dangled from her ears. Behind her came a smart lady’s maid, carefully carrying a little fur in case her mistress should feel chilly on the journey, and last of all a station porter, pushing a trolley piled high with trunks.
As she approached the first-class Pullman carriage, her heart was thumping. A uniformed attendant bowed low and extended a hand to help her inside, and Sophie was aboard the express train to Paris.
Although she didn’t know it, somewhere further down the platform, a thin grey man carrying papers bearing the name of Dr Frederick Muller was getting aboard the train too.
‘We have travelled by ship, by carriage, by donkey and even once on the backs of camels! But my favourite journeys of all are those by train. The very smell of the smoke, the rattling of the carriage, the chatter of our fellow passengers, all seem to promise romance and adventure.’
– From the diary of Alice Grayson
Wilderstein Castle, Arnovia
Anna held her breath as she crept along the hall, towards the governess’s bedroom. It was past midnight and the castle was whisper-quiet, the passageway made strange with shadows. In the dark, the antlers of the stuffed animal heads on the wall, the rusting suit of armour, even the painted shield with the arms of the Royal House of Wilderstein seemed to shift into new and sinister shapes.
A long, thin crack of yellow light was visible at the bedroom door and Anna moved towards it, her bare feet soft on the chilly stone flags. She felt excited. She knew that she was not supposed to be out of bed late at night, creeping around the castle, but it was rather thrilling to be slipping along the passageway in the dark in her nightgown, without even her bedroom slippers. It was absolutely the kind of thing that the heroines of the Fourth Form would do, even if it meant breaking the rules.
There were certainly plenty of rules at Wilderstein Castle. The Countess’s favourite words were discipline and decorum, and each day was the same, following an exact pattern. The day began with the ringing of the gong for breakfast at eight o’clock sharp, and ended with the chime of the bedtime bell, which meant that Alex and Anna must go to bed. Sometimes Anna felt that she was no more than a tiny cog in the Countess’s giant machine: a kind of musical box, where the Countess turned the handle, and spinning on top in time to the music was Alex. Not the real Alex she knew, but the Alex who would one day become King, shining out light like a golden star.
They all moved in time to the Countess’s tune: even the Count was bound by her strict timetable. Left to his own devices, Anna knew he would have been quite happy pottering about the castle, tinkering with his latest hobby – butterfly collecting, or motor cars, or more recently, his new-found passion for flying machines. Instead, the Countess insisted that each day at precisely the same time, the Count took Alex into the castle grounds for what they called ‘drills’ – a series of physical exercises inspired by his army training, which Alex simply loathed. This would be followed by a discussion of weapons and military strategy; the Count would give a detailed explanation of battle manoeuvres, or test Alex to see if he could correctly distinguish between a sabre and an épee. Alex, who couldn’t care less about broadswords and battle-axes, would return to the schoolroom pink-faced and wheezing, whilst the Count hurried back to his workshop to pore over the plans of aeroplanes.
Meanwhile, Anna’s morning always began with time at the back-board to improve her posture, whilst the Countess lectured her on royal etiquette and the importance of decorum. ‘As the Princess of Arnovia, you are an ambassador for your country and the House of Wilderstein wherever you go,’ she proclaimed. ‘You must never forget that.’ The Countess had many such maxims, most of which were about what princesses did and did not do: Princesses do not run. Princesses do not slam doors. A princess should not be inquisitive. Princesses do not lose their temper. A princess must never raise her voice. Now, Anna added in her head: A princess should not sneak about the castle at night in order to spy on her governess.
One of the many things that had struck her as odd about Miss Carter was her lack of interest in rules and discipline, and what princesses did or did not do. She had no sort of a timetable: one morning she’d let them read poetry aloud, the next she’d take them into the grounds for what she called a ‘nature ramble’. She hardly ever scolded them, except when she heard them speaking German. Then: ‘In English, please!’ she’d say at once. That made sense, Anna thought, for Miss Carter was supposed to be preparing Alex for his English school. And anyway, neither of them really minded speaking English. Although most Arnovian people spoke German, they usually spoke at least one other language as well, and Grandfather had always especially liked Anna and Alex to speak English, because of the strong relationship between Arnovia and Britain, and because their own grandmother had been an English princess. What was strange though was that Miss Carter barely ever spoke a word of German herself, except for the occasional bitte or danke. Anna had heard the Countess say that Miss Carter was fluent in several languages, but when Bianca, the Countess’s Italian maid, had tried to talk to her about some laundry, Anna had been certain she didn’t have any idea what Bianca had said.
It was yet another puzzling thing for Anna to add to her list. She was certain that the governess was up to something, and that was why she was here, creeping towards her bedroom door at night.
Some people might have thought twice about spying, but Anna didn’t. She liked to know things, and she had a talent for finding things out, especially the things she wasn’t really supposed to know. She was the one who had discovered the old secret passage in the castle cellars that no one else knew about; and she was the one who had found out about the secret love affair going on between Bianca and the Count’s valet. She had an uncomfortable suspicion that the heroines of the Fourth Form might have thought this kind of thing ‘sneaking’ or ‘dishonourable’, but she pushed that thought away as she peeped, feeling rather thrilled, through the door into Miss Carter’s bedroom.
Like many of the rooms in Wilderstein Castle, the governess’s bedroom was quite bare and cold. The stone walls were hung with crossed swords and tapestries of hunting or battle scenes – wild pigs being gored with pikes, and people in helmets hitting each other with swords. Miss Carter did not look like she belonged at all, sitting beneath one of the tapestries, writing a letter. The governess seemed quite different in a dressing gown, with her hair falling loose over her shoulders in long, snaking curls. She was not wearing her spectacles again, Anna realised, stepping a little closer, hardly daring to breathe.
She watched intently as Miss Carter put down her pen, tucked her letter into an envelope, and then got up and went over to the bed. Anna expected to see her turn back the covers, but instead, she bent down and reached under the bed, drawing something out from beneath it. Anna saw that it was a small leather attaché case, rather battered and stuck all over with luggage labels. As she watched, Miss Carter unlocked the case with a little key which hung on a chain around her neck.
Anna leaned forward, eager to see what was inside, but to her enormous annoyance, she could see only the back of Miss Carter’s head. The governess was taking something out of the case – a small object, which she dropped into her dressing-gown pocket. Then she locked the case, pushed it back underneath the bed, and made for the door.
Almost tripping over her nightgown in her haste, Anna scrambled back down the passage. From a safe spot behind the rusting suit of armour, she watched breathlessly as Miss Carter padded out of her room and down the hallway. Where on earth was she going at this time of night?
