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The Last Secret
Friday dawned with a cold fog that crept on to the school grounds. I shivered as I looked out of the window. The skeleton trees resembled charcoal sketches against the silver sky. Nonetheless, I had a good feeling about the day.
But that feeling evaporated as soon as we walked into assembly.
For a start, Mrs Knight wasn’t in her usual place at the front of the stage. None of the teachers were. Instead, it was Henry Bartholomew.
“Why is he up there?” I whispered to Scarlet, but she was too busy staring at him to reply. The hall was abuzz with conversation.
“Hello, girls,” he said loudly, and everyone went deadly silent. I knew they were desperate to know what he had to say. “I thought I ought to come and tell you this myself. It just seemed the right thing to do.” He smiled as if he was congratulating himself.
“You smug—” Scarlet started to mutter under her breath, but I hit her before she could finish.
“I’m afraid my inspector has found that the school building is in need of a lot of repairs. And so it has been decided that Rookwood will shortly be closing in order to carry them out.”
He paused, his eyes scanning the hall for our reaction. I expected a rush of whispers, but there was still an uneasy silence. I think we were all trying to figure out what he meant. Would the school reopen afterwards? Questions filled my head until Penny finally raised her hand. Without waiting to be called on, she asked, “Closed temporarily? Or closed permanently?”
“Ah!” Henry exclaimed, clapping his hands together and pointing back at her. “Good question. We’ll be looking into the possibilities. It might be that the building would be better for another purpose. And if that’s the case, then, when it closes …”
I realised that Scarlet and I were leaning forward. We were both holding our breath.
“… it might be closing its doors forever.”
Chapter Eight
SCARLET
“What are we going to do?” Ariadne asked desperately that lunchtime.
I swallowed the bit of sandwich I was chewing. “I’m working on it.”
The thoughts were whizzing through my brain. There had to be something we could do. I wasn’t about to let our old chum Barty take away the one thing that was keeping Ivy and me from the clutches of our stepmother. Who did he think he was?
I just didn’t have a plan. I hated not having a plan.
Ivy sighed. “Perhaps … if he really does decide to close the school, we just have to accept it, at this point.”
“Absolutely not!” I told her. But deep down, a tiny part of me wondered if she was right.
Friday afternoons meant ballet, and I was looking forward to that, at least. Ivy and I ran down the chilly steps to the basement.
“Oh, hello, Scarlet,” Miss Finch said. She was sitting in her usual spot at the piano. “Hello, Ivy. You’re the first to arrive, once again.”
“Anything to get away from the misery up there,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Well, we have some good news for you,” Madame Zelda said. She was stretching her leg up on the piano, rather impressively. “Just you wait.”
“Good news would certainly be welcome,” said Ivy, although she didn’t seem optimistic. She still looked despondent as she sat down to lace her shoes.
I prodded her in the shoulder. “Cheer up! Good news!”
“Maybe,” she said, staring at the floor.
When the whole class were present, with shoes laced and hair tied up, Madame Zelda snapped her fingers to get everyone’s attention.
“Now, girls. We have an announcement for you. This year’s ballet recital has been approved by the headmistress. We are going to be performing a version of the legendary Swan Lake.”
There were lots of gasps and claps.
I looked at Ivy, my eyes wide with excitement. This had to be a good omen, didn’t it? Our mother’s secret music box played the theme to Swan Lake, and now we would get to dance in it! Not to mention that it was one of the most famous and most beautiful ballets, one in which I had always dreamt of performing. In my head I was the white swan, dancing for a packed theatre.
Madame Zelda waved her hand. “Since there were some issues with the auditions last time …” I snorted at that. Penny had been causing trouble as usual. Then Madame Boulanger, the school French teacher, had been pretending to know about ballet just because she was French (although that too was debatable given her occasional Welsh accent). It hadn’t exactly worked out brilliantly. “We have decided that we will choose the roles by assessing your performance in class.”
Hmm. I didn’t know if that was a good thing, but I hoped it was. We’d just have to do our best in class. That would, at least, be a little less nerve-wracking than auditioning on the stage.
“But, Miss.” It was Nadia raising her hand this time. “We’ve just been told that the school is closing! What if that happens before we can do the recital?”
Madame Zelda and Miss Finch shared a look.
“My mother has an expression, Nadia,” Madame Zelda said. “It is: ‘Do not try to pick the apple before you have grown the tree.’”
“What?” said Penny, her face screwed up like a pig’s.
Madame Zelda sighed. “What I mean to say is that we will have to see what happens. Maybe we get apples. Maybe we get pears. Maybe we get nothing.” She shrugged.
“But Nadia has a point,” I replied, and it wasn’t often that I said that. I could almost see my dream role disintegrating before my eyes. “We’ll need a lot of time to practise and prepare. Henry Bartholomew might shut the school before we’re ready.”
This time Madame Zelda narrowed her eyes at me. “Were you not listening, Scarlet? We can’t be having all these what ifs.”
Miss Finch nodded slowly. “All we can do is our best. We’ll have fun preparing the ballet even if we can’t perform it, won’t we?”
I grumbled my agreement, and looked over at Ivy. She was still staring at the floor. I could see why now. She’d realised straight away that the promise of good news was too good to be true.
And perhaps it was. But perhaps there was also something we could do about it.
Despite the looming threat of the school closure, I danced my heart out that lesson. I was determined to win a great role, even if I would never get to perform it on the stage.
But I was thinking as well. Ballet always seemed to help my brain work, to clear the cobwebs and show me the ideas I needed. And I decided that what we really needed was a new approach.
I tugged on Ivy’s arm as we finished our curtsies and ended the lesson. “I’m calling an emergency meeting,” I said.
“A what?” she asked.
“An emergency meeting,” I repeated, a little louder.
She winced and held her hand over her ear. “All right! But why?”
“We need to find a way to save the school, and we can’t do it alone. And I don’t just mean calling Ariadne. I think we need more people. We need a team.”
The look on Ivy’s face told me that she wasn’t quite convinced by this plan, but I could feel the wheels starting to roll. I was on to something.
“Come on,” I said. “I’m starting with Penny and Nadia …”
After dinner, I stood in the darkening window of room thirteen, looking out at a small sea of confused faces.
Ivy was sitting on her bed, with Ariadne beside her. Violet and Rose were sitting on mine, talking to each other in voices so quiet that I could barely hear them. Ebony sat in the middle, on the carpet, like an island. Penny and Nadia sat a little way behind her, cross-legged.
“Right,” I said. “You’re probably wondering why you’re all here.”
“Why are we are?” Penny asked loudly.
I glared at her. “If you’ll let me finish … I’m calling an emergency meeting. To save Rookwood.”
I was trying to be a little dramatic, but my efforts went unnoticed.
“No,” said Penny. “I meant why are we here.” She pointed to herself and Nadia. “You hate us. I think Nadia still hates me.”
“I don’t hate you,” said Nadia, rolling her eyes. Strangely, Penny looked quite pleased with that.
“Shut up, both of you,” I said. “You’re here because you’re already involved, whether you like it or not. You’ve both been here the whole time – at Rookwood, I mean. You’ve seen everything that’s happened with Miss Fox and Mr Bartholomew. You even read my diary!”
Nadia had the good grace to look a little sheepish about that.
But Penny just shrugged. “I still don’t get it.”
“All right,” I said to her. “You want me to speak your language? Henry is a snake. It takes one to know one.”
“Huh!” she said. “Well, perhaps you’ve got a point there.” She was clearly trying to look annoyed, but her face soon broke into a devious grin.
“Right, then,” I said, clasping my hands together. “I think I should explain about the Whispers in the Walls. Some of you already know, but not all of you.”
There were a few knowing nods from my friends, while those who didn’t know what I was talking about looked puzzled.
“The Whispers was a secret group that our mother was part of, many years ago. We found out about them when Violet hid Rose in a concealed room in the basement that had their writing all over the wall.”
Ebony’s mouth dropped open. “Wait, what? There’s a hidden room in the basement?”
“Not any more,” Ariadne said. “The entrance was destroyed in a fire.”
“And why was Rose hiding in it?” Ebony asked.
“Because Violet rescued her from an asylum, and her family were trying to kill her,” I said.
“Oh,” said Ebony.
“So anyway, the Whispers’ aim was to expose the original Mr Bartholomew for his cruelty,” I continued, “and for the punishment he gave to a pupil that led to her death.”
Ebony had really missed out on a lot of the dramatic events at Rookwood.
Nadia raised her hand. “I heard he stabbed her with a letter opener.”
I sighed. “No. He didn’t. But anyway, we managed to track down all this information that the Whispers had, and we used it to trick him into confessing.”
Now Violet raised her hand. “I don’t understand where this is going.”
I glared at her. “You don’t need to keep raising your hands. Just listen to me, all right? The Whispers never managed to take down Mr Bartholomew, but we helped their voices be heard. Now we’re up against his son, and the school is about to be closed – whether that’s really temporary or not. And the thing is, thanks to Ariadne translating the secret code, Ivy and I have found some new information left by our mother.”
“What information?” Violet asked.
I put my head in my hands. This was like herding cats. Luckily, Ivy took over for me. “She was investigating the headmaster on her own too, after she left school. She’d heard rumours that he didn’t truly own Rookwood.”
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