THE BLACKWELL HOUSE was an old place. It had winding halls, deep closets and narrow, skylit rooms. The idea of building houses into hills had originally been a humble impulse, but wealthy families like Timothy Blackwell’s soon discovered an advantage: when ostentatiousness is out of fashion, it’s handy to have a home whose size no one can see. And the Blackwell house, bought generations ago with Blackwell money, was a sprawling, well-kept place. For over a hundred years, the floors had been trod on and cleaned and waxed. The clocks were kept wound, faces clean.
The strangest thing about the house, Elwyn discovered, was that it was divided in two. The original owners, husband and wife, often quarrelled, and so they made every arrangement to live as separately as possible while retaining respectability. This tradition, it seemed, had either been maintained or renewed, because one half of the house was clearly Piety’s, the other was Timothy’s, with the dining room and a formal parlour in the middle. Timothy gave a quick tour, naming the rooms as they passed them: Piety’s study, Piety’s bedroom, Piety’s sitting room. Piety’s library, Piety’s parlour. There were fewer clocks in her side of the house, different paintings, different sorts of books.
The house was not what Elwyn had imaged. He had been told that his mother and his aunt had both left the Hill farm where they had grown up, his mother to marry his father, his aunt to get an education. Mirth had wound up poor, while Piety married into a rich old family. Rich. Elwyn had pictured her house as a place with crystal chandeliers. Gold leaf on the wallpaper. Velvet cushions, silk pillows. Instead, there were clocks. And rugs. And rooms. Sturdy antique furniture wet with polish. They were, in fact, fine things, but not the sort Elwyn knew how to value, and he was vaguely disappointed.
Elwyn’s room was in Timothy’s half of the house, the northern side, where less sun slanted through the heavy glass. It was an austere room with a well-built desk, a well-built bed, thick sheets. If anything, it was plainer than the rest of the house, but stepping inside, Elwyn felt overwhelmingly grateful. He had never had a room all to himself.
‘A bath has been drawn for you in the washroom down the hall,’ Timothy said. ‘Be sure to be at my study at exactly half past four. No later.’ His heavily browed eyes looked over his glasses at Elwyn. ‘Remember, Nephew: punctuality is the foundation of orderliness and—’
‘“Orderliness is the foundation of civility”. I remember,’ Elwyn said, opening the wide armoire doors and putting the few things he had inside. Then he bathed and dressed and went where he was told. The airless little study was not far from Elwyn’s room. He sat in a heavy chair as his uncle selected books from the shelves that covered the small space. The room smelt of those books; most of them were thick with unintelligible names like Critical and Theoretical Underpinnings of Pedagogical Epistemologies.
On the wall across from Elwyn was a large clock, its pendulum as long as his arm. In the glass face, Elwyn could see his own reflection. There was only one small mirror at his house in Badfish Creek, and Elwyn’s sisters had pilfered it up to their room years ago. He found excuses to go up there and admire his face, the strong line of his jaw, his lively expressions. His sisters were constantly teasing him for it, but he didn’t mind much; nothing was wrong with a little vanity where it was deserved. But even though his reflection looked just the same there in the study as it did in the mirror back home, something about it wasn’t right. There was a dissonance.
Timothy closed the book he was perusing, cleaned his glasses and smiled. ‘Let’s get right to the core of it, Elwyn.’ The look on his face was that of someone about to give a gift. ‘Not only have I given you permission to stay here and offered to supervise your schooling – I have decided to devote myself to it. Your education will be my particular project. But it will require a great deal from you. It will require your full attention. Full devotion.’
‘Attention, Nephew. Devotion. You will need to decide if you want to commit to this now. Because if you are unwilling, there is no point in our going any further.’
‘I’m sorry – further in what?’
‘In this project. Our project.’ Timothy’s jowls shook with emphasis. He didn’t seem annoyed. He looked happy to have the opportunity explain himself, his work. Timothy lifted a notebook. ‘Do you see this?’ he asked. Elwyn nodded. ‘This is where I will be keeping notes on our progress. June the third,’ he read. ‘Elwyn arrives. Appearance: dishevelled. Vocabulary: moderate. Introduction to instruction begun.’ Elwyn looked blankly at his uncle.
‘You see, I used to work in academia. Social and educational research. I was working on studies that asked schools to incorporate the agricultural population by mandating that rural students be brought into schools in town centres three days a week. A highly successful experiment. It had been thought by many that it couldn’t be done, that poor rural people shouldn’t be given the same education as our more privileged citizens. My analysis countered that assumption and became quite sought after, not only within academia, but in government as well. For a while I was getting invitations to speak nearly every week…’ Timothy’s eyes glistened behind their thick spectacles, but then the gleam faded.
‘That was all before my heart gave out – strain and overwork, you see. I was encouraged to take an early retirement. And of course it was a blessing. I had been putting off starting a family for quite some time. I met your aunt, we settled here in my old family home in Liberty – a fine town, quite sought after. I now have time to get involved in civic leadership – planning commission, education initiatives and so forth. And ample time for leisure.’ Elwyn’s uncle said this last word with barely veiled displeasure.
‘But,’ Timothy continued, ‘when your letter arrived, it all became very clear. Why not get back into my old research? Take it a step further? If rural Hill folk could be educated, why not Foresters? I could write a first-hand account of it, of our work here, our success. An account of what a young Forester may become, given the proper guidance and instruction.’ Uncle Timothy looked down at his notebook with tenderness, as though it were a child. ‘The university will be clamouring to have me back,’ he added, more to himself than to Elwyn. Then he looked up. ‘Do you understand any of this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Elwyn said, truthfully. He was a little light-headed with hunger.
‘Well,’ Timothy said, brightness returned to him, ‘all I need to know from you is: are you willing to do what is necessary? To surmount any obstacles that come in your way? To devote yourself fully to your success?’
‘Of course I am,’ Elwyn said. ‘I give myself fully to everything.’ Timothy wrote something down in his notebook.
‘That’s what success is really about, right?’ Elwyn went on. ‘It isn’t being good at what you do. It’s about throwing yourself into something. And then the next thing and then the next until something sticks.’
But Timothy was scribbling away in his notebook and didn’t seem to hear his nephew at all; Elwyn’s attitude was hardly one his uncle would have agreed with. ‘Now, the first step on the road to an educated life,’ Timothy said, finishing what he was writing and closing the notebook, ‘is becoming literate.’
‘I know how to read,’ Elwyn replied.
‘Pardon?’
‘I said, I know how to read.’
Timothy looked puzzled, but before he could say anything, there was a pounding at the front door, loud and determined enough to be heard down the hall. They waited for someone else to answer, but the knocking didn’t stop.
‘Piety? Boaz? Can one of you get the door? We are discussing our lesson plans,’ Timothy shouted – shouting across rooms was forbidden in the Blackwell house, but this didn’t seem to bother Timothy when it came to his own behaviour. ‘We have this time scheduled. We mustn’t be bothered.’ There was no answer. ‘Of course, she had to choose this afternoon to go for one of her long walks…’ Timothy muttered to himself. ‘Excuse me one moment, Nephew.’ He got up and left the room, then a few minutes later an angry voice filled the hall. Elwyn went to see what the fuss was about, and once he was in view of the front door, a slender, red-faced man pointed furiously at him.
‘That’s him! That’s the forest trash that stole Miss Rhoad’s goat!’
The man pushed past Timothy and lunged sloppily at Elwyn. Elwyn had spent his life hunting; his reflexes were sharp. He dodged, and the man tripped on the carpet, landing face first on the floor.