my knuckles cracked where I gripped the table. I was eleven. Everyone I knew in the world was watching in silence as I fought the pain that scalded up my body. Emile had told me to scream. He said people like Dr Faure liked you to scream. There would be fewer strokes and it would be over quicker if I screamed. Only my throat was too tight and the scream would not reach past my teeth.
The second blow was fiercer, the third so fierce that the wall of the assembly hall swam in and out of darkness. A whimper left my lips and I heard Dr Faure mutter in satisfaction. I kept silent for the fourth blow, helped by the darkness that washed over me the second it landed. The fifth had my mouth open in a silent scream and I would have howled my lungs out with the sixth had I not looked up and seen a girl staring at me through a crack in an almost closed door. Her dark hair was greasy, her eyes wide and shocked, her mouth slightly open. She was my age, perhaps a year older.
A girl, in a school of a hundred and fifty boys.
The sixth blow shocked me into a low moan and the headmaster stepped forward before Dr Faure could decide to launch another. When I looked up the girl was gone and the side door to the assembly room shut again. I was helped to my feet by the headmaster and put into the care of two of my classmates, who were told to take me to my classroom and report to his wife if I showed any sign of fever. Dr Faure glowered at the fuss and scowled at me so fiercely I grinned, which only made him angrier.
They clapped me into the classroom, the other boys. I was a hero, the boy who took six strokes of the birch and barely murmured. I had to drop my trews and stand there while classmate after classmate came to stare at the bleeding. It was the best, several agreed, beating the existing record for damage, which had been inflicted by ten strokes of the cane laid on with full force by the headmaster the summer before. The previous record holder spent a full minute with his face a hand’s breadth from my rear while the class waited in silence for his verdict. Magnanimously, he agreed this was better.
A round of clapping saluted his sportsmanship.
‘Are you an idiot?’ Emile hissed, dragging me to one side when the clapping was done and the class had returned to flicking over the pages of the books they should have been reading or baiting each other. ‘He’ll just whip you again harder.’
Emile was usually good at knowing what others thought but he was wrong in this and I told him so. Dr Faure could not risk that I would hold out again. He’d failed to get a scream out of me and the headmaster had stopped him before he could inflict lasting damage. I’d made an enemy for life; neither Emile nor I doubted that. But Dr Faure could not risk another so very public humiliation in front of the boys. We should have guessed his response. Since he couldn’t break me he would break Emile. It happened the following week. Some imagined infraction on Monday afternoon saw Emile stretched across a table in the assembly hall on Tuesday morning, Dr Faure with a sneer on his face and a birch gripped firmly in his hand. Emile did scream. He screamed so loud that some of the smaller boys covered their ears. The headmaster stepped forward when blood began to flow after the third stroke, not to stop the whipping but to indicate Dr Faure should lessen his vigour. It made no difference, Emile was sobbing by then.
No one clapped him into our classroom. No one suggested he drop his breeches so I could see if I’d lost my title, although his bruising was every bit as bad and his welts as bloodily raw as mine had been. They avoided him as if cowardice was catching. His bourgeois birth, the fact his grandmother was meant to be Jewish, his going home at weekends were rolled out as reasons for his weakness. He went to bed still crying and woke looking even more hollow-eyed than the day before. At lunchtime, unable to stand his silent tears or the insults of my companions, I went to find the headmaster’s wife and insisted Emile had a fever.
‘What are the symptoms?’
‘He cries,’ I said.
She sighed heavily, muttered something about that bloody man and told me to fetch Emile immediately. He should spend the night in the sanatorium and since I was his friend I could sleep there too. In the meantime I was to bring her Emile and then return to my lessons. I was d’Aumout, wasn’t I? I agreed this was me and did what she said, collecting Emile under the scornful gaze of my classmates. ‘I’ll see you later,’ I told him.
‘Don’t bother,’ he said bitterly. ‘I want to be alone anyway.’
‘Don’t you want revenge?’ The plan had been forming since that morning. It was risky but what good plan wasn’t? And it would give Emile back his confidence and even impress the rest of the class. Not waiting for his reply, I left him at the door of the sanatorium, a dark room overlooking a small courtyard in which Dr Faure kept his dog. Dr Faure’s quarters were opposite so we would need to act quietly.
Back in the classroom I told them Emile needed volunteers for a plan he was going to put into action that night.
‘What kind of plan?’
‘He needs a judge, a scribe and a witness to swear that the trial was fair. Emile will act as the judge.’
‘And you?’ someone demanded.
‘I’ll be the executioner. Should one be necessary.’
‘He’s going to try Dr Faure?’
I shook my head. ‘Even better. He’s going to try his dog.’
Marcus, our class captain, grinned and I knew that if we brought this off Emile would be forgiven. Dr Faure’s dog was a foul-tempered hound on which he doted. It spent its nights in the locked courtyard howling at the slightest noise and keeping the dormitories awake. The beast was walked religiously each day and was, everyone agreed, the only thing in the school with a fouler temperament than the man who walked it. The boys in my class began to draw up a list of crimes with which the dog should be charged.
By the time the shadows thickened to darkness everyone except Emile knew he’d sworn ferocious revenge on Dr Faure, and he greeted my news of this with wide eyes. His lips were bitten, his face puffy and his nose red from crying. So I told him to rinse himself in the cold water the headmaster’s wife had sent up for us. When he just stood there, I put a china bowl on a tripod stand and poured the water myself, then gripped his head and pushed him under. He came up spluttering and flailing at me with useless fists.
‘You do it for yourself then.’
He scowled furiously and splashed his face noisily, spilling water down the front of his uniform, since neither of us had changed for bed and nor would we until justice had been done. I explained what I wanted from him. He’d seen his father in action in a courtroom. He was to be that man. This was to be done seriously.
‘I’m the judge?’
‘Yes. You prosecute and Marcus defends. But the final decision is yours and you are the one who passes sentence.’
‘But how can we get the dog to stay quiet? It will bark itself mad and Faure will come. He’ll see us.’ Another thought occurred to him. ‘And how do we get into the courtyard? It’s locked at night.’
‘That’s the point,’ I said. The little courtyard belonged to the Faures’ quarters and though a dozen windows looked into it there were only two doors: one into the main body of the school and one across the way into where the Faures lived. Dr Faure locked the first when he retired for the night and the second after he’d put his dog out. Only one man had the keys to those doors. Well, perhaps the headmaster had a spare set. But only one man had ready access. ‘We don’t get into the courtyard. The trial takes place on the roof overlooking Faure’s
