Free Wilberforce by H. S. Cross Page B

school? Did gas cause hallucination? He thought he remembered Grieves saying it took days to die from poison gas, and meantime one lay suffocating and burned in a field hospital. Was that chlorine or mustard gas he meant? Didn’t the Germans give one of them up as ineffective?
    â€”He’s too bloody arrogant, Nathan hissed. This is pointless!
    This wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. He had heeded the warning of the explosion. He had opened and closed negotiations with the shadow. Danger had departed. He had reformed. But now his friends—allies since their first day at the Academy—were turning on him, pinning him literally to the wall, and letting him know they saw his lies. The shadow had left the Academy, but here in the cloister of their study, a sinister war had broken out, a war his friends had conspired to wage when Morgan’s back had been turned.
    â€”Can’t you trust us? Laurie implored. After all this time?
    A perilous weakness seized him—the yearning to confess to them everything he carried. If you can trust anyone, you can trust them , the weakness whispered. And what surrender it would be to trust somebody, to have somebody equal to the truth, someone who would demand it of him, all of it, and on hearing it would not flinch.
    â€”I’ll tell you the truth if you’re so determined to know it.
    Laurie crossed his arms. Nathan glared. Morgan opened his mouth, but the weakness turned to alarm. What exactly could he confess, to them or anyone? What words could convey the menace of the shadow, the allure of Spaulding, the mess of Alex—and was that even the extent of it? How dare they torment him by pretending they wanted the truth! The truth ? Even his father could not wrest it from him anymore. How dare they behave as if the truth were explicable. Or endurable.
    â€”If you must know, his voice said loftily, I was in the chapel.
    â€”Right.
    â€”Why? Laurie countered.
    â€”If you must know, it’s my mater’s birthday.
    They boggled at him. Good. He had more ammunition and was not afraid to use it. Oh, they were clever. They conspired to trap him? To resurrect that desperate longing. How dare they? How dare —
    â€”She would have been forty-eight, his voice continued.
    Their faces reddened. Sods. They deserved this and worse.
    â€”They always talked about going back to Venice for it. Now of course, they aren’t.
    Their silence confirmed they took the lie as truth. When was his mother’s birthday, actually? It was in March, but when again?
    â€”If you were in the chapel, Nathan said ruthlessly, why didn’t you tell us in the first place?
    A rifle against his ribs; it was the eleventh of March—that was the date he’d written on Grieves’s composition this morning, and that was in fact his mother’s birthday. He caught his breath. This was not, absolutely not the moment to—he’d only said it to make them ashamed, and actually, since it was that day, not only could he have been in the chapel, but as far as the two traitors before him knew, he had been!
    â€”If you must know, I was blubbing.
    Let them eat that.
    â€”If you’ve any more disagreeable questions to put to me, perhaps you’d be good enough to wait until I’ve returned from the bogs, unless you want to chaperone me while I go and be sick.
    He detached himself from the wall. His good arm wrenched open the door, releasing him from that poisonous room. He stalked away without reply from his friends, without protest, without perception, without succor.
    *   *   *
    He needed to run around the playing fields, to sprint cross-country, to bang about in the scrum, to climb ropes in the gym, to bowl cricket balls, to swing bats, to do anything other than stand jittering in the washroom. Things were even more bashed up than he’d feared, but this destruction couldn’t be blamed on anyone else. He was the basher.