Читать книгу The Curse in the Candlelight - Sophie Cleverly, Sophie Cleverly - Страница 13
Оглавлениеt was wonderful to be back in the ballet studio again. Madame Zelda had taken us down to where Miss Finch was waiting.
“You’re older now, girls,” Miss Finch said. “Things are going to get harder. We’ll need you all to be on your best behaviour.”
Madame Zelda nodded, tapping her long fingernails on her arm. “Discipline, discipline, discipline,” she said in her unusual accent. “Work hard, and you will reap the rewards.”
It was harder. The two teachers pushed us to do moves that were more difficult than we’d ever done before. I could feel my muscles stretching to their limits, my joints clicking as I pulled them into unfamiliar positions.
By the end of it, when we went into reverence and bowed and curtseyed to the teachers, I was exhausted. Scarlet and I sat down to unlace our shoes, breathless.
I stared at my face in the mirror, my hair already falling out of my tight bun. Madame Zelda walked past. “Well done, Ivy,” she said, “and Scarlet. Both of you did your best today.”
I smiled, but something about the sight of Madame Zelda made my thoughts return to Ebony and what Nadia had said. She did seem to have some sort of power over the teachers. But what that could be, I had no idea.
Feeling drained after the long day, we made our way to Rookwood’s dining hall for supper. I hated to say it, but I was actually looking forward to the food. The air was filled with chatter, as always.
We met Ariadne in the queue. Thankfully, she didn’t look any more bruised than usual so Muriel couldn’t have hurt her.
“Nothing happened,” she said with a shrug. “Muriel just played hockey. I couldn’t believe it!”
“I told you so,” Scarlet said. “I think she must have really changed. Nothing to worry about.”
“Until she murders me in my sleep,” said Ariadne with a theatrical shudder. But I was pretty certain she was joking.
I looked around at the rows of long tables. Both Muriel and Ebony appeared to have been placed in Mayhew House, judging by where they were sitting, and other new students were scattered about all over the place. At one end of all the tables, first years were gathering, trying their first-ever helpings of Rookwood’s mystery stew, their uniforms perfect and shiny and straight.
We got our bowls and carried them on trays over to our table, where Madame Zelda was now sitting as the new head of Richmond House. I wasn’t surprised to see that she appeared to have brought her own food. Whatever she was eating certainly seemed to involve far more fresh vegetables than we were ever given.
As we passed where the girls from Mayhew were sitting, I saw Ebony daintily scooping the stew with her spoon. She even managed to make eating look glamorous and faintly mysterious. I noticed that the first and second years were all staring at her, wide-eyed and whispering.
Muriel, on the other hand, was drawing no attention at all. She was sitting alone, not talking to anyone. She waved at Ariadne as we walked by, and then went back to her dinner.
“It seems so strange to think that she bullied you. What did she actually do?” Scarlet asked as we got to our table.
“Scarlet!” I said. “Ariadne probably doesn’t want to talk about that.”
Ariadne sighed. “No, it’s all right. I haven’t explained much about it, really.”
Scarlet waved a fork at her. “Go on,” she said. We were sitting far enough away from any of the teachers, so we could speak freely.
“She was truly horrible,” Ariadne began. “Everyone at Hightower was afraid of her. Except for her gang, of course.”
“Hightower?” I asked, in between mouthfuls.
“Hightower School for Girls. Where I was before.” Her eyes glazed over with thoughts of the past. “I loved it there, at first. Before I met Muriel Witherspoon.” She took a deep breath. “It only took her a day to give me a whole list of nasty nicknames. And then she just wouldn’t stop picking on me. She would take my things and try to hurt me any time she got a chance.”
“Sounds like a few people I know,” Scarlet said through a mouthful of stew.
“Oh yes,” said Ariadne, “but that was just the start of it. She formed this secret club called the Crow Club that met in this shed out by the playing fields. It was a bit like the Whispers, except it only existed so she could be horrible to people.” The Whispers was the secret society of past pupils that our mother had belonged to. It had been quite the opposite of this Crow Club, though – they had actually tried to expose the corruption in the school and protect the other students.
Ariadne frowned at the table as she continued explaining. “They spread rumours all the time. They wouldn’t let me into the club because they said I was a ‘goody two-shoes’. And then they told everyone … well, I don’t want to say because it was just too horrible.”
“And that’s when you burned down the shed?” I asked, remembering how Ariadne had been expelled.
She nodded slowly. “I was just so sick of it. They were making my life a misery!”
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” said Scarlet. “I’m not exactly the queen of self-restraint when it comes to bullies, am I?” She grinned, and we grinned back at her.
“Freaks!” I heard a quiet voice say by my ear. But … it sounded friendly. And familiar.
I turned to see Rose standing beside me, with her empty tray.
“Oh yes!” Scarlet said with a grin. “Freaks together! That’s us, isn’t it?”
Rose grinned. When we’d had quite the adventure in the summer, we’d reassured Rose that she wasn’t alone in being an outsider. She may have been locked in an asylum and plagued by nasty relatives, but we knew all about that too.
“Nice to see you again, Rose,” I said.
She nodded. She didn’t talk a lot and she chose her words carefully.
“Everything all right?” Scarlet asked. “No more rogue relatives bothering you?” I shuddered. Rose’s cousin had nearly got us killed in the process of trying to steal her inheritance.
Rose nodded again. “I got a lawyer,” she said in her voice that was barely above a whisper. There was a mischievous sparkle in her eyes.
At that point, Mrs Knight appeared and began hovering around our table. “Good evening, girls,” she said. “Is all well over here in Richmond?”
“Wonderful, thank you,” said Madame Zelda, twirling a lettuce leaf with her fork. And it was true – everyone did seem to be behaving so far, which was quite unusual for our table. Madame Zelda was certainly a bit more intimidating than Mrs Knight, which helped. I got the impression she wanted the headmistress to go away.
“Oh good, good,” Mrs Knight said. She walked over to where we were sitting. “Staying out of trouble, girls?”
“Of course,” said Scarlet, batting her eyelashes comically. I nearly snorted my drink out of my nose. Rose laughed and walked away to join the back of the dinner queue.
“Ah,” said the headmistress. “I hope you will continue to keep an eye on Rose.”
“Is she allowed to stay now, Miss?” Ariadne asked. After all, Rose hadn’t always been a pupil at Rookwood.
Mrs Knight smiled and rubbed her sleeves. “Oh yes. We were able to secure some of Rose’s inheritance to pay for her to be here full time. She’ll be joining some lessons as well. Not all of them straight away, mind. That might be too much. She’s had a tough time.”
“That’s so kind of you, Miss,” I said, and I meant it. I couldn’t imagine our former headteachers showing any sort of compassion for a student.
Mrs Knight blushed. “Oh, it’s nothing. Right, girls, I mean it – you’ll stay out of trouble this term, won’t you?”
“Yes, Miss,” we chorused. I hoped we meant that.
When we’d finished (and Ariadne had gone back for a second helping of tinned peaches in custard, which was admittedly unusually nice for Rookwood), we picked up our trays to take them away.
We passed Ariadne’s former roommates, who were from the year below us, and were all sitting together.
They all waved. “Hello, Ariadne!” they called out in unison.
I recognised the girl who had become the unofficial leader of the group; she was Agatha, who had a bird’s nest of frizzy brown hair and loved to be in charge. “Psst,” she hissed, leaning forward. “Have you seen that new girl, Ebony McCloud?”
“Oh yes,” Scarlet replied.
“She’s certainly … interesting,” Ariadne said politely.
Agatha’s eyes slid across the room, as if she were checking for spies. Then she leant across the table again. “We heard she’s a witch!”
The other girls all nodded, wide-eyed and serious.
Ariadne paused. “Really?”
Scarlet looked at them incredulously. “A witch? As in … pointy hats and broomsticks and cauldrons?”
“Oh yes,” said Evelyn, the red-haired one. “All of that. And she can do spells.”
“Isn’t it exciting?” said another of them, Bonnie, her bright eyes sparkling. “Do you think she’ll teach us?”
“She can probably teach you how to be even more weird than you lot already are,” Scarlet said, but they didn’t seem to notice. The rumour mill was in full flow.
“Do you think she can make potions? Maybe she’d make a love potion for me …”
“I bet she can see the future!”
“If we look in her window at night we can see if she transforms into a bat!”
Wordlessly, we backed away. Ariadne’s old roommates were a little intense once they got an idea in their heads.
“Ebony’s certainly strange,” I said, as I scraped my bowl clean. “But where can they have got this idea from?”
Ariadne wrinkled her nose, though whether it was at the food slops or at her friends’ gossip I wasn’t sure. “Who knows?” she said.
Scarlet frowned. “I think they believe anything anyone tells them. I think she’s just eccentric, that’s all.”
I nodded in agreement. It wasn’t surprising that Ebony was a little strange – who wasn’t, at Rookwood?
But as I walked past her, with her hair the colour of the night sky and her eyes grey as storm clouds, I began to wonder if perhaps there was more to her than met the eye.
