Ribblestrop by Andy Mulligan
“Look,” said Ruskin. “That’s the viaduct near the school! There’s the train!”
Mr. Sanchez was pilot and was yelling into his headset. Andreas Sanchez was trying to navigate—map on his knee, nose pressed to the glass.
“Okay, okay,” shouted Mr. Sanchez. “I think we nearly there!”
“Look!” yelled Ruskin.
Millie and Sam looked.
“That’s the road from the station, I think. Yes—look, we turn right there, by the garage. Now, can you see that wall? That’s our wall, that goes right up to the gatehouse—there’s the gatehouse!”
Mr. Sanchez came in low, and Sam caught his first glimpse of real Ribblestrop territory. A high stone wall and behind that mountains of spinachlike hedging, with a driveway through.
“Fly up the driveway, fly up the drive!” yelled Ruskin.
Mr. Sanchez was enjoying himself as much as the children. The helicopter banked sickeningly and paused in the air. It dipped and it felt they were skimming the ground.
The driveway was long and turned slowly to the right into open parkland. It passed a vast, glimmering lake.
“There’s Neptune!” shouted Ruskin. A huge white statue lay reclining on the bank, its feet in water, its noble face staring ahead.
“There’s a donkey!” shouted Sam.
And yes, sure enough, a donkey was staring at them, deeply unimpressed by what it saw.
They were past it in a moment and Sam could contain his excitement no longer. He simply screamed the word “Yes! Yes!” repeatedly—for there, rising up from neatly cropped lawns, was the building from the photograph. The sun was low and softened the ramparts by turning honey-colored stone into gold. The school was a perfect square, half castle, half mansion; it had battlements and a giant set of timber doors above steps, statues, and a courtyard with a dramatic fountain. Four towers, one higher than all the rest, rose from each of the building’s corners. And, emerging like a spear from the delicate cone that surmounted that tallest tower, a flag fluttering in black and gold. True, the central section of the house was little more than black ash—and one tower was collapsing where the walls buckled—but Sam was able to ignore such blemishes. The school would be rebuilt, and he would help. He saw everything through watering eyes: the school crest stretching out proudly in the wind . . . the lion and the lamb on a cloth of gold.
“My school,” whispered Sam.
Chapter Five
“Headmaster.”
“Yes, Lady Vyner.”
“I think it’s time to be frank.”
“Certainly.”
“I think we’ve wasted enough time. I think it’s time we settled our accounts. The debt, Headmaster—your debts to me—are now running at such an intolerable level—”
“Well, in fairness, Lady Vyner—”
“Don’t interrupt me!” Lady Vyner snarled, and her spectacles flashed. She licked away the spit from her lips and proceeded. “You owe me a hundred thousand pounds, give or take. This debt has been run up through massive mismanagement. You still seem determined to call this crackpot venture ‘your school,’ though nobody else considers it to be one. You sit here waiting for the term to start—look at you. You wear a headmaster’s gown, you carry a register! You should be packing your bags, man! You should be turning any asset you possess into cash. You should be on your bended knee uttering only . . .”
“Tell him, Gran!”
“Apologies! Cash is what we need. Cash is what we want. And we want it now!”
“But have you read my development plan, Lady Vyner?”
Lady Vyner was a thin, wasted-looking woman, with gray skin. She leaned forward now, her bony fists resting clenched on the coffee table. Lord Caspar, her grandson and heir to the estate, sat on a hard chair beside her. His hands gripped an old flintlock pistol, which he was aiming squarely at the headmaster’s face. The two Vyners shared curiously ratlike features, with disconcertingly large, pale eyes. They were perched with their guest—Dr. Norcross-Webb, headmaster of Ribblestrop—at the top of the south tower, which was the highest of the four. A grubby tea set sat between them, the weak tea filmed with the dust that constantly dropped from the broken ceiling. The room was a musty junkyard of the Vyners’ salvaged antiques, and the sofa and chairs formed a little island in a wild sea of dressers, cabinets, and tables, all of which had been piled high with clutter. There were pots, pans, statues, dismembered suits of armor, and broken-framed paintings. There was a chandelier that had pulled down half the plaster, and there were bundles of clothes even the rats had rejected. Presiding over all of this was the loneliest, shabbiest antique of all: Lady Vyner.
*
Unfortunately for all concerned, Lady Vyner still owned Ribblestrop Towers—on paper at least. The noble seat had been home to her family since William the Conqueror stole it from somebody, and she was clinging to it with nicotine-stained fingernails. This room was all she had left of a home that must, once upon a time, have been quite splendid. Over the centuries, famous people had worked on both grounds and buildings. Two hundred men had dug the lake. Another two hundred had built railway lines to quarry the stone; grottoes, temples, and follies had been added. The south tower had been extended upward, with gargoyles carved under mock battlements. It had once been a gorgeous place to live, and Lady Vyner had been born there—delivered squealing onto an eiderdown, which she still slept under today. She had danced with two prime ministers, including Mr. Winston Churchill, who had planned a small part of World War Two in an underground bunker specially built by the war office. Legend had it that the tunnels beneath Ribblestrop connected these bunkers to Whitehall in London. Legend also said that there had once been a train that ferried Cyril Vyner (her husband) and his wartime cronies backward and forward, and that plans of national importance had been incubated deep in the vaults.
All that was in the past. Lady Vyner had vowed never to sell her home unless, she said, “the family honor is at stake.” Fifteen years ago, soon after her husband’s death, the family honor had been very much at stake. The estate had been losing money. Lady Vyner had filled her white Rolls-Royce with the last few decent antiques she could find, intending to sell them. Drunk on champagne, she’d got lost in Knightsbridge. Doing a three-point turn outside Harrods, her foot slipped off the brake and she reversed the car straight through a plate-glass window. When the police looked hard at her load, they found that many of the antiques had been pilfered during the Second World War—nothing to do with Mr. Churchill, but something very much to do with Lord Vyner and his trips across France and Germany. When the police get their teeth into that sort of scandal, they chew you to pieces—so Lady Vyner decided to sell.
“It’s bricks and mortar,” she said. “Nothing stays the same, we’ll put it on the market. Let the bidding begin!”
“I’m not sure it will be so easy,” said Mr. Cromby, of Cromby and Cromby, London agent to the Vyner family since seventeen-something. “It won’t be easy in the current climate.”
It wasn’t easy. Nobody bought it.
People were interested, of course. They came piling up the drive to inspect. But the problem was Lady Vyner herself, who insisted she be allowed to keep rooms in the south tower on a complex lease agreement. Most buyers turned around quickly, especially as the vast majority were developers, who wanted to subdivide every cupboard into retirement flats. The price went down and down until eventually, five years prior to the present, it was bought by a donkey sanctuary. For a little while, it was successful and many donkeys enjoyed the happiest years of their lives at Ribblestrop. But the donkey people gathered debts. They tried to diversify, and leased the west wing to St. Frideswide’s Brethren-of-the-Lost, a tiny band of monks that dedicated themselves to prayer and fasting.
But the coffers were low and cracks were appearing in the courtyards. Bits of tower would occasionally plummet to the ground and the gardens were turning to jungle. The donkey staff didn’t get paid; the donkeys themselves got thinner. The monks mo
It was at exactly this time that Dr. Norcross-Webb came on the scene.
He had cut a controversial figure in the world of education, pioneering the idea that children learned best away from the desk. He ran a small school in Suffolk, and it was—it has to be said—getting smaller under his guidance. He had said, at a packed parents’ meeting, that children learned best underwater. It was a chance remark based on an experiment he’d conducted on his own son in the family bathroom, but it was used against him and provoked a vote of no confidence. The next morning, his wife left him, taking his son with her, and he was dismissed.
“One cannot plan for triumph or disaster,” he said, at a press conference on Reading station, attended by a single reporter who’d stopped by for a sandwich. Dr. Norcross-Webb was on his way to the West Country, to see an elderly aunt, and his plans had been forming all morning. “In a way,” he said, “this is what I have always wanted. The opportunity’s arrived and I am going to start my own school. Education in this country is about to change.”
News was slow that week in The Reading Advertiser, and the journalist managed five hundred words of cheery optimism. Sacked head says revolutionary new school opening soon! ran the headline and, though Dr. Norcross-Webb had only got as far as designing the blazers, the newspaper gave the impression that the school already had a waiting list. How fortunate, then, that in the Station Hotel opposite, a certain South American businessman was—that very evening—taking delivery of a large stash of banknotes. How extraordinary that he was planning to confuse the X-ray machines of the local airport by wrapping his bundles of fifties in a newspaper he’d taken from the hotel bar. Mr. Sanchez saw the headline and the beaming face of the headmaster. The very next day, at an exclusive wine bar known as Benders, a deal was done and a suitcase full of money changed hands. Mr. Sanchez had decided not to smuggle the cash out of the country, but to invest it in concealing his recently injured son.
“To get to me, they take him. You see? Andreas, show this man.”
Dr. Norcross-Webb peered sympathetically at the boy’s foot, swathed in bandages.
“You see what they do? To a child, uh? To a child! Start your school, Headmaster. Keep Andreas safe for me.”
“Now?” said the doctor. “Right away?”
“His mother is dead.” The man had tears in his eyes. “The shock, you understand? It was all too much, and now I want him safe!”
“I’m actually looking for premises at the moment. We’ve narrowed it down, but—”
“Look hard, Doctor. Look fast. You need a down payment, yes? How much?”
Dr. Norcross-Webb visited Ribblestrop Towers on Tuesday morning. He put in his offer just before lunch and paid cash half an hour later. A one-year lease, renewable. Ribblestrop Towers, with its guest in the south tower, was his.
*
“There are new pupils on their way, Lady Vyner—they’re all listed in that document. The future is looking good and the money will be flooding in very soon.”
Little Caspar pulled the flint of his pistol back on its wheel. “If this was loaded,” he whispered, “I could blind you.”
“Hush, darling. Let the man do the one thing he’s good at: let him talk.”
“We have a new PE teacher,” he said. He was trying to smile rather than flinch, acutely aware of the child leaning toward him and the dead, fishlike eyes of his landlady. He watched as Lady Vyner picked up the document and put her long gray nose over it. “Captain Routon’s ex-army,” he continued. “He does PE—and a bit of building . . . he’s the one who helped me build the science lab. And Professor Worthington—page two—she’s to be our Scientist in Residence, starts in a day or two. Henry’s back—that’s the boy who broke the fountain. And the exciting news is we’ve struck a deal with an orphanage in the Himalayas, where I used to go climbing. I’m expecting a number of customers from there.”
“Orphans again? Like the little boy you lost?”
“Well, Tomaz wasn’t technically an orphan, and I’m ninety-nine percent certain he went home to an uncle. The boys arriving today are escaping lives of poverty and misery. You see, a school is a living thing: it grows from a seed. The seed has to be watered, and—”
“Throw him out, Gran! Let me call Crippen!”
“Coeducation,” said Lady Vyner. She had balanced a thick pair of spectacles on her nose and had found a paragraph on the third page. “Wait a moment, Caspar, this is interesting. I was always under the impression that this was a boys’ school—that’s what’s in the lease, of course. Which expires, very soon, you know.”
“Only the one girl at the moment, sadly, but a very interesting character.”
“Psychopath or arsonist?”
“I won’t deny she’s had a few difficulties. But, I like to think my school offers every child a new start. We take the children other schools reject—”
“How attractive you make it sound.”
“We take the children some schools give up on.”
“You take the rubbish the good schools discard. And it sounds like you’re now mixing it up with the detritus of the Third World. These are the folk you want my grandson to meet as your miserable seed . . . uncoils. You burn down half my home; you lose a boy—whose body might be buried out in the grounds for all we know—and you bribe the police to stay out of jail— What the devil’s that noise?”
“Lady Vyner, those are serious allegations—”
“Crippen! What is that noise?”
The air all around the tower was filled by a hard, metallic throbbing. It seemed to hammer on the roof and, sure enough, a brick-sized lump of plaster crashed from above, smashing an ugly chord from the piano it struck. The headmaster ran to the window and heaved it open. “It’s a helicopter!” he cried. “It must be . . . Yes! It’s the Sanchez helicopter!”
“Crippen!” shouted Lady Vyner again, and her elderly servant who was snoozing outside was jerked awake. “That thing is not landing in my garden! I never gave permission for helicopters!”
“He’s coming down! Look at that, he’s circling—he’s got . . . Bless my soul! One, two, three . . . they’re here!”
The headmaster leaned out and waved frantically. Four boys he could count—they’d spotted him and were waving back, cheerfully. The craft was descending expertly, its tail upraised like a scorpion. You could see the grass shivering in the downdraught as Mr. Sanchez selected his spot.
“Perfect landing! What a pilot!”
The noise was deafening.
“Look here, Headmaster. Listen to me!” Lady Vyner pulled at the man’s gown, but Dr. Norcross-Webb couldn’t hear her. Four children scuttled from helicopter to steps, and he heaved himself back into the room, tears in his eyes.
“You must excuse me,” he said. “I must attend to my students.”
“Listen to me, Doctor!” She stood in the doorway, her fists clenched into tight little balls.
Caspar had the pistol ready, and the servant was in the doorway, covering his ears.
“Listen!” shrieked the old lady. “Your school is a failure because you are a failure. Give it up, while there’s dignity!”
“Please, Lady Vyner, I have to go . . .”
“The school was a mistake from first to last . . . Listen to me! Your children are noisy, without respect! Don’t you push Caspar, don’t you dare! Come back here!”
But Dr. Norcross-Webb was leaping, dizzying himself down the south tower’s spiral staircase, until he emerged, staggering, into the late sunshine. Four children stood on the terrace, their hair flowing in the gale from the helicopter as it rose again. They looked around them, taking in the grandeur of the parkland, the house, the dream that was Ribblestrop. And as they stared—what was that coming into view? A car—an expensive car, whistling down the drive. The doctor blinked hard and stared again: there were two cars, shiny and purposeful.
Sanchez came forward, disguising his limp as best he could, for a firm handshake.
“I know you,” said the headmaster, looking at Millie. “I know you from a newspaper cutting . . .”
“Millie Roads,” said Millie.
“Millie Roads—delighted. And there was me saying ‘boys’ when now at last I can say ‘boys and girls,’ ‘girls and boys,’ as I have dreamed of doing!”
Millie stared hard. Dr. Norcross-Webb failed to notice. He moved to the frailest member of the party.
“And you must be Sam—am I right?” The headmaster crouched in front of Sam, leveling their eyeline. “I know I am, your parents were kind enough to send a photograph along with your swimming certificate. Sam Arthur Tack . . .” The child’s hand appeared from his blazer sleeve and clasped the headmaster’s. “We’re building a dream here, Sam. Are you a dreamer or a builder? You need to be both: a school you’ll never want to leave. A home! A nation state! Now how did you manage to come down together? What planning, what foresight! Cool drinks inside, and then we’ll be meeting for supper. Will you allow me just to . . . to welcome the other new arrivals? This is such perfect timing!”
The first of the two cars had swung up to the steps. Every door opened and bodies seemed to fall out onto the gravel. But no, the bodies were up onto their feet in no time and a buzz and a birdsong filled the air around them. Everyone stood counting—eleven, twelve, thirteen—one child had skipped round the back, maybe it was twelve in total. Their black-and-gold uniforms were immaculate and they were putting on caps and lining up for inspection: they’d even formed up in order of height, the oldest being a skinny eleven or twelve, the youngest being no more than six. Under the caps dark, anxious eyes faced front and each had a satchel over their left shoulder.
“My orphans . . .” whispered the doctor. “As promised . . . as prayed for and promised.”