The fog lightened then, revealing a hundred or more boys in jackets and school ties. Among them, the robes and gray hair of professors.
The assembly grew quiet at the crack of a distant pistol and craned their whole selves to see upriver, beyond the bridge, eyes on the next race.
All eyes, as it happened, except for the eyes of Mr. Daniel Titpickle, vice dean of boys, who excused himself through the crowd until he reached the towering robes and frowning soul of William Hay, professor of theology, and tapped him on the arm.
“What is it, Titpickle?” rumbled Hay.
“It’s the Froosian Goose,” whispered Titpickle. “It’s gone missing from the Damocles Club again. There’s reason to suspect the Barleycorn Society.”
Hay, the Barleycorns’ faculty adviser, raised a dread eyebrow. Something made him skeptical, although it was, in fact, traditional for the Barleycorns to make off with the Damocles Society’s sacred Froosian Goose, just as it was the Damocles Society’s duty, whenever possible, to kidnap the fabled Barleycorn Bones.
The Froosian Goose was an ancient stuffed goose (shot by King Edward II of Earth, founder of the original King’s College), “a simbol of Fellowshippe” carried with solemnity and placed before the brothers at assembly. The Barleycorn Bones were, according to certain dark and secret lore, the skeleton of one Jonathan Poore, a famous priest and cannibal.
The Froosian Goose had been captured once or twice a year since the society’s founding some hundred years ago. The bones had been stolen only once, and the brother with the misfortune to be asleep on guard that night, according to legend, lay buried under the dining commons in Oxbridge Hall.
“If you’d come with me back to my office,” suggested Titpickle, “we can dial up Broode at security, and he can tell you—”
“No need for that,” said Hay, raising a ministerial hand. “Not this time.”
“But—” sputtered Titpickle.
Hay silenced him with a dead eye.
“It’s not my lads,” he said, “sinners though they are. Not this time. I’ll involve the police, if they need involving.”
He dismissed Titpickle without word or gesture. A slight flexing of the atmosphere about his person was all it needed, and the dean slunk back the way he had come, missing the unexpected triumph in the second race—and by four seats!—of the brothers of the Round Church Circle.
—
Hay taught his classes like a dark lord. His more-serious students worshipped him. The dilettantes scowled behind his back, until they learned that what the older lads said was true: Hay had eyes in the back of his head, and ears everywhere.
“Hay is diabolical,” his acolytes declared, “like all great religious minds.”
Hay usually took his lunch in Washing Commons, but not today. Today, to his wife’s surprise, he went home and asked her to make him one of whatever she was making for Milo. Milo was their eight-year-old boy, a challenging young man who attended Sparrow, a primary prep school attached to the university. Most of the faculty brats went there. It was like a daycare facility where they read Chaucer.
So Victoria—Hay’s wife—kissed him on the cheek and made him a meatloaf sandwich and fetched him a glass of milk. Then she went off about her housework, leaving Hay at the table alone, where he was sitting and waiting with his hands folded in his lap when Milo came banging through the door and dashing into the kitchen, all flying hair and shorts and class four tie.
Hay would have preferred for his son to stop and address him with quiet awe, but he settled for a quick “Hey, Dad!” and a wave of one not-too-clean hand as his offspring shot past, out of the kitchen quite as suddenly as he’d come in.
Hay terrified everyone on Bridger’s except for his own child, which confounded him. He didn’t know, of course, that his child was an ancient soul who had lived almost ten thousand lives, who had been everything from a king to a pollywog.
Hay waited. He took a bite of his sandwich.
He was rewarded with the boy’s reappearance. Tie loosened, shirt untucked, shoes jettisoned, but with his hands and face clean. He mounted to the table and, with something like good manners, addressed himself to his lunch.
“How come you’re home?” asked the boy, with his mouth full.
“I’ll let you think that over,” Hay replied.
The boy ate, and studied his father.
You could see the wheels turning, the way boywheels had turned for a million years, like the minds of little poker players, judging whether to bluff or fold.
“I’ve hidden the Froosian Goose in my closet,” said Milo, pausing to gulp his milk. “I was going to paint it blue or else with dots.”
He licked away his milk mustache.
The Barleycorns, a club of some twenty-five promising nineteen-year-olds, barely managed to get away with the goose each year without setting off alarms. Despite himself, Hay was impressed.
“Tell me how you did it,” he said.
“Am I in trouble?” asked the boy.
“Naturally you’re in trouble. Don’t be foolish. How’d you manage it?”
Hay kept watching for signs of the boy’s infant-onset asthma to show themselves. As a toddler, the boy would sometimes get red in the face and short of breath when he was placed under stress or if he was caught getting up to no good. The condition had been genetically muted since, but sometimes the boy still seemed to labor for breath, if called on his behavior.
Not lately, though.
“How did you know?”
“Young man—”
“I’ll tell you how I did it if you’ll tell me how you knew.”
“Last night at dinner,” said Hay, “you asked why a goose was symbolic of fellowship, and I explained that geese never leave one of their own behind if he is injured. One of them will drop out of the flock and stay with him until he recovers or dies. You seemed to find it all funny, in your way. When I learned that the Damocles Society’s goose was missing, I put it together. It’s the sort of thing you’d do. Now. How?”
“Sometimes they take it places. I was on my way home from school when one of the brothers brought it out and put it down beside his car. Then he went back in to look for his keys.”
“You made it from the society clubhouse to our own door, carrying the Froosian Goose, without being stopped?”
“I wasn’t carrying the goose. I was driving the car.”
Hay dropped his sandwich.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It wasn’t hard.”
“How did you manage to start the car, with the keys missing?”
The boy suddenly seemed less plucky and cast his eyes down to the floor.
“Did you start the car…yourself?”
The boy nodded.
Hay had forbidden Milo to use that particular talent. Not until he was older, until his brain was more completely formed. It was for his own good. There were studies—right there at King’s College—indicating that a kinetic could experience a decline in ability if that part of the brain was exercised too early.
“Where is the car now?” Hay asked.
“I left it on Braintree Street, by the war memorial.”
Hay stood.