It felt like he’d been hit with a brick, and for a moment he saw specks of silver floating before his eyes, and his ears rang.
‘That’s better,’ Yardley said, then sat down on William’s chest and clamped his head between his knees and pinched his nose so that he couldn’t breathe. He felt like a sack of potatoes, and William was sure that he would suffocate and die. His heart pounded and blood pulsed in his temples.
‘Open up, you little peasant,’ Yardley demanded, waving the brush in front of William’s face.
Still William refused. Yardley’s face swam and blurred before his eyes, but he decided he would rather die than surrender. But then, without even realising what he was doing, he gasped for breath, and straight away Yardley thrust the brush into his mouth and jerked it vigorously back and forth.
‘This is all you’re good for, Reynolds, eating a gentleman’s shit.’
William gagged, and when they let him go he turned over and vomited onto the floor, crying tears of rage and utter humiliation. And while he lay there, beaten and helpless, one by one the boys all took turns to kick his bare, pale arse.
CHAPTER 3
The Latin master at Oundle was Mister Norris. He was a thin man with a nose like a blade, and small grey eyes which he would fix on his pupils with a withering, contemptuous stare if they displeased him in the slightest. The boys were all afraid of him.
Norris disliked being a schoolmaster, and disliked his pupils even more. In his youth he had studied classics and philosophy at Oxford, and dreamt of becoming a great poet. In his final year, however, his father died owing a great deal of money. Norris found himself without the means that he’d imagined would always allow him to live comfortably without the necessity of having to work for an income. He became a school master instead of a poet, briefly convincing himself of the worthiness of teaching the classics to boys who reminded him of a younger version of himself. But a failed romance and disillusionment with school life made him bitter. Instead of seeking some other means of making a living, he became increasingly resentful at the change in his circumstances, and as he became older whatever redeeming qualities he might once have had became atrophied. He hated the world.
As the first year boys filed silently into his class he stood beside his desk and regarded them with a cold glare. They kept their eyes lowered and walked briskly, but without hurrying, to their allotted desks. The last of them closed the door behind him and joined the others waiting for permission to sit down. Norris looked over them, ready to pounce on any boy who had dared come to his lesson improperly attired. His gaze lingered on William, who stood with his crutch at his side. That wretch, he thought! That he should be forced to endure a village dolt studying Horace and Virgil. It was an insult.
‘Sit,’ he commanded.
The boys obeyed, but the scraping of chairs against the floor irritated Norris intensely and he scowled at Yardley, who, it seemed to Norris, made more noise than was necessary. It gave him a small measure of satisfaction that the boy visibly paled and averted his eyes.
Norris went to the chalkboard and wrote a line from Horace’s Odes. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori . He turned to the boys who were now sitting with their hands clasped on their desks, looking at what he’d written. They were like statues, none of them moving so much as a muscle in case he should pick them out.
‘Reynolds,’ he said, ‘be so kind as to translate the phrase to English.’
William stared at the words on the board and desperately attempted to make sense of them from the rudiments of Latin grammar he’d managed to learn during his first weeks at Oundle.
‘I am waiting,’ Norris prompted impatiently.
But the little William had learned, fled from his mind. The complexities of noun declensions, verb conjugations, and of ablatives of means