Page 136 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

Rain loved to have things to tell Tip. He puzzled over them as if he were a military strategist, but Rain took this to be largely boredom. It seemed almost everyone was more interested in the progress of the war than she was.

“Does your grandfather write you letters?” Rain once asked of Miss Plumbago.

“Grandfather Cherrystone? No,” snapped Miss Plumbago. “You’d think he might. After all, he taught me to read. But he’s apparently too busy to write letters or send me little bank cheques.”

He’s besieged at Haugaard’s Keep still, thought Rain, and ventured her conclusion to Tip, who thanked her for trying but seemed to know this already.

No, it couldn’t last forever. In a couple of weeks, Madame Streetflye told them, it would be time for Rain’s class to take up Butter and Eggs. Most of the girls giggled and blushed. Rain didn’t have a clue until Scarly filled her in. Butter and Eggs was the Pertha Hills softsoap way of talking about Human Sexual Techniques: Practical Clarifications. Rain guessed that once she sat through that class, she could no longer allow herself to share a room with a boy. Neither, probably, would she want to, if she read accurately Scarly’s repertoire of expressions. Primarily scowl and disgust. What would Tip do then?

The matter resolved itself with painful swiftness. On the very day she was bringing back to Tip the latest gossip she’d heard—that men were going to be conscripted from Shiz—Proctor Gadfry Clapp was called up to war.

The way it happened was this. Lord Manning, the Senior Overseer, had stopped to pay an unexpected call, which was his right and privilege. All might have gone horribly wrong, since Tip was just passing through the stables when Miss Ironish rushed in unexpectedly to give some instructions to Lord Manning’s coachman. Tip was caught between Miss Ironish entering the annex from the schoolyard side and the coachman arriving from the service entrance. Luckily, Miss Ironish took Tip for the coachman’s boy. She handed over some papers folded inside a clasped sleeve of leather, school accounts or an inventory of students or something. “Store these in Lord Manning’s pouch, young man.” Tip brought them to the horseman, who in return told Tip to ask the Cook for a few extra apples. The horses had been ridden hard on such urgent business.

Suddenly, on this risky morning, Tip became a fixture in the backstairs without anyone quite having twigged to his lack of specific sponsorship.

“Bring your man this carroty cream crumble, you,” said Cook, who by and large liked men, her several husbands ample proof of that.

“Tell your Cook this may be the best cream crumble in Shiz,” said the coachman back.

“Tell your fellow to tell me something I don’t know.”

Lord Manning had had enough of hysterics. Having delivered his sorry news to Gadfry Clapp, he was in no mood to stay for a cold school luncheon. The proctor sat in marmoreal paralysis in his study, but Miss Ironish followed Lord Manning right into the ablutorium and out again, hissing at him. (The teachers kept their doors open a crack to catch the drama.)

“I am not the Emperor of Oz, Miss Ironish,” snapped Lord Manning. “I do not order a thousand men to march to war. I scarcely order starch for my collars. I am merely implementin

g the diktat come directly from the Emerald City. Now will you spare me your tongue?”

“Would you leave us without a man in the establishment? Lord Manning! I could not hold my head up with the parents of our girls, if they learned we had left them unprotected!”

“I am confident in your professional skills, Miss Ironish. You are perfectly capable of fending off any attempt at assault or rapine.”

“I shall close the school.”

“You have no authority to close the school. Please do not give my headache a headache, Miss Ironish.”

“Without a male in residence, I will not answer to the consequences.”

By now Lord Manning had reached the kitchen, and he barreled through the yard as if he owned the place, heading for the stables. He caught sight of Tip munching a bacon butty courtesy of Cook, and he said, “This boy, he’s old enough to be some help, I’ll warrant.”

“You would take the seventeenth proctor of St. Prowd’s and send him to battle, and leave a strapping stable boy in charge of the protection of school-girls? Lord Manning, have you abdicated your senses?”

For an instant Lord Manning appeared to reconsider. But then he swiveled upon his boot heel and he poked a finger almost up one of Miss Ironish’s flared nostrils. “Our charge is the protection of children, Miss Ironish. Don’t you dare forget it. This boy isn’t old enough to be a soldier, but he is old enough and strong enough for lifting down the trunks from the box room and for chasing away beggars from the kitchen yard. He will be your factotum, and that’s the end of it. Boy, what is your name?”

Tip, according to Scarly who told Rain all about this later, was so startled that he leaped to his feet and answered without hesitation. “Pit.”

“Was your family too poor to give you a last name?” snarled Lord Manning.

“Well, yes, sir,” he answered, “I mean, in a manner of speaking, as I’m an orphan. All they left me was my name.”

Lord Manning blew out air between his teeth and buttoned his overcoat. As he beetled toward the kitchen door, he called over his shoulder, “You will be Miss Ironish’s right hand when she needs you, Pit. We’ll settle details of a salary allowance later, but for now housing and meals, the usual, and so on. Is that clear.”

The Senior Overseer didn’t wait for an answer. He ignored the uninterrupted flow of Miss Ironish’s protests. His carriage left with purpose.

The room slowly quietened down. Miss Ironish dried her face in a tea towel and said to Cook, “A cup of lemon tea to strengthen Proctor Gadfry, if you please, Cook.” And to Tip, she added, “Your employer left you behind in a school of young ladies. He must be mad. Straighten your shoulders and look at me when I talk to you. We’ll discuss your obligations this afternoon. For now…” But she couldn’t take the measure of her new situation yet, and fled the kitchen.

Scarly came to Rain’s room that night to fill her in on the details, but Rain had heard a good deal already through the gossip. Proctor Gadfry had taken to his bed; Scarly had spent much of the day attending him with hot compresses and yeasty correctives. Tip was installed in a kitchen nook behind the wall stove, a corner that had been previously used for storing the butter churn and the lesser china. He had his own bed. The room was windowless but decent warm, said Scarly with more pride than envy.

Come evening, he couldn’t sneak out to Rain’s room the way Scarly could. Cook, who missed her sons, marshaled Tip’s company for her own maternal needs. Besides, she was a guardian of the students’ virtue, so she took to sleeping on a cot in the kitchen. She put it across the door to his cubby so he would have to climb over her to get out at night. In the case of loo emergencies she supplied him with a basin for night waste and a plate to cover it from flies. From Rain, therefore, he was pinned good and proper, but not entirely from Scarly, who during the day had reason enough to pass through the kitchen. At night she brought news of Pit to Rain in the Annex.

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