She frowned at her mother as they were leaving – it was always wise to register disapproval – but in truth she did not mind the exclusion. Adults, Ada had found during this family trip to England, could be rather dull companions, and at a glance the library was full of curiosities that would be far more pleasant to explore without a chaperone reminding her not to touch.
As soon as the adults were gone she began her inspection, pulling books from shelves, lifting the lids from odd-looking pots and delicate bonbonnières, investigating framed wall hangings that included collections of pressed feathers, flowers and ferns and careful cursive annotations in fine black ink. Finally, she came to a glass display case that housed a number of variously sized rocks. There was a lock, but Ada was pleasantly surprised to find that the top lifted easily and she was able to reach inside, turning the rocks over one by one, noting the curious markings, before realising that they were not rocks at all but fossils. Ada had read about fossils in the copy of Wood’s New Illustrated Natural History that her father had ordered from London for her seventh birthday. They were the leftover markings of ancient life forms, some of them no longer existent. Mamma had read to Ada from a book by Mr Charles Darwin during lessons back home in Bombay, so Ada knew all about the transmutation of species.
On the glass shelf below the fossils was another rock, this one smaller and roughly triangular in shape. It was deep grey and smooth, carrying none of the telltale spiral markings of the fossils. There was a neat hole through one corner and faint linear etchings, mostly parallel, on its side. Ada took it out and turned it over carefully in her hands. It was cold in her palm and holding it gave her a strange feeling.
‘Do you know what that is?’
Ada gasped, fumbling not to drop the stone in her shock.
She spun around, seeking the owner of the voice.
There was no one on the sofa or chairs and the door was still closed. Movement at her peripheral vision made Ada turn her head sharply. A woman appeared from a nook to the left of the fireplace that Ada had not noticed when she first entered the room.
‘I didn’t mean to touch,’ she said, closing her fingers tighter around the smooth stone.
‘Why ever not? I should have thought such treasures would prove irresistible. And you haven’t answered me: do you know what that is?’
Ada shook her head, even though Mamma was forever telling her that it was rude to do so.
The woman came near enough to take the stone. Up close, Ada could see that she was younger than she’d first appeared – Mamma’s age, perhaps – though not like Mamma in any other way. The woman’s skirt, for one thing, was as dirty at the hem as Ada’s got when she had been playing in the chicken run behind the kitchen garden in Bombay. The pins in her hair had been put in quickly, too, and not by a proper lady’s maid, as they’d wriggled out in many places, and she wore not a jot of paint or powder on her remarkably freckled nose.
‘It is an amulet,’ the woman said, cupping the stone in the palm of her hand. ‘Thousands of years ago, it would have been worn around someone’s neck for protection. That’s what this hole is for’ – she twisted her smallest finger as far in as it would go – ‘twine of some sort; it rotted away long ago.’
‘Protection from what?’ said Ada.
‘Harm. In all its many forms.’
Ada could tell when adults were being truthful; it was one of her special powers. This woman, whoever she was, believed what she was saying. ‘Where does one find such a thing?’
‘I found it years ago, in the woods beyond the house.’ The woman slipped the stone back onto its shelf within the glass cabinet, withdrew a key from her pocket and turned it in the cabinet’s lock. ‘Though there are those who say it is the amulet that finds its owner. That the earth knows best when, and with whom, to share her secrets.’ She met Ada’s gaze. ‘You are the girl from India, I suppose?’
Ada answered yes, that she had come to visit England from her home in Bombay.
‘Bombay,’ said the woman, seeming to taste the word as she said it. ‘Tell me. What does the sea smell like in Bombay? Is the sand of the Arabian Sea granular or stony? And what of the light: is it truly much brighter than ours?’
She indicated that they should sit and Ada obliged, answering these questions and more with the wary compliance of a child who is not accustomed to adults showing genuine interest. The woman, beside her now on the sofa, listened carefully and made occasional small noises signalling surprise or satisfaction, sometimes a mix of both. Finally, she said, ‘Yes, good. Thank you. I will remember everything you have told me, Miss … ?’
‘Lovegrove. Ada Lovegrove.’
The woman reached out her hand and Ada shook it as if they were a pair of grown women meeting in the street. ‘It is good to meet you, Miss Lovegrove. My name is Lucy Radcliffe and this is my—’
The door opened just then and Ada’s mother swept into the room on the wave of effervescence that she carried with her everywhere. Ada’s father and Miss Thornfield were close behind, and Ada jumped to her feet, ready to leave. But ‘No, dearest,’ said her mother with a smile, ‘you are to stay here for the afternoon.’
Ada frowned. ‘Alone?’
Mamma laughed. ‘Oh, darling, you are hardly alone. There’s Miss Thornfield, and Miss Radcliffe, and look behind you at all those lovely girls.’
Ada glanced over her shoulder through the window and as if on cue a slew of girls – English girls with long blonde curls tied back with ribbons – appeared in the garden. They were walking towards the house in a series of small groups, laughing and talking, some of them carrying easels and paint sets.
The whole experience was so unexpected and inexplicable that even then Ada failed to grasp precisely what sort of place this was. Later, after she had finished castigating herself for her stupidity, a small voice of self-defence would pipe up to remind her that she was only eight years old and had heretofore had no experience with schools; indeed, nothing in her life could have hoped to prepare her for what her parents had in store.
At the time, she had simply allowed her mother to hug her goodbye – yet another unexpected turn in a thoroughly strange day – taken a firm shoulder pat from her father teamed with an admonishment to do her best, and then watched as the pair of them linked arms, turned on their heels, and swept, together, out through the door and back along the halls to where their carriage was waiting.
It was Miss Thornfield who told her in the end. Ada had started after her parents, thinking to ask a little more about what it was precisely that they expected her to do that afternoon, when Miss Thornfield grabbed her wrist to stop her. ‘Welcome, Miss Lovegrove,’ she said, with a pained smile, ‘to Miss Radcliffe’s School for Young Ladies.’
School. Young ladies. Welcome. Ada liked words – she collected them – but those four hit her like bricks.
Panic ensued, and she quite forgot the manners that Mamma was always reminding her to use. She called Miss Thornfield a liar and a baboon; she said that she was a wicked old woman; she might even have shouted ‘Bevkuph!’ at the top of her lungs.
Then she pulled her arm free and ran like a cheetah from the house, past the other girls, still milling in the corridors, straight into a tall golden-haired girl who exclaimed loudly. Ada hissed through her teeth and pushed the bigger girl aside, running down the passage, through the front door, and all the way to the drive where the carriage had deposited her with her parents not an hour before.
The carriage was gone now and Ada let out a cry of angry frustration.
What did it all mean? Her mother had said that she was to stay for the afternoon, but Miss Thornfield had made it sound as if she were to stay here, at this school, for … for how long?
Longer than the afternoon.