Wilberforce by H. S. Cross

The Spaulding Smashup had been his fault, too, even though he hadn’t meant to do it.
    Had he?
    The truth was he couldn’t remember what he’d been thinking before he charged Spaulding. Had he been thinking at all? He remembered the slick of Spaulding’s arm against him, blocking his try. He remembered the flash from Spaulding’s eyes as he did it. He remembered …
    What if this shadow had been with him all along, only of late growing dark enough to sense? What if he had plowed into Spaulding in some desperate bid to outrun it?
    He tried to remember a time without it, but that time belonged to the other life, the life full of life, when they brought her breakfast in bed on her birthday, when his father kissed her in front of them, when her laughter overflowed everything, like the icing on the cake she made for herself and let him—but he couldn’t think such things or he would shortly cease to breathe.
    His father referred to the current age as some sort of sea journey. He would speak of being so many months out, as if he had boarded a sailing vessel and embarked on an odyssey of unknown length. Nine months out; two years out; forty-two months, one week, and three days out—the expression made Morgan want to punch someone’s nose in. Was it the grave self-importance that enraged him, or the metaphor itself? If one was out, then presumably one could come back in. When would they turn the ship around?

 
    8
    Two o’clock was surely the most hopeless hour of the night. Years after lights-out but ages before dawn, never had madness felt so close at hand. Rational thought had long ago departed—who knew how many months out it was now—abandoning Morgan to a body more agitated than he could endure.
    That body was now in fact slipping from his bed and moving somnambulant from the dorm. He felt aches, stabs, drafts, but the body paid them no mind. He watched, almost curious, as the body repaired to the changing room, where it stripped off pajamas and donned mufti before continuing in stocking feet to the study. He observed, now quite curious, as the body gathered items from his drawer: money, wristwatch, and, most peculiar of all perhaps, the small, soft-bound volume Silk had given him that last night, the night they’d sat together in the study after weeks of not speaking; the night Silk had told him the secret of the poacher’s tunnel; the night Silk had … not said goodbye, but failed to say it.
    Morgan had never precisely understood why Silk had given him Stalky & Co. as his fag book. Silk had claimed that Gallowhill had given it to him, and in fact the penciled initials G.G. could be found inside, but why after everything would Silk have parted with it? And why, so long escaped from Silk, was Morgan now stuffing it into his pocket?
    He followed as the body quit the study and made its way downstairs. There it turned in—peculiar—at the cloakroom, where it sought out his overcoat, scarf, and cap. It even—extraordinary—rifled through Holland’s overcoat for Holland’s gloves, the only ones known to exist in the House.
    He had nothing better to do, nowhere to be, so he accompanied the body as it laced up his outdoor shoes, unlocked the garden door, and strolled across the moonlit playing fields to the poacher’s tunnel, where it began the routines of gaining entrance to the woods.
    Whatever could its purpose be? It couldn’t be making for the Keys, as surely it knew that establishment was closed. It could only, Morgan realized with growing excitement, intend one thing. Finally, someone had recognized the bitter, bursting truth—that there was nothing left for him at that school, or anywhere in the east, west, or north of Yorkshire. Finally, someone had taken steps. Finally, someone was acting!
    Until this moment he had classed running away with the histrionics favored by his sister Emily. One of his earliest memories was of