The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School (12 page)

Bleeding and hurt, Crowninshield took a moment to be astonished by the flying girl.

Kali was on the shingles, the others not far off.

The rope parted, but too late. Frecks and Light Fingers were on the ground.

The ladder fell in a coil at the foot of the tower.

‘Beryl, how are
you
going to get down?’ asked Amy sweetly.

Crowninshield hissed, snarled and flung the knife – inaccurately – in Amy’s direction. It thumped against the cliff.

Amy let herself descend slowly – she was becoming more expert – and landed on the beach. The others were well ahead, and running.

She looked up and saw the trapped Witch shaking her fist.

They would soon be back in their cell. All four of them.

N
EXT MORNING
, K
ALI
reported herself present to Wicked Wyke. She said she had been abducted, held prisoner and rescued, but claimed truthfully that her saviours had been masked. She did not mention that she knew who they were. Though the outcome had been for the good, Drearcliff was not one to forgive Thirds who were off grounds without permission after Lights Out.

Should anyone be inclined to doubt Kali’s narrative, they were welcome to visit the scene of the crime, to wit: the tower. Since Crowninshield had cut off their only means of egress from the secret hiding-place, the rump of the Hooded Conspiracy were still in residence, stewing mightily. Wicked sent a Second with a note to Headmistress, who detailed Keys to lead a deputation to the scene of the crime. The party consisted of Keys, Mrs Wyke, Kali the Accuser and, in the event that a) there were villains and b) they were inclined to put up a fight, the reassuringly male Joxer. Amy suspected that, of the four-strong expedition, Joxer was least able to take care of himself in a mêlée.

Amy, Frecks and Light Fingers had to endure Monday morning lessons as per usual and missed out on the excitement while listening to Digger getting her Tudors and Stuarts mixed up. It was a wonder a period of history so full of people having their heads chopped off could be made to seem so blindingly dull.

Mid-morning, the Moth Club met up in the Quad, between lessons. The Heel, clean yesterday, already bore Absalom’s message of the week, ‘Death to President Juan Vicente Gómez of Venezuela’.

Kali gave them ‘the low-down’.

‘Swan’s called in the cops – you know, that broken-down sergeant from Watchet. The Sadista Sisters are tryin’ to make out they was snatched too, the doity bums. They’re sellin’, but Swan’s not buyin’ – though she’ll let ’em off, since she doesn’t want to dish out another multiple expulsion this term. If I were the Crowninshields, I’d take a spell in the slammer rather than stick around School. Beryl the Vent has had her whip’s licence yanked. They’ve stripped her gold piping off, which makes her meat for anyone with a grudge – and you’ll find me at the head of the line. The Hooded Creeps ain’t squawkin’ – they don’t know enough to be more afraid of Headmistress than their bosses. They were hired goons anyway. I got that much out of ’em.’

‘You’ve no idea what it was all about?’ ventured Amy.

‘Were you up for ransom?’ asked Frecks.

Kali shrugged. ‘They was tightmouth. Something was gonna happen this morning, though. Something permanent, I figure. I lost my hat in the tussle, and one of the jaspers said I wouldn’t be needing one after Monday sunrise. He said a tourniquet might suit me better.’

Kali drew a thumb across her neck.

‘You know your father’s coming,’ said Amy.

Kali looked down. ‘Yeah. How about that?’

‘I doubt we’ll ever get to the bottom of this,’ said Frecks. ‘Still, no real harm done. Jolly jape, as it happens. Kali rescued. Witches routed. Up the Moth Club, down the Murdering Heathens. Hurrah for School!’

Kali knew all about the Moth Club now.

‘It’ll be a shame to hang up the costumes for good,’ said Light Fingers. ‘I’ve ideas on how to improve them. But Kali’s safe, so our charter purpose is fulfilled.’

Amy thought about it.

‘Don’t put the costumes where we can’t get at them,’ she said. ‘I’ve a notion we might need them again. Paule said as much and she’s supposed to be able to see the future.’

Amy couldn’t help wondering who was behind the Hooded Conspiracy. Had Drearcliff heard the last of them? Red Flame remained at large and unknown.

‘Uh oh, here comes the Old Man,’ said Kali.

Dr Swan was coming across the Quad with a tall, dark, dramatically bearded man who wore a white western suit and a cherry-red turban. He had electric eyes, like his daughter’s. They flashed as he saw the girls in a gaggle by the Heel.

‘Don’t get hitched to him, that’s my advice…’

‘No fear,’ said Frecks. ‘He’s
ancient
!’

‘My last stepmother was a year younger than me.’

‘Crumpets,’ gasped Amy.

‘Don’t worry, doll,’ said Kali kindly. ‘Pop likes ’em fleshier than you.’

It wasn’t the prospect of matrimony which had startled Amy. It was the large pink sticking plaster on Mr Chattopadhyay’s forehead. The patch barely covered a bruise which looked for all the world as if an accurately chucked cricket ball had struck him between the eyes.

‘Double crumpets,’ exclaimed Amy again.

E
ARLY IN THE
new year, Amy returned to find Drearcliff Grange School transformed into a fairy-tale castle. House and grounds were blanketed with thick, white snow. Translucent stalactites hung from sills, gutters and eaves. Frost shapes sparkled on windowpanes. There was delight, especially among Firsts who had yet to experience a Drearcliff winter. Amy had an inkling that living in an icebound palace would have drawbacks, but was still struck by its prettiness.

Headmistress, swathed in white furs like a lady Cossack, greeted the back-from-the-hols rush of girls with cautions not to run on slippery flagstones. Nevertheless, there were outbursts of snowball-chucking, snowman-making and tea-tray tobogganing. Nurse had laid in a supply of ointment, bandages and sticking plasters. Casualties were inevitable.

Night fell in mid-afternoon. Joy sputtered.

Everyone realised how cold it was. Deucedly, devilishly, perniciously, pestilentially cold. Drearcliff wasn’t Fairyland, but Hell Frozen Over. No matter how much fuel Joxer fed into the furnace, scant warmth seeped from the basement to the rest of School. Piping-hot soup was icy by the time it got to table. The water closets were frozen solid until Keys went round with a hammer.

Rumour had it that the wolves of the motto loped from their caves when the weather turned. Smudge – who had
not
learned her lesson from the Affair of the Hooded Conspiracy – recounted stories of growling in dorm corridors at night and scratches found on cell doors in the morning.

This was not happy weather for moths.

The next day, Hale of the Fifth, the Goneril cross-country champion, refused the option to take part in indoor games for the duration and set out on her habitual run through the woods. In her usual kit of shorts and singlet, she waded through thigh-high drifts to her starting post, cheerfully proclaiming she’d warm up when she hit her stride. Hale and Hearty Hale, a heroine to her House, was cheered at the off, though even her most staunch partisans nipped back inside sharpish as soon as she was out of sight. Three hours later, a search party found her, barely a hundred yards along her route, blue-limbed and frostbitten. Hale mumbled about golden eyes glittering in dark places between the trees before swooning. When she came round, her new handle was Swot of the Antarctic.

The cold became the only topic of conversation. A thousand schemes were hatched to mitigate its numbing, creeping, deadly effect.

In their cell, the Moth Club piled every blanket and garment they possessed on to their beds, then burrowed into the cocoons. Even at the bottom of the pile, Amy had to set her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. Sleep was troubled by the shivering and moaning of her comrades in distress. She wore mittens over gloves and three pairs of socks to bed, but her hands and feet still froze. If wolves dared trespass in Dorm Three, they’d most likely be skinned by desperate girls, so their hides could be quilted into fur coverlets.

Frecks opined that Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was a charabanc outing to Eastbourne next to winter at Drearcliff. Kali said the eerie high mountain peaks of the Hindu Kush, haunt of the fabled
yeti
or
mi-go
, weren’t as dreadful as North Somerset in January. Howling blizzards came regularly, rattling the windows. Kali said if you listened hard, you could hear
yeti
calling each other in the wind. Each fresh snowfall obliterated pathways and further burdened straining roofs.

The Heel was buried under a white mound until the first week’s Infractors – mostly Seconds who disobeyed Headmistress’s decree about running on flagstones but could still walk afterwards – had to excavate and uncover the relic. Allowed small shovels in addition to the traditional toothbrushes, the punishment party discovered ‘Death to King Herod of Judea… and a Merry Christmas to All Our Readers’ painted on the marble in extremely large red letters. This earned Absalom another term’s worth of Sunday detentions. ‘I’m a second Dreyfus Case,’ she complained, but Amy suspected she welcomed political martyrdom.

Curious, Amy asked Absalom how anarchists celebrated the holidays. The girl explained her family exchanged radical pamphlets and gelignite recipes while dining on a roast swan her father had specifically poached from a royal estate. Instead of carols around a tree, they sang revolutionary songs in front of a fire into which they threw straw dollies made in the image of kings, presidents, colossi of finance and secret police chiefs. Absalom and her sisters nibbled biscuits decorated with red sugar stars and slogans of the struggle.

An anarchist Christmas sounded more fun than Amy’s hols. Arriving home after her first term away, she found Mother bright-eyed with expectations of a change in circumstances. Mother felt that, warmed by grog and mince pies, Amy’s latest uncle could be inveigled into addressing a Certain Pressing Matter. She ordered Lettie to decorate and sent Cook out to fetch a goose… but an ‘incident’ at a cocktail party in Altrincham prompted the revocation of Uncle Horace’s dinner invitation.

By Christmas, the house was left half-decorated and presents were returned unopened. On the day itself, Mother took to her bed with a headache. Lettie and Cook were with their own families and the goose was forgotten in the pantry. Amy worked on her Book of Moths. In the evening, she put a Chopin
Étude
on the gramophone and defiantly floated around the drawing room in her nightie, pushing herself off the walls and ceiling to drift gently like a balloon. She rolled herself up into a ball, tucking in her knees, and bobbed about the chandelier, then concentrated hard on becoming steadily heavier and setting down on the carpet. She wished she had thought to bring her Kentish Glory costume. She floated better with the leotard and mask.

On Boxing Day, Uncle Horace came round to apologise and left with a black eye and tea all down his shirt. He had not been one of Amy’s more inspiring uncles… indeed, he scored near the bottom of a bad bunch. Only after four or five of the beasts did Amy notice what they had in common. They were all fellows who had found some excuse not to be in the War. Uncle Horace, an alderman, said he would have happily served at the Front, except that someone sensible had to stay behind and keep the women-folk in line. He was proprietor of a munitions factory where girls who protested about the ratio of sawdust to gunpowder in the shells were dismissed out of hand. Army protests about Uncle Horace’s habit of sending them misfiring duds failed to effect a change of purchasing policy, thanks to his expert toadying, lobbying and backhanding. But getting round the War Production Board was easier than appeasing Mother.

Amy wouldn’t be surprised if Uncle Horace were mysteriously shot.

Worcestershire would scarcely be bereft were someone to collect the full set by potting Uncle Simon, Uncle Ernst, Uncle Clive, Uncle Peasegood and Uncle Stanislas like china ducks in a fairground shy.

Two weeks into term, snowmen made in fun on the first day were no longer jovial, friendly presences but visible minions of an invisible enemy. The unmelted monsters mocked the warm-blooded fools who had created them. Coal eyes took on a malicious cast, carrot noses sneered at shivering mortals and jaunty brooms were shouldered like rifles.

Girls began pitching cricket balls at the snowmen, knocking off hats or punching holes through heads. At first, superstitious Firsts and Seconds effected repairs, trying to placate idols who’d been given appealing names like Captain Freezing or Mr Cold. Offerings were laid on altar trays placed before their squat, primal forms. As conditions persisted, the worshippers fell away. Apostates took to bitterly denouncing their former beliefs.

Smudge, of course, said the snowmen came to life at night – in league with the prowling wolves. Even those who should know better started listening to her. With long, long nights and not much else to do for entertainment, there was an epidemic of ghost-storytelling. Not just from Smudge. Peebles Arbuthnot – hitherto taken for a sensible lass – came back to the dorm in a tizzy one evening, gabbling about a brush with a glowing violet apparition in the covered walkway leading from the Quad. She described a partially transparent girl, posed in an attitude of terror. One moment, she was there; the next, she was gone, leaving behind a whiff of chem lab stinks. Peebles’ House Sisters assumed someone was ragging her. Frecks suggested this was one of Ariel’s unamusing practical jokes. Peebles wasn’t especially high-strung or imaginative. Amy saw she was genuinely spooked.

‘I jumped,’ Peebles said, ‘but
she
was the frightened one… and not by me. I could see her, but she was looking at something else, something
terrifying
I couldn’t see. The expression on her face was awful. I’ll be walking the long way round from now on. I shouldn’t care to encounter that ghost girl again if I were let off R.I. for a whole term.’