Voices in Stone (21 page)

If you enjoyed VOICES IN STONE,
you might like to discover the spooky goings-on
at St Mark’s College for Girls in
THE BLUE LADY by Eleanor Hawken.

Read on to find out more …

I was never the sort of girl who believed in ghosts. I never played with Ouija boards, held séances or felt afraid of the dark. That stuff was for other people, not me. But that all changed when I went to live at St Mark’s College.

Unlike the other girls at St Mark’s, I hadn’t lived away from home since the age of eight. I didn’t come from a posh family who had a house in the country and a yacht in France. The only time I’d ever been to France was when Mum and I did a day trip using ferry tokens she’d saved up from a newspaper. Boarding school wasn’t for girls like me. I ended up there by mistake.

The mistake happened last December, when Mum’s friend Lynn invited her to an army officers’ Christmas
ball. Lynn’s brother is a major in the army and had just got back from a tour of Afghanistan. Apparently his wife used to write to him every week while he was out there, and then one week the letters stopped. Two months later he had another letter from her – only this time all she sent him were divorce papers. Lynn wanted to set Mum up with this guy – although I wasn’t keen. Mum’s had enough loser boyfriends without adding a jilted army officer to the list.

But that night, at the ball, Mum accidentally sat on the wrong table and chatted to a guy who she thought was Lynn’s brother. Turns out the man she was taking to wasn’t Lynn’s brother, but Lynn’s brother’s boss. His name was Lieutenant Colonel Phillip Walker. They got married eight months later. And thirteen days after the wedding, Phil was posted to Germany. Instead of taking me to Germany and putting me into a German school, Mum and Phil decided to send me to an English boarding school. So it was all just one big mix-up – if Mum had chatted to the right guy that night, I would never have been sent to St Mark’s. If I’d never gone to St Mark’s, then I’d still believe there’s no such thing as ghosts …

Emily Diamand’s debut novel,
Flood Child
(first published as
Reaver’s Ransom
), won the inaugural
Times
/Chicken House award for Children’s Fiction in 2009, was shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award in the same year and was awarded Best Young Adult Fiction in 2011 by the American Library Association.
Ways to See a Ghost
, the first book featuring Isis and Gray, was published in 2013.