twisted his signet ring.

—How's that arm, by the way?

—It's the shoulder, sir. And it's fine.

—Not a shrewd tackle, I didn't think.

—No, sir.

—But it was brave.

Morgan glowered and looked around for Polly. She was working her way towards them, carrying a full tray.

—I thought masters only came here Sunday afternoons, Morgan said.

—Clearly.

Clearly? Clearly he thought that, or clearly it was true? Was it more offensive that Mr. Grieves had known about them for three years, or that he'd harbored such a secret and said nothing?

Polly set two steaming mugs before them.

—That isn't my order, Morgan said.

—All there is, luv.

—What do you mean, all there is?

—Don't snap at Polly, Mr. Grieves scolded. And don't look at me like that. You've been cut off.

—Sir!

—Two is more than enough for a growing boy.

Two wasn't enough, and he wasn't a boy!

—And you still haven't told me what brings you here.

—What makes you think I will?

—I think you should.

—Or you'll tell S-K?

Challenge. Dare. Ultimatum? Mr. Grieves tipped a spoonful of sugar into Morgan's mug.

They sat at the table as their tea cooled enough to drink. The brown moment persisted, but with it lingered something novel, something stirring and even welcome. He hadn't the first idea of Grieves's game, or why in the name of Hermes he had chosen this evening to intervene, having known about them for three years and having watched Morgan come to the pub on his own two nights in a row. Did Grieves imagine he might wrest tearful confessions from him (of what, even?) or that he might shine the light of his intellect upon Morgan's evasions?

—You're letting yourself get carried away, Grieves said at last.

If Grieves imagined it was his place to say such things, then he was going to have to be taught a lesson. Morgan was forced to endure a good many things, but he drew the line at being toyed with.

—That's me, sir. A regular tearaway.

—You know what I mean.

Morgan laughed; Mr. Grieves didn't.

—Heaven only knows what will have to happen before your … generation gets it into your heads—

—
To respect our elders and betters and be grateful to the dead
, Morgan said, supplying one of the Headmaster's favored phrases.

Mr. Grieves held his gaze:

—I would have said the other way around. Be grateful to your elders and respect the dead.

—What's there to respect about death? Morgan balked.

—I'd have thought you had a notion about that.

A cheap shot. Shabby and cheap. How dare Grieves speak of—though it was possible the man was not alluding to his mother but was instead resurrecting the ghastly Gallowhill Ghastliness?

Of course he was. The man was sitting there at Morgan's table accusing him
once again
—of tearing from a yearbook a photograph of Gordon Gallowhill (Old Boy 1884–90, history master, war hero, suicide), of placing it inside a human skull stolen from REN's lab, of burying it in the wretched archaeology pit for a prank. Except that he
hadn't
, and in any case the whole affair had happened
years ago
! This man had a memory like a steel trap, and he held grudges longer than a perverse elephant. If anyone was off his dot, it was Grieves. Morgan got up from the table.

—The Eagle's been offered a post, Grieves continued blithely. Housemaster at Pocklington.

A surge of alarm overtook Morgan:

—Will he take it, sir?

—Can't see why not. Burton-Lee's got an offer somewhere, too.

—
Burton?

Morgan did not know what was more unsettling: the idea of losing Burton-Lee or the fact that Grieves was telling him unsolicited secrets from the Senior Common Room.

—But Burton's been here forever, sir. The Eagle almost forever. Why leave now?

Mr. Grieves gave him a look that made him feel culpable of any number of sins, venial and mortal:

—Why indeed, Wilberforce?

 

6

The next morning, Grieves had the gall to take breakfast in the refectory without looking once in Morgan's direction. In chapel, the Headmaster droned about bounds-breaking, veering periodically into windy reminders about Prep: the Third, Fourth, and Remove were not to leave their form rooms without written permission; the Fifth ditto their studies; the Lower and Upper Sixth likewise belonged in their own studies, not loitering in the library … The SCR lounged just beyond S-K's line of sight, Clement dozing openly, Hazlehurst consulting a newspaper, Grieves resting his head against his hand, whether to soothe a headache or to conceal closed eyes, Morgan couldn't tell.

Morgan had woken that morning with a curious waft of hope, a hope that evaporated once he remembered the unsavory nature of his conversation with Grieves: not only had Grieves ruined his refuge at the Keys, but the Academy was on the verge of losing the Eagle and the Flea, who, with Grieves, were the only switched-on masters in the place.

The Headmaster dismissed them after a prolonged lecture, but with a scant ten minutes left to the first lesson, Burton-Lee declined to teach them, instead directing them to begin their prep while he attended to some correspondence. It took all of Morgan's restraint not to tell Nathan and Laurie everything of the night, up to and including the fact that the Flea's correspondence could only be with the horrible other school. Instead Morgan gossiped about sport and wandered restlessly to French.

There Hazlehurst set them to reading from
Le Figaro
and writing précis, a task Morgan ignored so he could concentrate on dreading History. What precisely he dreaded, he wasn't sure. If Grieves was going to peach on him, he'd have done it years ago. Besides which, to whom would he peach? Not to the JCR, who would turn teetotalers before they entertained complaints from undermasters. Not S-K, since revealing his knowledge to the Headmaster would expose Grieves to an inconvenient line of questioning, beginning with why he'd not spoken up three years earlier. And as for informing Morgan's Housemaster, why would anyone bother? Hazlehurst encountered worse offenses almost daily and avoided taking action on all of them.

At the Cross Keys, Mr. Grieves had revealed that he'd noticed Morgan, that he'd been noticing him for some time. And Mr. Grieves had revealed his own connection to the Keys, for he evidently possessed some signal with Polly—Morgan's Polly!—a signal with the authority to cancel Morgan's order. It dawned on Morgan that the Keys might be Mr. Grieves's personal haunt even more than it was theirs. Nathan and Laurie would have been scandalized if Morgan had been in a position to tell them.

*   *   *

They poured into the quad for break and queued outside the tuckshop.

—Here come the Fleas, Nathan murmured.

A cluster of Burton-Lee's XV crossed the quad like a wolf pack. Their own XV did not go round together, but Burton-Lee's XV, perhaps as an expression of their dominance, traveled everywhere in groups.

—Ods bodkins, Laurie breathed, it's the King's bodyguards.

—Who's the king? Nathan muttered.

—Spaulding, Morgan said.

—Prob'ly can't even shit on his own.

The bodyguards arrived and cut into the queue.

—How's the wing? asked Buxhill.

Bux played wing forward, like Morgan.

—Mending, Morgan said.

—Fast, Nathan added.

—Not fast enough to save you from Clem's this afternoon, said Bux.

—Or REN's tomorrow, added Ledger.

Ledge was Burton-Lee's other wing forward, just as arrogant as Bux but less blatant about it.

—Not that it would've made a difference, said a voice from the pack.

Bux and Ledge stepped aside for the voice: Spaulding himself, towering, lean, powerful, with a mouth that seemed always amused. Nathan stepped closer, violating the buffer Spaulding's bodyguards had established: