Once Upon a Wardrobe(22)

Days later, after Jack had finally figured out the routine, and how to dodge Oldie in the hallways, he ran on the muddy fields with Warnie for a cricket game. Wynyard students wore their sporting clothes of black shorts, tall dark socks, white collared shirts, and soft leather shoes, tossing about the ball with a quick-footed assurance Jack would never have.

Thrilled to be outside, to be with his brother and the boys who weren’t bowed over books in the only classroom, Jack ran with Warnie. But Jack’s prowess for writing and learning, for quick wit and quicker understanding, did him no good on the athletic field.

An older boy tossed the ball to Jack. Instead of catching it, Jack stumbled and fell. Trying to rise in the mud, he looked up to see a crowd of their wolfish faces hovering over him, blending into one taunting scowl. They laughed. They laughed at him, and Jack’s heart slammed shut. He would never be the boy with physical prowess.

Ever.

He didn’t even want to be that boy.

He slipped and slid and finally stood.

When the game was finished and the other boys had hustled off, Warnie dawdled as he talked to Jack in the game house. The place smelled of sweat and mud and overflowed with balls and bats and uniforms. They were to be getting ready for dinner, but the brothers sat on a bench together in their misery for a few moments. Suddenly, a boy came from behind, a boy whose face looked as if it had been ironed flat, his blue eyes dull and mean. The boy thwacked Warnie over the head with the edge of a board, a sickening sound of wood on skull.

Jack cried out and Warnie groaned and put his palm to his head, then looked at his hand to see blood. Jack jumped up and lunged at the boy, but Warnie grabbed Jack by the arm, stopping him.

The boy laughed and darted from the room. Jack pried loose from his brother’s grip. “Why’d you stop me?”

“That boy, that demon, is named Wyn. He is Oldie’s son, and if you go after him there will be more hell to pay.”

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.