A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Thirty Seven: The Academy

Oxford, three months later:

The Academy on Headington hill was a large, red-brick building, shaggy with ivy and Virginia Creepers. The clock above the front door was swamped in this foliage – so much so that Danvers often forgot there was a clock, and started when he heard the chimes above him, making the ivy quiver. 

He didn't have an office. His office was wherever Jack happened to be – and Jack could get everywhere in the course of a day. He was forever surrounded by people, complaining or petitioning, jostling for his attention, scurrying to him with questions and away from him with a renewed sense of purpose. They orbited him like planets, and he gave instructions to them all, with the blend of boyish enthusiasm, crisp efficiency and abject misery that seemed to characterize all his actions these days.

Danvers's job was simply to follow in Jack's wake, trying to work out which of the numerous instructions he barked out were meant for him.

The Academy had been a charity school thirty years ago: a sanctuary for destitute girls. But then its entire complement of students had been wiped out in the cholera epidemic of the 1850s. According to local legend, you could still see ghostly figures in their school pinafores, playing hopscotch in the courtyards.

Still, it was a suitable home for the slave-girls, because it heightened the poignancy of their story – and my, didn't Jack sell the poignancy of their story! He had persuaded one of his friends at the Illustrated London News to write a piece on their situation. It presented them as wronged innocents – which Danvers would never have disputed that they were – but the kind of wronged innocents the public would approve of, and agree to send their money to.

A charity collection had followed the article and, with the proceeds, Jack had been able to buy the Academy, a place of refuge for the girls until suitable homes and situations could be found for them.

It had been a massive organizational undertaking. But fortunately, Jack had numerous contacts, limitless energy, and no particular desire to sleep.

There was something hysterical about it all. Oh, it wasn't that he didn't care for the slave-girls. He had conceived an affection for them that was almost masochistic, when you considered how cold and proud and violent they could be. You just got the feeling that he needed to be this busy, this recklessly optimistic – that, if he wasn't doing six different things at once, he would go insane.

It had been three months now since Miss Syal's death. Jack seemed to have got a hold of the anger, but he couldn't stop working. And every now and then, he would reach for the shackle at his wrist, as if he was half-consciously trying to squirm out of it, before he remembered that escape was impossible.

Today, Jack was in the Entrance Hall – a lovely, wood-panelled room, made shady and green by the ivy clustering over the windows. He was dictating a letter to Danvers, while Miss Ginniver tried to get his permission to marry her young gentleman, and Miss Carrie clanked and clattered her way through Für Elise at the piano.

Miss Carrie was one of the few girls whose irises, as well as her hair, had been bleached by the flames of the fire-mines. They were now an albino pink, and constantly watering, which made it quite hard for her to see. 

Fortunately, she had expressed an interest in music, which didn't require much vision, once you'd learned your way around the keyboard. Unfortunately, learning her way around the keyboard was proving to be more difficult than they had originally thought – although Danvers, who had a soft-spot for the slave-girls anyway, and more than a soft-spot for anyone who shared Elsie's disability of blindness – was willing to suppose the piano was simply out of tune.