And sometimes Touch would make up stories of his own for us. As quiet and gentle as he was, he had a powerfully inventive imagination. The sea was full of not only pirates in his tales, but sea serpents and mermaids as well, and more than one sailor lost his heart to those golden-haired sirens, or his life to a beast that rose unexpectedly from the depths of the Caribbean. I marveled at the way he could make my mind see just what his mind saw. He was four months younger than I, yet he seemed to have absorbed so much more of the world’s magic. I wanted to see things the way he did—to have his imagination and his kindness—and at the same time I wanted to be like Carrot, too, who was so sure of himself, who never doubted that life would always treat him well.
In those first days, around Mr. Lincoln’s map-covered table, I discovered the world. He was consumed by maps—in fact, among ourselves we sometimes called him “Maps,” because he had so many and seemed to love them above all else. Meticulous, colorful, hand-drawn maps, printed maps, entire books of maps—the whole world laid out like an architect’s drawing, as if one could indeed know all the workings of the universe if one could only devour enough maps. Soon enough I came to notice drawings on those maps: a sea serpent peeking over the waves, a compass decorating a corner, even a schooner in full sail.
Carrot nodded toward the schooner. “Touch drew those,” he said.
I glanced at Mr. Lincoln for confirmation, and he smiled and nodded. “Our friend here has a rare talent,” he said.
I noticed then that Touch’s eyes were downcast, but he was grinning.
“You could be a mapmaker!” I said enthusiastically.
“He could, if he wanted,” Carrot said.
“Indeed,” Mr. Lincoln said. But Touch did not acknowledge their words, nor did he look up at us, and the smile had disappeared from his face. It would be months before I understood why their encouragement pained him so.
Though he never beat us, Mr. Lincoln could be a most difficult man, and he brooked no foolishness. I quickly learned, as the others already had, to see beneath the surface of his questions, understanding that the correct answer was never enough; it was always more important to knowwhyit was correct. He believed in saturating us with learning, so that from the moment we came downstairs for breakfast until the light had faded and we trooped up to bed, we were nearly always studying something, talking about something, learning something.
His teaching was all about war: the wars against Napoléon when I arrived, but later, Julius Caesar’s campaigns and other wars that suited his purposes from time to time. What boy does not imagine himself a hero? Five and a half days a week, Monday morning to Saturday noon, we leaned over the maps, aligning our tokens in battle order—red for the British troops and blue for the French, and green and brown and black and purple for the other nations—and we fought those battles. Or we calculated the time it would take a thousand troops to pass a specific point, or the trajectory of a cannonball or the operation of a trebuchet, the weight of a barrel of salt pork or a barrel of rum, and the mechanics of lifting such heavy weights aboard a ship.
For the Napoleonic Wars we spoke French—or the rest did, as I struggled to follow along. Unswayed by my ignorance of the language, Mr. Lincoln spoke to me in French anyway, asking questions I did not understand and waiting impatiently for answers I could not give, until the others finally supplied the answers for me. The fact that I had no French seemed to matter to no one but me; they gave me no quarter, and thus I learned it to keep myself in the game. Though, in fact, it was no game; every discussion was deadly serious.
Touch came from a village twelve miles away, which distance he walked if the weather was fair when he went home after noon on Saturdays, with part of a loaf of bread to eat en route, returning by dark on Sunday evenings. If the weather was inclement, his brother came for him on horseback and they rode double on the return. Touch never said much about his home, but I learned that he was the elder of two boys, and his father was a vicar, and I could imagine that there were high hopes laid on Touch’s narrow shoulders. As I watched him leave each Saturday, I often imagined going with him, sitting down at the vicarage table and enjoying a family meal. I actually asked once, after I had been at Mr. Lincoln’s for a few weeks, if I might go home with him sometime, but with less than his usual warmth, Touch just said, “You wouldn’t like it,” and turned away. I never asked again.
I was far from unhappy, though, to be left with Carrot. We spent our half-Saturdays and Sundays exploring on our own, creeping through the Yorkshire wood as Captain Cabot and his men in the wilds of America, or British scouts spying on the French, or even British soldiers as the French tried to invade at Dover or Hastings or Bournemouth. We fashioned sabers from sticks and imagined muskets slung over our shoulders. Mr. Lincoln didn’t even own a musket, but he had taught us exactly the procedure for cocking and loading such a gun. We knew why soldiers need to wear bright-colored clothing: when five or ten thousand troops are firing their muskets and the smoke is intolerably thick, it’s essential to be able to discern one’s own men from the enemy. We took those times seriously, for we thought, in those days, that we knew all we needed to know to make soldiers of ourselves. Carrot, of course, was always in command: he was a natural leader, admired for his easy authority and his wild abandon.
Despite what Mr. Lincoln had said the night I arrived, we spent many evenings after dark with him reading to us by the light of a single candle. It was always the philosophers, and, for Mr. Lincoln, it was like reading from the Bible—unlike with texts we studied during the day, there was to be no discussion, no argument; whatever he read simplywas. When the candle guttered out he usually went on from memory, reciting from Plato’sApologyorThe Republicor the writings of Aristotle. He particularly liked Thucydides on the Peloponnesian Wars, but he didn’t seem to care for the Romans, which was odd, since his Latin was much better than his Greek.
At the approach of Easter, Touch went home for a whole week and even Carrot left for a similar time. Though he would not tell me where he was going, I assumed he was spending the days with his mother, to whom he wrote every week. By then I had been at Black Hill three weeks and would have been glad of a trip back to Thornfield to play again in the woods, employing my new warlike skills, and to tell Knox and Cook about my new friends. Indeed, as I watched Carrot and Touch prepare to leave, I asked Mr. Lincoln if I ought not to prepare as well, but he told me that there was no point in it, for with my father and brother gone to Jamaica, the place had no doubt been closed up.No one there?I thought.Surely that cannot be.I could not imagine the Hall closed and empty, and that first night, alone in the bed, I held my breath and forbade myself any pity.
Mr. Lincoln suspended studies in the absence of the others, and indeed he himself journeyed to Skipton for the holiday, leaving me in the care of Athena. Though I asked to eat in the kitchen with her and North—the man who had fetched me from the Four Bells, and who served as a man-of-all-work around the little house and grounds—she insisted on bringing my meals to the table as always, and I was left to eat alone. I amused myself those days with inspecting the bookshelves, picking out books at random. Or I unrolled maps and made my own war games, playing one side against the other. Often I wandered in the fields and marshes and woodlands beyond the little cottage. I assumed everyone would return by sunset on Easter Sunday evening, but when darkness fell and I was still alone, I clomped up to bed feeling more dejected than I had the first night they were all gone. I told myself that surely on Monday someone would return. There was a time, before Black Hill, when I had preferred being on my own to being shut up in the schoolroom with a governess, but now that I had known friendship, I missed Carrot’s bold ventures and Touch’s inventive tales.
The next morning from a window I caught sight of Mr. Lincoln, home at last, squeezing his large self out of a hackney coach and standing before the cottage as if he were surveying it for the first time. I felt a surge of resentment. I thought to ignore his arrival, letting him know I did not at all care that I had been left on my own, but my excitement got the better of me and I was unable to resist opening the door and calling a greeting. “Ah, yes,” he responded distractedly. “Jamaica. You’re here, then,” he added, as if he had expected me to be elsewhere.
Touch came back midafternoon, rosy faced from the exertion of his walk. In the pack he carried were cold lamb left over from Easter dinner and a few currant buns, which he kindly shared with me. I could not stop smiling, so happy was I to be back in the warmth of his presence. I asked him about everything he did while he was at home, and he told me in his usual froggy voice that it was nothing different from any of his other weekly visits, just longer.
“Do you play at war with your brother?” I pressed.
“Oh no,” he responded, “we would never do that.”
“Do you explore in the woods?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes we hunt for ramps.”
I studied his mild freckled face in dismay, and I suppose he sensed my disappointment. “It’s nothing there, Jam, really. It’s much more fun here,” he said. But he had no idea how I pined for a real home, with a real family.
Carrot was the last to return, the candle lanterns of his carriage announcing his arrival long before we could hear the thud and scrape of the horses’ hooves. He walked in grinning, trailing a footman carrying his trunk. He seemed to have grown a foot taller in the ten days he had been gone. He laughed and joked and carried on until it was time for bed, and even in bed he was restless and could not stop talking. I asked again where he’d been, and he chuckled. “Well, Jam, I’ve been to York,” he said. “Would have gone to London, but my father was in York on some matter or another.”
He had never spoken of a father; I had assumed his mother was a widow. “I didn’t know you had a father,” I said, stupidly.
“Oh yes,” he responded, his voice full of mirth. “And he’s the Duke of—”
“Duke?”
“Well, I was born on the wrong side of the blanket, but there you are. And the thing is”—he laughed a little—“he may put me aside for now in a place like this where no one can see me, but he can hardly deny me. I have his hair, you see.”
Carrot was far wiser in the ways of the world than I. I had no idea what he meant, and hard as I might try, I could not imagine what difference the placement of a blanket could make, but it didn’t matter. I was just happy to have the two of them, as dear to me as brothers, back where they belonged.
The weather had turned to spring: fields suddenly were greener, buds on the trees ready to burst; newborn lambs frolicked on distant meadows; and we boys, let off from our studies early some days, ran outside and reenacted our battles in the nearby fields. Seeing we could not be kept indoors, Mr. Lincoln got out paper and laid a quill pen on the table. “Build a siege engine,” he said. “Design and build one yourselves.”
