The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School (10 page)

‘What did you mean?’ Amy asked her. ‘Rapunzel? Got rid of?’

‘Mean? I’m not mean. I don’t mean. I… oh, good night…’

Frecks, breathing heavy, wings torn, tugged at Amy’s cloak and made for the open door, dragging Amy away from Paule, who fluttered her fingers in a distracted farewell. Light Fingers was already on the backstairs.

The Murdering Heathens clustered around the Head Girl, wondering how to get her out of the chimney without being hurt by her kicking feet or flailing fists.

The Moth Club rattled back to their cell, divesting themselves of their costumes en route.

A thin voice sounded from outside the window. Inchfawn dangled still.

‘That reminds me,’ said Frecks. ‘Light Fingers, go rouse Wicked Wyke. She’ll be up early, since it’s Sunday Chapel at seven, Lord help us! Report that some larcenous harlot has stolen your rocking chair! Best shift any oncoming blame on to persons unknown, eh? Say it was probably one of Ariel’s well-known not-funny japes.’

Light Fingers got into her dressing gown and hurried off.

Frecks was abuzz, exhilarated at the Moth Club’s first outing. While Amy had been in the Purple, no time at all passed for the others.

Amy didn’t know what to tell Frecks.

Rapunzel?
Got rid of
!

‘Crumpets,’ she exclaimed. ‘Calamity and crumpets!’

S
UNDAY
C
HAPEL AT
Drearcliff was more about mystery than enlightenment. All School – no excuses accepted, including deathly illness – filed in and took their pews. Miss Dryden, of the futile whistle, improvised at a wheezy organ, pumping stately, presumably devotional music with an occasional shrill screech or dramatic detour. Frecks claimed Dryden sometimes played ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas!’ very slowly as if it were solemn and religious.

Most of the Staff – and not a few of the Fifths and Sixths – looked as if they’d spent the night at a cockfight in an opium den followed by an orgy in a gin-house, then come straight to the Chapel without going to bed. The unscratchable Gryce might have looked fresh from eight hours of innocent sleep, but Crowninshield and Buller showed a satisfying collection of cuts and bruises. Paule was distracted, as usual. Did she even properly notice what happened outside the Purple, or even remember what she’d said last night?

‘
She won’t be got rid of till the third dawn.
’

If Paule meant the third dawn after Kali’s abduction, that would be first thing Monday. Tomorrow morning! In a terror spasm, Amy envisioned a scimitar held up to catch the sun’s first rays and Kali’s lovely neck stretched on a chopping block.

Miss Dryden’s straining organ rose in a crescendo, giving the Reverend Mr Bainter his cue. The chaplain had to hide behind a curtain while Staff and Girls took their pews. He emerged, wearing a peculiar tricorn mitre with candle-tassles which burned like slow fuses and smelled like Kali’s joss cigarettes.

With his hair-slickum, cheek-powder and a lotion which whiffed powerfully of aniseed, Ponce Bainter took to the pulpit like an ageing prima donna to the stage. Amy had thought all clergymen orthodox, respectable and slightly dull. Bainter was more than slightly dull, given to prefacing and concluding sermons with droning Tibetan chants, but was far from orthodox and, as all the girls were certain, quite the reverse of respectable. He seldom mentioned Our Lord Jesus Christ, an important figure in the sermons Amy had heard elsewhere. His vestments and altar cloths were embroidered with symbols not found in other churches – mediaeval scientific implements, monocular starfish, bipedal goats, wavy lines, the constellation of the Plough and snarly faced moons. The upside-down woman on the wheel, as represented on the school badge, featured heavily.

The text for today’s sermon was the school motto,
A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi
. Amy, incapable of concentrating on Bainter’s windy talk, still didn’t find out where the wolves came into it.

Mentally, she wrestled with a different text, ‘
Oh, she’s Rapunzel, waiting
.’

Amy was stumped as to what Paule could have meant. Kali didn’t have particularly long hair or (so far as Amy knew) a devoted swain intent on spiriting her off. Some wet girls whispered she’d eloped with Ivor Novello, but that was tommyrot. Kali detested matinee idols, and preferred a mug with a snub-nosed ‘gat’ in his fist to a gent with a high-pitched serenade. Now, if Lon Chaney were walking around North Somerset on his knees, snarling insults, then Kali might have been tempted… Kali
was
a princess, but Rapunzel was practically the only fairy-tale heroine Amy could think of who wasn’t. Technically, Rapunzel probably became a princess after the story was over – provided the prince who climbed up her hair did the decent thing and married her. Wondering why Miss Kaye obviously skipped passages in reading aloud to the form, Amy had looked up the original Brothers Grimm; in that, the prince caddishly got Rapunzel preggers and was blinded for it. Rapunzel was famously a prisoner in a tower, so maybe Paule meant Kali was being held captive. Rapunzel’s gaoler was her stepmother, but Kali’s father went through wives so rapidly no stepmother stuck around long enough to plot against her.

‘You, Amy Thomsett, Desdemona Third,’ shouted Bainter, raising his voice, pointing a finger. Girls edged away, putting clear space between them and Amy.

Had Ponce known she wasn’t paying attention? If so, why single her out? If anyone in Chapel
wasn’t
thinking of something other than the sermon, it would have been a miracle.

‘Answer the Question!’

Amy ummed. She had no idea what the Question was.

‘“With a precipice in front and wolves behind, what would you do?”’ rasped Frecks out of the side of her mouth.

Amy said the first thing that came into her mind.

All School tittered, except Ponce – whose eyes bulged with fury.

Amy caught herself. She had said ‘I’d
float
over the precipice…’

Dr Swan, eyes firmly shut throughout Bainter’s sermon, blinked alert and clapped once, silencing laughter.

‘…the wolves would rush over the edge,’ continued Amy, hoping she could claim she was trying to be funny, ‘and be dashed to death on the jagged rocks below.’

‘And
you
, Thomsett, where would
you
be?’

‘Ah, away with the fairies?’

Thunderous laughter. A note was passed along the pew and pressed into Amy’s hand.

She looked. It read MAJOR INFRACTION, R. Wyke (Mrs).

C
LEANING THE
H
EEL
wasn’t quite as frightful as advertised. It
was
done with toothbrushes, but Infractors didn’t have to use their own. Stout-bristled specimens were provided. Buckets of water and carbolic soap were also involved. Amy had imagined toiling alone, perhaps with hobbling weights, but reported to the Quad after Chapel to find herself in with a shower from all Forms and Houses. These miscreants had either clocked up enough Minor Infractions to qualify for the punishment or – like Amy, convicted of Impertinence in Chapel – gone for the High Jump and got caught in a Major.

School Rules decreed that a Major Infraction automatically got you the Heel, but – in a rare, merciful touch – obliterated outstanding Stains like the four Minors Amy had in her book, so you started fresh next week. Anyone with five Black Notches who wanted to do something appalling might find it almost worth the throw. Unity Crawford of Viola, known to all as ‘Vanity’, was here for pouring red ink on the dress shirt of a girl who had beaten her to the role of Lucas Cleeve, male lead in the Arthur Wing Pinero Players’ production of
The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith
. Polly ‘Perky’ Palgraive was here because her constant smile irritated the Witches so much they piled Minors on her in the hope of wiping it away. She was cheerful, if glassy-eyed. Amy remembered what Paule had said about the maggot in her brain and decided to start cleaning at the opposite end. The anarchist Hannah Absalom – who mortified a different monarch, plutocrat, churchman or politician every Monday – was up on her regular Major. She set grimly to scraping ‘Death to President Zog of Albania!’ off the Heel, cleaning the canvas for next week’s message of terror.

This week, the Heel was supervised by Miss Kaye. She brought a lawn-chair and a book, and let the girls get to it. She had a hamper and promised lemonade at the end of the job. Amy gathered they were lucky. When Fossil was in charge, she stood over Infractors with her Bunsen burner tube and added extra
encouragement
if the pace slackened.

Still, this was a pestiferous bother.

Every moment she was here, scraping grime out from under Achilles’s marble toenails, she wasn’t looking for Kali. If Paule were right, the Moth Club had to find – and
rescue
– their cell-mate before sun-up tomorrow.

It was done inside an hour. Miss Kaye inspected the Heel, deemed it suitably spotless, and gave the girls – Infractors no longer, their records clean as the marble – lemonade. Absalom refused hers on political grounds.

Miss Kaye – Acting Mrs Edwards – wasn’t like other teachers. She wasn’t here for life, so lacked the cowed, cringing attitude even termagants like Fossil had around Dr Swan. She had read out ‘Rapunzel’, albeit in edited form – so she might have an idea.

Amy asked, ‘Why would anyone say Kali Chattopadhyay was “like Rapunzel, waiting”?’

Miss Kaye was surprised.

‘Chattopadhyay’s hair isn’t long,’ she said, touching her own trimmed bob. ‘And she didn’t wait. She took off. If found, she’ll be scrubbing the Heel all term. Headmistress takes a dim view of absconders. Though she’s been in less of a bate about Chattopadhyay than Ferrers III last term. Funny, that. When Ferrers III went over the wall, the Chief Constable was summoned, notices put in the papers, the countryside combed by search parties and the truant tracked by private detectives to a boarding house in Torquay. I’d have thought a Kafiristani princess an even greater loss. But there’s been little fuss.’

Was Dr Swan trying to avoid bad publicity?

‘Kali’s father happens to be in Birmingham on business,’ continued Miss Kaye. ‘Buying rifles from Webley and Scott, I believe. He is due to pay a call on School tomorrow. That will, I imagine, be an uncomfortable occasion. Parents don’t generally take it kindly when their daughters go missing.’

Vanity snorted. She had the full set of parents, but still played the orphan. She acted up fearfully in the forlorn hope of getting attention. Amy suspected Vanity regretted not thinking of running away, preferably in disguise, to become the centre of a whirlwind of speculation. If she scarpered now, she’d be accused of imitating Kali – a severe blow to her reputation as an ‘original’. Of course, it wouldn’t be plagiarism. Kali had not, despite what Inchfawn swore, gone off on her own accord. She’d been snatched!

‘But why “Rapunzel, waiting”?’

Miss Kaye shrugged, not casually. Her eyes showed lively interest. There were some – well, Smudge, inevitably – who said she was a spy. Frecks, who knew about the espionage game, said Oxenford wasn’t as far off as usual about Miss Kaye. There were ‘tells’, apparently. After last night, Amy wondered if Smudge wasn’t imaginative
enough
– her fictions paled beside the unexaggerated truth of Dora Paule and the Purple. From now on, she might believe the girl on principle. The verdict was that Miss Kaye was at Drearcliff for some purpose beyond filling in for Mrs Edwards. Amy felt she could trust the temporary teacher in a way she couldn’t trust Headmistress or Ponce Bainter or Miss Borrodale.

‘Rapunzel sat in her tower, waiting for her prince to call “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair”,’ said Miss Kaye. ‘The story seems to have gone beyond that in Chattopadhyay’s case. Her prince has already come and spirited her off.’

‘But, Miss, it wasn’t like that. I saw hooded men take her away. Against her will.’

Miss Kaye’s eyes narrowed. Amy could tell Miss Kaye had no reason not to believe her and maybe more than reason to doubt Inchfawn’s story.

‘When Rapunzel was waiting, she was in a tower,’ said Miss Kaye. ‘With no way in but an upper window.’

Amy had to concentrate hard to keep on the ground.

That was it! The tower! Kali was being held in the tower. The broken tower on the beach, surrounded by ‘Danger’ and ‘Keep Out’ signs. What better place to keep a prisoner?

She must tell the Moth Club.

W
HILE
A
MY WAS
taking her punishment in the Quad, the rest of the Moth Club had not been idle. Returning to their cell, she found Light Fingers picking twigs out of her Sunday pinafore and Frecks in a state of high excitement.

‘After Chapel, we spotted Crowninshield and her homunculus of a sister sneaking off grounds,’ Frecks explained. ‘Light Fingers tailed them. She can dog a person’s tracks without being seen. Useful knack if you can come by it. There’s a secret way through the wall, hidden by ivy. Which is nice to know. No more braving the glass spikes.’

Light Fingers had worn her Large Dark Prominent domino, but not the full Moth Club get-up.

‘They took a hamper down to the beach,’ said Light Fingers. ‘Contraband from the kitchens.’

‘You’ll never guess where they were headed!’ declared Frecks.

‘I bet I can,’ said Amy. ‘The tower!’

Frecks and Light Fingers presented studies in bugging eyes and open mouths.

‘Good gravy, Thomsett,’ said Frecks, ‘how the diddle did you tumble?’

Amy hadn’t told her chums about the Purple, not to keep a secret but because she didn’t think she could explain without seeming potty. Floating and gills and hummingbird hands fell within the accepted realms of Drearcliff strangeness, but Paule’s peculiarity was excessive even by School standards.

‘Someone mentioned Rapunzel,’ Amy said weakly.

‘Ah-hah,’ said Frecks. ‘She of the upstairs dungeon. The mists clear!’

‘When the weird sisters got to the tower, a rope ladder was let down from an upper window,’ said Light Fingers. ‘There’s no other way in. The hamper was hooked to the ladder and pulled up. I didn’t see who was doing the pulling…’