The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School
Read The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School Online
Authors: Kim Newman
Also by Kim Newman and available from Titan Books:
Anno Dracula
Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron
Anno Dracula: Dracula Cha Cha Cha
Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard
An English Ghost Story
Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles
Jago
The Quorum
Life’s Lottery
Bad Dreams
The Night Mayor
The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School
Print edition ISBN: 9781781165720
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781165737
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: October 2015
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Kim Newman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Copyright © 2015 by Kim Newman
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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For Prano
V: The Witches of Drearcliff Grange
XV: A Meeting of the Moth Club
II: An Address to the Whole School
VI: ‘Spend Three and Fourpence…’
VII: ‘…We’re Going to a Dance’
VIII: The Coming of the Black Skirts
XII: A Summons to the House Captain’s Study
XVI: The Exorcism of Mauve Mary
XVII: Purple and Black and Red All Over
VI: Golden Rules for Detective Stories
XII: The Last Battle of the
Johanna Pike
XIII: A Reunion of the Moth Club
Drearcliff Grange School Register
Also Available from Titan Books
I: A New Bug
A
WEEK AFTER
M
OTHER
found her sleeping on the ceiling, Amy Thomsett was delivered to her new school. Like a parcel.
When the down train departed from Exeter St Davids, it was crowded with ruddy-faced farmers, tweedy spinsters and wiry commercial travellers. Nearer the end of the line, Amy had a compartment all to herself.
She first saw Drearcliff Grange through the train’s smuts-spotted windows. Shifting from seat to seat, she kept the school in sight as long as possible.
Amy had hoped the name was misleading. It wasn’t.
She should have known. Misleading place names like Greenland or the Cape of Good Hope ran the other way, passing off desolate climes as pleasant resorts. Drearcliff was exactly what it sounded like. A rambling, gloomy, ill-repaired estate on top of a cliff. This was wind and rain country. The sky was heavy with dark, roiling clouds.
For a stretch, the railway line ran parallel with the coast.
Waves broke against the cliff, washing through caves, eroding supporting rock. Chunks of North Somerset had sheared away, falling four hundred feet to the shingle. Some time ago, this land-nibbling had reached the Grange. A North Wing had tumbled over the fraying edge. Amid the strew of ruins on the beach, a gothic tower stuck up at an angle, white froth foaming around the base.
Newer wings straggled safely, if dully, inland.
The train terminated at Watchet. A porter walked the platform shouting ‘end o’ the loine… all orff that’s gettin’ orff!’ The Great Western Railway locomotive discharged excess steam. The clattering hiss was like a rattlesnake with whooping cough.
Amy stepped down from the carriage.
‘Ho, Thomsett,’ called someone. ‘You must be she!’
A tall, ginger-haired girl strode unscalded through the steam.
The hailer stuck out a hand, which Amy shook. Her grip was bone-grinding.
‘I’m Walmergrave,’ she announced, thumping her chest. ‘Lady Serafine Nimue Todd Walmergrave, in full. All and sundry call me Frecks.’
‘Crumpets!’ exclaimed Amy. ‘Why?’
‘Freckles. Used to have ’em. Don’t now. Too late to chuck the handle.’
Frecks had what Mother called ‘a strong personality’, which was code for a friend of Amy’s she didn’t approve of.
‘Headmistress has detailed me to slap on the bracelets and ferry you to School. Many new bugs set eyes on the place and flee for the hills. Men with hunting dogs comb the Quantocks for escapees.’
If not for the skirt, Amy might have taken Frecks for a boy. Her brick-red hair was cut short flapper fashion, her lips were the same colour as her face and she had square shoulders.
Frecks wore a more lived-in version of the scratchy uniform Mother had ordered for Amy from the school’s recommended London dressmaker, Dosson, Chapell & Co. of Tite Street. Grey skirt with black side-stripe, grey blazer with black piping, grey blouse with black buttons, grey socks with black clocks, grey-
ish
straw boater with black band, bright crimson tie with black-headed pin.
At Amy’s old school, girls wore baggy pinafores which made even long-legged Sixths look like children. In a Drearcliff skirt, she felt more like a little adult – on the outside, at least.
On the hankie-pocket badge, a worried-looking woman – Saint Catherine, presumably – hung upside down on a cartwheel above an embroidered motto,
a fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi
. ‘A precipice in front and wolves behind.’
If the dreary cliff counted as the precipice, where did the wolves come into it? Those famous hunting dogs?
‘This your gear?’ Frecks asked. ‘All your worldly possessions?’
A porter had hefted her father’s old brass-cornered trunk on to the platform.
‘Yes.’
Frecks signalled a bent old gaffer, who hefted Amy’s luggage on his back and conveyed it to a horse-cart in the station forecourt.
‘Joxer’s odd-job man and general slavey,’ Frecks explained. ‘Don’t mind him. Shot in the head at Vimy Ridge. Came to Drearcliff with the nag, Dauntless. She was in the War too. Charged enemy guns. Not very bright, if you ask me. Say the name’ – Frecks mouthed the syllables
Gen-er-al Haig
– ‘and Dauntless bolts. Runs perfectly amok.’
Joxer had the opposite of a beard. His chin was shaven, but thick brownish-white hair sprouted everywhere else on his face except nose and forehead. Cheek-whiskers teased out to nine-inch points. Eyebrows curled like the heterocera of the
dryocampa rubicunda
or North American Rosy Maple Moth.
‘Your tumbril awaits, Highness,’ said Frecks.
The girl helped Amy climb up into the cart. There were hard benches to sit on.
Joxer let out a sentence consisting of one long unintelligible dialect word and Dauntless began to clip-clop off. One of the conveyance’s wheels was a different size to the others. The vehicle listed like a ship holed below the waterline, bravely sailing on to certain doom.
On the narrow road from Watchet to Drearcliff, they acquired a horn-honking retinue of motorists. Frecks smiled and waved at the fuming drivers as if they were all in the Lord Mayor’s parade. The growling roadsters could not get by. Ignoring beeps and shouts, Dauntless kept to the middle of the lane. When the slow-rolling cart turned off for the Grange, the cars whizzed past in relief. Amy saw fists shaken and lip-read swear words.
A rutted track led to a tall wall. Broken bottles stuck up from a rind of cement along the top.
‘No one knows whether the jagged glass is to keep angry mobs out or hungry girls in,’ said Frecks. ‘Dr Swan empties all the bottles herself, for personal use. Green for wine. Brown for beer.’
‘What about the blue?’
‘Poison, my dear.’
They came to a set of spear-tipped gates. Frecks stepped off the cart and opened them, standing aside to let Dauntless through. After fastening the gates, she slipped on to School Grounds by a small, almost-hidden door.
‘I trust you’re giddy from the privilege, Thomsett,’ said Frecks. ‘You’ve just passed through School Gate. You only get to do that again when you leave for good. It’s symbolic. From henceforth, you come and go through Side Door. And Girls’ Gate, which is further along. Oh, and over the cliff if you can clamber like a monkey or soar like an eagle…’
Considering how Mother had reacted, Amy thought it best not to mention her floating.
‘Hop down and we’ll walk the rest of the way,’ said Frecks. ‘It’s quicker.’
Amy joined Frecks. They watched as the cart trundled off along a side path, without them but with her trunk.
‘Worry not about your gear,’ said Frecks. ‘Joxer will dump it at the dorms. The Witches will go through it for contraband.’
‘The Witches?’
Frecks grinned. ‘Whips. Prefects. A superior type of she-imp. If you stashed a precious heirloom in with your scanties, Gruesome Gryce and her Murdering Heathens will have it away. Sidonie Gryce is Head Girl. Wears scalps on her girdle. Did you bring any dollies?’
A dread hand clutched Amy’s heart.
‘Only Roly Pontoons… I’ve had him for ages, since I was little.’
Frecks was exasperated. ‘I assume you
were
warned…’
Father had brought Roly home from Belgium, on his last leave. After he was killed, she’d liked to think he left the big-headed clown to look after her. Sometimes, she made Roly float in the playroom, flapping his oversize coat like moth-wings.