The Custodian of Paradise (14 page)

I nodded.

She opened a drawer in her desk and removed a canvas bag into which she carefully slid the books.

“Take them home now,” she said. “Show them to no one and never remove them from your house again. You will not get a second chance. It is not to protect
you
that I have chosen to proceed this way.”

When I took the bag from her and stood up to leave, she sighed.

“All right then,” she said, her voice husky as though she were wishing some dear friend a last goodbye. “Off you go. Off you go, Sheilagh Fielding.”

   
Chapter Four
   

I
WAS, AS FAR AS THE GIRLS OF
B
ISHOP
S
PENCER KNEW, NO MORE
“out of bounds” than before, though I felt that, for the teachers of Spencer, I as good as lived in outer darkness, a student known to have done something Miss Emilee considered unspeakable who was allowed to remain only because, by expelling her, they would run the risk that she would tell everyone about her prank and thereby smear the school.

My conversation with her had left me feeling desolate. Her never-voiced but all too obviously grim view of my future prospects weighed upon my mind and spirit. She had all but said that I was by nature unsuited for happiness, an innately perverse young woman hopelessly inclined to waste her intelligence on subversive mischief. I could have told her that I did not share this view, but that would have involved explaining myself to her, which I was loath to do, loath to tell her that I wanted to be taken out of the running for the “prize” about whose value the other girls had not the slightest doubt. The girls who seemed unable even to conceive of another sort of life than the one for which Spencer was preparing them, a life for which I was all too happy to admit I was unsuitable.

The problem was that I could only vaguely conceive of alternatives, vague versions of the lives for which our brother school, Bishop Feild, was preparing its students, the potent, effectual, dynamic lives of men. But even the sort of life that might be led by a graduate of Bishop Feild did not appeal to me. I somehow knew that, even as a boy, I would be disaffected, disdainful of my single-minded peers, inclined to opt out but
having no idea what to do instead. I could clearly see what sort of man I would have made—one begrudgingly enlisted in a life that I disdained, an ineffectual crank who would become even more bitter as he aged, a figure of amusement to the captains of the world.

I could not have told Miss Emilee that I had acted out of reckless desperation with no real end but notoriety in mind, notoriety from which I hoped that, somehow, something matching my notion of good would come.

My motives, several years later, for beginning to associate with the boys of Bishop Feild were just as unclear.

Spencer and the Feild bordered on each other, separated only by a tall iron fence between whose bars the smaller or skinnier of the students from either side could have squeezed, though it was only the boys who did so and only then to retrieve a wayward cricket ball.

The girls of Spencer pretended not to notice the balls or the mock pleas of the boys to throw them back. It was an endless game between the students of the two schools, the boys overthrowing their balls on purpose, then standing at the fence and holding the bars jail-cell fashion while peering between them and shouting out the names of the more attractive and audacious girls.

Occasionally, one of the girls, in what was considered an act of brazenness and daring, picked up the errant cricket ball and threw it with all her might over the fence, as far from the nearest boy as she could, which always drew a cheer from the boys, none of whom wanted to be the one appointed to chase down a ball thrown back in such a fashion by a girl. If no girl threw back the ball, the captain of the Feild ordered one of the boys to retrieve it, a boy who, by his ability to fit through the fence or willingness to scale it, won for himself a kind of fame that, though not to be taken seriously, at least saved him from the obscurity that would otherwise have been his fate.

It had always been my practice to stay far clear of the fence, lest my conspicuous size and solitude make me a target of the boys. I was certainly not unknown to them—I had sometimes heard taunting shouts
of “Fielding” from a distance, my name drawn out to “Fieeelllding,” but had always pretended not to hear it, and the girls of Spencer were too terrified of me to draw my attention to it, let alone join in the teasing.

But one day I walked back and forth, looking through the fence at No Girls’ Land, looking, I imagined, because of my size and carriage, like one of the teachers of Spencer whose duty it was to patrol the fence each day. On the third day of my patrol, a group of boys gathered at the fence, at first conferring in whispers among themselves, until one of them spoke up.

“It must be hard,” he said, “finding clothes to fit you.” The boys with him laughed, but I kept walking back and forth. “It’s not as though you can wear your mother’s hand-me-downs, now is it?” They laughed again and were joined by other boys until the fence was a crammed phalanx of blue-blazered boys, the sight of which drew the girls of Spencer who formed a line behind me. The boys and girls stood like two opposing armies, while I walked up and down between them. “I think I saw you last year at the circus,” another of the boys said to more laughter, though the girls looked on in silence.

I stopped walking and, facing the boys, pointed my purely ornamental cane at them, moved it slowly from left to right. “Behold,” I said loudly. “The Lilies of the Feild.” The girls of Spencer all at once burst out laughing and I heard them repeating to each other what I realized with a mixture of glee and dread would be an enduring nickname. I had not expected the other girls to gather round, let alone to laugh at something
I
said at the expense of the boys who had for so long adored them from a distance.

“Fielding,” shouted one of the tallest boys. “They say that you are never to be found without your cane. They even say you take it with you when you go to bed.” In addition to the somewhat forced laughter of the boys, there was a chorus of gasps and half-suppressed giggles from the girls behind me.

“You have very small hands for a boy your size,” I said. “Or, rather, for a boy your height. I’m sure that, for a boy your
size
, one of them will do.”

Behind me there were more gasps and less laughter than before.

“My name is Prowse, Miss Fielding,” said the boy, who stood almost opposite me, his hands behind his back in the manner of a man out with his wife and children for an evening stroll. “My father was once headmaster here. I am the captain of the school.”

“Whereas I, Mr. Prowse,” I said, “am merely the master of my fate and the captain of my soul.”

“William Ernest Henley,” Prowse said.

It was hardly an obscure couplet, but I was suitably impressed with Prowse in spite of his affectatious manner. He might have been a gentleman introducing himself formally to a woman held universally in high regard. He
did
look manly, sporting beneath his blazer a blue vest that was not part of the official school uniform and so signalled some sort of exemption or special status. He was almost absurdly attractive, standing there with his feet planted far apart as if to say that he would, calmly and unostentatiously, hold his ground no matter what. His blond hair was parted down the middle and brushed back so that the whole of his strong but small-browed forehead was shown to best effect. I could see, even from this distance, that his eyes were bright blue. A boy, almost a man, such as I could never hope to have. Yet he had addressed me without condescension or scorn, addressed me in a manner that had disarmed everyone, myself included.

The boys on either side of him, among them the boys who had taunted me, regarded me somewhat differently now, their expressions begrudgingly noncommittal. I wondered if they were thinking that, though Prowse had accorded me more respect than they believed I deserved, it was still possible that he would change his tone, that he was disarming me as a prelude to repaying my Lilies of the Feild remark.

“Miss Fielding is formidable,” he said, “though not, we may dare to hope, our opponent at heart.” He nodded with the same exaggerated formality with which he spoke. “Good day to you, Miss Fielding,” he said. As he turned away, the other boys did likewise. He ambled, hands still behind his back, across the playing field, the boys he clearly
thought of as
his
boys surrounding him. He might have been some visiting dignitary whom the boys had been asked to show about the school, looking this way and that, as if he had never seen the grounds before, nodding, smiling at their efforts to impress him.

Seventeen years old at most, I thought. A mere boy. Absurd in his pretentiousness. Though no more so, perhaps, than I was in mine. I hoped I did not convey the sort of impression Prowse did. Yet how deftly he had brought the confrontation to an end, minimizing the damage to the Feild, yet at the same time seeming to intervene on my behalf, as well as on that of Bishop Spencer, preserving an as-yet never-interrupted peace between the two schools, and somehow even suggesting that, were it necessary, were he forced to stoop to my sort of tactics, he could have cut me down to size.

I stopped patrolling the fence. The way my encounter with Prowse had ended, it seemed out of the question to go back to baiting the other boys into making fun of me. That I had routed the boys with one line did nothing to alter or elevate my standing at Spencer. I had thought that day, especially as Prowse had addressed me so directly and with such deference, that something would come of it. But Prowse stayed as far from the fence as he always had. I saw him—even from a distance he was conspicuous both by his carriage and by the knot of boys by whom he was constantly surrounded—standing near the front entrance to the Feild, seemingly looking my way, though from that distance, it was hard to tell.

One day I followed the fence all the way to where it ended at Bond Street, walked around the iron post and stepped onto the other side, the Feild side, something that, in my time at Spencer, no other girl had been known to do. Seeing that none of the masters was about, I made my way across the playing field, bringing to a silent halt a football game whose participants gawked at me.

I walked straight through them, leaving it to them to step out of my way, focusing my eyes on the distant Prowse whose full attention I was now sure I had, for he and his delegation had begun to walk towards me. We met near the fringe of the playing field, still on the grass.

“Hello, Miss Fielding,” Prowse said. “Or is it true that people merely call you Fielding?”

“At Spencer they just call me Fielding,” I said. “I prefer it.”

“Then Fielding it will be,” he said.

I noted the future tense. Further visits would be welcome. Or merely expected?

“I will call
you
whatever the boys call you,” I said.

“They call me Prowse.”

“Then Prowse it will be.”

“Is that what you want to be, Fielding, one of the boys?” Prowse said. His tone had changed. Derision? No. A mere lapse into informality?

“Boys
will be boys,” I said.

“One of the men, then?” he said.

“Men also will be boys,” I said. “I have merely come to visit.”

“But look at the stir you’ve caused,” Prowse said, pointing across the Feild towards Spencer, where the girls had gathered at the fence, gripping and peering through the bars. “What will Miss Stirling think?”

I shrugged.

“Are you not concerned,” he said, “about your reputation?”

“My visits,” I said, “will do more harm to your reputation than to mine.”

Prowse laughed. “You plan to come back? What if Miss Stirling forbids it? What if Headmaster Reeves forbids it?”

“Then I will have to think of something else,” I said.

But my visits were not forbidden, by either Miss Emilee or Headmaster Reeves. I think she spoke to him about me, perhaps told him that, as my purpose was to agitate, the best thing to do was ignore me.