The White Tower

by Cathryn Constable

  These questions went round and round in Livy’s mind with no conclusion. She carried on trailing her finger along the shelves, forgetting that she had been walking for some time. When Livy next opened her eyes she felt a tug of panic. Surely she had not walked so far? Looking around, she realized she was quite lost.

  The room she found herself in was small and dim with a half-open door ahead of her. Just as she turned to try and find her way back to her father, she heard footsteps in the room directly above and the sound of something dropped on the floor. A minute later, she thought that she heard a voice muttering on the other side of the bookshelf.

  She peered round the other side: no one.

  The footsteps were behind her now, quick and light. Had she gone too far this time with her games? Livy ducked behind a bookcase as the footsteps came closer, and peered through the gap between the books and the shelf above. She heard a voice, a voice that she recognized, muttering, ‘Where is it?’

  And then the quick tapping of high heels, heading back to the stairs.

  Livy left the small room and followed the sound of voices to her father’s office below. She crept down a few steps and saw two heads, close together. She made herself very still, feeling as if she could almost dissolve into the air. She listened.

  ‘I am concerned that this book is missing, James.’ Dr Smythe’s voice coiled up towards Livy. ‘Are you sure you can’t find it?’

  ‘I’ve looked everywhere,’ Livy’s father said, sounding worried. ‘Could the last librarian have done something with it? The library catalogue is in a mess and books have been moved.’

  ‘But Alan Hopkins would never have dared to take it,’ Dr Smythe said, her voice firm. She brushed her heavy pale hair out of her face, and Livy caught a glimpse of the gold charm bracelet. ‘I must find out about Peter Burgess’s very last experiment! I must find his notes. That book is the only way. It must be found, James! That is your job, after all.’

  Livy heard the woman’s heels tapping on the wooden floor. The door of the library closed.

  Why was Peter Burgess’s notebook so important to Dr Smythe? And why was she so interested in what Mr Hopkins knew? What was the woman trying to do?

  Slowly Livy went down.

  ‘Are you really in a lot of trouble if you can’t find the book she wants?’ she asked.

  ‘I won’t be in any trouble.’ Her father smiled, but he looked sad rather than excited about his dream job. ‘But I just have to find it,’ he said, so quietly that Livy could hardly hear him. ‘I don’t have any choice.’

  Livy climbed up to her room. The book that the librarian had given her was still on her bedside table. She traced the shape of the seagull once more. She felt so sorry for the man; it was terrible that Dr Smythe had sacked him and thrown him out of his house. That seemed wrong. But perhaps he had been very bad at his job. He was making her father’s life difficult, certainly. And how could this book about a seagull – how could any book – possibly help her?

  She looked up. The Sentinel with the broken wing was lit by the soft glow of the streetlights below. He was holding his head as if he were listening to something.

  ‘Hello?’ Livy whispered. ‘Can you hear me?’

  Wanting to feel light, weightless, as she had when she ran across the roof, Livy flung open the window, leant right out so that she could see the feathers on the Sentinel’s broken wing and let the air absorb her. The moon was being dragged along by a row of clouds, like horses pulling a silver carriage. She took a deep breath of the night air.

  ‘I know you can hear me,’ she whispered. And she thought she saw the Sentinel dip his head in agreement and shake his broken wing.

  Seconds later, she was scrabbling across the tiles, chasing the last of the day that slipped behind the roof. ‘I must be careful,’ she told herself, but she noticed that the less she cared whether she fell, the easier her path, the faster she could slip through the air. The heaviness that had fastened around her after the day at school lifted into the air like smoke. ‘This is like walking on a tightrope.’ She lifted her leg in front of her. ‘I might try a cartwheel, like in the circus!’ She lengthened her stride and laughed as she hung in the air between each careless step.

  Another leap and she was on the roof of the White Tower. She drew the night air into her lungs and it made her feel even lighter.

  She went right up to the edge of the tower and leant over. Had she really done this the night before? She remembered that strange sensation of how she felt the air had been solid and she could push herself into it and not fall.

  She leant a little further, a little further . . . She felt her heels rise up off the dull lead that covered the roof. Humans could not fly. So why did she feel as if her blood was made of air and that she could step forwards and not fall? Even as her head told her she was wrong to feel this way, her heels had lifted and she was climbing up on to the parapet.

  Now her toes were right on the edge. She lifted her arms and leant forward and felt no fear. A breeze swirled around her and she had the uncomfortable sensation that the Sentinel had just shaken out its wings. That someone was watching her.

  ‘No.’ She heard a voice right next to her. ‘I won’t let you.’

  A strange bitter smell, like burning metal, filled her nostrils, and she felt herself thrown back. She landed against the smooth stone of the Sentinel’s gown.

  ‘What were you thinking? To stand on the edge like that! Again!’

  A boy stood above her.

  She was so startled that she couldn’t answer.

  ‘Did you think you wouldn’t fall?’ he said, angrily.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ Livy gasped. She looked around, confused. The roof was too small for her not to have noticed him. ‘Have you been watching me?’

  The boy did not reply immediately. He stared at her intently, as if he was thinking what he should say. He was taller than her, and very thin. But he could not have been more than two, possibly three years older. He had a narrow face with high, sharp cheekbones and his mouth, although it was full and red, was set in a serious expression. His skin was very pale, like moonlight, and in stark contrast to the inky blackness of his eyebrows and hair. His pale face seemed to float above a loose white shirt and a long black overcoat; one of the buttons had come loose and was hanging by a red thread. The gold flecks in his eyes burnt.

  ‘Why are you staring at me like that?’ Livy said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘The same as you.’ The boy lifted his chin. ‘I don’t belong down there.’ Livy noticed he spoke with a strange accent that she didn’t recognize.

  ‘You remind me of someone.’ The boy spoke very quietly now.

  ‘Who?’

  He shook his head. ‘Someone from a long time ago. Someone far away.’

  ‘Well, I’m just Livy Burgess,’ Livy said. ‘No one special.’

  As she said these words, the boy looked suddenly shocked. ‘Oh, you should leave Temple College,’ he said. ‘Go and not come back!’ He stepped back from her. ‘You’re the wrong element. You will spoil everything! You Burgesses made trouble before! Your experiments, your ideas . . .’

  A bird swooped into Livy’s face and she put her hands up and ducked. She felt the bitter air stir around her and heard the bird fly away, its wings singing.

  When she dropped her hands, she was alone. The boy was gone. He must have slipped behind the row of chimney pots.

  But how would he get down? Was there some other, easier, way up to the roof?

  I don’t belong down there.

  He’d been angry with her, but he’d also made her feel better. There was someone else who was struggling to feel that they belonged.

  And who do I remind him of? Livy felt as if her brain was frowning with the effort of trying to think about the boy’s strange words. It was odd, because she, too, felt that she had met the boy before. As if he was a friend that she had, until the very moment when he had spoken to her, forgotten that she had, one wh
o was angry about something she had done. But what?

  ‘Tom!’ she cried as she dropped down from the window ledge into her room. ‘You should be asleep.’

  Her little brother was sitting on the side of her bed in his pyjamas. He made no comment on the fact that she had just climbed in through the window.

  ‘Did you see Count Zacha?’ he said. ‘On the roof?’

  ‘Count Zacha?’ Livy turned and closed the window. ‘Of course not!’ But her pulse had jumped. Had Tom been watching her?

  She picked him up firmly. ‘Time for bed.’

  ‘I can see him.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Livy sang.

  ‘In the sky. He flies past my window.’

  ‘Of course he does,’ Livy agreed; always the best option if you didn’t want Tom to make a fuss.

  ‘Your face is as cold as the sky,’ Tom whispered as he put his arms round her.

  ‘And you are very tired,’ Livy said. ‘It’s too late for a little boy like you to be awake.’

  ‘I am not a little boy.’ Tom shook his head. ‘I am a flying fighter like Count Zacha!’

  ‘Even Count Zacha needs to go to bed,’ Livy said. She carried him down the stairs to his bedroom. The house was silent, her parents already asleep.

  ‘Count Zacha never sleeps.’ Tom yawned as Livy tucked him in. ‘He told me.’

  Livy spent the next day in a daze. She heard people talk to her and answered them, she did her work in lessons without too much staring out of the window. She again sat next to Alex when he slipped into the seat next to her while Celia was chatting. He again helped her to find the answers but without saying anything and with his cheeks permanently flushed. Livy noticed this, but felt disconnected. All the while there was a part of her that was trying to make sense of what had happened on the roof the night before. That part of her mind was filled with the light night air, the bright silver moon and a boy’s gold-flecked green eyes.

  Who was he?

  And why had he spoken to her in that angry and perplexing way? Did you think that you wouldn’t fall? Livy shivered as she remembered his voice, full of moonlight. But stern, too, as if he really cared about her. She put her hand up to her cheek as if she could stop herself blushing. She groaned. How could she have been so stupid? I should have said something, she thought. I should have thought of something clever or funny, something impressive that would have made him think that I am brave and clever and different from anyone else he had ever met. She realized that she should have said something that would have made him want to be her friend. But – of course! – she had been too shocked to say anything other than to ask him where he came from!

  Amy clicked her fingers in Livy’s face as they went up the oak staircase. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Earth to Livy!’

  Martha, her hair today in a glossy sheet held back by a thin hairband, nudged her. ‘Are you OK, Livy?’ She sounded concerned. ‘Amy! Don’t you think Livy looks really really pale?’

  Amy squinted. ‘White as a sheet.’

  Celia looked worried. ‘You do look pale. Did you sleep OK?’

  ‘Yes!’ Livy said, trying out a small laugh that was intended to make her appear carefree. ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘I slept like a log.’

  But Martha, with her ridiculous fussing, had broken the spell and Livy would have to recreate the picture that had been so vivid in her mind. She focused on the sharp smell of the night air, the moon hanging low over the river and the Sentinel’s broken wing. She felt her stomach turn as she remembered how she had leant so far over the parapet and allowed her heels to rise up off the lead. And the boy – he now filled her mind with his moon-white skin, black hair and piercing green eyes. She avoided Celia’s intrusive gaze as his words rang in her ears. I don’t belong down there. Those words meant that there was someone else who felt as out of place as she did. Someone else who only felt alive when they could reach out and brush the sky with their fingertips.

  But what could he have meant by those angry words, You Burgesses . . .? What trouble could any Burgess have caused? And, even more stinging: You’re the wrong element. What did he know about her feeling out of place? She had told no one.

  Standing outside a classroom as she waited for the pupils to come out, their voices loud and confident, she felt suddenly very alone even though she was surrounded by a crush of bodies. She could, surely, just allow her body to float up to the roof. Perhaps the boy would be there, waiting for her, and she would be able to convince him that she was no trouble to him. That they were the same. Maybe she would even be brave enough to tell him that she had never before felt such a strange sensation when she had met someone, as if they had already met. She shook her head. Where could she have met him? And when? She had no clear recollection of it. She thought again about his strange clothes; they looked as if he had found them in a dressing-up box. And his accent: she had lived in London all her life but had never heard words pronounced that way, like small hammers striking metal.

  ‘Does the school have a caretaker?’ Livy asked Celia.

  Celia looked surprised. ‘There’s a maintenance department,’ she said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I just wondered if the caretaker had a son who lived at the school.’

  Celia was staring at her closely, her large violet eyes troubled. She shook her head. ‘I’ve never seen anyone who looks as if they might be the caretaker’s son. Why do you ask?’

  Livy shrugged her shoulders and tried out her new fake carefree laugh again. ‘I don’t know. I just wondered.’

  If only I could get up on the roof right now, she thought. I would make that boy would understand how I feel. Because he’s right: I really don’t fit in down here.

  Livy felt no more included by the end of the morning; all the other pupils seemed to accept the formality and the rules, seeming to revel in the sensation that this made Templars somehow superior.

  In the queue for the dining hall at lunchtime, Celia explained, ‘We do this Rich Scholar Poor Scholar lunch once a week since Dr Smythe turned up. If you get a poor lunch, it’s meant to make you feel like the poor boys that Peter Burgess educated at his own expense. Those boys must have been half starved! Take a ticket and hand it in. You’ll be told which lunch to take.’

  She was distracted by laughter. Joe Molyns could not keep a straight face as his friends took handfuls of tickets in the hope that they might get a decent lunch. Perhaps that was why, having handed in her ticket, Livy took the wrong tray.

  ‘You had a Poor Scholar ticket,’ Celia whispered, her eyes sliding towards the older boys. ‘You’ve got the Rich Scholar lunch. Quick!You have to put it back! Dr Smythe is staring at you!’

  Livy put the tray laden with food back, her cheeks flaming as the group of boys behind them – including Joe Molyns – turned to look. Mahalia would have said that she wanted the ground to swallow her. But Livy hoped for the sky: that she could just dissolve like smoke and drift upwards.

  ‘She’s new,’ Celia explained in a tiny voice.

  ‘It happens,’ Joe said cheerily. ‘We were all new once.’

  Celia turned away, overcome. Sheepishly, Livy picked up the right tray on which there was just a piece of dark bread and a bowl of thin, grey-looking soup, no more appetizing than a puddle.

  ‘Hey!’ She turned to see Joe Molyns standing behind her, with his Rich Scholar tray. ‘Why not take mine?’ He shoved the tray at her and the soup splashed out.

  ‘No. Thank you. Really. Very kind. Not hungry.’

  ‘Of course you are. I’ve got football practice in five minutes. I’ll never have time to eat all this.’

  Livy knew what was happening as he started piling plates on to her tray. The capillaries in her cheeks were expanding and filling with blood. Her face would be scarlet.

  ‘That’s it!’ Joe exclaimed. ‘I knew it! The bus! We had a conversation about gravity! I knew I’d seen you somewhere before!’

  He picked up Livy’s bowl of soup and put it down on his tray, spilling half of the
thin, grey liquid. ‘I never forget a face!’ And then, Livy already forgotten, he turned to join his friends at their table.

  ‘You saw Joe on the bus?’ Celia whispered as they went to join Martha and Amy. ‘And had a conversation about gravity?’ Her eyes were round. ‘I’ve never had an actual conversation with Joe. Apart from just now. But I only said a few words and then my brain exploded and I couldn’t think of anything else to say.’

  ‘I dropped my travelcard, that’s all,’ Livy said. ‘It wasn’t what I would call a conversation.’

  ‘Celia!’ Martha said, patting the bench next to her. ‘Come and tell us all about it.’

  Celia frowned. ‘He helped Livy when she got confused about lunch.’ She stared at Joe’s back. ‘He’s so kind.’

  Livy remembered how Mahalia had said a similar thing about her crush when all the boy had done was offer his friend some chewing gum.

  ‘Oh no,’ Amy said, dropping her gaze. ‘Here comes Alex. He’s staring straight at me! Don’t look up. Don’t give him any encouragement.’

  Under her lashes, Livy saw Alex stop next to her. He didn’t seem interested in Amy at all. He stared at the empty place, but when Livy didn’t look up, he walked quickly away.

  ‘That’s right, move along and sit with the freaks and the geeks,’ Martha said.

  ‘So uncool. Thinking he was welcome here.’ Amy smirked.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Livy said, feeling angry with herself for stupidly doing what Amy had told her to.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Amy said, in mock surprise. ‘What’s right with him?’

  Livy wanted to apologize to Alex for the way he had been treated at lunchtime – for the way she had been so cowardly – and say that she would have liked him to join them, but he just scowled at her as they waited outside the classroom before going in for their Science lesson.

  They heard Dr Smythe’s heels in the corridor and the pupils, who had been chatting and laughing, unpacking their bags or lounging across desks, went quiet when the headmistress walked briskly into the classroom. Pupils shifted in their seats and sat up straight as she took her place in front of them. ‘Good afternoon,’ she said, and the class mumbled a ragged ‘Good afternoon, Dr Smythe,’ back at her.