Murder at the Spring Ball: A 1920s Mystery by Benedict Brown (romantic novels in english .txt) 📗

felt just as my grandfather must have for the last ten years; held in stasis, waiting for life to kick back in.

In general, boys my age fall into two camps, the bullies and the bullied. With my love of birds, cakes and Charles Dickens, I doubt I need to tell you which one I belonged to. The only good thing about my academic career at Oakton was that I was so entirely average at science, maths, rugby, cricket, hockey and lake swimming that I never stood out among the more successful boys. But with Cranley’s spring ball firmly planted on that year’s social calendar, I was suddenly the talk of the school.

Who knows how these things get out to the wider world (my best guess would be that Fellowes had sold the information to some gossip hound) but there was even an article about it in the social column of The Daily Telegraph. Such provincial events rarely made it into the national papers, so you can imagine what a story it was that Lord Edgington, the wealthiest landowner in the whole of Surrey and one-time scourge of London’s criminal underworld, was dipping his toe into high-society functions.

Far more interesting than that, though, was an article alongside it all about his career. I have to admit that I considered my grandfather something of a hero. Rather than staying in Cranley his whole life to live off the fat of the land, he decided that he wanted to make something of himself and so joined the police. Not only did he become one of the most celebrated officers in Britain, he shunned his family contacts and went in at the lowest rung of the ladder. Starting off as a constable, he worked his way up through the force on his own merit. I imagine that everyone at the time thought he was a raving loon.

Perhaps it was this, even more than the ball, which caught my curious peers’ attention. Suddenly everyone looked at me differently, but there were still two distinct trends to their behaviour. Three quarters of my schoolmates attempted to charm me in the hope of gaining an invitation for their families and the rest… well, let’s say that they were a little more hostile.

“Reckon you’re something special, don’t you, Prentiss!” Marmaduke Adelaide (known in the faintest of whispers behind his back as Marmalade) was a six-foot-three ape with luminous ginger hair and fists the size of megaliths. I’d lived in fear of him since we were five years old but he’d never paid me much mind, until now.

“Not at all,” I told him, as he grabbed me by the cravat to lift me off the surface of our small, muddy recreational yard. “I actually think I’m remarkably normal.”

“Well I think you’ve got a remarkable cheek answering back to me.” Marmalade was as well-spoken as any lord, and his family had more money than King George, but there were unflattering rumours about where the Adelaides’ wealth had come from.

“Um,” I replied, wishing I’d learn to keep my mouth closed. “I don’t honestly know how to reply as you might think I’m answering back again.”

The fingers in his right hand flexed, then curled together. He pulled his arm back, and I closed my eyes to prepare for impact.

“Master Adelaide,” a voice interrupted. “Would you please return your friend to where he was previously standing and be on your way? Master Prentiss has two perfectly good brown eyes, I doubt his mother would wish you to turn them black.”

Finding myself on terra firma once more, I stared out through tiny slits. Standing up close to Marmalade was our ox-shaped headmaster.

The bully’s grip relaxed and he offered a smarmy explanation. “I’m sorry, Mr Hardcastle. I was just giving little Chrissy here an astronomy lesson.”

The top man of The Oakton Classical and Commercial Academy for Distinguished Young Gentlemen had more to say on the matter. “That’s one thing you’ve never quite grasped in the years you’ve been here, Adelaide. You see, it is we teachers who are in charge of doling out the lessons and you boys who must learn them.”

If there was one person Marmalade was scared of, it was our headmaster. “Of course, Mr Hardcastle. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

The trusty educator watched Marmalade rejoin his gang of equally thuggish friends then walked away smiling.

I let out the breath I’d been holding for the last minute, just as Marmalade reappeared to deliver a swift, sharp dig to my ribs. I made a noise like a bellows with a hole in, as he delivered the complementary warning.

“You got away with it for now, but next time even Hardcastle won’t be able to save you.” I was doubled over with my hand to my stomach, so he grabbed my hair and yanked me up to look at him. “Don’t forget it.”

He released me to stagger away, then disappeared off to class.

For some reason, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Marmalade. On the one hand he was a thug and a menace, but I was certain he would have had an easier run of things if he hadn’t had to spend his life in his dishonest father’s shadow. No matter what he went on to achieve, talk of his family’s criminal connections would never leave him.

Perhaps inevitably after our one-sided brawl, I had my mind on other things. What I wanted, more than anything, was to be back by the hearth in Cranley’s cosy kitchen, with lovely Alice and Cook being nice to me. I wanted to see how the work was progressing and discover whether Grandfather had made any wild new resolutions.

Instead, I had a week at school to get through. A week spent learning algebra equations, quotations from Chaucer and Latin ablative constructions, which I would never need again once the class was over. A week being taught by large men with proportionally massive sideburns whose love of teaching came from the corporal punishment they could inflict upon the younger boys.

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