Sons of Fortune (11 page)

Blenkinsop tore his trousers down and breathed heavily inward between his teeth.

“Is it bad?” Caspar asked, trying to crane around and look over his own shoulder.

“It will be if we’re not quick.” Blenkinsop swept a pile of books off the table. “Lie down here. No, no. Face down!”

For the second time in less than an hour Caspar found himself face down on oak and wondering exactly what was about to happen. He wasn’t a bad chap, Blenkinsop. It was jolly good of him to take all this trouble.

Blenkinsop tipped something cold and creamy out of a bottle onto his buttocks and began to rub it in with a slow, hypnotic relish. It was very soothing, Caspar had to allow.

“Tchah! Trench puts them all over the shop,” Blenkinsop said scornfully. “He’s no craftsman, I’ll vow. I can lay down six and not vary it by the breadth of a hair. You’d have a six-week shiner if I’d done this.”

“I’m lucky, then.” Caspar giggled.

“You ask Gordon what I did to that boil on his bum!” Blenkinsop was relishing the memory. Then he came back to the present. “Oh, I wouldn’t hurt
you
, young ’un. I’m hells fond of you.” He massaged on into the silence. Caspar thought he could detect a shiver in him, in his hands and voice, just the same as under the blankets last night. When Blenkinsop spoke again his tone was a lot softer. “Did you get stiff today, too, eh? Did you get the bone?” When Caspar didn’t answer, Blenkinsop laughed. “I see you did. Your little bottom is blushing, you know. Have you got a bone now?”

“No,” Caspar said.

“Do you know how to get one?”

“I don’t want to know. I wish you wouldn’t talk about it so. I don’t like it one bit.”

Blenkinsop gave a tolerant laugh and patted him on the bottom. “I thought you’d be grateful to me for stopping these bruises. Go on, up you get!”

Caspar stood, now feeling sheepish. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful. “It’s kind of you, Blenkinsop. I am grateful, really.”

“Perhaps you’ll do me a little favour, then?” Blenkinsop asked casually.

“If I can.”

“Cut over to Crecy and give this book to a chap there called Garrett, would you?”

Caspar was delighted to get out of Blenkinsop’s study so easily; he had feared something more was about to happen, though exactly what he could not say.

“It’s hells cold out. You’d best take my scarf, young ’un.”

It was cold outside. Caspar had to ask the way to Crecy and was told to go through a small triumphal arch, past the boghouse, and over the games field. He found his way easily enough; the snow brightened everything outside. Crecy was nothing like Old School. Everything looked clean. Everyone had studies. It all seemed very organized.

He felt the hostile, polite gaze of the Crecy boys upon him as he stood inside the door and waited for someone to fetch Garrett. Like bees in the same apiary, the boys did not venture any depth into neighbouring hives. He marvelled that he had so soon become an Old School man; if he and Boy hadn’t been delayed by the quarantine, they might have been in Crecy, perhaps. Then they’d feel like this about going inside Old School. What made people one thing or the other like that? Could you tell one person he was a…a
glash
, say, and another that he was a
glish
, the deadly foe of all the
glashes
, and would they then fight each other? That would be quite funny.

Garrett came and took the book, looking at it a little mystified. He told Caspar to thank Blenkinsop. Caspar ran all the way back over the snowy playing field, dancing, leaping with sheer
joie de vivre
that he had survived so much and felt so good. Even old Blenkinsop wasn’t so bad, really. It was hells kind of him to do that thing about the bruises.

He was rather surprised to bump into Blenkinsop just as he was about to skip through the triumphal arch.

“Hello,” he said. “Do you want your scarf?”

Blenkinsop shoved him roughly back into the dark. “You know what I want,” he said. He gripped the little boy firmly by the arm and hustled him over to the boghouse.
Christ
, Caspar thought.
Am I going to get whacked again? What for now?
He felt like giving up all attempt to understand.

When they reached the boghouse Blenkinsop shoved him just inside the door. “Here,” he said. “
There’s
a bone for you!”

He guided Caspar’s hand to his—well, it was more like gristle than bone, Caspar thought. Hot. And gristly-slippery. And lumpy. And very big. Huge.

“Go on, then!” Blenkinsop said.

“Go on what?”

“Move your hand, you fool! Fiend me!”

Caspar let go.

“No! Like this!” And he showed him how to fiend.

Caspar obeyed with fascinated curiosity. The effect his action was having on Blenkinsop was very weird—the noises he made, the change in his breathing, the way he swayed, the jerks of his hips. Feeling nothing himself, Caspar listened and observed these transports in the other.

And that was when he remembered his vow. If ever he could hurt Blenkinsop…well, couldn’t he just hurt him now! He almost giggled aloud.

With the same gleeful curiosity he reached both hands over and, with all the force he could muster, bent that long, gristly stick double, this way and that, just as you would try to break a green branch off a tree.

Blenkinsop’s shriek rang out across the field—a thunderclap of pain and rage that Caspar did not wait to hear out. Its dying fall reached him as he leaped through the triumphal arch and ran to find Boy and bear him the joyful tidings.

The story had a greater effect than Caspar had dared to hope. The two older boys—de Lacy was with Boy—seemed able to imagine the pain much more easily than Caspar had. In fact, its intensity had surprised him. But he only had to tell them what he had done and then at once began to mimic Blenkinsop’s agony, doubling over and saying “Christ!” and “Ooooh!” and—with great relish—“the poor sod!”

“You’d better keep out of his way for some time,” de Lacy warned.

“I know how to deal with him,” Caspar said. “Swift mi told me.”

But de Lacy’s warning was too late. Blenkinsop was already coming down the passage, shouting “Stevenson mi! You little vermin!” at the top of his voice. Caspar darted behind a cupboard, waiting his time. Blenkinsop halted at each cupboard, sure that Caspar was in one of them. He kicked them and yanked open the doors in mounting fury, until at last he reached the one that concealed—though it did not enclose—Caspar. He had been waiting for the moment. He darted out, taking Blenkinsop sufficiently unawares to slip past him and race away to the Barn. Blenkinsop recovered quickly, though, and was almost out of the passage before Boy said, “Come on. He’ll kill him if he catches up with him.”

When they reached the Barn, Caspar was backed firmly against the bootroom door and Blenkinsop stood over him, panting hard and in no hurry to strike. Boy thought Caspar was going to try to duck at the last minute, making Blenkinsop smash his hand into the door; but Caspar’s scheme was even cleverer than that.

As soon as Blenkinsop drew back his fist, Caspar cried “Ring! Ring!” and ducked out beneath the surprised Blenkinsop’s arm. At once he took up the stance of a bareknuckle pugilist and waited for Blenkinsop to follow. Grinning at this show of pluck—or cheek—the others began to cluster around and form a ring.

“Come on, Blenkinsop,” they cried. “In the ring!”

For a moment Caspar feared he would take the challenge, and then the whole bright plan would shatter. But in the nick of time Blenkinsop realized how ridiculous he would look in a ring with a boy nearly eight years his junior, and so, scowling, he walked away. Caspar had sense enough not to dance and crow.

“Don’t ever let him get you alone,” de Lacy warned. “He’d scatter you abroad!”

Since neither Boy nor Caspar suffered any deformity, nor laboured under any physical infirmity, nor had his uniqueness stamped upon him in any remarkable way, both settled very quickly to life at Fiennes. A week after their arrival no stranger could have singled them out. They spoke of grunts and villains, beaks and roes, they troughed and said the food was shent—or even hells shent—as if these words had always been plain English. And whenever a pharaoh bellowed: “Roe!” they were not always (as they had been in the beginning) the last to join the line that quickly formed—for the last roe was the one who did the pharaoh’s bidding. Sometimes the pharaoh would want the roe to pick up a fallen book, or open a window, or brew tea; at other times it was “Get me a quart of beer from Ma Webster’s” or “Take this wager to old Purse—and don’t let the beaks catch you.” On the coldest days they would send a roe to go and sit on a bog seat to get it warm before the pharaoh came and used it.

All of this the two boys accepted as part of the natural and universal order of things. It was at least as natural as the endless round of Caesar and Livy and Pliny and Tacitus and Greek verbs and Euclid that filled their official hours. But they grew increasingly aware of the deep gulf between official school, both public and private, and the unofficial sort of school that thrived out of sight of chief and the beaks. The difference was probably less marked in the Houses, where each boy had his own study and slept in his own cubicle in the dormitory and where the hours of seven to nine each evening were passed in supervision.

But in Old School and in Hospice, beaks were rarely seen after seven, and their absence was certain from lockup at eight until six-thirty the following morning. That hour before eight, when boys were still at liberty to go to Langstroth or walk about the courtyards, was filled with a rising sense of excitement. For years Boy could never see gaslights loom out of the mist without thinking of that moment when the grown-up world could cease to exist. All his experience became tuned to it, everything referred to it, however trivial or everyday—even the crunch of gravel underfoot or the playful shout of a fellow hidden in the dark, over the wall, in another quadrangle, running on the moor; or the chime of the quarter-to-eight bell, rolling over the wet wastes between Langstroth church and the school, drawing boys magically inward…All of these were vibrant with a promise of those glorious hours when outside rules would crumble and ancient traditions supersede them.

For at eight the King o’ the Barn became a primeval Lord of Misrule. Pharaohs and roes all but ceased to exist as boys naturally sorted themselves into the brave, the foolhardy, the merely willing, and the outright cowards or weeds—categories that cut through all divisions of age and official status.

A born scholar could lock himself away in one of the cupboards in the outer passages, which he could either inherit by seniority or hire from a less bookish inheritor. There, with a “candlestick” (fashioned from a bent book cover, holed at the ridge thus formed), he could do his Latin and Greek for as long as he could endure the intense cold and damp—and as long as he could tolerate the happy shrieks of his fellows, the smell of grilling chops and cheese, and the sweet, hot aroma of mulled ale.

But few were so steadfast when Olympic games called. The run up the Barn, the heel-hard launch from a mattress, the mad head-over-heels light, and the cushioned landing in the twenty other mattresses piled against the wall—Homer had no such thrills. And when that game palled, there were buck-buck, piggyback jousting, build the human wall, kill you, where’s Jonah, Jacob’s ladder; the variety of ways to get dirty, tear clothes, bleed, sweat, and laugh and laugh was endless. There were crazes and fads, too. For a couple of weeks that term there was a craze for sliding on one’s back down a flight of stairs holding two brim-f pots of beer—trying not to spill a drop, of course.

For quieter moments there were ghost stories, told around the dying fire. Several of the fellows could make the blood run cold, but the doyen was Randall, of the lower dorm; he could even frighten himself. In fact, that was his trick. He appeared to be discovering the twists and turns of the story in the very moment he told it. In that way he kept every muscle in every body in his circle of hearers screwed up to a barely endurable tension as they watched him discover terror upon terror, and followed him into that dark. His true greatness lay in the fact that in all his stories—whether about a headless dog upon the moor, a disembodied hand in a vicarage, or a beautiful but deadly ghost-child seen only on bright summer days—the person so haunted or plagued would apparently triumph; the ghost would vanish, its manifestations cease…and
then!
Randall knew a hundred different ways of saying “then” and rolling his eyes piteously and implying such terrible compassion for the hapless victim, who must now be unmanned, unnerved, and demoralized, whose hair must blanch, whose blood curdle, while nameless horrors were loose once more around him. Randall made boys glad to flee to beds in crowded dorms and pull the blankets down hard over their heads, for flickering gaslight got every shadow pregnant with numinous fears.

And there were surprising evenings when nothing happened, no special games, no great spinning of yarns. Especially as the end of term and Christmas drew on, evenings of this sort grew more frequent. Boys would sit in groups of ten or so around the fires (either the proper ones or “tramps’ fires” built here and there on the stone floors) and talk of home and the adventures of last summer—visits to Egypt, Greece, the Alps. Boy was popular on these occasions, and his stories of the railways his father had built were always in demand. They loved to hear of quaking bogs subdued, of holes drilled through mountains, of valleys spanned by soaring arches and estuaries ringed with causeways of stone; of the strange customs of the navvies and their extraordinary capacity for labour; of how the French bourgeoisie rode out in their carriages from Rouen to watch the mad English workers moving prodigies of earth and rock; of how tunnels could be driven from opposite sides of a hill to meet not an inch out of line; of steam piledrivers that could crack a nut under a ten-ton weight yet leave its kernel intact; of rolling mills where men with tongs could catch the leading end of a red-hot ribbon of rail, moving at the speed of a galloping horse, and bend it around for a second pass through the rollers that had disgorged it; of machines that punched rivet holes in iron plate in the most complex patterns, controlled not by men but by sequences of holes in little metal plates no bigger than playing cards; of rascally foreigners who wouldn’t pay, and the devious and often terrible ways that Stevenson’s used to extract their dues.

For many at Old School these were their first, informal lessons in geography and modern history—indeed, in life itself, for what could the sons of gentry and aristocrats and clergymen know of that vast commercial world which now sustained them all? And for Boy’s part, he soon saw the justice of Carnforth’s unthinking remark, the first night, that you couldn’t put anyone you knew, friend or not, through the torture of drumming-in. Those nights of misrule welded bonds between boy and boy that time itself could not sever.

And that made the official House beatings all the more remarkable. House beatings were at the fixed hour of eight, immediately after the callover that followed lockup. They had been instituted by chief to allow the pharaohs to keep House discipline without undue reference to the beaks; the system had been imposed, willy-nilly, on Old School and Hospice, though both places lacked the organization to sustain it. In the Houses there were deep divisions between juniors and seniors. Juniors were as scullerymaids; seniors were lords of the earth. The sort of discipline inherent in the pharaoh system came naturally with such divisions. But in Old School a pharaoh might find himself called upon to thrash a boy after callover, when half an hour later they would almost certainly be ragging together, sharing toasted cheese, sitting side by side swapping yarns, or fiending in some cupboard or corner. In practice, it meant that some beatings were fairly perfunctory while others were needlessly savage, depending on the relationship between the pharaoh and his victim; and since, according to the ritual, each stroke was given by a different pharaoh, a beating could consist of any permutation of stingers and ticklers.

In fact, since flesh is quick to mend, the ritual was worse than the caning. Immediately after callover, the day’s tally lined up outside the head pharaoh’s study to sign the beating book, wherein were recorded the offence, the time it was apprehended, and by whom; and there was a blank column where the number of whacks was later filled in. No boy knew how many he was to get until he had got them. There was no set scale; the offence that drew two whacks one day might get four the next. A boy who squirmed or gasped or cried out always got more than one who was rock still and manly about it.

On signing the book the boy had to say: “I admit this offence and accept the punishment.” There was provision to appeal to chief, but only
after
the beating. “There’d be no point in going before, would there?” Malaby said. “You’d have nothing to complain about.” When all had signed they went up to the Barn where the most junior of them had to shout “All out of the Barn!” All the lucky ones then went to the passages, where they could lurk and listen; but to be caught watching was to join the next day’s quota. That was the only good thing about a House beating: None but the pharaohs saw it; even the other victims had to turn their backs.

Once the Barn had emptied, the boys about to be thrashed had to pull all the tables and chairs to the sides of the room, leaving the centre free for a good run. They had to put a single chair facing the wall at one end and then go to the other end, take off their trousers and underpants (if they wore them), and wait, also facing the wall. Soon—though it could be anything up to five minutes—the four pharaohs, each carrying a cane, came up from their studies. The King o’ the Barn was also there, to spy out strangers and to invite them to the following day’s ceremony.

The head of pharaohs called the waiting boys out for thrashing one by one, not in their order in the book, not in seniority, not in alphabetical order, not in any order a boy could predict. When a boy’s name was called, he turned and floated through a half-real space and time to the chair at the far end, hung his trousers over its back, bent over it, and grasped the farther pair of legs as low down as he could without lifting his feet off the ground. Usually a pharaoh stood there to whack his wrists with the cane if he didn’t bend taut enough.

Then a pharaoh would take a run at the bending boy and deal him one fierce thrash. The others would watch closely to see if he squirmed or puckered up the flesh of his buttocks. If he did, they added to the previously agreed tally of strokes. One by one each of the pharaohs, going in strict rotation of their seniority, took his run and gave his thrash. They were actually allowed to run the full length of the Barn but rarely did so—only for truly dreadful offences like cheeking a pharaoh or publicly bringing odium upon the school in front of villains in Langstroth. In any case, the long run added nothing but more terror to the ordeal, for even in a short run a hefty pharaoh could get up enough swing to “tap the claret,” as it was called.

The thrashes were not regular. Sometimes three or four laughing pharaohs would come down like wagons in a train, right, left, right, within the twinkling of an eye. (This fashion had started when some pharaohs had watched six men with sledgehammers piledriving the stays for a circus tent at Ingleton Fair, at the rate of four hammer blows every second. For a while after that every boy got four thrashes, whatever his offence, until the pharaohs had perfected the technique.) Sometimes the pharoahs would stop and gossip or tell a joke between strokes; and woe betide the boy who, thinking his punishment was over, stood and stretched while this happened.

Three or four was the usual number of whacks—far more commonly doled out than five or six, or one or two.

During that first term Caspar got House beatings for fighting without a ring (three times), whistling (twice), singing annoyingly, pretending to smoke a pencil, trespassing on pharaohs’ corridor (in fact, he bent to pick up a book that had dropped just inside the imaginary line dividing pharaohs’ from common corridors, so technically only his fingertips had trespassed), and failing to soak himself well after morning run. He got Barn beatings for wrong buttons, ostentatious tie knot, smiling in prayers, humming, running upstairs when not on a pharaoh’s errand, having both hands in his pockets, and inking an anchor on his forearm. Canes, slippers, and hairbrushes fell upon his naked buttocks eighty-six times between that first Barn beating and the last full day of term. Blenkinsop never again offered his balm.

Eighty-six was not an unusual number. Boy got ninety whacks for very similar offences. In a way, it hardly interfered with their ordinary school life. They grew used to sitting on blood scabs and bruises of baboon-like hue. That extrasensitive pluck of blue-black flesh when the muscle beneath it grew taut became normal; they would have missed it far more acutely than they noticed its presence. They quickly learned that the sting of the cane was short-lived; Caspar even managed to recite the nine-times table right through to himself, without a break in the rhythm, during one House beating of four whacks. And the ritual of looking at and displaying to the rest of the dorm a particularly fine set of “cuts,” as the bloodlined bruises were called, became one of the fun parts of the day.

The juvenile mind is so wonderfully adaptive that it was to be many years before the oddity of all this became apparent to Boy and Caspar. The offences they were beaten for were committed between the hours of six in the morning and lockup at eight. Yet after lockup such offences vanished from the criminal calendar; they might be indulged with impunity—often encouraged by the very boys who, moments earlier, had solemnly and sternly punished the identical acts! You might as well wonder why, on a day when you had broken, say, three commandments, God might still send the sun; while, on a day when you were exceptionally pious, the skies might open and the blizzards howl. Justice at Fiennes was every bit as capricious as all the other myriad forms of retribution which flow from mighty but ineffable systems.