by Kim Newman
Many players were already at the Finish. Humblebumblers were in a worse state after a night’s indoor roistering than folk who’d chased around fogbound streets trying to win the Game. Primrose Quell and Miss Steps had limped home, with some of their surly gang. Draycott’s would already be plotting next year’s revenge.
Amy couldn’t immediately see Larry. She was easy to miss, of course.
The Finish was an exciting prospect, but much of the chatter in the Drearcliff party was of tea and toast. Especially tea. Just now, it seemed a miracle elixir. The least the Undertaking could do was lay on a slap-up breakfast.
‘Show ’em the scarlet,’ said Frecks.
Light Fingers produced the toby and held it high.
‘Headers,’ said Frecks, ‘give us marching orders. Let’s romp to the Finish chins up and chests puffed.’
Haldane was jollied out of her introspection.
‘Yes, indeed,’ she said. ‘Drearcliff Spirit. At the right, off!’
It wasn’t a parade. Their close order wouldn’t pass inspection, but this wasn’t that prideful sort of march. This was a return from the wars, with trophies and honours. And wounds.
Headers – General Haldane of the Queen Mary’s Women’s Auxiliary Army Cadet Corps – marched like an automaton built for stamping cobblestones to powder. Frecks fell in with her and the rest of the girls got in step… except Knowles, who tried to keep time while skipping. Even Dyall, bringing up the rear, swung her arms like a wind-up toy soldier.
Miss Gossage buzzed again.
Amy saw another bundle between the Misses Gossage and Vernon. Small, and wound thickly with blankets – with a woolly bobble hat on top.
Trude Smarthe of the Brain-Boxes?
No, it was their own Larry Laurence.
Hooray!
Was H’Alfie ’Ampton lingering for thanks or reward, or had he vanished into the fog? Amy should track the street lad down and see him set on a better course in life. Or at least get a decent meal in his tummy and a newer, warmer coat on his back.
Someone grunted, but Amy didn’t care.
Mr Jay sat behind a baize-topped folding table. A junior undertaker stood by him, holding a large black umbrella. Another watched the Drearcliff column march home, a spyglass held up to one lens of his spectacles.
Various parties crowded around. Even a few Humblebumblers deigned to take notice. Amy assumed they had bets down on the outcome.
Haldane marched the team past Miss Gossage and up to the referee.
She produced the bits of the Piccadilly toby from her reticule and laid them on the table.
The attendant with the spyglass aimed it at the shards. Mr Jay held up a hand, thumb down.
‘Discounted,’ said the attendant with the umbrella. ‘And voided.’
Haldane stepped back. Light Fingers stepped forward and put the scarlet jug in front of Mr Jay.
Thumb up.
‘Counted. Valid. One point to Drearcliff Grange School for Girls.’
Frecks and Devlin launched a premature ‘hurrah’.
The swaddled Laurence hadn’t stirred. The goose was asleep. Understandable. The Sausage would put salt on her tail, wouldn’t she?
Miss Gossage buzzed…
The message came through, but scrambled.
Everyone looked at Amy in expectation.
‘Show us your hand, Amy,’ said Stephen Swift. ‘You’ve three trumps hidden, haven’t you?’
A quease sprouted in the pit of Amy’s stomach.
She saw two of herself, reflected darkly in Mr Jay’s circular mirrors. Her mouths were open. She was shocked and surprised.
The referee waited. The spyglass was aimed at her.
Someone hog-grunted. Nasty chuckles rippled among the Draycott’s faction.
‘Pardon me for one moment,’ said Amy, holding up a finger.
She turned and trotted-flew across the square, mothwings a-flap. Toes off the ground, paddling against pavement and grass.
As she neared the cocooned Laurence, the Third’s eyes popped open.
The girl was yawning when Amy laid a hand on her.
‘I was having a lovely dream,’ she said.
‘You can tell us about it later, Larry,’ said Amy. ‘Where are the tobies?’
Laurence was confused. Amy’s quease became a pang.
Frecks ambled over. She would sort this all out.
‘Ho, young Larry… we have ranged far and wide through shot and fire to meet at this brave dawn.’
‘Serafine,’ said Laurence, smiling, eyes wide.
‘Amy gave you three jugs, my girl,’ said Frecks. ‘Now’s the time to cough ’em up. The sun’s nearly ’bove the horizon.’
‘Oh, those,’ said Larry. ‘They aren’t in my pocket any more. I got an awful ache from keeping them in so long.’
The pang became a stabbing. Amy was a foot or more off the ground, angled so her shadow fell on Laurence.
‘Where are the tobies?’ Amy asked.
Laurence smiled and said, ‘Safe.’
The stabbing went away and Amy set her feet on the ground.
Miss Gossage was unaccountably not congratulating the team.
After a pause, Frecks asked, ‘Safe where, Larry?’
Larry’s hand poked out of her blankets and she pointed…
‘Mr Alfred is taking care of them,’ she said.
Amy and Frecks turned round. Larry was pointing at the knot of fellows no one paid much attention to. Their faces were all unfinished – handsome, but uninteresting. Cheeks raw or downy, depending on whether they’d mastered shaving. Amy hadn’t thought even to tell one Humblebumbler from another. What earthly use was knowing which was Jolyon Goodfellowe and which Pericles Pfister? They were all of the same stripe. Even Geoffrey Jeperson, the Captain, only stood out because his cricket cap had an extra stripe.
The lads cheerily waved at the girls. Someone whistled. Merriment rolled across the square.
Amy looked from face to face and didn’t find the sneak she expected.
She was too shocked to feel anything. Not so her best friend.
All Frecks’ face turned the colour of her bruise.
‘Oh, Larry,’ she said, expressing a century of sorrow and disappointment in the simple name. ‘What have you done?’
Laurence was fully awake now – and stricken to the heart.
Frecks turned away as tears started from the younger girl’s eyes. Larry’s chin wobbled. She turned urgently to Amy, imploring her to prevent an abandonment… hurt, confused, angry, desperate.
Amy didn’t have time for the little twit just now.
The Humble College lads bellied up to Mr Jay’s table as if it were a saloon bar.
Thump… a cheer…
Amy and Frecks raced back towards the table.
Another thump… a louder cheer…
Amy and Frecks barged through the boys, just in time to see a final toby jug plonked beside two others.
A great tumult of back-clapping and good fellowship erupted.
It died – or, at least, paused – after a withering flash of black specs.
‘Counted, counted, counted,’ said the attendant. ‘Valid, valid, valid. Three points – and a match victory – to St Cuthbert’s School for the Sons of the Humble and Pious.’
‘Primus,’ said Mr Jay. He had a broad, bitter Northern accent. The back-clapping resumed in earnest. Throats opened to regale the Houses of Parliament with an ancient, lascivious song in Latin. The ditty celebrated the exploits of a St Cuthbert who did not much resemble the renowned Northumbrian hermit. This fellow was more interested in chasing shepherdesses than attaining the grace of God.
The chimes of Big Ben rang out and the song matched the metre.
Amy found her own back being clapped by bluff fellows. The clapping felt like being thumped.
Frecks had to slap exultant Team Captain Geoffrey Jeperson when he tried to kiss her on the lips and dance her round in a jig. No shepherdess she.
; A victory for… Humble College?
How?
The hour tolled. Six resounding bongs.
Suddenly, Amy was flanked – Quell held one of her arms and Swift the other. Their matched smiles were serpent-like, not the apish grins of the Humblebumblers.
‘See the buckos enjoying this, dimmie,’ whispered Quell. ‘They think they’ve won something worth winning. It’s their right, you see. Always has been, always will be. They barely have to stir themselves. They don’t understand why you’ll hate them for it. They think it’s funny you take the Game seriously. These past few years, they’ve sat it out and let Drearcliff and Draycott’s pass prizes back and forth between us. When we win, it doesn’t count really – but they think they’re encouraging us, letting us take part, put up a good showing. They know they’ll take the prizes in the end… for they own everything. It’s been handed down to them from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, all the way back to 1066.’
‘You didn’t think you could really beat me,’ whispered Miss Steps.
Even in her cold rage, Amy thought she could and that she had – no matter what Swift said now. She hoped the harpy’s hand still bled. She should have bitten clean through to bone.
‘We gave you to them, Amy Thomsett,’ said Quell. ‘They picked you as easiest to gull.’
The St Cuthbert’s team elevated one of their number onto their shoulders and bounced him around the square. Amy didn’t recognise his face, but knew the crutch he was carrying and the rags he wore.
‘Alfred Henry Wax,’ said Swift. ‘Never shows the same face twice. That’s not the real him, no more than the crippled beggar. You know, I don’t even think he’s a good actor. The disguise is excellent – you have to give him that. What he does with paint and crepe is a wonder. Lon Chaney couldn’t touch him. But the accent was all over the place. No one talks like that, Thomsett. And, really, didn’t shuffling urchins die out when they transported the Artful Dodger?’
A.H. Wax didn’t look like H’Alfie ’Ampton.
He was taller, longer-faced, redder-lipped.
He saw Amy and waved, shrugging something that might have been apology… not that he really cared or expected her to. She wasn’t worth gloating over.
Amy wished she were still wearing Count DeVille’s cloak.
‘You went darker than we reckoned, though,’ said Quell. ‘If you’re expelled for this, there’ll be a place for you at Draycott’s. With a little work unstiffening your stays, you could be a proper discredit to the Disapproved School. Think about it.’
Not Kentish Glory. Death’s-head Hawk.
Amy reckoned Draycott’s would drop the gloveless Poll Sparks from their team and had learned something about loose cannons from Aurelia Avalon. The irony was that the House of Reform needed girls with a glimmer of the Drearcliff Spirit. Quell wouldn’t want to admit it but she was Team Captain at her new school because her old school prepared her for it.
The St Cuthbert’s song had more verses than any non-Humblebumbler could be bothered to memorise or bear to hear. The pious rake pursued the lasses of Lindisfarne in unsaintly fashion through at least a dozen more. Amy’s Latin wasn’t up to the bawdier couplets, which she suspected was a mercy.
‘Why?’ Amy asked, hearing a bleat in her own voice.
‘Why d’you think, dimmie,’ said Quell. ‘They’re rich and we’re… unscrupulous. The Humblebumblers did what they always do. They paid us.’
‘What about…’
‘The brats? Easy. We bribed the works foreman at Trimingham’s to loosen a nut and puncture a tank. The best Ability of all – cold cash. Takes no special training. No hidden Talent.’
Frecks had seen off Geoffrey Jeperson and pushed in to extract Amy from the grip of the enemy.
Swift’s mouth pursed – one of her Siegfried’s leaf tells – and she blinked – another! – as she nodded at Frecks, expecting to land an invisible blow to her already-bruised face.
‘It’s no go, Stevie,’ said Quell. ‘That bloody silver protects her.’
‘How’d she get the eye?’
Amy wondered that too.
‘Your Strangler deserved a thorough thumping. I doffed the coif so I was free to administer the sort of thorough punishment a parfait gentil knight would refrain from. I hope she appreciates the effort.’
Frecks got Amy away from the Draycott’s girls.
‘Well played, ladies,’ said Geoffrey Jeperson, draping arms around both of them. He stuck his mucky lips on Frecks’ cheek again and Amy’s for the first time… that did not count as a kiss.
Certainly not as a first kiss. Though it was April, Amy would start a diary for this year – she hadn’t kept one in yonks – and fill in pages and pages with what dull stuff she could remember of since Christmas, just to be certain to write an entry in capital letters stating plainly that on this morning Geoffrey Jeperson’s lips did not touch hers and barely brushed her cheek… which, somehow, was wet. Ugh!
He had beer on his breath. His blue eyes sparkled with a moral imbecility worse than malice. If you stuck a Christmas pudding sixpence in his chin cleft, it’d stay put.
The Humblebumbler let them go and rejoined the elevation of Alfred Henry Wax.
Amy was fagged out.
On Mr Jay’s table were three tobies in one group and one-and-a-smashed-muddle in the other.
‘Secundus,’ said Mr Jay.
‘A match placing to Drearcliff Grange School for Girls,’ said the official.
‘Well done,’ said Miss Gossage, as if she’d just watched her cats thrown into a furnace one by one.
‘I understand all gels in the team will get book tokens.’
The Humblebumblers piled into an open-topped sports car and drove the wrong way around the square. Alfred Henry Wax posed on the bonnet like the Spirit of Ecstasy.
Amy thought everyone was looking at her.
But they weren’t.
No, no one was. They were looking away from her.
She was a foot off the ground. Her insides empty. Her neck itching.
Silence in her head – no buzzes from the Sausage, not the cloak’s whispers… if this last green bottle should accidentally fall, no one would give a fig. You could get change from a fig and it still wouldn’t be what anyone would give.
Frecks put an arm around Amy and settled her on the ground. She gave her arm an understanding squeeze.
The Great Game had been played and won… by the rules.
‘Mistrust,’ said Light Fingers, to no one in particular and not very helpfully.
Miss Gossage swallowed a sob and jammed her hand into her mouth.
She remembered boldness, but always forgot mistrust.
This hit the Sausage worse than anyone else, Amy realised. Worse even than Amy, who was gripped by a calm acceptance that would give way to tears and screams if she didn’t keep hold of herself. For the girls, the worst had happened… and they were too exhausted and wrung-out to make a fuss. Miss Gossage had to go back to Drearcliff Grange and report to Dr Swan. After last year’s fiasco, a movement rose to depose the Sausage. The team might have been Miss Borrodale’s. Headmistress in her wisdom gave the teacher – an Unusual, the only one on the staff – a chance at redemption. Which had not turned out well.
By Miss Gossage and Laurence – who was grimly wiping away tears that would not stop flowing – was Hjordis Bok, her knee bandaged.
‘A Humble College harry – a blister called Pfister – brought me here in his car,’ she explained. ‘Said they couldn’t leave baggages lying about in the fog. They wanted to be perfectly decent about it.’
‘What utter curs!’ exclaimed Frecks.
‘Yes,’ agreed Bok. ‘Pfister asked for the telephone number of the Goneril dorm. He talked up the prospect of driving me down to Valmouth next Bank Holiday, for high tea and champers at the Hurstpierpoint Hotel. Said he didn’t mind the limp. I gave him a wrong number.’
‘Good for you,’ said Frecks.
‘Then he tr
ied exactly the same line on some sulk from Draycott’s he had to untangle from a lamp post. I think she gave him a wrong number too.’
‘Good for her, I suppose,’ said Frecks.
‘I was as much a chump as any of us,’ said Bok. ‘Worse.’
‘I blame myself,’ said Amy.
‘Don’t,’ said Frecks.
‘Plenty of others will,’ warned Bok.
Amy looked about for Larry. She knew how hard Frecks’ brief, instantly regretted glance of disappointment would go with the girl. She would feel that worse than the rest of the team felt the loss of the Game.
The Humblebumblers were tooting their horn and singing their horrible song. Quell, Swift and Miss Vernon were press-ganged to join the crew, and crammed onto the laps of victorious chaps, persuaded to come along on what promised to be a rag to end all rags. Swift blew a nasty kiss at Amy.
A traffic policeman – bright white gauntlets shining – stepped out of a hut where the road around the square divided in a scissors point. He tooted his whistle at the rotary rebels and Alfred Henry Wax knocked off his helmet with a swipe of his crutch. He lost his grip on the prop, which went sailing out of his hands and whooshed towards Amy, Bok, Frecks and Miss Gossage.
Amy saw the fellow’s face – the face he was wearing – freeze and express concern… he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone and was mortified.
The crutch came, whirling like a boomerang… and stopped in mid-air, clutched in Amy’s mentacle.
She squeezed and snapped it in two.
‘Good save,’ said Frecks.
With sportsmanlike admiration, the carload of revellers cheered for Amy.
They’d add a verse to the song, celebrating her good heart in Latin.
Amy turned away and almost ran into Mr Jay, who was being helped back into his hearse by his attendants.
She saw her white distorted oval face in his glasses.
She looked like a doll. She looked broken.
No, that wasn’t her face. That was someone standing behind her.