Beswitched (19 page)

Dulcie and Pogo grinned at Flora and Dulcie mouthed, “Well done!”

Pete stiffened with anger and bit her lower lip. Flora tried to catch her eye, but Pete refused to look in her direction. At the end of the class she scraped back her chair and flounced out ahead of everyone else. Flora and the others found her glowering in the corner of the common room.

“We’re honored,” she sneered. “The star actress has deigned to join us! The great Flora Fox!”

“Pete,” Dulcie said solemnly, “don’t be mean to Flora just because you’re jealous.”

“Jealous? Of course I’m not jealous—she’s welcome to
wear a carpenter’s hat and apron and make a fool of herself in front of the whole school! But I’m very angry with Miss Palmer, and I might have to tell my people to complain about her—choosing that babyish poem! And she said she was considering ME!”

Pogo sighed and rolled her eyes. “Oh, Pete—she didn’t say that! You ASKED her to consider you, and she told you she might. But you didn’t really think she’d allow you to do ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ did you?”

“It’s my father’s favorite poem,” Pete said fiercely. “And she said my recitation was a great success!”

“Only because we all laughed so much,” Dulcie said. “And it’s not a poem you’re supposed to laugh at—not when it’s about a lot of soldiers dying.”

Flora was grateful that Pogo and Dulcie were sticking up for her. Pete’s sudden anger was horrible.

“She should’ve given ME something to do in the display!” hissed Pete. “My mother and father are coming all the way from London for Speech Day—and Flora’s people aren’t even here!” She turned angrily to Flora. “You should’ve refused!”

“Don’t be a chump,” Pogo said. “Why should she? I’ve said it before, Pete—you’re an utter monster when your royal nose is out of joint.”

The table beside the window was empty. Pogo went to bag it, and calmly took out her prep. Whatever she was feeling inside, she was not a person to lose her cool. Flora wished she could be cool. When Dulcie had joined Pogo at the table, she lingered beside Pete.

“Look …” What on earth could she say? “Sorry I got chosen.”

“Oh, don’t APOLOGIZE!” huffed Pete. “Hadn’t you better go and sit with the friends you STOLE from me?”

“Pete—”

“Ah, Flora.” Consuela Carver was beside them. She gave Flora a superior smile. “How delightful that we’ll be reciting together at Speech Day! Poor Pete—but you can see why she couldn’t choose you.”

Pete stood up and scowled into the Carver’s face. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, you lollop about, and you look like such a tomboy—hardly an ornament to the school!”

Pete’s face and neck turned deep red. “At least my people care about me,” she said. “At least they love me enough to come to Speech Day—at least they’re not DIVORCED!”

“Pete!” Flora was horrified—this was incredibly mean. Who had told Pete? She didn’t want the Carver to think she had broken her promise.

Consuela choked something that sounded like “Beast!”

She swung her satchel and hit Pete hard on the head—it made a sickening thud, knocking Pete to the floor.

Every other girl in the room was suddenly silent, staring in amazement. After a dazed moment of rubbing her head, Pete scrambled to her feet and smacked Consuela’s face.

“Don’t!” Flora cried.

Pete and the Carver were fighting for real now—scratching and kicking and hair-pulling. Flora and a couple
of other girls nearby tried to pull them apart, but the flying fists drove them back. More girls stepped in, grabbing any bit of the fighters they could get hold of, and this made them fight harder. The common room was a pandemonium of shouts and shrieks.

The door opened with a crash. The small, shriveled figure of Miss Harbottle stood in the doorway. The girls were all quiet now. Consuela and Pete allowed the other girls to pull them apart. The sleeve of Pete’s blouse was torn. Consuela’s nose was bleeding.

In deathly silence, Harbottle stomped into the middle of the room. She was furious.

“I have NEVER seen anything so DISGRACEFUL! Fighting like a pair of GUTTERSNIPES! It’s enough to make Miss Beak turn in her grave!” She scowled at the two girls. “Someone give the Carver gel a handkerchief.”

Flora, standing nearest, fished her hanky from her knicker leg and gave it to Consuela.

“YOU, Miss Carver!” snapped Harbottle. “Why do I find YOU at the center of every drama, I wonder? Someone tell me what happened.” The beady little eyes traveled round the roomful of quailing girls. “Cecilia Lawrence!”

Pogo was still at the table beside the window. “Yes, Miss Harbottle.”

“Who provoked this revolting exhibition?”

“I—I didn’t really see all of it.”

“Tell me what you DID see!”

“I saw Consuela hit Pete—Daphne.”

Harbottle turned fiercely back to Consuela. “Is this true?”

Consuela dabbed at her bleeding nose with Flora’s handkerchief. “Yes.”

“Would you care to tell me WHY?”

She was pale. “No, Miss Harbottle.”

“I see. You attacked Daphne for no reason at all.”

“Yes,” said Consuela. “No.”

Harbottle’s wrinkles folded into a scowl. “This is RIDICULOUS. Either you had a reason, or you did not.”

“She did,” Flora couldn’t help saying—she was still shocked by Pete’s nastiness. “Pete said something.”

There were gasps, and someone let out a nervous giggle.

“Well, well, well,” croaked Harbottle, “the barrack-room lawyer speaks again! Can you tell me what was said?”

Pete was glaring at Flora—and so was Consuela. Neither of them wanted her to say it.

Flora said, “No, I can’t. But it was a really good reason to hit someone.”

“Hmm,” said Harbottle. “I am inclined to take your word for it. Daphne and Consuela, you are both at fault, and you will both report to me after tea.” She walked out of the hushed room, slamming the door behind her.

A little cautious talking broke out. Everyone moved away from Flora, Pete and Consuela.

Pete gave Flora a murderous look, and flounced away to the table by the window.

Consuela also gave her a murderous look. “I suppose YOU told her!”

I can’t win
, Flora thought.

She was shaken. In a few short minutes, the whole
atmosphere of the day had turned poisonous. Pete suddenly hated her, and being on the wrong side of Pete was horrible.

“You’re an ungrateful beast, Flora Fox! I’ve done everything for you! How DARE you stick up for the Carver? A fine friend you are!” Pete exploded as soon as they got to the bedroom. “Thanks to you I got a ton of extra prep from Harbottle—and a double pony! My only consolation is that you’ll look IDIOTIC at Speech Day and make a complete bish of it!”

Pogo said, “Stop it. She was only telling the truth.”

“Look, I don’t like Consuela any more than you do,” Flora said, “but you shouldn’t have been such a cow to her—no wonder she decked you! And if she got blamed for starting the fight, it just wouldn’t be fair!”

“Talk to the hand, kitchenmaid!” snapped Pete. “Because the face is NEVER SPEAKING TO YOU EVER AGAIN!” She pulled the curtains of her cubicle shut, so violently that several of the rings broke.

“Oh dear,” said Dulcie. “It doesn’t look as if she’s going to come round this time.”

Pogo was very thoughtful. She looked sharply from the curtained bed to Flora, as if making up her mind. “You’re right. It wouldn’t have been fair not to speak up for the Carver. I don’t know about you two, but I don’t much like Miss Peterson at the moment. In my humble opinion, Miss Peterson is a conceited ass!”

They all went to bed in very low spirits. Flora lay awake
in the shadows for ages. She had lost another best friend. First Ella, now Pete.

But last time it was my fault
, she thought,
and this time it’s not. How can I make it right again?

She drifted into sorrowful sleep, and had a very strange dream.

A voice was calling her name. It rang out through the silent, sleeping school. “
Flora
!
Flora
!”

She dreamed that she got out of bed and went down the great staircase to the hall.

“
Flora
!” The voice was cross and crabby, and vaguely familiar.

Someone was waiting for her beside the fireplace, under the portrait of Dame Mildred Beak. This person was wearing school uniform, but she had her back turned, and Flora couldn’t see who it was. She walked towards her uncertainly.

The figure suddenly whipped round, and Flora gasped, “Granny!”

The gymslip looked grotesque on Granny’s stooped old body. She glared haughtily at Flora, just as she had done last summer in Italy.

From above the fireplace came a rumbling sound, like low thunder. The portrait of Dame Mildred slowly turned its head and gazed down at them.

In a distant, echoing voice, Dame Mildred said, “If you two cannot be friends, you will never know.”

“Know what?” Flora asked.

But the bell rang and woke her, before the old sorceress could explain.

17
Hare and Hounds

N
obody could keep up a sulk like Pete. Two whole weeks after the fight with Consuela, she was still refusing to speak to Flora. She was also refusing to speak to Pogo and Dulcie, which made the bedroom very uncomfortable. Normally, when Pete was in one of her moods, Pogo said, “Ignore her. She’ll come round.” This time, however, she wasn’t so forgiving. She had told Pete she was a conceited ass, and she was sticking to it.

“It’s time she learned the difference between right and wrong,” she told Flora sharply. “She refuses to see why what she said to Consuela went beyond the limit. She won’t admit that it was—well—cruel. She’s too lazy to look at another
person’s point of view.” She added, “I wrote to Neville for his opinion—not naming names, but I bet he knew whom I meant—and that’s what he said. He said she’s like people who prefer to think the poor are careless, so they don’t have to think about why poverty exists.”

They were talking while they changed for games. This afternoon, the lower school was to play something called hare and hounds, which involved cross-country running. The girls gathered on the patch of gravel at the front of the school. Miss Gatling, the games teacher (a strapping woman, with bad cellulite on her upper arms), organized them into two groups and handed out red and blue sashes.

“Pay attention, girls. The reds are hares, and the rest of you are hounds. The hares will have a ten-minute start. They will leave a paper trail, and the hounds must try to catch them before they reach the finishing point, which is the village post office.”

Pete and Pogo, both fast runners, were hares. Flora and Dulcie were among the crowd of hounds.

“I don’t much like this game,” Dulcie confessed. “There’s so much mud, and you get so tired. And I wish it wasn’t raining.”

“It’s not raining hard,” Flora said. She was rather looking forward to roaming through the countryside without a teacher breathing down her neck. She missed the freedom they’d had at Merrythorpe. And she also missed her light, soft trainers—they would have made a cross-country run so much easier.

“One more thing!” called Miss Gatling. “You may go
anywhere inside the designated area—but Compton Wood is out of bounds. There’s been a landslip at the old quarry, and the farmer says it isn’t safe. You’ll have to skirt round it. And latecomers lose team points—so no slacking!”

The hares, with their big bags of paper slung over their shoulders, lined up on the path. Miss Gatling blew her whistle, and they dashed away along the drive. Ten minutes later, the whistle blew again, and the crowd of hounds ran after them.

Flora ran as fast as she could, but she and Dulcie soon fell behind the faster girls. When the trail left the road and veered off through coppices and fields, they had a hard time keeping up. Dulcie eventually collapsed on a stone wall. “I can’t walk another step, let alone run. And we haven’t seen a single scrap of paper—where are all the others?”

Flora knew the countryside immediately around St. Winifred’s from all the nature rambles and botany field trips they had done this term. “They’ll have to go over Crow Hill, since we can’t take the shortcut through the wood. Come on, Dulcie—we’ll get left behind!”