Scrambling out of bed, Mary hastened to the window. The tapping turned out to be an owl. As she pulled back the curtains she saw that it was a little owl, and as soon as it saw her it flew off towards the Abbey, which was bathed in moonlight and looked very spooky indeed. How she wished her brother Tom were there! As she watched, she saw the familiar spiral of smoke climbing into the night sky. Then something else caught her eye. Away in the distance, at the very end of the long drive, she saw the pale glow of a pair of car headlights. Turning to look at the bedside clock, she saw that it was five minutes past three. Who on Earth could be driving into the school grounds at such an ungodly hour? Taking care to keep out of sight, Mary watched as the small black car pulled to a halt outside the Abbey. And then out of the shadows emerged the figure of the man Miss Eggleton had been meeting!
The car door opened and a figure got out. Mary was not sure if it was a man or a woman, because whoever it was had got out of the other side of the car, the side furthest away from Mary. A few moments later she heard footsteps on the courtyard below, and sure enough, Victoria Eggleton, wearing a housecoat and slippers, ran swiftly across the lawn to where the two people were talking. For what seemed like ages they stood there, sometimes she could tell they were arguing, as there was a lot of arm waving, though no shouting, of course. That would have woken up the whole school. Then, at a quarter past three, the third person got back into the car and drove out, leaving Miss Eggleton and her man-friend. Mary saw the man point to the school, and guessed that he was telling her to go back before anyone saw her. At last the teacher walked slowly back to the school and the man went back into the Abbey. Mary breathed a sigh of relief. The person in the car had harmed neither of them, and Miss Eggleton was safely back inside the school with only Mary knowing she had been out. She climbed back into bed and pulled the sheets up around her, shivering with the cold. For what seemed like ages she lay awake, thinking up all manner of plots and mysteries involving Miss Eggleton and the two other people; then she drifted off into sleep.
It was the young teacher who roused her. ‘Mary! Come on, you’re late! You’ll miss breakfast if you don’t hurry!’
Mary woke suddenly, peering at the clock through half-closed eyes. It was half-past seven. She was a whole half hour late in getting up!
‘Mary, come on!’ the teacher called again, then the door slammed shut. Mary had a quick wash, piled into her clothes and dashed down to the refectory, where most of the other girls were already eating. To her relief, Ros was there. She had come straight from the infirmary. She looked pale and as though she hadn’t slept for a while, but other than that she was completely recovered.
‘A virus, matron said,’ she explained, spooning cornflakes into her mouth. ‘It was ghastly! So much sick……’
‘Yes, thanks Ros, I don’t think I want to know too much about it. I just hope I don’t catch it! How are the other two?’
‘Oh, they’re not as bad as I was, though it’s early days yet. But you should hear them moaning about it. Like big kids, they are! Anyway, what’s been going on while you’ve been on your own? Any more midnight rendezvous-ses?’
Mary hesitated momentarily, then decided that it would do no harm to let Ros know what she had seen.
‘It’s all most mysterious. First of all someone tricked me into going over to the ruin, saying that Miss Eggleton wanted to meet me there. When I got there, Miss Tibbs and James were searching for me – they’d been tipped off that I was out of bounds!’
‘Gosh! Who on Earth would have done that?’
‘I can only think that it was either Linda or Angela,’ Mary told her, explaining about the incident with the lines in the Latin lesson. ‘But why they should say it was Miss Egg who wanted to see me is a bit of a mystery.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, only you know about Miss Egg and I sharing this huge secret. And I’m not sure even she knows that I know, if you see what I mean!’
‘Hmm, I do see what you mean. But you weren’t seen, I mean you managed to get back to the school without them seeing you, didn’t you?’
‘Oh, yes, Linda and Angela will have to be much cleverer than that to catch me out!’ Mary said with a laugh. Then she realised that the two girls in question were sitting right behind her, and had probably heard every word!
‘Whoops!’ she whispered, giggling. ‘Anyway, after that… no I’d better save that till we’re safely out of hearing of anyone else. What’s our first lesson?’
‘Science.’
Mary groaned. ‘I hate science. It’s all about smells and light and materials. Give me English, History and French any day!’
‘Well, you’ve got to do it. You don’t have a choice.’
‘No, I know. It’s just not fair. Do you know that my brother Tom hasn’t done science since the first year? He took it in year two, found out he was no good at it, and dropped it.’
‘That can’t be right,’ Ros said, looking puzzled. ‘And anyway, how can the first year be year two? Explain that if you can.’
‘Well, I can,’ Mary said with a cheery smile. ‘Sir Thomas’s started as a prep school with just one class, which was Year One. They held their classes in the nave of the cathedral, I think, way back in the seventeenth century. When the school became a proper school after Cromwell, they retained the prep. class but it became disused over time, so first years go straight into Form Two. Daft, isn’t it?’
‘Stupid, if you ask me. But I don’t understand how they can drop things after just one year.’
‘Well, Tom explained it like this, they sort the boys out in the first year. Boys who are good at languages and English and so on, follow a “classics” course, while boys who are good at science, you know, chemistry, physics and biology, do a “modern” course. Lucky things! Wish I could drop a few subjects!’
‘That’s all very well, Mary, but you’re good at absolutely everything you do!’ Ros said enviously. It was true, but Mary would rather keep quiet about it. People tended to pick on you if you were good at everything. The thing was, she was good at sports, too, and frequently won every race she entered. And, as we already know, she had been picked for the school hockey team!
‘Come on, we’ll be late for Beaky.’ “Beaky” was Mr Beek, the chemistry teacher. He, with his colleagues Sarah Bennett and Stephanie Miller taught the girls chemistry, biology and physics respectively. If you didn’t like science, you were out of luck, because the three lessons were always together, three consecutive lessons spanning the midday lunch break. Mary was not looking forward to these lessons, though she could do the work perfectly well. It seemed to her that she was much more accomplished at writing and reading, and didn’t really appreciate the strict logic and rigid rules that went with the sciences. She felt the same way about mathematics, the notable difference being that she sometimes struggled with things like algebra, trigonometry and geometry.
During the lesson, she passed a note to Ros telling her briefly what had happened the previous night, and was careful to retrieve the note at lunchtime. Ros agreed that Mary should keep tabs on Miss Eggleton for as long as it took to find out what was going on, though she made it quite clear that she would have preferred to go to Miss Tibbs with the whole story.
‘Rather you than me, Mary. I don’t fancy getting up in the middle of the night just to watch Egg and her fancy men getting up to no good in the Abbey!’
Mary laughed. ‘I don’t mind. I’m a pretty light sleeper. They generally wake me up. Last night it was a little owl!’ They cheerfully made their way to Mrs Miller’s physics class.
