The Glass Bird Girl by Esme Kerr

Author:Esme Kerr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Australia
Published: 2014-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

A Midnight Feast

Miss Fotheringay pushed back the brocade curtains and peered into the motionless October night. The study window was open but there was no breeze. A pale lantern glowed below in the courtyard, and the moon showed the drive twisting through the park, ghostly white.

Edith Wilson and Anastasia Stolonov. She sipped her whisky, murmuring the names as she walked slowly back to her desk. There she opened her ledger and read again her first impressions of Anastasia: A confused home life has instilled an unusually heightened sense of order. She might need to be encouraged to let go.

Miss Fotheringay smiled. The pensive child who had appeared in her study on that first afternoon of term had given no hint of the trouble she would cause.

Then she turned to the entry she had made two weeks ago under Edith’s name: A habit of defiant reserve . . . let the child be stripped free of time to think and she will have a chance of flourishing.

‘A record of my mistakes,’ she murmured. She paused a moment, before starting a new entry underneath: Wilful, stubborn, obstinate and secretive . . . like her mother. Miss Fotheringay bit her lip, her pen poised over the page, when a knock on the study door made her jump. ‘Ah, Diana,’ she said, slipping the ledger into a drawer. ‘I was hoping you might have sent me a cowering child you’d discovered in the wrong dormitory.’

‘No such luck,’ Miss Mannering said brightly, dumping a cardboard box on the desk. ‘But it’s been a bumper evening for confiscations. Eight books, as many torches, three packets of sweets, and’ – Miss Mannering’s face puckered in satisfied indignation – ‘the beginnings of a midnight feast! The second-years were intending to celebrate a birthday but I pounced before the cake was cut.’

Miss Fotheringay tipped the box towards her, and peered inside. ‘I can only admire your rigour, Diana, but your enthusiasm for confiscating books would be questioned in some quarters. There is a school of thought which says children should be encouraged to read.’

‘Not after lights out.’

Miss Fotheringay smiled, and poured her a drink. Then she handed her a printed-out email. ‘From Prince Stolonov,’ she said, in a tone of weary displeasure. ‘Wanting to know what happened to Ansti on the lacrosse pitch.’

Miss Mannering lowered herself into an armchair by the fire, and read it with arched brows. When she had finished she scrunched it up and threw it into the flames. Her face was flushed and indignant.

‘I hope you told him—’

‘I told him the truth, that it was an accident and that Anastasia was not hurt,’ Miss Fotheringay said coolly. ‘And I also told him that such incidents are best dealt with by the school.’

‘Always best to keep the parents out of it,’ Miss Mannering agreed, folding her spectacles back into her pocket.

‘And you are my most useful ally when it comes to that,’ Miss Fotheringay said, looking at her affectionately. ‘When they say they only want to

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