The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School (2 page)

‘Say goodbye to Roly,’ said Frecks callously. ‘The Murdering Heathens have a burning fiery furnace. Like the one Shadrach, Meschach and the other fellow were bunged in. Prophets prosper in flames. Dollies don’t, as a rule.’

The dread hand squeezed. Amy was determined not to cry.

‘Gryce will probably dunk you in a horse trough too, or dangle you out of the North Window. Thinks she’s a caution. Best to grind your teeth and get it over with. You can shiv one of the minor arcana later, if you’ve a mind. It’ll either get the Witches off your back for a term, or declare a war which can end only in the fall of civilisation.’

Amy didn’t know what to make of Frecks. At her old school, there hadn’t been any girls remotely like her.

They strolled along a flagstone path between overgrown lawns. On one, a troupe of tall, clumsy girls in wispy Grecian gowns performed energetic leaps and bends under the direction of a large woman who beat time by slapping a riding crop into a gauntlet. On the other, a croquet match descended into a scratching, hair-pulling mêlée as a tiny teacher ineffectually shrilled a whistle. Amy thought she saw blood.

‘Unparalleled savagery,’ declaimed Frecks. ‘That’s the Drearcliff spirit. The malleteers are shamming the punch-up, by the way. The Fifth have a pool on who can get Miss Dryden to bust a blood vessel by overtooting.’

The path wound through gardens.

‘Our grand tour continues,’ said Frecks. ‘Sixpence for the guide would be appreciated. Dorms are in Old House, the one that’s falling off the cliff. I’m to get you settled in our cell later. Ames, the birdie who had your perch last, fled to Switzerland for her lungs. Reckon she inhaled ground grit to fake it. Hope you’re made of sterner stuff. It’s a nuisance having to break in new bugs every twenty minutes.’

Up close, Old House looked no more inviting than from afar. Near the cliff edge, signs warned against straying too close.

They passed through a short, covered walkway into a grassy square surrounded by low-lying buildings. In the centre of the Quad stood a plinth supporting a giant marble foot, broken off at the ankle.

‘Professor Clio Chalke McGill, classicist and plunderer, hauled that there tootsie from Ancient Greece and generously donated it to School. Miss Borrodale, who takes Science, says the rest of the colossus must be
hopping mad
. She’s mildly droll, though don’t get her on Palaeontology or you’ll never escape – and watch out for her thwacking habit. This lump is called the Heel. Rumour hath it the whole statue was supposed to be Achilles.’

‘Death to King Gustav V of Sweden’ was written in red on the white stone.

‘Pay no heed to the graffiti,’ said Frecks. ‘Absalom the Anarchist singles out a different oppressor of the people every week. Almost educational, but a Minor Infraction of School Rules. Clock up six Minors and you have to scrub the Heel with your toothbrush. I’ve done it twice.’

‘School Rules?’

‘Yes, nasty little beasts. Set down at the Diet of Worms in 1066. Memorise ’em, else you’ll be constantly in hot water. In some parts of School, it’s against rules to wear your boater. In other parts, it’s against rules not to. Running from lessons to Refectory is an Infraction. So is
not
running from Refectory to lessons. If a whip slaps you across the chops, you can be Minored for having a red mark on your face. She can keep slapping until you cease Impertinent Display. A Minor is whatever one of the Witches thinks up if she’s had a “Dear Jane” from her boyfriend and wants to take it out on someone who can’t jilt her for the butcher’s lass. I’ve been Minored for Inappropriate Failure to Whistle.’

‘Buttered crumpets!’ exclaimed Amy.

‘Major Infractions are the serious ones, though. Gross moral turpitude, grand larceny, public indecency, destruction of school property, arson in a naval dockyard. Anything liable to bring the institution into disrepute. Should you be inclined to such criminal endeavours, the good news is that whips can’t stick a Major on you without due process. The bad news is that Majors are punishable by fifty lashes with the Cat. Or transportation to the Colonies.’

The north side of the Quad was taken up by a new, three-storey building.

Frecks led Amy to the front steps. Stone eagles perched on low, twisted columns either side of the doorway. They had glass marbles for eyes.

‘I go no further, Pilgrim,’ said Frecks. ‘For me to pass unbidden between the Budgies would constitute a Major. Like School Gate, you only get the honour – if honour it be – of calling in at the Swanage on your first day. Venture within and report to Headmistress, who’ll terrify you for a quarter of an hour. Then trot along to Old House and seek out Dorm Three. I’ll introduce you to the Desdemona Damsels. With that, I bid you adieu… oh, and don’t look Dr Swan in the eye – she’s got the fluence.’

S
HE STEPPED INTO
a reception room.

One wall was three-fifths covered with framed school photographs, taken annually from 1877. Founding year. Generation after generation of girls. Rising through the years and passing out. Staff growing older and being replaced. Amy estimated Drearcliff Grange would have to start on a new wall in 1961.

A cabinet displayed sporting and artistic trophies. A grinning African fetish of evil aspect was lumped in with silver cups and ballerina statuettes.

There was a strong smell of pure alcohol. A burly woman stood at a table covered with newspaper, using vaporous astringent to clean a disassembled Lee–Enfield rifle. An enormous bunch of keys dangled from her wide leather belt. She looked at Amy through the long thin telescope of the barrel.

‘Go up, new girl,’ she said, nodding to a stairway. ‘Headmistress is waiting.’

Amy tried to put her foot on the first step, but found she couldn’t touch it – as if a hard, invisible pillow overlay the carpet. She shot a guilty glance at the custodian. Absorbed in oiling a spring, the woman didn’t notice. This wasn’t so much floating as standing on air. A slightly sick-making feeling, like pressing bar magnets together when their poles were aligned to repel. Amy was getting more used to it, though the sensation was still disturbing. She couldn’t get past the
wrongness
.

Using the banister, she pulled herself hand over hand. Trying not to think about going against nature, Amy glided upwards, toes barely brushing the steps. When she reached the first-storey landing, her usual weight settled back. Her shoes were set down on the carpet. After her floats, she felt heavy, as if Newton himself were paying her back for contravening his Law of Gravity.

A large door bore an engraved brass plate.

Dr Myrna Swan, Headmistress
D. Phil. (Bangalore), D. Eng (Sao Paolo), M. Script. (Wells
Cathedral) & Cetera.

Amy raised a knuckle. A voice came from beyond before she could rap on the door.

‘Enter, Thomsett.’

The door opened by itself. Across the book-lined room, a slim, imposing woman of indeterminate age sat behind a lacquer-topped desk.

Amy’s hand was still up, where the door wasn’t.

‘You didn’t do that,’ said Headmistress. ‘I did. I am not in the habit of issuing invitations twice.’

Amy stepped into the room.

Headmistress worked a lever on an apparatus like a typewriter mated with a sewing machine. The door closed behind Amy.

Above the contraption were several copper tubes which ended in eyepieces. Dr Swan had been looking through one. Another tube, with a lens, was out on the landing. It must be an array of mirrors, like a triple-jointed periscope.

Had Headmistress seen her
flying
? Not that it was really flying. Just –
fast floating
.

Dr Swan’s jet-black hair was coiffured in a bun on top of her head, with two pearl-tipped needles stuck through it. Her face was white but for red, bee-stung lips and a black beauty mark. Tiny lines showed around her large green-gold eyes. Amy remembered what Frecks said about the fluence. Dr Swan appeared over and over in the pictures downstairs. She had taken office in the founding year. Girls grew up and left, but she stayed the same, always dead centre in the school photograph. Her age must be even more indeterminate than it seemed.

Her tight silk dress was like a long tunic, green with gold griffin designs. A nurse’s watch was pinned like a brooch on her breast. Her black academic gown hung loosely. It had sawtooth trailing edges and a flaring demon-king collar.

‘Thomsett, Amanda,’ said Dr Swan, tapping a folder on her desk. ‘Third, Desdemona, Unusual.’

Amy understood half of that.

‘Desdemona is your House,’ Headmistress explained. ‘Drearcliff has five. Ariel, Viola, Tamora, Desdemona and Goneril. Had you arrived at the beginning of year, you would be Ariel. In the circumstance, you fit where you must. Desdemona was down a girl. As for
Unusual
… your mother wrote about “incidents” at home. Footprints on the ceiling.
She
trusts you will grow out of it…’

Amy blushed like a fire engine.

‘
I
know you will not,’ said Dr Swan. ‘Unusuals have Abilities or Attributes, sometimes both. You are blessed with Abilities. It is our responsibility to help you cultivate them, to find Applications.’

Amy was astonished. This was not what she – or Mother! – expected from her new school. In the months since she first came unstuck from the ground, Amy had been subjected to cold baths, weighted pinafores, long walks, hobbling boots and a buzzing, tickling electric belt. Leeches and exorcism were on the cards. Mother’s whole idea in sending Amy to Drearcliff was to clamp down on
floating
.

‘We have a tradition of Unusual Girls at Drearcliff. I like to think of them as my cygnets. You’ve heard of Lucinda Tregellis-d’Aulney…’

The Aviatrix. Britain’s flying heroine. The only woman among the Splendid Six, Britain’s most unique and remarkable defenders. She didn’t just float, she soared. Amy followed her exploits in
Girls’ Paper
. Lady Lucinda was currently prominent in the illustrated press for nabbing Jimmy O’Goblins. The coinernecromancer, whose lightweight sovereigns caused escalating misfortune each time they were spent, was in the Special Prison with a sore head. The Aviatrix was invited to high tea at the Palace with the King and the governor of the Bank of England.

‘Tregellis-d’Aulney passed out in ’16. She has made a name for herself. So have other Drearcliff Unusuals. Irene Dobson, the medium. Cressida Hervey, the Australian opal millionairess – with dowsing abilities. Monica Bright – ‘Shiner’ Bright of the Women’s Auxiliary Police. Grace Ki, the Ghost Lantern Girl. Urania Strangways, who survived hanging in Montevideo last year. Luna Bartendale, the psychic investigator. I take pride in my cygnets’ achievements, whichever direction their enthusiasms take them. You have, I trust, an
enthusiasm
?’

Shyly, Amy admitted ‘I like moths. Not collecting them. I don’t believe in killing jars and pins. I’ve sketched three hundred and twelve distinct live specimens. British Isles, of course. I’m nowhere near finished. There are over two thousand British moth species alone.’

‘That is
not
what I mean by an
enthusiasm
, Thomsett. Still, it’s early days yet. Can you, ah…?’

Dr Swan gestured with her flat palm, lifting it up over her desk.

Amy looked at her toes. She worked so desperately
not
to float, she couldn’t unclench whatever it was that held her to the ground.

She strained, eyes shut, making noises inside her head.

‘You are trying too hard, Thomsett. Nothing good comes of that. You must
let go
, not
hold tight
.’

Amy nodded and relaxed. She rose an inch or so from the floor, but couldn’t stay up. She clumped down again.

Dr Swan raised an eyebrow. ‘Promising.’

Amy was exhausted. Had the Aviatrix – who grew temporary wings of ectoplasm – started like this? With tiny floats? Did she ever wake up thumping against her ceiling, blinded by sheets tented around her, in a panic that the world had gone topsy-turvy?

‘And the other thing,’ Headmistress said. She put a fountain pen on her blotter.

Amy thought about the pen floating, but it only wobbled – and leaked a bit.

She tried to apologise. She could sometimes make things float. More often, she gave herself a nosebleed. Frankly, it was easy enough to pick up a pen with her fingers. Taking hold of things with her mind was a strain.

Dr Swan didn’t press her further.

‘My eye will be always on you,’ said Headmistress, tapping her copper tubes. ‘We shall see what can be done with your Abilities. Pick up your Time-Table Book from Keys.’

Amy knew who Headmistress meant.

‘
Dismissed
,’ said Dr Swan, depressing a lever.

The door opened. Amy backed through it.

O
UTSIDE
O
LD
H
OUSE
, Amy found four Seconds performing an intricate skipping ritual to a never-ending rhyme about drowned black babies in a terrible flood. She asked where she could find Dorm Three. They stopped in mid-chant, staring as if she were a person from Porlock – as it happens, only a few miles away – interrupting Coleridge in full poetical flow. The solemn adjudicator pointed up at the top of Old House, then crossed herself and snapped her fingers to order resumption of skipping and chanting. The terrible flood had to drown many more black babies.

Inside the building, which smelled of rain on rocks, Amy found a tree of signs pointing to destinations as diverse as ‘Refectory’, ‘Stamp Club’, ‘Timbuctoo’ and ‘Nurse’. A broken-necked Mr Punch dangled from the Nurse sign in a hangman’s noose, pricking Amy’s fears for Roly Pontoons. Higher branches indicated dorms were on the upper floors.

Amy climbed a winding stone staircase. Names, phrases and dates were scratched into the walls. At her old school, boarders slept in something like a hospital ward or a barracks – a big room with beds lined up opposite each other. At Drearcliff, dorms were long, dark corridors with doors off to either side. Amy didn’t know where to go from the landing, so she opened the first door. Four beds fit into a room the size of the one Lettie the maid lived in at home. A girl with two sets of extra-thick spectacles – one in her hair like an Alice band – was putting together a tiny guillotine from lolly-sticks and a safety razor-blade.