I glanced at Mr. Lincoln for confirmation, and he smiled and nodded. “Our friend here has a rare talent,” he said.
I noticed then that Touch’s eyes were downcast, but he was grinning.
“You could be a mapmaker!” I said enthusiastically.
“He could, if he wanted,” Carrot said.
“Indeed,” Mr. Lincoln said. But Touch did not acknowledge their words, nor did he look up at us, and the smile had disappeared from his face. It would be months before I understood why their encouragement pained him so.
Though he never beat us, Mr. Lincoln could be a most difficult man, and he brooked no foolishness. I quickly learned, as the others already had, to see beneath the surface of his questions, understanding that the correct answer was never enough; it was always more important to know why it was correct. He believed in saturating us with learning, so that from the moment we came downstairs for breakfast until the light had faded and we trooped up to bed, we were nearly always studying something, talking about something, learning something.
His teaching was all about war: the wars against Napoléon when I arrived, but later, Julius Caesar’s campaigns and other wars that suited his purposes from time to time. What boy does not imagine himself a hero? Five and a half days a week, Monday morning to Saturday noon, we leaned over the maps, aligning our tokens in battle order—red for the British troops and blue for the French, and green and brown and black and purple for the other nations—and we fought those battles. Or we calculated the time it would take a thousand troops to pass a specific point, or the trajectory of a cannonball or the operation of a trebuchet, the weight of a barrel of salt pork or a barrel of rum, and the mechanics of lifting such heavy weights aboard a ship.
For the Napoleonic Wars we spoke French—or the rest did, as I struggled to follow along. Unswayed by my ignorance of the language, Mr. Lincoln spoke to me in French anyway, asking questions I did not understand and waiting impatiently for answers I could not give, until the others finally supplied the answers for me. The fact that I had no French seemed to matter to no one but me; they gave me no quarter, and thus I learned it to keep myself in the game. Though, in fact, it was no game; every discussion was deadly serious.
Touch came from a village twelve miles away, which distance he walked if the weather was fair when he went home after noon on Saturdays, with part of a loaf of bread to eat en route, returning by dark on Sunday evenings. If the weather was inclement, his brother came for him on horseback and they rode double on the return. Touch never said much about his home, but I learned that he was the elder of two boys, and his father was a vicar, and I could imagine that there were high hopes laid on Touch’s narrow shoulders. As I watched him leave each Saturday, I often imagined going with him, sitting down at the vicarage table and enjoying a family meal. I actually asked once, after I had been at Mr. Lincoln’s for a few weeks, if I might go home with him sometime, but with less than his usual warmth, Touch just said, “You wouldn’t like it,” and turned away. I never asked again.
I was far from unhappy, though, to be left with Carrot. We spent our half-Saturdays and Sundays exploring on our own, creeping through the Yorkshire wood as Captain Cabot and his men in the wilds of America, or British scouts spying on the French, or even British soldiers as the French tried to invade at Dover or Hastings or Bournemouth. We fashioned sabers from sticks and imagined muskets slung over our shoulders. Mr. Lincoln didn’t even own a musket, but he had taught us exactly the procedure for cocking and loading such a gun. We knew why soldiers need to wear bright-colored clothing: when five or ten thousand troops are firing their muskets and the smoke is intolerably thick, it’s essential to be able to discern one’s own men from the enemy. We took those times seriously, for we thought, in those days, that we knew all we needed to know to make soldiers of ourselves. Carrot, of course, was always in command: he was a natural leader, admired for his easy authority and his wild abandon.
Despite what Mr. Lincoln had said the night I arrived, we spent many evenings after dark with him reading to us by the light of a single candle. It was always the philosophers, and, for Mr. Lincoln, it was like reading from the Bible—unlike with texts we studied during the day, there was to be no discussion, no argument; whatever he read simply was. When the candle guttered out he usually went on from memory, reciting from Plato’s Apology or The Republic or the writings of Aristotle. He particularly liked Thucydides on the Peloponnesian Wars, but he didn’t seem to care for the Romans, which was odd, since his Latin was much better than his Greek.