The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School by Kim Newman Read Free Book Online Page A

making up handles and expressions. Each prefect or teacher or girl had a Secret Handle, for use only among the Forus, selected so there was no obvious connection between the handle and the subject’s name or enthusiasm or physical appearance. Miss Borrodale was not ‘Fossil’, but ‘Lilac’ (her first name was Violet). Miss Kaye was not ‘Acting Mrs Edwards’ but ‘Janet’ (J came after K in the alphabet). Dora Paule, known to her relatively few friends as ‘Daffy’, was simply ‘A’ (because she was ‘A-paule-ing’). Inchfawn was ‘Inchworm’ to the School, but ‘Six’ – for Six Eyes, because of her two sets of specs – to the Forus. Only they called whips ‘the Witches’; the rest of School called them ‘the Sisters’. In Forus lingo, Black Notches were ‘Stains’ (fully, ‘Stains on the Escutcheon’), bosoms were ‘beakers’ (Light Fingers had the best-developed beakers), prep was ‘greens’ (as in ‘have you eaten your greens?’), serving in QMWAACC was ‘being ganged’ (derived from press-ganged), custard was ‘splodge’, and someone with a crush was ‘a limpet’.
    They all had Secrets. Amy’s was the floating. Light Fingers had a stash of stolen objects, picked up while practising hereditary skills. Frecks had a boyfriend in Watchet – a lad named Clovis, who was walking out with her (when they could both escape, which was seldom) though he was supposedly engaged to a little marchioness. Besides her reprobate brother and her spy parents, Frecks’ family tree included a glamorous uncle who had flown with Pendragon Squadron during the war. Lieutenant Lance Lake, her mother’s brother, had given Frecks some of his kit, including one of the mystic-blessed silvery chainmail balaclavas the Aerial Knights of Avalon believed kept them safe in battle provided their cause was just and true. Kali wore the snail in her nose at least partially to cover a scar given her by her father – who once took it in mind to stick the point of a dagger up her nostril and rip it free.
    Amy told the Forus about Mother, and the uncles she had periodically gained and lost since Father died. Light Fingers admitted she’d drawn up, and tested, five plans for escaping from School Grounds, which were set down in cipher in her Time-Table Book. Frecks said she was smuggling vitriol out of the Hypatia Hall a drop at a time, saving enough to throw in the marchioness’s face this Easter – using a test tube she’d managed to get her brother to leave his fingerprints on. Kali was thinking hard about her first massacre. You couldn’t be taken seriously as a bandit in Kafiristan until you’d supervised at least one massacre.
    Originally from Bengal, the Chattopadhyay clan were driven north-east across the entire sub-continent in the 18th Century by the East India Company, who Kali said were worse bandits than anyone in her family. Kafiristan – Land of the Infidels – was properly called Nuristan – Land of the Enlightened – these days, though Kali’s family resisted forced conversion to Islam a generation ago and refused to acknowledge what it said on the map. She hoped to be the first of her family to use ‘a Chicago pianola’ and ‘pineapples’ rather than kukri knives or strangling scarves.
    In books written by grown-ups, there was a lot of guff about school days being either the happiest of your life or a worse ordeal than penal servitude. Headmistress gave speeches about School Spirit and Wicked Wyke hoped to foment a similar, if more limited Desdemona Spirit which never quite caught on – though Desdemonas bristled at any suggestion other Houses were better in any way, except in games where Goneril won so often no one cared about losing. Amy didn’t have the luxury of stepping out of herself and thinking of Drearcliff in terms of Good, Bad or Indifferent. The place was, at times, immeasurably better than her old school (which she could barely recall – she spent twenty minutes nagging at a