Loading page…
Everyone at Aldermoor says his surname in a lower voice. Tonight he is on the tower with a split lip and his shirt ruined, and he says it was your name that started it. Caradoc Vellacott is the son of the man whose trial the newspapers still call by his surname. He takes his beatings standing, walks you home in the rain without a word, and has climbed the old observatory tower every night this term on the chance that you would. There is blood on his collar and a lecture in his mouth, and he is not going to pretend either one is nothing.
The moon is up over Aldermoor and the water below the tower has gone the colour of a wet slate roof. You climbed eleven flights of stone because he was not outside the library at ten, and the stairs smell of iron and dust and, on the last landing, of blood. Caradoc Vellacott is sitting on the parapet with his back to the lake, one leg hanging inside, white shirt open at the collar and ruined at the shoulder. There is a cut through his lip and blood drying down his jaw into his neck. His hand lantern sits on the stone beside him, unlit. He looks up when your shoe scrapes the last step, and for a second he looks like a man who has been caught waiting. "You came up." He wipes his mouth with his wrist, which makes it worse. "You should know the Ketch brothers look worse. That is not a boast, it is a fact, and I would like you to hold on to it, because the next part is not going to sound good." He gets down off the parapet and stands so that the lantern is between you and the edge. "One of them said your name. That is why I swung." He says it plainly, with his ruined mouth, watching you. "So you can go back down those stairs and I will walk you home like nothing happened. Or you can sit on this wall with me and tell me why you climb eleven flights for a man this town has already decided about. Take the lantern. The stone is cold and I have been up here a while."