afraid.
Percy ignored him, and the Clavigers hastily and willingly obeyed the order.
‘Now put the chests well back, away back at that wall where the rats are,’ Percy commanded firmly. ‘We’ll need time to think. I want to think about this.’
‘But the rats might eat the money,’ Skinny objected. ‘It’s only paper after all.’
‘Some paper!’ chuckled Savage.
‘They’d have to eat their way through all those dresses and things first,’ Specky commented, shrugging.
‘And we’ll be back before then!’ Savage cried. He showed off his good young teeth like an animal showing its fangs as he leered in triumph at Frank Garson. ‘Lovely lolly! All the lolly in the world there! And we’ll be back!’
‘Yes, we’ll be back,’ Percy admitted.
He felt a vague but none the less substantial right to the money. Even though he hadn’t found it himself it had been found in his father’s territory and he was his father’s heir. Indeed, it had been his territory too. Many a Sunday he had been sent down to the cellar to look after the boilers in the days when the school was still heated by steam pipes. Many a Saturday he had spent sweeping it out and making it tidy before it became a neglected dump. It was merely accidental that someone else had found what was in those tea-chests. But the right didn’t lie solely in the finding, it lay just as much in claim to the place. This cellar was his. He wondered where the money came from, but passed on at once. He had met somewhere in his grasshopper reading the remark that science consists in asking the right questions. That meant there were questions it was stupid to ask. For example, where this money came from. There was no answer. Why ask a question that couldn’t be answered? The right question was what to do with it. But first he must frighten the Brotherhood into obedience.
‘Gather round!’ he yelled in his Regent’s voice, and sat again in Miss Elginbrod’s broken-backed chair.
‘This is a very serious matter,’ he declared. ‘There’ll have to be a solemn vow of secrecy. Yous have all got to swear not to say a word about it to anybody and take a blood oath.’
‘That’s the idea! Great!’ Savage cried and rubbed his hands together and gloated.
Percy felt the glow of inspiration. It came to him sometimes when he was instructing the Brotherhood, a warm feeling round his brow and a tingling in his scalp, and he wished it would come oftener, it was so mysterious and thrilling. He took a safety-razor blade from his trouser- pocket, a blade he carried in a metal holder, and lightly and bravely he cut the ball of his thumb.
‘Kneel before me one by one,’ he commanded. ‘And repeat after me.’
They came to him in single file and he bent and dabbed the blood from his thumb on their forehead.
‘I promise not to tell,’ he incanted.
‘I promise not to tell,’ they repeated after him.
They waited in groups round the cellar after the oath had been taken, and then Percy told them they were all to come to a special meeting at eight o’clock the next evening, and they wouldn’t lose by it. They left the cellar by the chute and scattered silently from Tulip Place. Percy ushered them out one by one and locked the door when they were all gone. He stayed there for a moment before hurrying down the chute and running over to the wall where the rats were supposed to be. He had never seen a rat there in his life. He dragged out one of the chests and whipped away the rubbishy garments above the money.
Some of the notes were dirty, and some were fairly clean; some were creased and some had never been folded. He took a long time just looking at them, flipping them over and flipping them over but keeping each bundle in its elastic band. He noticed they were all from the same bank, but the numbers were all mixed up. It would be safe to pass them. He tried to work out just how much was there. If he counted what was in one chest and multiplied by three he might get a rough idea of the total. But Frank Garson was right. He couldn’t count what was in one chest. He kept on losing the place. He would need a bit of paper to write on and keep the score. He attacked the bundle of fivers and tried to do it by short methods: twenty in each bundle was a hundred and ten bundles were a thousand. But when he came to count fifteen, sixteen and seventeen bundles he wasn’t sure if seventeen meant the bundle he had just counted or the one he was just going to count. He gave in and gave it up. He knelt over the chest, his arms thrown across it and his head on his arms, and he wept.
He could have coped with buried Inca treasure and found delight in a sunken galleon or a pirate hoard. He could have revelled in plundering an Egyptian tomb and taken the jewels of Ophir in his stride. Gold in Arizona or diamonds from Africa would have been a thrill within his range. But so much ready wealth in the commonplace form of pound notes and five-pound notes frightened him. It was too stark, too simple, too easy. He knew it was too much as well, but it was his. Not for a moment did he think otherwise, even as tears rolled down his cheeks where a fine floss still waited its first shearing.
‘Oh, God help me!’ he moaned. ‘Please, God! Help me!’
CHAPTER FOUR
The special meeting was a nervous, frightened affair. Even Savage was slightly scared. Percy spoke so long and so mournfully on the dangers and responsibilities of their position, his brooding eyes seeming to see right into their trembling souls, that he gave them all the jitters. At one point they would mostly have settled gladly for five bob if that would let them out of it, but then he spoke of the freedom before them if they were obedient and faithful, and they saw a lifetime of happiness ahead.
‘Now, to avoid any suspicion and to make sure yous are not found out,’ he said, ‘I’m only going to allow yous a little at a time, and yous’ll get it only for a particular purpose, something you want right away, and you’ll tell me what it is, otherwise you won’t get it, so that nobody’ll ever find you with a lot of money on you. Now, I can’t always be watching yous, and there’s three of you got a key to the side door and any of yous could slip down through the basement during school hours if you were willing to take the risk of being caught by the janitor, so we’ll make a gentlemen’s agreement to do it my way and never go behind my back to take any of it on your own.’
He explained a gentlemen’s agreement to them, and to begin with he limited them to the silver. It kept them from buying anything big enough to arouse comment from the gossips at the close-mouth in the tenements round about, and it kept the younger members happy enough. A couple of half-crowns was wealth to them. But he knew he was only postponing the problem of what to do about the folding money. He heard a murmuring against him in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood. Skinny supported him, but Savage was niggling and Specky was slippery.
‘Ah, but look,’ Skinny argued when Savage wanted to remove the paper money in handfuls, ‘we made a gentlemen’s agreement. You can’t break a gentlemen’s agreement, that’s the whole point about a gentlemen’s agreement, you can’t break it, that’s why Percy made us make it. Percy’s right, you know, Percy’s shrewd.’
‘To hell with Percy!’ Savage spat.
‘You’d only spoil everything any other way,’ said Specky. ‘I hate to admit it, but you’ve got to. But what he ought to do is give us more or put one of the chests aside for us and nobody else.’
‘Gentlemen’s agreement!’ cried Savage. ‘Where’s the gentlemen? Him, he’s only a janny’s son. Mind you, my old man’s a gentleman all right, he hasn’t worked for fifteen year. Us three could empty those chests in a week. We could stash it somewhere else. We’re the only ones with a key, we could slip in any time at all. Nobody would know.’
‘Percy would know,’ Specky pointed out so quickly that Savage saw he had thought of it himself already. ‘Then the rest of them would get to know and they’d start coming in through the door in the basement.’
‘And if you make it a free-for-all you’ll only get us all caught,’ Skinny complained. ‘Somebody would clype. I bet you wee Garry would go to the