Chance might have thrown Lenox and Leigh together on that lengthy afternoon at the beginning of their Fifth Form year at Harrow, but they hadn’t immediately become friends thereafter. The social hierarchy of a schoolboy playground is infinitely less flexible than that of a king’s court, far more finely shaded in its calibration, and universal in its intuitive comprehension of rank. When Lenox’s friends returned from the summer hols, in the day or two following Lenox and Leigh’s long conversation, there was no question whatsoever in Lenox’s mind of integrating Leigh into the group. Nor in Leigh’s, probably.
Still, they had taken to nodding cautiously toward each other from time to time. Here and there they traded a word. And then, toward the end of September, chance had thrown them together again.
It was a chilly Saturday, with a blustery wind sweeping down the tall, lingering summer grasses. A mist hung in the air, perpetually a hundred feet away.
They met by coincidence at the turning to Mrs. Allison’s house. She was the laundress to whom most boys at Harrow sent their clothes; she generally returned them each Monday and Thursday, but it was known that if you were caught in a bind, if you stained your house tie for instance, she would sometimes oblige you by getting it fixed before then.
This meant a walk to her little cottage, a mile from the school’s grounds.
“Ahoy, Leigh,” called Lenox. They were in view of the small thatch-roofed domicile. “What brings you here?”
“I’ve torn my only decent bluer.”
“Sew it.”
“I don’t know how.”
Lenox frowned. Every boy at Harrow knew how to sew—it was essential, given how closely the prefects scrutinized the uniforms. He saw that Leigh was holding his bluer (the standard blue jacket all the boys wore) in a limp tangle. “Have you got needle and thread? I can do it for you while I wait.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Mrs. Al will. Let’s go.”
A thin woman, passing by middle age, her gray-brown hair back in a bun, greeted them with her usual brisk friendliness, listened to their requests, and agreed that she would try to find Lenox’s extra pair of gray trousers (“Spilled again, Master Charles?” she asked) before leading the boys into a sweltering kitchen, where she rummaged in a drawer until she found a spool of thread and a needle.
“It’ll be a bit,” she said, “while I go out the washing shed.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Allison,” said Lenox.
When she was gone, Lenox took the bluer from Leigh. Its right arm was in shreds—an unnatural tear, he saw immediately. “What happened?”
“I caught it on something.”
“That’s a fib. You’ll go to hell.”
Leigh looked at him stonily. “Ketchworth did it, after I got ripped in old Yardley’s class.”
Ketchworth was the bully of their year, Yardley their Greek professor. Lenox raised his eyebrows. “Ah.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Oh, yes, no difficulty there,” he said, bending down to the work.
All the boys at Harrow wore the same uniform: a bluer first, brown plimsolls, gray trousers of the exact cut and shade that Mrs. Allison was currently fetching for Lenox, and a varnished straw hat with a blue band. The only difference in attire was that each boy wore the tie of his house, while monitors, like Edmund, could wear ties of their own choice, which was considered a perquisite of inestimable worth. The key point was the hat, though. It was not a boater, a point upon which all Harrovians, even the least academic among them, could become as pedantic as a Paris doctor. It was a Harrow hat.
Leigh’s own was tilted back on his head. He sat for some time in silence as Lenox worked. “By George,” he said at last, “you’re handy with that.”
“Noonan taught me when I was in Shells. Nobody taught you?”
“No,” said Leigh shortly.
By one of those happy little flukes of life, Mrs. Allison came in with Lenox’s trousers at precisely the moment when he was cutting his thread. “There, done,” she said, and the boys looked at each other and laughed. “What? What is it?”
“Nothing, Mrs. Allison,” said Lenox, standing up and snatching his trousers from her. “Thank you! You’ve saved me a hiding!”
They rambled home slowly through the empty country lanes that separated Mrs. Allison’s cottage from the school. Lenox found that they fell once again into easy and natural conversation. When they had gone half a mile or so, he ventured a question that had been on his mind since their last one: the identity of his fellow student’s benefactor.
Leigh’s people were from Cornwall. He had grown up a mile or two inland of the rocky coastline at Tintagel, known as King Arthur’s castle, which many people considered the most beautiful place in all of England. Lenox had only heard descriptions, of ancient steps descending from high windswept cliffs down to a curving shore. Leigh’s mother was the niece of an earl, but her father was estranged from his brother, and relatively poor, a younger son.
Leigh’s father too had been poor, though of high birth, as well. He had been educated at Harrow and Caius, and had put Gerald down for Harrow at birth and begun to squirrel away money from his salary as a parliamentary inspector—a berth secured for him by a distant cousin—to pay for it.
But four years before, when Gerald had been ten, his father had been struck by a carriage near Bath and killed.
This was tragic in itself, but especially so because of how Leigh’s face seemed to become illuminated when he spoke about his father. They had been uncommonly close, from the sound of it, spending hundreds of hours together on the heaths of Cornwall, collecting specimens of every kind, plant, mineral, animal. This was the source of Leigh’s almost preternatural knowledge of the natural world, Lenox had deduced, a knowledge that he proved again on the walk home from Mrs. Allison’s with a passing reference to the hollow-weed along the side of the road.
After his father’s death, Gerald and his mother had moved to a smaller cottage and lived on their savings. Leigh had implied to Lenox in that first conversation that money was very close with them; and even now it was clear that some of his things were secondhand, especially his books and his clothes.
Harrow had become, of course, out of the question. The money that Leigh’s father had put aside was needed for the basic management of their lives—his mother, the daughter of an aristocrat, niece and granddaughter of an earl, had no way of making her own. She spoke perfect French, could play a piano or draw a tree; but it was not possible to convert these attainments into cheese and bread.
But then, a surprise. One afternoon Leigh’s mother had met him at the top of the road as he came from school, clutching a letter in her hand. (“She looked very chuffed,” Leigh recounted glumly.) It was from Harrow. His fees for the year had been paid; they would expect his arrival as a member of the Fourth Form on the fifth of September.
As Leigh had described it to Lenox, he had known immediately that it was a bad idea. He had been thus far an indifferent student at his local grammar school; within the family, the idea was that he might make it through the age of sixteen and then lean upon that same generous London cousin for some government sinecure upon which he could found a life.
Now, of course, that plan had altered. Harrow! Ambitions spread out before his mother’s eyes. None of her own family, those many earls, had gone to university.
“And I won’t, either,” Leigh had said, during their first conversation.
“Why don’t you try harder?” Lenox had asked.
Leigh had thought about this for a moment—a trait of his, that he received every question as if he had never considered it before. “When my father died I decided that I would never again do anything I didn’t want to.”
“Except come to Harrow.”
“Well; that’s different. My mother had her heart set upon it.”
“Does she know that you’re—”
Lenox hadn’t known how to bring this sentence to a graceful end, but Leigh had saved him the embarrassment of an attempt. “I’ve told her I won’t be sitting the exams for Cambridge. Her own grandfather stopped after Eton, so she doesn’t mind. She’s glad at least that I’m here. Among the gentlemen.”
This last word was not uttered very kindly.
After the mysterious letter from the school had arrived, Leigh’s mother had sat down and written them back, inquiring who had paid her son’s boarding fees. They ran to nearly a hundred pounds a year—a fortune upon which a man of the upper reaches of the lower class might easily marry and have children. (It was considered among the clerking class that a hundred and fifty pounds was the minimum sum upon which any respectable person could propose marriage to a lady. Many banks would sack any clerk who was married before reaching that salary, on the presumption that he would be tempted to steal from the cashbox.)
Harrow had promptly replied that they had been given specific instructions should such a question be asked of them, which were to say that the fees were paid by “a friend” and would extend through the remaining years of Gerald Leigh’s schooling. The correspondent—the registrar, Higgins—added that such anonymous munificences were in fact relatively common, and added, did Master Gerald intend upon taking his place at the school?
He did; he had. His mother had insisted.
Lenox had learned all of this during their first conversation. Now, as they walked back from Mrs. Allison’s, each with a garment slung over his shoulder, Lenox asked whether Leigh had any idea who “a friend” might be.
They were passing through a small, enclosed field, where three horses were grazing in the chilly mist. “The benefactor? I don’t know.”
“Hm.”
“How I hate him, though! You have no idea.”
“Why?” asked Lenox.
Leigh, his expression surly as a moment of silence passed, finally said, “He’s why I’m here.”
“It’s not so bad as that.”
Leigh shook his head fiercely. “And I also have some idea it’s a person whose help I don’t want—a person whose face I wish I could spit in.”
They had walked on, quietly, this remark hanging in the air, for some time.