A Talent for Trouble Read online

  Suddenly concerned, he turned back to Alice. “Do you need . . . Should I hold your hand now?”

  But Alice had also emerged, and was standing beside him.

  She had not imagined, from the ground, how wild it would feel on the roof. On the ground, the wind was barely a whisper, but up here it whooshed and swooped about in gusts and swirls, tugging Alice’s hair loose from her braids, whipping her plaid school skirt around her thighs. She tilted her head as Fergus was doing. Heavy gray and white clouds scudded across the sky, carrying the smell of rain, looking close enough to touch.

  “Gods, I think,” she said, replying to Fergus’s earlier questions. “The clouds, I mean. And rain is their way of talking to the world in the loch.”

  From where she stood, Alice could see the tops of the trees that surrounded the keep, swaying. The rustle of the leaves as they blew back and forth was like the ebb and flow of the sea, the rooks like landlocked gulls, the rooks’ nests tossed about like little boats.

  It was beautiful. It was magnificent. Everyone, Alice thought dreamily, should spend time on rooftops.

  “Have you got any signal yet?”

  Fergus’s voice brought her back to reality. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and made a face.

  “Nothing.”

  “There’s a ledge here. I reckon this must be where Carys fell off.”

  Not thinking, Alice stepped away from the trapdoor, toward Fergus.

  Still not thinking, she looked down.

  The lean of the tower was even more pronounced up here, and the roof sloped dramatically away from her toward a parapet, about half a meter tall, on which Fergus was sitting, with nothing but empty space behind him, and a long drop to the ground.

  Alice’s head began to swim as she wondered how she could have thought this would be all right. Her stomach lurched. She tried to steady her breath.

  “Alice, are you OK?”

  The ground was so far down! She closed her eyes, feeling the vertigo wash through her in waves. She forced them open then quickly sat down, holding out her phone.

  “You look for me,” she ordered.

  Fergus hesitated. Alice’s eyes were rolling back, and she was swaying. He could see her knees shaking. If this was what vertigo looked like, he didn’t like it. “I think, probably, I should take you back down.”

  “Please?” She tried to force a smile.

  “You look like you’re going to faint. Or throw up. Or actually even die.”

  “I won’t die, I promise . . . Just check, quickly.”

  “What, and if there’s a signal you’ll call your dad? Alice, you can’t even stand!”

  Still she held out her phone, even as the nausea rolled on. Silently cursing Barney and his lack of emails, Fergus slipped off the parapet and took the phone, then hoisted himself back up, with his feet dangling over the outside edge. Alice moaned and wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Nothing,” said Fergus. “Not one single solitary bar. I can try standing up, to see if that works, but only if you can hold on to my jacket. I don’t want to fall off like poor old Carys.”

  “That’s not even funny,” she croaked.

  “I’m not even joking.”

  Alice shuffled to the edge with her eyes almost completely shut and gripped a fistful of Fergus’s uniform as he clambered to his feet, trying not to think about the fact that if he died, it would be her fault.

  The wind grew stronger. A gentle rain began to fall.

  “Don’t slip,” she whispered, screwing her eyes shut.

  “Believe me, I have no intention of . . .”

  PING!

  Alice’s eyes flew open. A missed call! It must be from Barney—she was sure it must be from Barney—who else could it be?

  PING! PING!

  Three missed calls!

  PING!

  “Give me my phone!” She lunged forward. Fergus, caught off guard, took a step back—he wobbled on the edge of the parapet—screamed, and clutched at Alice—

  The rooks, disturbed from slumber, took off from their nests in a mass of flapping wings.

  PING!

  The fifth notification sounded as Alice’s phone flew, in a perfect arc, over their heads into the lowering twilight. The pair froze—Alice on the roof clinging to Fergus’s legs, Fergus on the parapet gripping her shoulders. For one desperate, hopeful second it looked as if the phone would fall back onto the roof. Fergus let go of Alice with one hand, stretched the other to the sky. But the phone plummeted like a lead weight past him, past the ledge on which the love-struck Carys Middleton had spent a frozen, tearful night, and shattered at the major’s feet.

  Fourteen

  We Didn’t Mean to Kill You

  If you asked Jesse privately what he hated most in the world, he would answer without hesitation that it was the violin.

  He knew what it was supposed to sound like. In the holidays, his parents had taken him to a concert to hear a violinist famous for playing so fast you couldn’t see his bow. Jesse hadn’t believed that was physically possible, but it was. Afterwards, his mother had said that was how she imagined angels played in heaven, and his father had added, a little too heartily, “Jesse’ll play like that one day,” and Jesse had felt depressed because he knew that however hard he tried, he could never play like the man with the angel bow, or even like Jed or Jeremy, who—unlike Jared, who had gone on to play in an orchestra—had given up the violin after the Grade Eight music exam.

  Jesse had failed his Grade Five.

  Twice.

  But he had to try. Trying was what Jesse did.

  And so this evening, instead of secretly watching a horror film in the common room with Samira, or fishing on the loch with Jenny and Amir, or playing football with Zeb and most of the other Year Seven boys, Jesse was in his usual practice room right at the top of the keep. His bow, scraping across the strings, sounded like one of the major’s trapped kittens, but it didn’t matter. One day, he told himself (without much conviction), he would play like a heavenly angel.

  He just kept on playing until Alice and Fergus tumbled into the practice room.

  Sometimes, when you are interrupted in the middle of doing something, it is very difficult to catch up.

  “Hide us!” Fergus hissed.

  Jesse paused mid–down-bow.

  “Please!” begged Alice.

  Jesse lowered his violin. He thought she might be about to cry. “Are you in trouble?”

  “Well, duh,” said Fergus, peering into a closet. “Why else would we be here? Alice, we can hide in this. Ugh, it’s thick with dust—who does the cleaning here? Jesse, play!”

  “P-play what?” stammered Jesse.

  “What do you think?” Fergus rolled his eyes as he pulled Alice in after him. “Your violin, of course!”

  “Thank you,” Alice whispered to Jesse, but Fergus had already closed the door.

  MEEEOWWW! HISS! SCRATCH! Jesse’s hands shook as he dragged his bow across the strings, and he played worse than ever. Inside the closet, Fergus shook with silent laughter.

  “He sounds like something dying,” he whispered.

  “Be nice,” Alice said, then, “Fergus, my phone!”

  Fergus breathed deeply to try and compose himself.

  “It didn’t look good,” he agreed.

  “Did you see who the missed calls were from?”

  “It was dark!” he protested. “I was hanging off a roof! Aaaaah . . .”

  He sneezed, loudly.

  Outside, Jesse’s playing paused. They froze. The playing resumed again.

  Fergus whimpered as he tried to hold back another sneeze.

  “It’s the dust!”

  “Pinch your nose!” Alice whispered. “Here, I’ll do it . . .” She felt for his face in the dark.

  “That’s my eye!”

  “Sorry! Is that your nose?”

  “It’s my ear!”

  “Are you sure you didn’t see who the missed calls were from?”


  Jesse’s playing stopped again.

  Discovery took less than a minute.

  “Jesse Okuyo!” The major beamed, like Jesse was his favorite person in the world. “Practicing again?”

  Jesse mumbled something incoherent.

  “Jolly good! Help me out, old chap. I’m looking for a pair of miscreants.”

  “Miscre . . . whats?”

  “Criminals. Wrongdoers.” The major lowered his tone to a conspiratorial whisper. “Fugitives from justice. Have you seen any such people?”

  “No,” croaked Jesse, but his eyes darted to the closet.

  “Ah,” said the major, and knocked gently on the door.

  Out came the miscreants, red-faced and embarrassed and a little bit sneezy. The major beamed again.

  “The troublemakers!” he cried. “Luckily unharmed. Unlike this.”

  Alice gulped as the major held out the remains of her phone.

  “The unavoidable consequence, I’m afraid, of throwing a fragile object from a tall building,” reflected the major as she took it from him. “Quite beyond repair. Still, it could have been worse. It could have hit me, and then who knows where we’d be? Dead, probably, in my case, and on trial for manslaughter in yours.”

  “We didn’t mean to kill you, sir,” Fergus mumbled. “Did we, Alice?”

  But Alice could only stare at her phone.

  “May I have the key to the roof?” the major enquired genially. “I noticed it was missing. You must learn to anticipate such details, if you are to lead a successful life of crime. Thank you, Mr. Mackenzie. And now, the burning question! What should be the Consequence of all this misbehavior? In the ancient world, they would cut off the hands of thieves—don’t look so panicked, Mr. Okuyo! Of course I am not going to do that. Now, let me think . . .”

  They watched nervously, flattened against the wall, as he paced the practice room, filling the small space with his massive frame.

  “I have it!” They all jumped as he clapped his hands. “The perfect Consequence! I am putting all three of you together as a team on the Great Orienteering Challenge!”

  “But I didn’t do anything wrong!” cried Jesse.

  The major’s eye was suddenly icy. “I believe you lied to me, Mr. Okuyo.”

  Jesse blushed and stared at the ground.

  “It is a perfect Consequence,” the major repeated. “Possibly my best ever. Now, I spot a piano. It has been an age since I practiced. Off you go, to other pursuits. I understand there is a highly illegal film being shown in the Year Seven common room. Failing that, you could attempt to catch a fish. I shall play Rachmaninov.” He cracked the joints in his fingers. “What are you waiting for? Go!”

  They left, to a torrent of musical notes.

  Jesse ran down the winding staircase, heedless of the steep, slippery steps. He was furious. The Orienteering Challenge! The one thing he had been looking forward to this term! Fergus was going to ruin it for him—Jesse knew he was! Fergus always ruined everything.

  Fergus followed at a more leisurely pace, astounded at having got off so lightly. Alice followed, cradling her phone.

  The major smiled. He had rarely felt so pleased with himself. He had set something in motion with this Consequence. He looked forward to finding out what it was.

  Somewhere in a different country, Barney Mistlethwaite once again tried to call his daughter. He had an urgent message to give her.

  Fifteen

  Like a Swamp, Without the Crocodiles

  The first training exercise for the Great Orienteering Challenge took place the following Saturday morning. Madoc, who was in charge on the basis that he taught geography and therefore knew about maps, gathered the Year Sevens in the Great Hall after breakfast to give them their instructions.

  “Today you will be playing Capture the Flag,” he told them. “There are three flags planted in three different locations in the surrounding countryside. You will be divided into three groups, which in turn will be divided into teams, each of which will be given the coordinates of one of the flags. The first team in each group to bring back their flag are the winners. Are there any questions?”

  “What are coordinates, sir?” asked Duffy.

  Madoc, who had been practicing map coordinates with his students since the beginning of the year, began to feel apprehensive.

  “Does anyone remember?” he asked.

  Jesse’s hand shot up.

  “A map coordinate refers to the latitude and longitude of a position,” he recited. “Longitude lines are perpendicular to the equator, and latitude lines are parallel. A geographic coordinate system enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters, or symbols.”

  “Excellent, Jesse! I’m glad someone in class was listening.”

  Jesse blushed under the unaccustomed praise. Madoc, feeling a little more hopeful, told the students to pick up their Orienteering Survival Packs on their way out. “You’ll find maps and compasses, water and packed lunches. Orange waterproofs are hanging by the door and are to be worn at all times. I repeat, at all times. Even if it isn’t raining.”

  “In case we get lost,” Jenny explained to Alice, who was looking mystified. “So they can find us easily before we die of exposure.”

  “People do get lost, all the time,” Samira added. “And last year someone broke a leg. They had to send a helicopter. Orienteering’s a lot harder than you think.”

  Alice, alarmed, glanced at Jesse. This time, when she caught his eye, he didn’t look away, but shook his head with a little smile, like he was telling her to ignore Jenny and Samira, and that everything would be fine. Alice smiled back, relieved. Fergus, watching, felt a stab of jealousy.

  The sun was out again after a week of rain, and a playful breeze scooted high clouds across a pale blue sky. Despite his misgivings about having Fergus on the team, Jesse was in high spirits. In the week since the incident in the music tower, he had thought a lot about what to do about today’s training exercise. His first idea had been to beg the major to put him and Fergus on different teams, but he was almost one hundred percent sure that wouldn’t work. Instead, he had emailed Jared (the least annoying of his brothers) for advice.

  Jared’s answer had been clear. Be the boss, little brother. Take control.

  It was what the knights in his stories would have done too.

  * * *

  The moment Madoc handed out the coordinates, Jesse became bossier than he had ever dreamed he could be. He would plan their route, he declared—the other two just needed to follow him. He studied the map in silence while they waited, then nodded and put it in his pocket. There was an obvious way to go, he said, which the other groups were sure to take. He, Jesse, could do better.

  “Ready, steady, go!” As soon as Madoc declared the exercise started, Jesse hurried Alice and Fergus through the griffin gates ahead of all the other teams. Then, as soon as they came to the first hairpin bend, he pulled them behind a rhododendron bush.

  “What?” Fergus protested. “That hurt!”

  “Shortcut!” Jesse whispered.

  They crept after him through the trees, a thick carpet of pine needles muffling their footsteps.

  A little farther into the undergrowth, they came to a path, just wide enough for one, winding through a pine wood. Jesse checked off landmarks as they went—an abandoned cottage, a pond, the brook that fed it. They were walking north by northeast, exactly as he’d planned. He felt a rush of exhilaration. Maps for Jesse held the same power as stories held for Alice. He read them the way most people read books, seeing an actual landscape where his classmates saw only lines on paper. He loved how maps changed the way he looked at the world around him. As he searched for clues to confirm their location, he saw so much that he would otherwise have missed: a tiny bird’s nest, a badger sett, a caterpillar . . .

  He held up his hand to stop the others.

  “What now?”

  “Up there, on that branch!”

  Alice gasped,
delighted.

  Tufty ears and eyes like black marbles, a plume of a tail and a nut-brown body, four small paws clinging to the trunk of a pine tree, head pointing toward them, nose and whiskers twitching . . .

  The prettiest thing she had ever seen.

  “A red squirrel,” Jesse whispered. “You don’t get them in the south. Hardly ever, anyway, but they still exist in Scotland.”

  A memory stirred deep inside Alice. Not an actual squirrel, but a picture book, read with her mother in the garden at Cherry Grange, and Mum saying, We used to have a pair in the garden when I was a little girl in Poland. They were so tame they used to steal things from the table when we ate outside. Alice had eaten every single meal outside for weeks after that in the hope of seeing a red squirrel of her own. For a fleeting moment, her mother was there in the woods with them, dancing on the grass in the garden, her long dark hair lifted in the breeze, laughing and singing, Dance with me, little pigeon.

  Little pigeon had been another of her special names for Alice.

  Alice blinked. When she looked again, her mother was gone, but the squirrel was still there, staring straight at her with its marble eyes, as if her mother had sent it.

  For the first time since smashing her phone, Alice smiled.

  Fergus felt another stab of jealousy.

  Like a lot of very smart people, Fergus saw nothing extraordinary in his own gifts. Instead, though he would never have admitted it, he envied Jesse what he didn’t have himself—his good looks, his gentle kindness, his physical strength. He envied him his family, the serene parents who always seemed so happy together. He even envied Jesse the merciless, teasing brothers, who all descended on the school in a loud noisy group every Visitors’ Day, forever hugging and cuffing their youngest sibling with real affection.

  The only family Fergus had was his parents, and they never came to Visitors’ Day, because they might see each other.

  He’d dealt with his envy in the past by laughing at Jesse for his stuffiness over school rules, but today was different. Today, Captain Fussypants was behaving like someone in charge, and Alice couldn’t stop smiling at him.