Fairies and Felicitations (Scholars and Sorcery) (7 page)

I suspect Esther would not blush at a boy's kisses.

I wheel my steed down and to the ground. Ember lands happily, eager at the friendly scent of horses and unicorns.

"Ember! Welcome back! And you too, Charley."

I grin happily down at Miss Roberts, feeling a little better at the sight of her weather-beaten face. Miss Roberts, Esther once pointed out to me in a meaningful kind of way, is what happens when pale-skinned girls go riding for years and simply won't make the effort to shade their complexions. I don't see what's so bad, myself, in a bit of sunburn and wrinkles. Miss Roberts' face is rather nice, like reddish aged leather. She, quite frankly, is a trump. Some of the other girls dislike her and are a bit afraid of her blunt, mannish ways, but there is more real kindness in Miss Roberts' little finger than Miss Evans, our fluffy little English mistress with her trail of adoring acolytes, has in all her over-perfumed body.

Miss Roberts is a Fernleigh Manor old girl and a friend of Miss Carroll, our headmistress, and the girls who bring their own steeds always stable them at Briar Stables. She hires out horses and unicorns to the girls who love to ride and don't have their own, poor things, and is patient teaching even the little ones. Not pegasi, though. Ember is the only pegasus who uses the special paddock that a wizard with a gift of binding enspelled to prevent flying beasts taking off without a rider. This gives me a kind of idea, a fragile and new little idea that, like a gryphon hatchling, needs to be hidden deep down in the straw of my mind before it can stand to be looked at too much.
 

We settle Ember together. Sometimes, I suspect Miss Roberts loves Ember almost as much as I do, and it makes me feel better about being separated from him.
 

We walk together back into the sunlight and I push the air out of my lungs in long, deep gust. It still tastes a little acrid in my mouth, from the soot that flies up from Ember's mane in a high wind. I love the taste.

"All tip-top at home, Charley?" Miss Roberts' tone is as light as a voice as deep and husky as hers will ever be, but the glance she shoots me is sharp.

I think of everything that was worrying me on the short ride over, and I wish that I could find the words to tell her. Somehow, I think she'll understand better than most. But the words are just impossible. I'm a schoolgirl, not even eighteen yet—how can I talk about kissing, and marriage, and not sound foolish? Most of all, how can I tell a grownup, of whose private inside life and any past romances I know nothing, how horrible the kissing made me feel? Won't she laugh at me? Or, if she is a spinster who has never even had a drop of romance, wouldn't it make her feel I was being wicked and ungrateful?

I lift one shoulder slowly, then let it drop. "It's just hard coming back, after long hols." Miss Roberts understands, better than anyone, what coming back can sometimes mean to me. "I'll be fine once I shake down."

"All right, then. But you know - if you need anything, ask Miss Carroll if you can come over for tea. Not tea, though - filthy muck. But I'm told I can make a wicked cup of black coffee." She squeezes my shoulder.

"I'm fine," I say. "So long."

I can feel Miss Roberts' gaze on the small of my back as she shuts the gate behind me and I set off down the road to the school. It's only a short walk. It's strictly forbidden to leave Fernleigh Manor's boundaries alone without a permission slip, but there's quite a large gap in the hedge nearby, and I'm not the only one who slips out to Briar Stables every now and then. Miss Roberts is too much of a sport to report us for popping down to see her charges.

Somewhat to my surprise, Esther and Cecily are waiting for me by the gap in the hedge. We slip back into the school proper together and cross the playing fields, an arm slipped into each of mine. It’s somehow warming to have the company, that they thought of me.

There’s no doubt that my time at Fernleigh Manor has been made terrifically easy for me because Cecily and Esther took me up, as—well, as a kind of hobby, I should say. I’m in the privileged position of being a bit of a favoured and indulged pet of these two. I’ve enjoyed the position since not long after I first turned up at Fernleigh Manor as a sullen, lonely waif of a second-former, determinedly hostile to the indistinguishable girls in gym slips who shared the bell-regimented life in which I found myself—so different to my home, overrun with children, animals and magical beasts. I had snubbed every offer of friendship from what seemed to me incredibly stupid girls in order to spend my time in the first form science classroom, attempting to communicate with the almost mindless fairies in the aviary. It was only when I successfully summoned a Cait Sith kitten to the Blue Dormitory that I discovered that that least two of the silly creatures weren’t so bad. Cecily, kind enough to wake the bad-tempered newcomer for a midnight feast, found Meggs returned to full visibility and curled up asleep on my stomach.

 
There’s just something about trying to hide a magical feline in a boarding school dormitory that breaks down the most stubborn of barriers between collaborators. By the time Meggs was discovered by a prefect and shipped home to my parents, leaving the three of us with enough lines to keep us busy all term, Cecily and Esther had adopted me as their own particular concern. Esther began including me in the practical jokes with which she plagued the mistresses, Cecily urged me to try out for hockey, and all of a sudden school did not seem such a purgatory after all.

 
I squeeze their arms affectionately.

“So, did I miss anything? Any word on who is Head Girl?” I ask, lifting a meaningful eyebrow at Cecily. The Head Girl and the Games Captain are generally from School House—not entirely fair, I suppose, but it always seems to work out that way—and Cecily is very much our shining star. She sometimes tops even Esther in class, is brilliant at games, and popular with everyone from her classmates to the little ones, to whom she has all the glamour of a wild Colonial girl.
 

She shrugs carelessly, although she looks straight ahead without turning to look at me. “It won’t be me, I think,” she says, and I don’t think it’s entirely false modesty. Cecily really doesn’t ever seem to realise her standing in the school. “They’ve given me a good run, lower fourth form and fifth, and I suppose they’ll give someone else a shot this year. Maybe it will be our dear Esther,” she adds, a little malice in her tone. “After all, she’s our most shining scholar.”

“What, a bad influence like me?” Esther opens her wicked eyes wide. “Surely they won’t risk the snowy morals of the school to my tender mercies.”
 

Cecily frowns, as if she doesn’t quite find that quite as funny as Esther does, and I can’t think of a single reply. I don’t even understand the joke. Esther can be a little less than straightforward sometimes, and I don’t always understand her sense of humour, but I’ve never known her to do anything really bad. I brush the exchange aside as something unimportant.
 

Instead, I ask: “Any new girls?”

It’s really just something to say, not with any real expectation of a positive answer. It’s rare to take new girls into the upper forms, and even though Blue Dormitory has dwindled a bit in number over the last few terms, I don’t really expect a replacement.
 

The other two exchange one of the quick, sideways glances that always leave me feeling uncomfortably excluded, as if they are communicating in ways that cut me out. They are both looking past me, right in the middle of them, and it makes me uncomfortable, somehow. Why don’t they just say what they mean? My brothers don’t do all this silent talking with their eyes, even the twins, who can do thought-to-thought communication. It’s just silly girl stuff.

“Of course, you were off putting your baby to bed and you missed the excitement,” Cecily says.

“Excitement?”

“The arrival of the fashion plate,” Esther says, as if that explains everything.

Cecily giggles, suddenly looking much younger than a Senior Prefect should. “Well, at least, she looked that way to us. If she hadn’t been wearing a Fernleigh uniform, I would have assumed she was a grown up sister of one of the girls, or even a mistress. Too well dressed for a mistress, I suppose.”

“Gym slip by way of Paris,” Esther says in her slow, honeyed voice with its undercurrents of malice. I don’t always like her as much, when she talks like this, all sidelong, somehow. “It’s a work of beauty, let me tell you. And her hair, permanent waved by the very best London stylists—not that I expect you could tell one way or the other,” she added, her gaze lighting on my hair.

I shrug off the comment. I have no use for spending hours primping and preening my hair, like Miss Evans, or Esther, for that matter, especially since when it’s any kind of length my hair forms ringlets, which take so much time to keep neat. Crop it short, and then there’s no fuss.

“Oh, well. She’ll settle in well enough, no matter how expensive the uniform is,” I say. I’m not as interested in the new girl as they seem to be; I’ve already dismissed her as not my type. “Miss Carroll won’t put up with any nonsense.” Miss Carroll is the Headmistress of Fernleigh Manor, but she’s also the Head of our House, one of the advantages - or disadvantages, depending on how you look at it - of being in School House. For all that, she’s not a bad sort. Not precisely the kind that you’d want to curl up on a stool by her knee and tell her your secret troubles, but pretty decent.

 
We head toward the Sanatorium. My trunk is already at the school, sent on by train—I could hardly bring it myself on Ember—and we just need Matron to confirm we have a clean bill of health before finding out our assigned dormitories for the year. And, of course, to assign our studies. School House Sixth Formers get studies shared two to a room, rather than a common room—another point of favouritism over the other Houses, I suppose. We don’t get to choose our study-mates, but Miss Carroll usually tries to assign girls to their particular friends, which means that Esther and Cecily will be put together, and I—I don’t know. Whoever is left over, I suppose. Probably Valerie, unless she’s been put with the new girl, who seems more likely to be her soul-mate than I would be.
 

I have a vague hope that I’ll have a study to myself, although I suppose there’s not much chance of that. Not that I dislike the other girls, but living in a group is hard enough, without spending more time one-on-one with a girl that I’m not close with. I wish there was a study big enough for three girls, but then, even with their arms companionably in mine, I don’t know that Esther and Cecily would actually find three comfortable company. There are limits to how much you want even your own particular pet around.
 

Esther breaks into my thoughts. She obviously hasn’t exhausted the subject of the new girl. “But, my dear girl, you have no conception of how honoured we are. Fernleigh Manor is, at last, attracting girls of the right class.” She’s smiling, in a not particularly nice way. Lips tucked in at the corners in a way that somehow makes the faint points at the tip of her ears seem sharper. “This vision of beauty—her name is Diana, Diana Struthers, a very suitable name—is, we are reliably informed, the daughter of Mary Bing, of the Bings. We, my dearest Charles, are at last going up in the world.”

I’m a little confused. I suppose she means the new girl is from one of the old elfin families, but so are quite a few of the girls here, although we’re hardly one of the more expensive or exclusive schools. That girl with the spectacles and plaits, for instance, had the look about her, pointy ears and all. A few of my father’s friends sport titles, sharp ears and odd shades of hair; magical steeds are popular among the upper classes, who usually have the magical ability to control them. Some of Father’s cronies are quite decent sorts, knowing their beastflesh, and others aren’t worth the time of day if you ask me, but I don’t remember anyone expecting me to be particularly impressed by their families.
 

“I wonder why she’s come here,” Cecily says, thoughtfully. “Fernleigh isn’t really the kind of school to attract the rich and fashionable, especially not in our final year.”

“There’s Kitty in the Fifth, on the Second tennis team. I think she’s actually Lady Emmeline something,” I offer. “Pointed ears like a cat.”

“Kitty’s a holy terror, that’s what she is,” says Cecily, with the deep emotion of a prefect and Games Captain.

Ethel shrugs slim shoulders. “Kitty’s only here because Miss Carroll is tolerant about waiting terms for her fees to be paid if they come with a nice present to the school when the gee-gees are doing what they’re supposed to. Her father’s pretty much a professional gambler, for all he’s a Marquis. I don’t say Miss Carroll’s wrong at that. She probably comes out of it better overall. But a more exclusive school might expect more regular arrangements. As for Diana. . . I have no idea. Perhaps Miss Carroll is trying to attract a better class of girl than the rough hoi-polloi like Charley and myself and wild Colonial roses like you, Cissy.”