A Talent for Trouble

by Natasha Farrant

  Then crashed, when no one else came out.

  She had hoped so hard that this time would be different.

  The clement weather had vanished overnight, leaving the day’s organizers gazing anxiously at the sky. Under lowering clouds, Patience and Alice walked away from the castle toward the loch.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Patience said. “He arrived yesterday at my flat, and we were going to fly to Edinburgh together. But then just before we were due to leave, he went out. I haven’t heard a squeak from him since, except a short message to say there had been a change of plan. Oh, Alice!”

  They had reached the water, which today was dark and choppy and bleakly beautiful. Patience stood on the shore, reaching her arms out to the view as if she were trying to hug it. “I wish I could paint this!”

  Alice, at this moment, couldn’t have cared less about the loch.

  “Did Dad give you a message for me?” she asked.

  “Of course he did!” Patience lied. “He sends heaps of love, and says he’s really sorry.” She came away from the loch and took her niece’s hands. “Darling, you do like it here, don’t you?”

  “I miss home.”

  The words, spoken out loud, delivered their truth to Alice like a punch in the stomach. She loved it here, but it wasn’t enough. She didn’t think anywhere would ever be enough.

  Patience put her arms around her. “Oh, darling.”

  “And I want Mum.”

  They sat for a while in silence while Patience considered her reply.

  “Do you remember,” she said at last, “once, when you were little, you climbed out of your bedroom window to sleep in the cherry tree?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “Well, you did, and then you were furious when your mother ordered you to come back in. You shouted and cried that you wanted to sleep among the cherry blossoms like a princess. When your mum finally did manage to bribe you back in with the promise of ice cream, you wouldn’t talk to her, just took the ice cream and closed the door in her face. She’d locked your window by then, of course, like any sensible mother. But do you know what she said to me that night? She laughed, and said she hoped you would always be fearless and want to sleep among cherry blossoms. She was already ill then. I think she was trying to be fearless too.”

  Alice looked away so her aunt wouldn’t see her trying not to cry.

  “I want what she wanted, darling. For you to be fearless, like you used to be. To climb out of windows, and up trees, and to live life, the way she did. Dancing in the garden—do you remember?”

  Alice gave a tiny nod. Patience squeezed her hand.

  “Stories end, darling, and that’s sad, but they have to so new ones can begin. It’s why I sent you here. Someone—a friend—had told me about this school, and Major Fortescue. She—my friend—said it was a place that was good for people starting again. And I don’t think Cherry Grange was good for us anymore, darling. Too much history, when we should be looking to the future. I think the dear old house was hurting us.”

  She didn’t add the other things her friend had told her—that the major was famous for collecting waifs and strays, or that he only ever asked people to pay what they could afford, which in Patience’s case, even with the sale of the house, was not much. And when Alice asked, after a long silence, “Where was Dad, that night when I climbed out of the tree?” she bit her tongue and only answered, “Somewhere around, I expect, I don’t remember,” instead of the truth, which was that even when Alice’s mother was alive, no one ever really knew what Barney was up to.

  The heavens opened as they walked back. Stormy Loch took it on the chin. The concert was moved into the Great Hall; the fireworks display was put off to another day. The picnic tent collapsed and cakes were demolished with gusto in the dining hall instead. The rain washed away the paint of “Democracy Failing,” causing the students to cheer and Frau Kirschner to resign in disgust. The day was happily declared a triumph.

  Alice sang with the others and pecked at a cake, but Patience could see that her heart wasn’t in it. They did not talk about Alice’s parents again, but before she left, Patience took a small flat parcel from her bag and gave it to her niece.

  “Open it,” she said.

  It was an exquisite, delicate watercolor of a spray of white roses.

  “Even in the pot, they flowered,” she said. “I wanted to bring you some, but I was worried they wouldn’t survive the journey.”

  A lump rose to Alice’s throat. Patience pulled her into another hug.

  “Fearless,” she whispered. “Don’t forget.”

  Away the visitors went again, huddling under umbrellas to the buses, waving and blowing kisses. Tatiana waltzed past, all smiles. “Nice to see your brothers, Jesse! I am definitely taking them out in my Maserati when I win that million. Funny”—she laughed—“you look smaller next to them.”

  Jesse scowled.

  “Cheer up,” said Fergus. “At least your family came.”

  He spoke lightly, but not enough to disguise his bitterness. Alice briefly dragged her thoughts away from her own unhappiness.

  “I’m sorry they didn’t come, Fer.”

  “Ah, don’t be! I told you they were useless. You OK, Alice?”

  “I think I’m going to go to bed.”

  “But it’s not even five o’clock! What about dinner?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Fergus watched her go, worried. He had been furious with Barney for not coming—much more than with his own parents. He had never expected them, but he knew how hard Alice had been hoping.

  While the rest of the school were clearing up after Visitors’ Day, Fergus sneaked away to the library and typed Barney Mistlethwaite into the search engine. A short Wikipedia entry came up, listing a handful of plays, a TV series, and a couple of films, all a long time ago. So who was Barney Mistlethwaite? He wandered on to Barney’s personal bio—one sister, Patience, a painter. A daughter, Alice, of course. A wife, Clara Mistlethwaite, born Kaminska, deceased . . .

  The eye sees what the heart desires, the therapist his parents had sent him to after they separated had said. Fergus knew this to be true—he just wondered what it was Alice desired. Feeling pensive, he deleted his browsing history and closed down the computer.

  There was a lot more he could have found out about Barney Mistlethwaite, if he’d searched a little harder—none of it to do with acting. Still, what you don’t know won’t kill you—that was another one of the therapist’s sayings.

  Except, of course, when it nearly does.

  Nineteen

  Stormy Loch

  Alice went up to her room and climbed into bed and tried to think only good things about Barney, like the swing he had made and hung in the old oak tree at home, and his big warm laugh and excellent hugs. She tried to convince herself that these were the things that mattered, much more than forgetting her at school when she was little, and not answering her emails, and failing to turn up at a moment’s notice. She tried not to count how many times he had not turned up before.

  Sitting up against her pillows, she traced the contours of her aunt’s watercolor roses, and in her imagination the painting grew and grew, until its thorny branches burst out of the frame and filled her little room. She closed her eyes to chase them away and saw her mother again, dancing in the garden. Blinked, and saw the empty hallway of her dream.

  She pushed away the duvet and went over to the window. Outside, the rain had stopped and a weak sun threw a pale path across the dark waters of the loch. She opened the window and leaned out, breathing in great gulps of clean, damp air.

  Now, in her mind, she heard Dr. Csintalan ask his question—What do you long for in your deep heart’s core?—and suddenly she knew the answer.

  She wanted to be the girl Patience had told her about. The princess in the cherry blossoms. Her mother’s fearless climber.

  She closed her window again and ran out to the loch.

  She could
not tell them afterwards why she had done what she did, except that she wanted to be brave, and the loch was there, and the sun was shining a path on it like something in a story.

  For a while, just looking at it was enough. But only for a while.

  The boathouse was built on stilts over the water, with floating platforms running along the walls and a jetty down the middle that wobbled as Alice walked along it. For a few seconds, as she stumbled and fought to regain her balance, she looked straight down and saw her own reflection in the coal-black water, and thought of the drowned world. Upright again, she banished these thoughts and walked firmly to the farthest boat, untied the painter, climbed in, clambered over a crate, picked up the oars, and rowed out.

  At first, Alice felt magnificent, as though the world existed only for her, but when the sun disappeared behind a cloud, she woke from her sunlit trance in the middle of a loch that was not gold but dark gunmetal gray, and she was cold and exhausted with hands covered in blisters from the rowing. She turned the boat and began to row back, but now the wind was against her, and she was going against the current. One of her blisters burst and started to bleed. She dropped an oar. Then, as she tried to retrieve it, she dropped the other one.

  The weeds swayed beneath her like people waving.

  Feeling anything but fearless, Alice tried to shout for help. Bracing her feet against the sides of the boat, she stood and yelled through cupped hands, but it was pointless. She was half a kilometer across a loch, and everyone else was indoors. Nobody saw or heard a thing.

  She only realized when she sat down again what cargo she was carrying.

  The crate in the bottom of the boat contained Professor Lawrence’s fireworks and a lighter.

  * * *

  Please never, ever try at home what Alice did next.

  We have to assume that, being an intelligent girl, she was too tired to think straight. Or too frightened to know any better. Either way, she was lucky that the fireworks, even in their crate, had suffered from the damp, and didn’t all go up when she lit the taper. The roman candles, the Catherine wheels, the rockets all fizzled damply in their shells and decided, on balance, that they would rather not ignite. But the flares—ah, the flares! Professor Lawrence, rushing to the window with the rest of the school when the shout went up, felt a glow of professional pride. Fuchsia pink, emerald green, and bright orange, punctuated by showers of silver stars—the flares were magnificent.

  “Is it the Northern Lights?” breathed a small pink girl.

  “No, Daphne.” The professor sighed. “It’s science.”

  Stormy Loch was an unconventional school, with an approximate approach to health and safety, but they knew the basics. Which is to say, they had a motorboat, and they knew how to use it.

  Madoc drove the boat, Matron behind him at the ready with a first-aid kit, the major at his side with his binoculars. Over the dark water and the golden wavelets they sped, toward the little rowboat drifting now on the far side of the loch.

  The little rowboat that appeared to be . . . empty.

  Madoc cut the engine and steered carefully toward it. The major caught it and pulled them to. Their hearts in their mouths, they peered over the edge. Perhaps the rower had fainted—or was hiding.

  But there was no one in the rowboat.

  Alice, suddenly alive to the danger of live fireworks, had done the only sensible thing and jumped into the loch.

  Twenty

  Midnight Picnics

  She woke in the infirmary, with the major at her bedside.  “Ah good,” he said. “You’re awake. You’ve been asleep a very long time.”

  She looked toward the window and saw that it was light outside. “What is the time?” she asked.

  “About two o’clock in the afternoon. You’ve slept almost around the clock. Quite the fright you gave us, I must say. You were clinging to the side of the boat when we found you, and you fainted when we plucked you from the water. It’s been a dramatic day, one way and another—the weather, the tent, Frau Kirschner’s resignation . . . But really, in the drama stakes, you take first prize.”

  Alice, feeling mortified, mumbled an apology.

  “I fancy myself a good judge of character, Miss Mistlethwaite,” the major mused. “And yet I confess myself a little baffled by yours. What do you say?”

  He peered at her with his good eye.

  “I don’t know . . . I mean, I don’t know what you think about me, or my character.”

  He sat back in his chair, resting his chin on his hands.

  “It seems to me,” he explained, “that since you arrived here, your behavior has been, shall we say, erratic. On the one hand, you have made friends. You have joined in. Your teachers tell me that, bar a pronounced tendency to daydream, you work well in class. On the other hand . . .”

  He performed a sort of royal wave, as if to imply that the other hand, comprising as it did rooftops, gongs, explosions, and near drownings, was too exhausting to detail.

  “I never used to do mad things,” she told him. “At home, I mean. All I did was read and write stories. It’s just, since I’ve been here . . .”

  “Yes?”

  How could she explain—the sense of vastness from the moment she stepped off the train at Castlehaig, that first morning hammering the gong in the silent hall, the sky on the roof of the keep, the feeling of being a queen with the world at her feet, the sun path on the loch . . .

  “It’s like stories come alive here,” she said. “And it’s so big. I think it makes me want to be big too.”

  The major nodded, looking pleased, then asked curiously, “What were you thinking when you took the boat out on the loch, alone and without informing anyone, in such terrible conditions?”

  “That I was in a story,” Alice admitted, feeling even more mortified. “And that I wanted to do something brave.”

  “Ah,” said the major. “Something brave.”

  He closed his eye, thinking—as he quite frequently did—that children were fascinating but also exhausting, and he stayed like this for so long that Alice thought he might have fallen asleep. She was just wondering if it would be acceptable to poke him when he stirred and asked, “Were you afraid?”

  “Not when I set out,” she replied. “Only later, when I thought I couldn’t get back.”

  There was another pause, and then, “I am not sure you can be brave, if you are not afraid,” the major said. “Being brave means standing up to the things that frighten us, even as we are quaking in our boots. There is so much in this world that is utterly bewildering. Jumping into lochs, dancing about on rooftops—these things may be reckless, or joyous, or dangerous, but I do not think they are courageous. To be fearless, we must first banish our fears, and to achieve that, we must look them in the face.”

  He smiled, seeing how hard she was trying to understand him.

  “However! There is more to life than fear and bewilderment. Sometimes the beauty of the world can take your breath away—just wait for the Orienteering Challenge and you will see what I mean. And the summer nights—the wonderful northern summer nights! Soon they will be so short it will be almost always daylight. Students will sneak out for midnight picnics while the staff pretend not to notice . . . Dr. Csintalan will row on the lake in the small hours of the morning composing poetry, and who knows? Perhaps Mr. Madoc will find love again. We must take care of the beauty in the world, Miss Mistlethwaite. It is one of the reasons I started the school here, in this valley. We must look after it—but perhaps we may also enjoy it? Perhaps . . . you could try to enjoy it?”

  It was a tempting proposition, especially to a girl who in the past day had almost drowned, nearly blown herself up, and been sorely disappointed by her only parent. But there was one last thing, and if Alice was to face up to her fears, she knew that she had to ask.

  “Sir, shouldn’t there be Consequences? Melanie, the girl who had my room before—she was expelled for blowing up the chemistry lab. Isn’t this just as bad?”


  “Oh, I don’t think so,” said the major. “A bit of a scare, but no harm done. This is your home, after all. I think we’ll give you one more chance.”

  Alice felt immeasurable relief. The major stood with a great creaking of bones and pressed his giant hand on top of her head in a kind of gentle blessing. “But perhaps try to keep out of trouble until the end of term?”

  He smiled, so benevolently it was impossible not to smile back.

  “I promise,” she said.

  “Excellent! And meanwhile, perhaps things are not as bleak as you imagine them.”

  He left. Alice sank back into her pillow. She wondered what he could possibly mean, then forgot about it, lulled by the surprising softness of her infirmary bed, the crisp linen, the smell of lavender. Unlike the rest of the castle, this room was neat as a pin, freshly painted white, with gleaming floorboards and clean windows through which she could see the tops of trees. She felt safe, and cosseted. An improbable lightness began to bubble up inside her. There were things she was afraid of, and one day she would face them and become fearless. But in the meantime, midnight picnics sounded fun, and white nights. She could already feel the stirrings of a new story, a happy one, about a family of hares driven from their home in the south, coming to a new valley . . .

  She turned toward her bedside table for a pen. There were two envelopes leaning against the lamp, both addressed in Barney’s handwriting.

  Twenty-One

  A Paradise for Seabirds

  The letters both had London postmarks and had been sent on Friday. The first consisted of a hand-drawn picture of an island, with lots and lots of fairly basic birds, and five words: Meet me at the castle. There was a number too, written in Roman numerals—a date, ten days away.

  The second letter was even shorter, and said only: Bring package. Tell no one.