Page 30 of The Secret Word (Twist Upon a Regency Tale #10)

T he explosion of anger, when it happened, was from an unlikely source.

Tom Fuller was caught beating up Martin White, the older of the two boys Mrs. Westbridge had rescued from the orphanage.

While Partridge had dealt with fighting between the boys by organizing boxing lessons and imposing the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules, this was not sanctioned and it was not fighting.

White was down and begging for mercy, but Fuller was continuing to hit him.

“I’m heartbroken,” Partridge told Chris and Clem. “I would never have taken him for a bully.”

“We shall have to let him go,” Chris said. “We cannot allow such brutality.”

“What does Mr. Fuller have to say for himself?” Clem asked, but apparently, Fuller would not defend himself, nor speak on his own behalf in any way.

White, too, was tight-lipped, though that might have been because speaking hurt.

He was in the infirmary, with a broken arm, possibly cracked ribs, eyes that were swollen shut, a missing tooth, and multiple bruises.

“Besides,” Partridge said, “nothing can excuse such a total lack of control.”

Clem frowned thoughtfully. She like Andrew Partridge, very much. But she had heard enough from Chris about the conditions that boys abandoned to the streets faced that she could imagine circumstances in which the anger and grief of years of abuse might break out. “Explode,” as Chris put it.

“You predicted this,” she said to Chris. “Not from Tom Fuller, perhaps. But he has wounds, even if he has learned to hide them. They all do, you said. All our street boys. I think we need to know what set him off, if we are to be just.”

Chris couldn’t argue with Clem’s wisdom.

So each of the adults spoke to two or three boys, dividing them up.

The other boys claimed ignorance, even those who had witnessed what had begun as a fight.

The one clue that someone let drop to Mrs. Westbridge was that Martin had been teasing Arthur.

“Just pokes and words, like,” said the informant.

“And tricks, like. Tripping him. Pushing his cocoa over. Not stuff to get him half-killed.”

“Perhaps not half-killed,” Mrs. Westbridge told the other adults when they gathered to compare notes, “but certainly bad enough to see Mr. White on kitchen duty for months, if not expelled. But why did Mr. Fuller not come to one of us?”

It was a good question, but one to which they could not find an answer, until Clem thought of a possible way to break Arthur Stone’s silence. She took him out with her to the garden, to the berry cage, where the autumn-flowering raspberries needed daily picking.

He had come out of his shell a little in the two months he’d been with them, but—now she came to think of it—she’d noticed a withdrawal in recent days, and now he was as white and as silent as he’d been when he arrived.

“These are the ripe raspberries,” she explained. “To check, put your fingers gently around one that you think is ready, and tug without squeezing. If it falls off in your hand, it is ready.”

The strained look around his eyes eased as he experimented, soon discovering the knack of it.

“Try one,” she invited. “They’re good!” And she had the satisfaction of seeing his eyes open with wonder and a small smile that vanished almost immediately.

“Good?” she asked.

His nod in reply was vigorous.

“You may eat one raspberry for every ten you put in the pail, Mr. Stone,” she said.

For a while, they worked in silence, filling their pails. Arthur relaxed even more, and Clem wished she did not have to break the peace, which was doing the poor boy good. But they had to resolve this situation somehow, and Arthur was the key.

“Mr. Fuller will not tell us what made him so angry at Mr. White,” she commented, keeping her tone conversational. “Unless we discover he had a good reason, we will have to send him away from the school, but he will not tell us, and neither will Mr. White.”

Arthur said nothing, but he stiffened, and his hands stopped picking berries.

“I know that Mr. White was being mean to you. Bullying you. One of the other boys told Mrs. Westbridge. What I do not know is why you or Mr. Fuller did not tell one of the adults. Did you not know we do not allow bullying at Maidenstone Court?”

More silence.

Clem sighed. “You will miss Mr. Fuller when he is gone,” she commented.

The boy sucked in a breath that was a series of gulps.

“They said you’d throw me out if you knew,” he said, his voice anguished.

“Tom said it, and so did Martin. They said you wouldn’t have the likes of me with the other boys.

” The next sentence was whispered. “Martin said you’d send me back to that place. ”

Clem cautiously touched Arthur’s shoulder.

He was usually wary of being touched, but this time he threw himself on her to weep against her chest. “Martin called me a Molly boy. He said he would tell you all if I didn’t—” he whispered the next bit, describing an obscene act that Martin had demanded in vulgar terms that Clem, even now she was married, only partially understood.

“I don’t want to do that ,” he wailed. “I don’t want to do it ever again. When I told Tom, he said he was going to kill Martin. Mrs. S. Don’t send me back to the place. Please, don’t.”

“Never.” Clem made it a solemn oath. She had both hands wrapped around Arthur, holding him safe, patting his back.

“Arthur, Martin was wrong. We will not send you away. Chris guessed weeks ago, when you first came. He knows what evil people can do to boys who have no family or friends to protect them. Even if he hadn’t known, we would not blame you.

None of what happened to you was your fault, Arthur, and we are never sending you back. ”

She repeated the message in different words over and over, patting Arthur’s back, until the boy’s noisy and relieved crying reduced to a few gulps.

“Come,” Clem said then. “We shall go and speak to Mr. S. and then he shall talk to Mr. P.

“Will they hate me?” Arthur asked, in a very small voice. “Do the other boys need to know?”

Clem tousled his hair. “No and no,” she said. “You shall see. All shall be well.”

It was, too. Chris reassured Arthur, asked him to promise to let him or Clem know if he suffered any further bullying, and telling him that matters would be arranged with Partridge.

The head teacher was so distressed he had not noticed things getting out of hand that he offered his resignation, which Chris refused. “We all missed it. We shall all have to do better.”

Mrs. Westbridge also had to be reassured. “I begged you to bring the White boys here. And Martin did this? How wicked! How terrible! How will you ever trust me again?”

Which left the two boys at the center of the disaster.

The adults agreed that they didn’t want to lose either of them, but they needed to know that Martin knew what a terrible thing he had done and was truly sorry, and that Tom could be trusted to find healthier and safer ways to deal with his anger.

If this was the worst that could happen, it was not so bad.

Chris spoke to Martin White, and Partridge to Tom Fuller. They laid out the facts as they now knew them, then told each boy what he had done wrong.

Then, as they had agreed, they proposed that each boy decide who they had hurt by their actions and how to make recompense.

“Martin was a victim, too,” Chris reported to Clem.

“Until Mrs. Westbridge came to work at the workhouse, one of the night watchmen was an abuser. Mrs. Westbridge made sure he was fired, and warned Martin never to tell anyone what he had done. She was afraid that the self-righteous supervisor would blame Martin. As for the bullying, he saw it as toughening up. That was what the supervisor told the older boys—that they had to toughen up the younger ones, for it was a cruel world, and a person had to be hard to survive.”

“You have explained the error of his ways, I hope,” Clem said. She was still furious on Arthur’s behalf.

“I’ve suggested to him that Arthur is one of the toughest people he’ll ever know, surviving what he’s been through, running away and finding Fuller, surviving Martin White. White agrees. I’ll be interested in seeing what he comes up with by way of recompense.”

Tom Fuller was the first to present his plan.

“I am truly sorry I did not come to one of you as soon as I knew what Martin was saying and doing. I should have known you would not send Arthur away. I have hurt everyone here,” he said.

“Mr. and Mrs. S. first, because the school was their idea, and everyone thought it would not work.”

He addressed Clem directly. “Mrs. S., I heard you say you wanted to put in a rose garden, and the gardeners haven’t had time to dig the soil over, get out all the weeds, and add sand and stable manure.

I would like to do that for you. If it is acceptable to you, Mr. S. , can that be my payment to you, too?”

“Mr. Fuller, that is a huge amount of work,” Clem said. Fuller was wiry and strong, but not very big.

“I can do it,” he insisted. “I would like to do it.” He grinned somewhat sheepishly. “And if I get blisters, perhaps they will remind me to make better choices.”

“Mr. P. and Mrs. W., I thought maybe I could clean out your fireplaces for a week. In your bed chambers and in your parlors. You have both been very good to me, and I should have trusted you.”

He frowned. “I have already spoken to Arthur and apologized for giving him bad advice. So there is just Martin. I… To tell you the truth, I am still pretty mad at him.”

“What Mr. White did was wrong,” Mrs. Westbridge said.

“He must make his own recompense, and would have needed to do so, even if you have left us to apply justice. But you broke his arm, cracked a couple of ribs, and knocked out a tooth. You kept hitting him after he could no longer fight. You need to make that right, Mr. Fuller.”

“I could help him with his geometry,” Fuller suggested. “He is not very good at it, and he is falling behind, being in the infirmary. Would that do?”

“Ask Mr. White if that is acceptable to him,” Clem suggested, hoping that, if the boys would only talk, they would find they had more in common than what divided them.

And so it proved. Fuller was nearly at the top of those to whom White wanted to make recompense, with only Arthur ahead of him.

And he had come up with a surprising way of making things even.

“I will tell Tom and Arthur what happened to me in the orphanage, and then they will know I am just the same as Arthur. If they ever want to hurt me, they can.”

As far as recompense to the staff was concerned, he was still bedridden, but he said that would not stop him from peeling vegetables if someone would bring them to him.

“And if you like, I can do the reading,” he suggested.

Mrs. Westbridge had formed the habit of reading a chapter from a story book every night, and the boys really looked forward to it.

Since Martin had a dramatist’s flair when reading, the suggestion was popular with everyone.

Peace was restored, or as much peace as could be expected when living next door to a school of fifteen boys.