“Very wise,” nodded Isabella. “Come along, Nan; we’ve work to do.”
“Work?” Melchior was suddenly very alert. “What work?”
“Study, of course,” Annabel said.
At the same time, Isabella said, “Dressmaking.”
They exchanged a glance. Melchior looked between the two of them and opened his mouth.
“Off we go,” said Annabel firmly, pulling Isabella away by the elbow. “Oh! And don’t talk to us at the dinner table, Melchior. The other girls notice and it’s annoying.”
“Annoying—!” began Melchior in outrage, but the girls were already half way down the dining hall.
“Oh, well done, Nan,” Isabella said in a congratulatory, albeit hushed, manner. “Wasn’t he annoyed! You’re doing awfully well, I think.”
“I thought so,” agreed Annabel, very pleased with herself. “All right, we’d best be off to lessons, I suppose. Or is there somewhere else we actually need to be right now?”
“I’m sure I gave you a schedule, Nan.”
“I shouldn’t have to read my own schedule,” Annabel said, putting her nose in the air. “That’s what I’ve got you for.”
Isabella giggled. “You’ve had one victory over Melchior and run mad with the heady success! We haven’t a class until Elegant Elementaries of Ensorcellment; until then, we’re free to enjoy Interim Activities.”
“You want to poke around, then,” said Annabel, unsurprised.
“Certainly I do. Alice has been busy—I told her we’d look at whatever was happening inside the school, and she was quite pleased with that because she’s focusing on something outside the school. I’ve got a few other girls looking around the school in general, but the fourth floor is all ours.”
“Do you suppose it’s Lady Caro who’s set it around the school that I’m not really the queen heir?”
“More than likely,” Isabella said. “But a rumour like that doesn’t spread well without a bit of encouragement. I believe I would like to know who helped it spread. The Deportment Master, obviously—”
“Obviously.”
“But I’m quite curious to know if it was Miss Cornett or the Aunts who really gave it wings. Lady Caro wouldn’t spread a rumour like that without reason—she may dislike me, but she’s clever enough to know who to support, and in this case, that person is you.”
“So there’s still something important we don’t know,” Annabel concluded gloomily.
“Exactly so,” said Isabella. “However, the more we know, the closer we come to discovering exactly what that thing is. All the known things start to cast the not known thing into relief, after which it becomes much easier to tell what the not known thing is. And I’ve a feeling that the relief-work bit is about to become a lot clearer. Let us make a nuisance of ourselves today, Nan.”
Annabel was perfectly agreeable to making a nuisance of herself now that she was properly fed, but it did strike her that it would be more enjoyable to make a nuisance of herself in the nominally cooler halls of Trenthams than wandering the gardens in the sun. She said as much to Isabella, in a less than cordial tone of voice, but although Isabella said, “Yes, perfectly horrid, isn’t it?” she said it in a cheerful tone of voice and showed no sign of either slowing her brisk walk or moving to one of the shaded walks. Annabel was inclined to resent this until she saw that Isabella’s eyes were directed up toward the school windows more often than the walk she was engaged upon, though she was careful not to tilt her head and give away as much.
“Who are we trying to see through the windows?” she asked. “That girl who arrived?”
“Naturally,” said Isabella, nodding. “Why else would we be outdoors on such a horrid day when there’s nothing to be gained from exercise but a headache?”
“I suppose your pet first year girls told you they’d seen something,” Annabel said, with one eye on Isabella.
Isabella looked slightly guilty, but grinned. “Well, but Nan! There are three or four of them who simply love climbing trees! You have no idea! So why not put such skills to good use?”
“When did they tell you?”
“Just before lunch,” Isabella said. “I would have told you sooner, but you pick things up so quickly that it’s fun getting you to guess. Besides, Melchior was prowling and trying to listen. We’ll have to be careful at dinner if he’s going to be presiding again.”
“Ye-es,” said Annabel, rather slowly. “Belle, those windows are the ones that belong to the suite you wanted to have, aren’t they?”
Isabella narrowed her eyes at them. “Well, I never!” she said. “The absolute cheek of it! They’ve put that secretive guest in our suite, Nan!”
“Rude, isn’t it?” asked Annabel, enjoying herself just a little again, despite the heat. Her face was far too hot and her corseted waist felt as though it was slowly cooking, but Isabella’s outraged face was too amusing to allow her to dwell on the discomfort. “The Awesome Aunts are taking their revenge on you, Belle!”
“What nonsense is this?” Isabella murmured to herself. “I was sure it would make things clearer, but this only makes things more confusing. What are they playing at?”
“Not croquet, anyway,” Annabel said, skipping nimbly out of the way of a croquet ball that bounced through the hedges and would have clipped her ankle. “How rude. Where did that come from?”
“Gangway!” shouted a voice from the other side of the hedge, as an approaching hat bobbed up and down above the hedge.
“Much good that does!” said Isabella in amusement. “It would have already taken out an ankle by the time we heard any warning.”
“Oh! Is there someone there?” called the bobbing hat. There was a shaking of foliage and the muttered complaints of the voice as its owner was scratched in her attempts to push through the hedge, then a young lady of about their own age tumbled through onto the path, hat first, and brushed herself down.
Her name was Gwyn, if Annabel remembered correctly; she had been in one of the first groups of girls who came to see Annabel on that first day of receiving visitors. Then, she had looked from Annabel to Isabella in narrow-eyed appraisal.
Now, she looked at them in undisguised surprise. “Miss Farrah! Miss Ammett! I expected you both to be in the school!”
“We occasionally take the air,” murmured Isabella. “If it comes to that, Gwyn, I’m surprised to see you on the croquet field. I thought you didn’t care for it.”
“Oh well,” said Gwyn, shrugging elegantly to remove a clinging leaf from the hedge, “we’re just trying to get a look in the windows on the fourth floor. That’s why the croquet ball keeps going astray.”
“Are you?” Annabel asked, in undisguised surprise.
“Goodness me!” said Isabella, much more languidly. “That seems like an odd thing to be doing!”
“I thought that’s what you were doing, too,” Gwyn protested. “How else are we to get a look at her before breakfast tomorrow if they won’t let us visit her?”
“Her?” Isabella’s tone was, if possible, even more languid.
“Haven’t you heard?” Gwyn’s face was the picture of astonishment. “But you hear everything first!”
Annabel tried very hard not to giggle, because Isabella had gone almost imperceptibly stiff. “Who is it that you’re trying to see?” she asked, since Isabella seemed to have been deprived of words in one fell swoop.
“It’s the Queen!” Gwyn confided, leaning closer but speaking more loudly. Annabel had the feeling she enjoyed telling Isabella something the other girl didn’t know. “The queen heir, I mean! She’s just now arrived!”
For a moment, Annabel nearly laughed at the absurdity of it. Was Gwyn attempting, in this singularly ridiculous way, to try and trick her into an admission of being the queen heir? Not even one of the less clever girls in the younger classes would do that.
“I didn’t see anyone arrive today,” she said, but now all she could think about was the girl she had seen exiting Lady Caro’s r
oom two nights ago, the stickiness that had clung to Lady Caro’s clique for the past two days. According to Gwyn, the supposed queen heir was in the very room she had just seen the mysterious girl. Coolly, she added, “I haven’t heard anyone arrive since we’ve been out in the garden, either.”
“Not exactly just now,” Gwyn corrected herself. “But two nights ago. Just think! The queen heir at Trenthams for real!”
“I beg your pardon?” Isabella said, at last. “You are saying that the queen heir arrived two nights ago?”
“You must have heard the fuss!”
“Goodness me!” said Isabella, losing that tiny edge of stiffness completely. “Fancy that, Nan!”
“Fancy!” said Annabel for the first time in her life, and with something of a hollowness to her voice. She didn’t want to be queen—she had never wanted to be queen—but there was something very odd about her stomach suddenly. Something that said although she hadn’t wanted it, it was her responsibility. And something that said it was very odd for another potential queen to turn up at Trenthams exactly when Melchior and Annabel were both there.
“And we were certain it was you!” Gwyn turned her look of sugary surprise on Annabel. “Who can have set such a rumour around, I wonder! We’re so very sorry!”
“Now this,” said Isabella, her grey eyes sparkling, “is more like it! Come along, Nan! We’re going to go see the queen.”
“You’ll find it hard to get in to see her!” Gwyn called after them. Her voice was a mix of spite and disappointed surprise; she had obviously hoped for a bigger reaction from both of the girls. “She’s not accepting all callers, you know!”
Annabel found herself being dragged along the path by the force of Isabella’s arm, skinny and determined, crooked through her own. “Why are we—shouldn’t we tell Melchior that the girl is pretending to be the queen heir?”
“Why should Melchior have all the fun?” demanded Isabella.
That struck Annabel as a perfectly just sentiment. She said, “Yes! Why should he! He’s been awful for weeks. Let him find out for himself.”
“Exactly so!” said Isabella nodding. “And he probably already knows—if he didn’t know from the very start.”
“Oh bother!” Annabel said in disgust. “He probably does.”
“I’m more astonished at myself, quite honestly. It seems perfectly obvious now; the Aunts and their Miss Ammetting lately, not to mention the suite, and a hundred other things!”
“Yes,” said Annabel, feeling disgruntled. She felt that she should have put the clues together much better. “How annoying! And Melchior—”
“Never mind about Melchior. At least you can be casually knowledgeable if he brings it up.”
“If he brings it up,” remarked Annabel darkly. “All right, who is this person pretending to be me? Let’s go find her.”
“That’s the spirit! Goodness! You look perfectly warlike!”
“I feel perfectly warlike,” said Annabel. It was very surprising. “I didn’t spend weeks running around a castle having my life threatened and being tested as the next queen just to have someone else pop up without taking the trouble of a test.”
“They must have something,” Isabella said thoughtfully. “Something that makes them think it safe to bring out a pretender right now.”
“Yes,” said Annabel. “Because it would be stupid to turn up without something that looks like the staff.”
“More importantly, they wouldn’t turn up without the support of at least four influential families. I do wonder how long Lady Caro knew about this.”
“Why is that more important?”
“Because a staff can be faked—”
“I don’t think it can, you know.”
“And even if it can’t—well, get the support of enough families, and everyone will politely overlook the lack of a staff. No one, in fact, will even mention it. I hope you’re prepared to use the staff if necessary.”
Annabel, who hadn’t in fact thought about it, found herself saying, and with some decidedness, “Yes.”
“Very good. Now, Nan, who do you suppose is behind this latest outrage?”
“Do you know,” said Annabel thoughtfully, “the first thing I thought was that it was probably the Old Parrasians?”
Isabella nodded. “That’s as a good a guess as any, given the fact that we’ve mostly dealt with Old Parrasians; but it would be a bit odd for Old Parrasians to want a queen on the throne, don’t you think?”
“That’s the bit I’m not sure about,” Annabel said. “But so far as we can tell, all the fingers in this pie have been Old Parrasian ones. And isn’t it awfully handy for the real queen heir to disappear just as another one comes along? The only other real option is that some of the powerful families have gotten a bit too used to being powerful and don’t like the idea of giving up power when a queen comes along. Perhaps they’ve been using the Old Parrasians to do their dirty work.”
“That’s more likely,” Isabella said, nodding. “And they’re so awfully clique-y in the old families! If enough of them agreed to something like this, they’d probably think it worth trying.”
“Some of the clique-y families have hidden Old Parrasian roots, too,” said Annabel, unwilling to give up on her own idea. “At any rate, it’s rude to be putting pretend queen heirs in the school while I’m here.”
“So impolite.”
“Yes,” said Annabel, grinning suddenly. “Accepting sham queens isn’t the sort of behaviour you expect from a school like Trenthams. And giving her our suite, too!”
“I knew you’d see it my way,” Isabella said, with a very small, sparkling smile. “Goodness, no wonder the girls have become so unbearable over these last couple of days! They won’t just be trying to put you down, either; they’ll be trying to put me down now that there’s a chance to prove I’ve picked the wrong side.”
Annabel looked at her curiously. “Aren’t you used to that sort of thing?”
“Goodness, yes! In this place factions form over which breakfast settings are allowed to be used by which families. That’s not what I meant. I meant that you might find the pushback to be stronger than if you’d been by yourself; it might have been easier for you if I’d not shown my outright support. I honestly didn’t consider such an eventuality. This will do me such a lot of good in terms of personal growth, don’t you think?”
“I don’t mind hissing and spitting,” said Annabel, ignoring Isabella’s last, cheerful pronouncement. Nasty words and disgusted looks didn’t much disturb her—no one who had been friends with Peter since childhood could be affected by something as insubstantial as words. She had once thought that was because of the comfortable layer of flesh she had worn for so long, but she was beginning to understand that it was a strength built somewhere much deeper within her than that. It made her wonder, suddenly, how it was that Melchior managed to get under her skin so easily these days.
“All right, then; what should we do about this? We need a real plan—not just going to see the Pretender and seeing what we can find out, I mean.”
Annabel stopped short. “Ah. I didn’t think of that.”
“Of course not. You’re merely annoyed—perfectly understandable. Did you know, by the way, that you haven’t been walking toward the school building?”
“My subconscious must be smarter than I am,” Annabel said, beginning to laugh. “Oh well, since we’re out here now, we might as well sit down and work out a plan. I suppose you’ve already got a few ideas?”
“Of course!” said Isabella cheerfully. “I wouldn’t be much of an advisor if I wasn’t prepared for most situations, would I? Let’s hatch a little bit of reverse-treason, shall we?”
“I suppose,” said Annabel thoughtfully, a little later, as they sat beneath a conveniently shady tree, “at least we know why everything was just a little bit late when we first got here.”
“Indeed,” Isabella agreed. Her grey eyes were reflective and thoughtful, and Annabel was quite certa
in that whatever she herself was thinking, Isabella was thinking of that and something else as well. “Which is somewhat worrisome, given the sheer amount of instances in which Trenthams staff have been just a little bit late about doing things. They wanted to be sure they had a foot in the door if things went your way, but they weren’t very certain things would go your way, and—good heavens! Miss Cornett!”
“Pardon?” Annabel asked blankly.
“How awful! I’ve maligned her!”
Annabel frowned. Isabella might be irreverent, facetious, and entirely concerned with how the world affected her own affairs—or at least, the affairs of her little papa—but she was usually careful to make sure she didn’t actually mock any of the teachers.
“When?”
“Well, not aloud, but I did think she came to see you to be a hanger-on—she probably knew I thought so, too. It must have been very hard for her.”
“You mean she didn’t?”
“She’s an odd, fluttery thing, and she can be ridiculous, but she does have a very strong sense of right and wrong. I suppose she knew about this and she was showing her solidarity in the only way she could.”
“Oh!” said Annabel. “That’s rather nice.”
“Yes.” Isabella looked vexed. “Goodness me, it really is a salutary year for me! Wrong more than once in the first term!”
Since Annabel was quite well aware by now that this was merely Isabella’s way of mocking herself when she was particularly annoyed at her own hubris, she didn’t point out that Isabella was, in fact, often wrong. Isabella was very well aware of that.
“Are we really going to see the other one?” she asked.
“Do you not want to go?”
“No,” said Annabel. “I want to go. But I keep thinking that we’ve been scrambling behind everything since we started out to get here—Melchior, Raoul, the new girl. I want to do a bit of research first.”
“When you say research—”
“Yes. I want to break into the Records Office.”
“That should give us a good idea of things.” Isabella looked very satisfied. “Although, I feel I should warn you that it’s likely to get us both caught and expelled. Even I have never made it into the Records Office—and not, I should like to point out, from lack of trying!”
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