Mr Witney put a stop to the ratting only when the light was beginning to fade.
It felt as if we had only been at the farm for five minutes but it must have been at least an hour and a half. The dog rubbed itself against my leg. It was a mangy little animal, a mongrel, with a piece of rope for a collar and a half-healed wound on its side.
‘Well done, boy,’ Mr Witney said. ‘So you learn more than Latin and Greek at that school of yours.’
I bent down and scratched the dog between his ears. ‘Good boy, Stanley,’ I murmured. ‘Good boy.’ Just for a moment I was blindingly happy, dizzy with joy.
Faraday nudged my arm. ‘Can we go back now? Please?’
I looked at his pale face and his big teeth, ghostly in the fading light, and all at once the joy evaporated.
‘There’s blood on you,’ he said. ‘There’s blood everywhere.’
He was right. My hands were streaked with blood from the dog’s muzzle and the handle of my stick. The corpses of rats lay everywhere, some complete, others in fragments. The dogs’ interest in them diminished sharply once they stopped moving.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Please.’
I glanced over my shoulder, hoping for a wave from Mr Witney or a nod of farewell from one of my comrades in the battle. But no one was looking at me. No one paid any attention when we left the yard and walked down the muddy lane towards the green.
For a few moments, for an hour even, I had been part of a group; I had played a useful part; I had been, in some small way, valued for what I did. That was all gone. Now I came to my senses and discovered that part of my collar had come adrift from my shirt and the tip of it was nudging my left ear. My overcoat was splashed with mud and cowpats, as well as blood. I had lost my cap. And I was alone once more with Faraday.
‘They were talking about me,’ he said in a voice that wobbled. ‘Mr Nicholls was there. He knows.’
‘Who’s Nicholls?’
‘He is a lay clerk. A tenor.’ For a moment there was a hint of superiority in Faraday’s voice. ‘Not very good, though he thinks he is.’
The lay clerks were the basses and the tenors of the Cathedral choir. They were grown-ups. Many of them had been at the Choir School when they were young, and they still lived in the town.
‘What does it matter if he recognized you?’
‘You don’t understand.’ Faraday was always accusing me of that, and quite rightly. ‘Mr Nicholls was pointing me out and whispering about me. They know.’
‘I expect it was about your voice breaking and not being in the choir any more.’
‘No. You should have seen their faces. They’d heard about … about the other thing.’
He meant the postal order. If Mr Nicholls knew about it, the story could no longer be confined to the Choir School and a handful of trusted outsiders like Mr Ratcliffe. It would be all over the place in a day or two, in the College and in the town.
‘I can’t bear it,’ Faraday said.
I glanced at him and saw a tear rolling down his cheek.
‘We’ll go back to the Rat’s now,’ I said. ‘We can make tea. If there’s bread, perhaps we can have toast. He’s got a toasting fork in the fireplace.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, blowing his nose. ‘Thank you.’
Poor little devil. I was sorry for Rabbit. I wanted to help, as long as doing so wouldn’t inconvenience me too much. The question is: did trying to help make matters worse?
It was starting to rain. In order to get back to the Sacrist’s Lodging as swiftly as possible, I took us back through the Cathedral, which was not only shorter than going through the College or through the town but also, at that time of day, lessened the chance that we should meet anyone who knew either of us.
My suggestion wasn’t entirely altruistic: if a boy from King’s was found outside the College without his cap, it automatically earned him a beating. It was possible that the rule did not apply in the holidays, but I didn’t want to put it to the test. Besides, I was starving, Mrs Veal’s lunch a distant memory, and the idea of food was powerfully attractive.
Most people in the College used the Cathedral for shortcuts, and so did many townspeople. There were three doors open to the public – the west door under the great tower, the south door, which led through the ruins of the cloisters to the College, and the north door, from which a path led both to the High Street and to the Sacrist’s Lodging. Using the Cathedral also meant you kept dry. It was considered bad form to hurry, however.
We walked through the porch and pushed open the wicket in the west doors. It was dark, much darker, inside the Cathedral than it was outside. The lamps had not yet been lit, apart from one or two at the east end, beyond the choir screen.
The emptiness of the place enfolded us like a shroud. The air was cold and smelled faintly of earth, incense and candles.
Ahead and to the left, in the north aisle, was one of the great stoves, each surmounted by a black crown, that were supposed to keep the building warm. There was a faint but clearly audible chink as the coke shifted in its iron belly.
‘I’m freezing,’ Faraday said.
He walked over to the stove and held his hands to it.
‘Hurry up,’ I said. ‘I’m starving.’
‘Just a minute. I’m so cold.’
I joined him by the stove. If you stood about three inches away from it, you could actually feel the warmth of it on your skin. It wasn’t so much that the stoves weren’t occasionally hot: it was more that the Cathedral was eternally cold.
Faraday glanced at me. ‘There’s blood on your hands,’ he said. ‘And on your sleeve.’ His voice lurched into a croak. ‘It’s everywhere.’
‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter. I can wash it off. What’s water for?’
I turned my head to avoid seeing his white face and rabbit teeth. My eyes drifted away. It’s a funny thing about buildings, how they take control of you and guide your eyes along their own lines, towards their own ends. In the Cathedral, the rhythm of columns and arches, diminishing in height as the layers climbed to the roof, made you look upwards and upwards. Towards heaven, the school chaplain once told us in a sermon. Or to the roof. Not that it matters in this case: the point is I looked up into the west tower.
Its west wall rises sheer, a cliff of stone pierced with openings: first the doors, then a great window which doesn’t let in much light because of the stained glass. Then, higher still, bands of Norman arcading line the inside of the tower. The first set has a walkway that runs behind it. The next one, further up, is blind, its arches and pillars flattened against the tower wall behind. Above that still, 120 feet above the ground, is the painted tower ceiling, above which the tower rises, higher and higher, stage by stage, to the lantern that perches on top.
Sometimes one of the younger masters would take a party of boys up to the top as a treat. You went up a spiral staircase in the south-west corner, crossed the width of the tower by the walkway behind the lower arcade, climbed another set of stairs, and then another, until your legs felt twice as heavy as usual. Finally, you came to a wooden door that led on to the leads, more than two hundred feet from the ground.
Up there was another world, full of light, where a wind was always blowing. You felt weightless, as if floating in a balloon. Far below were the streets of the town and tiny, foreshortened people scurrying through the maze of their lives, oblivious of the watchers above. Beyond the town stretched the Fens