LITMIR.BIZ

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      The morning after the incident at the Courthouse Will woke in a wretched state: aching from head to foot. He tried to get out of bed, but his legs replayed their imbecilities of the night before and down he went, with such a shout (more of surprise than pain) that his mother came running, to find him sprawled on the floor, teeth chattering. He was duly diagnosed as having ‘flu, and put back to bed, where he was plied with aspirin and scrambled eggs.

      Sleet had come in the night, and slapped against the window through most of the day. He wanted to be out in it. His fever would turn the icy downpour to steam, he thought, as soon as it fell on him. He’d walk back to the Courthouse like one of the children from the Bible who’d been burned in a furnace but had come out alive; steaming, he’d walk the muddy track, back to where Jacob and Rosa kept their strange counsel. Naked, he’d go, yes naked, through the hedgerow, scraped and nicked, until he got to the door, where Jacob would be waiting to teach him wisdom, and Rosa would be waiting to tell him what an extraordinary boy he was. Into the Courthouse he’d go, into the heart of their secret world, where everything was love and fire, fire and love.

      All this, if he could only get up and out of bed. But his body was cheating him. It was all he could do to get as far as the toilet, and even then he had to hold onto the sink with one hand and his penis – which looked very shrivelled and ashamed of itself right now – with the other, to be sure he wouldn’t fall over, his head was spinning so much. Just after lunch the doctor came to see him. She was a softly-spoken woman with short, white hair, though she didn’t look old enough to have white hair, and a gentle smile. She told him he’d get well as long as he didn’t get out of bed and took the medicine she was going to prescribe, then reassured his mother that he’d be right as rain in a week or so.

      A week? Will thought. He couldn’t wait a week to be back with Jacob and Rosa. As soon as the doctor and his mother had gone he got up and made his uncertain way to the window. The sleet was thickening into snow, and it was sticking a little on the tops of the hills. He watched his breath come and go on the cold glass, and determined that he would make himself strong, damn it, simply by telling himself to do so.

      He started right then and there: ‘I will be strong. I will be strong. I will—’

      He stopped in mid-flow, hearing his Papa’s voice in the hall below, and then the sound of his footstep on the stairs. He started back to his bed, and just made the safety of the covers when the door opened and his father came in, his face more forbidding than the sky outside the window.

      ‘All right,’ he said, without a word of greeting, ‘I want an explanation from you, my lad, and I don’t want any of your lies. I want the truth.’ Will said nothing. ‘You know why I’m home early?’ his father demanded. ‘Well?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘I got a call from Mr Cunningham. Damn lunatic, calling me in the middle of the day. He tracked me down, he said, tracked me down, because his son’s in a terrible state. Can’t stop the boy crying, apparently, because of some damn thing you’ve been up to with him.’ Hugo approached Will’s bed. ‘Now I want to know what stupid stories you’ve been putting in this brat’s head, and don’t shake your head at me like that, young man, you’re not talking to your mother now. I want answers and I want the truth, you hear me?’

      ‘Sherwood’s…not quite right…’ Will said.

      ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’ Hugo said, spittle flecking his lips.

      ‘He says things without really knowing what he’s saying.’

      ‘I don’t care what’s wrong with the little bugger. I just don’t want his father coming to find me and accusing me of raising a complete idiot. That’s what he called you. An idiot! Which you may be, by the way. Have you got no sense?’

      Will was starting to get tearful. ‘Sherwood’s my friend,’ he spluttered.

      ‘He’s not quite right, you said.’

      ‘He isn’t.’

      ‘So what does that make you? If you’re his friend, what does that make you? Have you got no sense? What were you up to?’

      ‘We just went looking around, and he…he got scared…that’s all.’

      ‘You’ve got a peculiar idea of fun, putting nonsense into a little boy’s head.’ He shook his head. ‘Where’d you get it all from?’ he said, already giving up on his son. Plainly he didn’t want an answer, though Will so much wanted to give him one, so much wanted to say: I didn’t make up anything, you dead-eyed old man. You don’t know what I know, you don’t see what I see. you don’t understand any of it—

      But he didn’t dare speak the words, of course. He just cast down his eyes, and let his father’s contempt fall on his head until it was all used up.

      

      Later, his mother came in with pills for him to take. ‘I heard your father having a talk with you,’ she said. ‘You know he’s sometimes harsher than he means to be.’

      ‘I know.’

      ‘He says things.’

      ‘I know what he says and I know what he means,’ Will replied. ‘He wishes I was dead and Nathaniel wasn’t. So do you.’ He shrugged, the ease of the words, the ease of the pain he knew he was causing, exhilarating. ‘It’s no big deal,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I’m not as good as Nathaniel, but I can’t do anything about it.’ All the time he was talking, looking at his mother, it was not her he was seeing, it was Jacob, giving him a moth to burn, Jacob smiling at him.

      ‘Stop it,’ his mother said. ‘I won’t listen to you talking like this. The way you behave. Take your pills.’ Her manner suddenly became detached, as though she didn’t quite recognize the boy lying in the bed. ‘Are you hungry?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘I’ll have Adele heat up some soup for you. Just make sure you stay under the blankets. And take your pills.’

      As she exited she threw her son an almost fearful look, the way Miss Hartley had at school. Then she was gone. Will swallowed the pills. His body still ached and his head still spun, but he wasn’t going to wait very long, he’d already decided, before he was up and out. He’d drink the soup (he’d need the sustenance for the journey ahead) and then he’d dress and go back to the Courthouse. With his plan made he got out of bed again to test the strength of his legs. They didn’t feel as unreliable as they had a little while before. With some encouragement, they’d get him where he needed to go.

       III

      Though Frannie wasn’t sick, she suffered a good deal more than Will had the day after the night in the Courthouse. She had managed to smuggle Sherwood and herself into the house and upstairs to clean up before they were seen by their parents, and had entertained the hope that they were not going to be questioned until, out of the blue, Sherwood had begun to sob. He’d been thankfully inarticulate about what was causing him to do so, and though both her mother and her father quizzed her closely she kept her answers vague. She didn’t like lying, mainly because she wasn’t very good at it, but she knew that Will would never forgive her if she let any details of what happened slip. Her father simply grew cold and remote when his first fury was spent, but her mother was good at attrition. She would work and work at her suspicions, until she had them satisfied. So for an hour and a half Frannie found herself quizzed as to why Sherwood was in such a state. She said they’d gone out to play with Will, become lost in the dark, and they’d got frightened. Plainly her mother doubted every word, but she and her daughter were alike in their tenaciousness. The more Mrs Cunningham repeated her questions, the more entrenched in her replies Frannie became. At last, her mother grew exasperated.

      ‘I don’t

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