School for Skylarks

by Sam Angus

  As she traced the letters once more with her finger, all the longing of those years, the longing to be loved, came rushing back to her, the yearning, the waiting, the hoping.

  She raised her eyes and looked out and saw the boathouse at Shearwater and the lake, and remembered lying there with Cat on lyrical foxglovy afternoons, the blackberrying, the blustery acorn and chestnut times, the leaping joys, the larking on the rooftops, the Ancient Greeks in scarves, and the disgrace of the mathematics exam.

  Lyla paused. She remembered the hall filled with girls, heard the echoing of the hymns they’d sung, the anthems and the carols, she heard the shrieks and laughter from the lake and in all these things she felt the sad slipping of the years that had gone.

  Five wild, magical, lonely, tragic years.

  At the door to the Billiard Room she paused, then pushed it open. Solomon had been busy clearing things, for the gelignite and blasting powder, strontium carbonate, string and tape and all the things devised to confuse German shipping were now gone.

  Lyla ran her fingers along the baize surface of the billiard table at which she’d spent many long, dark evenings with Cat, filling boxes for the Red Cross. She turned and saw the Monopoly sets, stacked one above another, and smiled fondly at this eccentric notion of her great aunt’s that British prisoners should want to play Monopoly so much more than any other game when they were bored and far away in foreign jails.

  Why Monopoly?

  Still wondering, Lyla walked slowly to the forbidden part of the room. She lifted a box from a package and placed it on the table. Why this game? Why couldn’t they have had Supremacy or Conflict? Lots of people liked those.

  Still musing, she lifted the lid, took out the folded board and ran her fingers through the dice and tiny houses and hotels. Perhaps Ada was right. Perhaps grown men in prisons did only like Monopoly. She picked out the dice and rattled them in the palm of her hand, then the silver top hat and car and dog, bemused. Dear Ada. She tossed the pieces up in the air and caught them, rattled them in her cupped hands, then tossed them up once more, still musing.

  ‘Miss Lyla?’

  Lyla turned, feeling guilty to be caught by Solomon in Ada’s room, and the pieces fell to the floor.

  ‘Allow me, Miss Lyla,’ said Solomon, stepping forward. He bent and picked them up and, about to hand them back to Lyla, said, ‘You never knew, did you, Miss Lyla?’

  ‘I never knew anything.’ She paused. ‘I never knew anything, and I never did anything right.’

  ‘You did, Miss Lyla,’ Solomon said gently. ‘You did this. You got this right. It was doing what you did, what you and Lady Ada and Catherine Lively did, night after night, that allowed Captain Spence to escape from the prison in Italy.’ He gestured about to the boxes.

  Lyla shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

  By way of explanation, Solomon held out the little silver top hat and twisted it till it opened. He took Lyla’s hand, turning it palm upwards, and tipped the crown of the hat and shook it over Lyla’s palm.

  Lyla looked down and saw a tiny metal object. Frowning she held it up. A compass.

  Next, Solomon fiddled with the little motor car and extracted from it a small, sharp metal file.

  Lyla frowned. ‘I still don’t understand.’

  Solomon turned and went over to the bookcase.

  He pressed a spine, and a section of the case swung open. Slowly Lyla walked forwards. Wads of money held with rubber bands, pots of blue clothes dye, maps, compasses, top hats and dice, silver cars. Lyla’s fingers hovered over the wads of money. A little nervously she lifted one down and stared at it.

  Reichsmarks? German money, here at Furlongs?

  She grabbed another. Italian lira.

  Suddenly shaking and confused, she held them out to Solomon.

  Solomon smiled at her. ‘It did the trick.’

  Lyla shook her head, still bewildered.

  He took from a shelf a larger piece of paper and, unfolding it, handed it to Lyla.

  ‘A map. She’d thought it all through. Maps. Foreign currency. Metal files, Miss Lyla – all to help the prisoners escape, all hidden in these sets.’

  Solomon watched Lyla’s face as it turned from confusion to gradual understanding and he said, ‘It was all for you really, Miss Lyla, for Captain Spence and for you, to bring him back for you . . . He received one of these, miss – a Monopoly set – in a Red Cross box – it made its way to him.’

  Lyla gazed at the little silver hat and car and murmured, ‘Father . . . Father had one of these?’ She looked up at Solomon.

  ‘You didn’t get everything wrong, you see,’ he said.

  ‘I had no idea . . . All along – no idea at all.’

  How had Lyla not known, not imagined what Ada had been about, when she’d been so urgent about the matter of the prisoners? All those evenings, all those boxes, for perhaps a year . . . the frantic sealing and shipping of boxes to Geneva. She smiled to think how a Monopoly set had made its way from the Billiard Room of Furlongs across the channel and all the way across continental Europe to Geneva and finally arrived at the very same remote prison in Northern Italy in which one Lovell Spence was held captive. ‘Dear Ada . . . Dear, dear Ada. How clever of her . . .’

  ‘She died knowing, miss, that Captain Spence escaped from the jail in Italy with one of these. There were two other men – She heard they made it home, but that Captain Spence was wounded and separated from them in the Adriatic. She thought it likely he was recaptured, for after that she could find nothing out.’

  Lyla nodded. ‘Solomon, did Cat know? Did she know all along?’

  ‘I think she guessed, miss.’

  Lyla nodded again. Of course. Of course Cat had known. She bowed her head.

  ‘I would so have liked her to have been here with me today.’

  ‘She had something to attend to, miss. In London, I believe.’ Solomon smiled.

  Hearing footsteps on the gravel, then more footsteps in the hall, both Lyla and Solomon turned to the door. Lyla must join the guests. She buttoned her coat and straightened her hat, and Solomon, waiting, held the door open for her.

  87

  OLD ALFRED

  In the Painted Hall beside the coffin stood Prudence and Tawny and Solomon, and on the coffin perched Little Gibson. A little aside from them stood an elderly man, with a serious face and spectacles and walking stick.

  Lyla went over to him.

  ‘Dr Gibson, I am so glad you are here.’

  He chuckled. ‘In a way I was always here, you know –’ he touched his heart – ‘always close. There was never anyone else.’

  Lyla turned and placed on the coffin the photograph that Ada had kept for all these years on her bedside of herself and Dr Gibson when they were young.

  Dr Gibson put his stick aside, and he and Tawny and Solomon lifted Ada’s coffin on to their shoulders, and Ada was borne out of the house. Lyla followed, and as she stepped outside she gasped, for there on the steps and all around the fountain stood almost every Garden Hill girl who’d ever come to Furlongs. A guard of honour five girls deep lined the steps and the edges of the forecourt. Lyla searched among them all, looking from face to face, but couldn’t find Cat.

  Beyond the fountain stood a small group of important-looking men with ribbons and decorations, none of whom Lyla had ever seen before, and beside them stood all the staff of Garden Hill School for Girls and Pinnacle, and beyond them all were lines and lines of motorcars.

  Lyla walked slowly between the guard of honour, and as she passed the Garden Hill girls turned and fell into crocodile file behind her. Hand in hand and two by two, they walked across the park, as they’d walked each Sunday up to the chapel at Heaven’s Gate. Behind them came the staff and then the guests, and Violet, seeing that everyone was going somewhere, widened her gentle eyes. She swished her tail and lowered her head and followed the procession to the chapel.

  Lyla glanced back at Furlongs and saw how Violet’s clematis was unse
asonably in flower. For Victory, perhaps, and for Ada.

  Tawny had filled the chapel with the snowy loveliness of Ada’s white currants. Lyla was shown to a pew and sat alone at the front of the chapel.

  They stood to sing ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’, but Lyla, for tears, could make no sound come out. A few girls read tributes they’d written. One among them told how Ada believed it essential to keep a carrot always about herself in case she should come across a horse, and how she’d taught the girls to let their minds drift and soar like larks, to dream of all the things that they might do and how they might build their world anew.

  A man from the Red Cross talked about Ada’s most vigorous contribution to the relief of prisoners, and another chap with a beard and a worn tweed overcoat talked of her work as a freelance inventor of experimental weapons, which would, on various alarming occasions, land on the desk of the Secretary of the Armament Design Department. She had drawn inspiration, he said, from the revolutionary mortars used in the Sino-Japanese war, and had concocted her own first mortar from black powder, cigarette papers and a croquet ball. She was a physicist, botanist and sage, he said, with the mind of a projectile missile and the energy of a high-voltage current.

  Pinnacle, too, spoke of Ada – of her verve and gusto, her piercing mind, her unusual approach to mathematics and all other elements of education – and of Pinnacle’s gratitude that her girls had been so generously housed at Furlongs. I cannot say safely housed, she added, for nothing about Lady Ada Spence was safe. She’d had the intellect and energy and enterprise of ten generals, Pinnacle added. A laugh lovely and loud, a pocketful of gelignite about her person, a heart intrepid and fearless. She was beloved of all that had the fortune to know her.

  Father Scott Talks Rot quite forgot where he was and leaned back against the altar and fumbled for his pipe, and Little Gibson the canary grew melancholy and flew off to hide his sorrow midst the swathes of currant blossom.

  Ada was lifted once more and borne out of the chapel, and Lyla followed as they made their way to the spot Aunt Ada had specified for herself.

  Must face the old house . . . must have Solomon to hand, keep an eye on you all.

  As Ada was lowered into the earth, Lyla saw Solomon in the shadows, limping purposefully from one gravestone to the other, and decided that either grief was affecting him most strangely or that he was up to something.

  All of a sudden there was a hissing and a fizzing. At the creeping waft of cordite, the funeral guests glanced uncertainly about the graveyard, then jumped and clutched one another when, from the foot of the ancient yew at the gate, a whooshing firework shot upwards to the skies.

  Lyla smiled as a Pink Dandelion bloomed and burst overhead. Everyone’s faces turned upwards as it sprouted and sent forth more Dandelions. Lyla turned to Solomon. He smiled at her and bowed as above them and in every corner of the sky the air hissed and crackled and rang as it burst, until fabulous pink showers were falling through all the stars that hung that evening over Heaven’s Gate.

  Lyla looked on, smiling to think how Great Aunt Ada’s lion-taming butler had prepared this tribute to the mistress he had loved, a mistress who would have loved this spectacle.

  ‘Lyla . . .’

  Lyla swung round – Cat.

  ‘Where have you been?’ asked Lyla, her eyes glimmering as all the loneliness and grief of the past few days welled up in her.

  Cat smiled. ‘Busy. Come on, I want to show you something.’

  She held out her hand to Lyla, but Lyla, still full of hurt, looked away. So they walked in silence through the park, and at the lake Lyla paused, remembering all the things they’d done together there at Furlongs over the years and all the fun they’d shared. Yet when she had most needed Cat, Cat had found some other thing that she must do, some other place that she must be.

  On the forecourt, Cat took Lyla’s hand and smiled. They walked onwards across the gravel to the door. Holding it open for Lyla, Cat whispered, ‘You first.’ She smiled a smile so full it almost had tears in it.

  Lyla stepped inside. She unpinned her hat and placed it on the console table and there, of course, was Old Alfred. Dependable Old Alfred, still, after all these years on his tiptoes; still, after all these years between the Mail In and the Mail Out trays; still watching and seeing and knowing everything.

  Yes, he’d known everything, seen everything all along. He’d known the frightened, angry child who’d begged her father not to leave her here, the child who’d tried to run away, the child who’d led a horse upstairs, the child so lonely she’d counted footsteps, sent letters to herself and talked to suits of armour. He’d watched her clod-hop round in shoes a size too big, and watched her linger longingly for the letters that never came, and he’d seen her cast away the letters that she should have read.

  He’d known everything all along and always been right, and she herself had got so much wrong.

  ‘Lyla . . .’

  Lyla started.

  ‘Lyla . . .’

  She slowly turned.

  Father. Tall and straight and smiling, thinner, greyer than before, but still her father.

  ‘Father!’

  ‘Lyla.’

  He swept her up in his arms and for a long while they held each other tightly. Keeping her hands in his, he stepped back a little. Then he drew his hands away from hers, leaving something small in each of Lyla’s palms. She looked down and saw a tiny silver top hat in one palm, a tiny silver motor car in the other and burst out, ‘They’re from here – we sent them – Ada – Ada and Cat and I . . .’

  She turned and cast about for Cat, but Father said, ‘I know . . . Money, map, compass, file. That’s how I got out, Lyla, that’s how I survived . . . the reason I’m still here today.’

  Lyla could not speak for wonder so Father took her hands again and continued, ‘I couldn’t write – it was awkward getting home – a little dangerous – I had to take the long way round, so to speak, first the Adriatic, then, after some difficulties, over the mountains, through France, Spain, Gibraltar . . . He found me in a hospital in Gibraltar – your friend’s father – and helped me home from there.’

  ‘Cat!’ called out Lyla. ‘He’s here – he’s – Father’s made it home. It was the boxes – the games – your father!’

  At the door stood Lyla’s friend.

  Lyla saw Cat’s shy, proud smile and knew then how large a part Cat had played in all this. That she’d always known why British soldiers held in foreign jails would want to play Monopoly rather than any other game, and she knew too why Cat had kept her company and sat by her side night after night, packing the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of boxes of bootlaces and tinned puddings that would make their lonely, dangerous journey across the channel and over occupied Europe to end up, perhaps, just one of them, in the hands of her friend, Lyla Spence’s, father.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sam Angus grew up in Spain. She studied Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, taught A-level English for a while, designed clothes for a while longer and is now a novelist. She lives between London and Exmoor with an improvident quantity of children, horses and dogs.

  ‘We’re going to a fine place,’ Idie told Homer to console him, ‘with gullies and monkeys and hummingbirds.’

  Idie Grace is twelve when she inherits a grand house on a Caribbean island and is sent away from grey old England to a place where hummingbirds hover and monkeys clamber from tree to tree.

  As a lady of property Idie can do as she pleases, so she fills the house with exotic animals, keeps her beloved horse in the hall and carries a grumpy talking cockatoo called Homer on her shoulder. But her island home holds as many secrets as it does animals, and the truth behind Idie’s inheritance is the biggest secret of all . . .

  Also by Sam Angus

  Soldier Dog

  A Horse Called Hero

  Captain

  The House on Hummingbird Island

  First published 2017 by Macmillan Children’s Booksr />
  This electronic edition published 2017 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5098-3960-5

  Copyright © Sam Angus 2017

  Cover illustration by Steph Laberis

  The right of Sam Angus to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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