He nodded. He was three steps from her, and he could smell her body. It was a strong smell, like nothing he’d quite breathed before, but she could have smelt like manure and it couldn’t have kept him from her now. He reached out and laid his fingers upon her breasts. She sighed. Then he put his face to her flesh and began to lick.
‘Will…’
‘He’s fine,’ said the man in the dusty black coat. ‘He’s just overcome with excitement. Why don’t you just leave him be and run off home?’
‘I won’t go without Will,’ Frannie said, sounding a good deal more confident than she felt.
‘He doesn’t need your help,’ the man replied, his tone scoured of threat. ‘He’s perfectly happy here.’ He looked down at Will. ‘He’s simply a little overwhelmed.’
Keeping her eye on the man, Frannie went down on her haunches beside Will and, reaching for him, shook him violently. He made a moan, and she chanced a quick look down at him. ‘Get up,’ she said. He looked very befuddled. ‘Up,’ she said.
The man in black had meanwhile settled back in his seat, and was shaking the contents of his hand out onto the table. Bright, burning fragments fluttered down. Will was already turning back in the man’s direction, though he was not yet standing upright.
‘Come back here,’ the man said to Will.
‘Don’t…’ Frannie said. The flames on the table were dying down, the room giving way to darkness. She was afraid as she was only afraid in dreams. ‘Sherwood!’ she yelled.
‘Sherwood!’
‘Don’t listen,’ the woman said, pressing Sherwood to her breast.
‘Sherwood!’
He couldn’t ignore his sister’s summons; not when it had such a measure of panic in it. He pulled away from Rosa’s hot skin, the sweat running down his face.
That’s Frannie,’ he said, pulling himself free of the woman. She was wearing, he saw, a strange expression – her panting mouth open, her eyes quivering. It unnerved him.
‘I have to go—’ he started to say, but she was plucking at her dress, as if to show him more.
‘I know what you want to see,’ she said.
He retreated from her, his hand thrown out behind him for support.
‘You want what’s under here,’ she said, pulling up her hem.
‘No,’ he said.
She smiled at him, and kept raising her skirt. Panicked, and confused by the stew of feelings that was bubbling up in him, he stumbled backwards, and his weight struck the table. It tipped. The book, the inks, the pens and, worst of all, the lamp went to the floor. There was a moment when it seemed the flame went out; but then it bloomed with fresh gusto, and the rubbish around the desk caught fire.
Mrs McGee dropped her skirts. ‘Jacob!’ she shrieked. ‘Oh Jesus Lord, Jacob!’
Sherwood had more reason to panic than she did, surrounded as he was by combustible materials. Even in his dazed state, he knew he had to get out quickly, or be numbered amongst them. The easiest route was the door by which he’d entered.
‘Jacob! Get in here, will you?’ Rosa was yelling, and without so much as glancing in Sherwood’s direction again, she left the chamber to find her companion.
The blaze was getting bigger by the moment, smoke and heat filling the chamber, driving Sherwood back. But as he turned to leave, his body trembling from the excesses of the last few minutes, he caught sight of the book, lying there on the ground.
He had no idea what it contained, but it felt like proof. He would have it when his schoolmates scoffed, to show them and say:
‘I was there. I did all I told you and more.’
Daring the flames, he ducked and snatched the book off the ground. It was a little singed, no more. Then he was away, back through the labyrinth of passages, towards his sister’s voice.
‘Sherwood!’
She and Will were at the Courtroom door.
‘I don’t want to go,’ Will growled, and tried to pull himself free of Frannie. But she was having none of it. She kept a bruising grip on his arm, all the while yelling her brother’s name.
Jacob, meanwhile, had risen from his place at the table, alarmed by the sound of conflagration, and now by the sight of Mrs McGee in a state of disarray, demanding that he come right now, right now.
He went with her, glancing back at Will once, and nodding such a tiny nod as if to say: go with her. This is not the moment. Then he was gone, away with Rosa, to put out the flames.
As soon as he was out of sight. Will felt a curious calm pass over him. There was no need to struggle with Frannie any more. He could simply go with her, out into the open air, knowing that there would be another time, a better time, when he and Jacob would be together. ‘I’m all right—’ he said to Frannie. ‘I don’t need anyone to hold me up.’
‘I’ve got to find Sherwood,’ she said.
‘Here!’ came a shout from the smoky darkness, and out he came, his face smeared with dirt and sweat.
There were no further words. They pelted down the passageway to the front door and out, past the pillars, and down the steps, into the cold grass. Only when they were past the hedge, out onto the track, did they halt for breath.
‘Don’t tell anybody what we saw in there, okay?’ Will gasped.
‘Why not?’ Frannie wanted to know.
‘Because you’ll spoil everything,’ Will replied.
‘They’re bad. Will—’
‘You don’t know anything about them.’
‘Neither do you.’
‘Yes, I do. I’ve met them before. They want me to go away with them.’
‘Is that true?’ Sherwood piped up.
‘Shut up, Sherwood,’ Frannie said. ‘We’re not going to talk about this any longer. It’s stupid. They’re bad and I know they’re bad.’ She turned to her brother. ‘Will can do whatever he likes,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop him. But you’re not coming here again, Sherwood, and neither am I.’ With that she picked up her bicycle and mounted, telling Sherwood to hurry up and do the same. Meekly, he obeyed.
‘So you won’t say anything?’ Will pleaded.
‘I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ Frannie replied in an infuriatingly snotty tone. ‘I’ll have to see.’ With that she and Sherwood pedalled off down the track.
‘If you do I’ll never speak to you again,’ Will shouted after her, only realizing when they were out of sight that this was a hollow threat from a man who’d just declared that he was leaving forever some day soon.
i
‘Is he dreaming?’ Adrianna asked Dr Koppelman one day in early spring, when her visit to sit at Will’s bedside coincided with the physician’s rounds.
It