Nine Days: Chapter 5: Francis Summary & Analysis

In the middle of the night, Francis imagines himself to be Lamont Cranston, a well-trained spy, as he sneaks out of his shared room with Kip. He creeps down the hallway, imagining he’s crawling down the stone corridor of an enemy fortress, until he sees the kitchen and the cakes on the table. Friends and neighbors have been sending cakes to their house nonstop for the three days since the funeral. All they have to eat are cakes. Francis walks into the kitchen and sees the chair where his father used to sit. He crawls under the table and remembers how he and Kip used to hide under there together and poke at their father’s ankles until he dragged them out giggling. Now 13 years old, he can barely fit under the table alone. He wishes his father’s legs were still there in front of him.

In the morning, everyone rises before Francis and he finds them all sitting at the table, as if it were a normal day. His father would be leaving for work about this time. Jean tells him to sit down and eat some cake before they “drown” in it. Jean can tell that Francis wants to speak. She badgers him until he manages to ask what they’ll do for money. Kip is enraged, since their father has not even been dead a week yet, but Jean hits both of them hard. She announces that she’ll take a job as a housemaid, and Connie will quit art school so she can tend to their new boarder, Mrs. Keith. Kip asks if they all shouldn’t quit school to work, but Jean stubbornly refuses and claims it wouldn’t be “respectable.”

Francis knows this will be the hardest day, harder than the funeral even, since it will be his first day back to school and he’ll have to face the sympathy of his classmates and teachers. Jean tells Francis that Kip already left for school, and he races out the door to try to keep up. Instead of catching Kip, Francis runs into Pike, Cray, and Mac. They have a bad reputation and are all much bigger than Francis, but Pike puts an arm around him before he can escape. Francis expects he’ll be beaten up, but instead Pike tells him that they want him to run with their gang, they’ve got a job they could use him for, a plan that involves doing yard work for old ladies. Francis agrees, and Pike tells him they’ll meet again right after school, and warns Francis not to tell anyone else about this.

Francis leaves them and proudly imagines himself as part of the “toughest gang in Richmond,” wielding power over others rather than being beaten up. He goes to find Kip before school starts, finding him sitting alone on the floor in the library. Kip talks about how the coroner slit their father’s coat up the back to get his body into for the funeral, and about how guilty he feels that on the last morning their father was alive, he didn’t say goodbye to him because he was busy reading a book. When the school bell rings for their first class, Francis tells Kip they need to get moving, but Kip doesn’t budge. He’s decided he’s not going back to school, he’s going to find a job, even though Jean will be furious. School seems meaningless when their father is dead. Kip leaves, abandoning his schoolbag.

Kip isn’t in school for the rest of the day, but Francis hopes he’ll change his mind after a few days. After school, he goes to meet the gang again, and he’s thankful for the excuse to be anywhere but home. Pike, Mac, and Cray show Francis how to jump on the back of a tram after it’s already rolling away so they don’t have to pay, and though Francis is nervous—it’s the exact way his father died—he decides he’s going with them. He doesn’t want to walk away from his life like Kip did. Terrified, he makes the jump. They ride for a while and get off to switch trams, but the next tram’s conductor is watching them closely, so they decide to just pay the ticket price like everyone else.

The boys get off the tram in Hawthorn, a wealthier district of Melbourne, and tell Francis that they’ve arranged to do some yard work for an old woman, but that while she’s out in the yard with them, Francis is going to sneak into her house and steal whatever he can find. Pike warns Francis not to disappoint them. Francis agrees, proud to have this special role in the group.

Once the boys have started helping the old woman weed her garden, Francis sneaks into her house, imagining himself again as Lamont Cranston infiltrating an evil villain’s fortress, rather than a young boy robbing an old woman. He searches through her kitchen, looking for cash, but finds nothing. He moves into her bedroom and starts rifling her drawers, but as he’s in there he hears the old woman stomping back into the house, followed by the three boys shouting. One of them pulled up a flower instead of a weed and she’s firing them already.

Francis finds a handful of shillings in a purse, which he pockets, and finds a red velvet pouch under her mattress, which he slips down his sock. Francis tries to slip out while the boys distract the old woman, but she spies Francis in the hallway, standing behind Pike. However, in her old age she does not realize that are four boys in her house now instead of three. In his head, Francis swears that if he survives, he’ll become the most upstanding person in the world and take all the responsibility for the family. The old woman demands money for damages to her garden, and Francis hands her the shillings he stole from her purse, and she lets them all leave.

When they’ve made it to safety, the other boys are furious at Francis for handing over the shillings, even though it saved them. They beat him up and tell him he’s out of the gang, warning him never to tell a soul about the attempted robbery. After they leave, Francis remembers the pouch he put in his sock, and retrieving it, opens it to find an amethyst pendant.