The Glass Bird Girl (3 page)

Beware the Sideways Move

E
die sat in the car dressed in her stiff new clothes, with her trunk stowed on the back seat. The school uniform – brown tunic, yellow shirts, brown overpants (
Overpants!
Edie had thought, wrinkling her nose in disgust) and grey tights – had arrived in a series of brown paper parcels, each one to Edie's mind containing something even more frumpy than the last. Everything had been unpacked and sorted by Cousin Charles's silent Spanish maid. Her handkerchiefs had been counted and ironed; name tapes had been sewn into her socks; even her tuck box had been neatly engraved with her initials. And yet Edie felt ill-prepared.

‘Remember, Edith, you're not going to Knight's Haddon as an ordinary schoolgirl,' said Cousin Charles, hooting at a cyclist on Hyde Park Corner.

‘I know that. I'm not a schoolgirl, I'm a spy,' Edie said, rehearsing her brief.

‘That is one way of seeing it,' Charles replied, smiling.

‘But you said—'

‘You are a spy, but you are also Anastasia's servant. It is the prince, you would do well to remember, who is paying your fees.'

Edie scowled. She did not want to be anyone's servant, least of all to a girl her own age. And she did not like Charles's warning tone.

‘More secret servant than secret service,' he continued. ‘The roles are distinct, but not dissimilar. The important thing is not to get too close to anyone. If you start forming sentimental attachments to the other girls it will cloud your judgement. And that applies to Anastasia too. You must act like her friend, but never forget that you are, in fact, her servant – and a servant, as you will shortly learn, can never be a friend.'

Edie looked out forlornly at the whirl of traffic. It felt like just her strain of luck to be going to school with the specific instruction not to make any real friends at all.

She had been secretly elated when Cousin Charles had offered to take charge of her education. Such was her excitement at escaping from her cousins she hadn't thought to ask what sort of school he was going to send her to. It was only when putting her on the train to London that Aunt Sophia had said, ‘He wants to send you to boarding school, God knows why. But you might as well give it a go, darling. It's not as though you've been very happy with us.'

Of course I haven't
, Edie had thought sullenly.
Your sons are savages
. But boarding school! The only person she knew who had gone to a boarding school was Lyle, who had lasted less than three weeks before being expelled for reasons even he wouldn't talk about.

‘The school is famously strict and I don't want you stepping out of line,' Charles went on, his eyes fixed on the road. ‘Your job is to blend in.'

‘But I thought you said I might have to break the rules—'

‘I said you can break any rules you like so long as you break them quietly. And that includes your mobile phone. Strictly against regulations, but you'll need it to keep me informed of your findings. I don't want to hear it's been confiscated, Edith. Keep it well hidden. It's your first test.'

‘I don't see why we're not allowed them anyway.'

‘The school prides itself on keeping the world at bay. Parents like to think of their daughters being protected—'

‘From what?'

‘Oh, I don't know,' said Charles with sudden impatience. ‘And don't whine. I've only told you to hold on to your phone.'

Edie snorted. She thought one mobile was pretty poor payment for the job in hand. And the new phone he had given her with such ceremony was little improvement on her last. She had hoped at the very least Cousin Charles might equip her with some useful gadgets – devices for secretly recording people, or listening
through walls – but he had met this suggestion with contempt:
Romantic nonsense, Edith. You've been watching too many films. I've told you, all you'll need are your eyes and ears
. Her mobile didn't even have a camera.

Cousin Charles had put Edie's eyes to the test during the few days they had just spent together in Mayfair. One afternoon he made her face the drawing-room wall and tell him what was in the room. He looked surprised when she listed every piece of furniture.

‘When Babka started going blind I became her second pair of eyes,' Edie had explained with a hint of pride. ‘She'd ask me what I could see and she always seemed to know if I'd left anything out.'

‘She has trained you well,' Cousin Charles had said, impressed. By way of contrast he had given Edie no training at all – until this last-minute pep talk.

‘It's possible that Anastasia is simply imagining that she is being teased. In which case your job is simply to get in there and act like her friend and stop her feeling strange and lonely. Remember, this is a child who's used to travelling around the world in a private jet and being waited on hand and foot. She's made a fuss about wanting to manage on her own and she's not managing.'

‘You don't think she's being teased at all?' asked Edie in a puzzled voice. ‘I thought—'

‘I don't know if she is being teased,' said Charles. ‘Nor does her father. We can't know, as we're not there. It's your job to find out.'

‘And if I think she
is
being teased,' said Edie, ‘then what do I do about it?'

‘First you have to discover who is doing the teasing. If, for instance, someone really is messing with her possessions, you probably have to catch them in the act.'

‘Without telling anyone what I'm up to?'

‘Exactly. In the end it's about covering your tracks. To that end you can lie all you like, although it's best to stick to the same one. Sometimes the only thing you have to go on is the fact of a deception; you have to work backwards from there. Remember everything, Edith, never let anything go: most mysteries are solved by attention to the most trivial-seeming details.'

Privately Edie thought the whole affair was trivial. Cousin Charles talked as though it were quite natural for a father to send another child into a school to investigate whether or not someone was stealing his daughter's pencils, but Edie thought it was plain weird. Cousin Charles needn't worry about her and Anastasia becoming friends: Edie could not imagine liking someone so spoilt.

‘You say she's always travelling, but where's Anastasia's home?' she asked.

‘Moscow, Paris, the South of France – her father's got houses everywhere,' Charles said, sounding bored. ‘And her mother lives in Yorkshire.'

Edie was intrigued. She wondered if Anastasia ever felt homeless having so many homes to choose from. ‘And does she have a Russian accent?' she asked.

‘Certainly not,' Charles replied. ‘I told you, her mother's English and the prince was at school with me. He sounds more English than the Queen.'

‘You say she's dreamy, but that she keeps all her things in perfect order and arranges her books alphabetically, and that she never loses anything,' Edie said, thinking over the information she had been given, ‘but isn't it the case that dreamy people
always
lose things?'

‘You have a lot to learn, Edith. People's characters are not so easy to define.'

‘Babka thinks they are,' Edie replied. ‘She says there are good people and bad people – she doesn't believe in shades of grey.'

Cousin Charles gave a derisive laugh; but then his face suddenly darkened. ‘Babka, blow it,' he said, checking his watch. ‘We're running late. I might have to take you to see her another time.'

Edie looked stricken. ‘But – it – it's on the way . . . and . . .
and you promised
—'

‘All right, we'll go,' Cousin Charles gave in grumpily. ‘But remember in future, Edith, never pay any attention to a promise unless it's been made by someone you know you can trust.'

It was raining when they arrived at the St Benedict Nursing Home, a bare, red-brick villa on the outskirts of Oxford. The reception area smelt of cabbage, and there was a trolley piled with bedpans parked beside the desk.

‘I'll take a walk round the garden and come back for you in half an hour,' Cousin Charles said, turning away with distaste.

Edie felt relieved. She had an instinct he and Babka would not get on. A moment later a nurse appeared, and
led her to Babka's room. Edie gave a start when she saw it. She had expected something drab, in keeping with the rest of the home; but instead it was filled with a bright confusion of clutter and colours – pictures and ornaments, books, china and gold-threaded tapestries and quilts from the flat in London.

Babka was sitting at a small table in the corner, in the glow of a heavily shaded lamp. When Edie came in she looked up, unsmiling, from the chess game she had been playing against herself.

‘They tried to take them all away,' she said, gesturing blindly at her possessions, ‘but I say I go on the hunger strike.'

Edie sat on the end of the bed, and Babka reached out a hand and felt her face. ‘You have been unhappy,' she said. ‘Are your cousins being bad to you?'

‘I'm not staying there any more – I'm . . . I'm going to boarding school,' Edie said.

Babka's face hardened. ‘Boarding school? Who's paying for that?'

‘I don't know,' Edie lied. She did not want to tell her grandmother about her secret mission. Edie knew she would be contemptuous – but what could Babka do? She could offer Edie no alternative.

‘What a lot of things you don't know. Which makes two of us.'

‘No!' protested Edie. ‘Not you, Babka. You know everything.'

‘Not any more,' Babka said bitterly. ‘It's falling away. There is no necessity, here, to hold on to what you
know.' She turned away, nodding towards the chessboard. ‘But I still have the game,' she said, deftly feeling the pieces as she moved them back into their starting positions. ‘You be white this time.'

Edie did not want to play chess; she wanted to talk. ‘I . . . I haven't got long—' she began, but Babka silenced her with a curt wave of her hand.

Edie pulled up a chair to the table, and moved a pawn. Babka had never taught Edie how to play chess: ‘
You cannot teach chess; you can only learn. Study the moves, Editha, and work out the rules
.' Edie had done this, watching Babka play with the Polish grocer down the street, in the room behind his shop. When Edie had learnt enough she and Babka had started playing together, always in silence, always with a clock.

Edie did not enjoy chess. But Babka wouldn't play anything else.

‘Give us twenty,' Babka said, handing Edie a stopwatch; but in the end it took Edie only ten minutes to lose.

‘You were afraid of losing a piece, and so you lost the game,' Babka said. ‘It often happens that way.' Then she raised a hand, and her fingers reached out, trembling, as if feeling something in the air. ‘There is a dark knight in the room,' she announced, looking up with unseeing eyes.

Edie turned to see Cousin Charles standing in the doorway. She made a motion to say something, but he put his finger to his lips, then tapped his watch and left the room.

‘That was Cousin Charles,' Edie said when he had gone. ‘He's taking me to the school. Oh, Babka, there's so much to tell you and now there's no time.'

Babka nodded. ‘Don't fret. You are ready for school, I think. But I would take your Cousin Charles with a pinch of salt. Be prepared for the sideways move.' Then she reached back to the board, and moved her knight.

A Cosy Tone

A
 mile or so beyond the village they came to a pair of tall stone gateposts with a sign saying KNIGHT'S HADDON.

Edie sat in silence as Cousin Charles drove over a cattle-grid and into a thick tunnel of trees with branches that hung low over the windscreen.

‘Why do they let the road get so overgrown?' Edie wondered.

‘It is not a road,' Cousin Charles said impatiently. ‘It is a drive.'

‘Like saying
prep
for
homework
?' Edie asked.

‘Not unlike,' Charles replied.

As he spoke the drive opened out into wide fields – ‘a park' Cousin Charles explained – but Edie thought how different it looked from any of the parks she had been to
in London. It was huge and empty, sloping down on one side of them towards a swollen river, surrounded by sodden grey marsh, and on the other side rising up into a low ridge of hills. There were no buildings, not even a barn, and beyond the river the view ended in thick black woods. Edie leant her face into the coldness of the car window. The drive went on so long that even though it was a single road, leading only one way, she had a strange sense of being lost.

Eventually they turned the corner, and in front of them, towering above a sloping lawn, appeared a huge, pale stone building, with four spearing turrets.

‘Your new home,' Charles said in a bored voice as Edie gave a sharp intake of breath.

Everything about the house seemed to spike and soar. There were row upon row of sharp, pointed windows frowning down at her through curtains of flowerless creepers, and the turrets, which stood at each corner of the building, rose high up above the long, jagged roof. Edie thought how unlike a school it looked, with a frosty beauty that seemed strangely out of keeping with the surrounding patchwork of tennis courts and playing fields.

Charles drove on in silence into a paved courtyard and pulled up in front of a flight of stone steps. As the car stopped, a short, round woman came hurrying down to greet them. She seemed to be bursting out of her green wool suit, her face beaming beneath a cap of black hair.

‘Now you must be Mr Rodriguez,' she said warmly, as she clutched Cousin Charles's hand. Edie recognised the faint Irish lilt in her accent, for the woman living in the
next-door flat in London had been Irish too, and the memory gave her a sudden pang of homesickness. ‘And you must be our new girl!' the woman went on. ‘I'm Matron, that's what I'm known as here.' She said it with a slightly harsh laugh, as if she thought it a foolish name, and assumed others would too.

‘It is very kind of you to take Edith at such short notice,' Cousin Charles said smoothly. Edie noticed the change in his manner since the nursing home, where he had seemed less keen to make a good impression. ‘I hope she won't be too much trouble for you. Boarding school might come as a bit of a shock to her – she's been taught at home for the last two years.'

‘Would that be with a governess?' Matron asked, looking at Edie with interest.

‘A grandmother.'

‘Well, well, you are unusual,' Matron murmured, gazing at Edie over folded arms. ‘I don't think we've ever had a child who's been taught at home before.'

Her expression was kind, but Edie felt self-conscious. If Cousin Charles wanted her to blend in she wondered why he had revealed so much.

Matron turned and summoned a man to unload the luggage from the car, and Edie watched nervously as her trunk and tuck box were wheeled away. She knew from the schoolgirl books she had read that tuck boxes were intended for keeping food in, but Cousin Charles hadn't given her any to put in hers. Instead, she had filled it with all her most personal treasures – letters, photographs, some old schoolbooks of her mother's –
and as it disappeared she surreptitiously reached into her pocket to reassure herself that the key to the padlock was still there.

‘Don't worry, dear, they'll be taken to your dormitory,' Matron said, noting Edie's anxiety. ‘You can unpack yourself – there'll be plenty of time before supper. And I hope your tuck box hasn't got anything contraband in it,' she added, turning to Cousin Charles with a smile. ‘We do reserve the right to search them once in a while!'

‘Quite right,' Cousin Charles replied jovially; but he shot Edie a meaningful glance.

‘I'm very sorry Miss Fotheringay isn't here to greet you in person, but she's on her way back from a headmistress's conference in Oxford,' Matron said, assuming a more businesslike tone. ‘But I can assure you, Mr Rodriguez, Edith will be very well looked after. And the girls write a proper letter home every Sunday – no email nonsense here.'

What's nonsense about a letter that doesn't need an envelope or a stamp?
thought Edie crossly in the awkward pause which followed. She realised that Matron was waiting for her and Cousin Charles to say goodbye, and she detected a shadow of uncertainty on her cousin's face, as though this was an act he had forgotten to rehearse. He had never kissed her before, but he did it now, stooping to touch his lips against her cheek, while his arms remained stiffly by his side.

When he had gone Edie followed Matron inside, and found herself in a large hall filled with trophies and
shiny silver shields. Everything looked clean and polished, and very old. The walls were covered in panels of dark wood, and there were carvings on the ceiling, and gloomy-looking portraits hanging up the stairs. It reminded Edie of a country house she had once visited with her class at primary school, and it felt strange to think she was going to live in such a place.

She looked about her carefully, trying to make a mental inventory of the doors and corridors that led off in every direction. Charles had said that she should waste no time in learning her way around – but she felt overwhelmed by how much there was to take in. As she was peering about her a bell rang, and Edie felt the floor shake, then all at once a flood of girls appeared from the landing above and came crashing down the stairs like a wave about to swallow her.

‘Girls! Girls!' Matron cried, clapping her hands for attention. ‘Lower IV are still in music practice –
QUIET, PLEASE!
'

The noise subsided a little, and Edie felt a swarm of eyes settling on her face. She was wearing exactly the same brown uniform as everyone else, but felt as conspicuous as if she were dressed as a clown. It was a relief when a voice hollered ‘
TEA!
', at which the girls streamed away through a door on the right.

Matron smoothed down her skirt as though she had been set upon. ‘I'll take you to your dormitory,' she said, ‘then when Miss Fotheringay's back I'll fetch you for tea.'

Edie was surprised. She had not been expecting a
private audience with the headmistress.

Matron smiled. ‘Don't look so worried. She always has tea with the new girls – you're not in trouble yet. And when you are, just come to Matron and she'll sort things out for you. They don't call me Matron Mend for nothing.'

‘Thank you,' Edie said, but something in the cosy tone made her uneasy. Cousin Charles had warned her that she was to avoid getting into trouble at all costs. Why did Matron ‘Mend' seem so certain that she would?

Matron led her down a maze of corridors, with so many twists and turns that Edie was sure she would never find her way back to the hall. It was only when they started climbing a steep spiral staircase that she realised they must have entered one of the turrets. When they had climbed two floors they came to a curved landing, leading onto a long corridor with doors on either side.

‘This is you,' Matron said, stopping halfway down.

There was a list of names on the door written in beautiful italic letters. Edie saw
Stolonov, A
and her own name
Wilson, E
at the bottom. The sight of her name underneath the others gave Edie a jolt.
As if I belonged here
, she thought, almost guiltily.

The door opened into a large, bright dormitory overlooking the park. The five tall wooden beds were all set wide apart, each with a green candlewick cover and a pine bedside table. There were also five identical chests of drawers, and a large enamel sink. Despite its orderliness the room had a lived-in feel, with each girl
marking her territory with photographs and ornaments, toys and teddy bears. Edie's trunk and tuck box had been placed at the end of the bed nearest to the door; it looked very bare in comparison to the others.

‘There you are,' Matron said, fluffing up the pillow, then briskly marching off to pick up a stray sock.

Edie, uncertain what to do with herself, took off her coat and laid it on her bed.

Matron shook her head. ‘Coats, gloves, scarves and outdoor shoes are all hung in the cloakroom downstairs – one of the others will show you where,' she explained. ‘And you'll unpack later, but when you do, remember that it's strictly two ornaments only on your bedside table – most girls choose two photographs, but you can have one photograph and a clock if you prefer, so long as it's not a radio clock – radios aren't allowed. And as for i-anything!' Matron rolled her eyes. ‘None of that fancy technology here, young lady! And you can have six things on your chest of drawers, one of which should be your hairbrush . . . and a hairband or a hair-clip would count as another item, but if you put all your hairbands and hairclips together in a box, then you could have as many hairbands and hairclips as you could fit in the box and it would only count as one thing. Is that all clear, dear? Good,' she went on, taking Edie's blank stare for an answer. ‘Now you tidy yourself up, and I'll be back in ten ticks.'

Edie had never shared a bedroom with anyone before, and when Matron had gone she suddenly felt self-conscious. She stood frozen a moment by her bed, then
ventured around the room, peeking furtively at the toys and photographs.

The corner bed had a rather haughty-looking china doll on the pillow, with glassy emerald eyes. Edie walked over, and recognised a photograph of Anastasia's father on the chest of drawers – but looking very different from the solemn portrait Cousin Charles had shown her of the prince. Here he was leaning against the side of a sailing boat, his green eyes smiling from beneath windswept, pepper-grey hair.

Then something next to the photograph caught Edie's eye. At first she thought it was a jewel, but when she moved closer she saw that it was a glass bird, with sculpted feathers and a fanned tail, and shining violet beads for its eyes. Edie thought it was the prettiest thing she had ever seen, tiny and flawless, and though the glass was shining it had an ancient, centuries-old air, like an ornament peered at in a museum. It looked much too fragile to touch, and yet before she quite knew what she was doing she had reached to pick it up. As she did, she heard the door burst open behind her.

‘Oh!' Edie gasped, jumping round to see four girls appear. One was Anastasia – Edie recognised her at once from the photographs she had seen, taking in the dark eyes and pale skin, and the hair that tumbled over her shoulders in thick brown ringlets. It struck Edie there was something fragile and exotic about her, like the glass bird.

The other girls looked at Edie curiously, but Anastasia did not seem to notice that Edie had been rifling
through her things. She sat down on her bed with a dreamy expression, as if her thoughts were somewhere quite different.

‘Hello, I'm Sally,' said a plump, pleasant-looking girl with a pink face and a bouncing bob of straw-coloured hair. ‘Hey! What's that you're holding? Isn't that Anastasia's bird?'

Edie's checks burned. ‘I . . . I'm sorry . . . I . . . I just . . . I just wanted to look at it!' she stammered, fighting back a sudden sting of tears.

Anastasia watched carefully as she replaced the bird on the chest of drawers, but did not say a word.

‘You won't get off to a very good start here if you poke about in other people's things,' said a tall, pinched-faced girl. ‘How would you like it if we—'

‘Oh, leave her alone, Phoebe, she's new,' piped another girl. ‘You can see she's sorry and I'm sure she didn't mean to snoop. I'm Alice, by the way,' she said, turning to Edie with a warm smile.

Edie looked at her gratefully, feeling she had been pulled from a ditch. Something about Alice was very reassuring. She had brown hair scraped briskly into a ponytail and wore a badge that said ‘Form Monitor'.

‘I've told you, Anastasia,' Alice said teasingly, ‘if you insist on bringing back all these beautiful things and turning the dormitory into a museum then you must expect people to want to look at them.'

Anastasia shrugged. ‘I don't mind if people give Birdy a stroke,' she said, gazing at Edie from beneath thick black lashes. Her voice was gentle, and despite what
Cousin Charles had said about her having no trace of a Russian accent, Edie detected something foreign.

As Edie walked back to her own bed she caught Phoebe's hissed warning: ‘
We'd better look out for
her.' Edie wished the floor could swallow her, but the others chattered on as if quite used to Phoebe's spite.