Madam

by Phoebe Wynne

  ‘There always is.’

  ‘I know that you’re an old girl,’ Rose blurted out. ‘I know that you went here. That you’re a Hope girl.’

  Frances stiffened. ‘It’s no secret,’ she looked at Rose, a wan smile lifting her face, ‘and you never asked.’ She turned back to clear her kitchen counter, stacking plates in the sink.

  ‘I didn’t think I needed to,’ Rose answered in her own baffled way. ‘Why did you keep it from me?’

  ‘It comes with its own problems.’

  ‘You should have told me,’ Rose garbled on. ‘You’ve been stuck here – frozen in place – all this time. And that’s why you didn’t recognise my music, or understand any of my film references.’

  ‘What nonsense! How patronising you are.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be, I—’

  ‘You do.’ Frances squared her shoulders. ‘Coming here and standing there throwing these comments around.’

  ‘Can’t we talk about this properly?’

  ‘Talk about what?’ Frances turned her squinting face to Rose. ‘So typical of you to turn this into a drama.’

  Rose flinched. ‘Oh God, you sound like one of the Sixth.’

  ‘How dare you!’ Frances whirled her whole figure around to Rose.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you!’

  Frances’s eyes were slits. ‘I’m the same person, Rose.’

  ‘How can you be?’ Rose cried out. ‘You’ve been lying to me non-stop!’

  ‘Do you think I had a choice? They’re monitoring me, too. I’m volatile. I went wrong!’

  ‘Your whole youth, your life was spent here! And you teach those languages …’ Rose hesitated. ‘Have you even been to Germany, or Russia?’

  ‘Of course I have!’ Frances shot back. ‘On arranged trips, and—’

  ‘Don’t you see? You’re a victim, just as much as the girls!’

  ‘How dare you!’ Frances yelled again.

  ‘No, I mean to say –’ Rose raised her hands in surrender. ‘Just tell me what happened to you – there is so much I don’t understand.’

  ‘No!’ Frances shouted, slamming her hands down on the counter behind her. ‘I’m not your bloody case study!’

  Rose shrank away as Frances recovered her composure.

  ‘You are morbid sometimes, Rose.’ Frances tugged a hand through her ruffled hair. ‘Why can’t you let things be? Oh, I knew it would come to this.’

  ‘I’m trying to understand all this.’

  Frances looked madly at Rose, and pushed herself away from the counter. ‘Things went wrong for me, okay? I was an Elite. I wasn’t even an aristocrat, my parents were upper middle class, but I worked hard. And then I ruined it.’ Frances’s face convulsed with disgust. ‘A younger girl complained about me, she said I interfered with her – but I didn’t! She was the one that … well, never mind.’ Her face fell. ‘So I was branded. I ended up in Compassion with few choices – I didn’t want some old codger on his third wife. So I chose to stay here and help the others. Haven’t you ever read Jane Eyre? She stays on at Lowood and teaches the girls.’ Frances’s chest heaved as her voice grew stronger. ‘So don’t you dare pity me. I could have really been something, you know.’

  ‘Yes, Frances, I know,’ Rose said gently. ‘You already are something.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about what happened. I have such shame about it. There is so much shame about these things …’ Frances’s eyes shot away from Rose.

  ‘There isn’t, Frances, not out there.’ Rose was shaking her head. ‘You don’t have to hide who you are, or whom you love. You’re extraordinary.’ Frances looked at her, momentarily disconcerted, before turning away again.

  ‘I’m not, I’m a disgrace.’

  ‘No.’ Rose approached her friend. ‘This place is a disgrace. Let’s break out, let’s expose it somehow. If there are enough of us who want to stand up to the Headmaster, to the system …’

  ‘What,’ Frances’s face was still flushed, ‘the common room full of bachelors, or the happy, simple family women like Emma?’

  ‘What about the girls then?’ Rose tried. ‘I’m sure some of them don’t want this.’

  ‘Like Bethany? She got it into her head that she didn’t want to be married to her suitor. Poor old Jane didn’t help, with her delusions of grandeur, despite her being an old Compassion girl herself. They brought each other down. And me? I can’t fight anything – I don’t have the tools.’

  ‘You can, I know you can,’ Rose urged. ‘Let’s do it for Bethany, then. And any others like her.’ Her thoughts went back to Nessa and her demotion to House Clemency. ‘I won’t stand by and let any other girls suffer like she did.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Frances scoffed. ‘You’ll have to stand by. Look at Jane. They sent her away – said they’d find her a school – but they had no intention of doing that! And now she can’t even think straight.’

  Rose’s ears seemed to hollow out. ‘What does that mean, think straight?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Frances gave Rose a haunted look.

  ‘No, you said the same thing after the governors’ lunch – did they punish her? Tell me, what do you mean?’

  Frances turned her back on Rose again. ‘What do you think I mean?’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘Why, do you want to go to visit?’ sneered Frances.

  Rose looked at Frances. Her stance, her athletic figure. Rose could still see that teenage grin in her mind’s eye. The way she laid her hands on her knees when she sat down.

  ‘How did they let you come here?’ Frances carried on. ‘I should have stopped it. They all said you’d be an innovation. And they told us about your poor mother, terminally ill,’ she added bitterly. ‘And then, of course, losing your father so young.’

  ‘I …’ Rose’s thoughts felt sluggish. ‘You said you didn’t know about any of that.’

  ‘Of course we did, I just pretended not to. I could see it a mile away in your CV. I thought – she has been loved, and she has suffered. She’ll know what it feels like.’ Frances shook her head harder. ‘These girls don’t. They grow up here. Day in, day out. They’ve been handed over by their parents to us … Just like I was. You’ve really got no idea.’

  ‘But,’ Rose raised her eyes to her friend, ‘some of the girls, I do understand, I think … and if you know the system – can’t we break it, together?’

  Frances bristled. ‘No, stop talking like this.’

  ‘But Frances—’

  ‘Rose, please leave.’

  ‘Please don’t kick me out.’ Rose’s voice was desperate. ‘You’re all I’ve got.’

  ‘You’ve got Anthony. I’ve seen him hovering around your office, giving you longing looks across the dining hall since day one.’

  ‘What?’ Rose spluttered. ‘That’s got nothing to do with this, he’s—’

  But Frances was beyond listening. She threw up her hands in both defence and defiance. ‘I’ve asked you to leave. Do as I say. Leave me be.’

  In the passageway Rose stared back at the slammed door long after she stopped hearing Frances’s retreating steps.

  The following week saw the middle of March and, with it, Rose’s swimming activity resumed. The weather hadn’t improved but the secretaries had thrust the timetable under her nose, so off she set with the crew of girls, across the fields along the cliff edge and down the walkway towards the beach.

  Rose was glad to have a distraction from the catastrophic crash of her heart. The day before she’d tried to grab hold of some small, worthy thing she could do to make a difference: the mission the governors had hinted at. She’d approached Vivien in the common room, apologised for bothering her, and asked about any plans for Sixth girls applying to university. Vivien’s smug half-smile crawled up her face as she claimed ignorance, before sug
gesting some other explanation: was it Rose’s Sixth – now that Dulcie Hughes had been removed, were there others that needed disciplining? – or was Rose struggling with taking over the head of department duties from Frances? Rose hesitated, before insisting that the governors had mentioned potential Sixth university applicants at their lunch, and the need for Rose’s help. Vivien stopped her there and told her to discuss it with Anthony.

  Rose’s humiliation was still stinging through her chest as she trod down the walkway steps to the beach. She imagined the sea rising in some kind of mystical tempest, washing the school building away with it. One of the Philosophy teachers had mentioned something about a flood in the past. But the peninsula’s always been fine. William Hope used to say that the bad weather regularly cleared away the devil from this land.

  No, Rose thought, it’s the other way around – the devil has clawed his way across the land, and left his mark. That’s why the peninsula looked as broken as it did.

  The girls were happy to be reunited with the freezing water; it offered them a pleasant freedom from the past restrictions. But Rose wasn’t watching them, she was sitting on her usual crop of boiled rock, completely transfixed by a wooden door set into the cliff. It stood apart from the little huts, almost entirely absorbed by the cliff.

  Daisy and Nessa were stepping across the stones towards her: one tall and robust, the other slight and frail. They were an incongruous pair, and had dressed themselves haphazardly after the swim: Nessa’s dress hung loosely around her bodice, while Daisy’s was tight around the shoulders, patchily damp, her blazer slung over her arm.

  Rose couldn’t help but imagine Bethany’s body, the threads of her dress tearing away from her lifeless skin. Had she descended the rickety walkway like the rest of them had? Or had she come through that door?

  ‘Hi, Madam,’ Daisy and Nessa said in unison.

  Rose cleared her throat. ‘Hi, girls, you’ve finished early?’

  ‘Can’t we persuade you to paddle, Madam?’ Nessa coaxed.

  ‘No, Nessa, far too cold. Freddie’s not here with you. Does she not swim?’

  ‘She’s not on the list, Madam,’ Daisy said flatly. ‘She’s never been.’

  ‘It’s her chest, Madam,’ Nessa added. ‘The cold water isn’t for her.’

  ‘She might as well have a weakness,’ Daisy remarked wistfully. ‘She’s good at everything else.’

  Rose turned to face them. She’d spent the last thirty minutes trying not to see the girls fall in and out of the water, not to watch their bodies as they moved: bodies for sale.

  ‘Clarissa’s been taken out of school, Madam, did you know?’ Nessa raised her head importantly. ‘Health problems.’

  ‘Oh, I hope it’s nothing too serious?’ Rose replied. ‘The Sixth did seem unhappy at lunch.’ Health problems? she wondered. Clarissa was one of her letter-writing suspects – she certainly seemed to dislike Rose enough. ‘And … you enjoy swimming, do you, girls?’

  ‘It’s invigorating, Madam,’ Daisy nodded. ‘It’s one of the Disciplines.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Nessa said, rolling her eyes. ‘I forgot that we are educating you, now.’

  ‘Of course,’ coughed Rose, turning away. ‘There’s a poster in the main corridor. “Deportment.” I used to think it was a joke.’

  ‘No joke, Madam,’ Nessa said. ‘We all have to learn how to behave. I, however, am not very good at it.’

  ‘Oh, Nessa.’ Rose didn’t know how to comfort the girl, how to bolster her sense of self-worth.

  ‘Diving is a Value, I think,’ Daisy nodded to herself. ‘The Headmaster knows them all, I need to memorise them.’

  ‘I suppose you ought to know what you’re getting into.’

  Nessa had a strange look on her face as she gazed out at the sea. ‘They say I’m on track for C Pathway, Madam. I don’t want that at all. There was this old man staring at me at the carol service, I didn’t like the look of him. If you’re an Elite, you can have a really good go, but not in Compassion.’

  Rose attempted to shuffle off her rock, her heart beating urgently. ‘I’m sure it won’t come to that, Nessa. I’m sure you’ll have a say.’

  ‘Be serious, Madam. It’s all very well you trying to be kind,’ Nessa said, screwing up her face, ‘but that’s the way things are.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll have a say about your Pathways. All of you.’ Rose was having trouble getting up and Daisy leaned towards her instinctively. ‘If you think about it, it has to be about consent.’

  ‘Consent?’ Nessa narrowed her eyes.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We consent,’ Daisy said quickly.

  ‘But how can you, already? You’ve been here since you were eleven. This world is all you know. But right now, at fifteen, you’re supposed to question these things. You should be right on the cusp of … whatever you want to do.’

  The air seemed to break between them as the two girls fell silent. Rose waited, listening to the pull of the seawater against the stones.

  ‘You’re not quite right, Madam. Sometimes we are the ones in charge, like in Practice.’ Nessa twitched her nose. ‘So there.’

  ‘What’s Practice?’

  ‘Madam, stop asking us questions, it’s so frustrating!’ Nessa rolled her eyes. ‘You’re supposed to be the one with the answers.’

  Rose bent to collect her clipboard. ‘Sorry, girls, I don’t mean to upset you at all. Daisy, could you check the names for me again?’

  ‘Where are you going, Madam?’ Daisy asked, taking the clipboard. ‘We’ve still got fifteen minutes.’

  Rose moved beyond the two girls. ‘I just want to take a look at that door. Can you see it?’

  She heard Nessa speaking to Daisy behind her: ‘I think that Madam doesn’t like this place because it’s where Bethany died. She was close to her.’

  ‘Was she? I thought Bethany accused her of all sorts of things.’

  ‘Yes, but Bethany was odd, you know that. She got attached to teachers. And they liked her back.’

  ‘I suppose we should have left some flowers today, to remember her,’ Daisy said softly.

  Rose’s eyes hovered along the ragged shoreline. Had Bethany cried out with regret when she drowned? Was it as Rose suspected – had she resented the Pathway chosen for her, and taken her own? And was it only these few that still thought about her – not even Jane, who hadn’t responded to any of Rose’s letters, probably because she couldn’t think straight? Rose hadn’t yet allowed herself to interpret Frances’s worrying comment.

  C Pathway, Rose thought, glancing back at Nessa. Compassion. For whom? Frances, Bethany and now Nessa? Rose glanced at Nessa’s soft head, her misshapen dress, that strange crossness scrawled over her face. She looked at Daisy beside her, shivering as she dutifully ticked the names off a list.

  Rose shook her head and glanced back at the door, tiny and brown against the craggy cliff. It stood out to her so much now, she couldn’t believe she’d never noticed it before.

  17.

  The next day, Rose waited at the porters’ desk, tapping on the wood urgently. One of them appeared with a questioning face.

  ‘You can’t go out, there’s a storm coming,’ he said sternly.

  Rose regarded the porter with dismay. ‘It’s urgent. I need to go.’

  ‘Are you sure the Master knows?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rose lied. ‘I need to go to the village, just for the afternoon. Please.’

  ‘Mind you’re back before the storm hits.’ The porter had already grabbed hold of a set of keys, and was moving towards the main doors; Rose closed her eyes briefly with relief.

  Half an hour later Rose was safely ensconced in a Kennenhaven tearoom, having treated herself to a hot chocolate. The scorched milk film was sitting at the top and she pulled it away like skin.

  The mainland village didn’t have a
police station, she’d discovered. Rose should have known that the local constable had come from somewhere more official than the village. What could she say, anyway – she’d like to report a crime? The abuse of young girls through forced marriages? Except they weren’t forced. Rose remembered Clarissa’s words: I am everything I ever wanted to be, and I can’t wait for the future. Rose gritted her teeth to stop herself from smashing her hot chocolate against the wall in frustration.

  Perhaps this was what Frances meant when she blamed her moods. Emma had glided over Rose’s revelation of her friend’s history at Hope. Yes, well, Frances is a bit of an anomaly. Yes, Rose had thought – she’s very bright, and occasionally thinks for herself.

  Something in her wanted to rush to Anthony, to understand how someone as kind as he could have been indoctrinated into such an archaic and dangerous system. He’d passed by the Classics office and mentioned lunch every day that week, looking at her with soft and hopeful eyes, and Rose had agreed once. But she still couldn’t bring herself to speak up or challenge his confident compliance.

  Rose looked out at the rain across Kennenhaven harbour. Her second option, after the police station, had been just as fruitless. She’d barely heard the other end of the line as the rain drove hard against the glass of the telephone box, the yellow phonebook split open in front of her.

  ‘I need to speak to a reporter.’

  ‘I see. Can I take down your name and your contact details?’

  Rose had hesitated. She’d chosen a left-wing newspaper, hoping they’d be sympathetic.

  ‘It concerns a boarding school and some serious … malpractice.’

  ‘Oh yes? The great upper classes, eh? Think they can get away with anything.’

  Rose nodded vigorously into the phone.

  ‘What’s the name of the school, then, and how are you related to it?’

  ‘It’s Caldonbrae Hall and I work there. I’m a teacher.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. Malpractice? Our editor could be interested in this. I think his sister-in-law was a pupil there. Any of the Montgomery family still there?’