Sons of Fortune (12 page)

But this is not to say that the hours of school were all dour while those of lockup were all excitement. School had its pleasures, too. Having been privately tutored so long, both Boy and Caspar were ahead of all but the most bookish of their fellows. As latecomers they had taken care not to shine too brilliantly and so had a lot of scholastic capital left to fritter; in short, it soon became clear to them that they could pretty well float along for a couple of terms while they tasted all the delights the school could offer and which no home could ever supply.

Hours that might have been—that ought to have been—spent in private study in their mess at Purse’s were spent helping “Mrs. Purse,” as they called her. She took in washing from several of the beaks and it was the two young boys’ delight, on a cold winter afternoon, to stoke up the fire under the copper and watch the linen bubble in the grey suds or see the swirling wraiths of steam hurtle at the ceiling when they lifted the clothes up for a dunking. And every splash sent droplets outward in steaming ballistic arcs, like the smoking fragments of an exploding mine.

If Mrs. Purse caught them at such play, she would haul them roughly about the outhouse as if trying to jerk one of their limbs out of joint. And all the while they would shriek with laughter at her harmless ferocity.

“Oh, Mrs. Purse,” Caspar would say, “you do cook the most sumptuous tripe!” And he would lift out a shirt of Cossack’s or one of Whymper’s drawers.

“Be off! Be off!” she would shriek back in a frenzy, fetching him a vicious blow that missed by careful inches.

“Honestly,” Boy would chime in, “all the fellows would rather have that than our breakfast porridge. You should just try it!”

And she would run after them in a howling frenzy, pausing to catch her breath whenever it seemed likely she might catch them.

Later, when they came back for their savoury tea, she would call them “ill-thriven tastrils” and set the food before them as malevolently as if it were poison. And when they wolfed it down, for every day it was the most succulent food they had ever had, she would say they were “all gob and no gawm” as if she spoke a judge’s sentence. They should be “skelped with the spell of a chair,” she would threaten with glowering eyes as she pressed havercakes of treacly parkin into their pockets and watched them run back over the causeway to school.

Only once did Blenkinsop try to waylay Caspar—in the town, for he knew that in the school Caspar would only call for a ring. Caspar had been hanging around the market, helping to beat the cows from pen to pen, and was hurrying back to a tutorial class when Blenkinsop stepped out from a gateway, saw him, and stood so as to block the path.

The house within the gate was the doctor’s, so Caspar guessed that Blenkinsop had not deliberately waylaid him; this meeting was sheer chance.

“Changed your mind about me, young ’un?” Blenkinsop asked. His tone was friendly enough.

“How, Blenkinsop?”

“That was pretty shent what you did.”

“I only did it because of what you did to my bro.”

“Ah! So you won’t do it again?”

“No!” Caspar cried.

Blenkinsop grinned. “That’s the lad!” he said, walking away. “See you after dark, same place.”

Caspar let him get some way away and then shouted: “I won’t! I won’t fiend with you. Ever!”

Blenkinsop turned, looked at Caspar a long time, then shrugged and walked away. This lack of open threat was somehow even more menacing than any straightforward vow of revenge. For days Caspar went in fear of meeting Blenkinsop at some place where a cry of “ring!” would be useless; every blind corner held the dread of it. But nothing happened and, as day followed day, the fear subsided.

For Caspar there were his “apprentice hours” at Mr. Ingilby’s workshop, too.

“Do’st thou want to knock together one or two knickle-knacks?” he asked Caspar right at the outset. “Or learn the trade from A to ampersand?”

“Learn the trade,” Caspar said without second thought.

“Five year,” Ingilby warned. “Five year to get the rudiments.” He saw the boy’s face fall. “Happen thou’ll frame to it sooner,” he said comfortingly. “Being son to Lord John.”

Caspar just knew he would. But by the end of his first lesson he was less sure, for he spent the entire half hour down in the pit at the dusty end of the saw; and all they had to show for it was two eight-inch planks of elm.

“We’ll cut sapwood off tomorn,” Ingilby promised.

Caspar groaned and wondered if strength and voluntary movement would ever return to his arms.

“Nay, see thee,” Ingilby warned and patted the two bits of elm with the stump of his hand. “Them’s thy masters now. Thou’ll stick by them while they’re worked up into aught to be proud of. Thou’ll know every bend and twist of grain, where they’re kindly an’ where they’re stunt. They’ll learn thee! And be glad they’re not oak.”

And so it was to be, lesson by lesson. Ingilby’s bible was
Nicholson’s Guide to Carpentry, General Framing and Joinery
, from among whose patterns Caspar chose to make a simple Jacobean-style occasional table. Its only joint was a tenon, stopped and haunched for the top, tongued and pegged at the legs. It took him all term to make and polish. Then he looked up its price in Ingilby’s other bible,
The Preston Cabinet and Chair-maker’s Book of Prices Agreed upon July 1802
and found this table was worth but five shillings and sixpence.

“That’s not much, is it, Mr. Ingilby?” he complained.

But Ingilby only smiled. “Now, now,” he chided. “That’s no way for a master’s son to be thinking.” And his eyes twinkled as he spoke.

***

Their times in Langstroth filled only a portion of their free hours at Fiennes. With their schoolfellows they spent many afternoons rambling over the dales; their compulsory morning run up Whernside did nothing to blunt their appetite for those wild, open places, swept with the keen, clean air.

In fact, in connection with that break-of-day run Caspar had the honour of founding a new school tradition that very first term. He fretted at being so slow to descend Whernside after he had reached the cairn at the top of the run. Being athletic, he could run uphill quickly enough, but the way down was so steep that mere length of leg could always carry the race, and the wheezing and panting boys he had passed on the way up could, if they were taller, easily regain their advantage on the way down.

Then one day—this was during his third week at school—he was hanging around the gasworks shed, hoping to cadge a raw carrot off Purse as soon as he had finished filling the gas retorts with coal. Caspar loved the pungent, tarry, sulphurous smells of the place and often wished there was a pudding with just such a flavour. (Once, on one of Stevenson’s workings, he had watched some scaffolders heating a drum of coal-tar creosote, and one of them had told him the dark liquid was their pudding. He had been mortified when they had failed to invite him to share it, for no pudding had ever smelled more appetizing, and the truth had almost broken his heart. Now, all his life, he knew he would be haunted by a lost, never-attainable gastronomic delight.)

He dipped the corner of his handkerchief in the tar that floated on the water that sealed the gasholder. Tonight, he thought, already savouring the pleasure, he could lie in bed and sniff at it through the cloth.

“Thou’rt fond o’ yon tar, I can see,” Purse said.

Caspar noticed that Purse was about to put some beautifully curved pieces of wood on the retort fire. “What’s those?” he asked.

Purse looked at them. “Staves off an old barrel. The hoop’s rusted, see thou.”

Until that moment a barrel had always been just a barrel to Caspar; his mind’s eye had never dismantled it into hoops and staves. He held out his hands. Purse gave him the stave he had been about to burn.

Delighted with its shape, he turned it over and over in his hands, marvelling at the skill that curved and formed it. And then it suddenly came to him that this was exactly what he needed to get quickly down Whernside of a morning. He begged three of them off Purse—one to mess up, one to get perfect, and one to spare—and ran all the way to Ingilby’s, where he drilled a hole in the toe of one and threaded it through with stout hemp cord.

Next morning he was delighted to find that it took very little practice to go skimming—or “staving” as everyone quickly called it—down the slopes that led back to school. The best way, he found, was to stretch one foot ahead as a sort of brake; light sideways flicks with the heel of this foot would also correct the course if need arose. It took both hands to haul on the cord and keep the toe of the stave from digging into the ground and sending the “staver” tumbling headlong.

“Wheeeee!” he screeched as he staved down through thickets of stumbling legs.

“Whee-hee-hee!” he cackled as runners leaped aside and stood and watched and marvelled and cheered.

And “whooo-oa!” he called in an altogether different tone as he saw himself headed for the tall, blond, burly frame of the headmaster, standing legs apart, arms akimbo, right in his path.

“Can’t stop, sir!” Caspar yelled, longing to shut his eyes against this nightmare, but not daring even to blink.

Chief was prudent enough to step aside before Caspar could scatter him like a solitary ninepin. Caspar came to a chill, dusty halt about five yards beyond. He turned to see chief’s beckoning finger curling and straightening with ominous deliberation.

His approach was as curved and as sidelong as the stave he held in his hand. Chief stretched forth his vast pink paw; the piece of wood seemed a mere toy when he grasped it.

He turned it this way and that, looking at the cord, then at the slope, then at Caspar. Meanwhile a knot of boys had collected around.

“Don’t ban it, sir,” one of them pleaded, a boy called Spier, from chief’s own house.

“Yes, please don’t, sir!” several others joined in. Soon the chorus was quite general.

Chief patted his palm with the stave. Suddenly his free hand shot out and grabbed Spier by the arm. Grinning fiercely, he began pulling the boy to him and then thrusting him away—back and forth, back and forth—a favourite trick of his.

“I won’t ban it, Spier!” His tone was vehement, as if they had all been begging him to impose a ban. “D’ye know why, Spier?”

“No, sir,” Spier gasped, being almost tumbled off his feet with each thrust and pluck of that brawny pink arm.

“Because, Spier, when your team played mine last Saturday, Spier, it was the most lacklustre, Spier, spineless, Spier, bottomless, Spier, puny, Spier, wet, Spier, performance I have ever seen, Spier.” He let poor Spier go and began to grab indiscriminately at others in that laughing, squirming pack, which grew larger by the second. “It seems, Boyce, that our new system, Boyce, is producing, Wilkinson, young gentlemen, Wilkinson, of no fibre, Moss, no spirit, Moss! Mmmm, Aylsford, what say, Aylsford? And so, Aylsford, a few knocked heads, Fowler, a few grazed knees, Churley, a broken arm or two, Davies, a cracked skull or so, Abercrombie, may teach ye that pain don’t signify! Mmmm? Say?”

The conclusion was drowned in cheers as boys dashed off to the stone baths, eager to get through their ablutions and chores so that they could scour the place for barrel staves. Within two days every spare stave within five miles (and many more that had not exactly been spare) was at Fiennes. Never had boys climbed Whernside with such vigour, nor descended with such élan. And it was as chief had said—grazed knees, twisted ankles, even a broken arm (though, fortunately, no cracked skull), but none of it daunting enough to send the stavers back to the old pedestrian way of life.

Even Lorrimer, who was back in school three weeks before the end of term, joined in with glee. When he met Boy for the first time after he was up and about again he walked by with a wink. Boy thought it uncommonly decent of him.

***

On Saturday afternoons the whole school played football if the state of the ground permitted. It was a vast, sprawling, anarchic game that covered almost the whole length of the Whernside valley, the “goals” being medieval walls about four miles apart. Chief and Cossack were the team captains (and referees) but they saw their main function as “levellers”—that is, they would trap the ball away from older boys and make sure the younger ones got their share. House pharaohs acted as whippers-in, allowing no strays or slackers. When the ground was too boggy, boys were free to go on walks or runs over the countryside.

Boy was never to forget his long walks over Whernside, Widdale, Baugh, Abbotside, and a dozen other fells, during these times. The unseasonable snows of late October had soon given way to an equally unseasonable warmth. Almost always Boy went out with de Lacy and a fellow from Agincourt called Moncur, whose parents had sent him a copy of Charles Kingsley’s new book,
Westward Ho!
The three would go out to some sheltered hollow—a dry ghyll or a shallow cave in a scar—where, when the sun shone, they could almost imagine it was spring. And there they would take turns reading aloud, spellbinding one another with the amazing adventures of Amyas Leigh and his crew.

“And it’s all true!” Moncur would swear. “Kingsley’s a professor of history, you know.”

They became a new Brotherhood of the Rose and spent long evenings, before lockup, drawing plans of the ship and charts of her voyage.

They wept when Rose herself was killed—not one of them could read the chapter through without suffering at least a certain huskiness of voice. How they came to hate the very name Spaniard! How eagerly they rechristened their ship
Vengeance!
How stirring it was to be Protestant! How grand to be English! They ran screaming up and down the fells, brandishing bright swords of gorse root, and taking it in turns to be the Inquisition and get killed.

Secretly Boy took the white girl raised by Indians, Ayacanora, into his lonely fantasies. He saw her always sprawling drowsily in tropic groves banked around with gaudy flowers whose soporific perfume (which was also, somehow, her perfume) made the zephyrs heavy and excitingly perilous. He tried to picture her Indian-English skin, her eyes lustrous and huge; but she was too dangerous to imagine all at once. Only bits of her. An ear lobe, clear and sharp, with blurred hair, soft jawline, slim neck, shining eves, and again the perfume of her. An elbow—the inside of it, the soft part—and next to it, the sheen of skin that rippled softly over her ribs, and above it, fruits of flesh, lemons of all softness. Two. The thought of them could spurt through him like incendiary blood. And at climax, the thigh lifting from thigh. Where did the rest of her go then? Just thigh, lifting, away from thigh, in a black tropic jungle. The black marked the space between heavenly thigh and heavenly thigh. What is in that space? But before he could see, there always stole upon him that delicious, melting, throbbing ending, and it didn’t matter any more. The images had done their magic and could be put away, along with their dark mysteries, for another night. “Ayacanora,” he would breathe, thrilling himself to drowsy sleep again. “Ayacanora. My girl, girl, girl.” He came to love the word
girl.