How to Be Brave Read online

  “I don’t understand,” said Calla. “You can’t—none of this makes sense.”

  “I am no liar,” said the headmistress. “You can accuse me of a thousand things, but I do not lie. And so trust me when I tell you this: You will crack that code in your mother’s notebooks and tell us where she is going, or she will die and that duck will remain undiscovered.”

  Calla stared at her with horror. “But what if I can’t?”

  “You will. And while you are working on that, we have a second plan: When Elizabeth looks up through the canopy, she’ll see a plane pulling a banner behind it. Would you like to know what the message says?”

  Calla didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She had only just come to terms with the fact that her mother had been kidnapped. The fact that she now might be lost in the rainforest with only a week’s worth of food was almost too much to handle.

  “The banner says ‘We Have Your Daughter.’” She smiled the sort of smile that made Calla feel sick and then very angry, all at once. “That’s you, my dear girl. You were our insurance, but now you’re also our hostage. Did you really think that I’d returned to this school because I liked it? No. I came here for you. You’re the thing that’s going to make your mother finally give up. When Elizabeth sees that banner, she’ll send up a flare to reveal her location and then Mallardus Amazonica will be mine.”

  Calla found words from somewhere deep inside her heart. “She won’t do that.”

  “She’s your mother. She’ll do anything to keep you safe.”

  “You don’t know her.”

  “Frankly there are days when I wish I knew neither of you,” said the headmistress.

  “Was the letter from Belinda Freeman even real?” asked Calla.

  “Belinda Freeman is one hundred and two years old,” said the headmistress. “Of course the letter wasn’t real.”

  Calla took a deep, steadying breath. “I’ll shout for help. They’ll hear me. There’s an entire school out there. The nuns. The girls. They know where I am.”

  The headmistress shrugged. “Scream if you wish. The acoustics won’t be in your favor. I cried myself to sleep for years in this school, and nobody ever heard a damn thing. If that experience taught me anything, Calla, it taught me how to be efficient. I have thought of everything you might want to do and I have put plans in against it. No girl in this building has access to a mobile phone. Nobody’s allowed off-site without my knowledge. Nobody’s going to help you.”

  “Edie will. And Hanna. Good Sister Christine. Good Sister June.” Calla pulled the names to her as though she were in the sea and drowning. Everything was being taken away from her. There had to be something—somebody—she could hold on to.

  “Good Sister Christine cannot leave the school and is terrified of challenging my authority,” said the headmistress, folding down her fingers. “Edmée Berger and Hanna Kowalczyk are merely children, and Good Sister June is enjoying her forced retirement. There’s nobody left, Calla.”

  And then, in response to this awful speech, Calla did the most curious thing.

  She closed her eyes.

  CALLA’S BRIEF AND WELL-TIMED FLASHBACK

  Once, long ago, Elizabeth had taken her daughter to the fancy supermarket.

  “We have money,” she’d said, and that was all the explanation they needed. Money was something that did not come easily or often and when it did come, it was usually earmarked for a thousand other things rather than a trip to the fancy supermarket. Shoes. Clothes. Heating. Electricity. And sometimes not even those. Sometimes it was just enough for Elizabeth to catch the bus to the food bank and hope for the two of them to survive another day. But on this day, the money was enough to permit a trip to the fancy supermarket and the promise of anything in there for tea. And not just the reduced anythings.

  Calla could barely contain her excitement and neither could Elizabeth. Both of them stood in the doorway and let themselves be dazzled by it. The brightness. The cleanliness.

  “The dragon fruit,” whispered Elizabeth, who had half thought she had dreamt this strange and marvelous thing from her childhood. “It’s not actually a dragon, but anything that’s got ‘dragon’ in its name has to be a little bit magic.” She could not stop herself from placing one of these in the basket, even though she could not really remember what to do with it.

  A man at the end of the aisle looked up, locked eyes with Calla and Elizabeth, and started to walk toward them. For a moment, Calla grew confused and wondered if he was some sort of dragon-fruit guard. Perhaps you had to say a special word to him before you were allowed to have one. Perhaps every food in the fancy supermarket had a special guard and that was why it was all so fancy and expensive and the sort of thing that made her mum grow dreamy with longing.

  “Boysenberry,” said Elizabeth, who, of course, had not noticed any of this. Instead she had been staring at another section of the shelf and realizing that she had almost forgotten that there were other fruits in the world. They had spent weeks eating windfall apples given to them by Mrs. Merryweather from downstairs who knew more than she let on about Elizabeth’s financial well-being. “I didn’t even think these still existed.”

  “Mrs. North, isn’t it?” said the man, arriving suddenly at Elizabeth’s side. He was a tall man dressed in the sort of clothes that a shadow might wear. There was a peculiar logo on his blazer, like a duck with its wings crossed behind its back. Calla pulled at her mum’s arm and when the man noticed this, he gave her a smile that was the very definition of a lie. “I’m talking to your mother,” he said. “There’s a car for you outside, Mrs. North. We can give you and Calla a lift home. All we ask is that you have a chat to us about your research. We’re very interested to find out where you stand on a few matters of some urgency to our organization. You may have heard of us. We’re the Malus Organization, and we’d love to—”

  Elizabeth held up her hand. “Do you like boysenberries?”

  “I don’t—I don’t…,” said the man. It was the first time that he looked as though he did not know what was going on. Calla rather liked it.

  “Try one,” said Elizabeth. “It’s the law of soft fruit. You have to try one when you see it. Check the taste.” She picked one up and ate it. Her eyes flared with a sudden, soft pleasure. “Try it.”

  The man looked at Calla again. Calla made an Honestly, just try the berry, it’ll be quicker face. He made a How on earth have you dealt with it this long? face. Calla made a She’s my mum face back at him, because that sort of explained everything and if he did not understand that then he really was the not very nice man that he appeared to be.

  The man shrugged. “All right,” he said. “But then you have to come with us.”

  Elizabeth leaned forward and carefully pushed one berry up each of his nostrils. “We’re not going anywhere with you,” she said.

  DOING WHAT IS NOT EXPECTED OF YOU

  The man had worked for the Malus Organization. And they had been trying to kidnap her mum, even then.

  But instead of being kidnapped, Elizabeth had done the last thing that was expected of her.

  Which was what Calla was going to do right now.141

  “You’re not keeping me anywhere,” said Calla. The moment she finished speaking she lunged forward and grabbed the notebook from the headmistress’s desk. She stuffed it into her pocket, pivoted, and reached out for the phone as well. And she would have reached it, had the enormous man not entered the study at that very moment.

  “Where’ve you been?” the headmistress, who was turning bright red with rage, cried out. “Take this child to her bedroom!” She grabbed the phone and pulled it behind her, managing to move across the room quicker than Calla had ever thought possible. “And lock her in!”

  Calla and the headmistress locked eyes.

  “I was reading about ganache,” said the enormous man in a mildly offended sort of manner. “I know you’ve got me doing all this security, but I figured there wasn’t much to do right now and my
ganache does keep splitting.”

  “I don’t care about your ruddy ganache,” spat the headmistress. She reached out to grab Calla, who somehow managed to dodge her and in the process got closer to the study door. “GET THIS CHILD OUT OF HERE.”

  Calla could get herself out of there quite well and so she did. She took a deep breath and as the man said “Sorry, but I have to do what she says” and reached out for her, she threw herself forward toward the door. There was a complicated moment between the two of them where he had a hand on Calla’s arm, but then she twisted and ran and left him holding her dressing gown sleeve. But not her.

  Not her indeed.

  Calla was halfway down the corridor by the time that either the headmistress or the enormous man realized what had happened. She ran past several of the other bedrooms full of contentedly snoring girls, past the hall and up a corridor that she’d never seen, before finding herself in an older part of the building full of stained glass and dusty old dried flowers. A part of her wanted to keep running but she found herself slowing down.

  Elizabeth had escaped, and so would Calla. She just needed to take a moment to think things through and figure out what to do. Somehow, she needed to get in touch with people who would help her out, and not people who wanted to keep her hostage. People like the police. The fire service. The army. Maybe even NASA. Anybody. Everybody.

  And so she ran.

  AN INEVITABLE TRUTH

  It is not easy to run around a building where at least two people are trying very hard to catch you, and it is even harder to find somewhere to hide in that building when it is full of girls and every nook and cranny is already occupied. Calla discovered this the moment that she turned a corner and ran straight into a queue of girls heading down for breakfast. The thought of breakfast reminded her that her mum didn’t have enough food to stay hidden for long and made her stomach flutter with panic. She turned away and headed up the nearest corridor she could find, all the while keeping her head down and her eyes open for the arrival of the headmistress.

  Calla knew she couldn’t stay running forever. She knew she couldn’t hide.

  She had left her phone behind and she knew that the only other phone in the building was the landline in the headmistress’s study.

  So she had to go back.

  But before Calla did that easily said and quite terrifying thing, she did something else. Something that, in fact, she had been longing to do ever since she had heard that message on the phone, only an hour earlier.

  She had a tiny cry.

  A tiny cry is this: You cry, and you let it happen, and then you pull yourself together. It is the sort of cry you have when you are determined to sort things out but are a little overwhelmed by the nature of everything you have been presented with.142 And at that point in time, Calla was realizing all of this in the very sharp way that feelings sometimes make themselves felt. She pressed her back to the wall and scrubbed her hand over her face and tried to hold it all back, but it would not be held and so she had a tiny cry. She closed her eyes and sobbed into her sleeve and thought of sitting on the top stair with her mother and sharing the last biscuit between them, and even though it made her feel better to think of this, it strangely made her feel a little worse as well.

  And all of this is why she did not notice the panel in the wall opening in front of her.

  THE OPPORTUNE ARRIVAL OF EDMÉE BERGER

  “Salut, Calla,” said Edie, as though stepping out of a wall and finding her roommate crying in a deserted corridor was an everyday sort of occurrence. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at breakfast? Is everything all right? Why on earth are you crying?”

  Calla took a deep breath. “The headmistress is evil and kidnapped my mum but then she escaped into the rainforest and now the headmistress and this guy are trying to kidnap me to make my mum give herself up and—”

  Edie held up her hand. “I think I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.” She gestured at the space she had just crawled out of. “One of the ways I get around the school unseen is by going through the tunnels. There is a whole maze of them behind the walls.”

  “What?” said Calla, staring at her. “What’s that got to do with this?”

  “Nobody knows about them but Hanna and myself,”143 said Edie. “I have been using them all this term. That is why she hasn’t figured out who has been doing all the pranks. Also, it’s how I’ve been able to get across the school without being seen.”

  “Oh,” said Calla, who was rapidly starting to Figure Things Out.

  “Come with me,” said Edie.

  GOING BEHIND THE WALLS

  Going behind the walls may not be something that you are able to do in your house, as not many normal buildings offer the opportunity to do so. They tend to just have the one wall with a narrow space inside it stuffed with boring things like insulation and pipes and wiring, and then the outside. The School of the Good Sisters was not like that. It had been built in a haphazard fashion over the years with towers stuck on by people who liked towers, a kitchen added when people discovered they rather enjoyed hot meals, and bedrooms when people realized that the pupils did not enjoy sleeping in the broom cupboard. It is a building of circumstance and ambition, and one of the direct results of that ambition was the creation of a labyrinth of corridors between the walls. Some of them were the size of a very slender first-year and more cobweb than corridor, and others allowed three of the tallest girls to walk next to each other as though they were walking down the high street of Little Hampden itself. Some of the corridors led to panels that, if you worked them just right, could be lifted out from the wall to allow you to pass from one world into the next, whilst others had doors that looked like actual doors but when you opened them, led to nothing more than a long-abandoned mop.

  And all of this had been half forgotten until the day that Edie Berger had discovered the tiny door hidden behind a bust of Good Sister Maria. A sliver of darkness where there should be no such thing. Cold air coming from a supposedly solid wall. A door that opened if you pushed it in a very particular manner. And when it did open, her heart almost exploded with joy. This was the sort of thing that made her heart whole and she did not look back from that day. What lay beyond that door was freedom, and freedom was something you did not easily find in a boarding school.

  The space beyond the walls had become Edie’s world and then, after a while, she had shared her secrets with Hanna, and now she had shared them with Calla, too. Of course, she had only done so after finishing her task144 but then Edie has always been a professional when it comes to undermining disliked authority figures.

  She waited until she was sure that the two of them were out of earshot before she began to question Calla. “You said something about a man? Is it that grand man? The one at Good Sister June’s farewell dinner?”

  Calla nodded. She tried to ignore the fact that there was a spider crawling up her leg. “He works for the headmistress and she works for something called the Malus Organization, which I don’t know—?”

  “It is a criminal organization. I follow them on Twitter.” Edie helped Calla down a particularly steep step. “For professional reasons, obviously. Don’t trip up here. We’re just above the staff room and I guess they might notice if a foot comes through the ceiling. I am taking you somewhere safe, and then we will figure out what to do. Now, tell me everything. Why has your mother been kidnapped?”

  So Calla took a deep breath and told Edie everything that she knew so far. Edie’s face remained inscrutable throughout, although she did occasionally nod in a very knowing fashion.

  “We need to call for help,” Calla concluded. “Get people here. Somebody—anybody—there has to be—”

  “The phone in that office is our first target,” said Edie. “But they’ll know that as much as we do. And I’ll bet you anything that that man has been left to guard it. That means we’ll have to get rid of him and—”

  “My mum could be literally starving,”
said Calla. “We don’t have time to waste. What about breaking out and going down to the village? I mean, I don’t actually remember where it is, but there’s a policeman down there and—”

  “Not an option,” said Edie. “The school is in lockdown.” She balanced for a moment on the balls of her feet before turning right and heading up a narrow passage. “She’s locked the front door, locked the back, and locked all of the windows, which are unbreakable on the lower floors. The fire escape is armed. I am attempting to disable this, but it is a work in progress. She did it all last night. I watched her from behind a statue of Good Sister Helena Constance. The only way we’re getting out of this school is via the roof.”

  “I’m not jumping off a roof,” Calla said as she followed Edie. She paused suddenly as a new smell hit her, one of bacon and eggs and the distant hint of something else that might be intended for lunch. All of a sudden she realized that she had not eaten since yesterday and her stomach let out a little noise of pain. “Are we by the kitchens now?” she said, trying to distract herself. Edie nodded. “But that’s literally the other side of the building from the staff room. I don’t understand how we’ve got here so quickly. How did you work out where all of this went? How long did it take you?”

  “It is like any secret,” Edie said calmly. “All you have to do is figure it out. For example, a long while ago I was walking past this very same spot and I figured out that this was a door.” She ran her fingers lovingly across a dark wood panel, pressed in on something that Calla couldn’t see, and a door sprang to life underneath her hands. It was the sort of thing that you or I would never have noticed in a thousand years, but then Edie was the sort of person who could see things that others could not. “When I first found this door, I was not very happy. I was new at the school and I did not like it. Not one bit. Being at school was not for me. The food was horrible. There were no macarons to be found anywhere. I mean, can you imagine? The horror.”