Secrets at St Jude’s: Rebel Girl

by Carmen Reid

  Not even ten metres from her bedroom window – the cheek of it! – was a teenage boy. In his hands was a large shopping bag, and attached to the bag was a length of rope.

  Mrs Knebworth’s beady blue eyes followed the rope up to the window at the top of the fire escape. There, in the dim light coming from the Daffodil dorm window, she could see two girls who were holding the other end of the rope.

  This was just unbelievable!

  Girls were trying to smuggle in booze, right under her very nose! How did they think they were going to get away with this?

  Mrs Knebworth, who had grown up in Edinburgh’s very respectable Morningside area, and who had never once even thought about breaking a school rule back in the days when she had been a St Jude’s girl, was outraged. In fact, she was properly furious.

  It wasn’t just that these thoughtless girls in Daffodil dorm were in serious trouble; no, it was the fact that when things like this happened at the boarding house, it reflected very, very badly on Mrs Knebworth. And if stories like this got out into the wider community, well, they reflected very, very badly on the school.

  She wasn’t going to stand for that. Not for one moment.

  Her fingers were at the window catch. She intended to throw the window open and bellow out into the garden: ‘Hands up, you’ve all been caught!’

  But she thought it through for a moment. The bag was still in the boy’s hands. He would run off with it. The dorm window would shut, the lights would go off and everyone would deny everything. Even though she had seen it with her own eyes, she wouldn’t be able to prove anything.

  No. She wouldn’t open the window and shout out, she had a better idea. Quickly pulling on her dressing gown, she decided to hurry as silently as she could up to the Daffodil dorm. That way she would catch everyone involved red-handed.

  Mrs Knebworth sped out of her bedroom, past her small bathroom and through the private sitting room which she kept so neatly that whenever anyone was invited inside, they found it hard to believe that the housemistress really lived there.

  Now she turned into a hallway and began to hurry down the long locker-lined corridor which connected this building to the second big house where, up in the attic, Daffodil dorm could be found.

  Unfortunately, Daffodil dorm was many, many flights of stairs from the ground level and Mrs Knebworth was a large woman, approaching sixty, who had never been much of a keep-fit fan.

  No matter how outraged and how furious she felt, she couldn’t propel herself up the stairs as quickly as she would have liked.

  But she was going to get there in time, she told herself as she pulled herself up the second flight by the wooden banister. She was going to catch them in the dorm with all their contraband, she thought, as her breathing grew a little wheezy on the third set of stairs. Oh yes, she was!

  Chapter Two

  MILLY AND SHYANNE were taking the strain on the rope. They were tugging together, and slowly the heavy bag was starting to travel upwards.

  ‘Why didn’t he just come up the fire escape?’ Niffy asked Anthea, who was standing beside her and Gina at the dorm door.

  Anthea was holding the door slightly ajar, so that any strange or worrying sounds could be heard.

  ‘Maybe he thought this would make less noise,’ Gina whispered back.

  ‘Then he should have wrapped those bottles up in tea towels,’ Niffy replied. ‘I’m surprised the whole blooming boarding house hasn’t woken up.’

  ‘Shhhh!’ Gina urged, and for a moment everyone in the room froze.

  Thud, thud, thud . . . It was faint. It was still far away in the distance, but: thud, thud, thud . . . it definitely seemed to be getting closer.

  ‘Someone’s coming up the stairs!’ Niffy exclaimed. ‘QUICK!!’

  Milly and Shyanne yanked at the rope, then Milly reached over and grabbed hold of the bag. ‘RUN!’ she hissed at the boy and waved her arms about to give him the idea.

  Thud, thud, thud . . . There was no doubt that the footsteps were growing closer, and every one of the girls had a horrible feeling that there was only one person in the boarding house who had such a heavy tread.

  Shyanne and Milly hurried back in through the window and pulled it shut behind them. Anthea ran over and snatched the bag from Milly’s hands. It was packed with a jumble of goodies, but it was immediately obvious that three bottles just visible from the top had to be dealt with immediately.

  Anthea grabbed hold of the bottles and looked frantically around the dorm for a hiding place.

  Thud, thud, thud . . .

  If this really was Mrs Knebworth – the Neb – then she was just seconds from bursting through the fire door at the top of the final set of stairs.

  ‘Give them to us!’ Niffy instructed.

  Anthea ran over and handed the bottles, not to Niffy, who was still holding the door open, but to an astonished Gina.

  Gina almost let them slip from her hands with fright. Why was she being landed with this? She was the one who had wanted to stay in bed and keep out of it all.

  She didn’t need to be told what to do though: she fled from the scene, straight to her dorm and jumped into bed, taking the two bottles of wine and one of cider with her. Then she lay there, terrified, wondering what was going to happen next.

  Niffy tried to escape too. She let go of the door, turned on her heel and ran after Gina towards the Iris dorm. But right behind her, she heard the horrible screech of the fire door opening on its spring-loaded hinges, then the outraged voice of the Neb called after her: ‘Luella Nairn-Bassett, just where do you think you’re going?!’

  Niffy froze.

  The Daffodil dorm door banged shut, and the faint light visible underneath it went out.

  Niffy turned and faced the Neb in the dim light of the hallway.

  ‘You will come with me into Daffodil dorm and you will all tell me just exactly what has been going on up here,’ Mrs Knebworth hissed furiously, her pink quilted dressing gown and foam curlers not diminishing her many terrifying qualities in the slightest.

  Even in this light, Niffy was sure she could see the steely blue gaze coming from the Neb’s narrowed eyes.

  This was one of the rare occasions in Niffy’s life when she couldn’t immediately think of anything to say. Niffy had been at boarding school since she was eleven and she’d grown up with a prank-playing big brother, so she was usually very, very good at inventive excuses, brilliant tricks and spectacularly good fibs. But here in the hallway at 1 a.m. with a furious Mrs K facing her, Niffy’s mind went stubbornly blank.

  For a moment, she wondered if she should say this was nothing to do with her – she’d just got up because she’d heard a noise.

  But she had a feeling Mrs Knebworth wouldn’t believe her.

  The housemistress reached for the Daffodil dorm door handle. ‘Follow me,’ she barked at Niffy.

  The dorm was in darkness with the three girls in bed, just like it had been when Niffy had opened the door earlier. But Mrs Knebworth was not in the mood for any pretence; she reached up and snapped on the overhead light.

  Suddenly Daffodil dorm, with its gaudy new pink and yellow wallpaper, was starkly visible.

  ‘Get up!’ Mrs Knebworth commanded. ‘Don’t even pretend for one moment that you’re not awake!’

  Reluctantly Milly, Anthea and Shyanne sat up in their beds and looked at the housemistress nervously.

  ‘Where is that bag?’ Mrs Knebworth snapped. ‘Don’t bother denying it; I saw a boy out in the garden with a bag not three minutes ago.’

  She walked over to the window and threw it open. The blue rope was still hanging from the rail of the fire escape.

  ‘This was the pulley, so where is the bag?’ the Neb demanded.

  She turned and faced them, crossed her strong arms under her terrifying bosom and stared her frosty, furious stare at each of the four girls in the room in turn.

  ‘Aha!’

  One of her hands shot out and she pointed at the incriminatin
g item. She’d spotted it badly hidden under Milly’s bed.

  Without any hesitation, she marched over and pulled it out.

  ‘Right, what have we got here?’

  She yanked the bag up, placed it on Milly’s bed and began to examine the contents.

  She unpacked one small bunch of pink roses, a box of chocolates, a jar of strawberry jam and a paper bag which turned out to contain three chocolate croissants.

  ‘Where’s the contraband?’ the Neb demanded. ‘I heard the clinking of bottles when this bag was being lifted up. And I think we all know exactly what that means.’

  ‘No, there weren’t any bottles,’ Milly insisted. ‘It was a friend of mine . . . my boyfriend, in fact . . . and he was just trying to be romantic.’

  ‘Ha!’ Mrs Knebworth spluttered.‘No one goes to this much trouble for romance. The sooner you girls find that out, the better. You were smuggling in booze. I know it. I heard it. Now, open up your chests of drawers while I search the cupboard.’

  Niffy stood very still beside the dorm door, wishing that she’d not got involved with this. It so wasn’t worth it. The only thing inside that shopper that was of any interest to her right now was the bag of croissants. She wouldn’t mind snaffling a couple of those and then heading quietly back to bed.

  But she had a feeling the Neb was not going to leave without a very, very big fuss. Look at the bossy old battle-axe, rifling through drawers, searching under beds and all through the cupboard. Bent double over the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe, Mrs Knebworth in her quilted dressing gown looked like a baby-pink, over-upholstered sofa.

  After a long and full search of every nook and cranny in the dorm, the Neb finally had to admit that she was not going to unearth any offending bottles.

  She got up from her knees, dusted herself down and told the dorm furiously, ‘Don’t think for one moment that I’m going to leave it here! So far, I’ve only found chocolates, flowers and pastries. But I saw the boy, I heard the clinking! And when I find the bottles . . . Oh yes, I will find them, mark my words, then you will be in such trouble, you won’t know what’s hit you. In the meantime’ – Mrs Knebworth’s eyes narrowed and she looked at each face in turn – ‘you are all gated for three weekends.’

  Chapter Three

  THE TERRIBLE, PIERCING wail of the boarding-house siren tore through Iris dorm at 7.30 the next morning. It was so loud and so unexpected that Amy and Min both jumped out of their beds feeling panicked. But after the adventures of the night before, Niffy and Gina found it much harder to get up, despite the terrible racket blasting from the speakers in the hall.

  All four girls headed for the big, communal bathroom to splash warm water on their sleepy faces – Niffy and Min – or cleanse, tone and moisturise – Amy and Gina.

  Then drawers were opened, backs were modestly turned and the four climbed into the clean and folded St Jude’s uniforms which had been untouched for the three weeks of the Christmas holidays.

  No school uniform could ever be lovely, but the St Jude’s uniform was particularly disgusting. For a start, it was green. Not bottle green or army green, but somewhere sludgy between the two. There was a baggy, pleated skirt, which only looked reasonable if it was several sizes too small. Then there was a cardigan, which again had to be worn shrunken if you didn’t want to look like a librarian.

  A boring white shirt and either green tights (yuck) or green woollen socks (yeurrrrgh) completed the look.

  Both Niffy and Amy, who had been at St Jude’s since they were eleven years old, looked at home in their well-worn uniforms. Min and Gina’s skirts and cardigans still looked too big and too neat. So Gina rolled up the waistband of her skirt to shorten it and pushed her knee socks down to mid-calf. At least that way she exposed some tanned Californian leg and didn’t look like a total nerd. She also messed up her blonde hair a bit and fixed a glittery clip into it. There were no boys at St Jude’s so it wasn’t worth applying make-up and going all out, but Gina still wanted to look cool.

  Amy, fully dressed now, pulled open her bottom drawer to get her school shoes and was astonished to see two bottles of wine and a bottle of cider lying in there.

  ‘There’s three bottles of booze in my drawer!’ she exclaimed. ‘Who put those in there?!’

  Gina and Niffy exchanged a guilty look.

  ‘Sorry,’ Gina began. ‘Niffy and I got caught up in this thing with the Daffodil dorm last night and . . .’

  ‘What thing?’ Amy asked. She sat down on her bed, tossed her blonde hair over her shoulders and set her pretty face to quizzical. ‘Last night? When? In the middle of the night? Why didn’t you wake us?’

  Min shook her head. ‘Don’t think I’d have wanted to get involved.’

  ‘What happened?’ Amy persisted.

  ‘Believe me, you were better off in bed,’ Niffy said.

  She and Gina gave their friends a quick update on last night’s events.

  ‘The Neb’s on the warpath, she knows these bottles are somewhere – and you’ve put them in my drawer!’ Amy spluttered when she’d heard enough. ‘Thanks a lot!’

  ‘Well, she couldn’t risk putting them in your suitcase, Min,’ Niffy chipped in, ‘in case of the stowaway spiders. Black widows . . . button spiders, violin spiders . . . I know just what can come back in luggage from South Africa.’

  ‘Nif!’ Min protested. ‘That was two whole years ago, and it was a harmless house spider, just a bit bigger than the ones you’re used to.’ But she was laughing at the memory. Niffy had screamed the dorm down and brought Mrs K running when a very dozy, squashed black insect had crawled from Min’s suitcase at the start of her second term.

  ‘Uhhhh!’ Niffy shuddered at the memory. She was an outdoorsy, adventurous type, but big fat hairy spiders . . . they were her weakness.

  ‘You weren’t involved, Amy, so I thought she wouldn’t look in here,’ Gina justified herself. ‘I wasn’t trying to get you in trouble or anything.’

  ‘Our first night back,’ Min sighed, ‘and you’re already in trouble.’

  For a moment, Niffy looked annoyed. How typical of goody-two-shoes Min. Min was never, ever in trouble, of course. There she was, hair all neatly brushed and held back with a school hairband, skirt the exact regulation length, earrings the correct tiny little studs. Min had probably done extra homework during the holidays.

  ‘Swot!’ Niffy said, but she shot Min a smile before adding gloomily, ‘Even though the Neb didn’t find the booze, me and the Daffodils are gated for three weekends.’

  ‘Unbelievable!’ Amy said. ‘So just how are you planning to get to your hockey training sessions?’

  Niffy, who had been chosen to play in the Scottish Under-Seventeen team, gave a shrug.

  ‘Hopeless, totally hopeless,’ came Amy’s response. ‘Well’ – she turned her attention back to the three bottles – ‘we can’t have the booze anywhere in this room. As soon as we set off for school, you can bet the Neb will be up here combing through our cupboards and our drawers like a demon. No sooner do we step out of this building than she will be searching high and low for that stuff. Sit,’ she instructed her friends, ‘and think! Where in this building will she not look?’

  For several moments, they sat in silence, then their thoughts were interrupted once again with the terrible wail of the siren calling them to breakfast.

  ‘I’ve got it!’ Amy exclaimed, jumping from her bed. She wrapped the bottles in a hand towel and headed out of the dorm with a curious Niffy hot on her heels.

  In the big bathroom – empty now, as almost everyone was heading downstairs to the dining room – she stepped into a toilet cubicle, carefully set her towel package down on the floor, then lifted the lid of the cistern.

  ‘Hold,’ she instructed Niffy, handing her the porcelain lid.

  The toilets were old-fashioned, from the Seventies or Eighties, with deep, water-filled tanks. So Amy could easily slide one of the wine bottles down into the water. Then she pulled the flush, just to ma
ke sure that everything still worked as usual.

  She replaced the lid and told her friend, ‘One down, two to go.’

  ‘Genius!’ Niffy replied.

  ‘Gated on your very first evening . . . that should be a record, except last term Gina was gated as soon as she set foot inside the building,’ Min reminded them.

  ‘Yup,’ Gina confirmed.

  The four friends were walking together along the path which connected the boarding house to the main St Jude’s school building. Lots of other boarders in school coats and woolly hats were hurrying along the same path as well. It was only a five minute walk, but in the raw January weather, it still felt too long.

  There were never more than about a hundred boarders at St Jude’s. The rest of the school was made up of day pupils. Every day, from every corner of Edinburgh and its surrounding towns, three hundred day girls filed into the imposing three-storey stone building of the senior school.

  ‘Did you see Angus at Christmas?’ Amy asked Niffy, so unexpectedly that Niffy blushed a frantic shade of pink.

  ‘No!’ came the surprised reply.

  ‘No?’ Amy asked. ‘Why not? I thought you two were mad about each other. I thought the only thing that was keeping you apart was the fact that unfortunately he’d gone on a French exchange programme.’

  ‘Huh!’ Niffy said, and didn’t look as if she was going to offer any more information, so Gina stepped in.

  ‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘I thought you guys were going to try and get together in the holidays?’

  ‘He was only home for a week, so he stayed with his parents and didn’t come to see his aunt and uncle – or me – because apparently he didn’t have time,’ Niffy declared huffily.

  ‘Oh,’ Amy said carefully, because she knew just how close Niffy and Angus had been last year.

  Angus was Niffy’s first ever boyfriend. He was a friend of her brother’s and a great guy. Amy didn’t think he was the kind of person who would hurt Niffy’s feelings deliberately.