I manage to direct the stream of pale tea into the cups without too much spillage. Behind me, Penelope coughs politely.
“Lady Wakefield?” she says. “I’m so sorry, Scarlett—it’s just, you know, the start of a new year—so much to get on with—time is pressing . . .”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard Penelope finish a sentence. She always gives the impression of being much too busy to get one out.
“Absolutely!” my grandmother says. “Scarlett, my dear, drink up your tea. You know what things are like in September. Terribly busy. Complete insanity.”
I nod, and pour us each a drop of milk from the milk jug.
I prefer my tea very strong, with lots of milk and sugar, but according to Grandma that’s for the common folk. People as posh as us “take” their tea very weak, with barely any milk. Her task accomplished, Penelope slips discreetly from the room.
“You know the drill around here, of course,” my grandmother says, her lips pursing tightly.
I resort to wringing my hands behind my back. “Well, yes and no.”
“So I don’t need to go over it as I would for other girls,” she continues on as if she hasn’t heard me. “I must say, I wish it hadn’t come to this.”
“I don’t want to be here either,” I interject.
“I certainly didn’t think it was a good idea for you to come here. It would not have been my choice. That’s why I arranged for you to go to St. Tabitha’s, and boarded you with Lady Severs, who, I must say, was not as understanding as she could have been about this situation.” My grandmother sighs. “Still, neither she nor I are as young as we were, and I certainly wouldn’t like those vulgar photographers pestering me like horseflies whenever I tried to leave my own house. But needs must as the devil drives. And after the death of that young boy . . .”
One thing about my grandmother: she always calls a spade a spade. No beating around the bush for her.
“I quite understand the headmistress of St. Tabitha’s deciding that it would be best for you to make a fresh start at a new school. No headmistress would appreciate the press camped outside the school gates for the rest of the summer term. And apparently there were a lot of anonymous letters and e-mails. Teenage girls!” She sighs. “They can be very cruel, can’t they?”
I don’t bother to agree. I just sip my tea and try not to think about the contents of my e-mail in-box. Or the fact that I’ve had to change my mobile phone number and cancel all my IM accounts. No one knows better than I do how cruel teenage girls can be.
“So here we are,” says my grandmother with a sigh. “A fresh start. Term begins tomorrow. We’ll just have to draw a line under the incident and make the best of the situation, won’t we?”
She gives me her famous smile, which basically means that you’re dismissed from the room. My grandmother is as smartly turned out as ever. Pearls round her neck and clipped to her ears—they’ll come to Aunt Gwen when she dies, but I don’t think Aunt Gwen’s expecting to clasp that pearl necklace at her throat any time soon. Hair as white as her pearls in a neatly trimmed bob. Blue eyes bright and clear as periwinkles, and as all-seeing as satellite radar. Not a trace of makeup on her face apart from a little powder and some pale pink lipstick.
I get up and bend over to kiss her goodbye. Her cheek is soft, tissue paper over velvet.
“I’m sure you’ll have a very happy time with us, Scarlett,” she says.
“Yes, Grandma,” I say, walking toward the door.
“Oh, that reminds me.” My grandmother turns in her chair. Its high tapestry back means she has to crane round it to see me, but she manages to make even this movement seem elegant. “It should be Lady Wakefield in term time, not Grandma,” she says. “Very awkward for everyone if protocol isn’t observed, I think. And the same for your aunt Gwen.”
“Yes, Lady Wakefield,” I say sarcastically, and shoot out the door before she can reprimand me for my tone of voice.
I stand there in the corridor for a few moments. My grandmother’s suite of rooms are kept up like the old days, with antique furnishings—the big gilt-framed mirror hanging over the occasional table, the leather chairs on either side, set up for parents and their daughters waiting for an interview in the Holy of Holies, Grandmother’s study. You’d think it was still a stately home. Only one little thing gives it away. The brass plaque on the door, which reads:
HEADMISTRESS’S STUDY. ENTER ONLY UPON INVITATION.
The girls aren’t allowed to use the central mahogany staircase, with its two wings flowing round the sides of the Great Hall. Grandma is too worried that hordes of running schoolgirl feet will wear the precious old wood down to nothing. Only teachers can use it. And me, when it’s not term time. After official interviews with Grandma, I used to take the steps two at a time, eager to get away as fast as possible. But today I just walk down them slowly. Why hurry? It’s not as if there’s anything left in my life I’m remotely excited about. No need to rush toward nothing.
More oil paintings line the paneled walls of the Great Hall. There’s a giant tapestry hanging in the gallery, where the two wings of the staircase begin their descent. It’s an odd combination of medieval and Victorian, built that way by nineteenth-century Wakefields who liked the romance of living in medieval times—Knights! Jousting! Um, eating without cutlery and throwing the bones to the dogs!—but didn’t have an ancestral home that dated back to the thirteenth century. They had to build their own, on a large estate which, at that time, was well away from the stinky metropolis of London.
And they did a ridiculously thorough job of it. Wakefield Hall sprawls on and on for miles, and that’s just the house. The landscaping is pretty extensive, too: there’s a hedge maze, a lime-tree walk, formal terraces on the southwest side, and weeping willows and even an ornamental lake (now fenced off for safety reasons). The house itself kept expanding, as the original Sir Henry Wakefield, pumped up with excitement about having been made a baronet and given a ton of land by Queen Victoria, simply couldn’t stop adding wings.
There are parts of it that are walled off and that we never enter—unsuitable for schoolrooms. Ironically, when my grandmother realized that nobody apart from a billionaire could afford to live in Wakefield Hall—the heating costs alone are enough to pay off the Third World debt—and decided to make it into a school, she had to build a whole new prefab wing round the back. Plus the gymnasium. And the swimming pool. And the tennis and netball courts. It’s a small country here, really. Or at least a county.
Grandmother’s been running Wakefield Hall Collegiate for nearly fifty years. Imagine spending half a century at school.
And right now it feels as if that’s what I’ve been condemned to. An eternity at Wakefield Hall.
I push open one of the huge main double doors, each of which weighs roughly as much as a small car. They’re wedged open in term time from seven-thirty to nine a.m., for the teachers and sixth-formers to use. Two good things about being in the sixth form: you get to wear your own clothes and use the main door. The first one, of course, being a lot more important. I think there was a rebellion ten years ago—girls in their last two years of school were humiliated by having to travel on the tube in those awful brown Wakefield Hall uniforms. I mean, it’s all right when you’re twelve, but being seventeen and eighteen and still wearing a school uniform—you’d be a total laughingstock. Not to mention an easy target for every mugger around.
Outside it’s warm and breezy, a lovely sunny September day, enough to cheer up anyone whose life hadn’t come to a screaming halt three months ago, when she was accused of killing someone and had no way to prove anyone wrong, including herself.
I kick the gravel as I wander down the drive. There’s a huge stone fountain in the middle of it, not working, however. Little girls used to dare each other to come out here (playing on the drive is obviously strictly forbidden) and splash the water over each other. Grandmother didn’t like that one little bit. So the leaping stone dolphins don’t dribbl
e water out of their mouths into the stone bowls being held by the fat little stone angels (I know, it doesn’t make much sense—what are angels doing in a fountain?). There’s something very sad about a fountain with no water in it.
Mind you, everything seems sad to me at the moment.
It’s half a mile down the drive to the house where I’m staying. Technically, it’s my home, but I can’t bring myself to call it that. Though it must be home: I read a sentence once that said something like “home is the place where they have to take you in,” and that indeed is a good description of my aunt Gwen’s little nook.
Aunt Gwen had to take me in when I was four and my parents died in a motorbike crash. She didn’t want to do it then, and she doesn’t want to do it now. I was over the moon about getting out of here to go and live at Lady Severs’s charming abode, but Aunt Gwen was ecstatic. She couldn’t chuck me out the door fast enough. And now I’m back, like a bad penny. Having killed someone. Aunt Gwen must think she’s cursed.
Well, she wouldn’t be the only one.
We live in the gatehouse, which, as one can sort of tell from the name, is directly by the main entrance gates, which are enormous and imposing, designed to intimidate anyone visiting Wakefield Hall. The gatehouse is a stone cottage, and the gatekeeper and his family lived here in the old days, opening the gate for visitors in return for free accommodation.
If it seems a bit weird that my grandmother lives in full baronet-ial splendor up at the Hall and my aunt Gwen only gets the stone cottage that one of the lesser servants used to have, well, it seems odd to me, too. Aunt Gwen justifies it by saying that she “likes some space from Mother,” which would make sense if you didn’t know that there are a ton of other buildings on the Wakefield Hall estate that Aunt Gwen could have, most of them not on the road, and a lot bigger. Like the one my dad had, before he and my mum moved to London. My dad was the favored child. My aunt Gwen got the short straw. I feel sorry for her about that—or I would, if she didn’t take it out on me.
School starts in five days. I might as well go over my holiday work. I’m a bit behind: after Dan died, I missed a few weeks of school.
I couldn’t have gone back to St. Tabby’s as a student. I did briefly sneak in there once, to clear out my locker, and Plum and her entourage practically kicked me to death with their stilettos and wrote swear words all over my broken corpse. Even for that visit to St. Tabby’s, they had to sneak me in by the service entrance, because the press was waiting outside the school, hoping to take a photo of me. They had to take me out of Lady Severs’s house for the inquest with my head under a blanket, because that was under siege by photographers, too. Lady Severs was so furious I thought her head was going to spin round and round in fury, like that girl in The Exorcist. My life for that fortnight, trapped in that house with her, was like being in solitary confinement with one very angry warder with a big grudge against you.
After the whole inquest fuss was over—after it became clear that nothing had been resolved by the verdict—Aunt Gwen came and got me and smuggled me out to a car in the middle of the night and brought me here. Wakefield Hall’s giant iron gates clanged shut behind the car.
They just transferred me from one prison to another.
At least in this one I’m not trapped in my bedroom all the time. I get the run of the grounds. But I still have a jailer who’s taken against me. Unhappy as I am to be back in the gatehouse of Wakefield Hall, believe me, Aunt Gwen is ten times unhappier about having me here full-time.
I used to be able to avoid coming back here by staying with Luce and Alison for the holidays. But that’s not an option anymore. Speaking of which, I’ve tried to ring Luce and Alison on several occasions, but they wouldn’t talk to me. Their phones went straight to voice mail.
I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t talk to me, either.
The noise I’m making as I walk along, sullenly digging my toes into the gravel and churning it up, is loud in the quiet of the afternoon. Maybe that’s why I’m doing it, just to have something to listen to. Wakefield Hall is always like a ghost village when it’s not full of girls’ voices screaming, bells ringing, and the whistles of PE teachers.
And the crackle must be loud enough to have attracted someone else’s attention. A head pops up from behind a big lavender bush, one of a whole row that runs along one side of the drive. I jump with surprise, and skid slightly (and embarrassingly) on the gravel.
“Sorry if I startled you,” the head says.
I glare at it with contempt. “You did startle me,” I snap.
“What do you think you’re doing, skulking around behind a bush like that?”
The head moves, and the rest of its body comes into view—or most of it, as the middle part is still partly concealed by the rounded side of the lavender bush. It’s a man—or, now I look at him more closely, no, it isn’t. Though his voice is deep, he’s actually more a boy. Probably only a few years older than me. Tall, broad-shouldered, but with that teenage-boy leanness that means he doesn’t have that much flesh on his bones yet. Beyond that, I barely take in what he looks like, because I’m deliberately not looking at his face. Boys are off-limits to me from now on. I’m basically trying to pretend they don’t exist.
He holds up a pair of what I think are called secateurs, and I notice as he does so that while he’s not exactly bulky, his forearms are veined with muscle. Which means he must be pretty strong.
“I was trimming the lavender,” he says, a bit unnecessarily, but considering my grumpiness, he probably feels the need to overexplain. “And then I heard you coming down the drive, and I thought, That must be a girl, cuz teachers don’t kick gravel like that. Not in my experience, anyway.
So I was curious and I popped my head up to see who it was, because term hasn’t started yet.”
“Well, now you’ve satisfied your curiosity,” I say flatly.
“Not really,” he says, looking straight into my eyes. There must be a flash of sunlight on his face as he does that, because his eyes seem golden. It’s a weird optical illusion, but . . . wow, it’s so striking, especially added to the fact that he’s staring at me, that I have to duck my head.
I can’t look directly at him. Even this simple little conversation is overloading my brain. God, I am so messed up.
“You’re Scarlett, aren’t you?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for me to answer. “Couldn’t mistake you. There’s a picture in the Great Hall that could be you, a girl wearing a dress and one of those crown things.”
“Tiaras,” I say.
“Yeah. You’re a Wakefield, all right. No mistaking that. Back living here, then? You were away in London, weren’t you?”
Every question he asks is like a file grating directly onto my skin, cutting me raw. Which is odd, because he has a really nice voice, deep and warm.
“You must be bored here after London, eh? Can’t be much for you to do round here.”
“I’m fine,” I say shortly, and because I can see he’s about to add yet another comment on how boring and sad my life is, I turn away and keep walking down the drive.
“See you later!” he calls after me.
Not if I can help it, I want to shout back.
I can barely cope with talking to a boy, let alone one who seems like he might be remotely interested in getting to know me. How can I even think about boys? The only one I ever kissed dropped dead while we had our tongues in each other’s mouths. And I don’t know why he died. No one does. It doesn’t look like we’ll ever know what killed Dan. And that means that I might as well go into a nunnery. Because after what happened with Dan, how can I even think about kissing a boy ever again?
What if the next boy I kiss drops dead, too?
Aunt Gwen’s out today, thank God. I go in the back door and up the stairs to my room. I don’t go over my schoolwork, of course. I take out the file, the special one, sit down on the floor, and spread all the clippings out around me. I do this when I’m feeling upset, or lonely, or depres
sed.
So guess what? I do this a lot.
It’s as if I’m looking for clues, even though I know I won’t find any.
BOY, 18, DIES IN FREAK ACCIDENT
I turn the clippings over one by one. I don’t need to read them; I know them by heart. But somehow looking through them gives me a sense of calm, reminds me why I have this aching sense of emptiness and desperation lurking deep down inside me.
It’s not even that Dan died in my arms, terrible as that was. It’s that no one believed me when I tried to tell them I had no idea in the world what happened to him. Not the coroner at the inquest, not the police, not even, I think, my grandmother. No one.
And I sort of understand why. After all the lab tests came back inconclusive (they even went as far as testing my lipstick), the investigators were completely out of ideas. How on earth could Dan have died? The conclusion everyone seemed to jump to was the only one left: he somehow died from kissing me. It’s ludicrous, I know. But we don’t live in a world that deals well with the unexplained.
BAFFLING DEATH: “KISS OF DEATH” GIRL QUESTIONED
“KISS OF DEATH” GIRL: I WON’T CHANGE MY STORY
Yes, I got a nickname, like a serial killer they haven’t caught yet. Like the Yorkshire Ripper or Son of Sam. And I should be grateful, because the reason they gave me a nickname is that I’m not eighteen yet. I’m still a minor, and you can’t put a minor’s name in the newspapers if they’re connected with a crime, unless they’re guilty.
Or dead.
They could print Dan’s name all right. No problem there.
FOOD ALLERGY THE LIKELY CAUSE OF DAN MCANDREW’S TRAGIC DEATH
That’s part of the mystery. The only thing the autopsy did show was that Dan had died of some type of extreme anaphylactic shock. Which means an allergic reaction. Dan was dangerously allergic to a variety of foods, including nuts, shellfish, and strawberries, but he didn’t like talking about it with people. He was embarrassed by it and saw it as a weakness, his mother explained tearily during her testimony. Even though I cried the entire time, I was also trying to remember if I had eaten any of those things. But there was nothing to confess. I hadn’t eaten anything that day which was on the list of toxic foods for Dan. . . .
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