Rule Britannia Read Free Page B

adopted him but because, so the authorities told her, there was something amiss with his tongue, he might never learn to speak. He rolled delighted eyes at Emma as she entered, held up two fingers, a gesture taught him by Terry, then gazed once more towards the uppermost bed of the double-bedded bunk which he shared with Colin.
    Colin, six years old, was as white as Ben was black, blue-eyed, golden-haired—a director would have picked him from a million candidates for the role of the child Jesus. Found in a ditch after a Pop festival, his parents never traced. Mad, who was snobbish at times, swore he was of royal descent, but the devil had a hand in his making too, for he had a serpent’s guile beneath an angel’s hide. “If anyone can teach Ben to speak Colin will,” Mad determined, and to Dottie’s consternation she placed them together in the double bunk, from which moment Colin had become Ben’s god, though speech had not yet materialized.
    “What are you doing?” asked Emma suspiciously.
    Colin was lying motionless on the top bunk with a sheet folded over him, his hands crossed on his breast. His eyes were closed. Emma walked over to the bunk and prodded his cheek, and one eye opened.
    “Go away, Emma. I’m doing a play for Ben. I’m Madam dying, and in a moment I’m going to gasp and choke and it will be the end of the play. Ben will then have to clap, and I shall jump up and bow.”
    “What a horrible idea for a play,” said Emma. “Stop it at once and dress, breakfast will be ready any minute.”
    Colin looked aggrieved. “It’s not horrible at all. It’s realistic. Madam thought of it herself. We’re rehearsing it for her. At least, I am—Ben’s the audience.”
    Emma left them to it and went out of the room. The trouble was, as Pa was in the habit of saying—though she disliked agreeing with him where Mad was concerned—the trouble was that Mad was the last person in the world who should be permitted to give a home to maladjusted children. Happy they might be, but the world they lived in was unreal, a world of fantasy. Like mine, Emma thought, like mine, we’re all tarred with the same brush, Mad’s brush…
    She walked along the narrow passage and opened the door of the middle boys’ room. Andy and Sam, being twelve and nine, were known as the middle boys to distinguish them from their elders, Joe and Terry, who were nineteen and seventeen. The middle boys also had bunks, but their room was larger than the little boys’ lair, and it had a distinctive smell. This was due to the wired-off portion, containing a very ancient gray squirrel which, Sam had decided, could no longer fend for itself. The squirrel had shared the bedroom with him and Andy for several weeks. Discarded nutshells scattered the floor. Dottie had protested, practically in tears, that it was against all laws of hygiene.
    “Hygiene my foot,” Mad told her. “Sam will probably grow up to become a famous zoologist and win a Nobel prize. I won’t have him checked.”
    Sam was kneeling on the floor when Emma entered the room, but he was not tending to the squirrel’s needs. A new inhabitant, a pigeon, trailed a wing, while Sam endeavored to coax his visitor to take seed from his open palm. He glanced over his shoulder and motioned Emma to silence.
    “Don’t come too near, Emmie,” he whispered, “you might scare him. Once he knows me for a friend he’ll let me bind up his wing.”
    Perhaps. Perhaps not. Sam had saved wounded birds before now, but he had known failure too, and then there had been tears, and funeral ceremonies in the shrubbery, with Colin, invariably fascinated by death, performing his role as parson.
    “How did it happen?” asked Emma, also whispering.
    “He fell from the roof. He was disturbed by something.” Sam had a narrow, thin face, and he had been born with the squint that was still his distinguishing mark, making those who did not know and understand him feel uncomfortable. Perhaps it was