The Lost Twin

by Sophie Cleverly

  In history I sat at my desk next to Ariadne, the same rose-scented one that had belonged to my twin. Madame Lovelace looked up from the book she was reading. “Scarlet, Penelope,” she said. “I’ve been told you two are to sit together. You –” she looked at Ariadne blankly – “Missy, please swap places.”

  Ariadne looked flustered and started picking up her pile of books. I watched as she shuffled over to Penny’s desk. Penny sat down next to me with a thud.

  About twenty minutes into the lesson, a piece of paper flicked across on to my desk. I frowned. Then I looked at Penny. She was staring at her exercise book rather too intently.

  There, in blotchy blue ink, were the words:

  YOU ARE DEAD

  Penny didn’t speak to me for the next few lessons, thank goodness. But her note lingered in my mind, looming and threatening.

  At least she can’t come with me to ballet, I thought, as I ran to my dorm room to get changed. When I got there, Ariadne was sitting on her bed, pulling on her hockey socks. “I don’t want to go,” she moaned.

  “Go where?” I asked.

  She motioned to her outfit. “Hockey. It’s a nightmare. Why couldn’t they just let me play croquet?

  “Can’t you change to something different? Have you asked?”

  She nodded sadly. “They said I’m stuck with it until the end of term. I’m not sure if I’m going to have any legs left by then!”

  Poor Ariadne! “Maybe you’ll get better at it,” I said.

  Her only response was to stick her tongue out as she picked up her shoes and began lacing them on.

  I shivered as I walked into the ballet studio. “It’s getting colder in here,” Miss Finch said, as I passed her. “You’d better start warming up as quickly as possible.”

  I walked over to the barre with the other girls and began the exercises. I was in the middle of practising my développé, my leg stretched high in the air, when Miss Finch appeared behind me in the mirror. She was looking at me strangely. “That’s perfect,” she said. I smiled, and she smiled back, but there was a trace of uncertainty in her expression.

  At the end of the lesson, we lined up and curtseyed for Miss Finch. She waited until the majority of the class had left the room and I was on my way out, and then suddenly asked, “Can you stay back for a minute?” gesturing at me.

  I went over to where she sat at the piano stool. She remained silent until absolutely everyone had left and I heard the door at the top of the stairs bang shut.

  “That was some good work today from you, Ivy.”

  “Thank you, Miss,” I said.

  And then my mouth dropped open.

  “I-Ivy?” I stuttered. “What? I … Who’s Ivy?”

  Miss Finch waved a hand dismissively. “I know you’re not Scarlet, dear girl. You’re far better behaved, for a start. You like ballet for the sake of ballet, not because you yearn for fame and fortune. You can do your développé perfectly, which Scarlet could never get right. She told me about her twin, so … that’s you, isn’t it? You’re Ivy.”

  I dropped to my knees in front of her. “Please,” I begged, “please don’t tell anyone. No one’s supposed to know.”

  Miss Finch tipped her head on one side. “What’s all this about? Where’s Scarlet?”

  Tears threatened to roll down my cheeks. “She’s dead,” I whispered.

  Her expression warped from confusion to pure shock. “Are you serious?”

  I nodded.

  “How did it happen?”

  “I don’t know,” I sobbed. “That’s why I’ve got to stay here and find out. And I can’t tell anyone who I am or else she’ll—” I slammed my mouth shut.

  “Ivy, is someone forcing you to act like Scarlet? Because whoever it is …” Suddenly, Miss Finch pushed herself to her feet, leaning heavily on the piano. She clenched her fists tight. “Oh, don’t tell me. I think I know exactly who.”

  could barely believe what had just happened. I thought I’d been so careful to act like Scarlet, untidy uniform and all. I’d even slapped Penny! But as I dashed away to get changed for dinner I saw suspicion in the eyes of every person I passed.

  If Miss Fox found out that I’d let the cat out of the bag, she’d kill me. Or, worse, make me spend the rest of my life with Penny.

  I could tell that Miss Finch had more to say, but I feared staying a moment longer in her presence. She knew.

  At the dinner table I felt as if my brain had tied itself in hundreds of knots and I hadn’t the faintest idea how to untangle it. I left my soup for so long that it turned cold.

  Ariadne kept poking me until I spooned some into my mouth. “You’ll need all the strength you can get for cleaning up with Penny after this.”

  I groaned and almost dropped my head into my bowl. That was the last thing I needed today.

  A shadow fell over us and I turned around to see Miss Fox standing behind me. “I hope you haven’t forgotten about your duties this evening,” she said.

  “No, Miss,” I said begrudgingly.

  She tapped me lightly on the shoulder with her cane. “Good.”

  “Oh dear,” said Ariadne.

  Miss Fox walked over to the dinner ladies, and though I couldn’t hear what was being said I was pretty sure she was telling them not to clear up this evening. Wonderful.

  I stayed in my seat as everyone finished eating and began to leave the hall.

  “See you soon,” said Ariadne sympathetically, picking up her bowl and taking it over to the pile.

  Not long after, the room was empty except for Miss Fox, Penny and me. The dinner ladies had retreated into the kitchen and closed the wooden hatch.

  “Right, girls,” said Miss Fox. “I want these tables clean enough to see my face in. And the floor too.”

  Penny grumbled but I just nodded.

  Miss Fox slammed her cane on the floor, making both of us jump. “What are you waiting for? Get started!”

  “Yes, Miss,” we chorused. The dinner ladies had left out brooms, dustpans and brushes and cleaning cloths. Just looking at them brought a sudden wave of exhaustion over me. The dining hall was huge.

  Miss Fox’s heels clicked away through the big double doors, and I picked up a cloth and started scrubbing the nearest table.

  Moments later Penny appeared next to me. “I can’t believe you got us into this mess,” she sneered.

  My mind told me to ignore her, but the part of me that was acting like Scarlet couldn’t let that slide. I threw the cloth down and looked her straight in the eye. “I got us into it? You were the one who chucked the contents of your plate on me!”

  Penny snorted like a horse. “You didn’t have to hit me, though.” She gestured at her bruised nose. “And besides, we all know you deserved it.”

  Oh yes, the mysterious thing I had apparently done wrong. I sighed. I couldn’t keep fighting battles that Scarlet had started.

  “Look, Penny, let’s just get on with the cleaning, shall we?”

  Penny had clearly been expecting an argument but I wasn’t going to give her one.

  To my surprise, she didn’t say anything in retaliation. She simply began flicking crumbs off the table with her cloth.

  She remained silent as we worked our way around the tables. My arms were aching a little, but it wasn’t too bad, not compared with my stinging hands.

  I picked up a broom and began sweeping up all the small bits of discarded food that littered the floor. Penny suddenly stopped right in front of me.

  “I meant it, you know,” she said, staring at me, her face unmoving.

  “Meant what?”

  “The note.”

  Ugh. I’d almost forgotten about that.

  “I’m not just going to let you get away with everything.” Her bottom lip was shaking.

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “Excuse me,” I said, and continued my sweeping.

  I tried to hide the fact that Penny had shaken me. I definitely wasn’t comfortable with being alone with her, even with
the clatter from the kitchen where the dinner ladies and cooks were washing up.

  “Oh for goodness’ sake!” she exclaimed at one point, throwing her broom to the floor. But when I looked over she just glared at me, lifted the handle back up and started again.

  What felt like hours later, I stopped for a rest against the wall. The tables were pretty clean by now and we’d swept all the dirt into neat piles on the floor. It had grown dark outside the tall windows. I was just about to finish emptying my dustpan when Miss Fox returned.

  She swiped a finger along the table nearest to her and then inspected it. I remembered that she had done exactly the same in Aunt Phoebe’s kitchen, and I felt a rush of homesickness.

  “Hmm,” she said. “I suppose that’s adequate. You will do better next time, I trust.”

  I stared at her blankly, refusing to react. The room was almost spotless and she knew it.

  Penny, however, was not so quick on the uptake. “It took us ages, Miss!” she said from behind me. “My hands are practically bleeding!”

  Miss Fox’s eyes lit up. “Wonderful! Hard work builds character. If you do twice as much tomorrow, you’ll have twice as much character. Won’t that be grand?”

  Penny slumped down into the nearest chair and stared at her feet.

  “May we go now, Miss?” I asked, having tipped the final pile of dirt into the dustbin.

  “Yes,” Miss Fox snapped, and marched out of the room without saying another word.

  As I went to leave, I noticed Penny was still sitting down, her head in her hands. I didn’t have to, but for some reason I felt obliged to say something. “Bye?”

  “Get lost,” she replied, without looking up.

  Lost?

  I was already lost.

  I spent a considerable amount of time soaking my aching body in the bath that night. Eventually the matron knocked on the door and told me I had to get to bed. I didn’t protest.

  When I got back to our room, Ariadne was already asleep with the lamp still on. I smiled down at her. She always looked so peaceful, and fell asleep so easily.

  I really should have tried to get some sleep too, but instead I got down under the mattress and retrieved Scarlet’s diary. I sat down on the floor and spread out the pages in order. No matter how many times I looked at them, I never saw anything new.

  I stood up and peered at myself in the dressing-table mirror. The face looking back at me was blank and tight-lipped, not revealing anything.

  Sighing, I gathered up the pages again. I placed them back inside the leather-bound book, stroking my hand over the raised letters, and then returned the diary to its hiding place.

  The curtains fluttered, and I realised that the window was open and the door ajar, creating a breeze. I shut both, before changing into my nightgown, turning off the lamp and finally, exhausted, falling into bed.

  Just as I was slipping into sleep, a thought swam through my mind: If Miss Finch knew who I really was, there was no reason why she couldn’t tell me more about what had happened before Scarlet’s death. But before I could chase that thought, it was carried away and the current of sleep pulled me under.

  The next day Penny’s behaviour was even worse than usual. She was constantly trying her best to get me into trouble in every lesson.

  In Latin, she kept dropping her pen and flicking ink everywhere each time the teacher’s back was turned. “It was Scarlet, Miss!” she said and I got a rap across my sore knuckles.

  In biology, she kept elbowing me, making my handwriting into a spidery mess. Mrs Caulfield ordered me to do ten lines of ‘I must write neatly’ after class.

  In home economics, she knocked a whole bag of flour off the table and then screeched and flung her hands in the air. It was Ariadne who had to clean it up, and me who had to go and scrub my dress in the washroom.

  But the strange thing was that Penny didn’t seem to be joking with her friends any more. As I was leaving the cookery room Nadia nudged Penny and said, “I hope you don’t catch the freak pox off her.”

  Penny, however, didn’t join in with the jibe. “Shut up, Nadia,” she said, shrugging her away.

  Nadia’s face turned sour. “What is wrong with you?” she snapped.

  I left them to their bickering. I had a ballet class to get to.

  That was when things took a turn for the strange – or perhaps, more accurately, the stranger. Miss Finch was away again, only this time there was no Miss Fox ordering us to swap to swimming. Instead there was merely a note on the piano telling us to get on with some floor work on our own.

  Afterwards I headed back to our room in a cloud of disappointment. Ariadne was already there, optimistically trying to read and sew at the same time. She seemed a little less bruised than she usually was after hockey.

  “I just avoided contact with the ball as much as possible,” she said with a cheerful grin when I asked about it.

  I laughed half-heartedly and sat on my bed.

  “Oh,” she said, putting down her book. “I had an idea while I was out on the hockey field! You know the chapel?”

  “Yes, what about it?”

  “Scarlet said something about getting on our knees, right? Well, I could see the chapel from the hockey field … and I just thought – praying! Knees! So maybe we should check the pews?”

  I nodded, as the idea took hold; it was about the only place we hadn’t searched yet. “Ariadne, I think you might be some kind of undiscovered genius,” I said.

  “Maybe I am!” Ariadne jumped off the bed, knocking her sewing on to the floor. I reached down and picked it up. It said ‘BEST FRIENDS’, with cross-stitched flowers all around it. I put it back on her bed gently. A warm glow spread inside me and pushed away the gathering gloom. I’d never had a best friend before, unless you counted Scarlet.

  Ariadne was already reaching for her satchel. “They can’t tell us off for going to church, can they?”

  The chapel was on the east side of the school, surrounded by a meadow on one side and the playing fields on the other. There was a small graveyard next to it, presumably from when the school building had been a manor house in previous centuries. Without warning, my imagination populated it with dead schoolgirls. I shuddered as we waded through the uncut grass.

  As with most churches, the door was never locked, though it did have a large iron ring handle that was heavy to lift.

  I went in first and looked around. “Empty!” I whispered, beckoning Ariadne to follow.

  Our footsteps echoed off the walls as they hit the clay floor tiles. It was surprisingly bright inside, as light poured through the stained glass.

  “Where shall we start?” Ariadne whispered excitedly. There wasn’t really any need for us to talk in hushed voices, but it seemed the right thing to do.

  I looked along the pews. They all had tiny numbers in front of each seat. “Number thirteen, perhaps? It was Scarlet’s favourite.”

  Ariadne ran over and started counting along the row. “Oh,” she said. “There is no thirteen. It goes from twelve to fourteen. They must have thought it was unlucky.”

  “But not unlucky enough for them to inflict it on our bedroom!” I thought about it. “Number four, then?” The other hiding places had followed that pattern. But the fourth seat was right at the front, with nowhere to conceal a diary entry. “Hmm, how about where we sit on Sundays? Scarlet would have had to sit in the same place, wouldn’t she?”

  I found our pew and slid into it. It was identical to every other one in the chapel, with its hymn books and embroidered kneeling mats, each bearing the name of the person who had sewn them. “Let’s look underneath.”

  We both got down on our hands and knees and crawled the length of the pew. It was surprisingly dusty and Ariadne couldn’t stop sneezing, which made me giggle. I clamped my hand over my mouth, trying to dampen my laughter and keep the dust out.

  There was no sign of anything taped under the wooden seat or on the floor, as far as I could see. “Anything your end, Aria
dne?”

  She sat up and stuffed her handkerchief under her nose. “Nothing here.”

  Hmmph. I took a seat on the pew. “Let’s check these,” I said, gesturing at the hymn books and kneeling mats.

  “Oh yes,” said Ariadne, somewhat muffled by the handkerchief.

  I was in the place where I normally sat, seat twenty-four. “I’ll take the kneeling mat, you take the book.” I handed it to her.

  The prayer mat featured a cross-stitch picture of a shepherd with his flock, and was clearly the work of a less than perfect student. On one of the sides, there were big stitches that were more than a little wonky. I peered at them closely.

  “This could be it,” I whispered. “Maybe there’s something inside.” I began picking at the stitches. Ariadne was flipping through the prayer book, which she dangled upside down and shook to see if anything came out – but nothing did.

  I felt a little strange to be destroying a prayer mat, even if it was for a good reason. “Forgive me, Father, for I have destroyed your kneeler,” I said.

  Ariadne smiled. “I’ll bring a needle and thread and sew it back up on Sunday.”

  When I’d finally unpicked all the bad stitching, I could stick my hand inside the cushion. It was full of stuffing and … paper?

  I pulled it out. Oh, just ordinary packing paper, put in there to make up the rest of the bulk.

  Ariadne’s face fell. “No writing?” she asked.

  “No, but …” I put my hand back in and began pulling out more of the balls of paper. I threw about ten on to the floor until suddenly, “Aha!” The next scrunched-up ball had scrawls of ink all over it. Diary pages!

  Ariadne squeaked and clapped the tips of her fingers together in an attempt to make less noise.

  I shuffled up the pew, unfolding the diary entry. It read:

  Dear Diary,

  You won’t believe what has happened. It all started when I went to get my hairbrush, the silver-backed one with Mother’s initials, and it wasn’t there. I tore the room apart looking for it, and then I realised – it wasn’t lost. Violet had taken it. I just knew.

  Well, I wasn’t going to let her get away with it this time. I sat seething through my first lesson, just waiting to get my hands on her. In home economics, my chance finally came. At first I was only going to yell at her, but then she pulled out Mother’s hairbrush from her satchel and started brushing her hair with it. The letters E.G. were plain to see on the back. When she looked around, I was glaring daggers at her, but she just laughed and tossed her curls.