How to Be Brave Page 7

  But none of this could be said, because grown-ups were grown-ups all the world over and Good Sister Christine clearly thought that Calla was okay.76 Her hand was already on the door, and she was pushing it open. In the distance came the sound of a bell. “That’s the end of school,” said Good Sister Christine, “they’ll be here shortly. Are you sure you’ll be all right to wait for them?”

  Calla nodded. “Yes,”77 she said, knowing that there was nothing else she could say. “I’ll be brave.”78

  INTRODUCING EDMÉE AGATHE AURORE BERGER AND HANNA KOWALCZYK

  After Good Sister Christine closed the door behind her, Calla really was left quite alone. It wasn’t as bad as she had thought it would be. She had been alone on the train, and on the platform, and she’d survived that. As long as Miranda Price didn’t walk through the door in the next five minutes, everything was going to be all right.

  Almost unconsciously, Calla opened her suitcase and took out the battered mobile phone that her mum had given her. It wasn’t pretty and it couldn’t do anything fancy, but it was the most precious thing she had. And even though it was far too soon for Elizabeth to call as she’d still be on the plane, Calla couldn’t help hoping that it would ring.

  At that moment the bedroom door opened and a small girl bounced into the room. She dropped an exercise book by one bed, dropped herself onto the other, and pulled her dark hair out of its clip with a loud sigh of relief. And it was only then that she looked at Calla and said, ““Salut. Who are you?”

  “Calla,” said Calla, hastily stuffing the phone back into her case.

  “Calla what?” said the girl. She had a French accent that every now and then seemed to grow more pronounced. When Calla didn’t immediately reply, she said: “Calla uncomfortable silence? Calla awkward pause? It is an interesting name, I think, but I don’t think it’s really your name.”

  “Calla North,” said Calla North, who was slightly dazzled by the whole encounter. “I’m new. Good Sister Christine brought me up here and told me to wait for Edie and Hanna?” She was very aware that she was babbling and so she stopped herself by biting her bottom lip. It was a painful and yet quite effective method, best to save for emergencies.

  “I am Edmée Agathe Aurore Berger,” said Edmée. “But you can call me Edie, because nobody but my ancient grand-mère calls me that, and she’s too busy leaving her fortune to the dogs to remember that she has children, let alone grandchildren.” She paused for breath. “Hanna’s on her way but she’s been delayed by Good Sister Paulette, who will insist on people doing their homework. I knew Hanna would forget so I offered to do it for her, as I did last term, but Hanna’s developing a conscience and was determined to do it herself, and here we are. It really is most tiresome. Why are you called Calla? I’ve never heard of anybody being called that.”

  Other people might have been surprised by the sudden change of topic, or indeed the volley of information that had just been thrown at them, but Calla could deal with this sort of thing with her eyes closed. Elizabeth had never been one for linear thinking when she was excited. Neither, it seemed, was Edmée Agathe Aurore Berger. “My dad’s favorite flower was a calla lily, and so that’s what they called me. We put them on his grave when they’re in season.”

  Edie nodded. “That makes sense. I’m sorry about your dad. Mine is alive, though I barely see him. He is with the army, and stationed somewhere I forget the name of. Really, it’s as if I’m an orphan. My life is unbearably romantic that way.”

  The door opened for a second time. “Calla, meet Hanna Kowalczyk,” said Edie, doing introductions as she collapsed back onto her bed. “Hanna, meet Calla North. She’s new. Delightful joy.”

  Hanna grinned at Calla, before walking over to Edie’s bed and sitting squarely on top of her. “Hi,” she said to Calla, ignoring Edie’s yells. “I’m so glad you’re here! When term started, it was just us two, and when it got into March, I thought we weren’t ever going to get a third roommate and we needed somebody because people were all, ‘I can’t tell the difference between you two’ and I was like, ‘Well, she’s the one with the big hair and French accent and I’m the one with the glasses,’ and they were all ‘I still don’t know’ and I was—”

  “Shut up,” said Edie from beneath her. It was quite muffled, but still distinct. Edie was particularly talented that way.

  Hanna made a surprised face and sat up, pulling Edie out from underneath her. “Sorry, I didn’t see you.”79

  Edie gave her a Look before throwing a pillow at her. Hanna managed to dodge it, but the pile of clothes next to her didn’t. They slid down onto the floor and a pair of socks rolled all the way over to Calla’s feet.

  “Throw them back at her,” advised Edie, lounging on her bed.

  “Ignore her,” said Hanna, pushing her glasses back up her nose. “I have a question to ask you, Calla, and we can’t go anywhere or do anything or even possibly talk to you until you answer it.”

  “All right,” said Calla, putting down the socks. She felt just a little bit nervous all over again. “What is it?”

  “What’s the last book you read?” said Hanna.

  “The Breeding Habits of Mallardus Amazonica,” said Calla. “By my mum.”

  Hanna didn’t say anything.

  Edie didn’t say anything.

  And it was then Calla realized that that might not have been the answer that they’d been expecting.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF STORIES

  “Have you read any “school stories? We know your mum’s a super-author woman but that’s not what I meant.”

  “I don’t read anything like that,” said Calla.

  “But you must. Nobody comes to boarding school without having read school stories. You have to have read some of them at least. Enid Blyton? The Chalet School? Or Angela Brazil? What about Robin Stevens? Kate Saunders?”80

  Calla shook her head.

  “Okay,” Hanna said desperately, “do you believe in Morally Improving books? Is that the sort of thing you read? I have to know what you think about books. You might be like her.”

  “Like who?” said Calla. “There’s a lot of people that could mean.”

  Edie stood up and walked to the door. She opened it, peered down the stairs, and then closed it. “Coast is clear. Go ahead. Tell her everything she needs to know. And while you do, brush your hair so we’re not late for dinner.”

  “The headmistress,” said Hanna. She didn’t move an inch. “This school used to be the best thing ever, but it’s not. Not now. When we came back after half-term in February, everything had changed. We didn’t realize it at first, but slowly it all got worse. They took away our mobile phones—”

  “The official ones and the unofficial ones,” added Edie. She looked pale at the memory. “They went through our sock drawers and everything.”

  “That was at the end of February.”

  “And now the only phone you can use is in her study. Literally the only phone in the entire school, and she has it locked up.”

  “She’s made all the common rooms out of bounds. We’re supposed to go straight to our bedrooms after dinner.” Hanna paused for dramatic effect as she reached the most important point in her list of horror. “And she’s even changed the menu.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” said Calla, who was used to eating whatever was on offer that week, regardless of how well it went together.

  “You’ve never had rainbow sponge and chocolate custard. Good Sister Honey is, like, the best cook ever, and we all worship her. She’s basically a wizard. But with scones.”

  Edie wrinkled her nose in disgust. “And now she has to make things like Brussels sprouts cake and spirulina smoothies and kale milkshakes.”

  “That wasn’t so bad when we still had cookery classes.”

  “But now we don’t even have them. She’s canceled cookery, and drama, and art, and camping out in the woods and ballroom dancing and fencing and helicopter maintenance81—”

  “What
?” said Calla, wondering if she’d heard this correctly. “You do all of those?”

  Hanna nodded. “We did,” she said, “but that was under Good Sister June. She was our old headmistress, but the school’s been bought out by a big company and the new school board said we weren’t getting good enough grades so they shipped her in. She used to be a pupil here or something. Like that makes it better.”

  “I’m going to make her life hell,” Edie murmured dreamily.

  “Edie has powers in that direction. Usually she uses them for good, but I have authorized her to use them to get rid of the headmistress. Whatever it takes. It was when—when she got rid of the fiction in the library. All of the boarding school stories. That was it. That was when I knew. She got rid of everything good and brilliant and replaced it with books about—about algebra.”

  “Oh my god,” said Calla.82

  “Precisely,” said Edie. She glanced at the clock on the wall and let out a small, ineffably chic gasp. “We need to take her to the Hall, Hanna, or we shall be late for dinner.”

  “Do we go the normal way or the … other ways?”83 said Hanna. There was a subtle pause that really was not quite as subtle as she had intended it to be.

  Edie embraced a rare moment of tactfulness and pretended to not notice. “The normal way,” she said, ignoring the What on earth are you on about? look Calla was currently giving her. “For now. We’ll introduce her to the other ones soon. Anyway, look—come on. We have to get moving before one of our beloved prison guards comes to get us.”

  And so they moved. Hanna held the door open, and Edie grabbed Calla’s hand and pulled her down the stairs. The three of them ran through the deserted entrance hallway before skidding to the left and down a long, dark corridor. They passed windows that looked out onto a yard where vegetables grew alongside a long-forgotten duck house, and locked common rooms that ached for company, and then all of a sudden, into a corridor that was full of girls. They were everywhere and Calla, who had not dealt with girls well ever since Miranda Price had picked her last for basketball and then spent the game throwing the ball directly at her head, felt a little bit panicky at the sight and started to slow down.

  It can be understood that Edie and Hanna felt no such qualms. It can also be understood that Edie was not the sort of person to let a new girl navigate such complicated waters by herself. She kept her hand wrapped around Calla’s and pulled her into a gap in the line. Hanna slid in neatly behind them, and as the three of them caught their breath and tried to look as though they had been there all along, a man appeared in the distance.

  Both Edie and Hanna stiffened, as did the girls around them. It was not that a man was surprising, for men do exist and some of them are rather lovely and make an excellent Battenberg, but the fact that one had appeared in a girls’ boarding school was very surprising indeed.

  The man was enormously tall and looked deeply uncomfortable.84 None of the nuns in the corridor spoke to him or even seemed to notice him. They were too busy walking in and out of the dining room and whispering to each other under their breath. Calla found herself watching them as much as she watched the man. Not one nun looked happy, or even pleased to be there, and that was curious. Something had happened or, perhaps, was happening even now.

  The headmistress appeared at the end of the corridor. She was surrounded by more men, all of them wearing the same dark-colored suit as the gigantic man who had been there all along. It was the sort of dark-colored suit that people wore when they did not wish to be noticed.

  Calla had seen people like this before. They’d last come when she’d worn her old school uniform for so long that the holes had started to develop holes. They were in the house one evening when she got home, and while one stayed in the kitchen and talked to Elizabeth, the others took Calla aside for a Private Chat. They’d told her that her mum wasn’t able to look after her right now, and that there were other people who could help. They’d never understood that Calla could deal with anything providing she had her mum at her side.

  Suited people were problems.

  But a more pressing problem was the fact that Hanna was elbowing her in her ribs and saying, “Pay attention.”

  Calla pulled herself away from her thoughts and paid attention.

  “This is Rose Bastable,” said Hanna, gesturing at a girl their age. She had her hair pulled back into intricate braids that made Calla instantly envious of her. Her own bright yellow hair did nothing but stand up like a thick and unruly bush however many times she brushed it. “Rose, this is Calla. She’s named after a plant too. She’s new and in our bedroom.”

  “Poor you,” said Rose sweetly. “Edie can be trop difficile to cope with.”

  “Not compared to you,” Hanna said loyally. “I still haven’t forgotten that time you cried when Sister Honey put raisins in the cookies instead of chocolate.”85

  “I was six,” began Rose, but then she stopped. Good Sister Christine was standing in the doorway and clapping her hands together for their attention.

  “Girls,” said Good Sister Christine. She caught Calla’s eye and gave her a brief thumbs-up before she stepped back. “You can go in now,” she said. “Quickly, please.”

  IN WHICH CALLA MEETS SOMEBODY VERY IMPORTANT

  The dining hall was twice as big as the biggest room that Calla had ever been in, and had more paintings on the wall than they had in their entire house.86 It was also full of twice as many girls as Calla had ever seen, and a high proportion of those looked like they could be Miranda Price. She took a deep breath and sat where Edie told her to sit and tried to ignore how there were at least four different forks laid out in front of her.

  “Do not worry about the cutlery,” said Edie, who had, of course, noticed Calla’s slight panic. “Work from the outside in. It is part of the headmistress’s new ideas to make us good little girls.”

  “Good little girls from the 1900s,” said Rose from farther down their table. “How does knowing which fancy fork to use when make us better?”

  Hanna grinned. “I’ve been to enough government dinners to know that it doesn’t matter,” she said, “but some stupid people like to think it does.”

  “Good Sister June never cared about any of this stuff,” Rose said morosely. “We absolutely have to “do something about this.”

  Edie was about to respond, but then she stopped because the food was arriving. It was served by a series of nuns who looked absolutely furious with the world. They put their dishes down on the table before returning to sit with the rest of the staff in grim, severe silence.

  Calla could barely focus on her meal,87 and instead found herself studying the nuns and trying to figure out what was happening. They all kept looking at one woman in particular. She was a nun, older than Good Sister Christine, with pale white hair that curled out from underneath her scarf. She was not what you would call pretty, and indeed she had not been called pretty at many points in her life, but she was the sort of person that you would look at twice.

  Calla knew, as clearly as if she’d been told, that this was Good Sister June.

  And Good Sister June was staring right back at her.

  THE DIFFICULTIES OF STARING AT STRANGERS

  Calla North did not know Good Sister June one bit and so when Good Sister June looked at her in a Something’s Up and I Know That and I Am Trying to Solve It Golly Don’t You Look Like Just Your Mother sort of fashion, Calla simply looked back at her in an I Don’t Have the Slightest Clue What You’re Saying but I’m Sure It’s Fascinating manner.

  Good Sister June stood up and pushed her chair back under her table. She took a step toward where Calla sat.

  Just one.

  And then she stopped, and an instant later Calla realized why. The headmistress had stood and was clapping for attention, and the whole room looked up expectantly. It was time for the speeches, and nobody was going to get to talk to anybody else until they were done.

  However much they needed to.

  LADIES A
ND SMALLER LADIES, YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE

  The headmistress walked all the way around the table until she stood in between Good Sister Christine and Good Sister June.

  “We are all here tonight to say thank you to somebody very important to us all,” she said, resting her hand on Good Sister June’s shoulder. “I’ve known Good Sister June ever since I was a pupil at this school myself. She’s changed so many lives and made so many people who they are today. And now we must say goodbye to her.”

  She paused for the room to applaud. The suited men clapped, but none of the girls or the nuns moved an inch. The headmistress did not seem to notice this. “I am so humbled“88 to be here in front of you now, to guide you all through the coming months. Tonight, however, we pay tribute to the past.” The headmistress lingered just a little too long on that final word. “Good Sister June is retiring. She has been a splendid Head but the time has come for her to move on. She’ll still be on site, of course, as she will be working in our convent. Your daily contact with her will be little to none. It’s for the best, really. It’s time the school had a strong and stable headmistress as opposed to somebody who makes the rules up as they go along. Or who changes things to suit certain students and not others. Favoritism shall no longer be tolerated.”

  Good Sister Christine looked up at that. Calla had the strangest thought that she was going to say something, but she didn’t. She looked at Good Sister June who, almost imperceptibly, shook her head. Calla only noticed it because she was staring straight at her.

  “There are going to be changes. There will be no time now for frivolous extracurricular activities. There will be no ridiculous desserts like rainbow sponge and custard. Your work will be suitably challenging, and if any of you are caught helping each other with homework, there will be consequences.”

  The headmistress’s speech continued, but Calla could barely pay attention to what was being said, because she had just noticed something. The strange men in suits all had a logo stitched onto their jacket pockets. A duck, with its wings crossed behind its back, and the letters M.O. The same logo she had seen on the papers in the headmistress’s hand earlier that afternoon. The same logo that she was sure she’d seen before.