The Scullery Boy at Harrowick

About this book:

Fourteen-year-old Arthur Finch doesn't attend Harrowick School—he survives it. By day, he's a scholarship boy parsing Xenophon in a frozen classroom, his fingers still stinging from lye and mutton fat. By dawn, he's in the basement scullery, scouring thirty-gallon cauldrons before the bell rings for chapel, where the sons of baronets and coal-owners pray beneath brass candlesticks he polished with his own spit. The school's founder made his fortune in slave ships; its Bursar deducts soda-ash from Arthur's mother's five shillings; its Senior Prefect threatens five cuts of the cane for the crime of smelling like the kitchen that feeds them all.

But Arthur sees what the gentlemen miss. He reads the school in the rhythm of boots on flagstones, the politics of coal-dust, the secrets rising through flue and drain. When a prefect's cane taps a grease-stained sleeve, when a Bursar's ledger conceals more than soda-ash prices, when a spider crosses frozen mortar toward a warm crack behind the wainscot—Arthur understands the geometry of survival. He carries his father's advice in a second-hand Latin primer: *Keep it clean and it will keep thee.* The problem is, Harrowick's walls are rotting with things that won't stay buried, and the boy who scrubs the pots may be the only one who knows where the bodies are hidden.

Atmospheric, razor-sharp, and steeped in the smell of coal smoke and old limestone, *The Scullery Boy at Harrowick* is a literary historical mystery that turns the boarding-school novel inside out. For readers who loved the class warfare of *The Secret History* and the gritty period immersion of *The Essex Serpent*, here is a protagonist who doesn't just navigate the corridors of power—he scrubs them, and finds the cracks where the truth leaks through.