In defiance, Ada had been determined not to give the others the pleasure of a reaction; she swept aside all thought of Shashi and her own painful longing for home, and instead gazed straight ahead, pretending that she could not see them. After a time, in the face of their continued taunts, she started telling herself a story in soft Punjabi, as though she hadn’t a care in the world. Charlotte had not liked that; her gleeful smile had slipped and even as she ordered the others to leave with her, she’d fixed Ada with a puzzled frown, as if Ada were a problem that needed to be solved. A nut in need of cracking.
Charlotte had been right in one thing: Ada’s parents had left her at Miss Radcliffe’s School for Young Ladies in the misguided expectation that she would be magically transformed into a proper English schoolgirl. But while Ada was quite familiar with a water closet, she was not a ‘young lady’ and had no intention of being turned into one. She had never mastered stitching, she asked far too many questions that did not have ready answers, and her piano skills were nonexistent. In India, while her mother had played beautifully, melodies floating from the library on the warm breeze, Ada had only ever managed to torment the keys such that even her father – traditionally disposed to appreciate her every misstep – had hunched down into his collar so his ears might be protected.
Most lessons at Miss Radcliffe’s School for Young Ladies were thus a misery. The only subjects from which Ada took some small pleasure were the two actually taught by Miss Radcliffe: science and geography. Ada had also joined Miss Radcliffe’s Natural History Society, of which she was the sole member aside from a girl called Meg, who did not appear to have two wits to rub together and was content to wander about humming romantic dance tunes and collecting clover flowers to thread into elaborate crowns.
For Ada, though, the Natural History Society was the single redeeming feature of having been abandoned at Birchwood Manor. Every Saturday morning and Thursday afternoon, Miss Radcliffe would lead them on a brisk walk across country, sometimes for hours at a time, through muddy fields and flowing streams, over hills and into woods. Sometimes they bicycled further afield, to Uffington to see the White Horse or Barbury to climb the Iron Age hill fort or even on occasion as far as the Avebury stone circles. They became quite expert at spotting the round hollows Miss Radcliffe referred to as ‘dew ponds’: they were made by pre-historic people, she said, in order to ensure that they always had sufficient water. According to Miss Radcliffe, there were signs of ancient communities everywhere, if one only knew where to look.
Even the woods behind the school were filled with secrets from the past: Miss Radcliffe had shown them beyond the clearing to a small hill she called the ‘dragon mound’. ‘There is every possibility that this was an Anglo-Saxon burial site,’ she’d said, going on to explain that it was so named because the Anglo-Saxons believed that dragons watched over their treasure. ‘Of course, the Celts would have disagreed. They would have called this a fairy mound and said that beneath it lay the entrance to fairyland.’
Ada had thought then of the amulet in the library and wondered whether this was where Miss Radcliffe had found her protection charm. ‘Not far from here,’ Miss Radcliffe had replied. ‘Not far from here at all.’
To Ada, being a member of the Natural History Society was like being a detective, looking for clues and solving mysteries. Every relic they unearthed came with a story, a secret life led long before the object reached their hands. It became a game of sorts to come up with the most exciting (yet plausible, for they were scientists and not creative writers) history for each find.
Miss Radcliffe always let them keep their treasures. She was adamant about it: the earth gives up its secrets in good time, she liked to say, and always to the person it intends. ‘What about the river?’ Ada had asked one Saturday morning, when their adventures had taken them close to the water’s edge. She’d been thinking about a story Shashi had told her, about a flood that came to her village and washed away her precious childhood possessions. She realised too late her terrible faux pas, for Ada had heard whispers, by then, that Miss Radcliffe’s brother had died by drowning.
‘Rivers are different,’ the headmistress said at last, her voice steady, but her face paler than usual beneath her freckles. ‘Rivers are always on the move. They take their secrets and mysteries with them to the sea.’
Miss Radcliffe herself was something of a mystery. For a woman who put her name to a school proposing to turn young girls into civilised ladies, she was not particularly ladylike. Oh, she had all of the ‘manners’ that Mamma liked to talk about – she didn’t chew with her mouth open or burp at the table – but in other ways she reminded Ada far more of Papa: her purposeful stride when they were out in the open air, her willingness to talk about subjects like politics and religion, her insistence that it was incumbent on one to strive always for the attainment of knowledge, to demand better information to do so. She spent most of her time outside and had no care for fashion, always dressing in precisely the same way: dark leather button-up boots and a green walking suit, the long skirt of which was always caked with mud about the hem. She had a large woven basket that reminded Ada of Shashi’s, and she carried it wherever she went; but where Shashi filled her basket with fruit and vegetables, Miss Radcliffe’s was used for carrying sticks and stones and birds’ eggs and feathers and all manner of other natural objects that had piqued her interest.
Ada was not the only person to have noticed Miss Radcliffe’s eccentricities. The school was hers, and yet – aside from delivering occasional fierce and imploring speeches about the duty of ‘you girls’ to learn as much as possible, and offering the general admonishment that ‘Time is your most precious commodity, girls, and there’s none so foolish as those that waste their minutes’ – she left matters of administration and discipline to the deputy headmistress, Miss Thornfield. Amongst the other girls, it was rumoured that she was a witch. To start with, there were all those plant samples and oddities, not to mention the room in which she kept them. It was a small chamber adjoining her bedroom that students were forbidden from entering on pain of death. ‘That’s where she does her spells,’ Angelica Barry insisted. ‘I’ve heard her from the other side, chanting and intoning.’ And Meredith Sykes swore that she had glimpsed inside the door one day and, amongst the stones and fossils, seen a human skull upon the bureau top.
One thing was certain: Miss Radcliffe loved her house. The only time she ever raised her voice was in castigation of a girl caught sliding on the bannisters or kicking along the skirting boards. On one of their walks across Wiltshire, talk had turned to loneliness and special places and Miss Radcliffe had explained to Ada that Birchwood Manor had once belonged to her brother; that he had died many years before; and that although she still missed him more than anything else she’d ever lost, she felt close to him when she was inside his house.
‘He was an artist,’ Ada’s fellow rambler Meg had said once, apropos of nothing, looking up from the clover necklace she was threading, ‘Miss Radcliffe’s brother. A famous artist, but his fiancée was killed with a rifle and afterwards he went mad with grief.’
Now, her reverie interrupted by the proximity of her tormentors, Ada shifted carefully in her hiding place within the wall, mindful not to make even the tiniest of noises. She did not know much about lovers or fiancées, but she knew how much it hurt to be separated from a loved one and she felt immensely sorry for Miss Radcliffe. Ada had decided that it was the loss of her brother that explained the expression of deep unhappiness that came upon her headmistress’s face sometimes when she thought no one was watching.
As if she had somehow read Ada’s thoughts, there came now a familiar voice on the other side of the wall panel: ‘Girls, what are you doing in the hallway? You know how Miss Thornfield feels about skulking.’
‘Yes, Miss Radcliffe,’ they chorused.
‘I cannot think what could be keeping you so interested in here.’
‘Nothing, Miss Radcliffe.’
‘I hope you are not dragging those hockey sticks along my wall?’