Jack gazed at his brother. “How many days until holiday?”
“Exactly ninety-two,” Warnie told him as he sat on the hard bench of the game house with blood dripping down his cheek.
“Why’d he do that to you?” Jack asked.
“I didn’t change quick enough. That’s his job: to make sure we’re all at dinner on time.”
Rage poured through Jack, and he didn’t like the feeling. He thought of Lizzie and Annie, of the Irish fairy tales and of Boxen, of the little end room in Little Lea, and of his view over the emerald hills to Belfast Lough.
Why had Mother left them in this situation?
Warnie dropped his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Let’s hurry to dinner.”
Together the brothers cleaned up. Warnie wiped the proof of Wyn’s cruelty from his face, and the brothers quickly changed into their constricting and itchy uniforms and made it to the dining hall with the long wood tables and benches on time. Warnie and Jack slid into their seats just as the food arrived, gray lumps of indistinguishable piles. Potatoes, meat, and vegetables all seemed the same color.
Jack wanted to cry. He could feel sobs begin in his belly and rise to the back of his throat, but there was no better way to be abused and taunted than to weep in front of the very boys who had just beaten him on the field. It wasn’t the beating; he could abide such things. It was the cruelty that felt evil and inescapable.
Jack nudged Warnie. “Look up there. Wyn is eating the same food as his father while his sisters and his mother are eating the poor stuff we get.”
Indeed, at the headmaster’s table on a riser above the rest of the boys, Wyn sat near his father. Wyn’s and Oldie’s plates held lamb chops with sprigs of thyme, potatoes whipped white with melting butter, and a pile of green lettuce. Mrs. Oldie, with mousy and messy hair, her head bowed to the food, sat next to a string of three quiet sisters in pale yellow bonnets whose plates all were piled with the same gray food as the students’。
Evan, from Northern England and with a smooth accent that belonged in a lord’s castle, sat next to Jack on the other side. He leaned close. “Do not ever get in Oldie’s way. Just two years ago he beat a boy so badly he was sent to hospital and some say he died. Oldie was almost arrested for it, but he was let off. He will, I promise, kill you if given a chance. So just eat your mush and be quiet.”
“He’s evil,” Jack said simply.
“What did you say?” The voice bellowed behind Jack, and he turned to see a tutor he hadn’t yet met.
Jack thought of the two things he could do—lie or be quiet, and he chose the latter. Jack stared at the tutor, who had spittle on the edges of his lips and eyes so narrow Jack thought they might be closed. His ears poked out so far from the sides of his head that it was difficult not to laugh.
“What did you say?” the tutor asked again, louder this time so that the row of boys and Oldie and his son looked up. The brown-haired sisters and disheveled wife kept their heads down.
“Nothing, sir,” Jack said.
“Then nothing is what you shall have.” The man picked up Jack’s plate and walked off with it. Jack’s stomach rose with nausea and then settled again in a rock of fear and shame.
That night, in his room, he pulled out a crisp white piece of linen paper, good stationery his father had given to him, and began to write a letter.
Dear Father,
This is not a school. This is a house of horrors. You must come get us and bring us home. We must find a new school. The food is intolerable; the teachers cruel; the flat-faced son of Oldie a monster.
Surely Father would retrieve them, arrive in a coach as fast as a bullet, and take them home so Annie and Lizzie could continue their education in Little Lea.
“Jack. No.” Warnie’s voice came from behind. Jack’s chair squealed on the wood floor as he turned to his brother. Hard evening light spilled from the window onto the stationery.
“Do not write home to Father about this. Oldie will read it and make us pay.”
“Father needs to know, Warnie. He needs to bring us home.”
“He won’t come get us. And you can’t tell him. He’s never believed me, and Oldie will tell him stories about us that aren’t true. Father will believe the headmaster. He always has. We must do our best to survive and count the days to holiday.”
Jack crumpled the lovely paper and tossed it into the trash, biting back the tears that were entirely different from the ones he’d shed for his mother. These tasted like hatred and anger, and he loathed the flavor.
What could he do here to sustain himself? What would mean the most?
“We shall start a reading club,” Jack said.
“A reading club?” Warnie pulled up another chair to face his brother.
“Yes. A reading club for magazine stories.” Jack couldn’t buy all the magazines he wished to have—Captain and The Strand and so many more. “It will be our own kind of club, different from the banging about on the fields.”
“Yes!” Warnie said.
It was Warnie who invited the first boy, Evan, the one who had sat next to them at dinner and warned them of beatings, to be the first member. After that, Jack and Warnie drew a crowd, gathering in the library or the residence rooms. Each boy subscribed to a different magazine, and they would pass them about, gab about them.
“Do you think this or that man was worthy of his station?”
“How could another find his way out of the cave?”
Again, Jack found solace in the imaginary world that existed alongside the one he must endure. In the real world, where Oldie beat, taunted, and terrorized the children, Jack read stories, did his lessons, kept his head down, and counted off the hours and days until holiday and the return to Ireland.
At times light fell through, as on Sundays, when they walked into the sleepy town with cobblestone streets to attend the parish church, then afterward ambled about to whittle away their time. They watched trains appear and disappear from the mouth of the tunnel, bought candies and sweets, pottered about on the canal bank, and learned how to be part of a group of young men finding their way in life.
Also, Jack found a new fascination: entomology. “Do you know,” he said to Warnie one night at the dinner table, “everyone here treats animals as if they are dumb beasts. Even insects: they kill them and place them on slides.”
“You’re the very one who can’t stand the idea of a spider anywhere near.” Warnie grinned with their secret knowing, and Jack shuddered. A spider in his hair was one of his worst fears.
“But these aren’t spiders, and even if they were I wouldn’t be cruel to them,” Jack said.
“Well, not everyone feels as you do about animals . . . as if they are like us.”
“Well, they are.” Jack imagined King Bunny and Mr. Toad, and he thought about the insects that were torn apart for study. He would never see them as anything but what they were: beautiful, valuable creations.
Then there was math—the subject that brought Jack even more misery than the games on the field. Oldie seemed obsessed with geometry.
One bleak winter afternoon Jack sat with equations he could barely answer. Figures and the x and the y axes and what seemed to be hieroglyphics blurred together in a terrible headache. Jack stared at numbers with his pencil poised above the paper, waiting for it all to make sense. Yet he could not find the answer; he could not set his pencil down.