Elves and Escapades (Scholars and Sorcery Book 2) (10 page)

I fight my way to the front at last, and we stand there silently for a moment. I want to hold her and kiss her and tell her that the next fortnight will be unbearable without her. Surrounded by my family, with Bobby tearfully clasping her leg, all I can do is tell her I’ll write. I don’t even dare kiss her cheek, as I might with Cecily or Esther; I can’t endure the thought of my brothers teasing me about schoolgirl sentimentality, not after the night we have spent. I clasp her hand and she looks at me for a moment with those deep blue, questioning eyes, trying to say something I can’t read. Then she’s bundled into the car and gone.

I have a strong desire to go to my room and cry. Instead, I follow Mother inside and curl up on a cushion at her feet in her study. The day looks set to be an ugly one and fires and books are more attractive than outdoors. Harry is already at the desk, setting up his account books with a martyred expression.
 

I settle down and daydream about Rosalind, about a future that looks sweeter and rosier than anything I ever imagined.

“Mother?”

She looks up from her book.

“Do you like Rosalind?”

“I think she’s a very dear, sweet little girl. Not really the sort of girl I’d expect you to choose for your special friend, but then, there’s something to be said for odd couples. She flies like a she was a pegasus in a former life,” she adds, because my family always has its values firmly fixed when it comes to what makes someone worth our while.
 

“She’s not a little girl, Mother, she’s nineteen.”

“Perfectly grown up, then, of course.” My mother tweaks my ear.

I try to give voice to one of the shadows on my happiness. “What do you suppose life will be like for Rosalind when she leaves school? I mean, compared to mine. What will she do?”

Mother looks thoughtful. She’s weatherbeaten for her age and plump, showing signs of a long outdoor life and many children. In most ways, she I rather like I imagine I will be at that age, brown and simply dressed, innocent of makeup, not pretty or fashionable or fussing about her figure like some of the mothers of the girls at school; yet rather nice compared to them, I’ve always thought. I wouldn’t mind at all being like my mother. Without the husband, of course, and quite so many children—oh, I will miss having children. But there will be dozens of nieces and nephews to dote on, with any luck.
 

I wonder what Rosalind will look like at Mother’s age. Sweet, I decide, with her already pale greyish hair fading further and deep wrinkles around her elfin eyes. I can’t decide if she will become plumper, or even thinner with sharp bones, in middle age.
 

“Perhaps it is time to talk about your own future, Charley. You know we’ll do our best for you, dear, and for your sisters and this little one, if she turns out to be a girl.” She touches the swelling front of her dress circumspectly. “There’s a limit to how far our resources will stretch. You might have to think about taking some kind of shorthand course or something, and working in the city. I know you’ll hate the idea, but you may need to be brave.”

“Rosalind won’t need to go out for a job,” I say with certainty, brushing aside the unpleasant prospect of being a secretary. I’m not, I’m sure, at all the sort to make a success of it. Perhaps helping someone to run a country estate… But I can’t manage to fit Rosalind into that kind of life at all.

“I shouldn’t think so, dear. I know a fair bit about her family and there would be no expectation for her to earn a living. She seems young for her age; I wouldn’t be surprised if her family send her to be finished.” I nod, dismally. It’s what Diana had told me. “Then, I would expect that she’d be presented at court.”

“Presented.” The thought is foreign to me. Rosalind in a white gown and—family jewels. There would naturally be family jewels. Somehow that thought puts her further from me than anything else would. Mother has a string of rather small and slightly mismatched pearls, and a couple of brooches that belonged to Grandmother.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Rosalind’s quite a success,” Mother continues, relentlessly. “Properly styled she would be very striking, with that unusual colouring. I can see her getting quite a lot of attention from her own sort of people and a very suitable match.”

“In other words, dear sis,” fills in Harry, who has apparently not been as absorbed in the accounts as he’s seemed, “she’s not within striking distance of me. So, charming as the fair Rosalind is, banish any thoughts of a Forest-Hastings alliance from your head, you shameless little match-maker. Peers may marry chorus girls, but their daughters do not marry the strictly middle class sons of struggling unicorn breeders.”

I grimace and he laughs. I hadn’t realised I was that obvious.

I also hadn’t fully realised what Rosalind’s intended future would be like. Oh, Diana had told me, but I had put it down to spite. Now I realise, fully and painfully, what Rosalind stands to lose if I manage to hold onto her.
 

I had been dreaming of us in a little cottage somewhere, making money with something to do with fabled beasts perhaps, growing old and grey together, like the old spinsters just outside the village who call each other by their last names and do a bit of pig keeping and run their house together like clockwork. Everyone eventually giving up on the idea of us marrying and accepting that we are simply incurable old maids.

I hadn’t given nearly enough thought to how much Rosalind would be giving up for a dream like that to come true. I have no reason to think it’s a dream she would even share. I hadn’t properly thought about how unwilling her family might be to sacrifice glittering plans for her. The rush of knowing my love was returned had blinded me to the realities.

But… we do love each other. If we love each other, surely she would be happier in a cottage with me than in a suitable marriage with some man who couldn’t possibly understand her like I do, wouldn’t cherish the strength and courage in her heart.

I go to the cupboard and fetch my writing materials.

“Writing to her already?” Harry grins. “What on the green earth could you possibly have to say? I will never understand schoolgirl passions. I never had much urge to write daily letters to the chaps at school.”

I stick my tongue out at him to cover my confusion. “I haven’t written to Cecily or Esther all fortnight. They’ll think I’ve forgotten them. I should write to Gladys, too.”

It’s quite true, even if he was right in thinking I was intending to write to Rosalind. I sit there a moment, trying to think. I want to pour my heart out, to tell Rosalind what she means to me, to somehow seal what happened the night before and make her forever mine. To, in spite of all convention and possibility, make her promise to marry me.

All I can think about is Rosalind opening the letter at breakfast under her parents’ eyes, and what it will mean if they guess the contents or ask to see it. Rosalind never returning to Fernleigh Manor, most likely. Possibly never seeing her again.

I write to Cecily instead. Telling her absolutely nothing at all. I wonder, for a moment, if my friend is Sensitive enough to pick up my turmoil from the letter. Right now, I almost wish she was. I would give almost anything for someone to confide in.

four

N
EW
T
ERM

“SO,” I FINISH, somewhat uncertainly, dropping the chalk and trying not to quail at the sea of faces. “I hope that helps.”

 
Loyal little Ethelberta and Mary, sitting cross-legged in the first row, obligingly begin to clap their hands, and the applause is caught up by the others. I grin around at the assembled girls—mostly first and second formers, a few keen older girls. Cecily is there, Esther is lolling gracefully on a windowsill, and Gladys, Corona and even Frances, sitting in a small cluster of sporting Guides, have turned up in force to support me.

I’m more nervous than I wanted to admit about the innovation of calling training and strategy meetings while the weather remains too blustery for the playing fields, making a potentially hideous incursion on precious free time. I should have known that the some of these kids would turn up bright eyed and eager to impress their Captain and perhaps improve their game.

 
“You’re a great gang, you know that?” I tell them. “I’m proud of you all for being so keen.”

“You would have turned up, when you were in the lower forms, wouldn’t you, Charley?” Mary says confidently.

 
I have the grace to blush a little. I take a seat on the desk, swinging my legs. “Well, p’raps not. I didn’t shirk, exactly, but I did slack sometimes and I didn’t do more than I absolutely had to. The pity of it is that now I will never actually know how good I could have been if I’d put in the effort all along.” The girls are listening to me intently, hanging on my words as if even my failures hold the secret to success. I give them a sheepish grin. “You kids put me to shame. I wish every single one of you keen enough to turn up could have a place in a team right now. It will get easier to win a place when you’re older, and not competing with girls in the higher forms. I expect you all to become crack players for Fernleigh Manor to be proud of. If you keep it up, you’ll all win your colours in the end and I’ll burst with pride.”

“But you won’t be Games Captain then!” Erica says, dismally. “It’s too bad, losing you and Cecily both at the end of the year and starting over with yet another Captain. I wanted you to see me play in a match.”

 
“I’ll come back and watch your matches whenever I can,” I promise recklessly, without any idea if Miss Carroll would allow it. “Do you think I want to put in all this work with you kiddies, and never bask in the resulting glory?”
 

“You could come back as a gym mistress,” suggests Mary. “Then you wouldn’t ever have to leave.”

 
Just for a moment, the idea, which has been simmering at the back of my head since the beginning of term, seems terribly attractive. Watching over my babes, watching them blossom, meeting the new crop. Being a kind of permanent Old Girl who never quite goes away, like Miss Roberts. Only… never quite escaping this regimented life, either. Getting up and dressing to bells, eating with the other mistresses and girls, sharing chaste bedrooms and having one weekend to spend respectably a term. And Rosalind. There would be no place in a life like that for someone as sensitive and shy as Rosalind. The idea of her standing up in front of a classroom and keeping order is unthinkable. I shake my head, laughing.
 

“Of course she doesn’t want to be a mistress, silly. She’ll do something to do with magical creatures,” opines Lucy from the Third, and there is general agreement as the meeting breaks up.
 

“I really do love the kiddies,” I confide to my pals as the younger girls trail out and we restore the room. “I mean, I always was fond of my little brothers and sisters, but they belong to me anyway. I didn’t know how much I’d adore the chicks in the lower forms once I gave them the chance.”

“You should have joined the Guides,” Frances says. “You’d be a wonderful Leader.”

“You’re very good with your baa lambs.” Cecily gives my arm an approving pat. “I’m glad you justified my sponsorship. You really were the right choice.”
 

I feel warm with pleasure.

“It runs in your family,” says Gladys. “You’ll end up like your mother, with dozens of children following you around like a mother duck with her brood.”

 
Esther makes an odd clicking sound in the back of her throat. “While our orphanages full of unwanted children crying out for mothers,” she says, obscurely. “Good gracious, Gladys, don’t talk on such indelicate subjects, you’ll make our poor gentlemanly Charles blush.” A heart-beat later, seemingly inconsequentially, she adds, “That Rosalind midge is due back next week, isn’t she?”

 
“I believe so.” I adjust my tie, trying to look casual, as if it hasn’t been all I’ve been thinking of since my return to school. “And don’t call her a midge.” I have to admit to myself, though, that my lips twitch a little at the name. She does look just a little like a big-eyed insect.

I’d spent the final fortnight of the holidays girding myself up to run into Rosalind at school again. When I’d arrived—more conventionally than at the start of the last term, as suits the dignity of a Games Captain—I’d looked for her, in vain. It had been Frances, not myself, who had asked Matron what had become of her and been informed that her parents had taken her to the South of France and that she would be back in a fortnight.

There was a letter a day or so later, Rosalind telling me briefly that she had developed a slight cough in the cold weather so her family were taking her to more sunlit climes for a short while. I read it over carefully. “Dearest Charley,” rather than “Dear” like Cecily uses when she addresses her letters to me, but also rather than the “Darling” Esther always uses; “Love” rather than “Yours”, but otherwise no hint of emotion; rather chillingly polite thanks for a wonderful visit. Still, she might have to be careful who read it.