Page 26

chapter twenty-four

MOCKS

Walden started marking her sixth formers’ mocks on Monday morning at 10 A.M ., and had the grades in the system half an hour after the deadline. A* for Nikki, A for Will and Aneeta, a low C for Mathias, all more or less as she’d expected. She knew her late turn-in wouldn’t be the last. Annie in the office would be sending chasing emails until Wednesday. When it was done, she stretched, groaned, and went straight back into the cavernous room where the thaumic engines lived.

Todd hadn’t left. For once he’d taken off the heavy chain he wore around his neck with the Great Key of Chetwood hanging on it, and left it on the polished table by the door into Walden’s rooms. Now he lay in almost the same position Walden had left him in two hours ago, though he’d moved over to the left: flat on his back with torch and screwdriver under the brass-and-polished-walnut edifice that controlled the roadside boundaries of the school wardings. There was a pried-off panel at his side, and a double handful of ancient screws in a Tupperware takeout container. Most of them, Todd said, needed to be replaced. They hadn’t found the hole in the wards yet, but the 1960s expansion of the school to take in the building site for Scrubs had required a matching expansion of the school’s magical protections. Walden thought it was as likely a weak spot as any.

“Anything?” she said, without much hope.

“Not a brass monkey’s fart,” said Todd.

He’d been in here since half past four this morning. Walden hadn’t started until half six. I’m an old man, I don’t sleep much, he’d said. The hole’s in here somewhere. The Key feels it. I can feel it.

Walden had a lot of respect for Todd’s magical feelings, but she hadn’t found any obvious problems with the thaumic engines’ inner workings yet, and she couldn’t sense anything wrong. Neither could the Phoenix. And Todd was rapidly approaching retirement age. Nine hours from a 4 A.M . start was a long time for a person in his sixties to spend wrestling with ancient machinery, muttering curses to himself the whole time. “Take a break. Go and get some lunch.”

“With respect, Dr Walden—”

“It’s Saffy,” said Walden. “We’ve worked together for years, Todd, please. I know you know Chetwood inside out. I do need your help here. I’m asking you to have a rest and something to eat and come back fresh. I think we’re in for another late night.”

The cut-off groan Todd let out as he slid out from under the brassy bulk of the thaumic engine and sat up would probably have been a yell of pain from someone else. Todd showing any sign of being made of something less than solid oak was alarming. His shoulder-length grey hair was lank with sweat and dust. This was one of the few parts of the school that Premises could not access to bring in a vacuum cleaner. Walden had discovered, in the last two days, that Todd had been meticulously sweeping and polishing in here himself. He was ashamed—ashamed!—that in the last few years he’d stopped forcing himself to get down on his knees with dustpan and brush in order to get at the grimy residue that built up underneath the engines at the back.

Walden was the one who should have been ashamed. She just hadn’t thought about how the thaumic engines were staying clean. Two people ever went in, and Walden hadn’t been sweeping. She should have been. She was a lot younger than Todd.

She eventually managed to coax him out and send him off to the canteen, though only by the underhanded expedient of displaying the kind of fluttery feminine concern that felt like a ridiculous mask to her, but allowed Todd to be gruff and tough about how brutally hard they were working. Then she got back to her own job, picking up where she’d left off, going through the diagnostic readouts which were stamped onto a long thin roll of paper by an immensely slow punch-card system installed as an upgrade in about 1910. It was achingly dull. The readouts followed no current standard of magical analysis; they were masses of badly organised data, most of it useless, the sort of thing you would have fed through a computer to analyse if this system had been designed at any point in Walden’s lifetime. Without the Phoenix in the back of her thoughts providing sharp, interested commentary, it would have been impossible to focus. As it was, Walden was so completely absorbed that she let out a small scream when she realised someone else was in the room.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” said Mark. “How’s it going?”

“Nothing yet,” Walden said. “How was your patrol?”

“Still no sign of anything big moving in,” Mark said. That was the fear that lay under all Walden’s other fears, the danger Laura had pointed out months ago: the dreadfully tasty target that Chetwood represented to a new higher demon, a second Old Faithful. They’d survived an incursion on that level with no casualties once. They’d been very, very lucky.

“You look frazzled,” Mark said. “Up for some relaxation?”

“Mark,” said Walden.

Yes, all right, so they’d kept going.

Kept fucking, specifically. This was not a relationship. Walden had not lost all self-respect, she wasn’t going to get herself mixed up in a workplace romance proper, especially not with Mark Daubery . She’d already forced herself to have a very brief, very dry, very uncomfortable conversation with the examinations officer, because the entanglement as it stood was enough of a conflict of interest that she should not be invigilating or going anywhere near any of Will’s upcoming A-level exams. They didn’t seem especially close, but uncle and nephew was still a family connection.

Will, of course, had no idea what was going on. No one knew, apart from the examinations officer, who by nature of the role was not a gossip. Because there was barely anything going on, just a practical arrangement between two single adults, which was nobody’s business.

“Not now, thank you,” Walden said crisply. “If you aren’t going to make yourself useful, do please feel free to go away.”

“I thought I was being useful,” said Mark. He was standing by the door, next to the only table in the room. Todd hadn’t taken the Great Key with him when he went to get lunch. It was still there, strung on its chain, lying on the table. Mark picked it up and let it swing from his fingers. “Heavy, isn’t it?”

“Put that down.”

“Can’t be the original mediaeval key,” Mark said. “I wonder how old it is.”

“Put it down, Mark.”

“Down, boy. Yes, Dr Walden.” He dropped the big iron key back on the table; it landed with a thunk. “See you later?”

“I’m extremely busy,” said Walden.

“I’ll fix you a gin before you fall into bed.”

“Make it a double,” said Walden. “Now get out.”

Walden didn’t take a real lunch break, but she did swing by the staff dining room for supper. She was hoping for a big plate of proper boarding school stodge, the sort of thing that sat in your stomach like a lump of lead and could power an army of teenagers through hours of Games. She was in luck: they were serving toad in the hole with onion gravy and mash on the side. Middling-quality sausages padded out with batter and a heap of mashed potatoes, all in shades of brown and beige, and more carb for pudding in the form of jam sponge and custard. Walden requested large helpings of everything, even the sad, overboiled peas and carrots.

This kind of meal didn’t happen as often as it used to. A modern school catering company usually had ambitions towards nutritional balance and healthy living, and quite right too. But for Walden, this sort of thing was pure comfort, the food of her childhood, the food that made sense on a miserable January evening. She almost went back for seconds.

Ebele, dressed today in warm and summery orange, set her tray down on Walden’s table just as she was polishing off the last of the sponge and custard. It looked like she’d skipped the hot food offerings completely and raided the salad bar for her supper: cold chicken and pasta, a heap of leafy greens, a ramekin of yoghurt for dessert. “I’m so glad I caught you,” she said. “I know you’re very busy. Could I have a little word? It’s about Nikki.”

“Is everything all right?”

“She got her Oxford offer,” Ebele said. “Three As. The email came through this morning. I imagine we’ll get the letter later this week.”

Walden was delighted. She’d seldom had a student who deserved Oxford more than Nikki Conway. “That’s wonderful news! She’ll get those grades easily. Remind me which college?”

“Wadham,” said Ebele. “But she’s thinking of turning it down.”

“She— what ?”

Ebele inclined her head. “It’s her future and her choice,” she said, in the grim tones of someone who thought a teenager was about to make a very silly mistake. “I think—I hope —that Ezekiel and I have encouraged Nikki for as long as we’ve known her to grow into a young woman of character and ambition. We’ve had a conversation. Unfortunately, it went pear-shaped. Sometimes the overlap between Matron and foster mum is not very helpful. A teenager needs a person to rebel against and I think Nikki may have picked me. And we don’t want to bully her into something she doesn’t actually want.”

“But it’s madness,” said Walden. “She’s brilliant. She’ll have a wonderful time. And she does want Oxford.” She’d done her share of the interview prep sessions, starting last summer: one-on-two tutoring sessions with Nikki and Will, who were this year’s only applicants for Sorcery. Oxford, for Will Daubery, was just an assumption. He was following in the footsteps of his father and his uncle, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, and his great-great-great-aunt Gwendolyn Hornsey whose name Walden had recognised with a start as the suffragist pioneer who’d been the first female magician to study at Cambridge. If he had had any doubts about getting in, he hadn’t let them show. Sorcery was one of the less competitive courses, which meant there were only five applicants for every available place. Will Daubery had the predicted grades to get an interview and he was undeniably the sort of boy who interviewed well—one of nature’s bullshitters, polished to charming and confident excellence by a school that had been providing bullshit-polishing services for centuries. Walden had always thought his chances were high. Of course, the Chetwood background was no longer the free ticket to elite education that it had once been—and quite right too, no doubt, because straight As at an underfunded state comprehensive was a considerably more impressive academic achievement than straight As here—but Will would do well, if he got the offer.

For Nikki, though, Oxford meant something different, something more. She had only talked about it once.

My mum and dad never went to uni, she’d said.

And she deserved it. She was brilliant. It was hard to quantify the difference between a merely very intelligent student and a brilliant one. It didn’t show up in a list of exam results. Sometimes, in fact, brilliance could be a disadvantage—when all you needed to do was neatly jump the hoop of an examiner’s grading rubric without ever asking why. It was the teachers who knew, the teachers who felt the difference. A few times in your career, you would have the privilege of teaching someone truly remarkable; someone who was hard work to teach because they made you work harder, who asked you questions that had never occurred to you before, who stretched you to the very edge of your own abilities. If you were lucky—as Walden, this time, had been lucky—your remarkable student’s chief interest was in your discipline: and then you could have the extraordinary, humbling experience of teaching a child whom you knew would one day totally surpass you.

Walden had a realistic opinion of her own capabilities. She was not someone easy to surpass. But if there was such a thing as destiny, then it was calling to Nikki Conway, and it was calling with the mantle of the once-a-generation magician and scholar. She was a Roger Rollins, a Gwendolyn Hornsey. Perhaps she belonged on the list of truly legendary British wizards, up there with John Dee and Isaac Newton. She deserved the chance to find out. An Oxford degree was the first step along that road; and if she chose to turn off the road, then the prestige of having done just that first step would still open dozens of other doors for her. Turn it down? Why would she ever turn it down?

“I’m having a hard time getting to the bottom of it myself,” said Ebele. “And of course it’s not the best time to pile on the serious conversations, when she’s in the middle of mocks. But I think Nikki might benefit from talking about this with someone a bit less,” she made a face, “well, a bit less me . I’d like you to meet with her, if that’s all right. I know it’s not the best time for you either.”

The hedging and apologetic tone were a velvet glove wrapped around what was actually, very clearly, an order. Not many people outranked Walden in the school hierarchy, but Ebele was one of them. But—“Me?” said Walden. “I’m not really the right person for… pastoral.”

“I think you know,” said Ebele, “that usually, the right person to take the lead on any pastoral concern is the person that child feels able to talk to.”

Walden had a very good relationship with Nikki—as her Invocation teacher. They’d had any number of lively, delightful, academic conversations, in lessons and in interview prep sessions. But she had never had anything to do with her personal or pastoral development. She still remembered the enormous awkwardness of walking the tearful sixth former down the corridor to the infirmary in absolute silence.

Dr Walden, I think I should drop, Nikki had said.

They’d never talked about it again. Walden had handed it off along the proper channels—the nurse, the pastoral deputy head, the school counsellor—and got on with her own job.

But every child was every adult’s responsibility.

“If you really think I can help,” she said, “I’m happy to try.”