The Annam Jewel by Patricia Wentworth Read Free Book Online Page A

upon it, and came to the outer door. She unlocked it. Then she ran back again. If she could put the keys back on Miss Jones’ desk, nobody would dream that she had gone outside. Ethel would only think that she had followed her along the passage.
    She reached the desk, put down the keys, and then remained rooted to the ground with terror. Her hands clasped each other very tightly, her legs shook. Ethel was coming back, running! She came in rather flushed.
    â€œOh, lor’, Moony Loony, what a time you’ve been!” she said. “It ’ud serve you right if I left you ’ere a bit longer. P’r’aps you’d ’urry up and get finished with your betters another time if I did.”
    She crossed to the desk, picked up the keys, and put out the nearest gas-light. A second light burned farther down the room over the place where Rose Ellen had been sitting. Ethel moved towards this, talking all the time and jangling the keys
    â€œI’ve ’arf a mind to lock you in in the dark,” she said. “’Ow’d you like that, Miss Loony Whiteface, eh?”
    She turned, with the chain that controlled the gas-light in her hand, and fixed malicious eyes on Rose Ellen’s rigid figure.
    â€œSulky, are you?” she said. “You just answer when your betters speak to you, or I’ll put it across you, my lady. Wot, you won’t? Obstinate, are you? All right, stay ’ere in the dark, and think it over!”
    She gave the chain a vicious jerk as she spoke, and then made a dash with a view to intercepting any similar move on Rose Ellen’s part. With her hand on the door, she spoke again.
    â€œYou ’aven’t been a-learnin’ of your catechism,” she said. “Order meself lowly and reverently to all me betters—that’s your motter, Loony, and don’t you go fergettin’ it again. You can say it over to yerself in the dark for a bit.”
    She slammed the door, only to open it again and say in sepulchral tones:
    â€œDon’t you ferget as this is the ’aunted classroom.”
    Then she shut the door again, and waited about a yard away from it, ready, if Rose Ellen cried out, to rush in and silence her, or, if one of the staff approached, to open the door quickly and appear to be ushering Rose Ellen out.
    Rose Ellen stood in the pitch dark, the dark which she hated and feared. She kept on saying, “De—ah Peter. Oh, Peter de—ah,” to herself. And when she heard Ethel move away from the door she made a most desperate effort and ran on tiptoe to that other door, the inner one which led to the cloakroom passage.
    If you have to do things, you can do them. Peter always said that. Rose Ellen knew that she must go down the cloakroom passage. It didn’t matter if she was afraid, she had to do it. It had been bad enough when she went to unlock the outer door, but then the light from the classroom had followed her, and now there was not one scrap of light anywhere.
    She went very slowly, touching the wall. Three cloakrooms opened into the passage. She thought of them as black caves, empty and cold. She dared not run lest Something should come out of one of those empty places and catch her. She came to the outer door. Her little hands shook so much that she could scarcely open it. She had to strain and tug. Then it swung inwards, and she slipped through the opening and shut it behind her. The passage had been quite dark, black dark, but the playground was a grey dusk full of shadows: you couldn’t see anything, but it was only grey, not black.
    Rose Ellen crept towards the left-hand wall. She wanted to get close to something that she could touch. The curtainless windows of St. Gunburga’s stared at her. She reached the wall and leaned against it. All the windows were watching her. She could hear a rustling sound in the trees beyond the wall. She must go to Peter; she just had to. She went. It was at this moment that