by Alex Bell
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Estella isn’t in her bed, Miss Black,” Martha piped up. “She isn’t in the dormitory at all.”
The girls exchanged looks. They clearly thought it was Estella who was downstairs, making that noise.
Miss Grayson came out of her own room just then, her leather tawse clutched in her hand. Even though it was the middle of the night and she was dressed, like the rest of us, in a nightgown and slippers, her hair was still arranged in that elaborate pompadour bun. There was no way she would have had time to do that in those short moments. I finally realized that Miss Grayson must wear a wig. In her haste, she had put it on a little crookedly and I distinctly heard one of the girls snigger.
“What is the meaning of this?” she said, glaring at us. “Who is downstairs ringing the bell?”
“I have no idea,” I replied. Hoping to protect Estella I said, “I’ll see to it, Miss Grayson.”
But the schoolmistress was not to be dissuaded. “Is anyone missing?” she demanded. “Whichever girl it is will be punished severely.”
And then she was striding towards the staircase, switching on the gaslights as she went.
“Go back to bed,” I whispered to the girls, before hurrying after the schoolmistress.
We made our way down the stairs. I was shivering with cold but Miss Grayson was so furious that I think she hardly felt it. The bell continued to ring as we went down to the ground floor. As we approached the classroom, I saw that no strip of light shone from beneath the door. Someone was ringing the bell in the pitch-black.
Miss Grayson threw open the door and there was a dreadful clanging noise as the bell fell to the ground and rolled along the wooden boards. Miss Grayson quickly found the gaslight, which hissed into life, illuminating the room in a sickly, yellow glow.
I took in the scene and gasped. Estella wasn’t there. In the moments it took to turn on the light, she must have slipped out through the back door into the corridor that looped round to the servants’ stairs. This confirmed in my mind that it had been Estella who’d been here. As Henry had told me, the other girls all avoided the servants’ stairs.
But the classroom wasn’t empty.
It was filled with Frozen Charlotte dolls.
They were lined up on the desks, balanced upright on their small white feet, all staring directly towards the blackboard. I had wiped it down myself earlier but it wasn’t blank any longer. Someone had written the same sentence across it in chalk, over and over again, in uneven, childish writing:
Miss Grayson is a bald, beastly bitch.
Miss Grayson is a bald, beastly bitch.
Miss Grayson is a bald, beastly bitch.
I glanced at the schoolmistress, wondering how on earth she was going to react. She was staring at the board in silence but had gone completely white, and I noticed her lips were quivering.
“I’ll wipe it off,” I said.
“Leave it,” Miss Grayson said, before I could take a step.
“But—”
“Leave. It!” she hissed.
I stopped, just as the back door opened and Cassie poked her head round it.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “We heard a bell ringing.”
“It’s just one of the students misbehaving, Cassie,” Miss Grayson said. “Nothing to concern yourself with.
Please go back to bed.”
The maid cast one last dubious look at us and the dolls scattered everywhere before turning away and closing the door behind her.
“Fetch the girls,” Miss Grayson said.
“But … but it’s the middle of the night—” I began.
“I won’t ask you a second time, Miss Black.”
I had no choice but to go back upstairs and fetch them. They were still awake anyway, waiting to find out what was going on. I saw at once that Estella had rejoined the others.
I ushered them down to the classroom. Most of the girls didn’t own dressing gowns or slippers and stood shivering in their nightdresses and bare feet. Miss Grayson was before the blackboard and I heard some of the girls gasp when they saw what had been written there.
The schoolmistress suddenly gestured at the board with her tawse. The movement was so fast that several of the girls jumped.
“Who,” she said in a dangerously low voice, “is responsible for this outrage?”
The girls stared back at her. Nobody said a word. The silence in the room was almost deafening.
“I will give you one more chance to tell me who is responsible,” Miss Grayson said. “If anyone knows who did this, speak up now.”
The silence stretched on as the girls wrapped their skinny arms round themselves and shivered.
Finally Estella spoke. “Perhaps it was the Frozen Charlotte dolls, miss. They move around after dark. And they know things—”
“Estella, your lies get wilder by the day!” the schoolmistress exclaimed. She snatched up one of the Frozen Charlottes from a nearby desk. “If you think anyone is going to believe that this tiny doll was somehow able to pick up a piece of chalk and write on a board, as well as ring an extremely heavy bell, then you are quite deluded.”
Estella folded her arms across her chest. “Perhaps they told someone else to do it,” she said. “Perhaps they managed to persuade someone to—”
Miss Grayson pointed the tawse at Estella. “Not one more word out of you!” she snarled. “Not another word! I will not have human wickedness blamed on dolls. I will not!” She let the crop fall to her side and then reached up to pat at her hair. “As you can all see,” she said, “I am very far from bald. So whoever wrote this is both insolent and a liar. Since you refuse to tell me who the culprit is, I have no choice but to punish you all.” Her eyes narrowed into slits. “There will be no breakfast served tomorrow. Instead I expect you all to present yourselves here for your punishment at seven o’clock sharp. Anyone who arrives late will be flogged. Now, get back to your room.”
As the girls filed out, Miss Grayson finally picked up the duster and began wiping away the words. In an effort to help, I started to collect up the dolls but Miss Grayson snapped at me to leave them.
“They will be put to use as part of tomorrow’s punishment,” she said. “And we’ll see how fond of the things the girls are after that. Speaking of which, I thought you were supposed to be locking the toy room at night, Miss Black?”
“I’m very sorry, Miss Grayson, but I did lock the room,” I said. “The key was gone when I woke up. Someone must have crept in and taken it while I was asleep.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so before?” the schoolmistress demanded, turning away from the now clean board. “If we find the key then we identify the culprit!”
To my dismay, she insisted on searching the dormitory. The girls watched silently from the edge of the room as their space was turned upside down. Miss Grayson went at it like a crazy person, especially when it came to Estella’s bed and her small collection of belongings.
“Perhaps it wasn’t one of the girls at all,” I said, once Miss Grayson had finally admitted defeat and joined me out in the corridor. “Perhaps it was one of the maids?”
Miss Grayson chewed her lip furiously. “I’m sure it was Estella,” she said. “But it pays to be thorough.”
I walked with her down to the servants’ quarters where Cassie and Hannah were roused in turn. Hannah accepted the search in silence and Cassie sulked quietly, but there was still no sign of the key.
“What about Dolores?” I asked. “Aren’t you going to search her room, too?”
“I have searched her room,” Miss Grayson replied.
“Cassie sleeps in it now.”
“Then where does Dolores sleep?” I asked, confused.
Miss Grayson stopped abruptly at the foot of the stairs and turned round to face me. “How do you know about Dolores?” she demanded. “Has Estella been talking about her again?”
“No. I met her on my first day.”
Miss Grayso
n stared at me. Her nostrils flared. “I beg your pardon?”
“We passed each other right here on the servants’ staircase,” I said, gesturing towards it. “She was dusting the—”
Miss Grayson slapped me hard across the face. “You wicked girl!” she cried. “How dare you lie to me so brazenly?”
“I’m not lying!” I gasped, one hand pressed to my stinging cheek.
“You could not possibly have met Dolores because the stupid girl fell down this staircase and broke her neck. She died two years ago!”
Chapter Seventeen
Isle of Skye – January 1910
I rose early the next morning and went down to the classroom before everyone else, opening the door and peering in cautiously. Part of me feared that more writing might have appeared on the board or that the dolls might be in different positions from those they’d been left in. But the Frozen Charlottes were still on the desks and everything seemed to be in order.
I walked quickly over to Miss Grayson’s desk and took the Punishment Book from the top drawer, flipping over the pages until I found the one I was looking for. The entry for Estella last summer when she had spent almost three days in Solitary. I ran my finger across the line, looking for the crime she had committed, but there was only a single word written there: lying.
I closed the book and replaced it in the desk just as Miss Grayson walked in, carrying a basket full of sewing kits.
“Distribute one of these on each desk,” she ordered.
I did as she’d asked and the girls filed in soon after.
“You will each find a Frozen Charlotte on your desk,” Miss Grayson said. “Along with some sewing materials. Today we will put your fascination with these toys to some useful purpose.” She walked slowly up and down in front of the blackboard, her eyes gleaming. “When you leave this school,” she said, “you will be expected to make yourselves useful as servants and maids. Needlework is likely to be an important skill for you all, which is why we have weekly lessons here. Today we shall spend the entire day perfecting our needlework. We will not break for meals and there will be no playtime. Food and leisure are luxuries that must be earned.” She stopped in front of her desk and said, “By five o’clock this evening, you will each have sewn fifty dresses for your doll.”
“Fifty!” I exclaimed.
Miss Grayson gave me an icy look. “Fifty,” she repeated. “Anyone who doesn’t have fifty finished dresses at the end of the day will be flogged. You have ten hours. That is plenty of time, providing you stay focused on your task and work hard.”
Estella put her hand up.
“Yes, Estella?”
“I haven’t got a Frozen Charlotte doll,” she said. “I’ve got a Frozen Charlie.”
I saw she was right. Her doll was the male figure I remembered from the luggage room.
“So you have,” Miss Grayson said softly. “Well then, you had better sew suits instead.”
“Suits take longer than dresses,” Estella replied.
“Then I suggest you begin at once.”
Estella lifted her chin slightly but said nothing. I was quite sure that Miss Grayson had given her the Frozen Charlie deliberately. She wanted Estella to fail.
The girls hurried to snatch up scraps of fabric and lace, threading needles with an air of urgency.
“Miss Black,” the schoolmistress said, turning to me.
“Yes, Miss Grayson?”
“Please take away the girls’ thimbles. We will not be using those today. Thimbles encourage carelessness.”
“Very well,” I said miserably.
“After that,” Miss Grayson said, “I suggest you get started on your own dresses straight away.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I hope you did not expect to escape punishment after last night’s outrageous lie,” she said. “You will join the girls in their task.”
I bit my tongue. Once all the thimbles were collected, I picked up one of the dolls from Miss Grayson’s desk, fetched a sewing kit and took my seat at a spare desk at the back of the room.
The rest of that day was pure torture. Although the dresses were tiny, they were fiddly, and creating fifty of them was no small task. The girls worked in frenzied silence. Miss Grayson did not keep the fire going and the room got steadily colder. My fingers turned blue and numb. Working so fast, without thimbles, it was impossible not to regularly prick yourself. After the first hour, there wasn’t a single desk that did not have a spot of blood on it somewhere.
By lunchtime I had made twenty-four dresses but my fingers throbbed and my insides felt scraped out with hunger. When I glanced at the other desks I saw that most of the other girls were managing to work quickly enough. Estella in particular was clearly extremely skilled at needlework, for she had quite a pile of neat little suits at her elbow. One or two of the others appeared to be struggling, though, including Bess, who was crying quietly as she bent over her doll.
Finally Bess put up her hand and asked Miss Grayson in a timid voice whether she might be allowed to go to the lavatory.
“That is entirely up to you, Bess,” Miss Grayson replied without looking up. “If you think you can spare the time to go all the way upstairs for a lavatory break, by all means you may leave.”
Bess put her hand back down and carried on working, looking wretched. She fidgeted around in her seat for the next hour before finally getting up and running to the lavatory. She returned to her seat less than five minutes later but I could see that she was behind on her dresses. Unless she sped up, she wasn’t going to finish on time.
As the hours drew on it only got harder and harder, and our fingers became cold and sore and stiff. By the time it got to four o’clock, we all had blood trickling down our wrists. It felt like a nightmare that simply would not end. Several of the girls were crying but no one dared stop working for fear of not meeting the target and getting a flogging as a result.
I completed my fiftieth dress with about twenty minutes to spare. When I looked up I saw that almost all the girls had finished or were about to – all except Bess, who was sobbing more loudly now as she desperately tried to complete her last dresses. She wasn’t going to make it in time. I could see that at once.
But then, to my astonishment, Estella reached over and slid several dresses on to Bess’s desk. Bess stared at them for a moment before quickly putting them into her own pile. She glanced over at Estella, who was already starting work on her next suit. She must have noticed Bess was falling behind and stopped her own work to help. It was an act she paid for, however, when five o’clock arrived and Miss Grayson ordered everyone to put down their needles.
The schoolmistress walked around, checking the work that had been done, apparently unmoved by everyone’s raw, bleeding fingers. Finally she returned to the front of the classroom.
“Estella,” she said softly. “How many suits have you produced?”
“Forty-eight.”
“How many were you asked to make?”
“Fifty.”
“And why have you not done as you were asked?”
Estella stared straight at the teacher. “I wasn’t fast enough, miss.”
“You are the only girl here who has failed to produce fifty outfits. The only girl here too lazy to apply herself and work hard.”
I noticed Bess staring down anxiously at her own pile of dresses and although I longed to say that Estella had made some of them I knew I couldn’t without getting both girls in trouble. It was so dreadfully unfair. Suits were a lot more complicated and Estella had done marvellously well to make so many. But it was obvious that Miss Grayson was not going to be fair.
“Miss Black,” she said. “Kindly write Estella’s name in the Punishment Book and record that her penalty for idleness is to be twelve lashings of the tawse.”
Feeling physically sick, I made my way to the front of the class and did as the schoolmistress had asked. I lay down the pen as Miss Grayson beckoned Estella to the front of the room and the w
ords burst out of me. “Miss Grayson, may I say something in Estella’s defence?”
“You may not,” the schoolmistress snapped. “And if you utter one more word, Miss Black, I will double the number of lashes she receives.”
Seething, I could do nothing but stand and watch as Miss Grayson instructed Estella to lay her hands flat on the desk, with her back facing towards her. Miss Grayson then picked up her tawse, raised it high over her head and thrashed Estella as hard as she could. It was a vicious whipping that split the shirt on the girl’s back, and caused blood to well up with each stroke. There was total silence in the room except for the sound of that dreadful lashing, which seemed to go on for an eternity.
Tears ran silently down Estella’s face but she didn’t utter so much as a whimper and I admired her greatly for that. Sweat spotted Miss Grayson’s face and stained her shirt beneath the arms by the time it was finally over.
“I trust that a lesson has been learned here today,” Miss Grayson said. “You will go straight to bed without dinner. I suggest you all reflect on your dishonesty in order that another day like this does not occur.”
The girls filed out in a subdued fashion, Estella leaving last, walking slowly and stiffly, wincing with every step.
I set about collecting the dolls, beginning with Estella’s Frozen Charlie. I couldn’t help starting at the sight of his suits. They were all grey and, although I knew it could only be a coincidence, the thought rose in my mind that Edward Redwing always wore grey suits.
When I passed by Bess’s desk I saw that the top dress, one that Estella had made for her, had been cut from a striking cornflower blue fabric, almost the same shade as the dress I had been wearing the night Whiteladies burned to the ground…
“The same goes for you, Miss Black,” Miss Grayson said from her desk, interrupting my thoughts. “Once you’ve collected up the dolls, please put them on my desk and then go directly to your bedroom. I do not want to see you again until tomorrow.”
I took a basket from the cupboard, gathered the dolls and put them on Miss Grayson’s desk, then turned and walked from the room without a word. I went straight to my bedroom but only paused long enough to collect my cloak before creeping back down the servants’ stairs. I half expected to see Dolores there with her duster but the staircase was empty. I slipped out without being seen and made my way to Henry’s cottage.