How to Be Brave Page 14

  “Lucy,” said the first-year. Her eyes grew wide at being noticed by one of her heroes. She tried to distract herself by nibbling at her biscuit but then her stomach realized what was happening and she accidentally-on-purpose devoured it in one bite. Being on the run from the authorities really was hungry work. Hanna graciously pretended not to notice all of this and handed her another biscuit. “Thank you,” said Lucy. She blushed a little when she realized that everyone was looking at her. “It’s just that my dad owns a bakery and sometimes he gets me to help him with it, and honestly ganache isn’t that hard to do. I don’t know why Gareth’s having problems with it. I just forgot that we were doing, you know, what we were doing. Sorry, Calla.”

  “It’s all right,” said Calla.

  “It’s really not,” said Hanna. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. We can’t stay in here forever, not when Calla’s mum’s missing, and the school is being run by a madwoman, and Edie, our fearless leader, has been captured.”

  Calla grabbed her mum’s notebook off the table and stuffed it into her pocket. She had the sneaking suspicion that she was having an Idea, and that it was the sort of Idea that meant they might not be hiding in the room between the walls for much longer. “Tell me about ganache,” she said. “Lucy—please.”

  Hanna gave her a Look. “Did you hear any of what I just said?”

  Lucy, on the other hand, looked thrilled. “Honestly, it’s really useful,” she began. “It can go into a thousand different things, like truffles and icing and sometimes, if you put it inside the middle of a cake and salt it, you can get salted ganache and—”

  Calla held up her hand, stopping her. “Can you talk like that for about ten minutes?”

  “Absolutely,” said Lucy.

  “Brilliant,” said Calla. “Because I’ve got a plan.”

  A FURTHER FEW WORDS FROM YOUR NARRATOR

  Adults sometimes like to pretend that they know everything.164

  But Magda DeWitt had been the sort of child who frequently pretended to know everything, so it should be no surprise that she continued this pretense as a grown-up. But there were many things she did not know.

  The headmistress did not, for example, know about the hidden doors that existed all across the school. And she had not considered the potential impact on her plans of a first-year skilled in the ways of ganache and a bodyguard who was quite keen to improve his cooking of such. She had not thought about the eyeholes in the painting that faced the study door and allowed people standing behind it to watch her coming and going. She had not remotely considered the fact that the girls might continue to fight even though their ringleader had been taken hostage.

  And she had no idea of the enduring strength of Calla North.

  WHAT GARETH SAW NEXT

  Gareth Angus MacDonald was having a crisis of confidence.165 He had taken the job at the school because his passions were not paying. His passions, as you may have gathered, involved baking and in particular the fine, delicate work of the patisserie. Patisserie is French for “very fancy and very small cakes” and Gareth was really very good at it and had started a shop that sold cakes that were as beautiful as dreams. The only problem was that he was quite a substantial and scary-looking man and so nobody had ever quite believed that he had done the baking himself. His business had suffered, and so he had had to close and go into the security business. Security paid very well. And he had been very happy with how things had gone until he had discovered that the girls he was being paid to guard were actually quite pleasant166 and that for reasons he did not quite understand he would have to replace his lunchtime éclair with a stick of broccoli.

  It was because of all of this that he looked uncommonly thrilled to see Lucy creeping down the corridor toward him. He had felt awful since their previous encounter and so the first thing he said to her was, “I’m sorry.” Of course after this he said several other things including “She’s not here” and “It’s okay,” but “I’m sorry” was the most important part of it all because he truly was sorry and a little part of him was starting to wonder if the headmistress was completely right about this school. People who knew about ganache were never the sorts of people who needed grounding in their rooms, in his experience.

  Lucy grinned at him. When she came closer, she said, “I’m sorry we had to run off earlier but she can’t have Calla. We’re trying to look after her. It’s nothing to do with you. We just had to run. It wasn’t personal.”

  “That makes sense,” said Gareth, even though it really didn’t. He pulled a confused yet slightly wistful face.167 “Honestly, I’d rather be baking. I only do this because I have to. My baking doesn’t pay enough. People don’t believe I’ve made the crème pat, and then when I split my ganache—”

  “That’s because you’ve got your ratios wrong,” said Lucy. She looked thoughtful. “I could show you how to make it better. But—not here. I mean, we’d have to go to the kitchens. You can’t cook in a corridor. Good Sister Honey would have an absolute fit.”

  “She would,” said Gareth, who understood a lot about the particularities of chefs. He looked at Lucy and then down the corridor. There was no sign of the headmistress anywhere, and her absence made him come to a swift decision. He could leave the study and come back before she’d even realized he was gone. And if his slightly scary employer called, then they’d just have to leave a message. “Come on,” he said. “Will you show me how to fix it? If we go now?”

  “Of course,” said Lucy.

  If he had known her better, he would have noticed how relieved she looked, but I do not think Gareth really saw anything at that point. His mind was full of petit fours and truffles and cheesecake, and I think he practically skipped as he led the way to the kitchens.

  The moment that Gareth and Lucy turned the corner, Calla and Hanna snuck out from where they’d been hiding and watching the whole thing. “Ready?” said Calla, staring at the study door. Within seconds, they’d be inside and phoning for help and it would all be okay.

  “Always,” said Hanna.

  And they walked into the study together.

  INSIDE THE HEADMISTRESS’S STUDY

  It was the first time that Hanna had been into the study since the headmistress had arrived. The shock of what had changed made her stand quite still and say, “You didn’t tell me it was like this.”

  “I didn’t know what it was like before,” said Calla with some justification. But I do, and so I shall tell you. When Good Sister June had been headmistress, she had had one shelf completely dedicated to the sort of china that one might use for afternoon tea, and another completely devoted to cake stands with handles so that they could be carried from shelf to table without disturbing the cakes. Another shelf had been full of biscuit tins and tubs: The cookies lived in a tin that celebrated the queen’s golden jubilee; the pink wafers could be found in a duck-shaped box donated by a former pupil,168 and the Viennese whirls were packed into a small tub that had With Love from Cleethorpes written across the top of it.

  The headmistress had removed all of this. The room felt empty and cold.

  She also had a pile of documents on the desk that had caught Calla’s eye. As a rule, you should not look at other people’s belongings or even their quite-suspicious-looking files, but when that person has recently tried to kidnap both you and your mother, you do have a slight excuse. It is because of that that Calla was making the most of the moment and had begun to flick through the papers.

  “Look,” she said, “it’s a map of the Amazon. She’s been trying to work out where my mum is.” And failing, she thought with a smile of satisfaction. Everywhere the headmistress had highlighted on the map had an angry cross cut through it. Elizabeth was nowhere to be found.

  Hanna came over to join her. “Maybe there’s evidence,” she said, rummaging through some of the papers. “Adults do like that sort of thing. They are very bad at believing things that are super obvious sometimes. Is there something we can show the police when the
y get here?”

  “There’s a list of calls to Manaus. I can take that, for starters,” said Calla, folding up the piece of paper and stuffing it into her sock. “And look, Han, look at this—she’s been buying a lot of stuff online. I don’t even know how to say half of them, but they sound weird.” And not good weird, she thought, not the good sort of weird at all. There was a list of things labeled Toxins and another of Poisons. These were never good words to read, and especially not when they were next to each other.

  “Pocket it,” advised Hanna, unaware that Calla was doing precisely that. “Take everything. Take it twice if it looks particularly dodgy.” She stretched across the desk and pulled the old-fashioned phone over, checking to make sure it was plugged into the wall. “Good Sister June had a pink phone. She bought it because it reminded her of pink wafers.”169

  She paused and then checked that the phone was working. Between you and me, this was less of a technical test and more of a gesture to distract herself from the fact that she was trying very hard not to cry. Once she had regained control of herself, she turned back to Calla. “Dial. Add an extra nine at the beginning, otherwise it will think that you’re trying to dial somebody internally. Old-people technology can be quite confusing.”

  “You are amazing,” said Calla. She did not dial, not immediately. She put the phone down and gave Hanna a fierce I’m going to pretend I didn’t see you almost cry then but I want you to know I am totally here for you hug. And when she had finished, she began to dial. The first number. The second.

  And then the line went dead.

  Calla looked up. The headmistress stood in the doorway, the cable for the phone dangling uselessly in her hand and Gareth hovering nervously behind her.

  “Gareth,” she said, “grab those children.”

  THE FALL OF THE NORTH TOWER BEDROOM

  Edie studied the new arrivals in the North Tower bedroom with the sort of expression one might use to study the arrival of a cold kale risotto. It was not a good, nor positive, nor even remotely polite expression. Eventually, she decided to speak: “Next time I sacrifice myself in order to buy you some more time, remind me to, you know—not?”

  Calla picked herself up off the floor and tried to ignore the sound of the door locking behind her. “She caught us in the study—”

  “And now you are here,” said Edie calmly, “which means that we are all locked in this room, which is a problem I did not expect to face. I have, of course, already tested the windows and the door, and confirmed that they are locked. I suspect that, even if we were to work the door free in some fashion, then she will have stationed that enormous man at the bottom of the stairs. It is what I would have done. She will think along similar lines. She is good. But not that good. But! Enough of my talents, tell me of the outside world. I have been locked in here for days.”

  “An hour,” said Calla. “It’s been literally just an hour.” She sat down on the edge of her bed and pulled out the notebook from her pocket.170 They still had it. They still had a chance. And that, more than anything, made Calla smile. It wasn’t over yet.

  “Well, it has felt like absolute weeks,” said Edie. “When you remove yourself from the field of play, everything seems so much longer. That is why, my friends, the generals of the past did not leave the battle until it was won. It was the error of an ingénue, but I am not one anymore. I am battle-hardened—”

  I am afraid we must leave Edie to carry on this soliloquy herself, for something else was happening in that room. And that something was this: Calla was starting to figure out the code in her mother’s notebook. When she had looked at it before, she had been afraid that she couldn’t do it. But Calla knew her mother better than any other person in the world and—perhaps due to the fact that she was both desperately tired and desperately terrified for her—the words were starting to swim about on the page and re-form themselves in a way that almost, almost began to mean something.

  In a flash, her mother’s words to Magda came back to her: If you truly want to read about ducks, you will.

  She could almost hear her mother saying it.

  Calla blinked and looked at a sentence at random.

  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.

  And as she stared at it, she started to realize that there was a very familiar word in the middle of all of this gibberish. “I need a pen,” she said suddenly. Hanna threw one across the room, barely pausing in her argument with Edie. Calla didn’t pay them any attention. She just grabbed the pen and started to pick out some very familiar letters in the code:

  Sc 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.

  Just in case you cannot see it, I shall help you.

  The letters that Calla had spotted spelled out the word: duck.

  Which was quite a familiar word indeed for Calla North.

  THE RISE OF THE NORTH TOWER BEDROOM

  Once Calla figured out that the word duck was repeated in the sentence, she started to realize that some of the words made sense. All you had to do was ignore the duck letters in them. Valkey was valley, macaus was Manaus, Ric Negko had to be the Rio Negro—the river that her mum had studied for years—and maybe the point where duck was written out in full was actually just the word duck itself. Hanna and Edie were too busy bickering for her to tell them about this, and so Calla just worked the code out by herself in the way that her mother had done, all those years ago when Magda had tried to steal her homework. For a moment, time in the School of the Good Sisters, and indeed in the Amazon rainforest itself, where Elizabeth was currently surviving on the bourbon creams she had kept in her sock for precisely this sort of emergency, stood still. The whole world was waiting for Calla North to solve the mystery of Mallardus Amazonica, and solve it she did.

  For the second thing she did was put in spaces around all of the words that she thought she knew, so that the sentence now looked something like this:

  dhink utsc valkey, deartue Ric Negko, dndiusonckdongwuyawcyfrok deople—iusgoctkde, ouherwise thc duck d huve becn disckvered dy nuw—anc theke’s dnly oue place ok dhe mup thct lo kks dike iu micht fikdand u thcnk Ilk de aule tc flk dhe re fu om macaus.

  And once she did that, she saw that the d from the duck always appeared as the first letter in the words she had made. It wasn’t just the d—the k did the same thing. She only had a few words but the k was always the fourth letter in them. Maybe the d was the first letter of the word, and the u the second, the c the third, and the k the fourth—and maybe, they weren’t the original letters in the word at all.

  Calla carefully wrote out the sentence again. She kept the gaps that she’d made and started to rearrange the remaining letters so that the k would be the fourth letter in a word, and the u and the c would be the second and third. Then she rewrote the sentence again and put in a star where the letters from duck should have gone and letters for the words that she thought she knew:

  *hink *ts * valley, *ear t*e Rio Negro, *ndi*son***ongw*y aw*y fro* *eople—i*sgo*t* *e, o*herwise th* duck *h *ve be*n discovered *y n*w—an* there’s *nly o*e pla*e o* *he m*p th*t lo*ks *ike i* mi*ht fi* *and * th*nk Il* *e a*le t* fl* *here f*om manaus.

  “What are you up to?” said Hanna, who had grown increasingly intrigued by both Calla’s silence and the fact that she had not participated in a much-needed squashing of Edie’s ego. She got up from her bed and wandered over to where Calla sat, hunched over the notebook. “Don’t tell me it’s homework. How can it be homework?”

  “It’s not,” Calla said carefully. She hadn’t even taken her eyes off the page. “I’m solving my m
um’s code.”

  Hanna let out a tiny shriek of surprise. Edie’s reaction, predictably, was much more under control. “Excellent,” she said, as though she had planned Calla’s moment of revelation all by herself.171 She pulled her blanket up and closed her eyes. “Wake me up when you are done. I shall tell you the next part of this plan.”

  “You have another part of the plan?” Hanna said disbelievingly.

  “No,” said Edie, accepting the point. “But I have time to think of one.”

  Calla did not hear this exchange for she was thinking of a Christmas once, long ago, when all she and Elizabeth had had was barely enough money to keep the heating on, let alone cook a Christmas dinner. They had feasted instead on the sheer wonderfulness of a whole day spent not worrying about bills, and a quiche, sent up by old Mrs. Merryweather from downstairs who saw more than she let on, and spent the afternoon playing word games until Calla had fallen asleep in the arms of her mother. And the two of them had spent the night like that, fully dressed and curled up underneath a pile of blankets and coats and not thinking about the ice on their windows and the rooms with no light bulbs left in them, for they were together.

  When dawn had come, and their room swam in a fine, silvery light, they had awoken and—unwilling to move from their cozy nest—Elizabeth stretched out and pulled a book to them and began to read to Calla from it. This book was a dictionary—a book full of words and the meanings of them—and although it was not the sort of book that you might have expected to be read on a perfect wintery morning, it was perfect for the two of them, for it meant that they could stay together for a moment longer and pretend that the outside world did not exist.