Today, I look like my father in the days before he died. I know I shaved, but half my face seems to have escaped the blitz. There was a brown stain—tea, I think—on the collar of my shirt. I pulled on my gown to conceal the fact that my suit was less than spotless, but now I looked like an assemblage of black litter-bags, held together with frayed string.

“Penny for the guy, sir?” chirped Allen-Jones as I entered my room. Then he saw my face, and I saw the same expression I had seen on the face of the Bursar.

“What was that, Allen-Jones?”

“We’re collecting money for Bonfire Night, sir.”

Good try, Allen-Jones. That was a dig at my crumpled gown. Still, the boy recovered well, and to do the other boys justice, no one laughed at the little joke. That made me feel uncomfortable. When my boys stop laughing, it means that something serious is afoot.

I skipped Assembly. I wanted to finish my resignation letter. I put down my old green Parker pen and waited for the ink to dry. I suppose the Head would have preferred an e-mail. But a letter, written in midnight ink, seems much more appropriate. I will hand it in personally, at the end of the day. I want to see his face when I do. I want to see the bastard’s eyes.

At least that’s what I was thinking as I sealed the letter and filed it away. But today, as it happens, Harrington is out of School on some kind of a course. Ms. Buckfast said as much when she came to watch my third-year class; but I will not give her the letter. To do her justice, she did not ask, nor did she ask if I had made my decision. She is far too clever to do that; besides, she knows the answer. She is so sure of her victory that she vanished halfway through my morning’s lessons and did not return for the rest of the day, leaving me with my Brodie Boys, and a grammar lesson that I might have enjoyed if not for the sword of banishment suspended above me. As it was, I was mostly silent, and the boys were silent too, while outside, the fog pressed down like a lid, and the crows on the roof of the Bell Tower gathered like judges, with murder in mind.

At lunchtime, Allen-Jones came in with Sutcliff, McNair, and the girl Ben. They often spend lunchtimes together, but this time the girl Benedicta came straight to my desk, at which I was moodily contemplating a passage from Catullus.

“Sir, we’ve heard a rumour. We’ve heard you might be retiring.”

“Who says?”

She gave me an impatient look. “Does it matter? Is it true?”