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By now Mr. Whitman was behind his desk, telling us to put our minds to Shakespeare and his sonnets.
For once I was truly grateful to him. Better Shakespeare than Gideon! The chatter died down around us, giving way to sighs and the rustling of paper. But I did hear Charlotte saying, “Well, certainly not Gwenny.”
Lesley looked at me sympathetically. “She has no idea,” she whispered to me. “Really, you can only feel sorry for her.”
“Yes, right,” I whispered back. But in fact I was sorry for no one but myself. I could see that an afternoon in Charlotte’s company was going to be a whole load of fun.
* * *
THIS TIME the limousine wasn’t waiting at the school gates, but parked discreetly a little way down the street. Red-haired Mr. Marley was pacing nervously up and down beside it. He got even more nervous when he saw us coming.
“Oh, it’s you,” said Charlotte, very obviously displeased, and Mr. Marley blushed. Charlotte took a look through the open door at the interior of the limousine. It was empty except for the driver—and Xemerius. Charlotte looked disappointed. That gave me a real boost.
“Did you miss me?” Xemerius sprawled contentedly in his seat as the car purred away. Mr. Marley was sitting in the front, and Charlotte, beside me, was staring out of the window in silence.
“Glad to hear it,” said Xemerius, without waiting for an answer. “But I’m sure you realize I have other duties too. I can’t be looking after you the whole time.”
I rolled my eyes, and Xemerius giggled.
In fact I really had missed him. Classes had dragged on slowly, and by the time Mrs. Counter was going on forever about the mineral resources of the Baltic states, if not sooner, I’d been longing for Xemerius and his comments. Also I’d have liked to introduce him to Lesley, so far as that was possible. Lesley loved listening to my descriptions, even though my attempts to draw the gargoyle demon for her hadn’t turned out very flattering. “What are those clothes-pegs for?” she had asked, pointing to the horns on his head.
“At last!” she said enthusiastically. “An invisible friend who might come in useful! Think about it: unlike James, who just stands about in his niche doing nothing but complaining of your bad manners, this gargoyle can go around spying for you, and he can tell you what goes on behind closed doors.”
That hadn’t occurred to me before. But it was true—over that business this morning with the reti … reti-thingy … the old word for a handbag, Xemerius had definitely made himself useful.
“You could have an ace up your sleeve with Xemerius” was Lesley’s opinion. “Not just a useless ghost always taking offense like James.”
I’m afraid she was right there. James was—yes, what exactly was he? If he had rattled chains or made chandeliers swing, he could have been officially described as our school ghost. But the Honorable James Augustus Peregrine Pympoole-Bothame was a handsome young man aged about twenty who wore a powdered white wig and a flowered coat, and he had been dead for 229 years. The school had once been his parents’ house, and like most ghosts, he couldn’t understand that he had died. As he saw it, the centuries of his life as a ghost were just a strange dream, and he was still expecting to wake up. Lesley suspected he had simply slept through the part of dying where you see a bright light at the end of a tunnel and go toward it.
“James isn’t totally useless,” I had objected. After all, only yesterday I’d decided that as a child of the eighteenth century, he could be genuinely useful to me, for instance as a fencing teacher. For a few hours, I’d reveled in the fantasy of being as good with a sword as Gideon, thanks to James. Unfortunately I’d made a big mistake there.
Our first (and probably last) fencing lesson just now, in the empty classroom at lunchtime, had left Lesley rolling about the floor in fits of laughter. Of course she couldn’t see James’s movements, which looked to me very professional, or hear his instructions—“Parry, Miss Gwyneth, just parry! Tierce! Prime! Quint!” She’d only seen me waving Mrs. Counter’s pointer desperately about in the air, fending off an invisible sword that could be sliced through like thin air. Useless. And ridiculous.
When Lesley had quite finished laughing, she said she thought James had better teach me something else, and for once James himself agreed with her. Fencing and all other kinds of fighting were a man’s business, he said. In his opinion, embroidery needles were the most dangerous weapons a girl ought to pick up.
“I guess the world would be a better place if men stuck to the same rule,” Lesley had said. “But as long as they don’t, women ought to be prepared.” And James had almost fainted away when she produced a knife with a seven-inch blade from her school bag. “So you can defend yourself better if another of those unpleasant lowlife characters in the past is out to get you.”
“That looks like a—”
“Japanese kitchen knife, yes. Slices through vegetables and raw fish like butter.”
I’d felt a shiver running down my spine.
“Only for emergencies,” Lesley had added. “To help you feel a little safer. It was the best weapon I could get in a hurry without a license.”
The knife was now in my school bag, in Lesley’s mum’s old spectacle case converted into a sheath, along with a roll of tape that, if Lesley was to be believed, would also come in useful.
The driver swung around a bend, and Xemerius, who hadn’t been holding on tight, went slithering over the smooth leather upholstery to collide with Charlotte. He hastily scrambled up again.
“Rigid as a church column,” he remarked, shaking his wings. He inspected her sideways. “Are we going to be lumbered with her all day now?”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“Yes unfortunately what?” asked Charlotte.
“Unfortunately I skipped lunch again,” I said.
“Your own fault,” replied Charlotte. “Although to be honest, it won’t hurt you to lose a few pounds. After all, you’ll have to fit into the clothes that Madame Rossini made for me.” She tightened her lips for a moment, and I felt something like pity. She’d probably been genuinely pleased by the prospect of wearing Madame Rossini’s costumes, and then I came along to spoil everything. Not on purpose, of course, but all the same.…
