“Well, he would certainly think so,” said Agatha. “I do hope you won’t twitter and gush at him like so many of our ladies? We try to treat him as any other neighbor.”
“Of course not,” said Beatrice, trying unsuccessfully to quell her excitement. She was to meet the master whose work she had studied and even aped at first in her own stumbling efforts towards writing a novel. Even her father, who so despised the novel form that she had omitted to share her efforts with him, had grudgingly admired Tillingham in his peak years. She was dizzy at the sudden prospect. “May I help you?” she asked Agatha. “I can trim flowers.”
“Well, if it isn’t rude of me, perhaps you can find your own way to the stable house. I think Hugh is up there—he has a workroom upstairs.”
“I think I can manage,” said Beatrice, who could see the stable building visible behind a large hedge at the edge of the courtyard.
“After you are done meeting the boys, do have a good rummage through the box room for furniture. It’s behind where we keep the car. The key should be hanging under the stairs and Hugh knows where it is. And if you could discreetly remind him that we are dressing for company tonight.”
—
Two horses hung their heads over loose box doors and regarded Beatrice without much interest. She ducked into the cool, dark interior of the stable building, where a staircase to her right led to an upper floor. She hesitated, aware that it was silly to be intimidated by a piece of machinery but unwilling to step around the large motorcar. Upstairs looked sunnier, but she was reluctant to just walk up without an invitation.
“Hello? Anyone home?” she called, her foot on the lowest step.
“Who’s there?” asked a man’s voice, and Hugh appeared at the top of the stairs, a square of glass in one raised hand.
“Your aunt sent me,” said Beatrice. “To meet your pupils?”
“We are in the middle of making microscope slides,” said Hugh. A scent of formaldehyde wafted down the stairs. “I believe you said you were not delicate?”
“Oh, I’d love to come up and see,” said Beatrice, enthusiasm overcoming her intention to be reserved and polite. “My father and I made slides sometimes. I have quite a collection of insect wings.”
“Sectioning chicken heads is quite a bit messier,” said Hugh.
“I assure you I’m not at all squeamish,” said Beatrice, her stomach giving an unpleasant lurch.
“Come up at your own peril,” said Hugh. “Only if you faint, we won’t be able to catch you without smearing brains on your frock.”
The room at the top of the stairs was set under heavy rafters and boasted a bay window overlooking the kitchen gardens. It contained a large worktable and several lumpy armchairs of mismatched and tattered upholstery. The late-afternoon sun was streaming in at the window, and two of Hugh’s three pupils were bent with sharp knives over lumps of bloody tissue on the table, while a third was curled up in an armchair, chewing a pencil and leaning on a large book, sneaking glances at the open window. They stood up at her arrival and looked at her with frank curiosity. She smiled to cover her shock, for they were more unprepossessing than she had expected, with all the gangly knobbliness of boys who were no longer children but had not yet solidified into men. Though they were of different heights and faces, there was a uniform ugliness to their large ears, badly cut hair, and drooping socks. And despite evidence that they had combed their hair and washed before their lessons, they carried the unmistakable odor of young men, against which a weekly hip bath could make little impression. For a moment Beatrice quailed to think she would soon face a roomful of such rudely gaping mouths. She wondered how Agatha Kent had come to see any promise in three such grubby specimens.
“A splendid room,” said Beatrice, faintly.
“I was exiled here as a boy shortly after my chemistry experiments proved malodorous,” said Hugh. “Just give me a moment to finish this and I’ll introduce you to the boys.”
To adjust her composure in front of her new pupils, she walked along the wall to view the glass-fronted cabinets and extra shelves propped up on bricks, which contained books, boxes, and a lifetime’s collection of natural specimens. Skulls, rocks, fossils, feathers, half a dried bat, and a stuffed pheasant beset by moths seemed like a lost treasure. Beatrice was struck with a painful pang of jealousy that in this, the home of an aunt, a room bigger than her entire new accommodations would have been set aside for a visiting boy’s hobbies. She touched her fingertips to the cool, dimpled surface of an ostrich egg and bent to peer at a tank containing two frogs. One of the frogs swam energetically against the side, and Beatrice could not help but pause to examine his mighty efforts to scrape his way to freedom through the glass.
“That’s Samuel and Samuel, miss,” said the boy with the book. He was the tallest and wore boots of enormous size.
“We were going to call them Johnson and Pepys, but Daniel thought it sounded like a grocer’s,” said Hugh, carefully plucking something thinly sliced from a cup of formaldehyde and transferring it with tweezers to a slide held close to his face. “That boy impertinent enough to speak to a lady without being asked is Jack Heathly.”
“Sorry, sir,” said Jack, his ears flushing red. “Sorry, miss.”
“Jack’s father is one of our most respected local shepherds,” said Hugh. “And Jack’s older brother is a sheep-shearing champion.”
“Gone all the way to Australia, he is,” said Jack, who looked both proud and wistful. “I keep all the stamps from his letters.”
“I think they are upsetting Samuel with their brain slicing,” said Beatrice, smiling at Jack. “Did Mr. Grange section the heads of all his brothers and sisters?”
“Only if they died of natural causes,” said Hugh. “I’m not too good about killing things up close. Our cook dispatches the chickens.”
“I’d kill stuff for you, Mr. Hugh,” said the shortest boy, sitting down at the table.
“Thank you, Snout,” said Hugh. “This fine if somewhat short fellow is Snout. His father has the forge down by the Strand.”
“How d’you do, miss?” said Snout. He did not look up but continued to slice with slow precision through a chicken head, his thin face creased into a frown and his tongue pressed between his lips.
“And this third fellow is Arty Pike, Miss Nash. No doubt you’ve seen Pike Brothers, the ironmongers in the high street?”
“Ironmongers and Haberdashery,” said the jug-eared boy, coming to attention. “?‘All your needs and no fancy prices’ is our motto, miss.”
“I shall be sure to open an account, Master Pike,” said Beatrice. Her magnanimity was met with a smirk that suggested he had already appraised the modest size of her business.
“Finish up, boys, and I’ll introduce you properly to Miss Nash, who is going to be taking over as your summer tutor.” They must have been warned, thought Beatrice, for they managed to keep their groans as low as a mutter. They were not as enthusiastic to be taught as she was to engage in teaching.
“Can I finish up too?” asked the boy with the book.
“Only if you’re done with your translation, Jack,” said Hugh. He looked up at Beatrice to add, “We have an agreement that Latin homework will be done each week if we want to help with the science experiments.” He smiled in a way that telegraphed he might have much more to communicate about the boys were they not in the room. She returned the smile, admiring that he could disguise scientific inquiry as a reward.
“Wot we learning Latin for, anyway?” Jack asked, chewing his pencil. He looked with gloomy despair at three lines of Latin text scrawled by Hugh on a large sheet of brown butcher’s paper and returned to consulting the reference book.
“Jack’s learning Latin and bowing and scraping so he can be a gentleman,” said Arty. “They’re going to give him a top hat to wear while he’s shearing sheep.”