Page 48 of The Secret Word
Arthur said nothing, but he stiffened, and his hands stopped picking berries.
“I know that Mr. White was being mean to you. Bullying you. One of the other boys told Mrs. Westbridge. What I do not know is why you or Mr. Fuller did not tell one of the adults. Did you not know we do not allow bullying at Maidenstone Court?”
More silence.
Clem sighed. “You will miss Mr. Fuller when he is gone,” she commented.
The boy sucked in a breath that was a series of gulps. “They said you’d throw me out if you knew,” he said, his voice anguished. “Tom said it, and so did Martin. They said you wouldn’t have the likes of me with the other boys.” The next sentence was whispered. “Martin said you’d send me back to that place.”
Clem cautiously touched Arthur’s shoulder. He was usually wary of being touched, but this time he threw himself on her toweep against her chest. “Martin called me a Molly boy. He said he would tell you all if I didn’t—” he whispered the next bit, describing an obscene act that Martin had demanded in vulgar terms that Clem, even now she was married, only partially understood.
“I don’t want to dothat,” he wailed. “I don’t want to do it ever again. When I told Tom, he said he was going to kill Martin. Mrs. S. Don’t send me back to the place. Please, don’t.”
“Never.” Clem made it a solemn oath. She had both hands wrapped around Arthur, holding him safe, patting his back. “Arthur, Martin was wrong. We will not send you away. Chris guessed weeks ago, when you first came. He knows what evil people can do to boys who have no family or friends to protect them. Even if he hadn’t known, we would not blame you. None of what happened to you was your fault, Arthur, and we are never sending you back.”
She repeated the message in different words over and over, patting Arthur’s back, until the boy’s noisy and relieved crying reduced to a few gulps.
“Come,” Clem said then. “We shall go and speak to Mr. S. and then he shall talk to Mr. P.
“Will they hate me?” Arthur asked, in a very small voice. “Do the other boys need to know?”
Clem tousled his hair. “No and no,” she said. “You shall see. All shall be well.”
It was, too. Chris reassured Arthur, asked him to promise to let him or Clem know if he suffered any further bullying, and telling him that matters would be arranged with Partridge.
The head teacher was so distressed he had not noticed things getting out of hand that he offered his resignation, which Chris refused. “We all missed it. We shall all have to do better.”
Mrs. Westbridge also had to be reassured. “I begged you to bring the White boys here. And Martin did this? How wicked! How terrible! How will you ever trust me again?”
Which left the two boys at the center of the disaster.
The adults agreed that they didn’t want to lose either of them, but they needed to know that Martin knew what a terrible thing he had done and was truly sorry, and that Tom could be trusted to find healthier and safer ways to deal with his anger.
If this was the worst that could happen, it was not so bad.
Chris spoke to Martin White, and Partridge to Tom Fuller. They laid out the facts as they now knew them, then told each boy what he had done wrong.
Then, as they had agreed, they proposed that each boy decide who they had hurt by their actions and how to make recompense.
“Martin was a victim, too,” Chris reported to Clem. “Until Mrs. Westbridge came to work at the workhouse, one of the night watchmen was an abuser. Mrs. Westbridge made sure he was fired, and warned Martin never to tell anyone what he had done. She was afraid that the self-righteous supervisor would blame Martin. As for the bullying, he saw it as toughening up. That was what the supervisor told the older boys—that they had to toughen up the younger ones, for it was a cruel world, and a person had to be hard to survive.”
“You have explained the error of his ways, I hope,” Clem said. She was still furious on Arthur’s behalf.
“I’ve suggested to him that Arthur is one of the toughest people he’ll ever know, surviving what he’s been through, running away and finding Fuller, surviving Martin White. White agrees. I’ll be interested in seeing what he comes up with by way of recompense.”
Tom Fuller was the first to present his plan. “I am truly sorry I did not come to one of you as soon as I knew what Martinwas saying and doing. I should have known you would not send Arthur away. I have hurt everyone here,” he said. “Mr. and Mrs. S. first, because the school was their idea, and everyone thought it would not work.”
He addressed Clem directly. “Mrs. S., I heard you say you wanted to put in a rose garden, and the gardeners haven’t had time to dig the soil over, get out all the weeds, and add sand and stable manure. I would like to do that for you. If it is acceptable to you, Mr. S., can that be my payment to you, too?”
“Mr. Fuller, that is a huge amount of work,” Clem said. Fuller was wiry and strong, but not very big.
“I can do it,” he insisted. “I would like to do it.” He grinned somewhat sheepishly. “And if I get blisters, perhaps they will remind me to make better choices.”
“Mr. P. and Mrs. W., I thought maybe I could clean out your fireplaces for a week. In your bed chambers and in your parlors. You have both been very good to me, and I should have trusted you.”
He frowned. “I have already spoken to Arthur and apologized for giving him bad advice. So there is just Martin. I… To tell you the truth, I am still pretty mad at him.”
“What Mr. White did was wrong,” Mrs. Westbridge said. “He must make his own recompense, and would have needed to do so, even if you have left us to apply justice. But you broke his arm, cracked a couple of ribs, and knocked out a tooth. You kept hitting him after he could no longer fight. You need to make that right, Mr. Fuller.”
