The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School (6 page)

The flickers drew venomous hisses from the audience whenever it seemed the hero was on the point of planting a passionate smacker on the heroine’s cupid’s bow lips but they chickened out at the last moment and rubbed cheeks instead. Scornful of the breed of ringleted and ribboned Paulines, Elaines and Helens, Kali dared express a preference for the honestly naked crookery of the wicked uncles and clutching hands above the hollow charms of the unmanly youths held up as heroes in the chapterplays. Amy’s favourites among Mrs Wyke’s flickers were not American or British, but French – especially those in which adventuress Irma Vep prowled the rooftops of Paris in a black bodystocking and mask, murdering and robbing at the behest of a secret society called Les Vampires. It occurred to Amy that her Ability might come in handy if she were ever called upon to prowl rooftops. Should she ask Light Fingers how to go about beginning a career in crime?

In three weeks, she had seen and sketched twelve new moths, including the nationally scarce
Discoloxia blomeri
(Blomer’s Rivulet), though the Drearcliff grounds were poor moth country. Her
enthusiasm
was noted by Fossil Borrodale, who – when not thwacking Infractors – was a surprisingly good teacher. She didn’t baby-talk like Wicked Wyke or insist on rote copying like Digger Downs. Called after lessons to see Fossil, Amy dreaded punishment for some unintentional Infraction – only for the teacher to ask politely if she might look at Amy’s Book of Moths. While casting an eye over the sketches, Miss Borrodale admitted she had kept a Book of Fossils when she was Amy’s age. Fossil allowed that Amy could examine the Calloway Collection if she liked. The naturalist Damina Calloway – who had taught at Drearcliff around the turn of the century then disappeared in Patagonia – had donated a great number of specimens to the school, including several trays of mounted lepidoptera. Though against killing for science, Amy thrilled at the prospect. The trays had grown dusty and ignored, awaiting someone who shared the
enthusiasm
of the long-gone collector.

Leaving Hypatia Hall – the smelly edifice which contained the Biology and Chemistry Laboratories and the Machinists’ Workshop – Amy spied Inchfawn peeping round a corner, boiling with envy. ‘It’s all right, Inchfawn, I didn’t get the thwacks.’ That didn’t assuage Inchfawn, who darted away, spectacles up in her hair, heels of her hands pressed to her eyes.

Amy now knew her cell-mates intimately. They were together in lessons, at meals, on QMWAACC exercises, between lessons, at the flickers, doing prep, rambling in the grounds, playing sports and games and in the cell, talking in the dark after Lights Out. To everyone else, they were Frecks’ cell; among themselves, they were the Forus, a contraction of ‘the Four of Us’. If School had a language, the Forus had a dialect – a slang or code comprehensible only by themselves. Frecks was skilled at making up handles and expressions. Each prefect or teacher or girl had a Secret Handle, for use only among the Forus, selected so there was no obvious connection between the handle and the subject’s name or enthusiasm or physical appearance. Miss Borrodale was not ‘Fossil’, but ‘Lilac’ (her first name was Violet). Miss Kaye was not ‘Acting Mrs Edwards’ but ‘Janet’ (J came after K in the alphabet). Dora Paule, known to her relatively few friends as ‘Daffy’, was simply ‘A’ (because she was ‘A-paule-ing’). Inchfawn was ‘Inchworm’ to the School, but ‘Six’ – for Six Eyes, because of her two sets of specs – to the Forus. Only they called whips ‘the Witches’; the rest of School called them ‘the Sisters’. In Forus lingo, Black Notches were ‘Stains’ (fully, ‘Stains on the Escutcheon’), bosoms were ‘beakers’ (Light Fingers had the best-developed beakers), prep was ‘greens’ (as in ‘have you eaten your greens?’), serving in QMWAACC was ‘being ganged’ (derived from press-ganged), custard was ‘splodge’, and someone with a crush was ‘a limpet’.

They all had Secrets. Amy’s was the floating. Light Fingers had a stash of stolen objects, picked up while practising hereditary skills. Frecks had a boyfriend in Watchet – a lad named Clovis, who was walking out with her (when they could both escape, which was seldom) though he was supposedly engaged to a little marchioness. Besides her reprobate brother and her spy parents, Frecks’ family tree included a glamorous uncle who had flown with Pendragon Squadron during the war. Lieutenant Lance Lake, her mother’s brother, had given Frecks some of his kit, including one of the mystic-blessed silvery chainmail balaclavas the Aerial Knights of Avalon believed kept them safe in battle provided their cause was just and true. Kali wore the snail in her nose at least partially to cover a scar given her by her father – who once took it in mind to stick the point of a dagger up her nostril and rip it free.

Amy told the Forus about Mother, and the uncles she had periodically gained and lost since Father died. Light Fingers admitted she’d drawn up, and tested, five plans for escaping from School Grounds, which were set down in cipher in her Time-Table Book. Frecks said she was smuggling vitriol out of the Hypatia Hall a drop at a time, saving enough to throw in the marchioness’s face this Easter – using a test tube she’d managed to get her brother to leave his fingerprints on. Kali was thinking hard about her first massacre. You couldn’t be taken seriously as a bandit in Kafiristan until you’d supervised at least one massacre.

Originally from Bengal, the Chattopadhyay clan were driven north-east across the entire sub-continent in the 18th Century by the East India Company, who Kali said were worse bandits than anyone in her family. Kafiristan – Land of the Infidels – was properly called Nuristan – Land of the Enlightened – these days, though Kali’s family resisted forced conversion to Islam a generation ago and refused to acknowledge what it said on the map. She hoped to be the first of her family to use ‘a Chicago pianola’ and ‘pineapples’ rather than kukri knives or strangling scarves.

In books written by grown-ups, there was a lot of guff about school days being either the happiest of your life or a worse ordeal than penal servitude. Headmistress gave speeches about School Spirit and Wicked Wyke hoped to foment a similar, if more limited Desdemona Spirit which never quite caught on – though Desdemonas bristled at any suggestion other Houses were better in any way, except in games where Goneril won so often no one cared about losing. Amy didn’t have the luxury of stepping out of herself and thinking of Drearcliff in terms of Good, Bad or Indifferent. The place was, at times, immeasurably better than her old school (which she could barely recall – she spent twenty minutes nagging at a lost scrap of memory, unable to summon her old school’s word for ‘greens’) and at times far, far worse. She was here, this was (for the time being) her world, and that was that.

She was a Drearcliff Girl.

B
ECAUSE SHE WORE
specs, Inchfawn was trusted with the map.

This Thursday afternoon, Desdemona were at War with an unholy alliance of Tamora and Goneril. Ariel were supposed to be on their side, but had capitulated early. Viola were being Belgium, which meant standing in a field and blubbing rather than being bayonetted or importuned by Hunnish hordes.

The berserkers of Tamora wore Art Room blue paint on their faces and brandished hockey sticks decorated with the skulls of shrews. Led by Zenobia Aire, the Fiend of the Fourth, they broke through the Desdemona lines with a great whooping, bashing, screaming attack. It was a rout.

Amy, Kali, Smudge and Inchfawn were cut off from the rest of the House. They had fled to a wooded area outside School Grounds. Inchfawn found an overgrown path she promised was a shortcut back to HQ, but it ran downwards, turning into a small pebble-bed stream, and came out on the beach.

There was a dramatic view of Drearcliff Grange, but no easy way to get up to it.

Floating was an option – but Inchfawn and Smudge weren’t in on the secret, and Amy thought it best to keep them in the dark. Smudge, liable to exaggerate, would have Amy zooming about with her tail on fire like Hans von Hellhund, the Demon Ace.

Inchfawn was potentially a Problem.

Since Fossil had taken an interest in Amy’s Book of Moths, the teacher’s devoted disciple had been at best cold and at worst malicious. Jealousy was a terrible, terrible thing. Inchfawn was rather an unhappy girl and Amy of course felt sorry for her – but she was a drip and a millstone, a burden to the House and a liability to School.

‘Some shortcut, sister,’ snarled Kali. ‘Sure you ain’t rattin’ for Tamora? If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a dirty squealin’ rat. If there’s two things I can’t stand, it’s the wrigglin’ portions of a dirty squealin’ rat after she’s been chopped in half.’

That was a bit strong, but Amy didn’t pipe up.

She was cold, bruised and tired. Tuck had run out an hour ago. When they made it back to base, they were sure to be Black-Notched for straying out of bounds. Amy was not looking forward to scrubbing the Heel with her toothbrush. She only had the one, and would have to clean her teeth with what was left of it.

At this rate, they might have to surrender. She hoped they could find a Goneril patrol to be captured by. Then, they’d be marched to neutral territory to sit out the War with the wets of Viola. It would be worse luck to run into a Tamora murder party.

Inchfawn looked at the unrolled map again and shook her head. She offered it to Smudge, who was in her cell, but the other girl wouldn’t touch it.

Inchfawn had obviously given up even trying to help.

So far, Amy had stayed away from the beach. Shores were generally not moth country. The most notable landmark was the fallen tower, which was a way off, surrounded by ‘Danger – Keep Out’ signs. The coast was unevenly eroded, making seaside walks fraught with peril. There was always a risk of being cut off by the tide, which could swiftly transform open beach into a shrinking shingle bay, inaccessible except by boat or climb. Cliff-base caves tempted the adventurous explorer – but they’d been warned against them because, at high tide, the waters washed in and anyone inside would certainly drown.

It was said the caves were used in olden days by smugglers, though Amy supposed smuggling more likely on coasts facing France or Holland than one in sight of South Wales. A few wave-cut overhangs were on their way to becoming caves or catastrophic collapses. Chunks of rock often detached from the cliffs and fell on the beach. School legend had it that two teachers were squashed during a midnight tryst, dying in a compromising embrace.

Smudge pointed out the exact spot where this tragedy had occurred. She spread her arms to indicate the extent of the human pancake found the next morning.

‘We believe you,’ said Amy, ‘thousands wouldn’t.’

Smudge stuck out her lower lip. She was very fond of this story. At different times, she had identified six or seven different combinations of teachers in old photographs as the doomed couple. Until 1914, several moustached, jolly-looking masters could be found among the mistresses. Since the War, the only men in the pictures were Ponce Bainter and Joxer.

* * *

Amy knew it was down to her and Kali.

They couldn’t go back the way they came. They’d had to move quickly to avoid the Tamora patrol commanded by Crowninshield II, the ventriloquist whip’s younger, nastier sister. After taking prisoners, Crowninshield II performed harsh interrogations. Really, what she liked was tying people up. She practised knots on naive Firsts lured to her cell with the promise of lemonade. She might even have got in trouble for it if her sister weren’t a whip.

Together, Amy and Kali looked up the cliff.

‘There
might
be a path,’ said Amy.

‘For
you
, maybe…’

‘You’re a decent climber, Kali.’

They looked at Inchfawn and Smudge.

‘If we ditch the baggage, it’s a Stain. A whole mess of Stains, doll.’

Amy admitted it. Desdemona didn’t abandon its own.

Kali hefted her wooden rifle.

‘If this gat were the real deal, we could ventilate ’em a little, put ’em out of our misery.’

Smudge heard that and was alarmed.

‘She’s just joshing,’ said Amy.

Smudge not only spread wild stories, but believed them. It would be all over School tomorrow that Kali had killed several girls and buried them in the herb garden.

Inchfawn sat down and looked at her big clunky wristwatch. It was her prize possession, handed on from a brother who’d been in the trenches. If the hour-hand was pointed at the sun, it worked as a compass – but the day was overcast, if not actually raining, and they already knew which direction they needed to take. It was just that they couldn’t go that way easily.

Amy’s toe turned something out of the shingle. An old cricket ball, seams expanded but holding together. The School pitch was near enough to the edge of the cliff that balls could be hit for a six into the sea.

Suddenly, they were surrounded.

Kali threw away her useless wooden rifle. She reached under her knee-length khaki skirt to pull a long, straight knife from a holster strapped to her thigh. Not QMWAACC regulation issue. Amy hefted her wooden rifle by the barrel like a hockey stick, hoping to give the enemy a good sloshing.

‘Screw off, mugs!’ shouted Kali.

Inchfawn had her hands up, in surrender – the weed. Smudge fumbled with her ill-kept rifle, which came to pieces in her hands.

Kali held up her knife and bared her teeth.

A
crack!
sounded. Then, a curtailed ping-
nyeow
!

A shot, and a ricochet.

If Desdemona had knives, trust Tamora to bring real guns.

‘I say, you gels are playing rough,’ declared Smudge. ‘Get things in proportion, why don’t you?’ – which was rich, coming from her. ‘A damsel could get damaged.’

Another shot, and a spray of pebbles kicked up at Smudge’s legs.

Amy looked at the enemy and realised there was a mistake. These weren’t Crowninshield II’s rope-happy Campfire Comanches. Even She-With-No-Mercy Aire wouldn’t go this far.

There were eight or nine of them. Slight by grown-up standards, but not all – or not
even
– girls. They wore loose black clothes and matching hoods with eye-holes. Several had revolvers. One held a shotgun.