Fairchild by Jaima Fixsen Read Free Book Online Page A

meet his father’s eyes. Mr. Bagshot’s warning, that he would not tolerate his boy being bullied, earned only contempt—from Tom and the other boys. It made Tom look weak, and he knew he wasn’t.
    *****
    At fifteen, Tom was still a loner. There were boys who would have befriended him, for he could level an opponent with a single punch. But Tom let no one close, making no attempt to hide his disdain for them all: the headmaster, the dormitory wardens, the choir master, the shy, asthmatic boy everyone knew idolized him. Especially the handsome, vicious winner of the school fencing cup, already an Earl.  
    Knowing the frustrated masters would look the other way, Tom’s classmates determined to take him down. It was the fencing champion, the young Lord Harvey, who hit on the idea and paid the mathematics teacher to keep Tom after class.  
    It was late, night’s curtains drawing over the sky when Tom finished scrubbing the schoolroom desks and braced himself to cross the quadrangle alone. Dinner was long past, but up in his room, folded in a napkin, he had the remains of one of Mrs. Finch’s pies. The mother of his blacksmith boxing teacher was an excellent cook.  
    Since six o’ clock, Tom’s stomach had assumed the form of a ravening beast; now he was only dimly aware of the clock chiming half-past seven as he climbed the stairs two at a time, thinking of his supper. He did not notice how quiet it was in the corridors. Breezing through his bedroom door, he only had time to halt, widen his eyes, and utter “Wha—” before they jumped him.  
    They had dressed themselves as savages, stripping to the waist, and painting their faces. Falling on Tom, they were savage indeed, throwing a pillowcase over his head and bundling him down the stairs and into the dark churchyard. Binding Tom to a tall grave marker, they fell back, allowing Lord Harvey to remove the bag from Tom’s head with a flourish and a sneer.  
    “You belong on a midden heap Bagshot, not here,” he said, and planted a punch squarely in Tom’s gut. Striped with charcoal and chalk, the boys leered and hooted like demons as each one stepped forward to take a turn.  
    Still gasping from Harvey’s punch, Tom willed his stomach muscles to turn to stone, as hard as the grave marker that was scraping the skin off his back. It was his only defense against the blows. Some of the fists were weak, but others robbed him of breath and made him retch. He counted twenty-two punches but didn’t know when he started crying. Dying from shame, he scarcely heard their parting taunts as they doused him with a pail of water and left him.  
    He stopped crying once his teeth were chattering too hard. The meandering breeze was scarcely stirring the overhanging oak leaves and the ivy climbing over the graveyard walls, but it drove through Tom like a musket ball. He could hardly stand, but letting himself sag against the ropes binding his chest hurt worse. He could call for help, but who would hear?
    Through breaks in the cloud, he could see the stars, so very far away. A black shape obliterated their gleam for a moment, and Tom flinched. Owl, or bat? He wasn’t keen on either. Night noises pressed on him, and he glanced from side to side, afraid of what he might, or might not see.  
    Maybe a grim. Those great black beasts with slathering mouths were fond of graveyards. The creature would come on huge silent feet that left no mark, his misty breath a fog around his fangs.  
    Stop it!
    Tom clamped back a whimper, seizing and discarding thoughts as they blew away like sheets of paper. His fraying bootlace, rice pudding with sultanas, the crack of Harvey’s nose when he broke it—surely he would do that—the Latin declensions he’d been unable to completely ignore. Doubles to four thousand ninety six, the eight times table, the changing price of beaver pelts in England in the last three years. Something moved in the long grass, and thought fled, leaving his brain bare