In the reign of Queen Anne, Lady Denbeigh presented to the village of Yeo a modest schoolhouse. The masters are generally very young or very old, or in some manner broken down. The present incumbent, Septimus Kite, lives in two small rooms at the rear of the school. Here, between a small bed and a small table, he sleeps and eats and doses himself with laudanum. He has an assistant, a lame spinster out of the village. Miss Lucket. The money she receives, and money from the sale of her jams, keeps her, for the time being, off the parish.
All the Dyer children have attended, as and when they could be spared from the farm. When James goes on his first day, he walks with Liza, though Liza has long since finished at the school. They walk the lane, under the hawthorn hedges where in spring the children chew the tender green. The schoolhouse, its bricks still raw beside the weathered greys of the priory walls, stands at the side of the lane. Liza presents the boy to Mr Kite. Kite stares down, grunts, says: 'This is the one who does not speak?'
Liza says: 'Not yet, sir, though he understands very well.' 'Sit him there,' orders kite. 'I wish I had more like him.' James sits on a bench by the window. Liza puts a blood-warm baked potato into his pocket. She says: 'Do as they tell you, Jem.' He does not turn to watch her go.
Miss Lucket, one leg three inches shorter than the other, her walk a grotesque rolling, which the children, following her down the lane to school, ape behind her back, is a kindly and dedicated teacher. Young men and women, babes in their arms, will stop
shyly to talk to her, remind her of their names though she has not forgotten them.
From her, James learns to shape his letters, chalk on slate. He is, in his way, an apt and able student, yet there is something about him that renders Miss Lucket uneasy. It is her boast that, within a month of a child coming to her, she has him placed, can see how he will go on with the others, how he will turn out. With James she remains as ignorant of his true character six months after his starting as she was on the morning he arrived. He is not well liked, she knows that, but the children do not tease him. The older boys think twice before making any trouble with him. There is an independence, an arrogance, out of place in a boy of six and which she did not find in his brother or sisters who are moody, impetuous, ordinary children. She has heard the rumours, of course, the pall of gossip that has hung about Elizabeth Dyer since the child's birth.
She wonders if the boy is unhappy, and being herself a kind of expert in unhappiness she tries to draw him out with looks and little gestures of sympathy, none of which he appears to understand. His practical skills are excellent. He sews more neatly than the girls, stitches sized like midges. He draws well, which is to say he is a very neat copier of things; he never draws what is not in front of him. And stories bore him, a thing she has never known before. They seem to baffle him, such that when, during the afternoons that lie like vast blue or grey lakes over the moor, she reads from Gulliver's Travels or tells the tale of the Moonrakers or Tom Thumb, his is the one inattentive face; blank, almost moronic.
There is one boy at the school - Peter Poundsett - a year older than James, whom every child delights in tormenting. There is nothing obviously different about him. He is neither fat nor thin; his features are regular. He is strong enough for his age, can throw a ball or jump a ditch as well as any. His father is a carpenter, his mother a baker of excellent cakes, and their house is far from being
the meanest in the village. But the children, as if they saw on him markings such as bees see on certain flowers, markings invisible to adult eyes, twist his name into nonsense, into childish obscenities. His lunch is stolen and flung in the river. His back pelted with dung. He is accused of fornicating with farm animals, of stealing marbles and pennies from other children, of uttering curses that make them sick. Those who hound him most mercilessly are the same as accuse him most virulently. It is the most notorious thieves who accuse him of stealing, the kickers of kicking them; and those who trap him and strip him of his breeches - a thing that occurs at least twice each winter - are the ones most likely to accuse him of precisely this offence against them. They wheedle at Miss Lucket's knee, or more daringly at Mr Kite's, in the hope of getting their victim thrashed. Often they succeed, and Peter Poundsett is stretched over a chair at the front of the class while Mr Kite works with the strap, the half-yard of seasoned leather that hangs from a nail beside Lady Denbeigh's portrait.
James takes no part in these games, though he watches them from a distance, a small questioning frown on his face; and this Miss Lucket takes as evidence of a gentler heart. So too does Peter Poundsett who, desperate for an ally, makes eyes at James and does for love what he has never done from greed or fear; stealing titbits of food, and pennies from the box
