by Kim Newman
Amy got through her portion of shame in a few gulps.
She couldn’t really taste it, but the oily sludge was horrible. She bit into pellets of dry chalky matter.
Other whips at other tables forced other team members to take the same medicine.
‘Special treats for special girls,’ said Bewe-Bude.
At the Desdemona Third table, Poppet Dyall – who had free places either side of and across from her – had already emptied her jug. She looked up at Ziss, the worst whip, and politely asked if she could have seconds.
Ziss went frost-eyed at that and wandered on. The rest of Dyall’s table could breathe again, but the terror lasted for days. Each girl feared that when she was alone, Ziss might come back… and whisper. The whole school knew about – and dreaded – the whispers of tall, quiet, meticulous Heike Ziss.
A chalice of custard stood in Haldane’s setting at the Whips’ Table. Headers was absent. Her first ever infraction. Whisper was she’d done a bunk in the night. Hjordis Bok wasn’t at table either. Her punishment would have to be taken on a tray to the Infirmary, where she was laid up with her wonky knee. Being hors de combat would not get her out of the custard.
At the Ariel Third table, Laurence made her portion disappear, jug and all – and not into her mouth. Dungate, standing over her, didn’t know what to make of that. A voodoo stare dissuaded Dunners from forcing the issue.
If this continued, someone would toss custard in a whip’s face.
Or worse.
At Break, milling about on the Quad, the Moth Club were joined by Knowles and Devlin, who weren’t among their regular intimates… but not by Larry, who was. After the famous washout, the team were in bad odour. Devlin and Knowles were brought to a midnight trial before Kyd, the Desdemona Fifth Form Captain. She ruled that no one on their corridor was to speak to them for a week. Then the situation would be reviewed. The banishment to Coventry might be renewed indefinitely. Kyd had no use for Unusuals before the Great Game and seized on the opportunity to give the flukes in her dorm an excessive pasting.
One floor below Kyd’s domain, the regime was more enlightened. Alice Wright, the Desdemona Fourth Captain, had Inchfawn and Hoare-Stevens apple-pie the Moth Club’s cots and let it stand at that. She said the team deserved sympathy rather than scorn. Wright had been in the Game last year and lost in the sewers. So far as she was concerned, secundus was a step up from the wooden spoon.
Amy would have preferred harsher treatment.
Occasionally, she spotted Laurence out of the corner of her eye.
Amy had an impulse to join the younger girl. To exorcise herself.
She didn’t deserve her friends. She had let them all down.
Larry’s voodoo stare was always directed at Amy. She was the only girl in school who blamed her as much as she blamed herself.
It was precious little comfort for either of them.
The Third was in exile. When Frecks blurted out ‘Oh, Larry, what have you done?’ she was devastated. To her, that not-really-meant remark was a banishment to a region far more remote than Coventry. Nothing could have hurt her more. Larry’s appearance was in decline – her uniform less smart and neat, almost to the point of infraction. The odd neglected scrape or bruise suggested she was crawling – or being dragged – through bushes in her free time. She was as unhappy at school as at home.
Amy ached about that.
It was a mistake to think of Laurence as a pet or harmless encumbrance.
Amy hadn’t told anyone about Sparks and what happened when her hand got caught in Larry’s pocket. Was the change in the Draycott’s girl permanent? Amy’s guess (fear) was that it was. Sparks wasn’t the Glove any more. She was no longer an Unusual. Hjordis Bok, for one, wouldn’t be unhappy to hear that news. What with everything else, Amy didn’t have enough free worrying time to fret over Larry’s Application. She needed to talk about it with Light Fingers. Her friend thought deeply about the ins and outs of Unusuality. She’d have definite views on Venetia Laurence’s new party piece.
That evening, at supper, Dr Swan announced the new Head Girl. Alicia Wybrew.
The Goneril tables erupted in spontaneous cheering. The Ariel tables were silent in shock. For the first time, Head Girl came from another house. If Dr Swan had swallowed a cat whole, it would have excited less comment. One fifth of the school saw a dangerous step towards Bolshevism.
The choice was popular with the other houses.
‘If Good Egg Alicia’d been Team Captain, we’d have bagged primus for sure,’ brayed Sieveright, the Goneril sharpshooter. ‘She’d have picked a pukka side, not a load of flukes and foolies.’
At the word ‘flukes’, Light Fingers seemed to judder in her place… and Sieveright had a pocket full of custard.
She started up, yellow seeping from the trailing edge of her blazer, and froze – eyes on Kali, who’d casually adopted a fighting stance.
With her foot-boxing displays, Kali won a few grudging plaudits from the battlers of Goneril – who looked down on the misfits of Desdemona almost as much as they did the weeds of Viola.
‘You and me in the ring, trigger-gal?’ suggested Kali.
Sieveright ignored the custard seeping into her skirt.
‘No dice,’ she said, making a finger-pistol.
‘Now, you and Pinborough. I’d lay half a crown on that with Nellie.’
Kali side-eyed the Blonde Bruiser, who was forking down a second helping of bangers and mash. A clique of fight followers always donated to her plate. Sieveright backed off.
The excitement of the Wybrew elevation trumped all.
Kali sat.
Light Fingers pointed to her eye, held up ten fingers, then made a Q shape with thumb and forefinger. Eye. Ten. Que. I Thank You.
‘Nertz,’ said Kali.
Amy sensed a shift in the mood of the school.
Wybrew as Head Girl was Something Else.
It wouldn’t have happened without the Great Game and Haldane’s decampment – expulsion? liquidation? – but it was new news. There were implications. The order of the school, as it had been since Founding Day, was changed. In the Ariel Common Room, this would be taken seriously. Privileges were under threat. Could Byrne, passed over again for a position that once seemed hers by birthright, maintain her jollity? If she stopped laughing, would she start screaming?
With Something Else to editorialise about, the Great Game slipped below the fold of the Drearcliff Trumpet… then off the Front Page… and shrank to the Other Notes.
Days passed.
Once or twice, Amy had a conversation of five minutes or more that was not wrapped up in the humiliation of secundus. Life Under Goneril was a big topic. Other situations and circumstances demanded attention. Frecks received a letter with a Humble College return address and was uncharacteristically shy about sharing its contents with her cellmates. She let slip that the signatory was the odious Geoffrey Jeperson. Amy worried her friend hadn’t been properly alerted to the perfidy of the race of Humblebumblers and noticed Frecks didn’t pay full attention when she retold the terrible tale of duplicitous Alfred Henry Wax. Light Fingers attempted a beauty mark to match Frecks’ moveable spot, using soot and fixative from the chem lab. The formula was a recommendation from Sally Nikola of the Fifth… but the result was a little blemish that wouldn’t be shifted by soap and water.
Amy applied herself to gerunds again, but got distracted when Gawky Gifford popped into her cell to claim the bounty of a farthing on a moth cocoon she talked up as a fabulous rare species. As usual, it was really a dried leaf rolled into a tube. The Gawk, always on the scrounge, had tried this several times before – and at least wasn’t offended to be booted out unrewarded. She left behind the leaf, which unrolled to show a mould stain in the shape of a death’s head.
Chatter often shut off when Amy rounded a corner. Some girls got up and moved away whenever she sat down. It was the same for the rest of the team – though Dyall had always been treated like this and
didn’t notice any difference. When Bok limped out of the Infirmary, she got into a habit of knocking glumly around at Break with her teammates. The all-rounder might have expected preferment in the rise of Goneril, but excuses were found to deny her a whip’s braid. Bok hadn’t been part of the Moth Club’s extended circle – unlike the Unusuals Knowles and Devlin – before the Great Game. But there were things only the team understood.
Not just the loss. The girls of the House of Reform. The lads of Humble College. The Amphibaeopteryx. London fog. Lauriston Gardens and Villa DeVille.
All sorts of stories were in circulation. Knowles collected them.
The most persistent, pernicious rumour was that Amy had kissed a boy and thrown the Game. In the Trumpet, the parasitical editrix Shrimp Harper ran a cartoon depicting this mythical moment. Drawn by the talented Acreman of Viola, it was entitled ‘The Big Smacker, or Kiss Those Tobies Goodbye’. The image made Amy’s cheeks burn. She was even offended when girls said they didn’t believe it because no boy would ever kiss Amanda Thomsett… though no boy had, because Geoffrey Jeperson’s cheek spittle didn’t count.
Not at all.
She must get that diary and start work on that verification. This was not a point she could let stick.
Other stories went around.
The Humblebumblers had bribed the Drearcliff Grange girls to stand back and give them a clear field. Primrose Quell and Prima Haldane were in it together all along, sworn in blood as sisters of a secret society that extended beyond houses and schools. They’d fixed the whole thing between them and were luxuriating together in Leamington Spa, gloating over the havoc they’d caused.
Some said Kali had kicked a policeman in the back of the head.
When Smudge Oxenford trotted that one out, Kali sneered, ‘When I boot a bluebottle, I do it to his face!’
An elaborate theory was that Haldane was still on school grounds. She had been boiled down to replace the skeleton in the biology laboratory – though Lucy Lankybones had hung there since Founding Day, in a sorry state thanks to generations of infractors snaffling the odd tooth or knucklebone on dares. In another version, Headers was chained in caves under the cliff, waiting for the monthly high tide to drown her. Dr Swan visited regularly to gloat. The rumours persisted, even after a chauffeur – quite a dishy one, actually – showed up to collect the de-braided Head Girl’s trunk. Helfrich and Saxby, competing flirts of the Fifth, tried to worm information from the liveried fellow, more as an excuse to have a go at fluttering about near an interesting man than out of any concern. The driver said Prima was being packed off to a Finishing School in Dusseldorf.
The other Absence was less noticed.
Miss Gossage was well and truly gone.
The Remove, which was her purview, only met for lessons two afternoons a week and every other Saturday morning. The outbuilding which was their study hall had been spruced up last summer. Once Temporary Classroom Two, it was now marked on the school map as the Conservatory. Amy and her fellow Unusuals were the core of the invisible class, which cut across year and house lines. A few fringe Talents – including Frecks and Kali – were also on the register.
Turning up at the Conservatory two days after the loss, the Remove found Miss Tasker in the Sausage’s place.
She told them to sit quietly at their desks and get on with other work.
Amy looked around – there was Larry, still staring – and saw girls opening books and pencil cases. Unusuals who hadn’t been on the team were lumped in with the pariahs. Fleur Paquignet, who had more sympathy with plants than people, stroked the flower-bearing vines that wound around the Conservatory’s support poles. Picking up on the mood of the class, the plants were downcast and off colour. The Girl With Green Thumbs whispered soothingly in their ear-like buds, but they hadn’t rallied. Polly Palgraive smiled as ever, a dead girl piloted by a worm in her brain.
Harriet Speke, a Viola Second, had hard-shelled hands, with eight dextrous pincer-tipped digits apiece. She could write four separate lines in different-coloured inks at the same time and was a whizz at picking locks. Next to her sat Gillian Little, a Goneril First who was six-foot four from stockings to crown and a yard across from shoulder to shoulder. Her yellow hair curled in stiff corkscrews like wood shavings and her pinafore was sturdy canvas so she wouldn’t rip it too often.
And the others… Aconita Gould and Janice Marsh, the Scottish Wolf Girl and the American Aquatic Prodigy. Susannah Thorn and Dilys Frost, who ran hot and cold – one could make fire, the other ice. Jacqueline Harper and Poppet Dyall, the school leeches. Amy owed Harper a ragging for that Big Smacker cartoon, and floated her pencil case beyond her reach whenever she was distracted. Bizou De’Ath, an Ariel Fourth, drank vinegar to increase her pallor and dyed her hair raven-wing black. Of a macabre bent, she augmented her uniform with black-lace cobwebs and hairpins in the form of spiders and bats. Unorna Light, a Viola Fifth, claimed to be a white witch – she could cast all manner of terrible spells but was too much of a prig to do so.
Amy could relax slightly in the Remove. Most of these girls were already beyond the pale. If they’d hoped a victory in the Great Game would elevate the status of flukes, they didn’t make a fuss about the way it had turned out.
However, Gould and Marsh – veterans of the year of the false trails – weren’t notably more sympathetic to their successors. Amy didn’t remember them being treated so shabbily, but they hadn’t been given a bunfest in front of the whole school.
The next lesson of the Remove was the same.
Miss Tasker. Getting on with other work.
Amy sketched Death’s-head Hawk wing designs. She’d see about getting Light Fingers to make a domino mask with the colouring. If she couldn’t hack it as a true paladin, she should at least consider other options.
Even Smudge didn’t dare speculate on the fate of the Sausage.
Miss Gossage was simply gone. No chauffeur came for her trunk.
Amy drifted, a ghost to herself. Her neck rash cleared up. Sometimes she thought she saw chalk lines on the floor. She occasionally floated objects, but became shy about using her Abilities. They’d been little help at the Finish. For the moment, it was best she stay curled up in her cocoon. She’d assessed her performance in the field and grounded herself. Rather than fly, she trudged.
Head down. Other work. Getting on with.
Saturday morning came.
III: Look to Windward
THE CONSERVATORY WAS locked. Through grimy glass, Amy saw Paquignet’s vines were dry and yellow, shrivelled without her healing touch.
A typewritten card was fixed to the door.
Lessons for the Remove will now be held in Windward Cottage – Dr Myrna Swan, Headmistress.
‘Windward Where?’ quizzed Frecks.
They all looked to Knowles.
Miss Memory frowned. She usually had the school map off by heart. After a dose of Dyall, Knowles’ sense of place was topsy-turvy. Not yet fully undiscombobulated, she was frustrated to find her Abilities unreliable. Amy sympathised. Since the Great Game, she’d been leery of extending her mentacles. A massive part of any Talent was confidence. Theirs had taken a hard knock.
‘The only cottage on school grounds I know of is Joxer’s,’ said Light Fingers. ‘Even Headmistress wouldn’t dare turn that into a classroom.’
The Remove had mostly turned up on time. Girls crowded around the Conservatory. Everyone wanted to read the notice for themselves – perhaps expecting to find secret writing in spaces between the words.
No one came away any the wiser.
‘Is this some bally guessing game?’ said Thorn hotly.
‘More likely another rag,’ said Marsh, gills rippling.
Regular outdoor Saturday morning activities continued. Goneril dragooned scratch cricket sides from other houses. The duffers would be bowled out double quick, then have to field for an age while sportists amassed tedious centuries. The Viola band practised a brass arrangement of ballet music that
provoked riots in Paris before the Last War. The Queen Mary’s Women’s Auxiliary Army Cadet Corps practised rifle drill so as to be prepared for the next one. On the whole, lessons were preferable to all this brouhaha. Few in the Remove complained of the additional block in their Time-Table Books.
No staff were in view, so answers couldn’t be sought from higher authority. Amy was surprised Miss Tasker hadn’t showed up. She supposed the teacher was already snug in this mysterious new site, surveying an empty classroom and a register of twenty soon-to-be-infracted-for-tardiness names.
‘I say we bunk off to the beach and make a driftwood fire,’ said De’Ath. ‘As an offering to the spirits of wind and water.’
‘That would be begging for a blistering,’ said Unorna Light.
‘Fire is a primal, elemental force and should not be summoned lightly.’ De’Ath and Light did not get on.
Thorn clicked her fingers and made tiny flames dance behind Light’s head. De’Ath giggled. Her high-pitched titter didn’t go with her vamp look. She affected a low, breathy voice and put drops in her eyes to make them glow wickedly like Theda Bara’s. But, when surprised, she laughed like a pickled hen.
Feeling a waft of heat, Light was cross but kept mum. She knew she’d missed a joke, but wasn’t going to make herself more ridiculous going on about it.
‘I could probably pick that lock,’ said Amy.
‘I definitely could,’ said Speke, clacking her strange fingers.
Amy re-read the note from Dr Swan and decided breaking and entering would be a bad idea. The Conservatory was out of bounds.
‘There was a Windward Cottage,’ piped up Devlin, extending her forefinger three inches. ‘Only it’s not been called that for ages and it’s not really a cottage. You know the fair-sized old house up on the cliff, with the “Keep Out” signs and the twisted weathervane. That was Windward Cottage. No one’s ever lived there.’
‘You mean no one’s lived there for years,’ said Knowles.
‘No… never. Sir Wilfrid Teazle started to build it for Jo Pike, the girl he named his ship after. It was to be their love nest. When she jilted him for that Welsh bard, he had the house finished then shut it up. He swore no one but Johanna would ever live under its roof. He put that in his will, with a clause entailing future masters of Drearcliff to abide by it… or else.’
