The tocsin did its business, and shortly thereafter came a scramble and bustle of activity inside the school, which was already burning on its western end where the classrooms were situated. Yet even in the dormitories on the eastern side, one could smell the pungent smoke and all knew instantly what was happening.
All, that is…save young Jack Snicks, who continued to sleep through all the shouting and the hubbub — slept soundly and peacefully upon his cot until Alphonse Chowser retrieved him from the smoke-clouded dormitory. Alphonse pulled the nine-year-old boy up from his bed, along with a tangle of sheets and blankets, and patted him gently upon the cheeks. Jack awoke with a start; he had been in the midst of a most engaging dream in which he had been sitting before his late aunt’s cozy hearth when the flue suddenly shut and the room became filled with smoke.
“Do you not know what is happening, lad?” asked Chowser, setting the boy down upon the floor and taking him by the hand. Then answering his own enquiry as the two hurried in their bare feet toward the door that offered egress from the smoky room: “But of course you could not have known until I woke you. I often forget, my little sleepy man, that you’re a deaf mute, for you read lips so very well.”
Jack made an unintelligible noise with his tongue and throat that served to forgive Chowser the oversight.
There was a brief and valiant attempt at forming a bucket brigade amongst the pupils and the staff, but the fire raged too great, and the hand windlass turned too slowly above the well to retrieve the buckets fast enough to make any difference.
Before the large stone manse that served as boarding school to some thirty-some-odd boys (the current crop), Alphonse Chowser, Esq., stood robed but still shoeless, along with all of those equally barefooted boys and wide-eyed adult employees. There was Porter (who went by nothing but his occupational name alone); and Mary Katharine, the maid-of-all-work; and Diggory, the gardener; and Mr. Smangle, who handled the accounts and sometimes taught arithmetic and eulogic, which was a discipline developed by this rumple-haired, pock-marked man himself: a philosophy rooted in a Panglossian sort of view that most people are by their inherent nature good and kind, though this evening of arson would prove the exception that makes the rule.
And there was Maggy, the saviour of the night, who, through a sleepless longing for the man she loved, had made possible a full and successful evacuation of the school. Chowser took Maggy’s hand in a silent show of gratitude whilst shaking his head despondently as the flames spat and danced within his tired, worried eyes.
“Oh, Smangle,” suspired Chowser in a lamenting tone, “all of my years of work, vanishing before my eyes. It is most difficult to bear.”
“Who would do such a thing?” asked Mary Katharine, her fingers running desultorily through her sleep-mussed hair.
“Arsonists, as I have said. I saw them with my own eyes.” answered Maggy in a logical but not altogether enlightening way.
“We will rebuild, Chowser,” said Smangle. “We must rebuild. At all events, these flames do not put to ashes all of the work you have already done, for there are hundreds of upstanding men throughout the Dell who are walking testament to your years of self-sacrificing labour. They are testament to all that your father has done and to the efforts of your grandfather before him. The Chowser School does not die there,” indicating the blazing fire with a gesturing hand, “but that it continues to live here.” Smangle pressed both of his hands tightly against his breast to show where his heart was.
“Mary Katharine asked the right question,” said Diggory. “Why would anyone want to burn down our school? For what possible reason?” The gardener was still wearing his sleeping smock. With one hand he clutched the handle of a spade, hastily drawn from his tool shed. With it, Diggory had hoped to strike blows upon the perpetrators of this dastardly act, though by that point the evildoers had already long vanished into the surrounding darkness. Diggory gave a nervous glance over his shoulder at his prized vegetable patch, which was too close to the darting flames for his comfort.
He turned back to Maggy. “And you’re very sure, Cook, that you saw them — the men with the torches? You are sure that they weren’t some fancy of your half-drowsy mind?” Diggory patted his callused hand soothingly upon the head of one of the youngest boys, who clung tremblingly to the gardener’s knee and would be in tears were such a thing ever to be permitted by his stoic older schoolmates.
“Alas, Gardener, I believe that Maggy’s eyes did not deceive her,” said Chowser through a sigh that carried a great weight of sorrow with it. “I have always wondered if it was not a bad decision on my grandfather’s part to build our school so far removed from Milltown or even from any of the other villages. Here we sit upon the veritable frontier of the Dell. I’ve sent Anthony on the fleet bay mare to fetch the firemen, but it will all be for naught. The blazes could not be contained even should the engine arrive at this very moment. In no time at all the whole building will be reduced to smoking wooden rubble.”
Chowser turned his back to the flames, able no longer to endure the sight of them. Yet still he could not successfully remove the scene from his view, for the fire shone in all the reflections round him: it shone in the blazing eyes of the boys who huddled close together and looked on in amazement at this destructive feat of nature (initiated in this case not by nature but by the villainous hand of man); its bright flames reflected in the coal scuttle held by Porter (thinking that it could be used to carry water to douse the flames, though it was found to be woefully inadequate for that purpose); it was mirrored in the Britannia metal tea pot rescued by Mary Katharine, the maid-of-all-work (because it was lovely and why should it not be saved?); and it gleamed bright yellow and orange from the side of the tin cash box, tucked beneath the arm of the ever practical Mr. Smangle.
It was that last gentleman who broke a silence that was in truth not so silent at all, given the crackling, popping, and crashing down of an old wooden and stone building succumbing to its fiery dismantling: “Do not repine the decision of your grandfather, fearless leader, for this has been a most excellent location for our happy little school, with ample room for the boys to run and play. If your father had bought a building in town, there should be no more romps in the meadow, and I for one could not have inculcated my young charges — under the canopy of that great, beautiful oak tree that puts us all at one with the squirrels — with all my acorns of eulogical wisdom. This has been a joyous, most splendid place of learning. Oh, hither comes the new sheriff. What’s that boy’s name?”
“Billy Boldwig,” offered Diggory with a sneer. “His father never enroled him here. He was privately tutored. And he has a stench. Have you noticed? There’s always a stench.”
The new sheriff dismounted his horse and marched up to the knot of frowning, moist-eyed fire-gazers comprised of both the pupils and the instructors and staff of the now former Chowser School for Boys (anteformerly known as the Chowser School for Wayward Boys, the “wayward” being subsequently struck when the school began to invite in other boys not so wayward to ingurgitate “the finest affordable education afforded anywhere to a Dingley lad”).
“Thank you for coming so quickly, Sheriff,” said Chowser, reaching to take Boldwig’s hand.
Not seeing the hand, Billy didn’t take it. His eyes were fixed on the fire. “I came quickly, but I cannot tarry here. There is a crime spree in Milltown. What happened here? Who did this?”