The Dance in the Dark

“Maybe it was the other girls,” I said, trying to reassure us both. “Maybe some of the first years thought they’d give him some extra treats.”

Rose nodded, her long blonde locks bobbing gently. “They do that sometimes,” she whispered.

“Look!” Scarlet called from across the yard. She’d plaited a horse’s hair over its eyes. I sighed and walked over to her. “Scarlet? Remember not getting into trouble?”

My twin just grinned. “The horses can’t make me write lines,” was all she said.

Chapter Six

SCARLET

The weekend had been fun, but for once I couldn’t wait for it to end. We’d walked to the village shop and bought midnight feast sweets, as was our tradition, even if it felt strange to do it without Ariadne.

But I was waiting for Monday. Not only would I get to do ballet, but also I’d get my extra tuition with Miss Finch.

I was restless for most of the day, but I made sure to not get in too much trouble. The last thing I wanted was another blasted detention.

At least Ivy had stopped incessantly asking me what was on my mind. I knew I ought to say something, but there was a lot I ought to do.

Ivy tells you everything, my brain insisted.

Pfft. It wasn’t as if my extra practice would have to be a secret forever. Just until I got the part.

Ballet was the last lesson of the day, and I felt both excited and, well, a little nervous.

To my relief, everything went fairly smoothly – even queen witch Penny seemed to be on her best behaviour. We practised a small section from the beginning of Sleeping Beauty.

But I couldn’t stop second-guessing myself. Was my leg as straight as Nadia’s? Were Ivy’s jumps higher than mine? I didn’t even dare look at Penny, because if she was any better than me, I didn’t want to know.

It’s all fine, I told myself over and over. You’ll get your extra practice. Then you’ll be the best.

It was all I could do to not say anything to Miss Finch when the lesson was over. I really wanted to make sure she hadn’t forgotten, or worse, changed her mind. But if I said anything, I’d give myself away. It’d be one thing if Ivy found out, but I couldn’t risk Penny knowing. I’d be utterly humiliated.

So Ivy and I traipsed back to room thirteen, and I pretended nothing was different.

“Oh!” I yelled suddenly, as we reached our door.

“What?” asked Ivy.

I spread my empty hands out wide. “I forgot my toe shoes. I must have left them in the studio.”

My twin looked exasperated. “What’s wrong with you this week? You never forget your shoes.” Her own soft pink shoes were dangling from her arm.

“Dunno,” I said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’ll go back down and get them. I’ll see you in a bit.”

“Try to make it back before dinner,” she replied.

You’ll be lucky, I thought.

I was almost out of breath by the time I reached the studio. What if Miss Finch changed her mind? I had rather guilt-tripped her into it …

But there she was, sitting at her piano stool, just as she always did.

“I’m back!” I announced.

She smiled at me. “I can see that. Let’s get started.”

She watched as I pirouetted over and over, trying to get it just right.

“Engage your core muscles,” she said. “Keep your eyes up.”

Every time I did a pirouette I felt a little less dizzy, and a little more confident. But I was still wobbling.

“You don’t need to push yourself quite so hard. You’ll throw the turn off. You’re not trying to spin as fast as you can.” She pointed to my head. “Imagine yourself doing it perfectly, in a controlled way.”

I took a deep breath, and made sure my starting plié was right. That final time, I spun the pirouette without a wobble.

“Excellent!” said Miss Finch, clapping her hands. “Keep it up. I think that’s enough for now.”

I had to say something. “Miss?”

“Yes?”

I couldn’t quite meet her eye. “I’m sorry if I made you feel bad. What Miss Fox did to me wasn’t your fault. I hope you don’t think you have to help me just because of that.”

She looked up, her eyes searching my face. “Oh, Scarlet. It’s quite all right. You haven’t had as much time as the other girls, so I don’t mind doing this bit extra for you.”

“Are you sure?” I really wanted that to be true.

“I’m sure. Now come on, you need to get up to dinner. There’s still time if you go quickly.”

“Yes, Miss! Thank you, Miss!” I beamed.

“Don’t forget to get changed,” she said with a grin. That was a good point. I’d get all manner of questioning if I turned up at the dinner hall in my ballet clothes. Not to mention I’d probably never get the smell of stew out of them. “I’ll see you again on Friday.”

“Thank you,” I said again. I was repeating myself, but I meant it. This time she didn’t reply, just went back to happily playing the piano.

Things were finally looking up.

When I reached our dorm, Ivy had already gone to dinner without me. I threw my uniform back on and headed down to the dining hall to join her.

She was not entirely pleased.

“Where on earth have you been?” she demanded loudly over the racket of the hall as I slid into my seat. “I was worried sick!”

“I just …” I started. “I went to get my shoes back from the studio, and I got talking to Miss Finch.”

My twin looked sceptical. “Well it was a long talk,” she said. “You were gone for ages. I was getting anxious.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, slamming down my knife and fork. “Can’t I do anything on my own without you having a panic about it?”

Ivy gave me the look that she’d developed recently: the one that said I thought you were dead, so cut me some slack.

But this time it wasn’t going to work. I was fed up of her using that as an excuse to keep tabs on me. “I was fine,” I said pointedly. “We were just talking about the ballet recital. Nothing happened. This school isn’t dangerous any more!”

Mrs Knight suddenly appeared behind Ivy. “You’re quite right, Scarlet. Rookwood is a safe place for everyone, I will be making sure of that!”

I looked up at her. She’d said that as if she’d been practising in front of a mirror.

“Uh … thank you, Miss?” said Ivy.

It was quite unusual for Mrs Knight to join in our conversations. She seemed to register our surprise. “Yes,” she said, “I think it’s important that everyone knows how different things are these days.”

“You mean now that headteachers aren’t trying to murder us any more?” I asked.

“Scarlet!” She looked affronted. “Well, really!”

Nadia looked up. “She’s not lying though, Miss. At least one of them was a murderer. The other—”

“That’s quite enough,” snapped Mrs Knight. “This is a new Rookwood School, and I won’t hear any more about the past. Let’s all move forwards, please.”

“Yes, Miss,” we chorused. She bustled away, her cheeks red.

We ate our dinner quietly after that. At least Mrs Knight’s interruption had saved me from any further interrogation by Ivy. But how long could I keep my extra ballet lessons a secret? Maybe Mrs Knight wasn’t going to try to kill me, but if Ivy found out I’d been lying to her … it wasn’t going to end well.

Chapter Seven

IVY

That evening, I lay in my lukewarm bath and tried as hard as I possibly could to stop worrying.

It wasn’t working out particularly well. Just being in the bathrooms always reminded me of the first time I’d set foot in there, when I’d been hunting for one of the pieces of Scarlet’s diary. When I’d first come to Rookwood School, I’d truly believed that she was dead, and that the paper trail she’d scattered was all that was left of my sister. It made my toes curl just thinking about it.

And worse – just after I’d found the pages, I’d been ambushed by Penny. Even if we were truly safe from the teachers, Penny was still desperate to give me nothing but trouble.

I shivered as I climbed out of the bath and wrapped myself in a threadbare towel. It was times like these that I really missed my Aunt Phoebe’s house. There was something so comforting about the tin bath in front of the fire, even if you had to fill it yourself with the kettle.

As I changed into my nightgown, I had the idea to write to my aunt. I made sure to do so every now and again, even if her replies often didn’t entirely make sense.

I peered round the corner before I left the bathroom, just in case Penny was lurking. Thankfully, she wasn’t.

Scarlet was already back in our room, practising ballet. There really wasn’t much room, but that didn’t stop her.

“Don’t mind me,” she said.

“I won’t,” I snapped back, dodging round her to get to my bed. I still hadn’t forgiven her for disappearing earlier.

My twin just ignored me and carried on doing pliés. Typical.

I reached under my bed and pulled out my satchel, where I had some sheets of paper and a pencil. At least I could write letters without having to worry about them being intercepted by the teachers any more.

Dear Aunt Phoebe,

I hope this finds you well. I miss you. Thank you for having us to stay at Christmas. If you can’t find the turkey knife, it’s because Scarlet was using it to try and carve a sword out of a branch.

Things seem to be better here at school. Mrs Knight says we’re all safe and I hope that’s true, but some things have happened that are making me worried … Perhaps I’m over-thinking it. I don’t want to scare Scarlet, or make her angry.

Speaking of Scarlet, she’s been

“Are you writing about me?” said my twin suddenly, her face appearing over the top of my paper. I jumped so quickly that I almost crumpled the whole page into a ball.

“Scarlet! Go away! It’s private!”

“Private?” she frowned. “Since when? You’re only writing to Aunt Phoebe.”

I flattened the paper against my nightgown so that she couldn’t read it. “How do you know that?”

“Who else would you be writing to? You already wrote to Ariadne just the other day, so unless you’ve suddenly decided to try and rebuild our relationship with Father, I assume you’re writing to Aunt Phoebe. Come on, let me see—”

“Scarlet!” This was exasperating beyond belief. “When you vanish for an hour I’m apparently prying if I want to know where you’ve been, but then you demand to read my letters! How is that fair?”

“Hmmph,” she said, and threw herself down on her bed, unlacing her ballet shoes so hastily I thought she was going to break them. “I just think that sometimes we should share things. Maybe not all the time.” She chucked the shoes at the chair.

I glared at her. I knew exactly what she meant. She meant that we should share everything when it suited her, and not otherwise. “I’m going to sleep,” I said finally.

“Fine. Me too.”

“Brilliant.”

There was a long pause, as both of us lay back on our beds and stared at the ceiling, flooded with anger that neither of us wanted to release.

“Ivy?”

“What?”

“The light’s still on.”

“Oh.”

With a sigh, I climbed up and went over to flick off the light switch. Room thirteen was plunged into darkness. Even the moon wasn’t shining that night, but was buried under grey clouds.

Back in my bed, on my blessedly no longer quite so lumpy mattress, I tried desperately to sleep. Unfortunately, though, sleep is one of those things where trying desperately to achieve it only results in it never happening.

I turned to look at my twin, but I could barely make out her shape, just a lump of blanket. So I stared up at the ceiling instead, until eventually I drifted off into a peculiar dream. One that I’d had a few times in the past month or so, but each time it altered slightly, unnerving me even more.

I was standing on a hill, green grass waving softly around my feet. I could feel the summer heat on my back. The sky was blue, the sun blindingly bright.

There was someone in front of me, sitting in the grass on a threadbare picnic blanket.

It was a woman, and I felt sure, somehow, that it was our mother.

She never turned around. She just sat there, a black silhouette against the sky. I tried to move towards her, to touch her, but I was rooted to the spot. I called her name – Emmeline – but my voice faded to nothing in the breeze. She couldn’t hear me.

Or perhaps – I realised, in the strange way you think in your sleep – it was the wrong name?

She wasn’t Emmeline, was she? Emmeline had died when she was just a girl.

Mother! I called, trying to pull my feet from the ground, but it was as though they had grown into the grass, the roots pulling me down. Mother! I’m here!

Still the figure didn’t turn.

I slept on …

And then, in the middle of the night, I awoke with a start.

Someone was trying our door handle.

I watched, sick with horror, as it turned. Time slowed to a crawl. Scarlet didn’t even stir in the opposite bed.

The door creaked open, just a fraction.

“Who-who’s there?” I whispered, as loudly as I dared.

The door thumped back into place, and the handle sprang up.

And I could have sworn that I heard the jangling of keys in pockets, and the clacking of heels as someone hurried away.

Chapter Eight

SCARLET

I thought I’d been the one acting strangely that week, but Ivy was really taking the biscuit.

When I woke up on Tuesday morning, she was sitting by our dorm-room door and staring at it as if it were about to sprout legs and walk away.

“What are you doing, you oddball?” I murmured sleepily.

“Nothing,” she said, but she looked guilty about it.

She was quiet and jumpy for the rest of the day. I only had to speak to her and she would flinch as if I’d given her a slap. In biology, Mrs Caulfield asked her to get something from the cupboard and she just started panicking.

“Miss, I can’t, I’m … not feeling well!” she said, and ran out of the classroom.

When lessons were over, I cornered her in the corridor. “What happened last night? Did someone kidnap my sister and replace her with a total wimp?”

She opened her mouth and gawped at me like a stunned fish. For a moment I expected her to start yelling – ever since we’d been reunited, she’d been so much more … well, like me. She’d stand up for herself, argue back.

But now … it was like the old Ivy had reappeared. She looked like she wanted to shrink into the wall. I watched her face carefully.

“I—” she started, then bit her lip. “Actually,” she said, “there was something. I keep having this dream.”

I took her arm as we started to walk back to our dorm, steering her through the crowds of uniformed girls. “Tell me about it.”

“It’s about our mother, I … I think. I’m on this hill, and she’s sitting there in front of me, but I can’t see her face. And I can’t get her to turn round.”

I shrugged – as much as you can shrug with your arm through someone else’s. “All right, it sounds weird, I admit. I’ve had some pretty unusual dreams myself recently. That doesn’t seem particularly scary, or anything.” I was thinking of my nightmares with the rooftop and the dark stage, but I swiped the thought away before it could bother me.

We climbed the stairs slowly. “It just … it feels so wrong,” she said. “Like I’m doing something wrong. Because no matter what I do, I can’t get to her. And she won’t hear me.”

“Well, she is dead,” I said, but the look on my twin’s face told me that was not a very tactful thing to say. “Sorry.”

“I know. But I had a realisation – I kept calling her Emmeline. At first I thought that maybe it’s not her, maybe it’s the shadow of someone else.” I shuddered. “But if she wasn’t called Emmeline, then …”

I snapped my fingers, almost right in the face of Ethel Hadlow, who glared at me as she passed. “You don’t know her real name. So that’s why you can’t get her attention!”

“I-I think that might well be it,” Ivy said. “Not that the dream is real, or anything, but …”

“But it made you think, yes?” We reached room thirteen, and I went to turn the door handle. I could’ve sworn Ivy flinched at that too.

“Yes,” she said, after a moment. “There’s got to be a way to—”

“Hello!”

Both of us nearly jumped out of our skin. It was Ariadne.

She was sitting on my bed. Ivy backed up against the wall, gasping.

“Ariadne?” we exclaimed.

“I’m sorry!” she said, hurriedly jumping to her feet. “I didn’t mean to be scary. Was I scary?”

“Only mildly terrifying,” I replied, my heart thumping a little. I hadn’t expected anyone to be there, let alone our absent friend.

“Sorry!” she said again. “Well … hello.” She looked sheepish.

I bounced over to her. “Come on,” I said, “we’ll need a bit more than that. You were expelled! What are you doing here?”

“I came back,” she said, as if that weren’t evident from her standing right there in the middle of our room.

“But how?” said Ivy, before we both hugged Ariadne.

“Mmf,” Ariadne said, so we stopped squeezing her quite so much and stood back a little to give her some air. “Well,” she said triumphantly, “I persuaded Daddy. Since they found out it was the headmaster who started the fire in the library and not me, the school had no objection to letting me in again.”

“But Mrs Knight said there was no way your father would let you come back. Because he thinks it’s too dangerous for you to go outside, or something.”

“Well, I … might have threatened to tell Mummy that he ran over her prize petunias when he was trying out the new Bentley.” Ariadne carried on staring at her feet, her face red.

Ivy’s eyes widened. “You blackmailed your father?”

“Oh no! I mean, it’s not blackmail, is it? Well, he shouldn’t have done it in the first place. He’s not even supposed to drive a motor car, that’s Horace’s job …” Her mouth kept on flapping uselessly.

“Ariadne, you silly goat!” I shook our friend gently by the shoulders. “It doesn’t matter if you locked him in the basement to get back here. You did it!”

Her face lit up. “I did it! I’m back!”

I ran out into the corridor, nearly tripping over the little trail of suitcases. “Ariadne’s back!” I yelled to no one in particular.

Penny leant out of the doorway of her room and glared at me. “Nobody cares!” she shouted.

But even wicked witch Penny couldn’t dampen my mood. We were a proper team again. This was utterly brilliant. I danced into room thirteen, and spun Ariadne around.

“Bit dizzy now, Scarlet!” she said primly, and I let her go.

Ivy was grinning like a loon. “I can’t believe it,” she kept saying.

I sat down at the dressing table and blew a lock of hair off my face. “So,” I said, “where are they putting you, now that Violet and Rose are roomies?”

“Apparently I’m to go in one of the bigger dorms with the first formers,” Ariadne said. She went out into the corridor and picked up one of her suitcases. “I’m actually rather excited. They’ll love my midnight feasts, don’t you think?”

Ivy laughed. “I’m sure they will,” she said.

“Oh, wonderful,” said Ariadne, sinking on to the bed in relief. “Anyway,” she said suddenly, “did I interrupt you? You were talking about something …”

Ivy sat down on her bed. “I was thinking about our mother,” she said. “I had this dream about her, and— Oh! You don’t know!”

“Know what?” Ariadne asked.

Ivy gave me a quick glance – neither of us had explained. Nor had we put it in our letters. The truth had seemed too strange and secret to risk the teachers finding out, even the good ones. “After you were expelled, we went looking for the memorial plaque to the girl who drowned in the lake. And we found it, but it wasn’t exactly what we were expecting …” I paused, not wanting to waste a good moment for dramatic effect. “The name on it was our mother’s. Or at least, what we thought was our mother’s.”

“Your mother was a ghost?” exclaimed Ariadne. Her voice was reaching peak squeakiness levels.

“No, no,” Ivy waved her hands desperately. “At least, I don’t think so. We think that Emmeline Adel must not have been her real name.”

“Hmm.” Ariadne wrinkled her nose. She looked utterly baffled. “Well, who was she then?”

“Not the faintest,” I said. “A pupil at this school, I suppose. That’s as much as we know.”

“Oh!” said Ariadne suddenly. “Was she one of the Whispers, do you think?”

That was a good point. Last term, when we’d discovered Rose hiding in the secret room below the library, we’d also uncovered the Whispers in the Walls. They were a top-secret club who, twenty years ago, had vowed to bring down Headmaster Bartholomew and reveal the truth about what he’d done to the pupils of Rookwood – including the murder of the real Emmeline Adel. We’d had their book full of coded writing, but it had been destroyed in the fire, along with the staircase down to the secret room.

“I suppose she might well have been,” Ivy replied. “If only we hadn’t lost that notebook …”

“I might be able to remember some of the names from the wall,” Ariadne said, in between thoughtfully chewing on one of her nails.

Suddenly, an idea flashed brightly in my mind. “We ought to talk to Miss Jones! She went to school here, didn’t she? She might have known our mother!”

Ivy beamed at me. “That’s a brilliant idea!”

“Um, I think she’s away,” said Ariadne. “I went past the library earlier and I didn’t see her in there.”

“She probably needed some time off,” said Ivy. “She was really upset about the library. It was in such a state after the fire.”

I hadn’t been there yet, but Ivy said it still smelt faintly of smoke, and a lot had had to be replaced. Miss Jones had been totally distraught about the loss of her precious books.

I went over and patted Ariadne on the back. “Dinner?” I said.

“Oh! Yes!”

I grinned. If Ariadne had missed Rookwood’s school dinners, there was definitely something wrong with her!

Miss Jones the librarian was indeed away that week, Mrs Knight confirmed at the Richmond dining table. Our inquisition would have to wait.

The days leading up to Friday were a blur as I counted down the hours to my next secret ballet session. And of course, I had to come up with a way to distract Ivy. There was no way she was going to believe me if I tried to use the shoe excuse again.

Things got even more tricky when I happened to pass Miss Finch in the hallway. “Ah, Scarlet,” she said. “Could you come down after dinner on Friday? I think I’ll need a bit of a longer rest after the lesson.”

“Yes, Miss,” I said, a lot more brightly than I felt. “I’ll see you then.”

On Friday, our ballet lesson flew by, almost quite literally, as were practising tour jetés. I felt that I was getting better – but was I good enough?