Andrew Taylor - The American Boy

As for Charlie, he stumbled like an automaton through the days. I wondered that Mr Carswall did not remove him from the school. Boys are unpredictable creatures. I had expected his schoolfellows would bait him, that they would make him suffer for his father's crimes. Instead, most of them left him alone. Indeed, when they did not ignore him, they handled him with a certain rough kindness. He looked ill, and they dealt with him as though he were. Edgar Allan rarely left his side. The young American treated his friend with a solicitude and a delicacy of sentiment which was unusual in one so young.

Delicacy of sentiment, however, was not a characteristic which could be attributed to either Morley or Quird. Nor was common decency. I came across them fighting with Allan and Frant in a corner of their schoolroom. Morley and Quird were so much older and so much heavier that it was not so much a fight as a massacre. For once, I intervened. I flogged Morley and Quird on the spot and ordered them to wait on me that evening, so that I might flog them again.

"Are you sure you want to do that, sir?" Morley asked softly when he and Quird appeared before me at the appointed time.

"I shall beat you all the more if you don't take that insolent smile off your face."

"It's only, sir, that me and Quird happened to see you and Mr Dansey the other night."

"Quird and I, Morley, Quird and I. The pronoun is part of a compound nominative plural."

"Smoking under the trees, you were."

"Then be damned to you for a pair of snivelling, spying scrubs," I snarled, my rage boiling over. "And why were you not in bed, pray?"

Morley had the impudence to ignore my question. "And we saw you and him, sir, on other nights."

I stared at him, my anger rapidly subsiding. A show of anger has its uses when you are dealing with boys, but ungovernable passion must always be deplored.

"Bend over," I ordered.

He did not move. "Perhaps, sir, it is my duty to inform Mr Bransby. We must all listen to the voice of conscience. He abhors the practice of-"

"You may tell Mr Bransby what you like," I said. "First, however, you will bend over and I shall thrash you as you've never been thrashed before."

The smile vanished from Morley's broad, malevolent face. "This is most unwise, sir, if I may say so."

The words were measured, but his voice rose into a squeak at the end when I hit him a backhanded blow across the mouth. He tried to protest but I caught him by the throat, swung him round and flung him across the chair that served as our place of execution. He did not move. I dragged up his coat-tails and flogged him. There was no anger in it now: I was cold and deliberate. One could not let a boy take such a haughty tone. By the time I let him go he could hardly walk, and Quird had to half carry him away.

Nevertheless the incident left me shaken, though Morley had richly deserved his beating. I had never flogged a boy so brutally before, or given way to my passions. I wondered if the murder of Henry Frant had affected me in ways I had not suspected.

What I did not even begin to suspect until later was that Morley may have known Dansey better than I did, and that his meaning had been quite other than I had supposed.

Nine days after the murder, on Saturday the 4th December, I received a summons to Mr Bransby's private room. He was not alone. Overflowing from an elbow chair beside the desk was the large, ungainly form of Mr Carswall. His daughter perched demurely on a sofa in front of the fire.

As I entered, Carswall glared up at me through tangled eyebrows and then down at the open watch in his hand. "You must make haste," he said. "Otherwise we shall not get back to Town in daylight."

Astonished, I looked from one man to the other.

"You are to accompany Charles Frant to Mr Carswall's," Bransby said. "His father is to be buried on Monday."

"I am a bastard," Miss Carswall said to me on the Monday evening after Mr Frant's funeral.

I was so shocked by her immodesty I did not know how to reply. I glanced at the door, fearing it might be open, that her words had been overheard. At the time Miss Carswall and I were alone in the drawing room of her father's house in Margaret-street; Charlie had run upstairs to fetch a book.

She fixed me with her brown eyes. "Let us call things by their proper names. That is what I wished to tell you in Albemarle-street. The day when Charlie interrupted."

"It is of no significance," I said, feeling I must say something.

She stamped her foot. "Had you been a bastard yourself, you would know how foolish that sounds."

"I beg your pardon. I did not make my meaning clear. I did not mean that it was of no significance to you, or indeed in the general scheme of things. I – I meant merely that it was of no significance to me."

"You knew, sir, admit it. Someone had told you."

Miss Carswall glared at me for a moment. She had the fair, almost translucent skin that so often goes with auburn hair. She looked captivating in a passion.

"My papa does not choose to advertise the circumstances of my birth," she went on after a moment's silence. "Which in itself has been a matter of some inconvenience to me. It can lead to situations in which people – that is to say – they may approach me under false pretences."

"You need not trouble yourself on my account, Miss Carswall," I said.

She studied the toes of her pretty little slippers. "I believe my mother was the daughter of a respectable farmer. I never knew her – she died before I was a year old."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. When I was six, my father sent me to board at a seminary in Bath. I stayed there until I was fifteen, when I went to live with my cousin, Mrs Frant. Papa and Mr Frant were then on friendly terms, you see. Mr Frant was in America on the bank's business, so there were just the three of us, Mrs Frant, little Charlie and me. I wish…"

"What do you wish?"

"I wish I could have stayed there. But my father's wife died, so there was no longer an obstacle to my living with him. And he and Mr Frant had quarrelled, so it was not convenient for me to stay in Russell-square. So I came here." She spoke jerkily now, as though pumping the words from a deep reservoir of her being. "As a sort of companion. A sort of housekeeper. A sort of daughter. Or even – Ah, I scarcely know what. All those things and none of them. When my father brings his friends to the house, they do not know what I am. I do not know what I am." She broke off and sat down on the little sofa by the fire. Her bosom rose and fell in her agitation.

"I am honoured you should take me into your confidence," I said softly.

She looked up at me. "I am glad the funeral is over. They always make me hippish. No one came, did they, no one but that American gentleman. You would not think it now but in his life Henry Frant had so many people proud to call him friend."

"The American gentleman?"

"Mr Noak. He knew Mr Frant, it appears, and Mr Rush the American Minister introduced him to Papa and me a few weeks ago."

"I have met him, I believe. Mr Noak, that is to say."

She frowned. "When?"

"He was at Russell-square once, just after his arrival from America. I saw him later, too, in Albemarle-street on the night Mr Wavenhoe died."

"But why should he come to the funeral? They do not appear to have been intimate friends, and Mr Frant's crimes have turned his other friends into strangers."

"I do not know." I looked into her face. "Can you not ask him yourself?"

She shook her head. "I scarcely know him. We were introduced, but he has no conversation. Anyway, why should he wish to waste his time talking nonsense to a chit of a girl?"

I made no reply, for none was needed, or not in words. The question hung in the air between us and she blushed. Our eyes met and we smiled at each other. Flora was never beautiful but when she smiled it made your heart leap.