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14th April, 1846
Look long into the eyes of a Samdhya, he said, and you shall change. I looked long. I looked deep. Blossom fell from the tree, yet I did not notice. Already, I sense myself changing.
— From the diary of Margaret Ravenswood,
daughter of the Reverend Laurence
Ravenswood, Rector of Haughley
White Quad bell rang out into the mid-morning air, and Tom Swinton slumped down onto a wooden bench underneath a statue of his school’s founder. In front of him, a lone figure moved across the well-tended lawn, picking up and bagging detritus from last night’s Summer Ball. Tom was still wearing his dinner jacket, his bow-tie poking out of his pocket, his top shirt buttons undone.
He closed his eyes.
The party had continued into the early hours, and he’d fallen asleep on someone’s study floor, wrapped in a duvet. Sunlight had woken him at dawn. His friends were snoring gently, sprawled on their beds or on rugs. He’d gone to walk in the woods, which he always liked to do, taking with him a cold can from a vending machine.
He wanted to be alone among the trees. He hadn’t wanted to say goodbye to anyone. He’d wandered around the grounds for hours, making the fizzy drink last, waiting until he was sure all the cars, with their loads of schoolbooks and sports clothes and teenage boys, had gone.
Now, sinking back, the hard slats of the bench pressing into him, he counted the tolls of the bells.
8, 9, 10 …
It was almost eleven o’clock, and at some point he would have to properly face the fact that he was the only pupil left in the whole school, for the entire summer holidays.
A cough made him look up. A boy he didn’t recognise was standing on the gravel path in front of him. Almost eight hundred boys attended the school. Tom, being in the lower sixth form, did not come across many of the younger ones; but he knew most of them by sight. There was something distinctive about this one, though, and Tom wondered why he hadn’t noticed him around. He would have remembered him.
Tom couldn’t tell how old the boy was. He was very pale, with short black hair oddly combed so that it lay almost flat to his skull, and a snub nose. He looked like he might be in one of the junior forms, but a challenge in his eyes suggested otherwise.
Big fawn’s eyes and long trembling lashes. His uniform didn’t quite fit him, the purple jacket with its absurd gold stripes hanging off his shoulders; his tie in the school colours, green and grey, done up askew.
The badge on his blazer was odd. Instead of the school crest it showed a small square inside another square and another one inside that.
The boy was holding something to his chest, arms tightly across it. Tom wasn’t in the mood to be disturbed and savagely dragged a hand through his long blond hair, letting it fall across his eyes before blowing it away in displeasure. ‘Shouldn’t you have left?’ he snapped. ‘Everyone else has.’
The boy didn’t reply. Instead, he uncrossed his arms and offered up what was in his hands.
At first Tom ignored him. But there was a tightness in the boy’s shoulders. An insistence.
Tom took it carefully.
It was a letter. A heavy cream envelope of a type Tom hadn’t seen for years. The address was written in spidery ink. ‘Where did you get this?’ Tom straightened. ‘Did you take it from my pidge?’ The boy didn’t answer.
It was clearly addressed to him:
Master Thos. Swinton Downshire College There was no postcode, no county.
The boy shifted slightly, as if expecting something. Tom continued to stare at the letter. There was a silence around him; everything seemed so still, and he could hear no birds.
Even the litter-picker seemed to have paused, deep in thought, and a cloud hung partway over the sun.
Thos? What did that mean? Nobody had ever called him Thos.
He turned the heavy letter over and was surprised to see that it was sealed with scarlet wax, which bore the imprint of a heraldic animal like a leopard’s head. He didn’t want to break the seal, but after a second’s thought, he slid his finger under it and opened the letter, leaving the body of the wax intact.
There was a single piece of thick card inside and two other small bits of orange card which fluttered out. Tom caught them without giving them a glance.
The writing was hard to decipher, flowery and scratchy, with flourishes in unexpected places. Somebody had spent a long time writing this letter. The boy, standing patiently in front of him, scratched his nose. Tom struggled to make out the writing.
