Interestingly, the ringleaders of this talk are boys who have been at the periphery of things before. Not one of them is a member of the highest aristocracy. Charlie, usually popular across factions and cliques, finds himself avoided: his father is a prominent Tory. Julius, too, is sidelined, participates only by listening, an odd little smile on his face. In fact, his whole behaviour appears changed, especially as regards his treatment of Thomas. The first few days after the Trip he was his usual self: jeering, pompous, and hostile, baiting the younger boy at every opportunity. Now he is watching; seems omnipresent in fact, always at the doorway or standing halfway down the hall, his hands in his pockets, his dark eyes everywhere. He, too, is having daily discussions with Renfrew. It may be that it is these that account for the change.

Whatever the reason, it has caused considerable confusion amongst Julius’s cronies — the whole complex web of guardians, prefects, and informers that upholds the structure of the school more surely than the teachers or the bricks and mortar. They have grown unsure of themselves, less inclined to impose their authority. In the lower school in particular, Charlie hears, it leads to more horseplay, more pushing of the rules, more arguments, more quarrels, more Smoke. But then, it’s almost Christmas. Everyone will be going home soon. Perhaps it is nothing more than this.

ф

With Thomas busy and preoccupied, and he himself adrift between the group of “rebels” and those representing the “old order,” Charlie he finds himself with time on his hands. For a full week he searches for a sense of purpose, sits around, mopes, turns pages in books he fails to read.

Then he finds it.

It starts with a letter to his parents. The letter is overdue — Charlie is to write every Sunday without fail — but he did not feel up to it before. Even now each sentence crawls reluctantly out of his pen. The words sit on the page with a clarity that feels unearned and mock the chaos of his emotions. Part of the problem is that he does not know what to say about London. “I was very saddened to see the preponderance of sin,” he writes then crosses it out immediately. Not only is it inaccurate but it reads as though he is eighty years old and lives between the covers of a book (and a dusty book at that). “I hated it,” he tries again, but again crosses it out, because this, too, is false, inadequate, short of the mark. It takes six drafts in all for him to produce a satisfactory version. In not one of them does he mention the execution.