Back to Blackbrick by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

to see us in connection with the smuggling of a girl onto the premises.
    â€œGod almighty, Kevin, but the same question occurs to me for the second time in as many days: Why didn’t you come to me? It’s pure silly of you lads to have done this without at least explaining to me what you were planning. If you needed help, then you should have come straight to me. Isn’t that the way it used to be, Kevin?”
    â€œI know. I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble,” Kevin said, deliberately making his eyes wide and innocent-looking.
    And Mrs. Kelly said, “Well, all I can say is that you’re terrible altogether. And when you get back from talking to LordCorporamore, you’re to fill me in on what has happened and who this girl is, and honestly, don’t you know that you can be assured that I can help? Do you not know me by now, Kevin? Lord George is waiting for you in his study, so now it would be in both your interests to get yourselves up there as quickly as possible and explain yourselves to him. Mind your manners and prepare for an act of contrition, do you hear me? He’ll be raging with the pair of you.”
    We left the kitchen with Kevin spitting out words under his breath. “It must have been Cordelia. How did that brat find out? I’m going to kill her.” I started to get hot, the way you do when you’re filling up with shame. I started to imagine what Kevin might do if he found out it was me who was the rat.
    He told me there were sixty-four steps from the kitchen to Corporamore’s study, even though at the time I wasn’t really in the mood for Blackbrick trivia. I was too busy feeling very uneasy about what was waiting for us at the top.
    He said, “Leave the talking to me,” which was absolutely fine as far as I was concerned.
    When we got there and knocked on the door, a voice from inside said, “Come,” and we walked in.
    It was the first time I got a proper look at his face. George Corporamore was sitting behind a big varnished desk. There were red curtains, shimmering in the light of a crackling, spitting fire. He was holding a massive cigar between his fingers, and he was looking the two of us up and down.It was then that it began to occur to me the extent of the serious trouble we might both be in.
    He was more or less the pointiest man I had ever seen in my life. His chin was pointy. His nose was pointy. His ears. His clothes. His shoes. His fingers. Even his eyes were like little pins, piercing and poking at us from his triangular face.
    He didn’t look like the kind of man who would kneel and cry at the end of someone’s bed.
    He asked me to introduce myself. He said that Mrs. Kelly had told him about how she had hired me in a temporary capacity because of what a great horseman I was, which was news to me. He wanted us to tell him whether we had been responsible for bringing a young girl into the Abbey, and for putting her in his son’s room. A place where nobody had been permitted to go for more than two years now.
    Kevin’s hands were in his pockets and he was standing with his legs wide apart. If you hadn’t been as close up to him as I was, you’d probably never have seen the small blob of sweat sliding down the side of his face. And you definitely wouldn’t have thought he was the tiniest bit scared.
    He went on about what a great worker Maggie was and how he was dead familiar with her family and what decent people they were. And he said that it was not the slightest bit “apt” for boys to be bringing breakfast to Miss Cordelia and that it would be very useful to have Maggie, who washappy to stay and work in exchange for room and board, and she had the appetite of a small bird, so she wouldn’t be that much of a drag on the household’s resources.
    He definitely had a talent for talking, all right. He was a high-performance persuader, no doubt about it. At the time I reckoned