The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School (42 page)

The smell from Hypatia Hall was an acrid mnemonic, taking her back to scrapes, stinks and the time Francesca Stone sent half the Fifth to the Infirmary by concocting mustard gas ‘by accident’ in the Chem Lab. Three children – Firsts? – skipping in the Quad chilled her to the bone. Good grief, there was that rhyme again…

…ants in your pants, all the way from France…

It had been extinguished, for obvious reasons, after the Fall of Rayne, but must have lingered in the collective memory of Drearcliff to be revived by girls who had no idea what it had once meant. A whip with an ARP armlet – she looked twelve – came along and broke up the skipping circle, which was a relief. Amy trusted the words had lost their power. Without an Ant Queen, the rhyme could no more breach the Purple than ‘Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosy’ could spread the Black Plague.

Walking from the car park – School had a car park! – she had strayed near the woods and found no trace of the Runnel and the Flute. That was done with three or four wars ago. It wasn’t even in Kentish Glory’s Top Five Worst Perils. Since then, they’d all been busy… the Wizard War, the Dawn of the Kali-Yuga, the Water War and the Current War…

It was late afternoon, night falling fast thanks to the blackout. Girls walked by in groups, chatting and joshing. Their short skirts, smart-fit blazers and rakish berets were more stylish than the scratchy, baggy uniform stuck on her generation by the long-out-of-business Dosson, Chappell & Co. Drearcliff kit was now supplied by Tanqueray – For Girls, who streamlined skirts and padded shoulders.

As was proper, the girls didn’t know or care who Amy was.

Had she even noticed Old Girls when she was a young one? Ex-convicts must have pitched up at School on missions like this, grown women invisible to growing girls. Even in her day, there were reunions and state visits. Some of these children might be the daughters of her contemporaries. She knew Hannah Absalom, Charlotte Knowles and Marigold de Vere had girls in School… was there a new Radical Rita or Miss Memory, defacing the Heel or coming top in every scheduled test?

She’d motored from London in her Riley Falcon, blowing six months’ coupons on the one trip. Past Exeter, road signs were taken down or turned around in case there was an invasion and the enemy needed to be fooled. She still knew the way…

Driving from Watchet to Drearcliff brought back a memory. Joxer at the reins and dear old Dauntless clopping along. Serafine Walmergrave cocking snooks at horn-honking motorists.

Her car had been garaged for three years while she was busy on the home front and in France. Kentish Glory had gone to war too. Officially, Amanda Thomsett was a Second Officer in the Women’s Royal Navy Service, seconded to Naval Intelligence. Her cover job was shoving model ships around a huge map with a modified snooker cue. But she had other duties.

She wore her Wren uniform… mask rolled up in a concealed pocket of her greatcoat, a trick learned from Emma Naisbitt all those years ago.

She resolved not even to think the words
all those years ago
ever again.

They were all in uniform these days. A new Pendragon Squadron flew Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, without help from the Lady in the Lake. Don Conquest, atoning for his interned father, was Captain Conquest of the Conquering Commandos, hero of lightning raids into the occupied territories. Kentish Glory had gone along with them on a jaunt in Norway, striking against a dark physics facility in the lea of a glacier – preventing the Nazis from reviving a rhedosaurus from the ancient ice. Connie Hern showed up at Dunkirk with her racing submersible
Silver Sprite
and rescued dozens from the beaches. Dennis Rattray, disgraces set aside again, was with Monty in North Africa. Facing a squadron of Tiger tanks controlled by the bottled brains of dead Afrika Korps commanders, Rattray used his Fang of Night gem to blacken his fist once again and halted the enemy advance in its tracks.

Even Jonathan – Dr Shade,
her
Dr Shade! – had rejoined the Royal Army Medical Corps. Long shifts among the wounded of the Blitz didn’t stop him zipping about London during air-raids, tracking down (and terrifying) Fifth Columnists. Hans von Hellhund was back, with a sulphurous swastika burning on his Stuka. The Demon Ace called out Dr Shade as his only fit opponent in this war. Poor old Sidney Skylark – whom Amy had met at Gatherings of the Circle and couldn’t help but feel sorry for – was in a deep sulk. Thanks to his infernal pact, von Hellhund still flew, but his original arch-nemesis was grounded by arthritis and tummy wobbles.

Now the Yanks were in the big show, whole divisions of mystery men, boy geniuses, night-avengers, circus daredevils, muscle maniacs and machine marvels were storming into the fray. Overpaid, oversexed and over here wasn’t a tenth of it. It’d be a miracle if the Allies got through the War without a major falling-out among their Unusual Combatants. A section of the Mausoleum called the Glasshouse was a military prison for Infractors with Abilities, the No-Stockade-Can-Hold-Me Brigade. It already needed to be expanded.

Sometimes, Amy missed Antoinette Rowley Rayne and the Hooded Conspirators.

Hitler’s favourite British books were
Tarka the Otter
and
Formis
. When she’d first seen newsreels of marching Nazis, she’d thought them a comical imitation of the Black Skirts. They didn’t seem so ridiculous now.

Sometimes, Amy felt everything in her world – in
the
world – had started at School.

After all, for her, it had.

She passed between the Budgies and stepped into the reception room of Tempest Keep.

The display of class photographs was bigger. She was in four of them. But the wallpaper hadn’t changed and the furniture was the same.

Keys was still at her post.

No,
a
Keys was behind the desk.

The
Keys was gone. Near the end of her time at Drearcliff Amy had learned the custodian’s name, Hilda Percy.

‘Amy,’ exclaimed the new Keys, smiling.

She came out from behind her desk, working the wheels of her chair with her hands. A tartan blanket was tucked around her dead legs, which were twisted and fused together from knee to ankle…

‘Paule,’ said Amy, tears in her eyes. ‘Paule.’

Several more white streaks ran through Dora Paule’s cloud of hair, but her face was unlined. She didn’t look old enough to be Keys. She seemed, in fact, much younger than Amy.

A bunch of keys, mostly purple, was hooked over the arm of her chair.

‘Those are Larry Laurence’s copies,’ said Amy.

‘We buried Miss Percy’s set with her.’

‘Of course you did.’

The original Keys was still on the grounds, in a small, well-tended cemetery. It was also the last resting place of Ponce Bainter – interred face down with an iron spike through his head, if there was any justice – and a number of former Staff and old girls.

Amy understood a few asked to be brought back and buried here because later life had disappointed them. School really had been the best days of their lives. Spanish flu in ’19 and an outbreak of beri-beri in ’32 added clusters of small, sad stones.

Soldier Ant casualties whose bodies were found this side of the shimmer – Priscilla Rintoul, Bryony Burtoncrest, Gladys Sundle – were buried elsewhere, but a plaque listed their names… along with those lost in the Purple. The unrecovered were only presumed dead. No new Mauve Mary loomed out of the thin shimmer in the covered walkway. Officially, that had been an epidemic – the Purple Plague.

Some girls were taken out of School for months afterwards, but most came back. The uniform rules were amended. Black was no longer an option. Former Black Skirts remembered little of the craze, and didn’t care to think too deeply about time spent skipping along the Runnel after Antoinette Rowley Rayne.

Amy bent over and hugged Paule, which was slightly difficult…

…but only with her arms. An old trick came back, and she entwined Paule with her mentacles, lifting her out of her chair. She caught her blanket and tidied it away. Paule wore a long skirt in Drearcliff grey and shiny shoes.

At first, she’d had to puppeteer Paule. Then, they learned better. Her Ability supported her friend’s weight as if it were a body of water. Paule swam in it of her own accord. Amy had sworn she’d never leave the Unusual girl to be stuck in her chair… but, of course, she’d left School in the end, as Paule insisted she should.

‘Am I first?’ she asked.

‘No, you’re nearly last. We’re not sure the fourth can make it. We had only a formal acknowledgement of receipt from the Diogenes Club, with a PS blacked by the wartime censor. I sympathise. I have to read the girls’ post and blot out strategic or demoralising information. Sneaky Steff Seelan makes up paragraphs about troop movements and death-ray projects just so I have to use up ink.’

They danced around the room, without touching. Both floated.

‘Baby Fa-a-ace,’ they sang, adopting shrill little-girl voices, ‘You’ve got the cutest little baby fa-a-ace…’

Then they collapsed in giggles.

‘We had the best songs,’ said Amy. ‘Have you heard the rot girls listen to nowadays?
Doodly-acky-sacky want some seafood, mama
. What does that even mean?’

Paule hung in the air, momentarily melancholy.

‘You always forget, Amy. I was old and young when you first knew me and I still am. I don’t have your songs the way you do. “Baby Face” and “Yes, We Have No Bananas” and “Ain’t We Got Fun?” I have the songs that were silly when I was first a girl
and
the songs that are silly now… and all the ones in between. I get “Ta-Ra-Ra-
Boom
-De-Ay” and “Der Feuhrer’s Face” mixed up.’

Amy wanted to hug her friend again.

Paule drifted back into her chair and settled herself. With her blanket on, she looked like a mermaid in disguise…

…thinking of mermaids: Janice Marsh grew up to be a real Hollywood film star, despite (or because of) the fish-lips and pop eyes. She’d been in
Nefertiti, Down Ecuador Way
and
Salome in the WAVES
. She’d also fallen in with the very fishy Esoteric Order of Dagon in California. Not all of the Remove stuck with
Just and True
as a motto. Amy couldn’t always blame them – even if Kentish Glory had to send Frost and Thorn to the Mausoleum after their wheeze of freezing and firing their way into the Bank of England.

‘You trot upstairs,’ said Paule. ‘Headmistress knows you’re coming. The all-seeing eyes are still there.’

Amy looked to the portrait of Dr Swan. Its eyes were crystals.

‘Television?’

‘Something like,’ said Paule. ‘Welcome to the Marvels of Futurity.’

That gave Amy a tingle. Also
déjà vu
.

After the downfall of the Splendid Six, the Mystic Maharajah’s Sordid Seven challenged Dr Shade and Kentish Glory to a duel in the ruins. Mystic Marge had tried to slap the fluence on her and this tingle felt oddly like that…

Why, after all, was she here?

There was a war on. Didn’t she have more important things to do?

The spell passed and she climbed the stairs to Dr Swan’s study. There were more of them and the walls stretched and contracted.

She had an urge to pull on her mask.

Outside the Swanage, what colour was the night?

Then, she was on the landing. Britannia still commanded the corridor, brandishing heads that looked like Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito.

The door of Headmistress’s study opened by itself. The mechanism was smoother than in her day, but the trick was the same.

Dr Swan, unchanged, stood by her desk, with a glass of something violet in her hand. She wore her academic gown over a silver evening dress. It was if she’d been standing there for twenty years, waiting for Amy to come back.

Two women got up from chairs and rushed at Amy.

She was embraced, simultaneously by Inspector Naisbitt of the Women’s Auxiliary Police and the Ranee of the Kali-Yuga.

Amy knew Kali was still on WAP’s Most Wanted International Criminal list. Emma must be prepared to overlook that… for the evening.

The scent of Kali’s herbal cigarettes was still heady.

The three former cell-mates hugged.

At least her friends had the decency to get older at the same rate she had. They had little lines around their eyes and mouths.

Amy had seen Emma only a few weeks ago, at the site of the Clerkenwell Beheadings. They tended to run into each other at scenes of the crime. Together, they had settled the hash of the Fiend of the Fifth Column, put an end to the Blitz Butcher, saved St Paul’s from the Mjolnir Bomb, solved the Riddle of the Xenoglyphs and broken up the Black Quorum.

Officially, the WAP looked askance at the likes of Dr Shade and Kentish Glory… but Amy and Emma worked well together. Jonathan, she noticed, was a smidge jealous of the old school tie. When the women dug up some deep-buried scrap of Drearcliff lore or laughed at something impossible to explain to a non-Old Girl, Amy sensed his eyes narrowing behind the Dr Shade goggles and saw his slouch hatbrim angle to convey irritation.

‘Oof, no strangling,’ said Emma. ‘Especially not from you, Ranee Kali.’

So far as Amy knew – and who could really tell? – Kali hadn’t set foot on English soil in ten years. She’d been active in China when the Japanese invaded. The mysterious deaths of five particularly brutal officers who held high rank in the Blood Banner Society were credited to her. There was a fanciful movie about the case,
She-Strangler of Shanghai
. She’d also been in the Deep South around the time Dudley Hogg-Pidgeon was assassinated. If he’d lived, the demagogue might have united several American fascist parties into an effective movement. Kali was more likely to be in bad odour with Emma for robbing the Sub-Continental Stronghold of Box Brothers Bank in Calcutta.

The Kali-Yuga – the Age of the Demon – had influence in every corner of the world. Its queen had proved herself much more than the mere thief her father had been. To some, Kali was a distaff Dr Mabuse… to others, a female Gandhi. It was said Hitler and Churchill only agreed on one thing – that Kali Chattopadhyay should be hanged.