Authors: Malcolm Macdonald
***
“I shall be a soldier,” Caspar told Causton and Swift mi one day. “My poor bro will have to see to family affairs, but I shall cover our name with glory.”
He never talked of business or trade, always “family affairs”; chaps at Fiennes were not keen on commerce—even Causton and Swift mi, both of whose people were in trade, never spoke of it.
Causton’s people had been amazingly careless about the matter of a career, so, though he was all of twelve years old, he had not yet the remotest idea of what he should be in life. He decided that he, too, might as well aim at the army. Swift mi knew he was going to the East Indian part of the family’s tea business, but the idea of soldiering suited him better at this stage, so he joined Caspar’s army, as well.
No one could quite explain why it was Caspar’s (or, rather, Stevenson mi’s) army. As its youngest member he ought, by all the rules of a place like Fiennes, to have been the very last to claim it as his. And, to be fair, he never once called it “my” army—always “ours.” But everyone else knew it as “Stevenson mi’s.” Perhaps it was because, thanks to his father’s playful training, Caspar could draw a map that looked a dead copy of a real one from the Ordnance Survey, right down to the puzzling little compass roses and strange messages like
Mag var 19º 33’
that decorated the borders. Maps like that gave everyone confidence.
Perhaps it was that Caspar made the best medals. For a while that term there was quite an enthusiasm for making gorgeous medals, cut out of ticket card, and then awarding them to one another with grand ceremony. Caspar had discovered the scene painter’s trick of dabbing in bold highlights and shadows, giving a powerful effect of sculptured relief to his designs; his crosses and stars looked as solid and chunky as the real things. He made a whole chestful and often stood before the boot-room looking glass frowning sternly; as he saluted himself in the styles of a dozen armies. (This particular enthusiasm waned when Barley, the fat boy who had shared Caspar’s first Barn beating, took to awarding himself such ridiculous decorations as The Most Noble Grand Cross of the Thibetan Buttered Beauty, fifth class, and The Purple Liver, with the motto
For Soaks
across its face.)
Or perhaps it was just that Caspar always seemed to fit best at the centre of things. When there was a charge to be led up the sheer face of a scar, Caspar always broke the skyline first; his restless body, nimble in its speed, demonic in its energy, always drew the eye. Without a weapon of any kind he put so much vim into his wars and made them so blood-curdling that there was a special thrill to the climax of every battle as, naturally, he and his regiment overran the defenders’ lines and took no prisoners.
And when wars grew weary, Caspar always had his treasured Dart to bring out and steam. In the half-dark of the gaslights, when its steam hung in wreaths on the evening air, it looked especially realistic and always drew a great crowd, which often included pharaohs.
In the last week of term Causton got his new slide-valve engine, the Achilles, and at once issued a challenge to Caspar. Its double-acting cylinders gave full power on both forward and backward strokes of the piston, so without a handicap it would have beaten Dart every time. it took two days to establish what the handicap should be. Blenkinsop, despite his dislike of Caspar, was a great enthusiast of steam engines and helped both youngsters to push theirs to the limits of their safety valves. It was he who set the final handicap for the big race, which was held on the next to last day of term. And it was he who, on that day, helped Caspar to fire up the Dart. Caspar was delighted that Blenkinsop had at last forgiven him; his one great dread had been that the senior boy would regain some official position in the House or school and so be able to make his life intolerable.
News of the Grand Train Contest spread through the school. Chaps came to the Old School cloisters from every House to watch; over a hundred and fifty had gathered by the time the races began. Someone said that more than £300 was laid in bets, with Achilles the favourite. Blenkinsop told Caspar he himself had a fiver on the Dart, which quieted Caspar’s last lingering suspicion that Blenkinsop’s real game might be to make Dart lose the race.
It was quite dark when the time came for the first of the three runs that would decide the contest; Dart was to go fifteen paces, Achilles twenty-one. Swift ma was the starter. On the first run he delayed so long that Dart’s safety valve began to weep and tremble, and Caspar thought his neck would twist off, what with turning back to watch Swift and forward to look anxiously at the hot little bomb whose wheels he held in check.
At last there was Swift’s cry of “Off!” The wheels thrashed the air, spun on the stone, gripped, and the Dart was away, true to its name. After that Caspar could not touch it except to correct its direction with a sideways poke of his stick. A great roar went up from the boys who stood on, sat on, leaned on, or peered through the cloister balustrade.
“On Achilles! On! On!” they howled.
“Forward now, Dart! Keep forward!” they bellowed.
And Dart kept forward. Swift’s delay, by raising the steam pressure to its very limit, now stood the little engine in good stead so that it reached the finishing line an easy two seconds ahead of the more powerful Achilles and still had steam to spare. The cheer was deafening, but Causton was not the least put out; he grinned broadly as he picked up the laggard (and now clearly misnamed) Achilles.
“Beginner’s luck,” he scoffed. “The next two are ours. We are about to reverse the legend.”
“Words!” Caspar sneered.
“I’ll give you ten to one.”
“He’s up to no good,” Blenkinsop said, worried now at Causton’s confidence.
Caspar ought to have delayed his “ready” signal until the safety valve began to tremble once again, but impatience led him to guess the pressure was almost there and to give the signal early.
Again they were off. And again the Dart surged ahead of the Achilles—or was that a false impression, fostered by the six-pace handicap? Surely not. Caspar, looking beneath his arm, watched the gap narrowing, narrowing, narrowing. Quicker than last time? He skipped in frustration on the flagstones and blew futile draughts down at Dart, whether in hope of fanning its fire or just generally wafting it forward he could not have said.
By the three-quarter mark it was clear that, barring a miracle, Achilles was set to overhaul Dart well within the distance. As indeed she did, exactly reversing the margin by which Dart had taken the first round. The cheer, now running with the money, was even greater.
“A fine handicap you set!” Caspar said bitterly to Blenkinsop as they went back for the third and final run. Blenkinsop merely grinned. “Got us the right odds, though,” he answered. “And I’ve a trick yet to serve. You wait—you won’t lose.”
“What odds?” Caspar asked. “I haven’t bet anything.”
“More fool you, then.” Blenkinsop knelt beside Caspar as he blew into the firebox to raise the steam more quickly. “Giddy?” he asked.
Caspar nodded.
“Let me,” Blenkinsop said as he edged Caspar aside. Every breath laid an incandescent gold on Blenkinsop’s strangely knobbled face. He blew and blew until the safety valve wept and shivered.
“Shall I give the ready?” Caspar asked, certain of a “yes.”
“Just one more thing.” Blenkinsop drew a number of wooden spills from his pocket and popped them in his mouth, rolling them around like a humbug. Then he spat them out and poked them swiftly into the firebox.
“Hey, they’re wet!” Caspar protested.
Blenkinsop winked. “You’ve enough steam now and they’ll soon dry. Then you’ll just see!”
Caspar, delighted at this stratagem, turned to give the “ready” to Swift.
“Here, you must hold it.” Blenkinsop handed him the engine.
“Off!”
This time there was no doubt. The Dart thrashed away as it had never thrashed before, not even on its hardest trials. It was actually going as fast as Achilles, despite the difference in power between them. Caspar danced and skipped in triumph as the distance between the two held and Causton began to look really worried.
Blenkinsop’s ruse with the damp firing worked, too. Caspar saw the now-dried kindling flare into life, hotter and brighter than any of the gas flares along the cloister. It gave a hellish, flickering joy to the cheering faces that thronged the balustrade, and it punched Caspar’s dark, exultant shadow on the vaulted arches above.
Suddenly there was a deafening explosion that left the cloisters ringing with a painful high note. A burst of sparks replaced the Dart. A broad, vicious crack split the paving slab on which it stood—or had stood, for there was now nothing there but one bent wheel and a few small sherds of unrecognizable copper and brass.
Where was the Dart? Even Caspar in the depth of his shock knew these few bits were only a tenth of that once magnificent machine. It had simply vanished into the air.
He laughed. What else could he do? It was that or tears. Everyone laughed then as Achilles steamed on through and collected the prize.
“Hard lines!” Causton said, holding up the triumphant Achilles, letting its wheels thrash the air to exhaust the steam. He was genuinely disappointed at Caspar’s bad luck; it was not the way he had wanted to win. “Where’s the rest of it?” he asked, looking at the cracked stone and the few scraps left around it.
“We’ll have to search tomorrow,” Caspar said, looking vaguely out through the thinning crowds and into the dark of the courtyard.
And then he froze. And his heart rose up into his throat. And his stomach lifted and turned over. For there on the far side of the courtyard he saw that the window of the pupil room, the window with some of the oldest stained glass in Yorkshire, was shattered beyond any repair. And Cossack was at that moment in the act of opening the remains of one of the frames. Even that careful movement was enough to send several more once precious fragments clattering down, no more valuable than the cheapest coloured cullet.
“Who is the culprit?” Cossack’s voice boomed out over the courtyard.
“I’d better own up,” Caspar muttered, full of dreadful fears.
“And Blenkinsop,” Causton said. “He’s in it, too. Where’s Blenkinsop?”
The cry went up: “Where’s Blenkinsop?”
He was nowhere to be found.
On feet of lead Caspar walked over the courtyard to the beak. When he stood before him he could see no feature inside the intense black of the silhouette, but he could sense an almost ungovernable fury in the way the man breathed and swayed.
“I’m extremely sorry, sir. The pressure built up too much and it just exploded,” he offered.
Only that terrifying breathing.
“I’m sure my father will make what financial reparation may be…”
“Silence, sir!” Cossack barely spoke. His voice was threaded precariously on a tremble. “You! You think…you think that money—can…Well, you come here, sir, and I’ll show you! I’ll show you, sir. I’ll show you. I’ll show you indeed. I’ll show you what money can’t. I’ll speak to you in your own ruffian tongue.” He could hardly get out some of the words.
Miserably Caspar turned and began the long trek around the cloister, through the courtyard, the Barn, the passages, and so up to the pupil room. All the way people patted him on the back and commiserated. “Hard lines, mi!”…“Hard cheese!” But all Caspar could think about was the three sharp cuts still on his bottom from a House beating a few days ago; Cossack would surely see the marks and lay his own on top, where it would he more painful.
For Cossack hated him. Caspar knew that. He was always picking Caspar out in sarcastic asides. He would say, for instance, in giving out a sum: “A man buys lands at seventy pounds…or, in your case, Stevenson minor, seventy thousand pounds…” Caspar was at a loss to understand why Cossack did it, for the sarcasm never brought much of a laugh; it bewildered the other boys as much as it did Caspar. Money was not made much of at Fiennes. But these constant digs left Caspar in no doubt that Cossack hated him. He had often wondered why Cossack never thrashed him. Well, he was going to make up for it now!
In the last of the passageways he met Blenkinsop, who smiled at him broadly.
“Oh, Blenkinsop, thank God! You’ll come and see Cossack with me, of course?”
The smile grew even broader and more reassuring. “Don’t worry. I’ve just seen him and explained everything; you’ll be all right, young ’un!” Playfully he whacked Caspar with an imaginary cane.
With much lighter heart and tread Caspar went up to the study door. Only when he heard the beak’s dreadful “Come!” did his confidence in Blenkinsop’s reassurance begin to fade.
One look at Cossack was enough to shatter the rest. Whatever Blenkinsop had said, it had done nothing to improve the man’s anger.
“I’m waiting,” he said before Caspar was even inside the door.
“Sir?” His voice sounded like a stranger’s.
“I’m waiting to know why I should not flog you within an ace of your life, Stevenson minor.” Anger made him slur the words.
“But, sir!” He felt panic beginning to claim him. “Did not Blenkinsop explain? The wood? The damp wood, which he put on the…”
“Enough! Do not seek to shift the blame, sir!” Cossack boomed. His voice alone was a physical assault. “I am talking of
this
.” He held forth a shattered fragment of the Dart. “What is this?”
“My engine, sir. I was saying, did not Blenkinsop explain that he…”
“This, sir! This!” Cossack’s unsteady finger pointed to the safety valve, half-buried in the mangled copper plate of the boiler. “This!” He thrust it inches from Caspar’s nose. “What is your explanation for this!”
“It’s the safety valve, sir.”
“And in it, sir. What is in it? What is that…
stuff
, inside it?”
Caspar peered into the recess and his bewilderment only increased. There was something in the safety valve. Greeny-white stuff. Limestone fur? Had the boiling water deposited it there? Was that why it had exploded? “I don’t know what it is, sir.”
Cossack smiled thinly, a ghastly, disbelieving grimace. “It is blotting paper. And well you know it.”