Two o’clock was surely the most hopeless hour of the night. Years after lights-out but ages before dawn, never had madness felt so close at hand. Rational thought had long ago departed—who knew how many months out it was now—abandoning Morgan to a body more agitated than he could endure.
That body was now in fact slipping from his bed and moving somnambulant from the dorm. He felt aches, stabs, drafts, but the body paid them no mind. He watched, almost curious, as the body repaired to the changing room, where it stripped off pajamas and donned mufti before continuing in stocking feet to the study. He observed, now quite curious, as the body gathered items from his drawer: money, wristwatch, and, most peculiar of all perhaps, the small, soft-bound volume Silk had given him that last night, the night they’d sat together in the study after weeks of not speaking; the night Silk had told him the secret of the poacher’s tunnel; the night Silk had … not said goodbye, but failed to say it.
Morgan had never precisely understood why Silk had given him Stalky & Co. as his fag book. Silk had claimed that Gallowhill had given it to him, and in fact the penciled initials G.G. could be found inside, but why after everything would Silk have parted with it? And why, so long escaped from Silk, was Morgan now stuffing it into his pocket?
He followed as the body quit the study and made its way downstairs. There it turned in—peculiar—at the cloakroom, where it sought out his overcoat, scarf, and cap. It even—extraordinary—rifled through Holland’s overcoat for Holland’s gloves, the only ones known to exist in the House.
He had nothing better to do, nowhere to be, so he accompanied the body as it laced up his outdoor shoes, unlocked the garden door, and strolled across the moonlit playing fields to the poacher’s tunnel, where it began the routines of gaining entrance to the woods.
Whatever could its purpose be? It couldn’t be making for the Keys, as surely it knew that establishment was closed. It could only, Morgan realized with growing excitement, intend one thing. Finally, someone had recognized the bitter, bursting truth—that there was nothing left for him at that school, or anywhere in the east, west, or north of Yorkshire. Finally, someone had taken steps. Finally, someone was acting!
Until this moment he had classed running away with the histrionics favored by his sister Emily. One of his earliest memories was of Emily storming off to her bedroom after shrill confrontation with their mother, packing a bundle, and Running Away.
—Don’t bother coming after me! she’d cried over their mother’s protests.
This had been when they lived in the country, in the cottage at Longmere, and he had a mental picture of his father returning home shortly afterwards (on a horse?), consoling their mother, and then departing on the horse (with Morgan and Uncle Charles?) to search for Emily. They found her in a glade nearby, and Father had sent Uncle Charles back with the horses while he stayed to Reason with Emily. Morgan had a memory of riding his father’s horse back to the cottage and announcing that Emily had been found! Safe and sound! Emily and Father returned, and their mother prepared a special tea with iced buns.
His legs were not striding through the woods in search of a special tea. His mother was no longer making buns of any description, his father no longer rode horses, and Emily had gone and married Captain Cahill. His legs were striding through the woods in pursuit of something altogether undemonstrative and compulsory. His legs were striding for one reason only: to shore up his sanity.
But how? The station lay in the opposite direction; what’s more, his money would take him only a few junctions down the line. Surely the body did not propose to trek on foot to their destination? He may have traversed the Cheviots at the age of nine and survived Dartmoor blizzards before that, but how many hungry miles would it take to escape Yorkshire? Were they headed for London? Home, as his father called it? Decidedly not. If Yorkshire held nothing for him, London held less than nothing.
He hungered for somewhere distant, somewhere epic, somewhere full of valleys, mountain ponies, beacons, Brecons—Wales? Wales! Ancient Cambria, land of his father’s mother’s people! The body gave no acknowledgment, but Morgan knew he had discovered its secret. For Wales they were bound, though plainly they weren’t going to walk the whole way, not with three shillings sixpence in their pocket. The path would lead them to Fridaythorpe, but there was nothing in that village beyond a public house, a church, and a post-office shop, all in the middle of precisely nowhere.
The post-office shop! He aha’ed to let the body know that he was onto it.
—So that’s it, he said aloud. The post-office van!
They were to hitch a ride in the back of the post-office van, like some self-mailing parcel, posting themselves on to the next destination, Doncaster perhaps, and proceeding thusly to their terminus beyond England’s western border. He smiled in triumph as they plunged deeper into Grindalythe Woods, later into the night, farther from the Academy and his friends, who had ejected him like so much rubbish from a life raft, farther from everything known—ten minutes out, a thousand paces out, half a mile out, out, out, and out.
* * *
The clock on the church was stuck at half past seven. Beneath the dial, words mocked, Time is short, eternity long. They made him want to punch someone again.
The walk through the woods had warmed him, but it wouldn’t last. He tried the front and back doors of the Keys and found them locked. This he considered unfair. What possible reason could there be to lock anything in Fridaythorpe? The post-office shop he found similarly inaccessible, though the mailbag languished on the stoop awaiting early collection. How utterly typical. The post office they locked, but the mail they left unattended in the night. People everywhere were idiots.
An unholy racket like the sound of a tin shed collapsing dispelled the quiet of the night. He ducked down a passage between the post office and the adjacent block of houses. Pressing his back against the damp wall, he rubbed his shoulder, now sore from being out of its wrappings. The noise grew louder, and he realized it was no collapsed shed but merely a cat fight amongst dustbins, loud enough to wake the dead.
He slid to the ground and held his arm against his chest as a part of his mind carried on jauntily with its caper: He must stay hidden down yonder snicket, in case the cats roused anyone. He mustn’t be caught just as his adventure was beginning. He could watch for the van, and then, oh, what ripping yarns he’d have! He’d outgrown ripping yarns long ago, of course, but even Stalky grew up to stalk in India. If he was bound for Wales, it could only be because his full-grown courage demanded broad horizons. It was a shame the post bag wasn’t big enough to fit inside of. That would have been the best plan; instead, he’d have to wait for the driver to load the bag and return to the cab before he slipped in the back. Oh, it would require timing, exquisite timing, and although it might hurt quite a bit given his tedious arm, he would prevail. He would, because that was the only turn his story could take!
As this corner of his mind prattled, he felt fatigued. A light flicked on above the post office, startling him to his feet and driving him farther down the snicket. He unlatched a gate and scarpered into the garden behind the houses. Presently, a woman in dressing gown emerged from the back of the post office and began to upbraid the cats. Other lights came on, in the house belonging to the garden and in the one next door. Morgan stayed hidden until the woman went back inside, but his mind continued painting a dashing picture of hitchhiking across the countryside, of food stolen from dustbins—unfortunately, the cats had got to Fridaythorpe’s—of Huns thwarted, rescues achieved; even Stalky’s attack on the Khye-Kheens would pale beside the campaigns that awaited him.
In the middle of the garden, there was a boulder surrounded by a patch of dirt. Morgan sat down on the rock and let his head rest upon his knees. He had no intention of falling asleep; he was merely huddling to conserve warmth and to rest his arm. His mind demanded he keep an ear for any approaching vehicle. Wearily, Morgan agreed.
When Emily ran away, it was daytime, and spring, and she left carrying a cloth as if for a picnic. She ran away demanding that no one follow her because she had perfect confidence that someone would. Not only someone, but the one person she wished to follow her, their father. She had probably performed the entire drama to force a crisis, a kind of closeness through confrontation with the person she trusted and loved and needed.
There was no one Morgan could expect to come after him. Even if the Academy could stir itself to realize he was missing, it would be midmorning at the earliest. He could not expect his father to come north looking for him. Even if someone filed a missing person report, how much interest could the constabulary take? He might be a schoolboy, but boys his age worked down the mines, in shipyards, in a hundred and one trades across the land. Soon he’d even be able to vote in elections, should they ever deign to occur. In all likelihood, the Academy would dispose him for bunking off.
But his father would worry, and so would his sisters, inconsolably. When they finally found him, Veronica would tear strips off him and then start all over again in the morning. She would make him feel wretched, as wretched as he deserved. Silly, vain, pathetic.
Though what should he do instead? Return to the Academy, haul himself back through the woods, back to the House, the dorm, and the two he had lied to? (And wasn’t he the worst sort of liar, the kind everyone believed…?)
Morgan raised his head and saw that all the lights had gone out, save the one in the house whose garden this was. The curtain lay askew as if someone had pulled it aside and not replaced it properly. He could see a wall and a bookcase, but nothing else—except for a garden door, which was opening and revealing a man, a man in dressing gown, a man who paused on the threshold and gazed into the darkened garden, a man who stepped off the stoop and padded across the wetted grass in slippers, towards him, a man he knew.
* * *
His body would not move.
Mr. Grieves stopped, stuffed his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown, and looked at him. Morgan looked back.
—Come on, Mr. Grieves said.
He beckoned as if nothing were amiss, as if there were nothing to refuse, nothing to resist, as if it were perfectly natural for him to fetch Morgan from his garden in the middle of the night.
The body did not ask permission but uncurled itself and stood. Mr. Grieves walked alongside, a silent companion across the swath of grass. At the door, Mr. Grieves gestured for Morgan to precede him. The body, rogue agent, stepped into the passageway and up a tilting flight of stairs to a door, which Mr. Grieves opened, admitting them to his rooms.
—Sit down.
The body did as Mr. Grieves bid it, collapsing into a wooden chair at a small table. Mr. Grieves retired to an alcove, where he lit a gas ring and put a kettle on to boil. He filled a toothglass from the tap and set it in front of Morgan. Morgan gazed at it and felt Mr. Grieves gazing at him, as if examining him for damage. It was cold in the flat, almost as cold as it had been in the garden. Morgan pulled the muffler over his mouth and ears, sleeves over fingers. The air from the room no longer touched him. Presently he would wake in his bed and ordinary life would resume, dry, heartless, but recognizable.
The kettle whined. Mr. Grieves assembled tea things: a pot wrapped with a flannel, unmatched cups, one chipped, which Mr. Grieves took for himself after wiping the other for Morgan, a tin of sugar, a nearly empty bottle of milk brought in from the windowsill.
—You drink that.
Mr. Grieves gestured to the toothglass and then rooted in the open shelving for another tin, water crackers, which he poured carelessly into the lid and set on the table. Dry crackers and water felt oddly appropriate, and under Mr. Grieves’s gaze, Morgan drank and ate. His tongue seemed enlarged, its sensibility magnified, detecting the lead of the pipes, the lime and peat of the water, even the dust that must have lined the glass. As he emerged from the cocoon of scarf and coat, he began to sense the outlines of the place: cold, shabby, even more so than the studies back at the Academy. The floorboards here wore a rug, but it didn’t look as though it had ever been beaten out, and it was unraveling along one side. Unlike the studies, Mr. Grieves’s windows possessed drapes, but they, too, looked thirdhand and possibly moldy. The bed, which Morgan glimpsed through an arch, was larger than his own, but its mattress sagged in a way that made him think of a backache. Only the books on the shelves seemed cared for. Mr. Grieves’s clothing hung out of sight somewhere, with the exception of a pair of socks, which dangled below the drapes, clipped in place by the window. Morgan could see no radiator, only a gas heater with a meter on it, like the one they’d had at that dreary hotel in Bournemouth last Christmastime. Beside the armchair languished a pile of exercise books. Mr. Grieves’s satchel bulged. A clock chimed the quarter hour, a clock that must have been ticking all the while.
Mr. Grieves unwrapped the pot, poured out the tea, stirred in milk and sugar, and plunked the cup before Morgan with a determined expression.
—Right, he said, I think you had better start talking.
There was a lump in his chest, and his blood had slowed to something hot and viscous. Irresistible, to sit there at Mr. Grieves’s table, the man’s eyes upon him. No one would disturb them. Mr. Grieves had nothing, apparently, to do besides cross his fingers around his teacup and let his thumb caress the chip.
—I didn’t do it, sir.
Mr. Grieves’s eyes widened.
—I didn’t know about it either. I know who did, now, but I didn’t then. I promise.
Mr. Grieves scrutinized him, his eyes deepest brown, impossible in the light even to distinguish from black. And as he stared, a chill crossed Morgan’s scalp, announcing something uncanny. His mouth had spoken without his leave, but Mr. Grieves did not ask what he meant.
I didn’t do it would most rationally refer to the explosion in the chemistry lab. It would be reasonable to say such a thing when caught out-of-bounds in the middle of the night. It would be reasonable to inform Mr. Grieves that he was not running away from punishment. But Mr. Grieves was not looking at him as though Morgan were speaking of the explosion. Mr. Grieves was looking at him as though they were speaking of the thing that had come between them three years ago and never quite departed. Mr. Grieves’s expression was in fact a tell, one that confirmed Mr. Grieves still thought of that time and bore a grudge.
However freely Morgan might lie about any number of things, he was telling the truth about the Gallowhill business. He had not taken advantage of Mr. Grieves’s friendship to ruin the dig. He had not insulted Gallowhill’s memory by engineering the prank. He hadn’t known who did it when Mr. Grieves questioned him that day.
—I believe you, Mr. Grieves said at last.
A weight, one Morgan didn’t until that moment know he bore, seemed to slip from his shoulders, as he felt the pilfered gloves slip from his overcoat. He picked them up and set them on the table beside the cracker lid.
—I stole these, he said.
—From whom?
—Holland.
Mr. Grieves examined one of the gloves.
—Won’t Holland miss them?
Morgan nodded. Mr. Grieves regarded him again.
—Why did you steal them?
—I needed them.
—Why?
The bald simplicity startled him, and he felt a pleasurably painful freezing like he used to feel before entering Silk’s study for Accounting. Every other grown-up framed questions with commentary, sarcasm, rebuke, or with a clear indication of the answer they required. Mr. Grieves’s query in its nakedness was at once more curious and more exacting than any Morgan could have expected.
—The cold, he said.
—And are you cold now?
Morgan dipped a fingertip into his tea and found it too hot.
—Drink that, Mr. Grieves said.
Morgan lifted the cup to his lips. Mr. Grieves, a human mirror, did the same.
—And? Mr. Grieves prompted.
Morgan held his cup closer.
—As we’re in the confessional, you may as well out with it, Mr. Grieves said.
—Out with what?
—All of it.
And a wall rose up before him, like the waves Poseidon raised to crush Odysseus’s ship, a wall of everything the question had summoned. Here they were, outside the Academy, somewhere in the free world, subject only to the softly ticking clock. They might stay here forever, that gaze forever upon him, forever ready to listen to the truth.
But he couldn’t sit there eternally mute. Time did turn, and patience, even from Mr. Grieves, had a limit. If he continued to say nothing, Mr. Grieves would grow bored with him and decide his problems were better confessed to someone else.
—I don’t know where to start, sir.
Mr. Grieves refilled his own cup:
—How about with what you were doing in my landlord’s garden at three o’clock in the morning.
—Isn’t three o’clock supposed to be the wickedest hour of the night, sir? The reverse of when Christ died on the cross?
—Don’t evade.
So known to be cornered thus, the way Silk cornered him, but more clear-sighted. Silk had been able to see to his heart, but sometimes what Silk claimed to see there was only a reflection of Silk’s own ideas, the ones from his idea shelf that he kept so proudly polished, regardless of their relation to reality. But Mr. Grieves was not a man to make guesses. Mr. Grieves relied on evidence. Now for instance, he had offered no hypothesis concerning Morgan’s circumstances; he merely searched for facts. Already he could tell truth from evasion. Already in his understanding he had sensed the real Morgan Wilberforce, the one Nathan and Laurie missed, the one even Silk mistook, the one his father no longer sought.
—Morgan?
And now he was calling him by his Christian name, as he hadn’t in years.
—I didn’t know it was your garden, sir.
—Oh, no?
—No, sir. I swear it!
—I believe you.
A tightness in his chest noticed only in the loosening.
—Nevertheless? Mr. Grieves prompted.
—The cats were fighting, and I was … waiting for the mail.
Mr. Grieves turned those brown-and-black eyes on him again—believing, demanding, searching—until Morgan somehow, without the right words, without paragraphing, without thesis of any kind, unfolded the story: the trek through the woods, the post-office van, Wales …
—And yet, Mr. Grieves said, you didn’t actually want to go to Wales, did you?
Morgan certainly did want to go to Wales. In fact he still wanted to go there. Wanted to and would!
—You made for Fridaythorpe, Mr. Grieves observed, not the station, which is closer to the Academy. You imagined a post-office van rather than a luggage car, which is bigger and easier for concealment. You chose a vague destination and lacked a compelling reason to go there. And you hid in my garden when you ought to have been pursuing transport.
It made him sound a duffer, fit for nothing but imprisonment in a run-down school amidst people who neither understood nor wanted him. He dug at the table with a fingernail.
—God knows I’m a complete waste of space, sir.
Mr. Grieves straightened:
—God knows nothing of the sort.
His skin tingled as though the air had grown heavier.
—You’re focusing on the wrong thing, Mr. Grieves said.
—I suppose I ought to be focusing on how lucky I am to be at a school at all, to have food, clothing, friends, a family who love me …
He almost added et cetera, et cetera.
—That’s undoubtedly true, said Mr. Grieves, but not just now very interesting.
—What in God’s name is interesting, sir?
—Stop taking the Lord’s name in vain, please. And stop wallowing.
Mr. Grieves’s voice was mild though his words were not, as if he could take any amount of railing and respond unfazed.
—The question you ought to be asking is what.
—What?
—Yes, Morgan, what. What is it in that heart of yours strong enough to wake you in the night and take you from the only home you know to a vague and ill-considered destination you had no desire actually to reach?
The room didn’t change color. There was no smashing that he could point to. It was more incremental, as if a heavy mantle had been laid upon his shoulders and was gradually revealing its weight. As he grew accustomed to its pressure, it grew heavier, yet it answered a longing so hidden it could only be known in satisfaction. To be held so always, to have his heart seen, known, and shown to him, to be reeled in from error so lightly, as if someone existed who truly knew right from wrong, someone capable of enforcing this distinction on him, someone for whom it was as natural as breath.
His father had been that kind of man once, but even then his father had never stood apart from the world as Mr. Grieves had done when he refused to take up arms in the War. Morgan couldn’t fathom what would drive a man to such a stance, but whatever it was, it must have come from the clarity Mr. Grieves now possessed.
—Well?
—I don’t know, sir.
—Of course you do. Try harder.
The mantle settled again, and a pressure in his throat that made his voice sound queer.
—I …
Was it possible that Mr. Grieves would not retreat? Was it possible that he would sit there telling Morgan to try harder until he provided an actual answer?
—I suppose I must have wanted to be found, sir.
So bald, and so inadequate.
—I thought as much.
Now the eyes! He thought as much? How could Mr. Grieves have thought anything?
—I didn’t mean it like that, sir, I meant—
—Shh.
Then like a coal, Mr. Grieves’s fingers touched his wrist, and Morgan saw in those eyes a softness he could scarcely endure.
—You’ve been lost?
Morgan cast his gaze to the tabletop, to the ridges in the wood where crumbs had collected, but it began to blur, and he retracted his wrist into his sleeve, his hands clasped together like a monk’s. He needed a gesture that would make light of Mr. Grieves’s words. He needed a rebuttal, but the mantle was so heavy, so protective in its burden, so desirable, so filling.
—You need a lot of looking after, don’t you?
The warmth of that voice buckled the last support that remained, and Poseidon’s wave struck, drowning his men, splintering his ship, and dragging him into that salty, breathless sea. Was it so easy to demolish his reserves, built with such effort all these years? The last time he’d been reduced to such blubbering had also involved a weight on his chest, a devastating pain there on Silk’s study floor. How had Mr. Grieves accomplished as much barely touching him? He buried his head in his arms, helpless against the sea, until, like Ino’s veil, a handkerchief appeared at his ear. He put it under his nose.
—I’m too old for that, sir.
—Are you?
Again his throat seized. Again he hid his face in his arms. Mr. Grieves went to put on more water.
—Let’s review facts, Mr. Grieves said, running the tap. First, you were sufficiently motivated to abscond from the Academy tonight. Reason not yet established. Second, you left without supplies and you made for an illogical destination. Why? Because you wanted to be found. Third, you have confessed to glove theft, but your manner indicates a person far more compromised than such a crime would suggest.
Through salt water, Morgan’s face burned again.
—Are you in some danger at the Academy?
—No, sir.
—Are you a danger to someone?
Was he?
—No, sir.
—Points off for hesitation. Have you done something wrong and fear being found out?
He’d done countless things wrong, all of them commonplace. He didn’t fear punishment from any authority.
—I’m not afraid of being found out, sir.
—Then perhaps you’re afraid of not being found out.
Morgan inhaled sharply, and in the moment that followed, he saw he’d given himself away. A grin colonized Mr. Grieves’s face.
—Of course! Mr. Grieves said. In that case, young Morgan—
He wasn’t young! He was seventeen years old!
—I think you had better make up your mind to tell me everything, and I mean everything. I’ll grant you the seal of confession for the next …
He craned to see the clock.
—three-quarters of an hour.
—But you aren’t a clergyman, sir. You aren’t even a proper—
He stopped before he said Christian.
—Yes, yes, Mr. Grieves replied airily. We’re all imperfect servants. But you’re wasting time.
If anyone else had bid him make a full, vocal confession of every wrongdoing, he would have dismissed them as pious or naïve. Now, though, a hunger came over him for the particular form of discomfort Mr. Grieves had been inflicting since he entered the flat.
—I’ve lied, sir.
Mr. Grieves nodded, giving no indication whether he found Morgan’s words surprising.
—I’ve been lying for a long time.
—To?
—My father. Pearl and Lydon. Everyone.
—To yourself?
He hesitated.
—Go on, Mr. Grieves prompted.
—That’s all there is.
Mr. Grieves appraised him:
—You don’t want people to know the truth.
—They wouldn’t like the truth!
—And what is the truth?
Morgan felt there should be a falling sensation to accompany the dreadful precipice on which he stood. The truth, if he ever could explain it, would destroy everything.
Yet, wasn’t everything worthwhile destroyed already?
—Love, sir.
—Yes?
—Yes.
—Loving people you oughtn’t?
Morgan nodded.
—Go on.
—Love is perhaps a dramatic way of putting it.
—Perhaps.
How could he explain whom he had loved? Silk, Nathan, his mother, his sisters, that girl with the tennis serve, Mr. Grieves himself, and that was just off the top of his head, not counting those for whom he had only lusted. Was it right to love and wrong to lust? Wrong to love Silk Bradley, who had been so wicked and desolate, who had nobody perhaps to love him besides Morgan?
Silk had told him to pour a second cup of tea that day Fletcher had been in the Tower. Morgan had filled Fletcher’s cup and set it beside the parcel wrapped in brown paper, which had appeared in the study that morning.
—If you tell anyone, you’ll be sorry, Silk had said. Even Fletch.
Morgan had nodded, uncomprehending, and sat at Silk’s command, like those other times, but not like those other times. Silk had sliced open the package, revealing Kendal Mint Cake and a letter he pocketed without reading. He broke the cake in two and set half before Morgan.
—Go on, he said, dipping his own into the tea.
Tentatively, Morgan took a bite. The mint was fresh, potent.
—Wiggie, Silk explained. Takes pity once a year.
—Lent?
—Birthday.
Morgan’s head had spun wondering why Silk didn’t have a hamper if it was his birthday, why no one knew, and why he wasn’t sharing his godmother’s present with his best friend.
—I can see what you’re thinking, Silk had said, and it’s a bore. Fletch thinks my birthday’s in the hols. And the antecedents never send presents.
Morgan drank from Fletcher’s cup, sharing Silk’s only present, bound to secrecy in the gray light of day.
* * *
Morgan Wilberforce sat at his table, eyes swollen and red. Outside, daylight crept implacably towards them. John had only seen him shed tears once before, in that odd encounter over the boy’s birthday his first year. Wilberforce had waited all day for his birthday hamper and then heard Fardley declare the hamper wasn’t coming, and what’s more had never been ordered. It was shortly after the boy’s mother had died, John recalled, the oversight surely due to the father’s distracted grief; but it was custom at the school for parents to send birthday hampers, and when Fardley destroyed all hope, Wilberforce had buried his face in John’s coat and wept, stirring in John a feeling both paternal and avuncular. John had killed that feeling after the Gallowhill business, but now—like divine reprieve after years of hopelessness—John could see that Wilberforce had been telling the truth after all. The night was wiping the slate clean of all dust, requiring neither contrition nor atonement. Like a simple misunderstanding, the past was being blown away, and John was sitting at a table with the same boy, albeit taller, inside the same cloister of rapport.
He wanted more than anything to sort this boy out, but his position at the Academy was ancillary at best. He had no authority outside his classroom and not much inside it. He had never done a dorm round, never communicated freely with a parent, never had a study to which he could invite boys for … what could it be called? Moral influence? For whatever it was men gave to boys. For the kind of thing the Bishop had given him before—but he made it a rule never to think of that time. He had never comforted (counseled? catechized?) any boy in the night. The closest he’d come was the odd night terror when his goddaughter was small. She would enter his room in the dead of night, take his hand, and begin conversing with him. It always took him longer than it ought to realize that she was failing to make sense and that she was not, in fact, awake. Morgan Wilberforce was most certainly awake. Would John be capable of such a sorting out, even if he possessed the means?
The boy had confessed to loving someone he oughtn’t. Well, he wasn’t the first boy, and he’d hardly be the last. John couldn’t encourage him, but he didn’t see the point in making a fuss over it.
—Has loving this person led you to do things you oughtn’t?
Morgan Wilberforce went confused behind the eyes:
—Which…?
He dried up.
—Which one? John supplied.
A blush. John was beginning to see the problem. Not an ardent public school friendship, but a whole raft of unsuitable attachments. He thought he knew something about both.
—Do you know what I think, sir? I think God’s made a balls-up of this whole business.
—Oh, yes?
—Look at the world, sir. Look at the War.
John sighed.
There were so very many ways this boy needed sorting out, John felt nearly breathless contemplating them. He felt even more overwhelmed considering what the Headmaster would say about his hosting a late-night, out-of-bounds confabulation with a pupil. He needed to get this boy back where he belonged before a scandal ensued, or worse.
An idea came to him then, as they did when he wasn’t trying, a memory of a book he’d been reading earlier. He fetched it from the windowsill and, flicking back in the pages, found the passage. He read it aloud standing under the lightbulb:
—He said that it was not fair, when a man had made something for a purpose, to try to say it was not good before we know what his purpose with it was. I don’t like, he said, even my wife to look at my verses before they’re finished! God can’t hide away his work till it is finished, as I do my verses, and we ought to take care what we say about it. God wants to do something better with people than people think.
John could hear the question Morgan Wilberforce wanted to ask, and the boy’s silence struck him as a kind of deep companionship, an acknowledgment that the question and its corollary—What did God want with Wilberforce? What did he want with either of them?—had no vocal answer. That Wilberforce appeared to know it said more about the boy than almost anything else that night.
A flurry of ideas began to come to John then, and he knew from hard-learned experience with ideas that the only thing to do was to obey without overthinking. He certainly ought not to ponder why he—dogged by insomnia and pacing his frigid rooms—should have investigated the carousing of tomcats at the same moment that a St. Stephen’s boy had wandered into his garden, and not any St. Stephen’s boy, but Morgan Wilberforce. The important thing was that ideas were continuing to arrive like a host of relatives. (Not that he had a host of relatives—but he made it a rule—never mind.) The ideas told him that whatever had driven Wilberforce from the Academy that night was neither single, concrete, nor precisely relevant; that the boy was compromised, but not in the way people might imagine; that the sorting out would take time and quite possibly require other hands; and that most essentially John needed to get this boy back to the Academy before his absence was discovered and circumstances became complicated by irrelevancies. John was certain as he could be that the answer to the opus called Morgan Wilberforce would not be found in his traipsing across Yorkshire, or Wales, but would grow somehow into itself after his return to ordinary life, arising this morning from the philistine dormitories of Hazlehurst’s House, sleepwalking through lessons, and facing whatever else the day delivered. He had the idea that change was sweeping towards them. He didn’t know what, but he could feel its breath cold on his neck.
Before any of this could transpire, however, Morgan Wilberforce needed conveying back to the Academy. A glance at the clock told him there wasn’t enough time to send the boy on foot, and in any case, John didn’t entirely trust him to return on his own.
He braced himself. It would have to be the bicycle. Lord, help them.