A Talent for Trouble

by Natasha Farrant

  It would be very nice if you could come to hear us.

  I have to go now, because it’s my turn to collect eggs from the farm, which is a bit mad because the hens are allowed to roam around and you have to try and guess where the eggs are. In Year Nine, we get to kill the hens.

  Lots of love, Alice xxx

  Little by little, Alice was learning to like school. True, Frau Kirschner’s lectures on “Democracy Failing” were a little overwhelming, but there was something gloriously liberating about art classes that always ended up with everyone pretending to be Picts and Romans flinging mud at one another. And while the thought of singing in front of a whole army of parents did terrify her, the music teacher, Senhora Silva, had added Brazilian drums to “Scotland the Brave,” and it was impossible not to dance along to them. She still wasn’t quite sure about pretending to be French vegetables, but she did love Madoc’s classes, and had filled a whole notebook with stories about hares and rabbits.

  Alice’s pale cheeks were pink now from being outside so much, and they were rounder, too, because like everyone else she was permanently ravenous, and gulped down great bowls of porridge and soup and stew, with hunks of bread and butter and jam, which tasted all the more delicious from knowing they had been grown and raised and made right there in the valley. And though it would be wrong to say that she had become chatty—Alice would probably never be chatty—her silences were becoming more comfortable and less loud. She was on quiet good terms with most of her year, and she was actually friends with Fergus. The giggling in assembly had been followed a few days later by an evening fishing on the dark green loch when Alice, in an unexpected burst of talkativeness, had made up a long story about a drowned world under the water, in which the weeds beneath their boat were the arms of the dead, waving for help. Fergus’s blood had frozen as he listened, and later he’d even had a nightmare. He couldn’t believe she had made up such a brilliant story. She couldn’t believe she’d actually told it to someone other than Barney, or how much fun it had been to do so. They had become inseparable.

  Only two things made Alice sad.

  The first was that Jesse wasn’t talking to her. She had tried several times to engage him, most recently during the outdoor geography lesson. She had noticed over the past weeks that he was happiest when he was outside, surrounded by nature. Where all the other Year Sevens treated Madoc’s class as a holiday, Jesse took it seriously. One day he had asked Madoc a lot of questions about wildlife habitats, and how they were changing, and what could be done about it, and then he had marched off on his own, looking like he knew exactly what he was doing. Alice had followed him, but just as she was going to ask nervously if they could work together, Fergus had come bouncing up.

  “Leave him,” Fergus had said. “He’s still cross because of Captain Fussypants.”

  To which Alice (who didn’t like Fergus’s name for Jesse) had replied that she didn’t call him Captain Fussypants, so why was he cross with her, without understanding how crushed Jesse was by her friendship with Fergus, or how stubborn he was, or how long he could hold a grudge.

  * * *

  The other thing that made her sad was that Barney had not replied to a single one of her emails.

  “Is he all right?” she had asked Patience, who had replied that she had no idea—because she had had no news from him either and didn’t even know where he was—before adding meanly (partly because he was off doing goodness knew what somewhere in Europe while she was stuck in a poky flat in London, partly because she was cross with him for not writing to Alice), “You know what your father is like.”

  Which was somewhat contradictory, since one of Patience’s main grievances was precisely that Alice didn’t know what Barney was like, or at least chose not to admit it.

  Which is almost the same thing.

  * * *

  On her third Sunday morning, the day after her latest email to her father, Alice sat on the gate to the pigpen, watching Fergus muck out. Alice liked the pigs, which were fat and pink with great black patches in their long white hair, and she liked the farm, which was tumbledown in exactly the right way, with higgledy stone walls on which a chicken or a goat was always perching, and a garden full of currant bushes that looked like ghosts, swathed in gauze to keep away thieving birds. Today, however, she wasn’t looking at any of that but was waving her phone about in an attempt to get some signal—“In case Dad sends a text.”

  Fergus, who had spent three weeks watching Alice pine for news of Barney and had developed an intense dislike for him, observed that parents were useless.

  “Dad’s just busy,” said Alice, still waving her phone about.

  “Well, my parents are useless,” Fergus said. “Honestly, sometimes I wonder what it would be like to run away. Properly, I mean, like totally disappearing and national searches and posters and police. Then, when they were fully sobbing, you know, wailing and gnashing teeth, I’d come back and be all, ‘Here I am, what appears to be the problem?’ That would teach them to get divorced.”

  She looked at him curiously. “Would it?”

  “Probably not,” he said lightly. “But quite fun, though. Alice, give up! There’s no signal anywhere.”

  “I just want to talk to him.”

  This, despite his dislike for Barney, Fergus could understand. Since his parents had separated, he had about a million questions for them. Like, Why are you splitting up? Why are you going back to Germany? Why do you travel so much? Why can’t you take me with you? Why can’t I still live at home?

  “What do you want to say to him?” he asked.

  “I don’t know! Just . . . that I miss him, I suppose.”

  Fergus was silent for so long, Alice began to worry.

  She nudged him.

  “I’m just thinking,” he said. “There is a place. It’s just that we’d be mad to try it.”

  Twelve

  Kittens!

  “The roof of the music tower,” said Fergus as they left the pigpen and began to walk back to school. “It’s been out of bounds since Carys Middleton fell off it as a twelfth-year.”

  Alice’s eyes widened.

  “She used to go up there to call her boyfriend,” Fergus explained. “And then they broke up, and she was crying, and she couldn’t see. It was OK, because she fell on this ledge, but there was a whole thing because she couldn’t get up again and no one found her till morning and she nearly got hypothermia. So now it’s kind of forbidden.”

  “How forbidden?” asked Alice cautiously.

  “Totally forbidden.” Fergus’s eyes began to shine with excitement. “Also totally locked. We’d need to get hold of the key.”

  Alice looked up toward the music tower, which looked just as sinister as when she had first seen it from the top of the hill, leaning madly to one side, alive with ivy and rooks. More sinister, in fact, because then she had been above it, looking down, whereas now . . .

  “I can’t.”

  “We won’t get caught, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Fergus assured her. “I mean, we probably won’t get caught. And even if we do, what’s the worst that can happen? It’s not like they’re going to expel us. I don’t think. They’d make us scrub the tower or paint the windows or something.”

  He was bouncing with excitement now. Until about a minute and a half ago, he had honestly never given a moment’s thought to the music tower roof. Now he couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than to climb up onto it. As they drew closer to the school, he could hear the distant caw of the rooks, and it was like they were calling to him—Come up, come up, it’s lovely in the sky!

  “It’ll be like your story about the loch,” he coaxed. “Except the opposite—a world in the clouds!”

  “I can’t do it,” said Alice, loudly, to sound stronger than she felt, “because it’s too high up.”

  “That’s the whole point,” said Fergus kindly. “That’s why there’s a signal.”

  “I know!” Alice’s eyes pricked w
ith tears as she thought of Barney.

  “But then—”

  “I’m scared of heights!” She hated to admit it. It made her feel weak, and silly, especially when she remembered how unafraid she used to be—her mother’s little mountain goat! But there was no getting away from it. Heights were impossible for her. “They turn my legs to jelly.”

  Fergus stopped walking to stare at her. Alice, afraid! It seemed quite extraordinary to him. He thought about her first morning at school, the way she had hit that reveille gong and brought the whole school out . . . And then he thought about the day she arrived, and the way she had run against Jesse, like she really thought she might beat him . . . And the story she had told him—that story! He still shivered just thinking about it.

  “I can’t believe you’re afraid of anything,” he said.

  “Well, I am.” Alice kicked a pebble down the path. “Heights.”

  Fergus felt his resolve harden. It wasn’t just that he wanted—badly—to go up on the roof. It was because at this moment, Alice looked so small and he didn’t like it.

  “I’ll help you,” he said firmly. “I’ll hold your hand, if I have to. I’ve never held hands with a girl before, but I’ll do it for you.”

  He elbowed her in the ribs, to be clear he wasn’t being soppy.

  “Ow!”

  “Think of your dad! Think of the phone signal! Think of your phone!”

  Alice gulped. She couldn’t, she just couldn’t.

  Could she?

  Like Fergus, suddenly what Alice wanted most in the world was to be on the roof of the old tower.

  “All right!” she cried as he prepared to elbow her again. “All right! I’ll try.”

  “Excellent!” Fergus beamed. “Then let’s get plotting!”

  All the way back to school, they thrashed out different ideas.

  “The forbidden bit is easy,” said Fergus. “We’ll just go after dark and make sure nobody sees us. And if they do, we’ll say we’re doing extra music practice. Teachers love that, when you do extra stuff. So that just leaves the key. There’ll be one in the major’s study. He has a full set, in a sort of cabinet. I saw it when I . . .”

  He stopped.

  “What?”

  “If you must know, I did once try to run away. But”—he waved toward the vast mountains—“it’s not very easy to get away from here. I walked all night, but I only got as far as the car park. Then it started to rain and I sheltered under a bush, and the major found me and brought me back. He was nice. I don’t really want to talk about it. Nobody knows except him, and now you. The point is, he has a key.”

  “Yes!” said Alice, but she couldn’t drag her mind away from thoughts of Fergus, walking alone in the mountains at night. School was one thing, strange but busy and happy and, on the whole, safe. The mountains were different, remote and immovable but at the same time always there and always changing as the wind chased shadows across them and ruffled the bracken and heather.

  They were beautiful and scary, and she hadn’t made up her mind about them yet. How must it have felt for Fergus to set out alone among them?

  “Alice?” Fergus, feeling vulnerable after his admission, was bouncing up and down again. “The major’s study? We have to break in.”

  “Yes!” she repeated, then added, rather obviously, “When he’s not there.”

  “During dinner?”

  “But then we’re at dinner too.”

  “You could go first thing in the morning, before reveille—if he turns up, you can say you’re . . .”

  “What?”

  “Muddled? Lost?”

  “Sleepwalking?”

  “Or just stupid!”

  They both cackled with laughter. They were back in the courtyard now, looking up at the major’s window.

  “Kittens!” Alice said suddenly. “The feeding schedule! That’s how we’ll get in!”

  It was simple. It was genius! To quote Fergus, it was a flipping criminal master plan.

  And maybe it was the sun, suddenly shining through a break in the clouds, or maybe it was simply that there are few things in life more thrilling than creating criminal master plans, but they were both suddenly happier and more excited than they could remember ever being. Heads together, voices low, they walked for a long time on the shores of the muddy brown loch, perfecting their plan and fizzing with excitement.

  Getting on to the kitten schedule was the easy bit.

  “They’re horrible,” said Jenny, who organized the schedule. “They’ve got a disgusting litter tray you have to clean, they fight over food, and if you get too close, they bite.”

  “But they’re tiny,” Fergus objected.

  “There are seven of them,” said Jenny darkly. “Whatever you do, do not let them out of the room or you’ll never get them back. The vet’s coming next week to give them their shots. Hopefully then they’ll go outside and get eaten by a fox.”

  It is not a pleasant thing to talk about, but a litter tray shared by seven cats living together in one small room does not smell nice. That was the first thing Alice and Fergus noticed as they entered the major’s study. The second was that there was no sign, anywhere, of the kittens. The third, that there was no sign of the keys.

  Fergus swore.

  “Which do we look for first? The stinking cats, or the stupid keys?”

  A yowl, not dissimilar to the waterpipe noises at Cherry Grange and just as reminiscent of the undead, echoed through the room. The conspirators jumped. Back to back (in a manner akin to Roman soldiers under attack by Picts), they gazed about them. Meowing, scratching, snarling, the kittens came from all directions—the top of a bookshelf, a ceiling lampshade, a curtain rod. They clawed at Alice as she mashed food into bowls. Nipped at Fergus as, gagging, he cleared their litter tray. One of them bolted for the door.

  “Why is that open?” shouted Alice.

  “I thought you’d closed it!” Fergus screamed, and vanished after the kitten.

  Left alone, Alice shakily lined up the feeding bowls. The remaining kittens swarmed forward. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . One was missing!

  A faint scratching noise, a pitiful squeak . . . Alice tiptoed round the room, listening. Scratch  . . . squeak . . . the bookcase! One of the old-fashioned kind, free-standing, with ancient leather-bound books kept behind glass . . .

  Ancient books, and something else . . . She peered closer. A pair of green, marble-round eyes glared back. A tiny pink mouth with sharp little fangs hissed as she reached for the doors; a small furry bullet shot out as she opened them. She ignored it. For at the back of the bookcase was a panel, and on that panel were hooks, and on each hook was a key with a label . . .

  Art room, Alice read. Biology. Chemistry lab.

  Were those footsteps? She rushed to the door. Yes, she could hear voices—one was Fergus, talking unusually loud—a warning . . . She ran back to the bookcase . . .

  Dining hall. Entrance hall. French. Geography.

  The voices were just outside the door . . . She scanned down the panel for a key labeled Music or Tower . . .

  Neither of them existed. And now the door handle was turning, the speakers were about to come in, their chance was lost! A word was dancing just outside Alice’s consciousness, a word she couldn’t remember—another name for a castle or a tower—what was it?

  “They do wander,” she heard the major say. “But well done you for catching him! Now, easy does it—I want to keep the little tykes!”

  Keep! That was the word, and there was the key! Alice reached up to unhook it.

  When the major and Fergus came into the room, all they saw was Alice, gently reprimanding a small tabby kitten, smiling like this was the work she was born to do. A few well-chosen words about kittens—“Adorable! So fluffy! No, no, that’s not a scratch!”—and the two were off, shoulder to shoulder, swallowing back giggles, the key heavy in Alice’s pocket.

  Alone in his study, the major scooped up the tabby k
itten, deposited it on his shoulder, and looked thoughtfully at the open bookcase.

  Thirteen

  PING!

  At first, Alice wasn’t scared at all. She and Fergus felt  their way up the narrow winding staircase of the keep in the dark, and though they held on to the banister rope for safety, she almost didn’t need to. The excitement of doing something forbidden, combined with the anticipation of speaking to Barney, had chased all fear of vertigo from her mind. Up they went, past three floors of locked music rooms, passing no one.

  A light was on in one of the top-floor rooms. Someone was practicing the violin. Alice and Fergus froze. The violinist kept playing. Holding their breath, they tiptoed onto a short flight of steps at the back of the landing, leading to a bolted, padlocked trapdoor.

  The violinist was Jesse, but they didn’t know that yet.

  Alice opened the padlock, and Fergus slid back the bolt. The trapdoor had been painted over since lovesick Carys’s misadventures, and did not open easily. Alice and Fergus thumped away at it as quietly as they could, torn between hysterical laughter and the fear of discovery. When the panel gave way, suddenly, in a cracking and tearing of paint, they clutched the sides of the opening to stop themselves from falling down the stairs, then covered their heads with their arms as a shower of dead leaves poured through the trap and fluttered to the ground around them.

  “Messages from the spirits of the sky!” whispered Fergus. “What do you think, Alice? Or the souls of the drowned, finally free of the loch?”

  She rolled her eyes and pushed him gently out of the trapdoor ahead of her.

  “Oh wow!” he breathed, turning his face to the sky. “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow!”