The Children's Book

1

Two boys stood in the Prince Consort Gallery, and looked down on a third. It was June 19th, 1895. The Prince had died in 1861, and had seen only the beginnings of his ambitious project for a gathering of museums in which the British craftsmen could study the best examples of design. His portrait, modest and medalled, was done in mosaic in the tympanum of a decorative arch at one end of the narrow gallery which ran above the space of the South Court. The South Court was decorated with further mosaics, portraits of painters, sculptors, potters, the “Kensington Valhalla.” The third boy was squatting beside one of a series of imposing glass cases displaying gold and silver treasures. Tom, the younger of the two looking down, thought of Snow White in her glass coffin. He thought also, looking up at Albert, that the vessels and spoons and caskets, gleaming in the liquid light under the glass, were like a resurrected kingly burial hoard. (Which, indeed, some of them were.) They could not see the other boy clearly, because he was on the far side of a case. He appeared to be sketching its contents.

Julian Cain was at home in the South Kensington Museum. His father, Major Prosper Cain, was Special Keeper of Precious Metals. Julian was just fifteen, and a boarder at Marlowe School, but was home recovering from a nasty bout of jaundice. He was neither tall nor short, slightly built, with a sharp face and a sallow complexion, even without the jaundice. He wore his straight black hair parted in the centre, and was dressed in a school suit. Tom Wellwood, boyish in Norfolk jacket and breeches, was about two years younger, and looked younger than he was, with large dark eyes, a soft mouth and a smooth head of dark gold hair. The two had not met before. Tom’s mother was visiting Julian’s father, to ask for help with her research. She was a successful authoress of magical tales. Julian had been deputed to show Tom the treasures. He appeared to be more interested in showing him the squatting boy.

“I said I’d show you a mystery.”

“I thought you meant one of the treasures.”

“No, I meant him. There’s something shifty about him. I’ve been keeping an eye on him. He’s up to something.”

Tom was not sure whether this was the sort of make-believe his own family practised, tracking complete strangers and inventing stories about them. He wasn’t sure if Julian was, so to speak, playing at being responsible.

“What does he do?”

“He does the Indian rope trick. He disappears. Now you see him, now you don’t. He’s here every day. All by himself. But you can’t see where or when he goes.”

They sidled along the wrought-iron gallery, which was hung with thick red velvet curtains. The third boy stayed where he was, drawing intently. Then he moved his position, to see from another angle. He was hay-haired, shaggy and filthy. He had cut-down workmen’s trousers, with braces, over a flannel shirt the colour of smoke, stained with soot. Julian said

“We could go down and stalk him. There are all sorts of odd things about him. He looks very rough. He never seems to go anywhere but here. I’ve waited at the exit to see him leave, and follow him, and he doesn’t seem to leave. He seems to be a permanent fixture.”

The boy looked up, briefly, his grimy face creased in a frown. Tom said

“He concentrates.”

“He never talks to anyone that I can see. Now and then the art students look at his drawings. But he doesn’t chat to them. He just creeps about the place. It’s sinister.”

“Do you get many robberies?”

“My father always says the keepers are criminally casual with the keys to the cases. And there are heaps and heaps of stuff lying around waiting to be catalogued, or sent to Bethnal Green. It would be terribly easy to sneak off with things. I don’t even know if anyone would notice if you did, not with some of the things, though they’d notice quickly enough if anyone made an attempt on the Candlestick.”

“Candlestick?”

“The Gloucester Candlestick. What he seems to be drawing, a lot of the time. The lump of gold, in the centre of that case. It’s ancient and unique. I’ll show it to you. We could go down, and go up to it, and disturb him.”

Tom was dubious about this. There was something tense about the third boy, a tough prepared energy he didn’t even realise he’d noticed. However, he agreed. He usually agreed to things. They moved, sleuth-like, from ambush to ambush behind the swags of velvet. They went under Prince Albert, out onto the turning stone stairs, down to the South Court. When they reached the Candlestick, the dirty boy was not there.

“He wasn’t on the stairs,” said Julian, obsessed.

Tom stopped to stare at the Candlestick. It was dully gold. It seemed heavy. It stood on three feet, each of which was a long-eared dragon, grasping a bone with grim claws, gnawing with sharp teeth. The rim of the spiked cup that held the candle was also supported by open-jawed dragons with wings and snaking tails. The whole of its thick stem was wrought of fantastic foliage, amongst which men and monsters, centaurs and monkeys, writhed, grinned, grimaced, grasped and stabbed at each other. A helmeted, gnomelike being, with huge eyes, grappled the sinuous tail of a reptile. There were other human or kobold figures, one in particular with long draggling hair and a mournful gaze. Tom thought immediately that his mother would need to see it. He tried, and failed, to memorise the shapes. Julian explained. It had an interesting history, he said. No one knew exactly what it was made of. It was some kind of gilt alloy. It was probable that it had been made in Canterbury—modelled in wax and cast—but apart from the symbols of the evangelists on the knop, it appeared not to be made for a religious use. It had turned up in the cathedral in Le Mans, from where it had disappeared during the French Revolution. A French antiquary had sold it to the Russian Prince Soltikoff. The South Kensington Museum had acquired it from his collection in 1861. There was nothing, anywhere, like it.

Tom did not know what a knop was, and did not know what the symbols of the evangelists were. But he saw that the thing was a whole world of secret stories. He said his mother would like to see it. It might be just what she was looking for. He would have liked to touch the heads of the dragons.

Julian was looking restlessly around him. There was a concealed door, behind a plaster cast of a guarding knight, on a marble plinth. It was slightly ajar, which he had never seen before. He had tried its handle, and it was always, as it should be, since it led down to the basement storerooms and workrooms, locked.

“I bet he went down there.”

“What’s down there?”

“Miles and miles of passages and cupboards and cellars, and things being moulded, or cleaned, or just kept. Let’s stalk him.”

There was no light, beyond what was cast on the upper steps from the door they had opened. Tom did not like the dark. He did not like transgression. He said “We can’t see where we’re going.”

“We’ll leave the door open a crack.”

“Someone may come and lock it. We may get into trouble.”

“We won’t. I live here.”

They crept down the uneven stone steps, holding a thin iron rail. At the foot of the staircase they found themselves cut off by a metal grille, beyond which stretched a long corridor, now vaguely visible as though there was a light-source at the other end. The passage was roofed with Gothic vaulting, like a church crypt, but finished in white glazed industrial bricks. Julian gave the grille an irritated shake and it swung open. He observed that this, too, should have been locked. Someone was in for trouble.

The passage opened into a dusty vault, crammed with a crowd of white effigies, men, women and children, staring out with sightless eyes. Tom thought they might be prisoners in the underworld, or even the damned. They were closely packed; the boys had to worm their way between them. Beyond this funereal chamber, two corridors branched. There was more light to the left, so they went that way, negotiated another unlocked grille, and found themselves in a treasure-house of vast gold and silver vessels, croziers, eagle-winged lecterns, fountains, soaring angels and grinning cherubs. “Electrotypes,” whispered the knowledgeable Julian. A faint but steady light rippled over the metal, through little glass roundels let into the brickwork. Julian put his finger to his lips and hissed to Tom to keep still. Tom steadied himself against a silver galleon, which clanged. He sneezed.

“Don’t do that.”

“I can’t help it. It’s the dust.”

They crept on, took a left, took a right, had to force their way between thickets of what Tom thought were tomb railings, surmounted by jaunty female angel-busts, with wings and pointed breasts. Julian said they were cast-iron radiator covers, commissioned from an ironmaster in Sheffield. “Cost a packet, down here because someone thought they were obtrusive,” he whispered. “Which way now?”

Tom said he had no idea. Julian said they were lost, no one would find them, rats would pick their bones. Someone sneezed. Julian said

“I told you, don’t do that.”

“I didn’t. It must have been him.”

Tom was worried about hunting down a probably harmless and innocent boy. He was also worried about encountering a savage and dangerous boy.

Julian cried “We know you’re there. Come out and give yourself up!”

He was alert and smiling, Tom saw, the successful seeker or catcher in games of pursuit.

There was a silence. Another sneeze. A slight scuffling. Julian and Tom turned to look down the other fork of the corridor, which was obstructed by a forest of imitation marble pillars, made to support busts or vases. A wild face, under a mat of hair, appeared at knee height, framed between fake basalt and fake obsidian.

“You’d better come out and explain yourself,” said Julian, with complete certainty. “You’re trespassing. I should get the police.”

The third boy came out on all fours, shook himself like a beast, and stood up, supporting himself briefly on the pillars. He was about Julian’s height. He was shaking, whether with fear or wrath Tom could not tell. He pushed a dirty hand across his face, rubbing his eyes, which even in the gloom could be seen to be red-rimmed. He put his head down, and tensed. Tom saw the thought go through him, he could charge the two of them, head-butt them and flee down the corridors. He didn’t move and didn’t answer.

“What are you doing down here?” Julian insisted.

“I were hiding.”

“Why? Hiding from who?”

“Just hiding. I were doing no harm. I move carefully. I don’t disturb things.”

“What’s your name? Where do you live?”

“My name’s Philip. Philip Warren. I suppose I live here. At present.”

His voice was vaguely north country. Tom recognised it, but couldn’t place it. He was looking at them much as they were looking at him, as though he couldn’t quite grasp that they were real. He blinked, and a tremor ran through him. Tom said

“You were drawing the Candlestick. Is that what you came for?”

“Aye.”

He was clutching a kind of canvas satchel against his chest, which presumably contained his sketching materials. Tom said “It’s an amazing thing, isn’t it? I hadn’t seen it before.” The other boy looked him in the eye, then, with a flicker of a grin.

“Aye. Amazing, it is.” Julian spoke severely.

“You must come and explain yourself to my father.”

“Oh, your father. Who’s he, then?”

“He’s Special Keeper of Precious Metals.”

“Oh. I see.”

“You must come along with us.”

“I see I must. Can I get my things?”

“Things?” Julian sounded doubtful for the first time. “You mean, you’ve been living down here?”

“S’what I said. I got nowhere else to go. I’d rather not sleep on t’streets. I come here to draw. I saw the Museum was for workingmen to see well-made things. I mean to get work, I do, and I need drawings to show… I like these things.”

“Can we see the drawings?” asked Tom.

“Not in this light. Upstairs, if you’re interested. I’ll get my things, like I said.”

He ducked, and began to make his way back amongst the pillars, crouching and weaving expertly. Tom was put in mind of dwarves in mine-workings, and, since his upbringing was socially conscientious, of children in mines, pulling trucks on hands and knees. Julian was on Philip’s heels. Tom followed.

“Come in,” said the grimy boy, at the opening of a small storeroom, making a welcoming gesture, possibly mocking, with an arm. The storeroom contained what appeared to be a small stone hut, carved and ornamented with cherubim and seraphim, eagles and doves, acanthus and vines. It had its own little metal gate, with traces of gilding on the rusting iron.

“Convenient,” said Philip. “It has a stone bed. I took the liberty of borrowing some sacks to keep warm. I’ll put ’em back, naturally, where I found them.”

“It’s a tomb or shrine,” said Julian. “Russian, by the look of it. There must have been some saint on that table, in a glass case or a reliquary. He might still be in there, underneath, his bones that is, if he wasn’t incorrupt.”

“I haven’t noticed him,” said Philip, flatly. “He hasn’t bothered me.” Tom said “Are you hungry? What do you eat?”

“Once or twice I got to help in the tea-room, moving plates and washing them. People leave a lot on their plates, you’d be surprised. And the young ladies from the Art School took notice of my drawings and sometimes they passed me a sandwich. I don’t beg. I did steal one, once, when I was desperate, an egg-and-cress sandwich. I were pretty sure the young lady had no intention of eating it.” He paused.

“It isn’t much,” he said. “I’m hungry, yes.”

He was rummaging behind the tomb in the shrine, and came out with another canvas satchel, a sketch-book, a candle stub and what looked like a roll of clothing, tied with string.

“How did you get in?” Julian persisted.

“Followed the horses and carts. You know, they turn in and drive down a ramp into these underground parts. And they unload and pack things with a deal of bustle, and it’s easy enough to mingle wi’ them, wi’ the carters and lads, and get in.”

“And the upstairs door?” Julian queried. “Which is meant to be locked at all times.”

“I came across a little key.”

“Came across?”

“Aye. Came across. I’ll give it back. Here, take it.” Tom said

“It must be horribly frightening, down here alone at night.”

“Not near so frightening as t’streets in t’East End. Not near.”

Julian said “Please come with me now. You must come and explain all this to my father. He’s talking to Tom’s mother. This is Tom. Tom Wellwood. I’m Julian Cain.”

Major Prosper Cain, of the Royal Engineers and the Department of Science and Art, had an Elizabethan manor house, Iwade House, in Kent. He also lived in one of the small dwelling houses which had grown up round South Kensington’s monstrous steel and glass Boilers. (The purpose-built, cast-iron building, designed by a military engineer for the Museum, had three uncompromising long rounded roofs, which were mockingly known as the Brompton Boilers.) The dwelling houses were largely inhabited by the successors to the sappers who had originally constructed the Boilers after the Great Exhibition in 1851. Major Cain had what was not exactly an official residence, slightly larger than those of his men. There were ambitious projects to extend the museum buildings, and murmurings against the military presence. A competition had been held. Precise visions of palaces, courtyards, towers, fountains and ornaments had been scrutinised and compared. Aston Webb’s project was declared the winner, but no work had taken place. The new Director, J. H. Middleton, appointed in 1894, was not a military man, but a reserved ascetic scholar, who came from King’s College Cambridge and the Fitzwilliam Museum. He was at odds with Major-General Sir John Donnelly, secretary of the Science and Art Department. Moves had been made by keepers and scholars to demolish the inner dwellings, on the grounds of fire hazard and leaking flues. Twenty-seven open hearths, with chimneys, had been counted. The art students complained of soot and smoke rising into their studios. The military pointed out that the team of Museum fire-fighters was composed of the sappers who inhabited the buildings. The argument continued and nothing was done.

Prosper Cain’s narrow little house had elegant hearths, both on the ground floor, and in the first-floor drawing-room. They were decorated with delightful tiles by William de Morgan. He had offered Olive Well-wood a French gilt chair, carved in an ornate style detested both by the Arts and Crafts movement, and by the Museum keepers. His eye was eclectic and he had a weakness, if it was a weakness, for extravagance. He took pleasure in the appearance of his visitor, who was dressed in dark slate-coloured grosgrain, trimmed with braid, with lace at the high neck and fashionably billowing sleeves above the elbow. Her hat was trimmed with black plumes and a profusion of scarlet silk poppies, nestling along the brim. She had a bold, pleasant face, high-coloured, eager, firm-mouthed, with wide-set huge dark eyes, like the poppy centres. She must have been, he judged, around thirty-five, more or less, probably more. He deduced that she was not in the habit of wearing such tight corsets, kid shoes and gloves. She moved a little too freely and impulsively. She had fine flesh, fine ankles. She probably wore Liberty gowns or rational dress, at home. He sat opposite her, alert and fine-featured, like his son, his hair still as dark as Julian’s, his neat little moustache silver. His wife had been Italian, and had died in 1883, in Florence, a city they both loved, where their daughter had been born, and christened Florence, before the fever struck, and the place became tragic.

Olive Wellwood was the wife of Humphry Wellwood, who worked in the Bank of England, and was an active member of the Fabian Society. She was the author of a great many tales, for children and adults, and something of an authority on British Fairy Lore. She had come to see Major Cain because she had a project for a tale that would turn on an ancient treasure with magical properties. Prosper Cain said gallantly that he was delighted she had thought of him. She smiled, and said that the most exciting thing about her small success with her books was that she felt able to disturb people as important and as busy as he was. It was something she could never have expected. She said his room was like a cavern from the Arabian Nights, and that she could barely resist getting up and looking at all the wondrous things he had collected. Not much Arabian stuff, actually, said Prosper. It was not his field. He had served in the East, but his interests were European. He was afraid she would find no scholarly order in his personal things. He didn’t believe that a room needed to be set slavishly in one style—most particularly not when the room was, so to speak, a room within the multifarious rooms of the Museum, as the smallest eggshell might be in a Fabergé nest. You could set an Iznik jar very well next to a Venetian goblet and a lustre bowl by Mr. de Morgan, and they would all show to advantage.

“I hang my walls with mediaeval Flemish needlework, next to the small tapestry my friend Morris wove for me at Merton Abbey—greedy birds and crimson berries. Do look at the very satisfactory strength of the twist of the leaves. He never lacks energy.”

“And these?” enquired Mrs. Wellwood. She stood up impulsively, and ran a grey-gloved finger along a shelf of incongruous objects with no apparent relation to each other, aesthetic or historical.

“Those, dear lady, are, as it were, my touchstone collection of fakes. These are not mediaeval spoons, though they were offered to me as such. This nautilus is not a Cellini, though William Beckford was led to believe it was, and paid a small fortune for it. These baubles are not the Crown Jewels, but skilful glass replicas of some of them, which were exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1851.”

“And this?”

Mrs. Wellwood’s soft finger ran lightly over a platter containing very lively images, in pottery, of a small toad, a curled snake, a few beetles, some moss and ferns, and a black crayfish.

“I’ve never seen anything so lifelike. Every little wart and wrinkle.”

“You may or may not know that the Museum came to grief through the very expensive purchase of a dish—not this one—by Bernard Palissy. Who is immortalised in mosaic in the Kensington Valhalla. It was subsequently realised to our embarrassment to have been made—as this one was—as an honest replica by a modern French pottery. Sold as souvenirs. It is in fact—without incontestable artists’ marks—very hard to distinguish a fake Palissy—or a copy, I should say—from the seventeenth-century thing itself.”

“And yet,” said Mrs. Wellwood, quick on the uptake, “the detail, the precision. It looks unusually difficult.”

“It is said, and I believe it to be true, that the ceramic creatures are built round real creatures—real toads, eels, beetles.”

“Dead, I do hope.”

“Mummified, it is to be hoped. But we do not know precisely. Maybe there is a tale to be told?”

“The prince who became a toad and was imprisoned in a dish? How he would hate watching the banquets. There is a half-stone prince in the Arabian Nights, who has always troubled me. I must think.”

She smiled, catlike and content.

“But you were consulting me about gold and silver treasures?”

Humphry Wellwood had said “Go and ask the Old Pirate. He’ll know. He knows all about hiding places and secret transactions. He haunts markets and antiquaries, and pays pennies, so we are told, for ancestral heirlooms that get onto street stalls after revolutions.”

“I want something that’s always been missing—with a story attached to it, naturally—and that can be made to have magic properties, an amulet, a mirror that shows the past and the future, that kind of thing. You can see my imagination is banal, and I need your precise knowledge.”

“Oddly,” said Prosper Cain, “there aren’t so many gold and silver treasures that are very ancient—and that’s for a very good reason. If you were a Viking lord, or a Tartar chief—or even the Holy Roman Emperor—your gold and silver things were part of your treasury, and always—from the point of view of the artist and the storyteller—in danger of being melted down, for barter, or soldiers’ wages, or quick transport and hiding. The Church had its sacred vessels—”

“I don’t want a grail or a monstrance, or that sort of thing.”

“No, you want something with a personal mana. I see what you need.”

“Not a ring. There are so many tales about rings.”

Prosper Cain laughed aloud, a sharp bark of a laugh.

“You are exacting. What about the tale of the Stoke Prior Treasure—silver vessels buried for safety during the Civil War, unearthed in our own day by a boy hunting rabbits? Or there is the romantic tale of the Eltenberg Reliquary, which was purchased for the Museum by J. C. Robinson in 1861. It came from the collection of Prince Soltikoff—who had bought it with about four thousand mediaeval objects from a Frenchman after the 1848 revolution.

“It was hidden in a chimney after Napoleon’s invasion by the last canoness of Eltenberg, Princess Salm-Reiffenstadt. And from the chimney somehow it reached a canon in Emmerich who sold it to a dealer in Aachen—Jacob Cohen of Anhalt—who called one day on Prince Florentin of Salm-Salm and offered him one small walrus-ivory figure. And when Prince Florentin bought that, Cohen returned, with another and another and another—and in the end the reliquary chest itself, black with smoke and reeking of tobacco. Now, Prince Florentin’s son, Prince Felix, persuaded him to sell the pieces to a dealer in Cologne, and there, we believe, clever modern fakes were substituted for some pieces—the Journey of the Magi, the Virgin and Child with St. Joseph, and some of the Prophets. Very clever fakes. We have them. This is a true story, and we are convinced the original pieces are squirrelled away somewhere. Would this not make a great tale, the tracking and restoration of the pieces? Your characters could go on the trail of the artisan who made the fakes …”

Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here appear to be lies.

“I should need to change it a great deal.”

The scholar and expert in fakes looked briefly displeased.

“It is so strong as it is,” she explained. “It has no need of my imagination.”

“I should have thought it calls upon all our imaginations, the fate of those lost works of art and craft…”

“I am intrigued by your toads and snakes.”

“For a tale of witchcraft? As familiars?”

At this point the door opened, and Julian led Philip Warren in, followed by Tom, who closed it.

“Excuse me, Father. We thought you should know. We found—him—hiding away in the Museum stores. In the crypt. I’d been keeping an eye on him and we tracked him down. He was living down there.”

Everyone looked at the dirty boy as though, Olive thought, he had risen out of the earth. His shoes had left marks on the carpet.

“What were you doing?” Prosper Cain asked him. He didn’t answer. Tom went to his mother, who ruffled his hair. He offered her the story.

“He makes drawings of the things in the cases. At night he sleeps all alone in the shrine of an old dead saint, where the bones used to be. Amongst gargoyles and angels. In the dark.”

“That’s brave,” said Olive, turning the dark eyes to Philip. “You must have been afraid.”

“Not really,” said Philip, stolidly.

He had no intention of saying what he really felt. This was that if you have slept on one mattress, end to end with five other children—a mattress moreover on which two brothers and a sister had died, neither easily nor peacefully, with nowhere to remove them to—a few old bones weren’t going to worry you. All his life he had had a steady craving for solitude, hardly even named, but never relaxing. He had no idea if other people felt this. On the whole it appeared they did not. In the Museum crypt, in the dark and dust, briefly, this craving had been for the first time satisfied. He was in a dangerous and explosive state of mind.

“Where are you from, young man?” asked Prosper Cain. “I need the whys and the hows. Why are you here, and how did you get into a locked space?”

“I come from Burslem. I work in t’Potteries.” A long pause. “I run off, that’s it, I ran away.” His face was stolid. “Your parents work in the Potteries?”

“Me dad’s dead. He were a saggar-maker. Me mum works in th’ paint shop. All of us work there, one way or another. I loaded kilns.”

“You were unhappy,” said Olive.

Philip considered his inner state. He said “Yes.”

“People were hard on you.”

“They had to be. It weren’t that. I wanted. I wanted to make something…”

“You wanted to make something of your life, of yourself,” Olive prompted. “That’s natural.”

It may have been natural, but it was not what Philip meant. He repeated

“I wanted to make something…”

His mind’s eye saw an unformed mass of liquescent mud. He looked around, like a baited bear, and saw the flaming de Morgan lustre bowl on the mantelshelf. He opened his mouth to comment on the glaze and decided against it.

Tom said “Won’t you show us your drawings?” He said to his mother “He used to show the lady students, they liked them, they gave him bread…”

Philip undid his satchel and brought out his sketch-book. There was the Candlestick with its coiling dragons and poised, wide-eyed little men. Sketch after sketch, all the intricacies of the writhing and biting and stabbing. Tom said

“That’s the little man I liked, the elderly one with the thin hair and the sad look.”

Prosper Cain turned the pages. Stone angels, Korean gold ornaments for a crown, a Palissy dish in all its ruggedness, one of the two definitely authentic specimens.

“What are these?” he asked, turning more pages.

“Those are just my own ideas.”

“For what?”

“Well, I thought salt-glazed stoneware. Or mebbe earthenware, that page. I were drawing the metal to get the feel of it. I don’t know metal. I know clay. I know a bit about clay.”

“You have a fine eye,” said Prosper Cain. “A very fine eye. You were using the Collection as it is intended to be used, to study design.”

Tom drew a sigh of relief. The story was to have a good ending.

“Would you like to study in the Art School?”

“I dunno. I want to make something…”

He was suddenly at the end of his resources, and began to sway. Prosper Cain was still studying the drawings, and said, without looking up,

“You must be hungry. Ring for Rosie, Julian, and tell her to bring fresh tea.”

“I am always hungry,” said Philip, suddenly loudly, with twice the force of his earlier remarks. He had not meant it to be funny, but because he was truly about to be fed, they all took it as a joke, and laughed merrily together.

“Sit down, boy. This isn’t an interrogation.”

Philip looked doubtfully at the flame and peacock silk cushions.

“They’ll clean. You look all in. Sit down.”

• • •

Rosie, the parlourmaid, made several journeys up the narrow stairs, bringing trays with porcelain cups and saucers, a cakestand with a solid block of fruitcake, a platter of various kinds of sandwich, delicately designed both to appeal to a lady and to nourish growing boys (cucumber slivers in some, wedges of potted meat in others). Then she brought a dish of tartlets, a teapot, a teakettle, a cream jug. She was a wiry small person in starched cap and apron, about as old as Philip and Julian. She set everything out on occasional tables, put the kettle on the hearth, bobbed at Major Cain and went downstairs again. Prosper Cain asked Mrs. Wellwood to pour. He was amused to see Philip raise his cup to his eye to study the shepherdesses on flowered meadows around it.

“Minton porcelain, Sèvres-style,” Prosper said. “An abomination in the eyes of William Morris, but I have a weakness for ornament…”

Philip put the cup down on the table at his elbow, and did not answer. His mouth was full of sandwich. He was trying to eat daintily, and he was horribly hungry, he was ravenous. He tried to chew slowly. He gulped. They all watched him benignly. He chewed, and blushed under the dirt. He was close to tears. They were aliens. His mother painted the borders of cups like these, with fine brushes, day after day, proud of her repetitive faultlessness. Olive Wellwood, smelling of roses, stood over him, handing him slabs of fruitcake. He ate two, though he thought it was probably impolite. But the starch and the sugar did their work. His unnatural tension and wariness gave way to pure fatigue.

“And now?” said Prosper Cain. “What shall we do with this young man? Where shall he sleep tonight, and what should he do with himself?”

Tom was put in mind of David Copperfield’s arrival at Betsey Trot-wood’s house. A boy. Coming to a real home, out of dirt and danger. He was about to echo Mr. Dick—give him a bath—and managed not to. It would have been most insulting.

Olive Wellwood turned the question to Philip

“What do you want to do?”

“Work,” said Philip. It was an easy answer and it was largely right.

“Not to go back?”

“No.”

“I think—if Major Cain agrees—you should come home now, with me and Tom, for the weekend. I imagine he has no thought of prosecuting you for trespass. This weekend is Midsummer Eve, and we are having a midsummer party at our house in the country. We are a large family, and friendly, and one more or less makes no difference.” She turned to Prosper Cain.

“And I hope that you too will come over to Andreden from Iwade, for midsummer magic, and bring Julian, and Florence too, to join the young folk.”

Prosper Cain bent over her hand, mentally cancelled a card party and said he would—they all would—be delighted. Tom looked at their captured boy, to see if he was pleased, but he was staring at his feet. Tom was not entirely sure about Julian coming to his party. He found him intimidating. It would be good to have Philip, if he would consent to enjoy himself. He thought of adding his voice to his mother’s, and was embarrassed, and did not.