The lights in the hall come on. It’s a shock, the harsh white fluorescent light flaming out into a long pale rectangle down the steps of Fetters like a theatrical effect; a couple of the girls yelp in surprise.
“All clear,” says a firefighter, coming outside. “Safe for everyone to go back in now.”
“We take what you just said very seriously, believe me, Officer,” Miss Carter assures Stewart. “When we find out who did this, she will be very severely disciplined.”
“Glad to hear it, miss,” he says, standing aside as the teachers start shepherding the girls back into the school again.
Taylor helps me up; I’m surprisingly unsteady on my feet.
“Shock,” the firefighter who looked after me says to us laconically. “Go slowly, lassie. And get some sleep.”
“Thank you,” I say, handing him back his water bottle.
It’s so bright inside I find myself shading my eyes again with my hand. My throat’s sore, even after drinking the water. Taylor’s by my side as we follow the rest of the girls upstairs, one hand cupped under my elbow. Just in case.
“Ooh, look at Scarlett and Taylor,” Plum coos, “all cozy and—”
“Shut up, Plum!” every single girl in earshot snaps simultaneously.
Small mercies, I think, managing to smile.
“Go to your rooms, all of you,” Aunt Gwen says to us grimly. “We’ll talk about this in the morning. And if I hear one peep out of any of you …”
She doesn’t need to finish the sentence.
“I’m so tired,” I say as I push open the door to our room. “I could sleep for a week.”
There’s a piece of paper on the floor. It must have fallen there, knocked off the desk when Taylor and I were evacuating the room, bleary-eyed and stumbling. Automatically, I bend over to pick it up.
“What is it?” Taylor asks, seeing me stare down at it, unable to believe what I’m reading.
Silently, I hand it to her. It’s been torn from a notebook, white paper with faint gray lines making little boxes all over the background. Something about the paper’s very familiar, but I can’t access that memory right now, because I’m focusing on the thick black letters very carefully printed across the center of the page.
No, I realize. Not printed; stenciled.
Clever. You can’t trace handwriting from a stencil.
And it reads, in capital letters:
YOU CAN’T RUN AWAY FROM THE PAST, SCARLETT.
five
“IN AUSTRIA THERE ARE MANY PRINCESSES”
We’re all very, very subdued on the coach the next morning, for many reasons. Breakfast was delayed, to give us a chance to catch up on our sleep, but it turned out to be porridge, with a choice of raisins, golden syrup, jam, or stewed prunes. Very traditional and Scottish, and Miss Carter lectured us all about how porridge is the best way to start the day, but we’re not used to eating that heavily in the morning (some of us aren’t used to eating that many calories in a whole day), and now we’re all slumped in our tartan-upholstered seats in a carbohydrate coma.
And, of course, that wasn’t the only lecture we got this morning. Aunt Gwen, cold as an iceberg and much scarier, subjected us all to one of those “if the guilty party owns up now she will be dealt with leniently, but if she doesn’t you will all undergo horrible punishment” speeches that never, ever, result in one girl standing up bravely, her hand on her heart, and saying:
“It was me, Miss Wakefield! I cannot see my fellow students suffer for a crime I myself committed! Please—rain down whatever retribution you choose on me, but spare my innocent sisters!”
No one was idiot enough to confess to setting off the fire alarms and smoke bombs. So we’re all waiting for the axe of punishment to descend on our necks, which is never a pleasant feeling.
But it does bring us nicely to Mary, Queen of Scots, who only reigned in Scotland for about five years before fleeing to England because lots of sexist old Scottish noblemen didn’t like a woman being in charge of them and rose up against her. Then she was imprisoned by Elizabeth I and spent the next twenty years or so trying to escape, being moved around a series of castles, waiting for Elizabeth to decide she was too much trouble to keep alive, before having her head chopped off in 1587. With a sword, actually. Not an axe.
(We’re doing the Tudors for history A-level. And we’re on our way to Holyroodhouse, the Edinburgh royal palace, where poor old Mary lived most of the time when she was queen of Scotland.)
“I must say,” I observe to Taylor, who naturally is sitting next to me, “being a princess isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
Taylor raises an eyebrow.
“Who ever said it was?” she asks.
“Oh, I was desperate to be a princess when I was little!” I say, thinking of my obsession with the Little Mermaid and (God help me) Sleeping Beauty. “Isn’t everyone? But look at Princess Diana. And Mary, Queen of Scots. And Elizabeth the First—I mean, she was a great queen, but she couldn’t even get married because she didn’t trust a guy not to try to take over her throne.”
“I never wanted to be a princess,” Taylor says flatly. “I wanted to be SpongeBob SquarePants.” She considers for a moment. “Or Pippi Longstocking,” she adds. “She was cool.”
“I’m glad you identified with one girl,” I say, not entirely sure whether Taylor’s joking about SpongeBob. For an American, she has a really dry sense of humor.
“She was superstrong! And a pirate!” Taylor says. “Of course I liked her!”
“But they had fabulous dresses!” Lizzie’s head pops up above the back of the seat in front. As usual, she’s wearing a whole applicator pen’s worth of eyeliner. It doesn’t suit her, but it’s fashionable, and that’s all she cares about.
“SpongeBob SquarePants?” I ask, baffled. “Pippi Longstocking?”
“Princess Diana! Mary, Queen of Scots!” Lizzie chants, her eyes bright. “And they had lots of lovers and they were really beautiful!”
“They had miserable lives and they died young,” Taylor says flatly.
Lizzie pouts.
“You ruin everything, Taylor,” she complains.
“In Austria,” Sophia von und zu Whatsit observes, popping her head up next to Lizzie’s, “there are many princesses, and some of them have very good lives.”
As always when Sophia says something, I have absolutely no idea how to reply. She can kill a conversation dead at thirty paces.
Even Lizzie, Little Miss Chatterbox, is slightly flummoxed by this one.
“Do you know any princesses?” she asks eventually.
“Oh yes,” Sophia says, her blue eyes opening wide like a really expensive doll’s. She could be a china doll in almost every respect, I think: golden curls, round face, perfectly smooth white skin, brains made of hardened ceramic. “They are often guests at my parents’ schloss,” she continues.
“Your parents’ what?” Taylor says incredulously.
“Schloss! It means ‘castle’ in German,” Sophia informs her as I stifle a giggle. I know it’s very immature of me to laugh at words in foreign languages, but there’s no denying that schloss sounds pretty silly to English ears.
“Wow,” Taylor says. “What’s the plural of that?”
“Schlosser, of course!” Sophia says quite seriously.
I gulp as hard as I can, pressing my lips tightly together, and stare out the window. The coach has been chugging up one of the steep inclines that seem to characterize Edinburgh, and now it’s diving down the other side, round a wide curve with a high, gracious crescent of houses on the right and a breathtaking view on the left: a drop that rises to rolling high hills beyond, grassy and green, the highest one peaked like a mountain, its top gray and craggy with stone outcroppings.
At least the talk about princesses and schlosser has distracted me for a little while from my speculation about who was behind last night’s drama. That note just confirmed my suspicion that the entire thing was staged to lure me into the s
tairwell and give someone a chance to push me over the rail, making it look as if I were injured in a freak accident while I was trying to escape from what we all thought was a burning building.
I say “injured,” but what I really mean is “killed.” Because I don’t know what my assailant meant to do to me—whether she really set out to kill me—but that was such a likely result of toppling me down the stairs that I shiver when I think about it. I have bruises on my arms where I whacked into the side of the staircase as a vivid reminder; not that I need one.
Someone has tried to kill me before. I’ve had a shotgun pointed at my face. But, weird though this sounds, that time it wasn’t personal. I wasn’t the intended target; I just got in the way.
This was personal. No question. That girl was calling my name. She knew exactly who she was shoving over that rail. And she wanted me to know she was nursing a huge grudge against me, a grudge that goes back into the past, because she left me a note to tell me so.
I shiver.
Alison? Luce? But this happened the very first night we found ourselves all staying at Fetters together. I refuse to believe that one of them has been traveling with firelighters and smoke bombs in her luggage for the past year, just in case she runs into me. Still, I suppose it’s by no means impossible that someone could have overheard Ms. Burton-Race at St. Tabby’s talking to another teacher about her plans to meet up with Miss Carter and the Wakefield Hall contingent in Edinburgh.…
Plum? I just don’t see Plum, with her smooth hands and French manicure, painstakingly collecting metal rubbish bins and lighting firelighters in them. Or, strangely, being able to disguise her voice enough to trick me: Plum is always so much herself I don’t believe she’d be capable of taking on another persona.
But I do believe that Plum would be able to talk or blackmail or bully someone else into doing it for her.
Then I wonder about Nadia. She’s shown herself to be much sneakier than either Taylor or I thought she was. But I can’t think of a motive for Nadia to go after me. Certainly nothing strong enough to make her want to see me badly injured. Or dead.
And so the spinning wheel of my thoughts returns to where it started: someone, last night, wanted to do me serious harm.
I just can’t think of one thing I’ve ever done in my life that was bad enough for anyone to want to kill me.
“It is a house of many memories.… Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chambers,” Ms. Burton-Race intones into the coach microphone, making us all jump. “Robert Louis Stevenson wrote those words about Holyrood in his ‘Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes’ in 1878. So now let’s go and see the chamber where murder was committed for ourselves! And the bed slept in by Mary, Queen of Scots, plus the famous Darnley jewel!”
The coach is pulling up outside the golden-stone wall of what must be Holyroodhouse. And I have to give Ms. Burton-Race credit: I never had her for history at St. Tabby’s, but she certainly knows how to grab your attention and get you interested. The porridge-induced carb coma is forgotten; the girls pile out almost before we’ve come to a stop, eager to see where a murder happened. Plus, of course, anything to do with Mary, Queen of Scots. And jewelry.
Famous jewelry. That’s what’s got us moving. Ms. Burton-Race really does know sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls.
“It’s rather small for a palace, isn’t it?” Plum says disdainfully as we walk through the high stone gateway into the central quadrangle of Holyroodhouse, a huge green grass square. High, symmetrical windows run all around the encircling golden-gray stone walls; it’s beautiful, but you’d always feel watched. “I mean, I’ve stayed in ones that were much bigger.”
A couple of women who work here, bustling past in their neat uniforms, shoot Plum killing looks at this insult. But she’s oblivious, of course, as she is to pretty much anyone who has to work for a living.
“It is small, isn’t it?” Nadia agrees, tilting her head back to look as Ms. Burton-Race points out the royal coat of arms carved on the part of the facade that hosts the royal apartments. “It’s really more like a stately home.”
“They’re going to get stabbed,” Taylor hisses to me as a tour group of Scottish people on the other side of the quadrangle stare across at Plum and Nadia and then start talking to each other with a lot of shaking heads and pursed mouths of disapproval. It’s very unfortunate that both the girls have those high-pitched, clear, posh voices, which bounce around the stone walls, carrying their message of disdain to everyone within a hundred yards of them.
“ ‘Murder has been done in its chambers,’ ” I quote to Taylor cheerfully. “And if someone does stab Plum, I for one am not investigating that.”
“Jeez, no,” Taylor agrees. “They’d be doing the world a service.” She looks over at Plum and Nadia, who are rolling their eyes at each other, energized by having something to patronize. “Hey—did you know they were talking to each other again?” she asks me, frowning. “When did that happen?”
She’s absolutely right.
“Good point,” I say, thinking hard, as Ms. Burton-Race leads us inside the palace and immediately starts babbling enthusiastically about cantilevered stairs, fresco panels, and impressive plasterwork ceilings; there’s a gigantic oak staircase, wide enough to ride a horse up, wrapping round the walls, rising three stories high to a ceiling that looks like wedding cake icing gone completely mad.
I tune out Ms. Burton-Race’s commentary as we go up the stairs and into the royal apartments, that, of course, being the bit we’re here to goggle at. Taylor’s observation is bang-on: Plum and Nadia, as far as we know, are deadly enemies.
So why are they exchanging any kind of civil conversation, rather than scuttling around putting hair removal cream in each other’s shampoo or—more likely—planting drugs on each other someplace where a teacher’s bound to find it?
“This, of course, is the throne room,” Ms. Burton-Race says, leading us into a large, red-carpeted room with shiny wood-paneled walls hung with portraits and chandeliers. We all draw in our breaths with excitement and then let them out again in disappointment. I’ve never seen a throne room, but I was expecting something really majestic: a carved golden seat high up on a dais, a bit like the ones in the film The Slipper and the Rose (a musical about Cinderella that is my all-time-favorite guilty pleasure. Taylor totally doesn’t get it).
Instead, the thrones are smallish wooden seats, almost like folding chairs, upholstered in embroidered red velvet with golden tassels, low matching footstools placed in front of them. They’re barely even elevated, just placed in a small alcove at the far end of the room, up a couple of red-carpeted steps.
“Scottish people,” Taylor comments dryly, “aren’t exactly show-offs.”
“This is the official residence of the Queen when she comes to Scotland,” Ms. Burton-Race says loudly, sensing our feelings of anticlimax. “She has an annual garden party here each July. And Prince Charles is resident here for a week every year too.”
“Does that mean William and Harry have stayed here?” Lizzie says excitedly. “Oh my God! I love Harry!”
“How can you? He’s a ginge!” Plum says disdainfully, slanting her eyes over at redheaded Alison.
“Plum!” Ms. Burton-Race says angrily. “That is a very discriminatory way to refer to redheads!”
And again, Taylor and I watch as Plum and Nadia roll their eyes and toss their hair back in unison, exchanging little superior smiles with each other.
“They’ve definitely made up,” I say to Taylor. “Very interesting.”
“It must have happened last night,” Taylor says. “ ’Cause they didn’t look at all friendly at the concert.”
“No, they didn’t,” I agree. “Do you think Plum’s lulling Nadia into a false sense of security so she can get some more stuff on her and have her revenge?”
“Or she’s just going with ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,’ ” Taylor suggests.
�
�The thing is, together they’re unstoppable,” I comment, looking over at them as we move into the king’s bedchamber, girls oohing and aahing at the state bed, canopied with red damask trimmed with gold, heavily frilled, its cornice and headboard painted red and gold too, looking as regal as you could imagine.
“If they were making friends again last night,” Taylor adds, “they weren’t running around setting smoke bombs or trying to push you downstairs.”
“Unless that was their idea of bonding,” I say jokingly.
But now I’m staring at Alison and Luce, who are absorbed in talk. Alison’s fiddling with her long mane of hair, which I think she must have lightened in the last months; I remember it being more carroty. Now it’s a strawberry blond, straightened out of its frizzy curls, and it looks really striking. She’s wearing the unofficial St. Tabby’s uniform this season—a rock-chick look, narrow jacket and T-shirt over leggings tucked into slouchy suede boots. For Alison, who used to live in exercise clothes, this is a really big deal. Equally so for Luce, who’s in a variation of the same outfit, but with ballerina shoes. Clever—they keep her tiny little wiry body in proportion. In the boots everyone else is wearing, Luce would look as if she’d pulled on her mum’s Wellingtons.
They look so smart now, Luce and Alison. Wearing makeup, trendy haircuts, scarves draped fashionably round their necks. Like they’ve had the kind of makeover I did, when I went to a fashionable boutique and threw myself on the mercy of a surprisingly nice salesgirl.
So maybe, I think hopefully, they don’t care about my betrayal of them anymore, now that they’ve turned into full-blown, head-to-toe St. Tabby’s girls.
And then Luce, sensing my gaze, swivels her head away from the hangings of the state bed to look directly at me. Our eyes meet.
The shock is huge. I feel like she punched me in the breastbone. It’s the first time Luce and I have truly looked at each other since our awful breakup. For a brief, breath-holding moment, I have a blinding flash of hope that everything will magically be all right; that she’ll manage a small smile for me, or even make a gesture that says I should come over and talk to her and Alison.…
Kiss of Death Page 6