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chapter twelve

REPUTATIONAL DAMAGE

“Dr Walden, thank you for waiting,” said the Chair of Governors. “We’ve agreed a compromise.”

Walden’s gaze flicked round the meeting room—panelled walls, oil paintings, uncomfortable blue plastic folding chairs around an ancient long refectory table—trying to assess what ‘compromise’ meant. Two intensely busy weeks had passed since Old Faithful had made its move, broken through in a critical incursion, and died at Walden’s hands. The governors were mostly male, though there were a few women among them. They were all well-dressed, and almost all white. David, as Headmaster, sat at the Chair’s left hand. His expression gave nothing away. This meeting was the final stage of the governors’ formal investigation into the disaster.

“Chetwood is one of the leading schools of magic in this country—I daresay, in the world. You were appointed Director of Magic as part of that mission. Now, our whole school community must take this demonic incursion very seriously.”

It was quite something to be accused of ‘unseriousness’ about demonic incursion by a person who had probably had to look up eleventh-order demons on Wikipedia two weeks ago when he got the phone call. Sometimes Walden regretted being a grown-up. It meant you could not say what you actually thought. But she kept smiling. She had no leverage here. It was quite likely that she was about to unceremoniously lose her job. She had been deep in crisis management for the last two weeks. She knew how many angry and frightened phone calls from parents there had been. She knew that next year’s eleven-plus entrance applications were down. The bloody local journalist had not been able to resist the drama: a critical incursion, an eleventh-order demon, right here in our sleepy Buckinghamshire village—just think of what could have happened to the children! And think of what could still happen to our house prices !

And then, nightmarishly, the BBC had picked it up, and now the whole thing was in the school’s search results. For a private school, which needed parents willing to pay school fees in order to survive, reputational damage was an extremely serious problem. Old Faithful was no one’s fault. But once you got to Walden’s level, things that were no one’s fault were still your responsibility.

“We considered your points very carefully,” the Chair said. “You made some forceful arguments—as did David, of course.” Walden and David had met before this meeting to go over every single headline they needed to hit. It was always a relief to have a good Head in your corner. “I want to say, on behalf of the board, that we are all impressed by your dedication to your students.”

What had become very clear, in the course of the investigation, was that the governors expected someone to take the fall for what had happened. It had been indicated—not very subtly—that since recruiting a qualified Director of Magic halfway through the academic year was going to be very difficult and expensive, they were happy for the blame to be put on a pair of reckless young people from troubled backgrounds. Someone had said that, ‘troubled.’

Walden had not been in the meetings twenty years ago. Perhaps someone had said the same sort of thing about Charlie.

So she and David fired back: our duty of care. Our mission . Our school’s long and noble history as a safe haven for young sorcerers with nowhere else to turn. Our institution’s charitable status, said David solemnly, and got some nervous looks: ‘charitable status’ was a tax issue. And then Walden had looked around the room and reminded herself that most of the governors were people who sincerely believed in the importance of Chetwood School and the mixture of magical and academic education it provided. Plenty of them were alumni. Not a few had children at the school. They were frightened. It was a shutting-the-stable-door kind of fear. They wanted to act, at once, in a way that would make them feel like they had done the right thing.

Let me tell you about Nicola and Mathias, she’d said.

The sob stories had worked on some of them. The magic words ‘Oxford candidate’—Nikki had put in her application at the start of October, and Walden thought her chances were good—had worked on others. And then they’d invited Laura Kenning to come in and give her final account of the incident, along with her analysis as Chief Marshal.

Walden had been expecting it to be a disaster. Laura was such an abrupt and awkward person. She didn’t have the years of practice addressing a group that any teacher got as a matter of course. Besides, there had been several mistakes in how they’d handled Old Faithful’s incursion. Walden lay awake at night thinking about them. If she had just paid more attention to Nikki in the days following that summoning gone wrong. If she hadn’t let herself be worried about Mathias, and distracted by the need to scold Will, and then caught up in the countless meetings and observations and phone calls and emails that were also her job. If she’d taken more time answering Aneeta’s question about Old Faithful’s whispers that day. If she hadn’t given Nikki the book.

There were several mistakes in the handling of this incident, Laura had begun, in an abrupt and awkward way.

Then she’d thrown herself on her sword.

Walden had felt fairly awful listening to it. Laura had clearly done her own share of lying awake. What was the good of a Chief Marshal on a school site, if not to protect children from demons? Insufficient threat analysis , Laura said. A historical culture of carelessness regarding the eleventh-order demon known as ‘Old Faithful’—like sitting on a volcano and assuming it would never erupt, just because it hadn’t for a while. Lack of personnel. Lack of preparedness among those personnel who were on duty. Lack of leadership by the Chief Marshal. Patrol schedules too heavily focused on the student dorms and known hot spots, requiring school staff with little training or experience to cover gaps on an ad hoc basis. Frankly, she’d paused, and looked grim, and finally said, a lot of people should have died.

And then, while everyone still looked solemn about that, she’d gone on: The only reason this incident was just a frightening mistake, and not a horrific tragedy, is Dr Walden.

Walden hadn’t been expecting it. She did not quite know what to do with her face for the next part. You could not sit there and smile blandly while a person called you a hero; it was too awkward. Laura gave a stripped, professional account of their trip into the incursion to recover Will, Nikki, and Mathias. Somehow, she managed to make it sound like Walden had been tremendously efficient and highly competent the whole time, instead of full of adrenaline and making it up as she went along.

“At the very least, the three children in the incursion should have died, or worse,” said Laura in the end. “I wouldn’t even have tried to save them. And if I had tried, I would probably have failed. I don’t know how to explain to you all just how dangerous an eleventh-order demon is. A volcano probably is the best thing to imagine, or any kind of natural disaster—that’s what a higher demon is, a natural disaster. It’s not just a question of being brave or doing the right thing. To take on something like that, you need skills that most people simply don’t have. The Order of Marshals keeps track of the magicians in this country who do have those skills, and it doesn’t take much effort, because I could count them on my fingers.

“I want you all to be clear about what I’m telling you. Chetwood just lost an apex predator that’s been lurking in the school’s magical shadow for hundreds of years. That doesn’t mean the school is safe. It means it’s open season until a new higher demon moves in to claim that hunting ground—and there will be a new one. No demon can resist the sheer quantity of wild magic that a large group of teenage magicians is always going to generate as a matter of course. You need to substantially step up the magical security operation on the school campus. You need to increase the number of Marshals, and the new squadron should include at least two pairs of active-duty demon hunters. And it would be absolute madness to get rid of the only member of staff you’ve got who is capable of handling the problem personally if all else fails.”

Laura had scared them. Her blunt, abrupt, awkward speech—her obvious sincerity —had worked. The Chair of Governors didn’t actually say so, but as he laid out his compromise, it became clear that something had shifted in the whole room’s perception of Walden. They had thought of her as—well, as the person she was: academic turned educator turned school management. Which was to say, not real management—even people who sat on boards of governors were often a little unconsciously woolly about the fact that the people running a school were effectively the C-suite of a medium-sized business enterprise—but essentially the same kind of person they all were: an educated middle-class professional, doing a normal, everyday kind of job.

But Laura was a Marshal. Marshals were not normal and everyday. The Order of Marshals was even older than Chetwood, another mediaeval survival dressed up in a twenty-first-century org chart. It had endured down the centuries since its inception by changing, and changing, and changing. There were Knights Mareschal in Robin Hood stories, or projected backwards in time into legends about King Arthur. They had hunted demons first as mendicant monastics, then as organised thugs. They had been enforcers for the Church in the days when demonic exorcism was the job of the village priest and God help him if he wasn’t up to it. They had been a crusading knightly order in the Middle Ages, and witch-hunters in the Protestant Reformation. They had dwindled in the Enlightenment, when gentleman-wizardry was on the rise, and grown again with the Industrial Revolution, as demons discovered the joys of technology. Marshals had fought in the First World War, the first and last modern conflict where both sides had openly summoned demons onto the battlefield, pouring monsters into machine-gun emplacements and early tanks and the very first aeroplanes. There was a long strip of no-man’s-land, near the site of the Battle of the Somme, where even now the boundaries between the mundane world and the demonic plane were thin, and it was a very bad idea to switch on your mobile phone.

Marshals—including the first Marshals-Distaff, female recruits—had stood with silver swords drawn on the rooftops of London during the frightening stage of the Blitz when everyone had been convinced the Nazis would crack demonic bombings any day. There’d been quite a good BBC miniseries about it a few years ago.

These days, of course, the Order of Marshals was essentially a specialist branch of the police, funded by council tax, plagued with all the usual problems of a modern UK police force: understaffing, bureaucratic complexity, organisational inertia. But Laura Kenning was a Chief Marshal. Though hardly anyone actually paid attention to the Order’s traditional internal ranks, Walden guessed she could probably tack something like KMC—Knight Mareschal Capus—onto her name, if she wanted to. She was slightly too young to get KMCD, for ‘Distaff.’ The Order had taken an amazingly long time to admit that having a separate set of ranks for female Marshals made no sense, but they’d caved at last in about 2006.

When a tough and beautiful person wearing rune-inscribed armguards and a silver sword stood in front of you, very visibly the inheritor of nearly a millennium of demon-hunting hero-tales, it was quite hard to shove her back into the place where some part of the Chair of Governors clearly wanted to shove someone with no university degree and an Essex accent. Laura too clearly knew what she was talking about. She looked like a hero, even while she insisted that she had been the key point of failure. If she said Walden was an astoundingly capable magician and the person Chetwood needed, it was hard to disbelieve her.

“The students in question must, of course, face appropriate consequences for a very serious error of judgement,” the Chair said, “but I would not dream of interfering with the school’s processes, David, when it comes to what those consequences should be. The safety of the school community is paramount, naturally. The governors are sure you will consider the best interest of all the children under your care.”

Walden murmured agreement, as did David in the Headmaster’s seat. The Chair was quite right, after all. A little patronising, but quite right. And what he was really saying was that they had won, won what they had been fighting for all through the investigation process: another chance for Nikki and Mathias. Walden had not been expelled from Chetwood for bringing Old Faithful down on top of herself as a teenager—and she probably should have been, because she had done it on purpose, and someone had died. But then, teenage Saffy’s parents had been alumni and donors. Charlie had taken the blame: conveniently dead, with no one to speak for him, another young person from a troubled background.

And so Walden was not immediately losing her job. She was, despite everything, a little surprised by that.

“Chief Marshal Kenning,” said the Chair, “we have considered your assessment as well. As the Marshal on the spot—and as a key stakeholder in the school’s magical security arrangements—we felt we had to take you very seriously. We have also spoken to the Marshals’ District Commander for Buckinghamshire about this matter.”

Ah, thought Walden, before he said it. She caught David’s eye and saw that he already knew. She felt awful. It was Laura who was losing her job. In front of a roomful of people, no less. That was a nasty way to do it. But you did not become a fantastically successful hedge fund manager—which was what the Chair was, when he was not generously donating his time to the school—without an edge of ruthlessness in you. Someone had to take the fall for what had happened, and Laura, with her blunt and honest review of her own mistakes, had volunteered. With the Chief Marshal gone, the school could put out a statement: immediate reorganisation and improvement of our magical security operations —it wouldn’t repair all the damage done by the BBC News article, but it would be a start. Walden also had an edge of ruthlessness in her. She could feel awful for Laura and at the same time appreciate that it was the neatest solution possible to Chetwood’s problem. It was one of only two solutions, in fact, that avoided the practical consequences of Old Faithful’s incursion coming down like a hammer on the vulnerable children in the middle of the disaster. From the governors’ point of view, either Walden or Laura had to go. They must have been discussing it before they invited her in. David had hired Walden himself, and liked her; that would have tipped the balance.

Laura took it on the chin. Walden saw that she’d been expecting it. Perhaps the District Commander for Buckinghamshire had warned her. She got out some dignified platitudes: it’s been a privilege and grateful for the opportunity . Then the Chair dismissed her, and she left fast.

“All right, moving on. Dr Walden, please take a seat,” said the Chair. “Obviously, our next concern is the future development of Chetwood’s magical security operation. We have talked extensively with the Order, but we felt there were concerns about their suggested approach.”

Walden took the offered seat. She was no longer on trial. “I have my disagreements with the Order’s theoretical approach,” she said, “but they are generally fairly good at what they do. What kind of concerns?”

The governors exchanged looks. “To put it bluntly,” said a woman sitting near the end of the long refectory table, “they’re quite old-fashioned. Their idea of a plan is just to throw more warm bodies at the problem. Nothing but respect for the organisation, of course, but having a bunch of Marshals hanging around the school doesn’t seem to have actually achieved much in a crisis. As David has pointed out, it was your skills, as a fully trained academic magician, that made the difference. So we were hoping to achieve something a little more agile —”

— and a little less expensive? Walden thought. But she was now at the bottom of this room’s hierarchy, and so she did not say it. Besides, she’d been in the Ops meetings, she knew enough about Chetwood’s finances. The governors were right. Laura’s suggestion—doubling the Marshal squadron that the school paid for, bringing in the crack frontliners of the Order, the active-duty demon hunters—Knights Mareschal Venitant—would be wildly expensive, and unsustainable. Especially if eleven-plus entry was down.

“We have decided to bring in a magical security consultant,” said the Chair. “Say hello, Mark.”

Walden’s hackles immediately rose. ‘Consultant,’ what did that mean? Magical security was her job. It looked like they’d planned a replacement for her, not for Laura. David gave her a warning glance. It was clear he’d used plenty of his own capital with the governors, fighting to save her career. She’d said so many times to him that Chief Marshal Kenning was obstructive and unhelpful. That had probably fed into his decision to back the governors getting rid of the Marshal now. Office politics—don’t think about it! Who was Mark ?

The man at the far end of the table gave a charming, faintly embarrassed smile and a little wave. He had been introduced at the start of the meeting as a representative of the school’s ‘wider community,’ a phrase so vague it could mean absolutely anything. His expression now seemed to say: Sorry about that, bit of light skulduggery! He was a white man with conservatively cut curly hair, a slight tan of the just-got-back-from-Provence variety, and the faintly ageless look of a person who had always been good-looking and was now committed to maintaining it. Walden guessed he was in his forties, but equally he could have been mid-thirties and outdoorsy, or mid-fifties with some light plastic surgery. He was wearing a very good suit, with a shirt open at the collar. No tie, no wedding ring.

Walden had an unaccountable sense of familiarity. Her field was not huge. Had she met him before?

“Mr Mark Daubery, Dr Sapphire Walden,” said the Chair. “Mark is an expert on magical security in general and demonic issues in particular. He’s worked for the highest levels of the government, and we are very fortunate to be able to call on his expertise at Chetwood. He’s going to do a full review of the school’s magical position. He’s also going to take over Chief Marshal Kenning’s role as active security lead, until the end of this academic year. So you’ll be working closely together.”

Daubery . Well, that explained it. And it also gave Walden a better guess at his age: he had to be an alumnus, but she had no memory of ever meeting him, so he was at least half a decade older than she was. She gave Will’s uncle, a magician who did ‘military stuff,’ a friendly and professional smile. There was no way to avoid having him imposed on her, that was obvious. And there was no need to assume the worst. But she did not like that she had never met him before. She did not like that he was a consultant, outside the school hierarchy; it was clear that she was not supposed to be able to tell him what to do, nor even to go over his head to David.

On top of that, knowing perfectly well that it might be unfair, she was immediately suspicious of the charming smile and good suit. Will as a schoolboy you could tell off for his nonsense was bearable, and even quite funny. Will as an adult colleague presented a range of unpleasant possibilities, including but not limited to ‘incompetent bullshitter’ and ‘absolute bastard.’ No sensible woman over the age of twenty-five felt anything but dubious in the face of a smiling posh chap with good cheekbones.

Mark Daubery’s smile was easy, but his eyes were cool and assessing. “The famous Dr Walden!” he said. “William talked about you right through Christmas dinner last year. It’s a pleasure.”