Sons of Fortune (15 page)

The waning moon, still almost full, came out from behind a cloud. It must have shown Brockman the figure of Caspar, walking slowly and steadily away, not even pausing. Caspar knew he had been seen but his disobedience left him unmoved. He was wondering if there was anything left about which he might possibly care. There was absolutely no sign of the coming dawn.

Chief’s cry was heard by one other at least. In the gasworks shed Purse laid down his shovel, put on his overcoat, and walked out into the dark, following the path Caspar had taken.

When Caspar was halfway up the hillside the last of the thin, ragged clouds passed down into the sky below the moon, which now rode out, almost painfully bright, into a clear, inky vastness. It was hard to believe all that brilliance was borrowed. The light showed every stalk of sedge, every heather leaf, each prickle of gorse; it was even bright enough to show their colours, sable and purple and green. Deliberately he walked into the gorse. Only his skin felt the stab of those myriads of needles; only his skin winced.

A cow, straying from its pasture, stared and breathed at him over a limestone outcrop. The whites of her eyes burned with a supernatural brightness. She backed away on legs that the steepness had converted to stilts. She trampled through a sheet of ice that groaned and wheezed before it shattered.
That’s how cold it is
, Caspar thought, not feeling any cold at all.

It seemed no time before he was at the very summit, over thirteen hundred feet above the school. But he did not look down. Nor did he remember any of the dashing charges that had so often won him and his army this eminence. From here he could see the entire system of Yorkshire dales, black and royal in the burnished moonlight. The clouds were now no more than a vanishing scumble on the skyline, hinting at the approaching dawn. Indeed, a tinge of green already suffused the eastern rim.

That’s where his home was, in the east, over the dales, down into the Vale of York where his mother hunted with the York and Ainsty, and up again into the Wolds, where Lord Middleton’s hunt would not accept his mother at any price. Why were people so against them? Like Cossack.

He and Boy would be home tonight, back there over the horizon in lovely Thorpe Old Manor, in the wolds. No he wouldn’t! Of course, this Christmas they would all be down south at Maran Hill, their other home. He thought of the long tedium of the journey, almost to London; his sudden dread of it was the first non-physical feeling he had had since waking.

“Young boy!”

Chief”s voice. No need to answer, somehow. There was a lantern swinging below. And a man, very lithe and powerful, coming quickly up with short, springy steps that were almost a run. Some way behind him came Purse, a more laborious climber. Chief was not out of breath when he arrived.

“Stevenson minor? I thought it would be you.” He drew close and put down the lantern before asking gently, “Why have you come here?”

The question puzzled Caspar. He pointed over the dales, spreading his arms theatrically, as if it were an answer.

Brockman turned and looked where Caspar had pointed. He stared at the sleeping dales for a long time, nodding his head. Then he looked down at the school; Caspar had forgotten it was there.

“You can even mark the individual stones, see!” Brockman said. He turned to Caspar. “I hope you will one day be able to love it as every boy should.” He waited for a response. “And…forgive it,” he added.

Caspar nodded. Those ideas were so remote: love, forgiveness.

“It
will
be different now, Stevenson.”

Caspar opened his eyes and saw…the stove in Purse’s kitchen, blazing merrily, and Mrs. Purse—smiling! Smiling anxiously. And it was bright sunshine outside the window.

“There now!” Mrs. Purse said. “Just look at them apples for cheeks! Thou’rt hungry, I’ll be bound?” He could sense a great bewilderment in her. It banished all her protective ferocity and left her as vulnerable as he.

“What has happened?” he asked.

“Dr. Brockman and Purse carried you down.” She touched his cheek. “Poor mite! Poor mite!”

Her fingers were a lovely warmth. Suddenly he knew all that had been missing, not just since last night but all these weeks: tenderness! Gentle, sweet, lovely, warm, precious, feminine tenderness.

He reached up and caught her fingers as she was in the act of withdrawing them. And he pressed them against his face just as softly as she had laid them there before. The room shivered and dissolved in a hot ocean. He blinked, and two fat, hot, sumptuously hot, tears rolled down his cheeks and vanished among their entwined fingers.

“Oh!” she cried, now as overcome as he was. She fell to her knees beside him and threw her arms about his tiny body.

“My little lamb! My poor little lamb!” she said between sobs.

He snuggled and pressed himself into that ample bay of softness and wept and wept for sheer happiness.

Caspar had never seen his mother so angry; it was hard to keep remembering that the anger was not at him but against Fiennes. When Nora saw what that school had done to her little boy, she almost screamed aloud, first with shock, then with anger, of such intensity that it seemed to expel her from her own body. She became, as it were, a livid bystander of herself, angry in her own right and angry by proxy. Her fingers kneaded and pinched her brow; she felt the pain of their pressure and she felt her fingertips as if they touched a third party. She could not look twice at Caspar’s wounds; yet, looking once, she could hardly take her eyes off them.

Caspar was as yet too young to play the complete man; in another few days he would have healed enough to be able to choose between laughing it off or accepting every crumb of sympathy going. But now, a bare twenty-four hours after the flogging, his wounds were at their most severe. To surrender to the full intensity of his mother’s solicitude—even to increase it by fanning her anger—was a luxury he could not forgo. Gasp by gasp, between tears and hugs, she got the story out of him.

From all over the house came the other children and the servants, to look in horror, to listen agog, to add their share of compassion. Soon Caspar was convinced of two things—that what had happened to him marked a new depth in man’s inhumanity to man, and that it had been worth it.

Winifred, the eldest, looked at his wounds and cringed to Nora’s side. “They’re horrible, horrible people, Mama,” she said. Like her mother she hated the sight yet could not look away. She also knew well her mother’s opinions about “gent manufactories” as Nora called the schools.

Clement, who would one day be “Stevenson minimus” and was already imagining what it would be like when he joined Boy and Caspar at Fiennes, was appalled. “I wouldn’t let them do that to me,” he said, with more bravado than conviction.

“Try and stop them!” Boy sneered.

“We’ll do more than try!” Nora said vehemently as she rocked Caspar back and forth. “Wait till your father gets back.” But even as she spoke she knew it would be no good waiting for John; his return was all in the air. She would have to deal with Fiennes herself.

Abigail, who would be nine that Christmas Eve, was, outwardly at least, more shocked than any of them. She stood apart, in the middle of the room, and stared in terror at the marks on Caspar. Then, her hands writhing in fruitless contest with the air, she shouted: “I think people are just horrible. People are stupid!” (“People” in her vocabulary always meant adults.) The inadequacy of these words in the face of those monstrous wounds angered her to bitter tears. She stood alone in the middle of the room and shook the floor with her grief.

It was one of those displays that hover between the pathetically comic and the deeply moving. In the circumstances of that place and moment, the potential comedy was apparent to no one, except perhaps to Boy, whose own anger had found its scope with time. But for the rest, Abigail’s unequal battle between words and feelings touched them all. It kindled among them, adults and children alike, a communal anger and pathos that might soon have grown into a general hysteria if Nora had not, quite by accident, said the one thing that stopped this progress in its tracks.

“Never fear, popsie,” she promised Caspar. “You will never go back there again!”

Caspar froze in mid-sob. Mr. Ingilby’s workshop…Purse’s winking, smiling face…Mrs. Purse’s food and all her lovely anger…the other fellows…life after lockup—all that fierce, free comradeship…the sky…the wind…Never again! Never again?

It was unthinkable.

He looked straight into his mother’s eyes. “But I must go back,” he began. And now his tears were at the fear of all he stood to lose.

But Nora, not knowing that, was smiling serenely now that the decision was out in the open. She shook her head, thinking to comfort him out of a hateful obligation by removing all sense of it from him.

Panic began to take him over. “Yes, yes! I must,” he insisted. “I love it there. Don’t you see?” He wanted to pull away from her but that embarrassing thing had happened again—the erection. It hadn’t happened since his first week in Fiennes, not since he had discovered the real purpose of the funny stiffness. At least, it hadn’t happened any longer in connection with cruelty or pain. But now, here in his mother’s boudoir, what with his trousers down to his ankles and being dressed in among her skirts and surrounded by all that hot female sympathy, it had happened again. He burned with shame, not that it had happened but that she might notice it. Or Winifred, still beside her.

He ought to pull away from her so that he could oppose this terrifying notion with the vehemence it demanded. Steeling himself not to wince, he stooped quickly and grasped his trousers, snatching them up around him as he rose. He almost managed it. Or did he? Did she see? Naturally the trousers didn’t slide up around him swiftly as they would have done without his embarrassment. He dared not look at her, or at Winnie, until the last button was done up again.

“Your behaviour is pretty shent, mi,” Boy said quietly.

It wasn’t quite the proper idiom but Caspar knew instinctively why Boy had used it—to make outsiders of everyone else in the room. Fiennes was under attack. Fiennes, not Cossack. They could not allow that; they must rally round.

Suddenly their family had become “villains.”

With more fortitude, with a greater indifference to pain than he thought he could muster, Caspar nodded his acceptance of Boy’s rebuke and turned to Nora. He stepped away from her, peeling her unwilling fingers off his shoulders and arms. “It wasn’t the school,” he said firmly. “It was just Cossack.”

“He was drunk,” Boy added. “And he doesn’t like us.”

“The school is all right,” Caspar insisted.

Nora, always alert for an insult, rounded on Boy. “Doesn’t like who? All the boys? Who is ‘us’?”

“Us.” Boy shifted uncomfortably. “Us Stevensons. He doesn’t like us.” He wished he had not started this hare. “It’s only him, you see. Not the school. Only Cossack’s to blame.”

“Why does he not like us? I don’t think I even know the fellow. Cossack? What sort of name is that?”

“It’s not us,” Caspar said. “It’s money. He doesn’t like people with money. He’s always being sarcastic about it.” How could he possibly convey to his mother, to anyone in that room except Boy, the quality of that sarcasm! Home and Fiennes might have been on different continents. “He thinks Papa is a parvenu.”

“His real name’s Cusack. We just call him Cossack because he’s so fierce.”

“He…what?” Nora stood abruptly. Now she was in a new kind of rage, one whose edge was no longer blunted by compassion for Caspar. For a moment Caspar thought she really was angry with him. “A lot of the fellows give out against parvenus,” he said, hoping to make Cossack sound less unique and his crime, thereby, less heinous.

Of course it had the opposite effect. Her rage now towered so great that she no longer trusted herself to stay in speaking distance. She swept from the room, still radiating a fury that made them quail. “Put him to bed,” she told the night nurse out in the passage. “Dust those sores with calomel.”

Mademoiselle Nanette, her lady’s maid, followed her without needing the bidding. She had been Nora’s maid for the past seven years; she knew that Nora would never rest until she had been to Fiennes and faced down these
monstres barbares.
In her mind she was already sorting out which clothes Nora would be needing for the journey and which would best suit that angry confrontation. Black and yellow? A wasp?

As they went through the boudoir into the bedroom Nora heard Abigail say: “I hope Mama will hurt and hurt that man!”

Even in her rage Nora could not suppress a fleeting smile. There were times when Abigail was possibly the most infuriating infant in the world; but she had her moments. Like everyone else, Abigail knew Nora would be going directly to Fiennes.

It was too late that night to command a special train for the journey. Nora had to content herself with dispatching a man to the station with two messages to be sent over the railway telegraphs.

One was to King’s Cross, ordering a special train (with their own private carriage and a flatbed wagon to take her coach) to be cleared through to Ingleton tomorrow. The other was to the stationmaster at Ingleton; he was to go, tonight, to Langstroth and to inquire into Dr. Brockman’s intended movements—if the headmaster was expected to be away tomorrow or the day after, the stationmaster was to telegraph back and save Nora the waste of the journey.

There was some use, after all, in being wife to a director of, and large shareholder in, a couple of dozen railway companies!

Then she went downstairs to dine with Winifred and Young John.

***

Boy was annoyed that Caspar had made so much of his cuts. It gave people at home a distorted view of Fiennes. Of course, he understood his mother’s anger. After all, less than twenty-four hours earlier he had been on the point of doing Cossack far greater harm than she would be capable of, whatever she might say to chief. But he could place his own anger in the full context of Fiennes; to him it was a complete anger. Hers was very partial—a mere multiplication of the annoyance with which she had accepted their entry into the school, for she had been unable to conceal it from them.

All through dinner Boy tried to tell them about the other side of Fiennes, but everything conspired against him. The costly Spode off which they ate, the deeply waxed mahogany of the table, the gleaming silver, the fine candles, odourless and smokeless in their graceful candelabra, the soft carpets, the warm fire, the shuttered windows and the quiet world they enclosed, the silent and unobtrusive service, the rich food…how in such surroundings could he hope to convey anything of the quality of Fiennes! Everything he tried to say was snapped up by his mother—and by Winifred—as further proof of the complete depravity of the place.

“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.