I nodded, still unsure of what to say. “Did you read them?” I dreaded to think what they said.
“At first, I thought it might have been an apology from her. But when I saw that it was a diary entry, I didn’t look at it. I knew it wasn’t meant for my eyes.”
“Oh, thank you, Miss.” I sighed with relief. “But how did you know it was by Scarlet?”
“She used to write me notes sometimes, did you know that?”
“No,” I said, surprised.
“She just left me little letters about looking forward to class, asking about when I used to dance professionally, things like that.” She smiled wanly. “I thought I recognised the handwriting, and if anyone would hide something in the new piano, it would be her.”
I nodded and folded the pages up tightly.
“I hope one day you’ll tell me what this was all about.”
“I hope I’ll be able to,” I said, sincerely. “Thank you. You have no idea what this means to me.”
I managed to make it back to the safety of the dorm without being scolded for running. This time I made sure the door was firmly shut behind me – I didn’t want another Penny episode. If only it had a lock as well.
The room was chilly as usual, so I put on a cardigan over my ballet clothes and climbed under the blankets with the diary pages.
Dear Diary,
Something has just happened, something so unbelievable that I’m not sure if I can even write it down. I feel cold inside.
I trembled as I read those lines. What could I be about to read?
I really did go too far. Violet and Penny were spitting with anger and they hunted me down. I was asleep in bed when they came for me, them and their awful friends. I tried everything to fight them off, biting and kicking, but they dragged me up to the rooftop. They’d even found out about my secret place. Now nowhere here is safe.
It was freezing cold and dark, with only the light of the moon and the stars. Violet pinned me to the tiles and Penny spat in my face. I wiped my eyes and tried to scramble to my feet, and then I heard the click of a lock. At first I thought they’d gone and left me there, but it was worse – they’d left me with Violet.
She just stood there, her hair blowing about her face. “You thought you’d get away with all of it, didn’t you,” she said in a voice as cold as the night.
I said nothing.
“Well, I know all about you, Scarlet Grey, I know everything about your pathetic little life. I know what you did to get into this school.”
“You’re lying,” I said, and I went to lunge at her, but she darted sideways and I lost sight of her.
Then she reappeared, a shadow between the tall chimney stacks, pacing up and down with her hands clasped behind her back like a military commander. “You may have tried to hide the evidence in your precious diary, but I found it. And I knew exactly what to do with it. I will get you thrown out of this school for good. You never should have come here!”
“You little sneak!” I yelled. “You, you …”
She charged towards me, as if my words were bouncing off her. “I will get you thrown out and I will tell your twin the truth. How would that make her feel, hmm?”
I slapped her, hard, and then I tried to wrestle her to the ground. But she got the better of me, clawing at my face until I fell back and cried out …
And that was when the hatch burst open, and Miss Fox appeared.
She was screaming something at us, but I was too caught up in tackling Violet to hear her. And then Violet’s weight was lifted from me as Miss Fox grabbed Violet by the ear and hauled her over to the edge of the rooftop.
“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ALL THIS?” she screeched. I was winded, trying to get my breath back, so I couldn’t say a word.
Violet twisted out of her grip. “Scarlet started it, Miss, I found out that she—”
But before she had even finished, Miss Fox had hold of her again. “You mistake me for someone who cares for your excuses,” she said through gritted teeth. “You DARE to break the rules in my school? I will make you sorry you were even born, mark my words!”
And then Violet started yelling back. I couldn’t believe anyone would dare to take on Miss Fox, but she did. “You’ll be sorry if you lay a hand on me! I watch people, I know things.”
“What are you—” snapped Miss Fox, but Violet interrupted her. “I’ll tell everyone, I swear it. I’ll tell them what’s in your desk drawer and—”
And those were the last words I ever heard Violet speak. Miss Fox spun her around and clamped a hand over her mouth. I was lying on the tiles by the open roof hatch, and I watched as Violet’s eyes silently turned from fury to pleading. They were perilously close to the roof edge.
Then, still keeping hold of Violet, Miss Fox strode over to me. I went to stand and she shoved me so hard in the stomach that I crumpled over and fell down through the hatch on to the steps below. The Fox slammed the hatch shut above me, and somehow locked it from the outside. I pushed it as hard as I could, banged my fists on it, loudly enough to wake the dead, or so I thought. Yet there was no response from the other side, and no one came running. I could see nothing but darkness out of the hatch window.
I waited there for what seemed like hours.
Now I’ve returned to the dorm, and I just don’t know what to do. What just happened seems unreal. Like a dream.
Or a nightmare.
I realised I was holding my breath. The words washed over me and threatened to pull me under. Miss Fox had a secret. One so terrible she’d do anything to keep it hidden. This was a huge discovery, and it twisted my stomach.
I thought the pages had ended, but there was more.
Dear Diary,
Violet didn’t come back that night. I went to lessons as usual, and when I returned all of her things were gone. Even her bed was pristine. It’s almost as if she never existed.
I’ve always wanted to get rid of her, but not like this! What if … what if Miss Fox pushed her off the roof?
Penny knocked on my door and asked where Violet was, over and over. I told her I had no idea, but she doesn’t seem to believe me. “If you did something to her, I will find out what it was, and I will kill you,” she said. I closed the door in her face.
So now I must confront Miss Fox. I can’t let her get away with this.
If she can make Violet disappear, what might she do to me?
shuddered. Miss Fox was clearly determined to silence anyone who got close to her secrets.
I was awash with panic and unease as I turned over the last sheet of paper.
It simply said:
The End …
I frowned. There had to be more!
Was Scarlet being contrary? Was she trying to tell me that this wasn’t quite the end? That I’d find the ending somewhere else?
I must tell Ariadne.
As if by magic, she shuffled into the room. She looked a little ropey, but happy. “I was excused from hockey,” she said. “With a note from the nurse. I had to write an essay about the benefits of fresh air and exercise instead.”
That seemed a pretty strange thing to be happy about, but Ariadne was strange by nature. She flopped on to her bed contentedly.
I waved the new pages at her. “Look what Miss Finch found. I can’t believe it.”
She sat up straight away. “Oh. My. GOSH. Is that what I think it is?”
“She found them in the piano, but she swears she didn’t read them.”
I didn’t think I could explain everything I’d just read to Ariadne so I handed both the entries over. I watched Ariadne’s eyes grow wider as she read, her lips moving along with the words.
When she had finished, she just put the pages down in front of her gently. Her face had turned the shade of our morning porridge. I imagine mine looked similar. “Miss Fox … made Violet vanish? Took her away somewhere or … worse?”
I shook my head. “How can we know? Scarlet didn’t see what happened.”
Ariadne
’s eyes lit up. “Let’s look at what we do know,” she said. “So neither of them came back down the hatch, but even if Miss Fox pushed Violet from the roof, she can’t have jumped off herself, can she?”
“Unless she turned into a bat and flew off into the night.” Reading Dracula had clearly had an effect on me.
“Exactly.”
I thought about it for a moment and then the answer hit me. “There’s another hatch! Another way off the roof!”
Ariadne flapped her arms frantically. “We have to look!”
In unison, we turned to the window and peered at the outside world. The sky was iron grey and it was blowing a gale, the trees bending at the force of the wind and the driving rain.
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
I lay awake thinking about what we’d found out. Miss Fox was behind all of this, pulling the strings, I just knew it.
“Ivy?” Ariadne whispered to me from the other side of the room.
“Yes?”
“We’re close. I can sense it.”
I grinned in the dark. “You’ve got psychic powers now, have you?”
She threw her teddy bear at me. “No, silly. But I’ve got a feeling. We’ll find the missing piece. These things are always in the last place you think to look, aren’t they? Like the time I lost my pony.”
I propped myself up on one elbow. “You lost your pony?”
“I wasn’t allowed out for two days and the stable boy forgot to feed him, so Oswald kicked the gate down and trotted to the local village. I found him in the Thompsons’ back garden. The Thompson boys were feeding him jelly beans …”
I started laughing quietly. “Are you saying the final bit of Scarlet’s diary is going to be in someone’s back garden?”
Ariadne tried to look indignant, but her expression soon cracked into a smile. “No, but the Thompsons’ was the last place I thought of.” Then her expression turned sad, and she pulled the sheets up higher. “Of course, that was what made Father say Oswald was too much trouble. I had to sell him.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry …”
“It’s all right.” She sighed. “He was very naughty anyway.”
“Well, hopefully when you finish school you can get another pony. Or a whole horse!”
“I wouldn’t want half a horse,” she replied.
Not long later, Ariadne was fast asleep, but images of my sister, of Miss Fox, of Violet kept flashing through my mind. Silently, I prayed that the next day would bring clear skies so that we could investigate up on the roof.
I struggled to think what ‘The End…’ could mean. Were we close to the final entries, should we think about where the story could end? Or was it literal? Perhaps the last pages would be hidden inside a book …
These thoughts dragged at me through the night, until I finally succumbed to sleep.
When I awoke the next day, I rushed to the window. The sky was the grey of old linen, with the sun nowhere in sight. But there was no rain or wind, so we were safe to go up on the roof. I shook Ariadne awake and told her the good news.
We still had to attend lessons, and I was so distracted I was probably doing a better impression of Scarlet than ever. Arithmetic was a blur and geography a nuisance. I wanted nothing more than for the bell to ring out and let the school day be over.
At lunchtime I went to the library, hopefully flicking through the endings of a few of the books I knew Scarlet had read, gaining myself some strange looks from the librarian. But wherever the end was, this wasn’t it.
Three o’clock came eventually, and I hurried to meet Ariadne at the bottom of the stairwell that led up to the roof. She was already bouncing up and down when I got there.
“So much for being inconspicuous, Ariadne,” I teased.
She turned around. “Oh, I— Scarlet!” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “I’m just so excited. I know it’s strange, but this could be our chance to find … something. Everything! I’ve been thinking about it. This place was Scarlet’s secret sanctuary, and what happened to Violet happened up here. What if this is what she meant? What if this is the end?”
I knew what she meant, but at the same time I couldn’t bring myself to share her excitement. I might be about to find out how my sister had died. I wanted to know – no, I needed to know, for myself as well as for her sake, but the thought made me feel numb inside. Then it would be real and I would be more alone than ever.
Somehow, my face expressed this without saying a word. Ariadne put a kind hand on my shoulder, and together we slowly climbed the stairs. But when we came to the roof hatch, a terrible sight met our eyes.
Someone had fitted a brand-new lock – big, golden and expensive-looking. Anyone could have been responsible – the caretaker, Miss Fox, maybe even Penny, although I doubted her locksmith skills. And now our last hope was gone.
I sank down against the cold wall. Ariadne ran over to the lock, muttering, “No, no,” to herself. I watched as she pulled out a pin from her hair and tried her old methods on it in vain. There was a snap as the hairpin broke and Ariadne cried out in frustration.
“Leave it, Ariadne,” I said. “We can’t get up there.”
To my surprise, she started to cry. Tears trickled down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry!”
It was enough to drag me out of my stupor. “Why are you sorry? It’s not your fault someone put a lock on the hatch. There’s nothing we can do.”
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and sat down next to me, sniffling. “I shouldn’t have said we were going to find it. I gave you –” sniff – “false hope. Oh, Ivy, what if we can’t ever get up there? The truth could be lost forever!”
I put my arm around her and let her cry. “We could try to find the other hatch,” I said, but I had little hope for that either. Struggling to our feet, we searched the top corridor. There were several doors, but they were all either firmly locked or led to dusty broom cupboards. I supposed that when Rookwood was a grand stately home, this would have been the servant’s quarters.
Soon I was on the verge of tears myself. Ariadne had calmed down a little, but she looked no less upset.
“It’s hopeless,” she said. “Truly hopeless.” A moment of silence. “Unless—”
I grabbed her arm. “Unless? There’s an unless?”
You couldn’t interrupt Ariadne when her brain was working. She shook her head as if to clear her thoughts, but her eyes were glazed. “It could be … it could be possible.”
I shook her, gently. “Ariadne, tell me what you’re thinking.”
“If there’s a lock, there’s a key. What’s to say we can’t find it?”
She was right. “Yes! Oh yes …” I stared at the wall, trying to see the full picture that was building in my head. “And who keeps all the school keys in her many pockets?” I remembered that day – already seeming so long ago now – when Miss Fox had jangled up the stairs, unlocked the door of room thirteen and abandoned me with my luggage. She had pocketed the silver key and its brown paper label. “With labels on, no less! Miss Fox will have it, I’m certain.”
Ariadne looked crestfallen. “But do we have any chance of getting it from her?”
“Maybe if we distract her. Or –” my face lit up – “we give her a reason to change her dress.”
“Yes, make a tear in it, or … or … spill something on it!”
“Giving us the time to steal the key!”
We stood there in the hallway, both breathless with the flow of ideas. And I watched as, slowly, Ariadne’s mousy features stretched into a wide grin. With her mane of hair haloed in the light from the window hatch, she was suddenly no longer a mouse, but a lion.
“I have a plan,” she said.
t was crazy. It was ridiculous. It was certainly going to get us into trouble. And there was the vague, tiny, miniscule chance that Ariadne’s plan might just work.
The first thing we had to find was a bag of flour. My immediate thought was to get some from the storeroom in the win
e cellar. But Ariadne had a less risky idea that didn’t involve another night-time kitchen trip. She hid a bag of the stuff in her satchel during home economics, along with a bottle of bright red food colouring.
By dinner, I was sitting at our usual table alone. I really hope you know what you’re doing, Ariadne, I thought.
Dinner time was the one occasion when we knew for certain where Miss Fox would be. She was always in the hall, tapping that infernal cane against her leg and staring daggers at potential wrongdoers.
I watched the clock, feeling its ticking in my bones even though I couldn’t hear it over the din. When Ariadne finally walked in, clutching the bowl that contained her concoction, I almost choked on my stew.
She caught my eye and I nodded at her – imperceptibly, I hoped.
Then her look of determination melted into her familiar, half-dazed expression. She ambled in the direction of the kitchen, some of the red gloopy liquid sloshing over the side of the bowl as she moved.
Nothing escaped Miss Fox. Her eyebrows knitted and she jerked out in front of Ariadne, pockets jangling, cane whooshing at her side. “Miss Flitworth, what do you think you’re—?”
And at that, Ariadne tripped. And chucked the entire mess down the front of Miss Fox’s pristine black dress.
Miss Fox screamed. It was like a growl and a whine and a high-pitched roar all rolled into one.
The whole hall went silent. I could barely breathe, but Ariadne had her role down to a T. She burst into tears. “Oh, Miss, I’m so sorry, Miss, I was trying to make a jelly but it all went wrong and I just wanted to ask the cooks what had happened and I didn’t mean to spill it and …”
To my surprise, Miss Fox didn’t shout at her. Nor did she immediately threaten a caning. In fact, she was turning an interesting shade of puce. She’s embarrassed, I realised. The Fox, embarrassed!
The silence lingered a while longer. Then Miss Fox said, very quietly, “Go to your room, Miss Flitworth. Save your cookery for class.”
“Oh, Miss, of course, anything you say, Miss,” sobbed Ariadne. But Miss Fox merely held up a finger, and she shut up. All eyes were on Miss Fox, as she tried to walk from the room in a dignified manner. Her dress dripped specks of the goo on to the floor as she passed.
The Lost Twin Page 16
