Beswitched (7 page)

“I nearly forgot,” Pogo muttered, “breakfast is in French.”

“It’s—what?”

“Shh! We’re supposed to keep quiet till after Peepy’s said the prayer. And then we have to speak in French.”

“Why?”

“Never mind why!” They were approaching the dining hall, and Pogo lowered her voice. “It’s simply one of the rules.”

“Well, it’s a silly rule,” Flora said. “What’s the point, when we all speak perfectly good English?”

“Shhhh!” hissed Pogo and Dulcie.

As they entered the dining room, all the girls became eerily silent—Flora had never known an entire school could be this quiet. It wasn’t natural. And making them speak French—that was child abuse.

The hall was big and drafty, like a church. Hundreds of girls stood in silent lines at the four long tables. The breakfast now smelled of wet socks. At one end of the hall was a raised table, where the teachers stood, also in silence. The headmistress stomped royally to the center of the top table. She said something that Flora thought might be Latin.
Everyone murmured, “Amen.” Then Miss Powers-Prout said something that sounded like “
Bonjour memzel, assayer voo
.” There was an explosion of chairs scraping as everyone sat down.

A bit of talking broke out round the table, but Flora, despite several years of French lessons and two holidays in France, couldn’t remember a word of French, except “
Coca-Cola, s’il vous plaît
” (and “
Pas devant les enfants
,” which was what Dad said to Granny when she started on about her husbands). She looked down at her breakfast. There was a pale, scummy cup of tea, a slice of white bread and butter and a bowl of slimy porridge.

“Yuck,” she said, “what a carb-fest! Don’t they know anything about healthy eating? At home I have mangoes and nectarines, and sometimes a croissant—” She broke off. The whole table had gone quiet, and they were all staring at her. Consuela Carver sat opposite. She giggled nastily. Flora’s face burned.

“Flora,” Virginia Denning said, from the end of the table, “
eel fo parlay fransay
.”

“
Elle ay tray stoopeed, nez par
?” sneered the yellow-haired girl.

Flora understood “stoopeed.” She decided she hated the Carver, and she absolutely knew it after breakfast, when everyone was surging out into the hall, and the cow brushed past her, saying loudly, “At home I have mangoes and nectarines—and a nice hot curry!”

“Beast!” muttered Pete. “Take no notice.”

Flora was still stinging from the “stoopeed” crack. “You
three are supposed to be looking after me,” she snapped. “So you’d better keep her out of my way. ”

The three girls looked at each other uneasily.

Pogo said, “That might be tricky.”

“I don’t care how tricky it is! Let me remind you, I didn’t ask to come here, and I refuse to spend my time being bullied by someone from the past who isn’t even real!”

“Of course this is real!” cried Pete. “You’re the one who’s not real!”

“I am real! I belong in the twenty-first century and you three are just—just—shadows!”

“Shadows?” Pete scowled. Her gaze locked with Flora’s, and the two girls glared at each other. Pete was revving up for an argument. “You’re the shadowy one—when you appeared at the summoning, we could see right through you!”

Flora was annoyed. “I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but the fact is that everything that happens to you has happened already—what you think of as now is really then—so you are sort of shadows, aren’t you?”

“This is a shadow, is it?” Pete pinched Flora’s arm.

“Ow!” Flora gasped. “That really hurt!”

“So I’m real after all, am I?”

“Don’t!” Dulcie blurted out.

“Stow it, Pete,” Pogo said quietly. “You can’t fight with Flora. We got her into this mess, and we’re honor-bound to get her out of it. That’s all there is to it.”

Pete lifted her head proudly and pressed her lips together. After a short silence, she muttered, “Sorry.”

She was not sorry. Flora rubbed her arm angrily. Her chest
felt tight, and she was afraid she might cry. Pete could be horrible. Why didn’t Dulcie and Pogo stand up to her more?

Dulcie took her hand again. “We have to go back upstairs now. We have fifteen minutes to make our beds and then it’s assembly. Come on.”

Despite having all these servants, the school expected them to make their own beds. This wasn’t easy, with all the sheets and blankets, and the slippery “eiderdown” that looked like a duvet but wasn’t. Flora could not make it all look tidy. She gave up halfway through, and waited for Dulcie and Pogo to finish the job. Pete did not lift a finger to help—but she was struggling with her own bed, which was like a heap of washing. In the end, Dulcie and Pogo did all the work.

After this, Flora was taken down to assembly, which happened in a huge room across the hall from the place where they had breakfast. The entire school filed in silently, and sat in rows of hard chairs. Old Peepy read something from the Bible, and made an announcement about a nature ramble the following week. They sang a hymn called “Come Down, O Love Divine.” A thin lady with clip-on glasses played the piano.

It was quieter and more boring than assemblies at APS. Otherwise, it wasn’t too dramatically different, and Flora felt a little calmer. She was sorry now that she had fought with Pete. For some reason, she wanted this awful, headstrong girl to like her.

It was partly my fault
, she thought.
I didn’t have to call her a shadow
.

Before she had a chance to patch things up with Pete, however, Virginia Denning came up to them.

“Morning, maggot.”

A crowd of girls—now chattering just as loudly as any girls at a modern school—milled around in the hall, under the forbidding portrait of Dame Mildred Beak.

Flora said, “Hi, Virginia—I mean, hello.”

The older girl’s green eyes were friendly. “I hope you’re settling in.”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Someone should’ve warned you about the French.”

“We did,” Pogo said.

“She didn’t listen,” said Pete.

“Hmmm, well, never mind. I’ve come to march you off to Matron—you three can scoot.”

“But …,” Flora began. She looked helplessly at Dulcie, Pogo and Pete. She hadn’t expected to be left alone, and she wasn’t sure she could cope.

Dulcie quickly patted her arm. “Don’t worry. Matron’s a darling.”

“Pete,” Virginia said, “your tie is at half-mast. Has someone died?”

“I’ve lost the top button of my blouse. And my collar keeps coming open and the knot keeps slipping.”

“You’d better sew the button back at first break, or Harbottle will have the vapors. Come along, Flora.”

Reluctantly, Flora followed her, feeling small and nervous without her three guardians. Virginia handed her over to a short, round woman with a puff of gray hair under a starched
white cap. Matron had a strong Scottish accent. She wore a very stiff white apron, and had gold-rimmed glasses on a long chain. Her room smelled exactly like the medical room at APS.

Flora wondered if there was any way a trained nurse could spot that she was from the future. All Matron said, however, was that Flora was “a wee bit thin.”

“Thanks,” Flora said.

Matron did not hear this. “Never mind. We’ll soon fatten you up.”

She made Flora take a spoonful of “tonic” that tasted disgusting. Flora did not want to be “fattened.” Wasn’t it good to be thin? How ghastly if this stuff worked, and she was fat when she got back to her own time.

The horrid taste of the tonic lingered in her mouth as she followed Matron back to the bedroom to unpack her boxes—or rather, the other Flora’s boxes. This was interesting. Once you got past the piles of vests and knickers, the other Flora owned some nice things. She liked the heavy fountain pen, and the writing case made of soft red leather. She also liked the small, rolled-up leather case full of needles and threads and stuff for sewing. Matron said it was called a hussif.

“And a very good one it is, too,” she said approvingly. “You’ll be mending your own clothes while you’re here.” She pointed to a hole that had somehow appeared in Flora’s stocking. “You can start with this—I expect you to show me a beautiful darn.”

Flora made a mental note to ask the others what a darn was.

“Now, put your writing things in your satchel.”

The satchel was made of brown leather. This was how she would carry her stuff around the school—like the backpack she took to APS.

When the unpacking was finished, Matron took Flora to her form room. “In you go, dear.” And she trotted away.

Flora took several deep breaths and pushed open the door.

Twenty heads turned round. Twenty pairs of eyes stared at her. Her head swam. She searched for her three friends, and the first face she made out belonged to horrible, sneering Consuela Carver. Like many class cows, the Carver was the first person you saw because she was—in an evil sort of way—very pretty, with her bright golden curls and big blue eyes. The expression in those eyes made Flora feel slightly sick.

Miss Bradley—with a black gown over her tweed suit—was at the front of the class. “Ah, the new girl—come here, dear.”

It wasn’t a big room, but the walk up to Miss Bradley seemed to take ages.

“Girls, this is Flora Fox. She’s come all the way from India, and I hope you’ll do your best to make her feel welcome. Yours is the desk next to Dulcie’s.”

It was comforting to see Dulcie’s kind pink face. Flora sat down at the vacant desk beside her. It was the old-fashioned sort of school desk with a sloping lid. It had a few spots of ink, but nobody had written anything on it. At APS she shared a table with Yasmin, Jessica and Kylie.

On the veranda at home, there was an old card table with a green
baize top, and Fritz the monkey perched on the top step, chattering to himself and daintily eating a banana. They had to stop lessons when the sun was too hot and the sweat dripped off the ends of their pigtails
.

If only the other Flora would leave her alone—fighting off her memories was exhausting. It took all her effort, and she couldn’t think straight.

“You catch us in the middle of our history lesson,” Miss Bradley said. “We’re learning about the campaigns of the Duke of Marlborough.” On the blackboard behind her was written: “Blenheim—Ramillies—Oudenarde—Malplaquet.” It was all gobbledegook to Flora. Blackboards were yet another weird thing. When Miss Bradley wrote something, the chalk squeaked unpleasantly, and when she banged the felt board-rubber it puffed out white clouds of dust.

Miss Bradley caught her bewilderment. “Don’t worry, it’s all in the book. You can read the chapter for your prep tonight. What were you studying at home?”

“The Saxons,” Flora said. “And something about the Corn Laws.”

There were scattered giggles. Miss Bradley’s lips twitched, as if she were trying not to smile. “Something? That they were repealed, for instance?”

“I—I don’t know.” The heat rushed back into Flora’s face. The Corn Laws had come from the memories of the other Flora. She made an effort to remember her last history lesson with Ms. Stuart at APS. “We made a Saxon castle, out of cardboard.”

More giggles. It was so frustrating—they all thought she was completely thick, and didn’t realize her brain was split between two centuries.

“And—and we were going to do a project about the Second World War.”

After a second of astonished silence, the whole class erupted into shrieks of laughter. Consuela Carver was in absolute hysterics, and so were Pete and Dulcie and Miss Bradley.

The only person not laughing was Pogo, who was staring at her with a mixture of fascination and alarm. Flora suddenly remembered that the Second World War hadn’t happened yet. It wasn’t due to start for another four years—she was pretty sure it started in 1939, because they had a mug at home with the dates on.

This was so embarrassing. She wanted to disappear. Everything she knew was jumbled up with everything the other Flora knew, until she didn’t know which was which. And the frightening thing was that when she tried to concentrate on the future, she felt her memories of the twenty-first century rolling about chaotically, like beads from a broken necklace.

“All right, simmer down, everyone!” Miss Bradley was still chuckling. “I’m glad to say there has been only one world war, Flora, and nobody’s in a hurry to repeat the experience!”

The laughing stopped, and Miss Bradley began to talk about battles. She wrote some dates on the blackboard. Flora wrote them down in the notebook she had found in her
satchel, because this was what everyone else was doing, but she was thinking about what she had blurted out just now. There was a big difference between knowing a war had happened in the past and knowing one was about to happen in the future. If she did not get home to the future, she would see it.

7
Harbottle