The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School (34 page)

‘Righteously left, right.’

Light Fingers switched hands and, with Knowles turning pages and Amy blotting, completed another fair copy. It looked different enough from the first. Then, Light Fingers tried right-handed but slanting left and with a thicker nib. Marsh and Paquignet took over page-turning and blotting duty.

Devlin fished her exercise book out of the basket.

Dyall, catching on late, abandoned her copy. As gently as possible, Amy led the girl to the farthest corner of the classroom.

‘Could you sit here, Poppet?’ she asked. ‘Just till we get things sorted.’

There was an irregular niche, partially screened from the rest of the room, just big enough for a chair and desk. Dyall seemed happy to make this her hidey-hole. Amy gave Poppet one of Lamarcroft’s gob-stoppers, which she slipped into her mouth. Her cheeks hollowed and her eyes widened. It would take her a while to dissolve the big sweet.

Even brief proximity to Dyall gave Amy the beginnings of a head. What day was this? Why was she in the abandoned greenhouse with such a strange assortment of girls?

Getting away from Poppet brought on a dizzying rush of relief. The spots of forgetfulness filled in and Amy remembered everything.

Light Fingers had produced another copy, with a different nib and slant.

‘Harper,’ said Light Fingers, still writing away. ‘What you were saying last night… you’re right. We have to stop all this. The Black Skirts, Rayne, everything.’

Shrimp was still nervous about talking with the others. She was so used to girls wanting to get away from her that she had forgotten how to be direct.

‘I tried on my own,’ she said shyly, ‘but my Ability – I call it
breathing in
– won’t work on Rayne any more. When she came to School, I might have managed it… made her so weak we could have done something about her. She was just like
y-
… just like
everyone
, except Palgraive and Paule. I caught a
breath
from her when she was first here. But when I tried again, after the Black Skirts caught on, it was no use. I can’t
breathe in
from any of them now. It’s like they’re all one animal, too big to get a hold on.
Breathing in
is like sipping hot tea… sometimes, if I’ve gone a long time without, gulping down a whole mug at once. With the Black Skirts now, it’d be like trying to drink a boiling lake. Their level wouldn’t go down and I’d do myself an injury.’

Amy wasn’t the only girl disgusted with Shrimp.

‘Good gravy, Harper,’ said Thorn, ‘but you really are
dreadful
. I remember when you tried to “interview” me.’

‘And me,’ said Marsh. ‘I was parched.’

Panicked and squirming, Shrimp looked at the hard faces and pleaded ‘It’s not something I can help!’

‘Yes, but you
enjoy
it, you witch,’ said Knowles.

‘Leave her alone,’ said Frost, who understood runaway Abilities. ‘We can’t afford to be like this.’

‘The Frost’s right,’ said Light Fingers. ‘It’s what
they
want. The Ordinaries love it when we fight among ourselves. It means they don’t have to go to any bother to keep us in hutches.’

The air around Thorn simmered with heat haze. Amy wished she’d been in Thorn’s cell this term – it was probably the toastiest place in School.

‘Sorry, Shrimp,’ said Thorn. ‘I spoke out of turn. I was forgetting… I set light to my grandmama’s wig once, without meaning to. I know what can happen.’

‘You
should
be sorry,’ responded Harper, with her old spite. ‘You should
all
be sorry.’

‘
Shrimp
,’ said Amy, sternly.

Harper calmed down, took a deep breath – which made girls back away from her – and fixed a simper on her face that adjusted into a smile.

‘It is fine,’ she said, with a curtsey. ‘Thank you, Thorn. Thank you, Thomsett.’

Amy accepted the apology, though – like everyone here – she would remember what Shrimp had said about
breathing in
.

‘One thing, Shrimp,’ said Amy. ‘Your Ability works on everyone. Even Poppet?’

‘What she does is like what I do, I think. But not the same. When we’re stuck together, it’s
awful
. Neither of us could stop. It was like we were puffing up and running down at the same time, over and over. Keep us apart, please.’

There was no denying the little Unusual’s desperation.

‘…you said “except Palgraive and Paule”,’ said Amy. ‘What did you mean?’

Shrimp put her hand up to her mouth and whispered ‘I don’t think Palgraive’s
alive
, really. She’s like an empty cup. With
something
wriggling in the dregs. It keeps her walking and working and smiling, but
nothing else
.’

Palgraive paid no attention and continued copying in a measured hand. The Remove all stared at her. Even Amy, who knew more, shuddered. As she worked, Palgraive kept smiling.

‘And Paule?’ asked Amy.

Harper paused, reluctant to say anything… which, after the confessions she had made, was alarming. Finally, choosing her words, she said, ‘If the Black Skirts are like a lake, Paule’s like an ocean. There’s just
so much
there. You can’t see it, but I can. And it’s
terrifying
, chums. You all have
fringes
you can’t see but I can. Like second shadows. Wavering, transparent fringes around you all the time. Paule has more than a fringe. It’s like a storm, around her all the time, with lightning. And it’s…’

‘Purple,’ said Light Fingers, looking at Amy.

‘Like the skies in my dream,’ said Lungs.

‘I see
fringes
,’ said Green Thumbs. ‘Around plants, not people.’

‘Anyone else?’ asked Amy.

‘I see my pocket,’ said Laurence. ‘And things have fringes when they come back. Not purple, but purple-ish.’

‘Paule?’

Paule seemed to have heard nothing, as immune to being talked about as Palgraive.

‘It’s snowing upwards in the Purple,’ she said. ‘Thinning on the ground and thickening the clouds. Things are moving under the drifts. Holes with other holes in them are opening everywhere. Dandy and fine and safe as houses.’

‘That was terribly helpful,’ said Knowles, who got impatient when things didn’t make sense. She could put concrete information in her head, but contradictions and ambiguities annoyed her. ‘But what’s it got to do with the price of tea in China?’

Light Fingers was on to her sixth copy. She was even speeding up. She went through nibs and ink and tore pages occasionally, but kept at her task. Only Palgraive was still working on her own copy. She hadn’t finished the foreword.

‘Know-It-All has a point,’ said Lungs. ‘We might be pals now but we’re still in a prize pickle. The Black Skirts have the whole school. We’ve just got what’s in this room, and some of us are not up to much. We’re hard put to be any earthly use with these blasted Sisters Dark marching about like they own the place.’

‘Is it just us, though?’ asked Devlin. ‘What about the Staff?

‘Miss Kaye’s been dealt with somehow,’ said Frost. ‘And remember Miss Bedale – she spoke up and was degowned. The rest of the beaks are Black Skirt to the bone. Ponce and Digger have their arms up in the air all the time doing the wavey-wavey dance.’

Mockingly, several girls did their own ant salute.

‘I’m not thinking of them,’ said Amy. ‘I’m thinking of Headmistress. Aren’t we supposed to be her cygnets?’

C
ONVERSATION TURNED TO
Dr Swan and her Unusual Girls.

Everyone present, except fluke-among-flukes Palgraive, had received an invitation to Headmistress’s study when they first arrived at School. Only Marsh – who attended a Young Ladies’ Academy in Massachusetts before coming to England – shared Amy’s experience of being singled out as a Third. The others had all been titchy Firsts, overwhelmed by their new school, let alone personal attention from the imposing Dr Swan.

Some, like Frost and Thorn, were puzzled by the cygnets speech; they hadn’t yet twigged they were responsible for the occasional cold spots or smoulderings around their childhood homes. Laurence hadn’t realised her party piece wasn’t something everyone could do if they had a mind to. Dyall, gently questioned,
still
didn’t seem to understand what she did and looked like she’d cry if pressed on the matter.

Not everyone paid much attention to Swan’s speech. Some resisted any suggestion that they were different. They didn’t want to be flukes. In the Remove, they owned up. Here, they’d be flukes if they
weren’t
Unusual. Laurence, Frost and Paquignet told stories like Amy’s – their parents disapproved of and discouraged their Abilities.

Only Devlin, whose parents thought she was smashing no matter how far she stretched, was
encouraged
at home. The indulgence had limited her to trivial good deeds like fetching things down from high shelves. Marsh’s family were all like her and Light Fingers’ parents passed on suspicion of Ordinaries as well as their Abilities – which, it now transpired, included rapid-fire forgery.

Lamarcroft’s father was a Conservative Member of Parliament. ‘Dad told me not to break so many things and keep mum about the battle dreams,’ she said. ‘He was worried that if word got round I was cuckoo, Mr Bonar Law wouldn’t put him in the cabinet. Judging from the Ministers he’s had round our place, a cuckoo in the nursery shouldn’t be disqualification for high office… most of them are round the twist.’

Shrimp admitted her mother came down with a rare wasting disease just after she and her brother Jacques were born. Mrs Harper had been travelling abroad for her health ever since, leaving the twins to the care of a succession of nannies, all of whom got tired and quit after a few months. Even considering Shrimp’s slyness, Amy hadn’t the heart to say outright what everyone thought… Harper
must
realise she’d come close to killing her mother. She might not be able to own up to it even to herself.

Amy supposed that whenever Dyall’s family suspected something, they’d suffered bad headaches… then wondered what they’d been thinking. Prolonged and repeated proximity to Poppet might wipe her permanently from their minds. They would see family pictures on the mantelpiece and wonder who the little girl in them was.

Paule couldn’t remember if she ever had parents. Amy noticed the others were as wary of Daffy Dora as menaces like Harper and Dyall. They were hard put to remember her ever
doing
anything to them. It’s just that sometimes she said things which upset people.

‘Dad still thinks I’m only clever,’ said Knowles. ‘If he knew my trick, I’d be for it.’

Know-It-All lived in dread of her father catching on to her. Carleton Knowles wrote complicated detective novels in which impossible crimes turned out to have sensible solutions.
The Body in the Belfry, The Cadaver in the Cabriolet, The Head in the Hat-Box
. In a newspaper article, he had listed Thirteen Golden Rules For Detective Stories. The First Golden Rule was that a mystery should not have a supernatural explanation. His daughter worried he’d be no happier with her Ability than with a fictional murderer who could strangle a victim in a locked room and seep under the door in ectoplasmic form.

‘Anything that can’t be made sense of is not playing the game, he says, and not playing the game is a gross breach of trust.’

This prompted the Remove to spend a happy hour devising ways each could commit murder in a locked room and get away with it. Amy couldn’t distinguish between who was making conversation and who was thinking seriously about future homicidal enterprises. At first, it was agreed Frost and Thorn would make the best culprits – freezing or boiling victims from outside the window – though, of course, Larry Laurence could stash a bloodied blunt instrument or a just-discharged revolver in her pocket and pass the most thorough police search.

‘Amy, you should be able to lock and unlock doors by making the tumblers move,’ suggested Knowles. ‘You could leave the key in the lock and turn it from the other side of the door.’

That had never even occurred to her. Now, of course, she wanted to try it.

Not necessarily for murder. But not necessarily for anything noble and moral either.

Eventually, the topic of locked-room murders ran dry, and they came back to the matter at hand.

Headmistress.

Whatever their families thought of them – whatever they thought of
themselves
– the Unusuals were dear to Dr Swan.

‘We have a tradition of Unusual Girls at Drearcliff,’ Headmistress had said to Amy. ‘I like to think of them as my cygnets… My eye will be always on you. We shall see what can be done with your Abilities.’

Amy did not believe Swan’s eye had strayed.

She remembered that face, over and over in School photographs, back to founding day, unchanging with the years. Swan was an Unusual, too. It was the only explanation. If she had a choice, she would not have allowed the Rise of the Black Skirts. Rayne went against everything Headmistress professed to believe. Like her cygnets, she had been
removed
. She was put away, like a small object in Larry’s pocket.

It was down to the Remove to fetch Swan back.

‘
T
HERE
’
S SOMETHING WE
have to do, or – rather –
pretend
to do,’ said Amy. ‘We have to go Black.’

Hisses rose. Marsh showed shark-teeth. Devlin pulled her face out of shape.

‘It won’t work,’ said Knowles. ‘I’ve tried it. So have most of us. They won’t take us. We’re flukes, remember.’

‘They don’t have to take us,’ Amy continued. ‘It’s protective colouration. We just have to look like them. To get about freely. Knowles, do you still have the black kit? They didn’t strip you of it?’

Know-It-All nodded. ‘It’s in my trunk, back at the stables.’

‘Between us – and Light Fingers’ sewing when her hand’s better after being wrung out from all the copying – we should have enough black uniforms to put up a false front. You’ve noticed how dull they all are, the Soldier Ants. Even duller than the Dims. The Queen Ant thinks for them so they don’t pay attention to anything but their allotted tasks. They should be easy to fool. We need to get about School without being marched back here… or locked up. That’s what they’ll try next, if we give them an excuse.’