The Dance in the Dark. Sophie Cleverly

I passed Miss Fox’s office on the way back to our room that afternoon, I saw Mrs Knight standing in the doorway, talking to the caretaker – a middle-aged man with overalls and a bushy moustache.

      “We really need to get rid of these,” I heard her say, waving at the bizarre collection of stuffed dogs that still populated the office. “They’re rather vulgar, aren’t they?”

      He scratched his head. “I s’pose we could sell them,” he said. “To an antiques dealer, pr’aps.”

      I stopped, a sudden realisation dawning. “You mean you haven’t moved any of them, Miss?”

      “Oh, hello, Ivy,” Mrs Knight said, a little distracted. “No, the whole office has been left just as it was.”

      “Right,” I said, frowning. “But, um, there was a Chihuahua on the desk, wasn’t there?” I pointed to the little empty space where it had sat, which was now nothing but a slightly darker patch on the wood. “I remember it. It had pens in its mouth.”

      The caretaker grimaced, his lip twisting under his moustache. “Sounds unnatural to me.”

      Mrs Knight looked puzzled. “You haven’t touched anything, have you, Harold?”

      He shook his head. “Can’t say I like to go in there at all, Miss. Had to fix the window once and that old Miss Fox threatened to give me a whack with her cane if I weren’t quick enough. And all those dead mutts are enough to give any man the heebie-jeebies. Preferred to stay well clear, meself.”

      “It probably just got mislaid,” said Mrs Knight. “Perhaps when they were carrying out the investigation.”

      I nodded, remembering when I’d seen all the policemen going through her things. “That’s probably it,” I said. “Thank you, Miss.”

      “You’re welcome,” the acting headmistress replied. Then she blinked. I think she’d just realised that it was a bit strange of her to talk to a student about such things. “Go and get ready for dinner, then. Where’s your sister?”

      “Detention,” I answered, feeling a spike of loneliness.

      “Ah,” she said.

      I hurried away, leaving them both to discuss what to do with the unfortunate dogs.

      But I couldn’t help thinking that Mrs Knight’s explanation was odd. If that little dog wasn’t in the office, given that everything else was still in its original place, then someone had deliberately taken it. And what would the inspectors want with a stuffed Chihuahua that held pens? Come to think of it – who on earth would want it at all?

      I waited patiently in our room for Scarlet. I tried to do some prep work, but my mind wouldn’t stay on task.

      I thought about telling my sister, I really did. Twins are supposed to tell each other everything, and that was always what we had done …

      Or at least, I’d thought so. Until I found out that Scarlet had swapped our exam papers to get into Rookwood School in the first place, because she’d known her marks wouldn’t be good enough. Remembering things like that made me wonder if we could ever really trust one another again.

      I doodled on my paper – only realising halfway through that I’d drawn what looked like a tiny dog. I scratched it out.

      I wouldn’t tell Scarlet yet. There was no sense in worrying her. And I would keep quiet about Penny’s threat too. Hopefully she would give up and leave me alone. It seemed unlikely, though. As I passed her in the corridor just now she’d tried to trip me, her friends Ethel and Josephine breaking out in peals of laughter.

      Around half-past five, my twin barrelled back into our room.

      “Finally!” I said, laying down my ink pen.

      “Pfft,” she replied, blowing a lock of hair out of her eye. “I’m so sick of detentions. I hate them.”

      “You realise there’s a really simple solution to that, don’t you?”

      “And what’s that then, Little Miss Know-It-All?” My twin dumped her satchel on to her bed, her workbooks spilling out of it.

      “Stop getting into trouble!” Honestly, I wondered how we were related, sometimes.

      “Oh, that. Well, obviously. I will. I’ve got the ballet recital to think about now,” she said.

      She had that to think about this morning, I thought, and it didn’t make a difference.

      “So,” Scarlet continued, leaning over me to grab her silver hairbrush from the desk – the heirloom she’d inherited from our mother. “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?”

      I felt my cheeks get a little warmer. “Nothing,” I said. “It’s been very uneventful.”

      My twin stared into the mirror as she brushed out her hair, which was the same dark brown as mine. “It’s so strange,” she said suddenly, “imagining our mother brushing her hair here, with this brush.”

      “In this room?” I was sceptical. “Probably not.”

      “No, not in this exact room. But here, at Rookwood. Isn’t that weird?”

      I met my twin’s gaze in the mirror and nodded. Last term we’d found out that our dearly departed mother couldn’t have been who we’d thought she was. She had died shortly after we were born, and all we really knew about her was her name and date of birth: Emmeline Adel, 26/02/1914. But then we’d found those facts written on a memorial plaque for a girl who had drowned in the lake at Rookwood over twenty years ago. Whoever our mother was, it seemed she had been a Rookwood pupil, but she couldn’t have been Emmeline Adel, who had met her unfortunate demise at the hands of the now-incarcerated headmaster, Mr Bartholomew.

      Scarlet looked down at the hairbrush in her hands. It had the initials EG on the back, for Emmeline Grey, our mother’s married name. “I see this every day,” she said, “and I just wonder … about everything. What was her real name? Who was she? If she cared. If she’s … watching us now.”

      I shivered a little despite myself. “I don’t know. I don’t know if we’ll ever know.”

      My twin put the brush down and preened in the mirror. “Do you think she’d be proud?” she asked.

      That lightened my mood. “Ha! Proud of your three detentions in one day? Well, I suppose it’s quite the achievement …”

      Scarlet whacked me on the shoulder.

      “Hurry up, smarty-pants. A horrible dinner awaits us once more.”

      I smiled. I could say one more thing about Mother – if Scarlet took after her, she must have been quite a character.

      

       Chapter Four

       SCARLET

      I was practically buzzing when the time came for ballet class on Friday afternoon. My whole week had been building up to it.

      “Come on, come on,” I said to Ivy, dragging her through the corridor towards the studio.

      “You don’t have to drag me!” she protested.

      “I can walk myself!”

      “Then walk faster! I have ballet to attend to!”

      We reached the door that led down to the studio in the basement, only to find Miss Finch