Scarlet and Ivy 3-book Collection Volume 1
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I was vaguely aware of the reflections all around us, the illusion of Scarlet had faded. There was only me and Miss Finch now.
“Well, that’s diligent of you,” she said, “but you do realise it’s the middle of the night?”
I nodded. And I was about to say that I couldn’t sleep, that I was terribly sorry and wouldn’t do it again. But instead another question came to mind. “Why are you still here, Miss?”
She looked taken aback, but after a moment she walked over to the piano seat and sat down with a sigh. “It’s complicated.”
“You could explain it to me. I’m pretty good at listening.”
Her eyes flicked up, the light of the gas lamps dancing across them. “Not at listening to the rules, apparently.”
I blushed.
“The place I have to sleep is not ideal,” she said, staring up at the arches in the stone ceiling. “But down here it’s quiet, and I can be alone to think about things. The cold is a problem, though.”
“Oh yes,” I said, readily agreeing with her.
Miss Finch wrapped her knitted cardigan tighter around herself. “Can I ask you something, Scarlet?” she said.
I had to admit, I flinched a little. Something in the way she said the name made it sound so wrong. “Of course.”
“Why do you want to be a dancer?”
I turned her question over in my mind. “Because it’s beautiful. It’s an art, isn’t it?”
She frowned a little. “You don’t want to be in the spotlight? To be a prima ballerina, touring the world? To be showered with flowers and gifts every night?”
That seemed like something Scarlet would want. Had Miss Finch asked her the same question?
As I looked at Miss Finch, her small body seeming frail with her knees tucked up on the piano stool, it wasn’t Scarlet’s answer I wanted to give.
“No,” I replied. “I just want to be able to dance. Those other things … they don’t matter. Not to me, anyway.”
“You would turn it down?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Oh, of course not. But the dancing is enough for me.”
“Hmm.”
This was some sort of test, and she was deciding whether or not I had passed. But before I could consider this, she stood up.
“You’re right,” she said. “Of course you’re right.” She tucked a lock of her auburn hair behind her ear. “Goodness, it’s so late. You really should be in bed. I should be in bed.”
I nodded. But I hadn’t searched the studio! What if Miss Finch was down here every night, and I never had the chance again?
“Go on, then,” she said, gesturing towards the stairs.
I hesitated. “But … if Miss Fox …”
“She usually goes to bed at ten o’clock sharp. Couldn’t have her finding out about me staying down here after hours, could I?” Miss Finch smiled mischievously. It was an odd expression to see on the face of a teacher.
“So there’s no chance of me being caught?”
“I can’t say that,” she waved a hand dismissively, “but if you run into the matron, perhaps tell her you’re feeling unwell.”
“All right,” I said. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do. “Well, thank you for not giving me the cane.”
She gave me a look like I’d just told her I was a cabbage. “Why would I do that?”
“Because I’m breaking multiple rules?”
Her expression didn’t change. “Oh,” she said.
I was beginning to wonder if Miss Finch wasn’t all there.
“I shall go then,” I said. “Goodnight, Miss.”
“Goodnight,” she replied.
I walked out of the amber glow and into the darkness of the stairwell. I took a backward glance over my shoulder, and saw that Miss Finch was staring at her own reflection.
I’d got off lightly, but now I had a bigger problem – the ballet studio had become out of bounds.
Just as Miss Finch had said, there was no sign of any prowling teachers upstairs. I made it back to my bed without meeting a soul, and I was so tired that sleep came easily. But when my eyes flicked open the next day, with the light of dawn spilling in the window, my first thought was of Scarlet’s diary.
Unless I found a day when Miss Finch wasn’t present, I wouldn’t be able to search the studio ever.
I rolled over with a sigh. My bed sheets were surprisingly warm, and I fought the urge to slip back into sleep.
Ariadne woke up soon after I did, rubbing her eyes as she sat up. “Mmmfmorning,” she said.
“Mmmfmorning indeed,” I replied, pulling myself upright.
“I wonder what’s for breakfast today? I’m so hungry.”
Unsurprisingly, it was porridge. I’d managed to convince the cook to give me an extra spoonful of honey, though, so it wasn’t too terrible. I sat down at my usual place. Ariadne was looking despondently into her bowl.
“You didn’t get any honey?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I asked, but she just gave me a look and said, ‘Next’.”
“Hmm. I suppose someone was smiling in my favour today. Here, have mine. We’ll swap.”
“Really?” she said, her face lighting up as I handed her my bowl of sweet porridge. “Oh, thank you, Scarlet. You’re the best!”
“That’s kind of you,” said Mrs Knight from across the table, watching Ariadne shovel down her considerably improved breakfast. Then, “Slow down a little, Miss Flitworth, you can’t be that hungry.”
There it was, that word again. It echoed in my head as I stared at my tiny Scarlet-like reflection upside down in my spoon.
And then I realised why.
Hungry.
That scribble I’d seen on the back of one of the diary pages, something about being hungry. Now I thought about it, how could it not be a clue? Scarlet never wrote on the back of her pages, she said it made the ink smudgy!
When you’re hungry … you go to the dining hall.
I slammed the spoon into the table so hard I made myself jump. Ariadne squeaked. I looked around – we were surrounded by chatting girls, teachers and dinner ladies.
There was nothing else for it – I would have to make another night-time expedition. At least I now knew that Miss Fox was unlikely to be around.
Or, at least, that’s what I hoped.
By the end of the day, after another excruciating assembly, I was itching to begin my search. I waited for Ariadne to bury her head under the pillow, and then pulled on a woollen jumper over my nightgown. I sneaked through the dark corridors and down the stairs once more, but this time went in the opposite direction to the ballet studio.
I wondered if Miss Finch was down there still. What did she do? Sit and read? Perhaps she stood alone, under the gas lamps, trying to dance on her crippled leg. The thought made me feel rather sad.
The wide wooden doors of the dining hall were shut but, thankfully, not locked. I pushed one open and it swung too far and banged against the wall. I glanced around anxiously in case someone had heard.
The hall had high windows, and the glow of the moon spilled in. Everything was bathed in silvery-grey light – the rows of long wooden tables, the metal-legged chairs. The silence was heavy around me.
I walked the perimeter of the room, feeling the rough wall paint as I went, looking for hiding places. But there were no mouse holes, no loose bits of floorboard.
Then I started looking under the tables. I tried to picture Scarlet getting on her hands and knees with a roll of packing tape to secure her diary pages underneath. Even in my imagination, it seemed unlikely.
But after I’d searched under a third table, getting my nightgown thoroughly dusty, I realised the scope of my task. There were so many tables – and chairs too! – that there was no way of knowing which to check. Surely Scarlet didn’t expect me to look under every single one? I was beginning to feel like this might just be madness.
And besides, what if someone brushed their leg up against it, or a maid found it? They often put the chairs upside down on top of the tables in order to clean the floor.
I looked around the vast, deserted hall. What else was in here?
The serving hatch in the far wall drew my eye. It was shut, but there was a red door next to it that led into the kitchen, where dinner ladies usually bustled in and out, their arms laden with plates.
Well, it had to be worth a try. I went over and tentatively tried the door handle. Drat! Locked.
Flustered by my failure, I gave the kitchen door a kick, bruising my toe in the process. I sank down against the cold wall. What an idiot I was! Did I expect every door to be open?
And as I sat there, my head in my hands, wondering what to do next, I heard a little voice say, “Scarlet?”
I jumped up instantly, preparing my excuses. I was sleepwalking, I was hungry, I was lost, I was …
But the voice wasn’t that of a teacher. It had sounded like …
“Scarlet?” As I looked over to the doors, I saw a familiar mousy face peering back at me.
Ariadne.
“What are you doing down here?” I hissed, and immediately felt terrible as her face fell.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said dejectedly. “I was worrying about hockey. And then I saw you get out of bed, so I-I followed you.”
“You followed me? I might have been going to the lavatories or something!”
“Yes, but …” She looked ashamed. “The other night I could’ve sworn I saw you putting on your ballet outfit.” Suddenly her eyes filled with light. “And besides, you didn’t go to the lavatories, did you? You came down here and searched the entire dining hall. And now you’re getting angry with the kitchen door! What’s going on, Scarlet?”
I put my face in my hands. I had definitely underestimated Ariadne’s curiosity. And what’s more, I had run out of excuses.
“Well?” said Ariadne. “You can tell me. I’m your friend, aren’t I?”
“Of course,” I replied. At least, I hoped so. I wasn’t sure she would be after this. Could I trust her?
I walked over and sat down on a chair in the moonlight. “You might want to sit down for this.”
Ariadne followed me and pulled up a chair. “All right.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m not Scarlet,” I said.
“What?” Her face contorted in confusion. This wasn’t going to be easy. I stared up at the light fixtures dangling from the ceiling, hoping for some inspiration.
“I’m not Scarlet. The truth is … Scarlet is … was my twin sister. My name is Ivy.”
“Wait, what? What happened to Scarlet? And why are you pretending to be her?”
“Scarlet’s gone. She died, here at Rookwood, last year. And Miss Fox forced me to impersonate her from the beginning of term. I don’t know why, but …”
Suddenly the enormity of everything rushed in and threatened to drown me. What was I going along with? I’d always believed what I’d been told with all my heart, that Scarlet had died of a sudden flu and there was nothing they could have done. I’d clung to that. But everything about this felt wrong. What if something far, far more sinister was going on?
My voice cracked up. “I think something bad – really bad – went on here. But I have no idea what.”
Ariadne’s face crumpled. “The real Scarlet is dead? Oh gosh, I’m so sorry … I can’t …”
My stomach lurched, but I managed a nod.
“And they’re making you pretend to be her? That’s just wrong, that’s—”
“Yes.” I winced. “I had no choice. And now I’m caught up in it all and I need to know the truth.” A thought occurred, so horrible it took all my strength not to force it back down. “What if … what if she was murdered, Ariadne? My twin!”
Ariadne fell silent, her eyes wide and frightened. After some time she said, “I’m so sorry … this is awful. But why are you trying to get into the kitchen in the middle of the night?”
I blinked back my tears and the truth finally spilled out. “Well, you see, I need to find her diary. She left pieces of it for me all over the school, with clues. At least … some of them were definitely clues. I’m not so sure about this one. It just said something about being hungry.”
“You didn’t really lose your ring,” said Ariadne, shrewdly.
“No. I’m sorry I lied to you, Ariadne. I’m the worst friend ever.” I hung my head.
“Are you kidding?”
“What?” I looked up.
“This is so exciting!” Ariadne jumped to her feet, her expression suddenly alive. “A real mystery! I’ll help you, Scarlet. Ivy, I mean. We’ll do it together!”
I was astonished. “Aren’t you angry with me? I deceived you … I’m deceiving everyone.”
“Never mind that. You’ve told me the truth now, and no one ever tells me the truth.” She pulled me up from the chair. “I didn’t know Scarlet, so as far as I’m concerned you’re still the same person, just with a different name. We’ll find out what happened to your sister. I promise!”
“Thank you,” I whispered. “All right. Let’s do it. But we need to take things one step at a time. How are we going to get through the kitchen door?”
Ariadne walked over and tried the handle. It was no good, of course. But then she got down on her knees and peered into the lock. “I can pick this,” she said.
“Excuse me?” Now it was my turn to be bewildered.
She pulled a couple of bobby pins out of her hair and made a few attempts at twisting them around the inside. There was a click.
Ariadne stood up and opened the door, leaving me gaping at her.
As she slid the bobby pins back into her hair, Ariadne shrugged. “My governess used to shut me in the airing cupboard when I wouldn’t do my sums. But I was resourceful!”
The kitchen windows were small and it was quite a bit darker than in the dining hall, but there was a pile of white candles and a small book of matches on a shelf by the door. I lit one, and as it flickered into life I got my first glimpse of the Rookwood kitchen.
There was a large black iron range surrounded by plenty of worktops and drawers, a brand-new refrigerator and a deep ceramic sink. A vast wooden table took up the space in the centre of the room. The ceiling was hung with meat hooks, not currently holding any meat, thank goodness.
There was also a dumb waiter in one corner, a big imposing wooden cabinet built into the wall with a winch to send it up and down. I’d seen one before in Bramley Hollow Manor, back in my aunt’s village.
“Where should we look first?” whispered Ariadne. She had lit a candle of her own and held it out in front of her, her face glowing in the darkness.
“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Maybe the drawers?”
It turned out that opening drawers quietly is extremely difficult, especially when they’re full of cutlery and utensils. Ariadne and I went around the entire room, pulling out each one as carefully as we could.
“Don’t forget the tops of them,” I said, sticking my arm in at an awkward angle as I tried to feel the top of the drawer.
“Ouch!”
“What?”
“Knife.”
“Oh.”
The search was proving fruitless. In fact, it was a pretty fruitless kitchen in general. The only plant product I’d seen so far was a wilting cabbage.
“Cupboards?” asked Ariadne. I nodded in agreement and got down on my knees.
The first one I opened was full of plates of varying sizes. I held my candle as close as I could, trying to get a good look at the inside. There was nothing obvious, so I began feeling around the edges to make sure.
Ariadne was doing the same in the cupboard to my left, which was full of jars. Her look of excitement seemed to be fading into one of worry. She turned to me.
“What happens if we get caught, Scar— Ivy? What will Miss Fox do to us?”
“Give us a caning for stealing, I imagine.” I trembled at the thought.
“But we’re not stealing. We’re looking for diary pages.”
“We’re not going to tell Miss Fox that, though, are we! If she catches us, we’ll … we’ll tell her we were taking food. For a midnight feast. She might just believe it.”
“All right,” said Ariadne, her face still grave. “I don’t want to be caned,” she added, in a mousy squeak.
I stood up. “I’ll tell her it was me, that I coerced you into doing it. That she’ll definitely believe.”
Ariadne nodded and then peered in amongst the jars. “Ooh! I think I’ve found something.”
“What is it?” I hissed, jumping down beside her. I held my candle out, trying to see what she’d got. “Paper?”
“Yes! But … oh no …” She pulled her hand out of the cupboard. It had a square of white stuck to it. “Fly paper.” She grimaced.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Drat,” I said, hitting my hand on the wooden door in frustration.
Ariadne flapped her hand in the air, attempting to detach herself from the fly paper. It had a couple of unfortunate flies stuck to it too. “Yuck.”
We were running out of places to search, and I could feel my desperation piling up. I rifled through the rest of the cupboards. They were full of the usual kitchen things, foodstuffs, scales, rolling pins, baking dishes. It seemed quite a variety for a place that seemed to produce only stews and porridge.
Ariadne was still trying to peel the fly paper off. She hadn’t even put down her candle. “Look,” I said, speaking from experience, thanks to pranks pulled by my nasty stepbrothers. “You need to stick it to something else, or it’ll never come off. Try the table. And then you’ll have to wash your hands. It’s got arsenic in it, I think.”
Ariadne looked horrified and rushed to the table immediately, making disgusted noises. I took hold of her candle and stubbed it out. She put her hand down on the table and the paper stuck to it firmly. “Phew,” she said.
That was somewhere we hadn’t yet looked, I realised – the big table. So I got down on my hands and knees once again. The kitchen floor was no cleaner than the one in the dining hall.
“What are you doing?” whispered Ariadne.
“Checking under here,” I breathed. The table was so vast and tall that I could comfortably lift my head up underneath it. I looked at the tarnished dark wood by the light of my candle, searching it for a familiar white rectangle. And then I saw it.
“Please, let this not be fly paper,” I muttered, crawling towards it.
“Did you find anything?” asked Ariadne, her upside-down head appearing at the side of the table. “It’s dark up here,” she said uncertainly.
I peeled off the paper and unfolded it.
It was Scarlet’s handwriting! Just two words and an arrow:
Look down
I scrambled back out from under the table to where Ariadne was waiting, and relit her candle with my own. “I found this,” I told her, holding out the paper.
She scrutinised it. “Look down? Look down where?”
We both stared at the floor as if it would reveal something. But there wasn’t anything there, nor was there anything else we could look under.
“Hmm,” Ariadne said, and I could almost see the thoughts moving across her face in the candlelight.
“It must be out of sight, of course. And … somewhere down … Aha!” She clicked her fingers and then grinned at me expectantly.
“What?”
“We don’t have to just look down, we have to look, down.” She pointed. “Downstairs! Below this room. That must be what Scarlet meant.”
“But I don’t even know how to get downstairs. Or what’s down there.”
But Ariadne was looking behind me, and I followed her gaze. The dumb waiter.
“No. Oh no.” It was one thing to search the kitchens at night, and quite another to ride the dumb waiter into a deep, dark cellar. “You really think so?”
I went over to the dumb waiter and unlatched the wooden door. I could make out the wooden box and the ropes it was suspended from. I leant inside and put my weight on it, and it seemed to hold – and there was something grainy in the bottom. Flour, I guessed.
“I think they haul up sacks of flour in this thing,” I whispered to Ariadne. “It should be able to take my weight.” Should, I thought.
Ariadne gulped. “I’ll lower you down …”
And that was how I ended up contorting myself into a dumb waiter in the middle of the night. It was incredibly cramped and the flour tickled my nose, threatening to make me sneeze. My elbows and knees bumped on the sides, and I realised I was probably giving myself bruises on top of bruises.
“Ready?” asked Ariadne.
“Do it,” I said.
She began winching the dumb waiter down. I could hear the quiet whirring of the ropes as they went around the pulley. Darkness slipped before my eyes as I descended through the floor.
Eventually the contraption pulled to a halt, and I unfolded myself into the cold cellar. It was a cavernous place and the shadows crept towards me. I held out my candle, my hand shaking. The stone floor was covered with bags of flour, along with other supplies – tinned meats and soups, boxes of crackers, sacks of potatoes and porridge oats.
But that wasn’t all. As I held up my candle, I saw rows and rows of bottles glinting darkly at me. Great wine racks covered the walls as far as I could see. No doubt a treat for the teachers. Or perhaps it was Mr Bartholomew’s personal collection?
I tiptoed past the piles of provisions and stopped in front of the nearest rack. The first thing I noticed was that under each bottle was a different number – no, a year.
Scarlet would have picked something significant, I was sure of it. I tried the year we were born, 1922, but the bottle was full of wine and there was nothing behind it.
Something else, then, maybe another important date? Perhaps something to do with the diary … Aha! What about the year that Scarlet had come to Rookwood, 1933?
I followed the rack along to the end, but to my disappointment there was no bottle for 1933. It must have been too recent. So I had to go for something a bit further back. Father’s birthday was a possibility – but no, there was no love lost between him and Scarlet. But then there was our mother. If I remembered rightly, she had been born in 1899.
I dashed down the years, hoping that my hunch was right. And there, dusty but still present, was the bottle labelled 1899. I pulled it out and – yes! I couldn’t believe my luck. It had been emptied of wine and there were pages rolled up inside – a whole wad of them. “A fine vintage,” I whispered.
Remembering Ariadne was alone upstairs, I hurried back to the dumb waiter, still clutching the wine bottle. I climbed into the box and knocked on the top of it.
For a moment nothing happened, but then the whole thing lurched and I almost dropped the bottle. I clasped it to my chest as the dumb waiter creaked up the shaft.
At the top, I was greeted with Ariadne’s worried face. “Did you find anything?” she asked.
I untangled my limbs and then nodded, breathless, holding out the bottle to her.
She gasped audibly. “A message in a bottle! How thrilling!”
I pulled out the cork with a pop and tipped the papers out, then hid the empty bottle at the back of a cupboard. “We’ve got to get out of here,” I whispered.
We blew out the candles and returned them to the pile. With any luck, nobody would notice they’d been used. But as we hurried out into the dining hall, I heard something rustle behind us. Swiftly followed by a loud crash.
Ariadne and I looked at each other.
“Run!” I yelled.
