Chapter 8 The Weight of Crowns
Chapter Eight
The Weight of Crowns
“Do you know who Robert Oppenheimer was?” Mr. Carrow watched Jack with that particular intensity that meant a lesson was coming. A real one.
Jack put down his pencil. “No, sir.”
“He was a German scientist. A brilliant theoretical physicist. The most fundamental of his generation if not the century.” Mr. Carrow removed his glasses and cleaned them on his sleeve, a habit Jack had come to recognize as a stalling tactic that allowed time for his words to sink in.
“During the second World War, he was asked to build a weapon more powerful than anything the world had ever seen. Can you guess what it was?”
“A bomb?”
“The bomb. The one that ended World War II.” He replaced his glasses and met Jack’s stare. “He succeeded, Jack, building a weapon capable of destroying entire cities in a single flash. Thousands of lives, erased in an instant.”
Jack tried to imagine it, but couldn’t. The numbers were too large, the devastation too abstract. “Why?”
“That’s what he was hired to do.”
“So was he a bad man?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
The afternoon light caught the silver threading through his wheat-colored hair. He looked older than he had when they’d first met. Years of squinting over texts had worn grooves into his face.
“Oppenheimer believed he was protecting the world at the time. The project wasn’t just for the United States.
He was following orders from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Canada too.
He, like everyone else, believed the enemy would build just as evil a weapon if we didn’t build it first.”
“Like a race?”
“Yes. But after he showed the government what it could do...” He paused, shaking his head slowly. “He hoped they would never use it.”
“Did they?”
Mr. Carrow nodded, his eyes strained with deep regret.
“The work he did haunted him for the rest of his life. They called him the father of the atomic bomb. He felt responsible for fundamentally changing humanity until the very end, incapable of forgiving himself. Even his last words, from the Bhagavad Gita, spoke of great regret—’Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. ’”
“Was he the one who launched it?”
“Doesn’t matter. He made it real for them. His mind,” he said, tapping his temple. “gave them the tools for absolute devastation. It wasn’t long before other countries reproduced his design.”
Mr. Carrow’s gaze drifted to the bed, then back to Jack, his eyes intensely sad. “Intellectuals that use their knowledge to advance monsters are just as responsible for the evil they spread.”
Jack didn’t understand why Mr. Carrow was telling him this.
His tutor’s pale eyes searched his face. “Sometimes, Jack, the bravest thing a man can do is refuse. Even if it costs him everything.”
There was never a quiz on Oppenheimer and after that morning, Mr. Carrow never brought up the scientist again. And as the winter months dragged on, Jack forgot all about it.
It had been an English spring that year, truly polarized by a battle to bloom while frost continued to freeze the ground. The chancellor insisted Jack spend his fourteenth birthday at the estate.
“You’re getting older now,” the chancellor had said. “Fourteen. Soon you’ll be a man. It’s time you started to make some connections.”
Jack’s mother never made any mention of doing anything for his birthday, so he didn’t fuss about extending his stay.
The morning of his birthday, he woke to servants bustling in the hallway, their footsteps more hurried than usual, their voices carrying an edge of anxiety that meant the chancellor was in one of his moods.
When Jack descended the grand staircase, he found the entrance hall transformed. Streamers in gold and red cascaded from the chandeliers. A banner stretched across the marble foyer, in elaborate gold script that read, ‘Happy Birthday, Jackie!’
He had never seen anything so spectacular in his life. Not for him.
“There he is! The man of the hour!” The chancellor stood before a table laden with wrapped packages, arms spread wide.
Jack froze on the bottom step. In eight years, the chancellor had never acknowledged his birthday. Not once. Seeing such fanfare made him nervous.
“Come, come.” The chancellor beckoned with fat fingers, his signet ring catching the light. “It’s all for you, Jackie boy. All yours!”
Even at fourteen, Jack knew transactional men like the chancellor didn’t make grand gestures without a motive. He’d want payment in return. For that reason alone, the elaborate scale of gifts and decor terrified him.
Cautiously, he crossed the foyer.
Marco stood near the wall with his usual defeated posture, but beside him stood a small boy. Dark-haired. Perhaps ten years old, with similar features to Marco. Was this his son? Why was he there?
“Fourteen years old,” the chancellor repeated, clamping a fat hand on Jack’s shoulder and steering him toward the table.
The familiar weight of his touch sent ice through Jack’s veins. But he’d learned long ago not to flinch.
“Can you believe it, son? I remember when you were just a scrawny little thing. Look at you now—practically a man!”
The assembled staff offered a wave of wobbly, hollow grins, formed for performance in order to avoid backlash.
“I’ve invited Thomas to celebrate with you,” the chancellor gestured toward Marco’s son.
“Marco, bring the boy over. Let them get acquainted.” He grinned at Thomas.
“Later, Jack can show you some of his toys. You wouldn’t believe how good Jackie has it here.
Don’t you, Jackie boy? All the best toys and games a kid could dream of. ”
Marco’s face faded like old cheese. He placed a trembling hand on his son’s shoulder and guided him forward. “Say hello, Thomas.”
“Hello.” The words came out flat.
Jack didn’t know how to be a child with another child, or play with other kids. He wasn’t even sure Thomas was there for him.
He frowned at the inexplicable instinct screaming that Marco’s kid was a threat. As soon as he acknowledged that he might actually be jealous, he wanted to throw up. This place was a palace of nightmares. A prison where innocence came to die.
But it was also his sanctuary. He had books and heat and warm clothing and time with Mr. Carrow and he was not letting some little shit take that away from him.
Lifting his chin, Jack paid the boy no mind.
He could hate himself later for ruining his one chance at possibly making a friend.
In that moment, he only cared about protecting his things.
They were his things. His toys. His books.
His prison. He gave his soul and more to earn them.
And his acceptance of such bribes had warped him in ways there would be no fixing now.
“Presents first!” the chancellor boomed. “Open this one, Jackie.”
The box required two hands to hold. The gold paper crinkled beneath his fingers. It was the first time anyone had ever given him a gift like this.
“Go on. Tear it open!”
He ripped through the thick, metallic paper, revealing a box. The lid slid off with a soft swoosh. Nestled in the tissue paper lay a leather-bound, first edition that greeted his inspection with the musty-sweet smell of aged pages and time.
“Dell’arte della guerra.” Jack read, cocking his head. “Italian?”
“Did I not say he was smart? The Art of War, by Niccolò Machiavelli. It’s a collector’s piece. A first edition, published back in the fifteen hundreds.”
Mr. Carrow had taught him a little about the shrewd, calculating man named Machiavelli who would deceive anyone to achieve his goals.
Snatching the book with little regard for the tattered pages and aged binding, the chancellor waved it in the air. “Every influential man has a library full of books about power.”
Jack honestly preferred authors like Fitzgerald who created worlds for underdogs like Gatsby, but he appreciated the gift all the same.
“Now, you have something proper for your collection. Not just those dusty old fairytales and boring texts Carrow keeps dragging in.”
“Thank you, Chancellor.”
“That’s my boy.” His hand found his shoulder again, squeezed. “Like a son to me, this one. Made you into a fine young man, didn’t I?”
Mumbles of dubious agreement murmured from the onlookers.
“A toast!” The chancellor lifted a crystal glass, though no one else had been served. “To Jackie. Fourteen and more impressive than anyone would have predicted. From a young sprout to a young man.”
The room echoed the toast, “To Jackie.”
Marco cleared his throat. A small cough, barely audible, the kind of involuntary noise that escapes when saliva goes down wrong. But the chancellor’s head swiveled toward his advisor with the sudden, predatory focus of a hawk spotting a fieldmouse miles below.
“Something to say, Marco?”
“No, Chancellor.” He cleared his throat. “Nothing. Just—wrong pipe.” He coughed again, glancing sideways.
The chancellor set down his glass with a deliberate click, warmth draining from his ruddy face. “Did my toast offend you?”
“I didn’t mean any disrespect—”
“Then why did you interrupt?”
“Sir…” Marco looked up at him, confused by the sudden show of hostility but not surprised. “I coughed.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot, Marco?”
“No, sir.”
“If you don’t want to be here to celebrate Jackie’s special day, maybe you should leave.
” The transformation was instant. One moment, he had been the benevolent patriarch, dispensing gifts and affection.
The next, he was back to being a cruel force of nature, feeding on the fear of others as it rippled through the room.
“Chancellor, please—” Marco’s voice cracked. “My son—”