Wakestone Hall Read online

  The breakfast bell rang, and everyone hurried to stand in line. Miss McCragg stood at the top of the stairs and inspected them as they filed down to the dining room. She looked furious. She rapped a girl on the head. ‘Go back and brush that hair,’ she said. She twitched a collar flat with a jerk that almost pulled the girl off her feet. She poked her stick at the shin of a girl with a wrinkled stocking, making her squeak. Stella and Agapanthus and Ottilie were last of all. Miss McCragg glared at them as they passed, but all she said was, ‘Hurry up,’ and tapped her stick on the floor impatiently.

  Downstairs in the dining room, the kitchen maids were dumping big platters of bread and jam and chipped, mismatched plates onto the tables. There were little outbreaks of whispering all around the room. Usually, jam was a treat allowed on Sundays, and only then if a girl’s conduct had been impeccable, and she had been sent a pot from home.

  ‘No horrible porridge today, because all the bowls were smashed,’ whispered Agapanthus, as they took their places, standing behind their chairs.

  ‘Silence, filles,’ said Miss Mangan, clapping her hands. The French mistress, Mlle Roche, struck a chord on the piano, and they sang the school song.

  Wakestone Girls, so straight and true,

  Always do as we should do.

  Marching on with main and might,

  Always Righteous, Always Right.

  ‘Asseyez-vous,’ said Miss Mangan.

  Stella eyed the mistress nervously. Under cover of the sound of the chairs being pulled out, she whispered, ‘She doesn’t know it was us.’

  ‘I hope not,’ breathed Ottilie.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Agapanthus.

  Stella’s plate had a gilt rim and a pattern of fat pink roses, which was cheering. She helped herself to a slice of bread and jam. The jam was strawberry, her favourite. She felt her spirits rise a bit. Perhaps, after all, they would not be found out.

  But just as they were finishing breakfast, Miss Feldspar, the Senior Mistress, stood up and said, ‘Girls. Your attention.’ Stella felt her heart jump. Agapanthus drew in a breath through her teeth. Ottilie choked on a mouthful of bread and jam.

  Miss Feldspar was tall, with iron-grey hair and a bony, arched nose, like the beak of a vulture. Her lips were set in a thin line. She said, ‘Several girls were out of their beds last night, and were so far lost to propriety as to venture into the kitchen and purloin comestibles.’ She paused to allow her cold gaze to sweep the room. ‘These girls have broken fourteen separate rules. Fourteen. As well as a significant amount of crockery. They will come forward immediately. Miss Garnet wishes to see them in her parlour.’

  There was a rustle of nervous whispering. Girls turned to look at each other.

  Stella glanced sideways at Agapanthus and Ottilie. Agapanthus was scowling, and Ottilie looked frightened.

  ‘Silence!’ snapped Miss Feldspar.

  There was an instant hush. Stella looked down at the roses on her plate and swallowed. Nobody spoke.

  At last, Miss Feldspar said, ‘Believe me. There will be far worse consequences if the girls responsible do not come forward right now.’ She waited one more moment. ‘Until they do, the whole school will be punished. There will be bread and water for supper, and complete silence at all meals.’

  As they joined the end of the line of girls that filed out of the dining room after breakfast, Ottilie shot a glance over her shoulder and breathed, ‘W-what will happen if they find out?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something truly horrible,’ whispered Stella. She shivered.

  ‘They won’t find out,’ whispered Agapanthus, frowning. ‘Of course not.’

  Four

  Wakestone Hall was a tall house that had once been home to a large, wealthy family. When it had been turned into a school, the grand rooms had been divided up to make a maze of classrooms and dormitories. The large drawing room had been turned into three classrooms. The First Form classroom was the smallest of these. It contained the enormous marble mantelpiece from the drawing room. There was never a fire in the fireplace, and when it was windy, the chimney howled in a hoarse and gloomy manner.

  The classroom was dark and cold, and it smelled of mildew and chalk dust. The only pictures to look at were an engraving of the Queen, over the fireplace, and an oil painting of a ruined castle, near the door. There was a blackboard at the front of the room, a clock on the mantelpiece, a list of rules pasted to the wall and a small library consisting entirely of old issues of The Young Ladies’ Magazine and Moral Instructor. (Stella had looked through them, hoping to find something to read. They contained recipes and household hints, fashion plates, embroidery patterns, etiquette advice, court gossip from about twenty years ago, sentimental poems about fairies, and long, dreary serial stories that went for pages and pages without much happening at all.)

  The first lesson every morning was Elocution. The girls in the First Form stood beside their desks and curtsied as Miss Mangan stalked into the room. She wrote Discipline and Resolution Strengthen an Indifferent Constitution on the blackboard, took a metronome from her desk drawer, wound it up with a little silver key and set it ticking.

  She turned to the class and said, ‘Feet together. Toes out. Shoulders back. Heads up.’

  One by one the girls repeated the phrase in time with the ticking metronome, until Miss Mangan was satisfied with their pronunciation and their posture. Stella managed to say the words correctly on her third attempt, but she was scolded for slouching. Agapanthus was corrected for scowling and mumbling. Poor Ottilie was last of all, and she had to say the phrase again and again, her stammer getting a little bit worse each time, until she was incoherent and in tears.

  ‘Clear enunciation and elegant deportment are the hallmarks of a gentlewoman,’ said Miss Mangan crisply, as she wound up the metronome again.

  Ottilie nodded, sniffed and said, ‘Yes, M-M-Miss M-Mangan.’

  The next lesson was Etiquette. Miss Mangan read out etiquette advice from The Young Ladies’ Magazine and Moral Instructor, and the girls copied it into their notebooks. Seventeen incorrect uses for a fish fork. Instructions for how to address a letter to the second son of a baronet. Directives about exactly when one should leave a visiting card with a new acquaintance of a slightly lower social standing than one’s own. Miss Mangan walked around the room, inspecting their work. She glared at the spots and smudges of ink in Agapanthus’s book, tore the page out, crumpled it up and let it drop into the waste-paper basket.

  ‘Again,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Miss Mangan,’ muttered Agapanthus, frowning as she dipped her pen into the ink.

  The third lesson of the morning was Needlework, which was taken by Mlle Roche, the French mistress. They were learning to make button holes, and Mlle Roche insisted on tiny, perfectly even stitches.

  Stella tried to make the stitches as neat as she could, but her fingers were cold, and the thread got tangled, and her work soon became crumpled and grubby.

  ‘Abominable,’ said Mlle Roche, examining it with distaste. She flung it back to Stella. ‘Impardonnable. You will begin again.’

  ‘Yes, Mlle Roche,’ said Stella with a sigh, as she began to unpick the stitches.

  At last, the dinner bell rang. Stella stood up with relief, curtsied to Mlle Roche and followed the rest of the First Form as they filed out of the classroom.

  Dinner was boiled tripe and cabbage. This time, Stella’s plate had a chipped gilt rim and a cheerful decoration of several men on horseback galloping stiffly after a long line of hounds. Each mouthful of tripe she swallowed uncovered another horseman or another hound, and eventually, as she gulped down the last soggy bite, she discovered that they were all chasing a frisky-looking fox around the plate. The tripe was followed by a slice of suet pudding. It had cloves stuck in it like the bristles on the back of a hog, and it was wallowing in a pool of lumpy custard on a saucer that was decorated with forget-me-nots and daisies.

  As Stella scraped up the last claggy bit of custard from her s
aucer, Miss Mangan announced, ‘This afternoon we shall be visiting the museum, as the weather is inclement.’

  In the cloakrooms, the girls changed from their house shoes into their boots, and pulled on their coats and gloves and hats. They pushed their sketchbooks and pencil boxes into the pockets of their coats, and lined up, two by two, in the entrance hall, in order of height. Prunella Gridlingham, the tall Head Girl, was at the front of the line. Stella, Agapanthus and Ottilie were at the end. Ottilie was the smallest, and she would have been last, all by herself, but they were permitted to walk together, because Miss Mangan thought it was tidier.

  ‘Backs straight. Eyes down. Hands folded. In silence,’ instructed the mistresses, as they stalked along the line of girls. Miss Feldspar drew back the bolts and opened the big front door, and they all filed down the steps and out into the drizzling rain.

  Stella felt her spirits rise as they left the school. The mistresses walked closely beside them, making sure that nobody whispered or dawdled or turned their heads to gaze around, but even so, it was agreeable to be outside, and there were always things to see. Dead leaves and scraps of paper whirled along the street. Crows flapped overhead in the blustery, icy wind. A grocer’s boy dawdled along, swinging a basket and whistling. A maid emptied a dustpan out of an attic window.

  Agapanthus nudged Stella’s arm and jerked her head. The cat from the night before was dashing across the street. He stopped and stared at them, then trotted towards Stella in a cheerful manner with his tail pointing straight up. In the daytime, Stella could see he was a handsome cat. He had grey fur with swirling black stripes and bright green eyes, but his whiskers were bent and his ears were tattered, as if he had been in many fights. He looked so pleased with himself that Stella giggled. She remembered how he had leaped onto Miss McCragg’s head, and then shot out of the window with Miss Garnet’s sausages trailing behind him. He had no idea of all the trouble he had caused.

  ‘Silence!’ snapped Miss Mangan, who was walking just behind them, holding a big umbrella. She slapped Stella on the head. ‘Silence. Eyes down.’ She flapped her hand at the cat. ‘Shoo!’ she said, and the cat hissed at her with his ears flat on his head and dashed away.

  They turned the corner into the High Street and made their way past the long row of elegant shops. Stella liked watching the carriages and carts and omnibuses trundling along, splashing through the muddy puddles.

  In the shop windows, the flaring gas lights sparkled on rolls of brocade and lace and velvet, ornamented with tiny, glittering beads, and fashionable hats, decorated with birds, artificial grapes and flowers, and shining satin ribbons.

  People hurried past, muffled up in their coats. Well-dressed children clutched their nurses’ hands, and other children sold matches or flowers, or darted through the busy traffic, carrying packages and baskets, and running errands.

  Halfway along the street, Ottilie gave a sudden frightened gasp and nearly tripped over her feet.

  ‘What is it?’ whispered Stella.

  ‘N-nothing,’ stammered Ottilie, glancing nervously back over her shoulder.

  ‘Silence!’ said Miss Mangan.

  Stella looked back to see what had startled Ottilie. A heavily built man was leaning against a railing, picking his teeth as he watched the girls walk past, his dark eyes gleaming. He wore a shabby leather waistcoat and a bowler hat, and he had a red-and-yellow spotted handkerchief tied around his neck. He held a pot of paste and a brush, with a bundle of posters over his arm. At the top of the posters was a picture of a galloping horse.

  Stella glanced at Ottilie again, but her head was down, and her face was in shadow.

  Miss Mangan rapped Stella on the head. ‘Eyes front,’ she said.

  At the end of the High Street they came to Museum Square. In the middle was the Memorial Fountain. On one side were the curly iron gates that led to the Wakestone Municipal Gardens and on the other side was the museum. It was a large building, with a row of columns and two large stone lions out the front, and a number of little sooty domes on its roof, like a collection of pepper-pots. The schoolgirls filed up the wide stone stairs and went inside.

  Stella liked visiting the museum. There were glass cabinets of rocks and bones, and collections of rusty swords and arrowheads and broken statues. Overhead dangled the skeleton of an enormous creature with many pointed teeth.

  Miss Feldspar frowned as she folded up her dripping umbrella. ‘Begin work, girls. In silence, if you please.’

  Stella pulled off her wet gloves and rubbed her cold hands together. She took her sketchbook out of her pocket, opened it up and gazed around to find something to draw. But before she could begin, Agapanthus grabbed her wrist and pulled her behind a cabinet, out of sight of the mistresses.

  ‘What is it?’ Stella whispered.

  ‘Follow me,’ whispered Agapanthus. She jerked her head at Ottilie, who was standing nervously nearby.

  ‘What? Why?’ asked Stella, but Agapanthus did not answer. She led them away from the main room of the museum, up some stairs and through a smaller room full of broken clay pots. Halfway up another flight of stairs was a narrow doorway, which led into a small round room with a domed glass ceiling. There were cabinets around the edges of the room, containing preserved seabirds and several models of ships and the teeth of whales and an anchor covered with barnacles. In the middle of the room was an enormous, overstuffed walrus. It had patchy, moth-eaten fur and beady glass eyes. It was so immensely fat, it looked as if it had swallowed a sofa. A sign on the wall read: Specimens collected by the Expedition of the HMS Perilous, 1768, commanded by Captain Archibald Winterbottom, FRS. All Lives Lost.

  Agapanthus looked around to make sure they were alone, then whispered, ‘I found this room the other day. Nobody comes in here, because of the smell. And they won’t hear us, because of the rain.’

  It was true. The fat walrus emitted an unpleasant odour of mildew and camphor, which would have made anyone reluctant to linger, and the rain on the glass dome overhead made a steady sound that would muffle a whispered conversation.

  Agapanthus eyed the fat walrus’s glassy stare, opened her sketchbook and licked the tip of her pencil.

  ‘So now we can talk,’ she said.

  Five

  ‘I’m sure they don’t know it was us last night,’ Agapanthus said, frowning at the fat walrus as she began to draw a large, lumpish shape in her sketchbook. ‘If anyone had seen us, we would already be in trouble. We’d have been sent to Miss Garnet’s parlour, and I’m sure whatever happens in there is utterly dreadful. So we have to keep quiet about it, or it will be absolutely disastrous. Do you agree?’

  Stella said, ‘Yes,’ and Ottilie nodded.

  ‘Good,’ said Agapanthus. She drew two little beady eyes on her walrus.

  Stella sighed as she drew the outline of the walrus. ‘It’s horrible at school, isn’t it? Perhaps we will get used to it, do you think?’

  ‘I utterly refuse to get used to it,’ said Agapanthus crossly. ‘I knew it would be dreadful. I told my grandmother I would hate it, and I was right. It’s utterly ghastly.’ She frowned and added spiky whiskers to her walrus. ‘I’d put a cockroach in Miss Mangan’s corset, if I got the chance. That’d make her yell. Have a toffee.’ She rummaged in the top of her stockings and pulled out a handful of sweets. She gave them one each. ‘I smuggled them in here in the leg of my drawers. Don’t let Miss Mangan see them. It’s my grandmother who decided to send me to school. It’s her fault entirely. How did you land here?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Stella, as she unwrapped silver paper from the toffee and put it in her mouth. It was hard and round and tasted of treacle. ‘I have Aunts.’ Stella sucked the toffee. ‘Three Aunts. They were at school at Wakestone Hall themselves, years ago. My mother too. She was the youngest sister. But I think she did something dreadful when she was here.’

  ‘What did she do?’ asked Agapanthus with interest.

  ‘I don’t know. My Aunts just said that it was something
unforgivable. I’d like to find out. But they never answer questions. My Aunts are very disapproving of her.’ Stella sighed again as she drew the whiskers on the walrus. ‘And truly, that doesn’t mean much, because they disapprove of everything.’

  ‘Your Aunts sound just exactly like my grandmother,’ said Agapanthus. ‘They would get along very well. She adores disapproving of things. They would be absolutely the best of friends and have a marvellous time disapproving of things together. She utterly disapproves of me. She said I was thoroughly ungovernable.’ Agapanthus pulled a face. ‘Thoroughly ungovernable,’ she repeated with angry relish. ‘Mainly because I galloped on the gardener’s pony through the great hall and up the grand staircase. One of the stable boys bet me that I would not do it, and so I did. But Mother had an attack of vapours, and she was absolutely prostrated for two weeks. So Grandmother came to stay, and she kept springing questions at me all the time. At breakfast, she’d say, “What are the principal exports of Bavaria, Agapanthus? How would you address an archdeacon, Agapanthus? Who is the king of Sweden, Agapanthus?” Of course, I knew absolutely none of the answers. None at all. Not one. And she said that I was thoroughly ignorant, and the governess was doing nothing with me, and I had better go away to school, so she sent me to Wakestone Hall.’ She frowned and sucked her toffee and stabbed her pencil at her drawing, scribbling some patchy fur along the back of her walrus. ‘Do either of you have any sisters or brothers?’