Once Upon a Wardrobe(23)

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.

Oldie, his spectacles low on his nose, walked by a younger student, a cowering boy with greasy hair, and lifted his paper.

“You have nothing here,” he said in a voice that made the other boys scribble on their papers even if they had no idea of the answers.

The boy looked up. “I need help with that problem. I don’t—”

Oldie grabbed the boy by the ear, pulled him to the front of the class, and made him stand there and face the other boys. None of them would meet his gaze; he was as scared as Peter Rabbit being chased through Mr. McGregor’s garden.

Jack glanced about the room to see if anyone would help, but all the boys looked down.

“Turn your palms up. Now.” Oldie took a step toward a cane behind his desk, a thin rattan stick the tawny color of a cat, the end rounded like a shepherd’s hook.

The boy held up his palms. Jack was not entirely sure of what might come next, but knew it would be fierce and entirely unfair. This was a new terror.

Oldie lifted the cane from the green iron hook and brought it down with a thwack across the boy’s palms. He cried out and snatched his hands behind his back.

“Now sit down and do your work.” Oldie’s voice echoed about the room.

The boy hurried back to his seat and lifted his pencil.

That night Jack imagined a welt forming across the boy’s skin. Icicles formed on the windows like cage bars, and Jack told himself a story about a young boy who escaped a dungeon guarded by dragons.

The next day, as they filed in for breakfast, Jack’s eyes on the wood floor where dust gathered in the cracks, Warnie stepped up next to him. “Did you hand in your sums?”