and the house lapsed into a grey, damp silence from which it was roused only by the terrifying visits of the widow Ellis.
The widow Ellis was the chief reason why Mr Elwes had lost interest in his experiment – the widow Ellis and Whig politics. He had discovered politics at the end of the first stage in Tobias’ progress, and he had thrown himself into them with great enthusiasm. He had joined the Whigs, to their dismay, and he had done so through a sneaking attorney named Ellis – a fellow whom he employed very often, for he was perpetually at law. And when this person was killed and partially eaten by a performing bear at Mangonell Bagpize, Mr Elwes fell madly in love with his widow. She was an odious woman with a dark red face, black eyebrows that joined across her nose, and seven daughters. She hated Tobias at first sight, and she was determined that her first step in reforming and renovating Plashey would be to put him out of doors.
‘Oh the happy wedding day,’ sang Mr Elwes, adding a final stalk of bugwort to the dank swathe under his arm. ‘Happy, happy wedding day.’ His voice died away behind the hedge.
Jack came out of his leaves and dropped into the lane. He gave the yak an affectionate thump as he passed, asked it how it did, and hurried through the meadow to the temple of Fame, a crumbling plaster-and-rubble edifice hastily run up by Mr Elwes in a spinney to shelter the busts of Galen, Aristotle and Mr Elwes, but now forgotten and taken over by Tobias for his bats.
Tobias was not there, but Jack knew that he would come, and he sat down cautiously on the steps of the temple to wait. He sat down cautiously and with a meek, dutiful expression, because of Tobias’ bees; they lived in a row of hives in front of the building, and in spite of many sad proofs to the contrary Jack still believed that if he did not provoke them they would not sting him.
Behind him and above his head Tobias’ bats scratched and rustled in the darkness of their dome, faintly, shrilly gibbering as they quarrelled among themselves. A steady, good-tempered hum came from the hives, and in the sunlight that now came slanting through the spinney the bees could be seen rising and shooting away with surprising speed: Jack gazed at them with detached respect, and wondered vaguely what was keeping his friend.
It was difficult to account for their friendship. Apart from their age they had nothing at all in common, or at least nothing that appeared at first sight. Nothing could have been more different than their appearance, education and family; nothing could have been more unlike than their pursuits; but they were happy when they were together and they missed one another very much when they were apart. Jack’s education had been completely normal – he had done tolerably well at school and had come away with a certain amount of Latin, a reasonable acquaintance with mathematics, and nothing more. The education of Tobias, on the other hand, might have been calculated to produce a monster, and the fact that it had not done so was rather a proof of the resilience of the human spirit than any evidence of judgment on the part of Mr Elwes.
Yet one can avoid being a monster without necessarily being ordinary: Tobias was far from ordinary. He had never been to school, and he had never known anyone of his own age except Jack Byron and Georgiana Chaworth; he had spent all his days in that strange, dark, unsocial house, with odd, unsatisfactory servants perpetually coming and going; he had been kept to his book with inhuman persistence; and he was a strange young creature, very strange indeed.
‘But he is so very strange, my dear,’ said Mrs Chaworth. ‘So very strange. He assured me that toads were capable of gratitude.’
‘Are they not, ma’am?’ asked Jack.
‘Perhaps they are, my dear,’ said Mrs Chaworth, closing her eyes, ‘but with these words he passed a very large toad to Mrs Jerningham – Mrs Charles Jerningham – and desired her to caress it. Mrs Jerningham was obliged to be led away and recovered with sal volatile in the small drawing-room. My dear, unequal friendships never answer, as your grandfather often used to say.’
Mrs Chaworth did not forbid the association, but she dropped a gentle drizzle of disapproval upon it, and she would have been happy to see it die away, particularly on Georgiana’s account. This young creature, the prettiest of her daughters, was passionately attached to her cousin Jack and even more so to Tobias: she played cricket with them, tirelessly fielding while Tobias bowled and Jack batted, and a primitive kind of baseball; she climbed trees, whistled and shouted in a manner that distressed her elegant mother, and cherished hedgepigs (presents from Tobias) in her bedroom.
When Mrs Chaworth objected to his strangeness she referred not only to qualities that were produced by his nurture but also to some that were born in him; for example, he had a strange power with animals, however wild, and sometimes (though not always) he could call them to him over great distances; he had always handled bees without any protection, and since his earliest days he had been reputed a horse-witch. Clearly a budding horse-witch, however fluent in Greek, was not an ideal playmate for Georgiana: the family intended to marry Georgiana to Lord Carlisle, and Mrs Chaworth did not wish to hear any adverse criticism from the young man’s mother about Georgiana’s bringing-up: she often said to her daughter, ‘Lard, Georgiana, what an ill-looking fellow poor Toby has become; and will grow even worse, alas.’
And however Georgiana might snort and cry ‘I do not mind it,’ not even she could claim that Tobias Barrow was in any way a beauty. He was meagre, narrow-chested and stooping; his dull black hair made his white face even paler, while at the same time it made a startling contrast with his almost colourless light green eyes. To an unaccustomed eye it was a face so strange as to be almost sinister – Mrs Ellis, upon contemplating it for the first time, had been struck dumb; which is saying a great deal. It was in no way a boy’s face, and no one, looking at it, would ever have expected to see it moved by a boyish spirit. And then he had so early grown accustomed to loneliness and learning that he had slipped into odd, graceless habits; he would make sudden untoward gestures, forgetting his company – he would distort his face in thought, grind his teeth, and sometimes utter a low hooting noise. He washed only when he felt need of it, shifted his linen rarely, and always wore black clothes.
Jack could see him now, a slight dark figure running towards him through the trees. Jack smiled to see him coming, put up his hand after the fashion of sailors, and hailed him very loud and clear, ‘Ahoy.’
The bats instantly fell into a petrified silence. ‘There you are, Toby,’ said Jack; and to this valuable observation he added, ‘Why are you running?’ For it was a rare thing to see Tobias running.
‘Jack,’ said Tobias, ‘I am very happy to see you. I am very glad you have come.’
‘Why, what’s the matter?’ asked Jack, staring. It was clear to him that his friend was strongly moved: he was flushed, and he was breathing hard.
‘I tell you what it is, Jack,’ said Tobias, gripping his arm and looking up into his face with great anxiety. ‘You must give me your advice. I am going to run away to sea.’
WHEN THE LONDON ROAD leaves Mangonell Bagpize it plunges down a hill so steep that horses must be led. The bottom of the hill was a favourite place with highwaymen, because coaches coming or going were obliged to be almost at a standstill there – highwaymen with strong nerves, that is, for the more timid or fanciful were put off and discouraged by the sight of the gallows at the top of the hill, where their unsuccessful brother Medical Dick (a former apothecary’s boy) swung as a silent warning in chains, carefully tarred against the weather.
Tobias had eyed Medical Dick with a professional interest that could not possibly be shared by his companion, but he had not stopped talking; and still, as they walked down the hill with their horses stepping carefully behind them, they talked on with the same eagerness.
‘… but the final thing, the thing I could not stand, was her sending her servant to destroy my animals. That woman, that termagant, if termagant be not too warm an expression – do you consider termagant too warm an expression, Jack?’
‘No,’ said Jack. ‘I should have called her a termagant myself, if I had thought