H. S. Cross returns to “a school as nuanced and secretive as J. K. Rowling’s Hogwarts” (The Rumpus) in Grievous, the sequel to her coming-of-age novel Wilberforce.
St. Stephen’s Academy, Yorkshire, 1931. A world unto itself, populated by boys reveling in life’s first big mistakes and men still learning how to live with the consequences of their own. They live a cloistered life, exotic to modern eyes, founded upon privilege, ruled by byzantine and often unspoken laws, haunted by injuries both casual and calculated. Yet within those austere corridors can be found windows of enchantment, unruly love, and a wild sort of freedom, all vanished, it seems, from our world.
Told from a variety of viewpoints—including that of unhappy Housemaster John Grieves—Grievous takes us deep inside the crucible of St. Stephen’s while retaining a clear-eyed, contemporary sensibility, drawing out the urges and even mercies hidden beneath the school’s strict, unsparing surface. The Academy may live by its own codes, but as with the world around it—a world the characters must ultimately face—it already contains everything necessary to shape its people or tear them apart.
Release date:
April 9, 2019
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print pages:
544
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Third row of the Remove’s History lesson, Gray Riding slouched as much as discipline would allow, pen, exercise book: Weds. half hol, nothing worth changing shoes. Rain last five, rain today.
Everything in sight had succumbed to the damp. Towels never dried. Walls perspired. Games kit hung clammy in the changing room, where mildew grew with abandon.
Fifty-seventh day, Lenten Term, boredom chronic, boredom acute, the most dismal day in the year of our Lord 1931.
Then—in an instant?—paper brightened, silence fell. Mr. Grieves left his lecture and drifted to the window. Gray lifted his pen. Could everyone feel it on their skin, colors blooming warm and sharp? Even the back of his throat had a taste, like what you smelled when spring came to wake up the ground and banish winter in a night.
Gray wiped his spectacles. The rain had stopped, leaving only drips from the gutter. The Remove saw it, too, and when the bell rang, they cheered. Gray screwed the cap onto his pen, but the ink had run, pooling on the page and then smearing when he closed the book on the mess.
* * *
After lunch there was a wire. John took it from his matron and fumbled with the seal. Urgent notes never brought good news, but in this day and age what hazard? He tore it in frustration, Mr. John Grieves, St. Stephen’s Academy, nr. Fridaythorpe, Yorkshire.
The tides at Lancaster came faster than a racing horse. If the drowning didn’t get you, the quicksands would. He was a grown man and a Housemaster; he was seven years old and his mother was dead all over again.
* * *
Where did it come from, all that water? Cordelia opened the window in the alcove off the ward, but when she stuck out her head, the rain was gone. She knew about weather systems, trade winds, the Gulf Stream. Perhaps the Atlantic had dried up at last. Perhaps the spires of the lost city were poking through the seabed while England and the Emerald Isle drowned.
When she was small, the rain had made her think of Heaven.
—The angels are crying, Uncle John would tell her.
—Why?
—The sins of the world.
—What’s that?
Her godfather would open his mouth but say nothing.
—Where do angels come from?
—God made them.
—Where does God come from?
* * *
They were one missed call-over away from the cane. Gray hadn’t been caned since the beginning of last term (a prank of Trevor’s—egg, saltpeter, chimney), but despite the recent rocky patch, he thought he could make it to Easter. He put only 35 percent on Trevor’s avoiding the Junior Common Room, but bets on Trevor, even with himself, were notoriously unpredictable.
Gray wasn’t a coward, he hoped. He’d survived as many as six from the JCR. But as a punishment, the cane contaminated days. You couldn’t look the JCR prefects in the eye afterwards. The physical effects lingered. It was all unendurably personal. Lines at least could be done with an air of sarcasm, chores completed as Jean Valjean in prison, and even punishment runs might offer an interval with their Captain of Games when Swinton might speak to him with something other than the scorn due a boy hopeless at sport. All punishment brought shame, but the cane left him feeling ill, even after it was over.
In Stalky they didn’t care. They took just punishment in their stride and exacted revenge for anything else. Valarious, likewise. Marks were a badge of honor to him, as they essentially were to Trevor.
Trevor emerged from the washroom and led him through the post-luncheon throng. They might be on tight terms with the Absence Book, but they were, Trevor reminded him as they passed the school porter, no longer gated. Sun was breaking through the clouds, hours of half holiday stretched before them, and there was no reason they oughtn’t spend the afternoon at the Keep and make it back well in time for call-over. Ninety-eight percent (though you couldn’t forget the standard deviation for Trevor himself).
They strolled nonchalant past the juniors diving in the mud, past their compatriots in the Remove heading to the fives courts for battle, past upper schoolers choosing sides for ad hoc football. They walked without urgency, as if on routine ramble of their wide, wet bounds.
Beyond the jousting fields of Castle Noire stands Grindalythe Woods, alluring and entirely out-of-bounds. Their boots squelched as they circumnavigated the puddle-cum-lake that divided the upper and the lower pitch. Beyond the woods, even more alluring and even farther out-of-bounds, stands McKay’s Bothy. They slid down the ditch that marked a boundary in cricket season. There is, in bards’ lore, a third route, through the woods, past the keeper, Grendles módor, the details of which have evaporated like mead at the bottom of a barrel. Slipping from sight, they dashed for the old lodge. For three years, it has been widely suspected that Valarious holds the keys to that byway. Did he not squire for the Great Wilberforce? The Great Wilberforce, who, it is known, often took leave of Castle Noire to cavort with his men at the tavern in Fridaythorpe? Inside the ruined hut, they hauled up the stone—None of the men told how they were able to disappear from castle grounds—crawled down the chute—and then return, listing, hours after the watch—wriggled through mildewed, pitch-black—If none of Wilberforce’s men had told—tickling, hopefully not spiders—who else could know but Valarious? Of course, the knights of Castle Noire find it difficult to imagine that young Valarious could hold the keys to such a fortress, but even as they resent the possibility, they hope for it—every creeping thing—If secrets are not passed on, they pass away, into dead knowledge.
The ground sloped up, and they emerged into the woods, into air, light, and freedom. Their confinement at the Academy, some from rain, some from gating, had lasted three weeks, and now as Trevor led them up the path, Gray saw that streams had colonized the woods, presenting muddy ravines and newly fallen branches. He half-expected to find the Keep washed away, but as he and Trevor arrived at the wall above the barn, there it stood, stalwart and loyal.
On the heels of his relief, fear flashed, like being told his name was on the notice board. What if the barn actually were to wash away, or collapse? Inside the hollow wall, beyond the ledge that sheltered their books and cigarettes, beyond sight of anyone who looked without knowing what to look for, there in the heart of the barn, if such a place could have a pumping organ or seat of feeling, there, though he hadn’t touched it or looked at it in years, though most of the time he let himself forget it was there, there in the smoldering ashes or the rain-soaked splinters, however it happened, there someone would find it.
Sometimes he dreamed of the box. In his dreams, there was no fear. In his dreams, he swam through Grindalythe Woods, slid down the slope behind the barn, and reached into the rat-nesty walls for his father’s medicine box, the silver nameplate, T. Riding, untarnished. The box had no latch, the treasure his for the taking, and in the dream it was treasure inside, rich beyond measure, known to no one, power and luck and blessing all his, nearly forgotten but not.
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