Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [49]
Edmund produced a carrot from his jacket pocket.
“Hold it like this, with your hand out flat,” he said. “He’d hate to bite your fingers off. Nasty taste to a horse, young girls’ fingers.”
She did it, daring herself not to close her eyes. The massive head loomed down. The soft clever lips explored her hand. She shuddered. The upper lip lifted; a scoop of monstrous yellow teeth, and the carrot was gone. Edmund applauded her by banging his stick on the cobbles.
“Well done, my lovely! Well done. He knows you now. Very well, then. Peter?”
“Sir,” Peter said. “Here we go, then, Miss.”
And he put his hands under her arms and hoisted her onto the horse’s broad back. Her legs stuck out sideways, like a dropped puppet’s. Peter passed the reins up to her.
“You won’t need ’em,” Edmund said. “Magnus knows where to go. Just you hold on. How’s the world look from up there, young lady?”
It all came to end just before Christmas. Gerard Mortimer had been making inquiries about the local schools. None of them met his standards (which were more disciplinary than academic), so he sought farther afield. Over breakfast on a bitingly cold December morning, he announced that in the New Year Françoise would enroll at a Roman Catholic girls’ boarding school near Cambridge. He extolled its virtues and emphasized the cost. His words meant almost nothing to Françoise. She turned to her mother for help.
“Maman?”
But Nicole didn’t look at her. She punted bits of fried egg around her plate, as though fascinated by the yellow smears they made. Her grandfather would not meet her eyes, either. He bit his lower lip and retreated deeper into the woolen blanket that he was wrapped in. (Françoise had no way of knowing that her education had been one of the many things that her father and grandfather had argued over, bitterly.)
Her banishment changed her utterly. Saint Ethelburger’s was the bleak obverse of the fairy tale: the orphaned, lost-in-the-woods, lonely, and menacing side of the story. The dark stepmothers of the castle were nuns, and they hated her beauty the instant she arrived. Her dark liquid eyes cut no ice with the sisters. Françoise responded to their animosity in kind. She became difficult, truculent, sullen, willfully stupid. Her attractiveness and foreignness made her a victim of the other girls. In less than a term, she shucked off her accent. Still she failed to belong. When she returned to school after her grandfather’s funeral, Gerard had to drag her, howling, from the car.
He made generous donations on top of the fees to keep her there; nevertheless, she was suspended twice, for a fortnight each time. Since this was exactly what Françoise earnestly desired, it was not exactly a smart tactic on the school’s part.
Against the odds, and under protest, she enrolled in the fifth form at the beginning of September 1961. She found herself sharing a dormitory with three older girls. One was an upper sixth-former called Madeleine Travish, and Françoise fell under her spell.
It was Maddie who renamed her Frankie: “It’s rather sweet, don’t you think?”
In the evenings, after prep and prayers, the talk in the dormitories turned, frequently and inevitably, to sex. Inevitably because the sisters hunted down any word or whiff of sex like terriers after a rat, thus guaranteeing it a welcome refuge in the girls’ imaginations, where it bred a host of impure and wildly inaccurate thoughts. Maddie knew a thing or three, though, and had scant respect for the Dire Warnings regularly issued by Sister Benedicta.
“Listening to what she has to say about sex is like, well, I don’t know. Like taking music lessons from someone who’s been deaf from birth. God! Did I ever tell you what she said to me about patent-leather shoes? No? Well, this is true, as I live and breathe. ‘Madeleine,’ she says, ‘you must never go into town wearing patent-leather shoes.’ ‘Why not, Sister?’ says I. ‘Because,’ says she, ‘boys might see your knickers reflected in them.’”
“Golly,” said sweet, plump Veronica Drewe. “I’d never have thought of that.”
Which caused