The White Tower

by Cathryn Constable

  Livy shuddered at the image of the falling Sentinel. She felt suddenly that she wanted to run back to the car. She had pins and needles in her fingers and she could feel her heels rising up off the flagstones. She tried to breathe, to make herself feel as heavy as the Sentinels. Normal is good, she told herself, but then, since Mahalia had died, she had less confidence in what was normal.

  Standing in the centre of the courtyard was a woman with bright gold hair. She walked quickly towards them in very high heels and a beautifully tailored grey suit. The headmistress, of course.

  Livy sighed as she thought of the impression she would make in her unflattering new dress with its droopy hem and high collar. Her mother had called it ‘charmingly Victorian with a touch of Gothic drama’. Livy called it ugly.

  Livy’s father said, ‘Dr Smythe! Here we are! Thank you so much for seeing us.’

  ‘They’ve brought an extra,’ Miss Lockwood whispered under her breath. ‘What should we do?’

  Dr Smythe’s chiselled face barely softened as she looked down at Tom. ‘And who are you?’ she asked.

  ‘This is Tom,’ Livy’s father said.

  ‘Tom!’ Dr Smythe said, as if she had never heard such an interesting sound.

  ‘I can fly!’ Tom said brazenly.

  Dr Smythe blinked in surprise, but spoke to Tom quite seriously. ‘The founder of Temple College, Peter Burgess, would have been interested to know how you do that, Tom. He spent most of his life trying to understand gravity.’ She raised an eyebrow at Livy’s father. ‘Quite the golden boy, James.’

  Tom stared up at the woman, entranced. ‘Do you know Count Zacha?’

  Dr Smythe frowned. ‘I’m not sure I do, Tom. Would you draw a picture of him for me?’

  ‘Well,’ Miss Lockwood looked surprised, ‘he’s a charmer!’

  Livy wondered if she would be so successful at charming Dr Smythe. Thinking of the hours of interview preparation her father had given her, she thought it would take more than boasting that she could fly and drawing a picture of Count Zacha.

  Dr Smythe addressed her parents. ‘My secretary will give you coffee while I have a chat with Livy.’

  ‘I was hoping to take another look at the library,’ Livy’s father said. ‘I’m itching to get back in there.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘Especially the really old books that belonged to Peter Burgess. I can’t wait to see what you have!’

  ‘Even better!’ Dr Smythe smiled.

  She turned towards a doorway on the far side of the courtyard. ‘Come along, Livy, this won’t take long.’

  Livy fixed her eyes on Dr Smythe’s heels, which were as high and sharp as hypodermic needles. Her father had explained that Pernilla Smythe was a scientist of the highest order. She had, apparently, won awards, written papers on gravity, run laboratories in Prague, all while looking for things called ‘superheavy elements’. Educated at Temple College, she had recently returned as its headmistress, drawn back by the wealth of material in the school’s extensive and priceless library. She wanted to see if any of the Temple scholars’ work from centuries ago might be of interest to her. ‘So my job as librarian will be very important,’ Livy’s father had said. But his description of the headmistress had made Livy imagine a much older woman with scatty grey hair and dowdy clothes whereas Pernilla Smythe, in the flesh, was impossibly glamorous. How could Livy impress her? She had only just started studying the periodic table before all that time off school, and what she’d learnt she had forgotten.

  Dr Smythe disappeared through an archway next to the narrow tower. Pushing through the door after her, Livy saw the woman climbing an enormous stone staircase at some speed.

  Livy climbed the stairs after her, two at a time, trying to catch up; she was briefly aware of the framed certificates that hung on the wall. They were in all sorts of languages, with letters picked out in gold. But they all had two words in common: Pernilla Smythe.

  A door had been left open at the top of the stairs and Livy stood in the doorway, looking into a large book-lined study. She wasn’t sure what she should do.

  ‘Come in!’ Dr Smythe waved Livy forward.

  Stepping into the room, Livy saw a window that took up the full height of the wall from the ceiling to the floor and seemed to have been placed there purely to frame the Sentinel with the broken wing standing on the top of that strange, out-of-place tower.

  ‘Come further in!’ Dr Smythe called. ‘I can’t speak to you from there.’

  Livy closed the door behind her and walked reluctantly towards the woman who was now seated behind an enormous mahogany desk covered in very neat stacks of papers.

  ‘Ouch!’ Livy caught her leg on something and heard the crack of glass. Looking down, she saw that she had walked into a corner of a large packing crate in which several glass flasks were lying on piles of golden straw. ‘I’m so sorry!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Dr Smythe said from behind her desk. ‘You’re not hurt?’

  Livy shook her head although her shin had been begun to throb.

  ‘Let’s hope that nothing is broken. That box contains equipment for my laboratory,’ the headmistress murmured. With a wave of her hand, she indicated that Livy should take the seat opposite her. On her wrist was a large gold charm bracelet that looked too heavy for the woman’s delicate bones. ‘Flasks of that quality are very hard to get in this country: I had to have those sent over from Prague. I am about to resume my research into an obscure theory of gravity and I am certain that your father is going to be a great help in finding some scientific books which have got lost in the depths of the library.’

  Livy sank into the seat.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not hurt?’ Dr Smythe asked, though she sounded impatient. ‘You look pale.’

  Livy shook her head again. In truth, she didn’t care about the painful shin. What she was having trouble with was the sky . . . Being this high up in a room with such a huge window made her feel light-headed. Perhaps if she just stared at Dr Smythe, away from all the sky, away from the Sentinel, she could lock herself in her body. But the window had been left partly open and she could feel a draught around her neck, could smell the clouds and hear the flap of a pigeon’s wings.

  ‘Livy?’

  ‘Yes?’ Her voice was too loud.

  Dr Smythe had followed her gaze, her eyes as sharp as her heels. ‘I have days when I quite expect the Sentinels to speak,’ she said slowly. ‘They’re so lifelike, aren’t they?’

  Why isn’t she talking about Chemistry? Livy thought. Or Physics? She sighed and twisted round so that she couldn’t see the window at all. She thought, The Sentinels would be more likely to fly than speak.

  But to her horror, she saw by the startled expression on Dr Smythe’s face that she hadn’t thought those words, she had spoken them. Out loud. She dug her nails into her palms and the pain made her feel braver. Oh, what did it matter what Dr Smythe thought of her?

  But the headmistress looked thoughtful. ‘What an interesting thing to say,’ she said. ‘Did you know that there were some scholars at Temple College who believed that they had the power to make the Sentinels move? Even to fly like angels. But they had very different ideas about what science could do and what science was for back then. All very foolish, of course.’

  Livy shook her head in confusion. ‘But no one could make a stone statue move. That’s ridiculous!’

  ‘You might be surprised, Livy, by what scientists think.’

  Behind the desk hung a large, dark oil painting of a man with a pale face wearing black scholars’ robes. He looked as if he was peering through a haze of smoke to find out what Livy might say next. In the painted sky above his head hung both the sun and the moon. He held an hourglass in his thin white fingers. The man must have just turned it over because the sand had not reached the bottom of the globe. And along the bottom of this perplexing portrait, Livy saw two words: Tempus Fugit.

  Dr Smythe turned to the painting. ‘Take Peter Burgess,’ she explained. ‘The fi
rst headmaster of Temple College when it was founded in 1563. A superb scientist. And one of your ancestors!’

  ‘Dad said we might be related,’ Livy said, looking at the dark heavy-lidded eyes that bore no resemblance to her own hazel ones. ‘But I’m not sure I believe it. We’re quite poor and Dad said that Peter Burgess had loads of money.’

  Dr Smythe smiled thinly. ‘He had lots of gold, it’s true,’ she said. ‘He became fabulously rich almost overnight although he never said where the gold came from. And he used the gold that he acquired to do some good in the world. He collected rare and precious books that gave Temple College an unrivalled library. He plucked six poor boys from the parishes of London and educated them at his own expense. He called them his scholars: you can see their names on a board outside the Temple that gives the school its name. And, just before he withdrew to the White Tower where he lived out the rest of his life as a recluse, he paid for all seven Sentinels that guard Temple College to be carved by a master stonemason.’ She frowned. ‘Odd that he ordered seven Sentinels when there were only six boys. But perhaps it was cheaper to carve a statue than educate a child.’ Her eyes glittered with interest. ‘Master Burgess fascinates me. While I was working in Prague, I found out quite a lot about the mysterious Peter Burgess. Like so many scholars of the time, his scientific work was all bound up in his religious beliefs. He thought that gravity was brought into the world when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden for eating from the Tree of Knowledge. This sinful act, he believed, made their blood heavy and they fell to earth. Peter Burgess thought that, before that fall, humans were immortal and could fly like angels.’

  Livy pressed her heels down into the floor as her own blood surged upwards in her veins. The work of Master Burgess did not sound very scientific and yet Dr Smythe’s words were having a strange effect on her body.

  ‘Peter Burgess was born almost a hundred years before Isaac Newton, who we know discovered gravity, and yet here he wrote about why objects fell to the ground through an invisible “mortal force”. If only so much of his work had not been lost! I hope that your father will help me find the notes to his last experiment.’ Dr Smythe sighed. ‘The records in the library have not been well kept.’

  Livy looked at the dark painting. Could that man with his strange and very unscientific ideas that so interested Dr Smythe really be some distant relation of hers?

  ‘Just think,’ Dr Smythe said, quietly. ‘You might have the blood of the great Peter Burgess flowing through your veins . . .’

  Livy stared at her hands and the blue veins that showed through her pale skin. ‘Whether I’m related to Peter Burgess or not, it doesn’t make any difference to what’s in my veins,’ she said, thinking of Mahalia and how her doctors had hoped to transform her blood with their powerful chemicals. ‘I’m sure it is the same as anyone else’s.’ She flexed her fingers to get rid of the pricking sensation in them.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Dr Smythe said, looking at Livy thoughtfully. She flicked through some papers on her desk. ‘You’ve missed a lot of school recently.’

  Livy looked at her shoes. ‘My friend–’ she started to say, but Dr Smythe interrupted her.

  ‘However, although your academic record is patchy due to your having been absent for almost a term of your present school, still, I think there is every reason to believe that the scholarship place that comes with your father’s new job will not be wasted on you. I will make a formal offer of a place to your parents.’

  Dr Smythe stood and held out her hand.

  Livy stood too and shook the offered hand, which was as cool and smooth as polished metal.

  ‘Is that all?’ she asked, surprised at being dismissed. ‘Is the interview over?’

  Dr Smythe nodded, with a faint smile. ‘I think that Peter Burgess would approve of your being a scholar here,’ was all she said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Livy repeated, looking up at the painting. Why were the moon and the sun in the same sky?

  ‘Just one more thing before you go.’ Dr Smythe was already sitting back down and looking at her papers. ‘Your brother, Tom. How old is he?’

  ‘Tom?’ Livy asked, puzzled. ‘He’s four.’

  Dr Smythe bent her head and wrote something quickly on her papers. As she did not raise her head again, Livy turned and left the office.

  Livy walked slowly down the stairs, past all Pernilla Smythe’s certificates and degrees. She felt suddenly deflated. Her father had prepared her for being asked about her studies and what subjects she enjoyed, but Dr Smythe had not been interested. And yet Livy had been handed a place just like that. Was it really enough to be distantly related to Peter Burgess?

  She stepped out into the courtyard; her parents were nowhere to be seen.

  She stood at the edge of a puddle, looking at the reflection of the sky. She inched forwards so that the reflected angel’s wings appeared to come from her own shoulders. But what was that? Hovering just between ‘her’ wings? A twisting black shape made of smoke or shadow . . . Startled, she looked up. No – there was nothing but the Sentinel, staring at the clouds, and a bird wheeling round the beautiful carved stone head.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said to the Sentinel. ‘Should I come here?’

  But the person whose opinion she really wanted was Mahalia. What would she say? Livy wondered then. If only she could find a way to talk to her friend, to tell her where she was, to ask what she thought . . .

  ‘Livy!’

  She turned to see her parents walking quickly across the courtyard and Tom twisting his hand out of his mother’s and running towards her.

  ‘How did it go?’ her father asked.

  Her mother was looking at her hopefully. Livy knew that Tom had already been enrolled in his new nursery, that her father had bought a new suit for ‘the job of his dreams’ and her mother had started packing up their house and booked the removal van. Livy starting at Temple College was just the last piece in the puzzle that would be their new life. How could she tell them that she was unsure?

  But then, life was about to change whether she wanted it to or not.

  She shrugged. ‘Dr Smythe is not awful, I suppose.’ Livy felt that she had no choice but to be resigned to her fate.

  Her father squeezed her shoulder. ‘That’s the spirit! Let’s go and see the new house. You can choose your bedroom!’

  To get to the librarian’s house they had to walk out of Temple College and turn into a small side street of tall, thin houses that backed on to the school walls. ‘Leaden Lane’ Livy read on an old-fashioned metal street sign fixed to the side of the first house.

  ‘We’re number seven!’ Livy’s father announced, drawing a large bunch of keys out of his pocket. ‘This house is very old, Tom,’ he said, looking up at the dark brick façade. ‘Can you guess how old it is?’

  ‘Forty-three?’ Tom offered.

  ‘It was built in 1720. That’s nearly three hundred years old!’

  Tom shut his eyes tight. ‘Don’t like!’

  As her father pushed open the dark-grey front door, metal street sign fixed to the side of the first house. old!’ Livy’s mother wrinkled her nose. ‘It needs a good airing.’

  Large packing crates blocked their way. ‘Didn’t the last librarian take his things with him when he moved?’ Livy’s mother asked, looking worried. ‘I thought you said everything would be ready for us when we moved in.’

  Livy’s father kicked some crumpled newspaper to one side as they stepped over a pile of post into the dark, narrow, panelled hallway.

  ‘Oh, James,’ Livy’s mother said. ‘I’m not sure about this.’

  ‘We can paint the walls brighter colours,’ Livy’s father said, breezily. ‘We don’t have to keep everything this drab grey.’

  ‘If you say so.’ Livy’s mother picked up Tom, but she didn’t sound very sure.

  Livy’s father opened a door and they all peered into a small, dank sitting room. ‘Let’s not be disheartened,’ he said as they all fel
t just that.

  ‘But James!’ Livy’s mother sighed.

  ‘Not a word until we’ve had a good look round!’

  Livy chose the room next to Tom’s; it was slightly larger and had a view over the wall to the Temple College gardens. But as they were about to go back downstairs – her father squeezing her mother’s hand and whispering, ‘Will it do? It’s not very big but it’s got plenty of character, shutters in every room and all the fireplaces work,’ – Livy saw a narrow door.

  ‘Can we have a look in there?’

  Her mother sneezed. ‘I think I’ve had enough dust for one day. Can it wait?’

  But Livy was overcome with curiosity. She could feel a slight breeze coming from behind the little door. She turned the handle and the door swung open to reveal a steep staircase going up.

  She could hear Tom asking for his new toy plane, bought the day before, and her mother’s exasperated voice: ‘Hang on!’

  Livy ran up the stairs.

  She was in a small room: the roof came right down to the floor on two sides. If she put her arms out, she could nearly touch the walls. There was an odd smell too. Bitter and metallic.

  The window, which jutted out into the sky so that if you stood in the little box of the frame, you could see to the right and left, was open. A piece of red thread had got caught on the window frame and it fluttered in the breeze.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs. ‘It looks like a maid’s room,’ Livy’s mother said, arriving out of breath. ‘It probably once belonged to a girl the same age as you, employed to clean all the fireplaces and light the fires.’

  ‘Can I have this room?’

  ‘But it’s too small!’

  ‘I don’t mind!’