Page 46 of The Secret Word
“Mrs. Westbridge sent me. She is the one who suggested you for the school. Her brother, Mr. Partridge, is our head teacher, and she is our new matron. We have a three-hour drive, boys, but we are heading to my house first, where you will meet Mrs. Satterthwaite, my wife, and have something to eat.”
The school was not quite ready to be lived in, but Clem and Chris were able to provide house room to Partridge, his sister, and her twoprotégés.
Finding other staff members was now a joint task. Mrs. Westbridge, the housekeeper Mrs. Patterson, and Clem interviewed for the positions of cook and maids. Partridgeneeded an assistant teacher, though Chris would take some classes. The school would also require a couple of footmen and a handyman.
Chris would give the school free use of his stables, where his stableman and grooms were already in place. Also the gardeners, who would look after his and Clem’s private garden as well as the wider school grounds.
As they found more pupils, they would need more teachers and more servants, but time enough to cross that bridge when they reached it.
At last, all was in readiness. Partridge and Mrs. Westbridge moved into the school side of the manor, with the two boys from the orphanage. The servants and the new teacher all arrived and settled in.
Billy’s boys arrived by coach. At first, they found the countryside oppressive and scary. Fairly quickly, however, most began to appreciate the space and the fresh air, even if they did jump at unexpected noises. The oldest—that same Tom who had been the oldest boy at Fortune’s Fool—was one who remained cautious and jumpy, though he did his best to hide it, since he was something of a leader among the boys and took the responsibility seriously.
Tom—Mr. Fuller, he was called at the school, where all of the boys were addressed as if they were young gentlemen—was prepared to put up with a lot of smells and sounds he didn’t know for the sake of classes. He had grown past the mathematics taught at Billy’s and had never been introduced to the principles of scientific enquiry. Partridge tutored him in individual sessions on advanced mathematics and science, and he took to the subjects like a duck to water.
“We have our first pupil-teacher,” Partridge told Chris one day. “I’ve given young Mr. Fuller the junior arithmetic class. He is very good, Mr. Satterthwaite. Very patient and thorough.”
“Mr. Fuller is delightful with the little boys,” said Mrs. Westbridge. “He is the one they go to if they have nightmares or broken toys, or if they cannot resolve their own disagreements. My brother says he should go to university, if he can win a scholarship, or if we can find funding. But I think he would make a superb teacher should he choose.”
The boys all addressed Chris, who took them for English classes, as Mr. S.—an innovation suggested by Chris, since one boy had a speech impediment that made pronouncing Chris’s full surname an exercise in frustration and embarrassment for the boy and stifled giggles from all within hearing, at least at first.
Since they all had chores, and some of those chores brought them to the kitchen garden that was fast becoming Clem’s pride and joy, they soon began calling her, Mrs. S. Like Chris, they responded to Clem’s warmth and kindness, and Chris was not at all surprised when Mrs. Westbridge, with a twinkle in her eye, told him one day that depriving a boy of garden duty was regarded as one of the most dire punishments in the school’s arsenal.
*
As the boysrelaxed, some of them tested boundaries.
One broke the curfew, creeping out of bed after lights out to steal pears from the orchard. Caught on the way back into the bedchamber he shared with three other boys, he was sentenced to scrub vegetables in the kitchen for a week. For the pear offense, he was required to eat the pears he’d taken. They were not yet ripe, and he only managed one and a half of the hard, sour items before he was permitted to give up.
“The gardener tells me those are the late pears,” Partridge said. “I will have had him bring me a basket of ripe pears fromanother tree, and all of you shall have one after our dinner tonight, except for Mr. Wilson here, who took his share without asking.”
There was a private conversation between Partridge and young Mr. Wilson, too. Partridge didn’t tell Clem the details, but Clem assumed it was a reinforcement of the prohibition on stealing.
A group who slid down the bannisters on trays they had purloined from the kitchen spent a long afternoon with a mix of beeswax and oil, a polishing cloth, and all the carved wooden panels in the halls and stairways.
Boys who fought were given chores to do, but Partridge also added boxing to the school’s curriculum, for those who chose to participate and for any others caught fighting.
“He’s a fair man, Mrs. S.,” Tom Fuller told Clem one day when she found him in the kitchen garden, supervising a group of younger boys as they weeded the rows of winter cabbages. He waved a hand at the working boys. “This lot were caught holding a feast at midnight with food they’d sneaked from the table. Mr. Partridge said they should realize how hard the gardener and the cook worked to feed us. They’ve already peeled a mountain of potatoes.”
“A biff would be over quicker,” said one of the workers.
“You’ll remember this longer,” Fuller retorted.
As well as punishments—kitchen tasks, chopping wood, polishing the floors, cleaning out the stables—there were rewards. Food treats, half an hour later in the evening to read, time with the kittens that the kitchen cat had proudly added to the school’s complement of inhabitants, and—this was a favorite—riding lessons on the ponies that Chris had added to his stable.
The older boys were rewarded with trips to London, going up with Clem and Chris to spend a couple of days touring museumsand seeing the sights. They were expected to write reports on what they had learned, but the trips were highly-coveted.
The school was expanding, and now had fifteen pupils. Two had come from dame schools—the charity schools that taught the basics of reading and writing to the children of the slums, but had no capacity to help those whose ability and thirst for knowledge exceeded what the charity school could offer.
One was another boy of Billy’s, and three were paying pupils from families who had heard of the school from father. While surprised to hear he was recommending the place, Clem was pleased to have his support.
They added another teacher and an assistant matron to the staff, to make certain all of the boys had the attention they would accept.
The fifteenth boy was brought to them by Tom Fuller, a silent, frightened creature who clung to Fuller as to his only anchor in a storm. “Eight is my friend, sir,” Fuller said, when the boy was discovered hiding in his room. “He needs us. Can he stay?”
Apparently, Fuller and Eight had met up on one of Fuller’s trips to London, and Eight had managed to follow his friend back to Maidenstone Court, clinging to the backs of carriages and, when no one was going in the right direction, walking.
Clem’s heart said yes, Eight could stay. Mrs. Westbridge agreed, but the men were more cautious.
