Jane Steele(30)

“They told me they were publishers of poetry and plays.” Clarke’s eyes glinted hard and gemlike. “The older I grew, the more I thought it odd that they had sent me here. When I was home, they barely entertained or received any callers. For a day it would be splendid, and every hour afterwards I would feel more like a guest, Mother making the rounds at her Bohemian salons, Father at his office and clubs, them glancing at the clock during supper. I would ache to know what you were doing—I thought of you whenever they slighted me, whenever they heard my step and seemed almost . . . disappointed. Every visit, I told them we were tormented here, and every time, they said that school was difficult, and how could I move in artistic circles without an education? Artistic circles,” she repeated in disgust. “By the time I left after a visit, they could barely contain themselves for joy.”

“You can’t—”

“They lied to me, Jane.” The name, after so long without hearing it, stole my breath. She blinked in her oddly deliberate manner, polishing the apple against her sleeve. “They sent me away when I was six years old. And now you mean to send me away yourself.”

“But I—”

“Please don’t leave me behind to survive this school without you, I couldn’t bear it. Who knows what sort the replacement headmaster will be? We’ll find a new place to live.” Doubt pinched the corners of her mouth. “But perhaps you don’t want—”

“Of course I do.” A weightless feeling soared inside me, a flock of starlings scattering into flight. “I only—I’ve about five pounds and a silver watch that was my father’s, but that won’t get us far.”

Smiling slowly, Clarke took a bite of the apple. “You’ll think of something.” Pivoting, she fetched her carpetbag, which I had not even seen previous. “You always think of something—you’re terribly clever, the cleverest one. It’s nearly three—let’s be off before the cooks arrive to assemble the cold supper. When they find what’s in the head’s office,” she added with a shudder, “there will be hell to pay.”

It may have occurred to the reader that allowing Becky Clarke to flee the scene of a murder—with the murderess, no less—was not my most shining instance of altruism. I was sixteen years old, however, sixteen and nigh berserk to escape, delirious with the old instinct to run which had brought me to Lowan Bridge in the first place. Only this time, I would not be friendless and bereft; this time, I would have someone beside me who wanted, however inexplicably, to be there.

If sixteen-year-olds are accounted selfish generally, then reader, how much greedier was I in the face of freely offered loyalty?

“London,” I breathed in Clarke’s ear as I took her hand. “Where else would we go save for London?”

? ? ?

We fled on foot to the main road, fearing to look behind lest the hornet’s nest had upturned and sent swarms flying after us. The alarm had not yet been raised, however, and the grounds proved as empty as they always were of a Sunday—or had been ever since Granville and Taylor had been caught fleeing years ago and were returned by an obliging seller of trinkets who thought the sight of two unescorted girls demanded his immediate assistance.

The fact that Granville had died soon afterwards, though Taylor had scarcely been punished at all, surely does not require explanation at this late juncture. As for Clarke and me, we scaled the pocky wall next to the black wrought iron gate and tumbled to the ground with no worse consequences than scuffed shoes—or no worse consequences yet, unless I acted with miraculous rapidity.

Clarke threw her apple core at Lowan Bridge School, a final gesture of defiance. Half a dozen times, perhaps, we had all visited the village a quarter mile away to inflict Miss Lilyvale’s Christmas hymns upon the town square, and only gradually did I realise I was taking us there. London sent out new filaments continually, cast shimmering tendrils like the spread of shattered crystal—we had seen this from the roof every year, when London swelled and burst and swelled and burst again—but it was hardly feasible to walk there. Not with Mr. Munt stiffening over his desk.

“Who do you think it was?” Clarke asked.

Swallowing a spike, I shook my head. “The room looked ransacked. Robbers?”

My friend angled her head, curls twice gilded with late afternoon sunlight. “Maybe so.”

My heart constricted painfully. “Why couldn’t it have been?”

“Oh, it could. It’s just that . . . possibly someone wanted to find something other than money.”

“What sort of something?”

“Well, you never returned Miss Lilyvale’s letters. I read them, and then you . . . kept them. As protection, I assumed. But you never returned them.”

At the thought of whey-blooded Miss Lilyvale plunging a makeshift dagger into the cords of Vesalius Munt’s throat, I laughed so hard that a fox or a badger or some such went crashing away through the bracken.

“All right, she isn’t the bravest woman I’ve ever met,” Clarke agreed, half smiling in a way that sent me into further fits. She slapped my arm. “Jane, stop.”

“If she was looking for the letters, she took an unnecessary risk in slaying him, for I burnt them,” I gasped. This was factual, but Clarke need not know that I had shoved them in the dormitory fireplace after stabbing our headmaster. “In any case, why should I have given them to him?”