Page 14 of The Forgotten Boy

Clarissa waved a hand and instantly retreated behind her headmistress-in-charge shield. “No matter. Our primary concern is always the boys themselves. Whether they are teasing you, or whether there is something more going on, we must find out and put a stop to it. The war is grinding to an end. Our students have already, most of them, lost a great deal. We must ensure that they are healthy both in body and mind.”

Which was so very much the expected thing for a headmistress to say that Diana wondered if Clarissa had read it in a book. She exited the room thoughtfully, and with a sense that there was more going on with this school and its occupants than could be seen by the unwary.

That didn’t mean there were ghosts running around.

She’d forgotten that Joshua had wanted to speak to her until she nearly walked into him leaning backward against the balustrade.

“Aren’t you afraid of losing your balance?” she asked, for it was a long drop to the stone-flagged hall below.

“After France? Normal fears don’t really apply, do they?”

Not normal fears, no. But France had hardly made her fearless. It had just sharpened and focused her fears into one, all-encompassing terror. The high whine of the shell, the roar of the explosion, the crushing weight of wood and dirt and rocks, she couldn’t see, she couldn’t move, she couldn’t breathe …

Fortunately, that was easily dealt with: just stay out of confined spaces.

Joshua chose that moment to announce, “I’ve got an idea about the nighttime knockings on your door. Tunnels. And secret passages. Havencross has both.”

Of course it does, she thought wearily. Of course it does.

As they could hardly throw themselves into exploring in full sight of curious schoolboys, Joshua had to be content for the present with providing descriptions and drawings. That suited Diana just fine.

To the logical question of “How do you know this?” Joshua had given an equally logical answer: “The Murrays have been entwined with this house since its beginning. My great-­grandfather helped build it, and my grandmother was housekeeper here for forty years.”

Diana left unasked the second and third logical questions: Wouldn’t Clarissa know this? And if so, why didn’t she mention it as a possible solution to the knocking?

They had retired to the infirmary, being both a private space and yet official enough that no one would think them suspiciously intimate. Something else she’d learned in France—how to function as a rare woman in a sea full of military men without drawing undue disapproval. Joshua attempted to sketch each floor of the house on its own piece of paper, but there were so many wings and asymmetries and towers that there was no way to lay it out in perfect order. He did his best, standing at the examination table with the papers scattered across it.

“See?” He grabbed the first one he’d sketched, showing the entrance hall with the school dining room on one side and a similar space on the other that he pointed to now. “The drawing room. I know there’s a passageway going from there to the music room on the floor above. Gideon Somersby, who built the house, apparently liked to come and go from the ground floor without using the central staircase. He would pop out at guests without warning. Legend says it’s how he discovered his first wife was cheating on him with a violinist.”

“But my room isn’t anywhere near there. And that’s the private part of the house, anyway. I understand Clarissa keeps the outer doors locked against curious boys. Probably to keep them from playing tricks.”

“It’s not the only secret passage. Gideon was either truly paranoid or had a whimsical sense of fun. I know of two others, here”—he pointed at one spot and then a second on another piecemeal map—“and here.”

Diana leaned in and attempted to decipher them. “That’s the kitchen,” she said of the first.

“That one is less exciting—simply a roofed-over passage from the scullery to the outer storerooms. This one is more pertinent.”

“The staff quarters?”

He nodded. “Right at the end of the corridor. The entrance is at the back of one of the linen cupboards. It’s the only one I’ve ever been in. It was actually Clarissa who showed me, when I was here one day with my grandmother. I was—thirteen, maybe?—so she was still a little girl. This one takes you inside the walls of the house before climbing up a story and coming out in the old servants’ quarters.”

Well, that answered the question of whether Clarissa knew about the passageways. And gave greater urgency to the question of why she hadn’t said anything about it in the staff meeting.

“The problem is,” Josh continued, “I’m pretty sure that last one is boarded up. Or at least it was, during my first year teaching. And it takes a particularly bold set of boys to traverse an entire corridor filled with schoolmasters, even in the dead of night.”

“The real problem is that every one of these tunnels appears to begin and end in the main house,” Diana pointed out. “Which makes sense, if Gideon Somersby was the one who wanted them. It would have taken a lot more work to incorporate hidden passages into the oldest part of Havencross, where my bedroom is—and why bother, when he had so much space to construct whatever he wanted?”

“All right, so we haven’t quite sorted out how the boys are getting to you, but we will.”

What if it’s not the boys? Diana didn’t dare ask it aloud. She didn’t know Joshua well enough for such imponderable questions. But despite her honest answers to Clarissa about ghosts, there was one detail she had omitted from her statement in the staff meeting. A tiny detail, almost inconsequential: the sound of footsteps receding down the corridor as she approached her door. And not the soft whisper of bare feet or the slap of a boy’s slippers.

The distinct tapping of a woman in heels.

She’d left that part out because saying it aloud was tantamount to an accusation—against the inoffensive Mrs. McCann, or Beth Willis, or Clarissa Somersby herself. Clarissa, who had sat so silently as Diana explained the mysterious knocking. But who had also decided on nightly patrols of the boys’ dorms. Which could merely be her way of deflecting attention.

But why on earth would Clarissa Somersby be sneaking around her own home in the middle of the night simply to tease Diana? And why the other tricks—the missing or moved items, the smashed teacup? There didn’t seem to be any purpose to any of it, except to annoy Diana.

Or frighten her. Frighten her enough to leave? But Clarissa ran the school. If she wanted to get rid of Diana, she had only to fire her.

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