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      Lord Grimwald arrives

      Charlie Bone had been fast asleep. Now, suddenly, he was not. There were voices in the courtyard below. Charlie got out of bed, crossed the dormitory and looked out of the window. Two men were moving towards the main doors of the Academy. One Charlie recognised as Norton Cross, the doorman at the Pets’ Café. He was half-dragging, half-carrying a smaller person in a large hat with a drooping feather at the back.

      ‘Grief!’ muttered Charlie. He couldn’t see the face of the man beneath the hat, but he was groaning horribly. Charlie opened the window, just a crack, so that he could hear what was going on.

      ‘Ssssh!’ hissed Norton. ‘You’ll wake the whole school, sir.’

      The two men climbed the steps to the main doors and Norton rang the bell. A moment later there was a loud rattle and one of the doors opened. Weedon the porter stood on the threshold. He was a bald, stocky man with a sour face.

      ‘I thought he wasn’t supposed to go out yet,’ said Weedon.

      ‘He wanted to see the city.’ Norton dragged his companion through the door.

      ‘What’s the matter with him?’ asked Weedon, frowning at the sword that danced past him.

      The door was closed before Charlie had a chance to hear Norton’s reply. But then his attention was drawn to a second arrival. Three women came through the arched entrance and crossed the courtyard. Grizelda Bone’s imposing beak of a nose led the way. Grizelda was Charlie’s grandmother. Her sisters, Eustacia and Venetia, came close on her heels. All three were tall and lean, their dark eyes small, their black brows thick and heavy. Grandma Bone’s hair was a startling white, Venetia’s black, Eustacia’s somewhere in between.

      Charlie watched them climb the steps, his grandmother teetering very slightly in her high-heeled boots. As she rang the bell, Eustacia, for no good reason, suddenly looked up at the window where Charlie stood.

      Charlie backed into the shadows. Eustacia boasted that she was clairvoyant, though Charlie was not entirely convinced. Her power could wax and wane. Tonight it appeared to be waxing.

      To complicate matters the dormitory door was suddenly flung open and Charlie was caught in a strip of light from the passage. The matron, Grandma Bone’s third sister, Lucretia, stood silhouetted in the doorway. ‘What are you doing out of bed?’ she demanded.

      ‘Er, getting some air,’ Charlie said feebly.

      ‘Air? There’s enough air in here to fill the lungs of a thousand boys, let alone twelve.’

      ‘Is there?’ Charlie looked round at the eleven boys sleeping behind him. Not one had woken up, even though the matron had made no attempt to lower her voice.

      ‘Get back to bed!’

      Without waiting for Charlie to obey, the matron closed the door. Her footsteps receded so fast Charlie imagined she must be running down the passage. In the two years he had been at the Academy he had never known his great-aunt Lucretia to run. Tonight she must either be escaping from something unpleasant, or she was late for a very important meeting.

      And who would be holding a meeting at such a late hour? Only Ezekiel Bloor, Charlie decided. At a hundred and one years old, Ezekiel made no distinction between night and day. He spent his mornings dozing in his wheelchair and afternoons reading up on unpleasant spells. It was only at night that his malicious mind really came alive, and then woe betide anyone who didn’t fit in with his plans.

      Charlie was about to close the window when a curious smell drifted up to him: a salty, seaweedy tang that left its taste on the tongue. It was horribly familiar. Looking down into the courtyard he wasn’t surprised to see a large figure appear in the archway. The man wore an oilskin coat and long fisherman’s boots. He moved over the cobblestones with an odd swaying stride, as though he were on the heaving deck of a ship.

      Charlie raced back to his bed. Before he climbed into it, however, there was a husky whisper from the bed at the end of his row.

      ‘The window. Close the window.’

      Charlie pulled the bedclothes over his head. He could hardly bear to look at Dagbert Endless, let alone talk to him. Dagbert kept protesting that Tancred’s near-drowning had been an accident. Even the headmaster believed his story. The school had been told that Tancred Torsson had accidentally slipped in the Sculpture room, and been drowned by water pouring from a broken tap. Charlie knew better. Dagbert was a drowner. He even boasted of his power. But neither he nor the Bloors were aware that Tancred had survived. Tancred’s friends intended to keep it that way.

      ‘The window. Close the window.’ This time the voice was louder. The seaweedy smell from outside mingled with the fishy stench that Dagbert sometimes gave off.

      Charlie held his nose and lay still.

      ‘CLOSE THE WINDOW!’

      The shout woke half the dormitory. Some of the boys yawned sleepily and turned over, but Bragger Braine, the bully of the second year, sat up and grunted, ‘Who said that?’

      ‘I did,’ Dagbert answered in an aggrieved tone. ‘Charlie opened the window and he won’t close it.’

      ‘Close the window, Charlie Bone,’ Bragger commanded.

      His ardent follower, Rupert Small, echoed his words in a thin reedy voice. ‘Close the window, Charlie Bone.’

      Charlie held his breath. He was determined not to obey Bragger Braine or his pathetic crony.

      ‘CLOSE THE WINDOW!’ shouted Dagbert.

      This shout woke Fidelio Gunn in the bed next to Charlie. ‘Stop bellowing, Fish-boy!’ he cried, punching his pillow into shape. ‘Let normal people get some sleep.’

      For a few seconds silence reigned. Charlie smiled to himself in the dark and whispered, ‘Well done, Fido!’

      The whisper irritated Bragger. If his bed had been beside Charlie’s he would have thumped him. But they were half a dormitory apart and a day of thumping other people and starring on the football pitch had exhausted Bragger. He just wanted to go to sleep. The next time Dagbert repeated his demand, Bragger said, ‘Close it yourself, Fish-boy!’

      Charlie waited for Dagbert to slip out of bed and close the window, but the fish-boy didn’t move. Soon the room was filled with the soft rhythmic breathing of heavy sleepers. Charlie turned over and closed his eyes.

      Minutes passed. Try as he might, Charlie couldn’t sleep. A soft light insisted on creeping through his СКАЧАТЬ