The Dance in the Dark. Sophie Cleverly
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Название: The Dance in the Dark
Автор: Sophie Cleverly
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Детская проза
isbn: 9780007589234
isbn:
“Finally!” I said, laying down my ink pen.
“Pfft,” she replied, blowing a lock of hair out of her eye. “I’m so sick of detentions. I hate them.”
“You realise there’s a really simple solution to that, don’t you?”
“And what’s that then, Little Miss Know-It-All?” My twin dumped her satchel on to her bed, her workbooks spilling out of it.
“Stop getting into trouble!” Honestly, I wondered how we were related, sometimes.
“Oh, that. Well, obviously. I will. I’ve got the ballet recital to think about now,” she said.
She had that to think about this morning, I thought, and it didn’t make a difference.
“So,” Scarlet continued, leaning over me to grab her silver hairbrush from the desk – the heirloom she’d inherited from our mother. “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?”
I felt my cheeks get a little warmer. “Nothing,” I said. “It’s been very uneventful.”
My twin stared into the mirror as she brushed out her hair, which was the same dark brown as mine. “It’s so strange,” she said suddenly, “imagining our mother brushing her hair here, with this brush.”
“In this room?” I was sceptical. “Probably not.”
“No, not in this exact room. But here, at Rookwood. Isn’t that weird?”
I met my twin’s gaze in the mirror and nodded. Last term we’d found out that our dearly departed mother couldn’t have been who we’d thought she was. She had died shortly after we were born, and all we really knew about her was her name and date of birth: Emmeline Adel, 26/02/1914. But then we’d found those facts written on a memorial plaque for a girl who had drowned in the lake at Rookwood over twenty years ago. Whoever our mother was, it seemed she had been a Rookwood pupil, but she couldn’t have been Emmeline Adel, who had met her unfortunate demise at the hands of the now-incarcerated headmaster, Mr Bartholomew.
Scarlet looked down at the hairbrush in her hands. It had the initials EG on the back, for Emmeline Grey, our mother’s married name. “I see this every day,” she said, “and I just wonder … about everything. What was her real name? Who was she? If she cared. If she’s … watching us now.”
I shivered a little despite myself. “I don’t know. I don’t know if we’ll ever know.”
My twin put the brush down and preened in the mirror. “Do you think she’d be proud?” she asked.
That lightened my mood. “Ha! Proud of your three detentions in one day? Well, I suppose it’s quite the achievement …”
Scarlet whacked me on the shoulder.
“Hurry up, smarty-pants. A horrible dinner awaits us once more.”
I smiled. I could say one more thing about Mother – if Scarlet took after her, she must have been quite a character.
I was practically buzzing when the time came for ballet class on Friday afternoon. My whole week had been building up to it.
“Come on, come on,” I said to Ivy, dragging her through the corridor towards the studio.
“You don’t have to drag me!” she protested.
“I can walk myself!”
“Then walk faster! I have ballet to attend to!”
We reached the door that led down to the studio in the basement, only to find Miss Finch standing outside it. We were a little early, but it was unusual for her to not be inside already.
“Miss?” I said.
“Oh, good afternoon, girls,” she said. “Go on down, I’ll be right there.” But her voice was shaky.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. She was looking at the stairway as if it were about to bite her, her walking stick clutched under one arm.
“Nothing, really,” she said. “Don’t worry. I just find the stairs a bit … difficult at the moment. I’ll be all right.”
Her brave face wasn’t fooling me. “I’ll go ahead,” I told her, “and Ivy will be right behind you. Just in case …”
She smiled gratefully. “Thank you, girls.”
I took the gaslit steps down into the basement, careful not to go too fast. It was still cold down there, as it had always been.
I reached the bottom and turned to watch our teacher take the last step. She grinned, though her face was pale and I could hear her breathing heavily. “Made it,” she said triumphantly. “Go on. Since you’re early, you can start your warm-up. I’ll be grateful for my piano stool today.”
Ivy and I went over to the barre and started our stretches. The rest of the class weren’t far behind.
Penny and Nadia walked in together, arm in arm. Penny looked annoyingly smug, and I fought the urge to make a cutting remark.
I was working through my pliés in each position, when I saw that Penny was smirking.
I looked down at my feet. Was I doing something wrong? No. I shook myself. It was a simple warm-up exercise, and one I had done a thousand times before, at that. I had to get Penny out of my head.
When we moved to centre work, I didn’t have to look at her, as we all faced forwards. That was fine, until we got to the Allegro portion of the class, where we did the faster steps.
Miss Finch was instructing us from the piano, since she didn’t feel up to demonstrating. I’d heard some of the other girls whispering, saying that she shouldn’t teach a ballet class if she couldn’t always dance. I thought she did a fine job, and I’d always tell them to shut up.
“We really need to work on our pirouettes, girls,” she called. “They need to be polished for Sleeping Beauty, especially for whoever wins the role of Aurora.”
We lined up in rows of three to practise, and, as luck would have it, I ended up with Ivy … and Penny. Ivy looked horrified, but I wasn’t going to let it bother me. Easy, I thought. I can do pirouettes in my sleep.
I kept my eyes fixed and СКАЧАТЬ