How to Be Brave Page 12

  Calla had never had a macaron in her life. She wasn’t even sure what they were.

  “I was depressed,” said Edie. She did not look at Calla. “I ate these things that people said were good for me and they were all puddings. Sticky toffee, chocolate, treacle, and Yorkshire. How can a country live so much on puddings? It is so strange. I did not like it. The food. The people. The nuns. So I ran away.”

  “You what?” said Calla, unable to stop herself.

  Edie shrugged. “Yes,” she said, still not turning around. “I found the door behind Good Sister Maria and I thought that it might lead me outside, but it led me here instead. I stayed inside these walls for a week, Calla. I only left to steal food and go to the toilet and the shower. The one person who figured out that I was here was Good Sister June, and she did not make me leave, for she is not that sort of woman. She came and sat with me one evening and we talked about literature and patisseries. Let me tell you, the woman’s knowledge of crème anglaise is unparalleled.”

  A part of Calla could not quite believe what she was hearing. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Edie smiled and pushed the door open to reveal a large room full of books and sofas and possessing the sort of smell that made Calla realize that nobody had been inside it for a very long time. “Because this is where I stayed when I ran away, and it’s where you’re going to hide. I will make sure that you get food, and pillows to sleep on if you need them, but most of all I will bring you help. But you must give me time.”

  And because Calla had no other option, and because she believed in her friend in a way she did not quite understand, and because she knew that Edie was a friend, an actual, proper, true and honest friend who had come out fighting for her when she was at her lowest, she said, “All right. I’ll stay here. I’ll give you time.”

  THE INEVITABLE CONSEQUENCE OF HIDING

  Edie shut the door behind her.

  Calla listened to the sound of her friend disappearing quickly down the corridors and then, as silence fell about her, began to feel somewhat overwhelmed. She could almost see the headmistress and Gareth climbing through the walls to come and find her. Every creak sounded like the footsteps of somebody big and adult-shaped, and every breath she took seemed to be the loudest breath she had ever taken. And now, so strangely, the room was feeling small and tight about her and she had to fight a desperate urge to open the door and run, run as fast as she could.

  She was, I will let you know, having what can only be described as a mild panic attack. It is entirely understandable considering the stress that she had been under that morning and the knowledge of what was happening to her mother, right now, lost in the rainforest with a rapidly dwindling supply of food. The thought of being without food hit Calla hard, for she had spent much of her life hovering about the reduced section in the supermarket and sometimes, on the darkest days when money had seemed a long-forgotten thing, watching her mother being given food parcels to help them get through another few short hours. The simplest of things: a biscuit to dunk in a mug of tea, a crumpet laden with butter, or a slice of cake with icing as thick as the sponge itself, had been so often distant in her life. And now her mother was all alone, without her. Without hope.

  Calla felt a shiver begin in her toes as she realized all of this, and it was the sort of shiver that once begun could not be stopped. It moved from her toes to her legs, up past her knees and into her stomach, and it sat for a long while there, making it hard for her to think clearly or even breathe, and then all of a sudden it moved out and up into her throat and into her arms and down all the way to her hands. Her fingers began to shake and she could not stop them. It was as if her whole body had been taken over by somebody else and she did not know what to do, other than ram her hands inside her pockets145 and sit on them and will them to be still. But sometimes anxiety is stronger than anything we can imagine it to be, and so, suddenly furious with how her body was not behaving, Calla bounced to her feet and started to walk around the room. It was not an easy thing to do, for her legs felt as though they had never walked in their life and her throat was full of a fear she could not yet understand or master, but she did it. One step after another. Slowly, steadily, she did it. And with every step her anxiety and her worries and her panic began to fade away; her legs returned to her, her stomach began to feel normal, and her hands stopped shaking.

  And it was then that she remembered her mother’s notebook.

  A LIGHTNING BOLT IN THE DARK

  Calla sat down on one of the sofas in the corner of the room, and took the notebook out of her pocket. It was such a small thing and yet, because it might tell her where her mum was, it was suddenly the most important thing in the world. The pages were full of Elizabeth’s neat writing, and every now and then there was a drawing of something that Calla recognized from her mum’s research. Auriculars.146 Speculums.147 Custard creams.148 Elizabeth had been planning this trip to the Amazon all her life and reading about it was like having her in the room. The thought that Calla had almost given the notebook to the headmistress made her feel quite sick.

  The notebook had to stay with Calla, and both of them had to stay safe.

  Calla flicked past the pages she had already looked at, and let her eyes drift over the new bits. The little brown duck kept reappearing, as did the sections that Calla had thought were written in a different language. The headmistress had said that it was written in code, and that actually seemed like it might be a possibility. She picked a paragraph and began to study it, staring so hard at the letters that her eyes almost ached with effort.

  But then her eyes drifted farther up the page.

  And this is what she saw.

  WHAT CALLA READ

  Hi, Magda. I know you’re going to read this, so I’m going to start to write in code now so you can’t see what I’m doing. You know, if you’d just asked me about it, I would have told you everything I know about ducks from the start. They’re so interesting! I mean, did you know that there is a breed of duck on every continent apart from Antarctica? And that when a duck sleeps, they can sleep with one eye open to make sure they don’t get attacked? But I’m getting distracted. What I really meant to say was: Dhe reiu noching he ek dhat iu oc impkr tance dut sue wicls pekd dee ks tu ying tcf igkre dt out.

  “‘Tu ying tcf igkre dt out,’” Calla said softly to herself. “What even is that? How has she done this?” She drew her finger down to the next line and continued reading, turning over from one page to the next.

  That’s my answer to question five for history. I’m going to stop writing in code and tell you some more about Mallardus Amazonica because I know how much it interests you. And it should! It’s a very special duck! One day I’m going to go and visit where it came from. I’ve been figuring it out and I think I know exactly where that is: Dou nued tc look dor au pocnt wheke d fues hw ater ric er me eks dalt, und ics surko und ed dy sumethi ng thct makks dt aumost im cossi ble tk det out. Sc k dhi nk uts c valkey, dear tue Ric Negko, dnd ius onc k dong wuy awcy frok deo ple-i us goc tk de, ouherw ise thc du ckd huve becn dis ckvered dy nuw-anc th eke’s dnly oue pla ce ok dhe mup thct lo kks dike iu micht fik da nd u thcnk Ilk de aule tc flk dhe re fu om macaus. K dhink iu hac tk de sumewhere, toc, wheke dhe fuowers blcom ak didnight-tuere’s a notk a fuund ic Spakish an un olc book, and tuat’s thc onlk dhing tuat maces senke. dhere’s auso thus thikg dbout tue Eact ank aest Wund anc I’k dot suce k dnderstand tuat yec, buk d wull.

  There, I’ve told you absolutely everything I know. Now I’m off for some cake with Chrissie. Have fun breaking my code. If you really, truly want to read about ducks, you will. And if you decide you’re really interested and not just trying to copy me, I’ll tell you everything.

  Calla picked a bit of the coded section at random, and read it out loud again, hoping that it would make sense:

  “‘Dou nued tc look dor au pocnt wheke d fues hw ater ric er me eks dalt, und ics surko und ed dy sumethi ng thct makks dt aumost im cossi ble tk det out.’
”

  It wasn’t the easiest thing to say in the world, but there were certain words that did make sense. Dou was a word that sounded like it might be you, and if she ignored the break in sumethi ng, it almost looked like something.

  There was a pattern underneath it all. Her mum had never done anything without there being a good reason behind it. Of course a lot of those reasons were only understandable to Elizabeth herself, and perhaps not logical in the slightest to those who thought in a more conventional manner, but they had still been reasons nevertheless.

  A little, soft sound of pain escaped Calla at this point. She missed Elizabeth so much that it hurt, and so she shut the book for a second and closed her eyes, and told herself that it would be okay. Edie would come back. They’d rescue her mum. Everything would be all right. It had to be. There was no other choice.

  And then she did not tell herself anything else, because she was asleep and dreaming of ducks and rainforests and maps that almost, but not quite, made sense.

  IN WHICH EDIE BERGER DELIVERS ON HER PROMISE

  When Calla woke up, she did not know where she was or what was happening. Much of this was to do with the fact that she was in a room she did not recognize, and that the small and determined figure of Edie Berger was currently sitting on top of her. It was a lot to take in and I think Calla did remarkably well under the circumstances by not saying something Quite Rude into Edie’s face. Instead she pushed her off and pulled herself upright so that she could rub the sleep out of her eyes.

  And when she did this, she paused and stared at the room around them.

  Which was absolutely full of girls.

  Edie picked herself up off the floor and looked intensely smug at the expression on Calla’s face. “I told you that I would bring you help, and so I have. You can thank me later for being so remarkable and following through on my promise in just five hours. Five! Only five! Truly I am a professional when it comes to this sort of thing. Also, I threatened that if anybody woke you they would have to be my servant for the next three years.”

  “You’re amazing,” said Calla. She looked around the room. Rose and Gajal and Amelia were playing a very quiet game of tic-tac-toe on the floor. Sethi, Sabia, and Maisie were sprawled over an ancient sofa in the other corner of the room talking to each other in soft undertones.

  “Calla is now awake,” Edie announced grandly. “You can talk normally. We won’t be overheard here. Not unless Good Sister Robin decides to visit the western attics, and as that has not happened once in the past three years and in fact I am not quite sure she even remembers where they are, I think we are safe.”

  Hanna carefully made her way over from the corner of the room where she had been quite contentedly building a book fort. She poked Calla in the shoulder in the way that you can only poke somebody when they are one of your very best friends. “I brought you a sausage roll,” she said. “Good Sister Honey’s been stress-baking. There are literally hundreds tucked away in a cupboard on the third floor.”

  “Thank you,” said Calla, and she poked Hanna in the shoulder in the way that you can only poke somebody when you are realizing that they are one of your very best friends.

  “Enough of baked goods,” said Edie. She gestured at the crowd of girls gathered around them and then, when they did not quite pay her the appropriate amount of attention, she clapped her hands together and bellowed, “ATTENTION!” When the last first-year had turned around to look at her, she smiled benevolently. “Thank you, mes enfants. So! Now that our sleeping Calla has stopped her snoring, and now that I have inducted you all in the ways of the rooms between the walls, here is what is going to happen next. We are going to get Calla into the headmistress’s study so she can call for help and so rescue her dear mother who is hiding out in the rainforest from the evil organization that is running our school. A complex challenge for anybody, I suspect, but not for people like you and me. This is our school. It was never Magda DeWitt’s. It is time to take it back.”

  THE GREAT IDEA OF HANNA KOWALCZYK

  Edie waited until the girls had finished cheering before she continued. “There is, however, one problem. There is an enormous man guarding the study and he must be removed. He is three times as tall as myself, and almost as wide as the building itself. He is stronger than seven bears and as terrifying as a patisserie without its delicate and beautiful cakes. We must get rid of him. Some of you may die in the process. It will be a noble death. We will sing songs about your sacrifice for years to come.”

  One of the nervier first-years gasped before several others hushed her.

  “Nobody’s going to die,” Hanna said in a calming fashion. “Other than maybe Edie herself.” She took the opportunity to pass Calla a biscuit. “Math cupboard on the second floor,” she said, explaining. “There’s a stash of jammie dodgers.”

  “We should set off the fire alarm,” said a small red-haired girl.149

  “But then the headmistress shall just reset it,” said Edie, pacing furiously. “And to do that, she will be in the study. Precisely where we do not wish her to be.”

  “Not if there’s an actual fire,” said Rose.

  Edie sighed. “Fire may feature in this plan. But it does not yet. Not until we have no other choice. Does anybody else have some ideas that do not involve setting things alight?”

  “I do,” said Hanna.

  THIRTEEN BRIGHT YELLOW WIGS

  There are many things you can do in a boarding school, but disappear is not one of them. At least, it is not one of the things that you can do easily, particularly in large numbers. Cover stories must be developed, coconspirators bought with the promise of jelly-bean payoffs, and the teachers must be the sort of teachers who do not notice when a vast number of their class is missing. Good Sister Christine was, I admit, somebody whose silence could often be bought with the right kind of confectionary150 but she was also the sort of person to notice when Calla, Edie, and Hanna were among the missing and to deduce from this that Something Was Happening.

  It was because of this that she set her class (at least, what was left of it) to do silent reading, and went out to check on the inhabitants of the North Tower bedroom personally. She did not tell anybody what she was doing and when she walked past the front door of the school and noticed that it was locked, she did not tell anybody about that, either. Because on her way to the front door, she had noticed that the windows were all shut and that the other doors had been locked as well, and that all of the keys to these windows and doors were missing. And although that was unusual in itself, it did not become Particularly Unusual until she realized that the headmistress was not in her study and was instead marching along the corridors like a possessed thundercloud. Her footsteps could be heard two floors down, as could her voice, which was currently yelling at Gareth to “Look harder, she has to be somewhere!” It was not a pleasant picture, but it was one that told Good Sister Christine that something was quite definitely, particularly, spectacularly wrong.

  Good Sister Christine was not surprised to find that there was nobody in the North Tower bedroom, and she was also not surprised to see that the small purple car that ferried pupils to and from Little Hampden was still parked outside, and that the helicopter was still being repaired.151 From this she deduced that the missing girls had definitely not gone unexpectedly to the dentist and that they were, in fact, still somewhere inside the school. And so she looked: behind statues, in abandoned classrooms, and—quite bravely—in the long-forgotten broom cupboard on the first floor that now held more cobwebs than brooms. And she continued to look, until all of a sudden she came across the most curious sight of a crowd of girls carefully lowering themselves from the ceiling in the lower fifth’s common room.

  It was not the rappelling girls that bothered her, for any physical activity is a good thing and rappelling really did look like a lot of fun. But the fact that all of them were dressed as Calla North was somewhat problematic. The girls all wore the same school uniform and had, from somewhere,
managed to find bright yellow wigs. Some of the more enterprising girls had drawn freckles on their faces, reminiscent of the freckles on Calla’s own cheeks152 but of course, if you studied them closely, you realized that several of these girls had done so with more hope than ambition and in more than one case, the freckles were, in fact, brown sauce.

  Good Sister Christine waited until the last girl had reached the floor and had unclipped herself from her rope, and the missing floorboard in the ceiling had been replaced by whoever was left up there, before she coughed in a polite Gosh, could you please tell me what’s going on? manner.

  Several of the girls shrieked. One of the more flighty first-years gasped.

  The one who was nearest to Good Sister Christine waved as though this was an everyday scenario. “Hello, Good Sister Christine. The school is being run by an evil organization who are trying to hold Calla hostage—so we must break into the study to call for help.” She paused for breath. “On another note, we also need you to leave fifteen macarons behind the statue of Good Sister Theresa tonight, so that we153 can use them to power our fight against evil. Please could you also leave some charcuterie? Just a small tray. Maybe some olives as well. I am not fussed as to what type or color, but a few will do.”

  Good Sister Christine took a deep breath. “Edie, why are you all wearing wigs?”

  “How did you know it was me?” said Edie, looking quite disappointed. “I have not even shown you my Calla walk yet.”

  “Calla?” said Good Sister Christine. “I see Sethi, Sabia, and Hanna, but I don’t see you—?”