Excerpt from In Memoriam by Alice Winn, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Don't be daft."

Ellwood laughed a little unhappily.

"I'm sad about Roseveare and Cuthbert-Smith too, you know," he said.

"Oh, yes," said Gaunt. "And Straker. Remember how you two used to tie the younger boys to chairs and beat them all night?"

It had been years since Ellwood bullied anyone, but Gaunt knew he was still ashamed of the vein of ungovernable violence that burnt through him. Just last term, Gaunt had seen him cry tears of rage when he lost a cricket match. Gaunt hadn't cried since he was nine.

"Straker and I were much less rotten than the boys in the year above were to us," said Ellwood, his face red. "Charlie Pritchard shot us with rifle blanks."

Gaunt smirked, conscious that he was taunting Ellwood because he felt he had embarrassed himself by touching his hair. It was the sort of thing Ellwood did to other boys all the time, he reasoned with himself. Yes, a voice answered. But never to him.

"I wasn't close with Straker, anyway," said Ellwood. "He was a brute."

"All your friends are brutes, Ellwood."

"I'm tired of all this." Ellwood stood. "Let's go for a walk."

They were forbidden to leave their rooms during prep, so they had to slip quietly out of Cemetery House. They crept down the back stairs, past the study where their housemaster, Mr. Hammick, was berating a Shell boy for sneaking. (Preshute was a younger public school, and eagerly used the terminology of older, more prestigious institutions: Shell for first year, Remove for second, Hundreds for third, followed by Lower and Upper Sixth.)

"It is a low and dishonourable thing, Gosset. Do you wish to be low and dishonourable?"

"No, sir," whimpered the unfortunate Gosset.

"Poor chap," said Ellwood when they had shut the back door behind them. They walked down the gravel path into the graveyard that gave Cemetery House its name. "The Shell have been perfectly beastly to him, just because he told them all on his first day that he was a duke."

"Is he?" asked Gaunt, skimming the tops of tombstones with his fingertips as he walked.

"Yes, he is, but that's the sort of thing one ought to let people discover. It's rather like me introducing myself by saying, 'Hello, I'm Sidney Ellwood, I'm devastatingly attractive.' It's not for me to say."

"If you're waiting for me to confirm your vanity—"

"I wouldn't dream of it," said Ellwood with a cheery little skip. "I haven't had a compliment from you in about three months. I know, because I always write them down and put them in a drawer."

"Peacock."

"Well, the point is, Gosset has been thoroughly sat on by the rest of his form, and I feel awfully sorry for him."

They were coming to the crumbling Old Priory at the bottom of the graveyard. It was getting colder and wetter as night fell. The sky darkened to navy blue, and in the wind their tailcoats billowed. Gaunt hugged his arms around himself. There was something expectant about winter evenings at Preshute. It was the contrast, perhaps, between the hulking hills behind the school, the black forest, the windswept meadows, all so silent—and the crackling loudness of the boys when you returned to House. Walking through the empty fields, they might have been the only people left alive. Ellwood lived in a grand country estate in East Sussex, but Gaunt had grown up in London. Silence was distinctly magical.

"Listen," said Ellwood, closing his eyes and tilting up his face. "Can't you just imagine the Romans thrashing the Celts if you're quiet?"

They stopped.

Gaunt couldn't imagine anything through the silence.

"Do you believe in magic?" he asked. Ellwood paused for a while, so long that if he had been anyone else, Gaunt might have repeated the question.

"I believe in beauty," said Ellwood, finally.

"Yes," said Gaunt, fervently. "Me too." He wondered what it was like to be someone like Ellwood, who contributed to the beauty of a place, rather than blighting it.

Excerpted from In Memoriam by Alice Winn. Copyright © 2023 by Alice Winn. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.