by Kim Newman
This time Rayne fell… smashing backwards into the drift. It was at least a cushion for her tumble.
Buller snorted and drew back her size eleven for a nasty kick to the ribs.
…but Rayne was up again, and skipping.
She had leaped up like an acrobat, landed on her feet, and resumed her routine as if nothing had happened.
‘Ants in your pants
All the way from France…’
Nasty bruises marked Rayne’s forehead and leg. Her blazer, skirt and hair were dusted with snow.
‘Send reinforcements,
We’re going to advance…’
The clapping was louder, like a war drum.
Enraged, Buller got her head down and charged, aiming straight at Rayne’s midriff. The girl somehow jumped higher than before, three or four feet off the ground, and the whip slammed into the Heel.
Rayne touched down, and skipped on.
‘Ants in your pants
Take another chance…’
Now other girls were chanting for her. This wasn’t an execution any more. It was more like a prizefight.
Buller turned round, blood on her face. Her boater was crushed. She shook her braids. She didn’t know what had just happened…
And neither did Amy.
Had Rayne floated? Or simply jumped like a grasshopper.
‘Spend three and fourpence
We’re going to a dance…’
Buller might be afraid. Awe was stirring in her underused brain.
‘No no no no,’ muttered Paule, unnoticed by anyone but Amy. The tug of the Purple came. Amy thought the world was about to shift again…
But it didn’t. Paule scuttled off, hands pressed to her face. Amy thought the Sixth had a sympathetic nosebleed – as if she’d caught Buller’s self-inflicted injury.
Paule was not a comforting presence, but Amy had never seen her flee in terror… and worried about whoever was capable of frightening her.
McClure wasn’t as headstrong as Buller. She was subtle, cruel, ingenious. And wary. She had no intention of beaning herself.
Crouching, she felt around, naked fingers rooting in the snow. She dug out a chunk of rock from the gravel surround of the Heel. She weighed it in her hand then packed snow about it. School Rules said nothing about such missiles, but they violated the Code of Break, the rules girls made among themselves. You could fling an ice bomb at your best friend or worst enemy and it was all in fun, but a stone in a snowball was not done.
Except by McClure, devotee of the works of the Marquis de Sade.
‘That’s not cricket,’ commented Rhode-Eeling. ‘That’s not playing the game.’
‘This isn’t a game,’ said McClure, who had the nod from Gryce. ‘This is life and death.’
Rhode-Eeling shrugged, unwilling to cross Head Girl. Strictly, Gryce of Tamora should have cleared use of McClure, a Goneril Fifth, with Rhode-Eeling. Then again, Rayne was a Viola weed… and Mansfield wasn’t speaking in her defence. Handsome Helena was of Gryce’s party and always had been. She hadn’t protected Marion/Harriet from Vanity and wouldn’t stick up for Rayne. It was as if Captain Skylark flew home safe while Hunnish brutes were shooting Goosey Gander in the tail. Amy shouldn’t have confused Mansfield with the heroic roles she played.
McClure showed the stone snowball to the skipping girl.
Rayne had a choice. She could stop skipping or she could take this projectile to the face.
Rayne didn’t stop skipping.
The chanting rhyme continued.
Amy longed to do something, anything. She had to focus hard to keep her feet on the ground. She badly missed her mask.
McClure, who bowled for the First Eleven, casually walked back a few steps, snowball in hand. Amy recognised her shy smile. McClure liked to begin a match aiming high and straight at the eyes of the opposing opening bat. Most of her victims ducked, sloshed, fled or knocked the stumps to evade injury. Not a move much cared for by umpires, so McClure knew to use it sparingly. She only got one or two out that way per inning, though she had been known to brag that several of her targets slunk back to the pavilion with broken noses and never stepped up to the crease again. When McClure got you out, you stayed out.
Rayne seemed unconcerned.
McClure took a run up and let fly.
…and missed. The stone smashed against the Heel.
‘Ants in your pants
All the way from France.’
The chant was triumphal. Amy joined in, though it hurt to shout. Icy inrushes of air thumped her chest.
‘Send reinforcements
We’re going to advance…’
Frecks was chanting too, and Light Fingers, and Kali. Vansittart nodded in time. Prompt chanted as if in prayer. Rhode-Eeling as a rebuke to the unsporting Goneril.
All Viola House chanted, even Mansfield…
‘Ants in your pants
Take another chance
Spend three and fourpence
We’re going to a dance…’
With each beat, Rayne skipped. She must be fast as Light Fingers to dodge a Euterpe McClure beamer.
A tide was turning.
Gryce didn’t like it.
Prompt produced a rope, and began to skip alongside Rayne. Nowhere near as well as her cell-mate. Rather than jump, she just dragged the rope – which was too long for her – across the ground and stepped clumsily over it. But she joined in. The chant was for her too.
The wrongness clenched in Amy’s stomach.
McClure signalled. A group of toadying Tamora Seconds unloosed a volley of snowballs at the skipping girls.
Prompt was battered and fell. Rayne dodged most of the balls and kept skipping. Even direct hits didn’t faze her.
McClure, angry and forgetting herself, took hold of Rayne’s hair and yanked hard. She ripped her hand open as if she had grasped a fistful of pampas grass.
Gryce’s Murdering Heathens were hurting themselves more than Rayne.
Beeke and Pulsipher, the Violas who’d run off at the first sign of trouble, came back, barging past an astonished Crawford. They brought armloads of skipping ropes and gave them out to anyone who would take one.
Amy took a rope, but just looked at it. A few were dropped in the snow.
Beeke and Pulsipher began to skip. Better than Prompt, they kept time with Rayne for a minute or so before getting in a tangle… but then they got their rhythm back, and skipped on.
McClure slapped Rayne one way and the other. Her slaps connected, leaving a streak of her own blood on the skipping girl’s cheek, but Rayne kept skipping.
‘Stop it, you blasted worm, you. Cease…’ slap!… ‘this…’ slap!… ‘impertinent display!’
Unfair punch to the stomach. Sympathisers winced more than the victim did.
Rayne was pushed back against the Heel now, pinned by McClure’s blows. She moved up and down, in time with the rhyme.
All around Violas were skipping. And Thirds of all Houses, except Tamora.
McClure left Rayne be – she instantly recovered and, more precise than ever, found her spot and skipped – and careered from Viola to Viola, clouting and chopping and kicking and kneeing and elbowing.
Girls went down and stayed down longer than Rayne.
But they got up and skipped.
McClure’s face was red.
Amy, still not skipping, noticed Gryce had toddled off. If this was to be a loss, she wouldn’t be around to look defeated.
It wasn’t just Violas or Thirds. Amy saw Ariels skipping, now. And the odd Goneril, ashamed of McClure’s unsporting behaviour. Keele skipped, along with other Desdemona Sixths who found the ropes too short. Farjeon and her little circle of Seconds had been skipping well before Rayne’s arrival, and might wonder what all the fuss was about now. Taking Farjeon’s lead, the traditional skippers joined in – abandoning the drowned black babies to their terrible flood and taking up the cause of ants in pants.
And Frecks… Lady Serafine Nimue Tod
d Walmergrave, Willow Ermine… was skipping, long legs bending as she brought her knees up. She must have been a skipping demon when she was younger.
‘Ants in your pants
All the way from France
Send reinforcements
We’re going to advance…’
It carried throughout the whole Quad now. Amy couldn’t bring herself to skip, yet didn’t know why she was resisting.
This was a triumph. Rayne was a heroine.
She was an Unusual.
But… Amy’s stomach ached acutely. She wanted to skip too, but the wanting – a wanting close to a needing! – was wrong. It wasn’t her inclination. It was instilled by an external force. She heard a call her instinct was to resist.
No, she would not join in. No.
Double crumpets! Someone had given Henry Buller a rope. The whip was skipping too, stepping like an elephant, eyes crossed, boater blown away, blood freely spilling.
‘Ants in your pants
Take another chance
Spend three and fourpence
We’re going to a dance…’
Amy wasn’t the only hold-out. None of the House Captains skipped, not even Mansfield – though Amy saw they were resisting a pull, just as she was. Rhode-Eeling tapped her toes to the rhyme. Vansittart clapped daintily.
Some of the spectators had fled.
Shrimp was passed out beyond the Heel, shaking a little. Amy never thought she’d feel sympathy with her.
The racket – rhyming, clapping, the pounding of shoes on snow – brought faces to the windows. Ponce, Wicked, Miss Kaye, Keys.
Joxer walked into the Quad and was surrounded by skipping dervishes.
It lasted until the Break Bell sounded. Then, in an instant, it stopped.
Rayne wound her rope up and walked to her next lesson. The girls she left behind stopped skipping when she did, but were dazed in the wake of their fit… it had been like a craze spread throughout School.
Amy looked at Frecks, so flushed her long-gone freckles had reappeared. Her friend was elated, but Amy was frightened.
‘What just happened?’ Amy asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Frecks, ‘but I hope it happens again… soon!’
VIII: The Coming of the Black Skirts
TWO DAYS LATER, Amy thought she saw Rayne in the library. On the stairs to Entomology, a small, black-blazered girl was ahead of her. Sidling between rows, she passed out of Amy’s sight.
Was she ducking away from Amy or just looking for a book?
Curious, she peeped into the narrow, shaded alleyway between tall, dusty shelves. It wasn’t Rayne, but Phair – a dark-haired Second. An easy mistake. Phair wore the new Drearcliff kit. Black, with grey; not grey, with black. Perhaps because the uniform was new, it seemed shiny, like waxed leather or a beetle’s carapace. She’d seen Phair before, of course. Like most Seconds, she wasn’t noticeable. A spear-carrier or pageboy in Viola pageants. Light Fingers would call her an Ordinary.
From the top of a set of library steps, Phair was reaching for a book about locusts. Sensing Amy’s presence, she swivelled her head like an owl’s to stare back. In the gloom, her eyes flashed black as her uniform. The Second didn’t much resemble Rayne, really, though she had that same unsmiling expression, at once absent and focused.
Rattled, Amy mumbled an apology and stepped back, leaving Phair to the locusts. She hurried to the cosy nook where the library kept books on moths (and, as she reluctantly had to concede was fitting) butterflies. School had only the standard Lepidopterae texts, but the alcove was Amy’s private thinking spot. She came here when she needed to put her mind to something.
One thing private education seldom provided was privacy. In lessons, at Break, in Chapel, at meals, Amy was always among other girls. In her cell, she was liable to be distracted by Frecks commenting on the latest scandals or Kali reading out press reports of machine-gun massacres in Chicago. The dorms rattled with rackets. A cell of Seconds, one floor below, had taken up the ocarina and practised night and day. None of them, as yet, could hold a tune, not even ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ – but they had mastered shrill loudness.
The skipping plague had reached Desdemona. A few girls, notably the pariah Inchfawn and gap-toothed Hoare-Stevens, made a ghastly thumping din on bare floorboards. Out-of-time skipping accompanied by out-of-tune ocarina would send anyone into the cold, dark woods. Murder and worse was contemplated, but the Moth Club decided to let the irritations run on… this sort of petty crime was beneath their attention. Amy, however, often fled to the library.
In the lepidoptery alcove, there was a little desk – not much more than a fold-out shelf – and a stool. Amy could work here undisturbed.
To mark her spot, she had carved a moth sign on the underside of the desk with her penknife. The design was too fiddly. Light Fingers suggested she simplify it. Sigils, seals and signals should be bold, striking and easy to draw. Light Fingers said the Moth Club needed instantly identifiable trademarks, like the Scarlet Pimpernel’s wild flower or Zorro’s sword-carved Zs.
On secret missions, the Moth Club passed coded messages on paper strips left as pretend-bookmarks in Professor Hardinge Oldmead’s Moths of the Midlands (1867), a book so outdated as to be useless except as a postbox. From instinct, not really expecting a message, Amy pulled down Oldmead and opened it to a cutaway diagram of an anthill. That wasn’t right. She looked at the cover and found she was holding Jacob Vereker’s sensationalist Reign of the Ant Queen (1919). Moths of the Midlands wasn’t in its proper place. Was this a message in itself?
She looked at the shelves in the alcove. All the books were out of place.
Someone had replaced volumes about butterflies and moths with books about ants. Even the card labelled ‘Lepidopterae’ was gone. A new card read ‘Formicidae’. This was officially an ant alcove. Moths were relegated to the general stack.
Amy felt personally attacked!
Irritated, she had a dizzy spell… then found herself floating. She looked down at dust-furred books on the top shelves. Her head bumped the ceiling. She hoped no one chanced to be idly looking up. Phair had gone and no one else was in Entomology. Gripping shelves like the rungs of a ladder, she climbed down and put her feet firmly on the carpet. She had gone light for a moment.
And no wonder. This rearrangement was sacrilege.
Scouting around, she found the moth books, all a jumble and out of order, on a lower shelf in the darkest corner of the section. The ‘Lepidopterae’ card was upside down too. She fixed that. Then she sorted the books, alphabetically by author. All the while, her mind roiled and raced.
Ants?
…as in ‘ants in your pants, all the way from France’?
As in ‘Antoinette Rowley Rayne’?
Amy felt turfed out of her own alcove, though she had no sense Rayne was involved or that the new bug would claim her personal quiet spot.
However, Professor Rayne’s books were prominent in the Formicidae alcove. There were multiple copies of her freakishly popular Formis. The slender, yellow-covered pamphlet – little more than an essay with photographic plates – anatomised the working of an anthill and set it out as a model for the better ordering of human society. Many who should know better cited this fanciful wittering as profound and important. Amy thought it shaky entomology and dubious politics.
This injustice would not be brooked. Amy would get up a petition in the name of the Moth Club and present it to Dr Auchmuty, the librarian. ‘Doc Och’ was improbably glamorous. Smudge said she was the model for the ‘Beware Female Spies’ posters put up around barracks towns during the War. The louche, long-lashed librarian looked the type who could easily beguile a fatheaded Staff officer into passing on the plans for those revolutionary aerial spike-mines which nestled in artificial clouds to thwart Zeppelin raids. Judging by this anti-moth activity, Auchmuty was so unsuited for her current post Amy guessed she must have inveigled her way into it by blackmail. She probably knew fearful secrets
about Dr Swan…
The next day, Amy saw two more girls in the new kit. Then, at the weekend, three girls together in identical black hats, blazers and skirts.
A shower of Raynes.
A week on, the school body was shot through with them.
The Black Skirts.
It was an infection, like the measles. It was only a uniform option. No one told Amy not to wear her old grey. But she saw how it would go. At some point, Greys would be in a minority… then decline towards extinction.
Amy would be the last Grey.
Besides anything else, Mother would not open her purse for a whole new kit after only a term and a bit. Other girls wheedled parents or guardians. Ariels even spent their own money. Identical brown-paper parcels from Dosson, Chapell & Co. piled up at the Post Office in town until fetched by a frost-whiskered Joxer and a snowshod Dauntless. Bert Bates, the postman, wouldn’t hop out to Drearcliff in this weather. He’d lost a leg at sea and didn’t want to risk his whalebone falsie on the grim road to Drearcliff.
Viola went almost completely Black. Other Houses were speckled to various degrees, except Goneril. Rhode-Eeling insisted on traditional Grey and said she’d drop anyone in Black from competitive play. Frecks and Kali received brown-paper parcels, but didn’t immediately don dark plumage. They said they wanted the choice. Amy tried not to show disapproval. After all, what did it matter, really?
Kali crimped her new black boater to look like a fedora, but was wise enough in the ways of Drearcliff not to risk a Uniform Infraction by wearing it outside the cell. Few wanted to scrub the Heel in a blizzard.
The first whip to go Black was – no surprises! – Henry Buller.
Buller became Rayne’s bodyguard, always ten paces behind the skipping machine, ready to twist arms or slap faces. At first she was busy, enforcing respect for the Queen Ant… then, folk got the message and stopped chucking snowballs or chanting insults at Rayne.
The way Rayne wore her boater reminded Amy of Napoleon’s sideways hat.
She remembered what Keele had said about Boney. Was Rayne Amy’s own bogeyman, a dark doppelgänger sent to persecute or test or destroy? Rayne was an uncanny creature, but she didn’t come from the Purple. According to the note on the dust jacket of Formis, Professor Rayne lived in Oxford and lectured at Shrewsbury College.
