The Book of Bones

by Natasha Narayan

  The Book of Bones

  Natasha Narayan was born in India but emigrated to England at the age of five. She has had many jobs in journalism including working as a war correspondent in Bosnia. Like Kit Salter, Natasha loves exploring new places. She hopes to see the Great Wall of China one day, probably by plane and bus rather than steamship and horse. She lives in Oxford.

  The Book of Bones

  A Kit Salter Adventure

  Natasha Narayan

  New York • London

  © 2010 by Natasha Narayan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to Permissions c/o Quercus Publishing Inc., 31 West 57th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10019, or to permissions@quercus.com.

  ISBN 978-1-62365-278-4

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

  c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  The Kit Salter Adventures by Natasha Narayan

  The Mummy Snatcher of Memphis

  The Maharajah’s Monkey

  The Book of Bones

  To Lulu, for all your kindness

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  An Interview with the Author

  Chapter One

  “Enemy advancing!” Waldo cried, leaning out of the window.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Carriage stopping. Lady in red hat getting out and approaching house. Ringing doorbell.”

  As if on cue, the doorbell chimed.

  “Right. Troops on standby.”

  The front door slammed. We heard the faint murmur of conversation. My father’s bleating voice mingled with that of a shrill female. Any moment now our new governess would walk into the classroom and demand to take over. We couldn’t let this happen. As every schoolchild knows, teachers are a lot like puppies. They must be taught who is in charge, or all hell breaks loose.

  Instead of “puppy training” we had planned a spot of “teacher training” for our new governess. All right, we were going to play some practical jokes on her. These tricks would show Mrs. Glee who she was dealing with. First, we had balanced a bucket of water on top of the door. It was just waiting to topple down and splatter the woman as she entered the schoolroom. Second, a gold coin glittered on the floor. When Mrs. Glee tried to pick it up, she would find it mysteriously stuck! Hopefully, she would become all flustered, not realizing we had glued it to the floor. Best of all was the “hat trick”: a raw duck egg sewn into the lining of the new bonnet we had bought her as a present.

  When our Mrs. Glee put on the hat she would literally have egg all over her face.

  Your friend Kit Salter had thought up the plan, but my allies Waldo and Isaac had taken it up enthusiastically. Indeed the egg was Isaac’s idea. Everyone was behind the escapade, as we waited for my father and Mrs. Glee to appear. Everyone but goody-two-shoes Rachel.

  “Every time you do something like this it blows up in your face!” Rachel snapped, glaring at me. “Why are you always so childish?”

  “Perhaps because, technically, I am a child,” I snapped back, while Isaac and Waldo grinned sympathetically at me.

  Rachel was playing her familiar role of wet blanket, her face as sour as an old lemon. She was overreacting, as usual. The tricks we’d planned to welcome Mrs. Glee to 8 Park Town, Oxford, were harmless enough. Just a few jolly jokes.

  I don’t want you to think we were being cruel. Hard experience has taught me that I “learn” better without a governess. Our last teacher, a Miss Minchin, had left us to become engaged to the younger son of a baronet. My heart had leaped at the news. I thought I would be rid of all those boring attempts to turn me into a nice young lady. Plus lessons. I have never been all that keen on lessons.

  I would be free. Gloriously free! At liberty to gallop about on my mare Jesse, have adventures and generally “educate” myself. Instead disaster struck. My father, Professor Theodore Salter, insisted we have a new governess. Luckily, I had been able to sit in on the interviews and dismiss all the candidates so far, for one reason or another. Finally, he had lost his patience. He proclaimed that if we didn’t accept this Mrs. Glee, who was due to arrive any moment now, we would all be packed off to boarding school.

  Boarding school was impossible. For a start you had to get up before dawn—and the food was said to be worse than prison.

  So I had to think on my feet. Of course, Rachel warned, we would be punished, but I wasn’t worried. Usually poor Father threatens us with various horrible punishments—and then he is so absentminded he simply forgets.

  We heard a footfall on the landing. The dreaded governess-to-be had arrived.

  “Enter the dragon.” I muttered. “Everyone ready?”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” said Waldo, with a mock salute.

  “Then let the games begin.”

  Our tormentor appeared on the threshold. The sight gave me pause. Anyone less like a dragon than the gray-haired person chattering to Papa I could not imagine. Mrs. Glee was a tiny old thing, at least forty years old, dressed in widow’s weeds, who was drifting toward us like a wisp of thistledown. Everything, from the faded red bonnet she carried, to the monocle she wore dangling around her neck, suggested genteel poverty. Her watery blue eyes exuded meekness. She was probably the relict of a vicar, I decided. I am a good judge of people, and there and then I decided she was a gentle, dreamy poppet.

  “How lovely to meet you,” the lady trilled out as she glimpsed the four of us sitting at our desks. “I’m Vera Glee. But you can call me Vera, dears, for I don’t like to stand on ceremony.”

  “Call her Vera?” Who’d ever heard of calling a teacher by their first name?

  As she advanced to the half-open door, I had an awful vision of the bucket crashing down on her head
. We had made a dreadful mistake. This old lady looked too frail for jokes. We might knock her out. She might need a doctor, or to be rushed to hospital. Even my father would remember to punish us if we actually killed our new governess.

  “STOP!” I yelled, rising from my seat.

  Too late. Father pushed open the door for Mrs. Glee and, forgetting that it is “ladies first,” advanced into our schoolroom. I froze as the bucket fell from its perch, just missing the side of his head. A stream of water poured over his hair.

  “Kit!” he bleated, looking up at the ceiling. “It’s raining indoors.”

  “It’s … er … the leak in the roof,” I said, desperately running to them, while Waldo and Isaac jumped up and tried to hide the bucket.

  “But it’s not raining outside,” he replied, glancing out of the window. Father is one of the cleverest men in England, if you want an opinion about the Petrarchan sonnet. Sometimes he’s also reasonably sharp.

  “Drains must be blocked,” Waldo jumped in.

  “Must get that old oak chopped down,” Father muttered, while Rachel, who had grabbed a towel from the basin, dabbed at his sodden jacket.

  Mrs. Glee had walked into the schoolroom and was peering dreamily at the gold sovereign glittering in the middle of the floor. She looked as if she had spotted a rainbow. Really the coin looked very inviting, gleaming on the bare boards.

  “Professor Salter,” she said, “someone seems to have dropped a great deal of money.”

  Father wandered over to join her and peered down. “Must be one of mine,” he said. Then he bent over and picked it up.

  Or rather he didn’t.

  “Kit,” he bleated again. “This coin is very strange.”

  Exchanging glances with Waldo I strode over to help him. “It seems to be stuck,” I said.

  “Sovereigns aren’t sticky.”

  “There must be some …”

  “I dropped some glue earlier,” Isaac interrupted. “All a bit of a mix-up I’m afraid.”

  Father straightened up, suddenly wincing with pain. “Oh no, I’ve put my back out again.”

  Meanwhile Mrs. Glee had wandered over to the desk and spotted the large paper box, decorated with a red bow, which we had placed on her desk. She read the card attached to it and smiled with delight.

  “A present for me!” she fluted. “I do declare, you are the kindest, most thoughtful children I’ve ever met.”

  Beaming, she untied the ribbons and opened the box. I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as Mrs. Glee unwrapped the layers of tissue paper. How could I explain it away to Father, when Mrs. Glee had egg running down her face? Even he would smell a rat.

  The sheer awfulness of my behavior struck me, like a blow to the head. If I were someone else, I wouldn’t think much of Kit Salter. I would judge her to be headstrong, childish, thoughtless and sometimes, yes, even a bit of a bully.

  Why do I never consider the consequences of my actions? I was filled with shame as my eyes locked on the new straw bonnet. It was decorated with artificial silk pansies and violets and skewered with a jeweled hatpin. Really pretty, if you like that sort of thing.

  Mrs. Glee clearly did, for her face glowed with happiness.

  “My angels,” she gasped, overcome with emotion. “I don’t know what to say. You’ve made me very—”

  “May I take a look?” I barged in and held my hand out for the hat. I had to take it away and somehow remove the egg. But Father had already picked it up, while Mrs. Glee tenderly lofted the jeweled hatpin.

  “This is very generous of you children,” he proclaimed, lifting it up in the air. “Thoroughly decent.”

  “Professor! No!” Waldo blurted.

  For a moment Father looked as if he was about to absentmindedly try on the hat. Oh heavens, I thought, visions of egg yolk running down Papa’s sodden and dirt-streaked face. (The water in the bucket had not been entirely clean.) But luckily he handed the bonnet back to Mrs. Glee who tried it on, placing it well forward on her forehead, poking the hatpin through the straw.

  Rachel screamed.

  I watched in fascinated horror as the egg cracked and a dark dribble ran down her forehead. Isaac and Waldo were gazing at her open-mouthed. We had plotted for this moment, but somehow it was awful, not funny, as we’d expected.

  Rachel continued to scream, a shrill note in her voice. “Blood … It’s blood!”

  “Pull yourself together,” I hissed in her ear. “It’s egg.”

  “Hard boiled.” Rachel said. “I changed it for a hard boiled egg.”

  Rachel’s screams had finally attracted attention. Mrs. Glee blinked at Rachel. Her hand flew up to her forehead and dabbed. Drawing her fingers away, she held them up to the light. They were dripping wet. She looked at them as if they belonged to someone else, as if she had never seen her own fingers before.

  “Heavens!” she said in surprise. “My hands are quite bloody.”

  An invisible claw reached out and grabbed my throat, causing me to choke. I felt awful. Now I could see what had happened, but it was still truly puzzling. Mrs. Glee had pushed the new jeweled hatpin right through the straw bonnet. She had literally pushed it into her head. I could see the wound where the pin had entered the side of her forehead.

  There was something terribly wrong here, for it should have hurt like the blazes. Mrs. Glee should have been screaming. But clearly she didn’t feel a thing.

  Either our new governess was the strongest, bravest person I’ve ever met. Or something very odd was going on here.

  “Mrs. Glee,” I said, “I think you’d better lie down. I’ll show you to your room.”

  My handkerchief was scarlet by the time we reached the room where Mrs. Glee was to live. It was a charming chamber, light and airy, furnished with a lace bedspread, a chest of drawers and a rosewood desk. Our governess twittered her appreciation and then suddenly announcing that she was feeling a little breathless, sank onto the bed.

  “Do you mind finding my medicine, dear? It’s in the valise.” She pointed to a small leather case, which the maid had brought up. I rummaged around and found several bottles, which I drew out. Each time, however, Mrs. Glee shook her head. Finally, I found a small, glass-stoppered vial, full of a reddish-brown tincture. I could see the relief in my governess’s eyes as I handed it to her.

  “A little water, my dear. I am absolutely parched.”

  I poured her a glass and handed it to her. Taking the vial with eager hands, she put a few drops from the stopper into the water and then, as it went muddy, gulped the liquid down. She had sunk back against the fluffy white pillows piled on her bed, gazing blankly at the ceiling. Her pupils had contracted to tiny black pinpoints. She seemed to have forgotten that I was there.

  “Mrs. Glee?”

  There was no answer. As she’d collapsed she’d placed her dirty boots on the bedspread. It shocked me, to see the smear of mud on the clean white lace.

  “Please, um, Vera. Can I go now?”

  With an effort, Mrs. Glee switched her eyes away from whatever was happening on the ceiling. She smiled at me, her expression full of sweet sadness.

  “You mustn’t be frightened of me, Kitty dear,” she said. “I suffer from stomach pains and my medicine gives me a bit of a turn, is all. You run along now. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Something was gnawing at me as I rushed back to the schoolroom. Remorse, you might think. Well, yes. The practical jokes seemed very foolish now. But it was another emotion altogether, something more frightening.

  I hadn’t liked the way Mrs. Glee’s gaze slid out of focus. The way she sprawled on the bed, like a broken puppet. Worst of all were her eyes. The memory of her vanishing pupils made me turn cold.

  Her eyes were somehow not human; they were like marbles, not windows to a soul. In the few seconds after she’d downed that liquid, something had grabbed our new teacher and spirited her away from us.

  Chapter Two

  “I agree with Rachel,” Waldo
said as we talked things over a few days later. “You’re wasting your time worrying about Mrs. Glee. Who ever heard of worrying about a teacher, anyway?”

  “There’s something broken about her,” I mumbled. “I think she needs our help.”

  I had been trying to explain my fears about Mrs. Glee, but none of my friends shared my anxiety.

  “You’re a mystery, Kit,” Rachel said, with a withering look. “You’re terribly silly most of the time. Then, out of the blue, you get all het up about the most bizarre things. I’d thought you might have grown up a bit, after what happened in India. But it seems—” she stopped mid-sentence her eyes lingering on my scar.

  There was an awkward silence. I hadn’t told anyone what really took place in the icy mountains of the Himalayas, when I’d become separated from my friends and stumbled like a sleepwalker on the legendary paradise of Shambala. The whole journey seemed so long ago, so dreamlike. Sometimes I would wake up in the night feeling sad, but not quite knowing why. Then I would remember our friend Gaston Champlon, the legendary French explorer, who had been buried by an avalanche. He was infuriating and charming in equal measure, the only man alive who could make my Aunt Hilda blush. We owed him our lives. We would never see him again. All that remained of our ill-fated voyage to India was the scar on my cheek. Thankfully, it had faded quickly. Much faster in fact than seemed possible. Our doctor had expressed surprise. Still the marks of a tiger’s claw could still be faintly seen in the scar.

  “Mrs. Glee’s in some sort of trouble. I just know it,” I said, changing the subject back to our governess.

  “If she is, it’s down to you,” Rachel snapped. “Practical jokes are hardly the way to make someone feel welcome.”

  I hung my head. Our failures with the bucket and sovereign had dented my spirit. It was the end, I had decided, of my life as a practical joker. In case you are wondering, I did manage to remove the (hard-boiled) duck egg from the bonnet, and our lessons had proceeded without mishap. Well, there had been a few hiccups. The second day with Mrs. Glee, I had been dismayed to see our new timetable chalked up on the blackboard: