Tom Brown's Body

Preamble

*

What a dickens is the Woman always a whimpring about Murder for?

John Gay – THE BEGGAR'S OPERA (Act 1, Scene 4)

THE village of Spey is delightfully situated. It has woods and a river to the north, and to the south and west the undulations of its open fields meet the gorse and heather of the moors. It has a blacksmith, livery stables, a haunted Priory, and a witch.

The manor house of Spey was built in 1730, and in 1829 it became a public school. Nowadays the Headmaster, his wife, and, when they are at home, his two daughters, live in one wing of the manor, and the School House boys, some of the masters, the Headmaster's servants, and his butler's budgerigars, occupy the rest of the building.

Around the eighteenth-century mansion, like satellites around a noble planet, courtiers around a king, or his family of sheaves bowing down to Joseph the Dreamer, are other and lesser Houses which, with the mansion itself, make up the School.

There are twelve of these lesser Houses, and they are so discreetly situated – having been added one at a time as the School increased its numbers – that they do not impair the prospect of the original mansion. Unfortunately, together with Spey itself, they come to the number of thirteen, and, by superstitious boys and masters, that lesser breed, the parents, and that influential hierarchy, the Old Boys, to this mystic number has been attributed the dire misfortune which fell upon the School soon after the conclusion of the war.

The School, in short, has added to its other traditions the dubious one of a murdered junior master.