Wilberforce by H. S. Cross Read Free Book Online Page A

restricting breath, nothing to block the high tide rising by the second: Rees and Spaulding alone in the changing room; Alex in the study after dark, sitting on a striped backside, learning what his cock was for …
    â€” Le passé simple est simple , Hazlehurst crooned.
    â€” Le passé simple est simple .
    It was essential that he think of something else: Tudors, Stewarts, Plantagenet intrigues, the cosine of 60, the meter of Endymion , the passé simple of aller.
    â€” Il allé?
    â€” Alla. Alla , idiot boy! Le passé simple est simple!
    â€”Sorry, sir, but Est-ce que je peux aller aux toilettes?
    Personal Exercise urgent. If he couldn’t defeat the high tide, he’d have to resort to getting caned just to stop himself going mad.
    That night at Prep, he excused himself from the study, again pleading pain too sharp to endure. With calculated gait he crossed the quad, but inside the Tower, rather than mounting the stairs to Matron’s rooms, he used his penknife to spring the latch on the supply cupboard. Taking care not to disturb the mops and brooms, he let himself out the window to the grass beneath. A jagged dash across the playing fields, a stabbing squeeze through the poacher’s tunnel, and a swift stalk through Grindalythe Woods brought him mercifully to the Cross Keys, where Polly, the landlord’s daughter, brought him the usual.
    â€”How’re you keeping, pet? she asked. Still badly?
    He allowed her to touch his hair while he mouthed flirtations. She was affectionate to him, but he didn’t desire her. Laurie considered her plain, and Nathan declined her advances out of respect for Julia, a girl he claimed to have had during the holidays. Morgan classed Polly as a child.
    He drank half the pint in one go. It calmed the back of his throat and sent an agreeable pulsing through his jaw and temples. He swallowed the rest and nodded for another.
    He would drink the next more slowly, he told Polly. His shoulder would stop hurting halfway through the second pint, and by the third, the high tide would be well out to sea … if that’s what happened to tides? The point was that the entire visit was medicinal, and anyone who said otherwise was a moralist.
    Morality was something invented by old men who wished upon the young a life as desiccated as those they lived themselves, he told Polly. If he left the Academy to take a peaceable pint in lieu of Prep, he was merely making more of the evening than his fellows, who were in any case occupied consuming home brew, placing wagers, venting their frustrations on the younger generation, doing anything, in fact, but attending to the worthless tasks their masters had assigned them knowing full well they wouldn’t even try.
    â€”You have got a lem on, Polly declared tousling his hair.
    She went to pull his second pint and winked as she placed it on the bar. Perhaps she wasn’t such a child after all. As a matter of fact, she seemed to have recently … Yesterday you were a child, Now a blooming blushing virgin; Female passions warm and wild —
    He dragged himself to the bar and exchanged his glass for the new one full of soft, thick, perfectly foamed bitter. Two gulps, three, cooling the gills, opening passages, oiling his joints as he turned back to the room—into the path of Mr. Grieves.
    *   *   *
    A mere six feet between them and the room changed color—warm yellow to a buzzing brown. Mr. Grieves wore a pullover, shirt open at the collar, fingertips at his trouser pocket as if he were about to remove a handkerchief.
    â€”I think you’d better sit, Wilberforce, before you spill any more down the front of yourself.
    Morgan righted his glass. Grieves produced the handkerchief, but Morgan pointedly used his own.
    The brown moment continued, regardless of sense. Grieves fetched a mug of tea, which he placed on Morgan’s table. He sat down. Morgan eyed him.
    â€”What are