The Forgotten Book Read online

  * * *

  On Monday morning we put on our school uniforms for the first time that year and went off to our actual first lesson, followed by our second, third, fourth, and fifth lessons. I did my best to help Hannah settle in at Stolzenburg by introducing her to all the students and teachers we met over the course of the day. I wanted her to feel at home as quickly as possible and to enjoy her first day at the school. Like me when I’d arrived at Stolzenburg four years ago, Hannah was somebody who really needed a place to call home.

  When she was ten, Hannah’s parents and her little brother and sister had been killed in a car crash. Since then she’d lived with her grandma. I felt she’d more than earned a warm welcome from all of us. So I made sure that one of the other students took Hannah under their wing in all the subjects where we weren’t in the same class. And whenever Sinan was anywhere near, I laughed extra hard at Hannah’s jokes.

  By lunchtime I was almost certain that Hannah was going to love Stolzenburg as much as I did. When I entered the dining hall and saw her sitting at a table with Jana, Max, and Giovanni, chatting away to them without a hint of shyness, I took it as a sure sign that my plan was working. (I’d asked Jana to keep an eye on my roommate and make sure she was okay.) It probably helped that Hannah was so good at explaining the difference between alkanes, alkenes, and alkynes: The boys were hanging on her every word. Charlotte and I, meanwhile, sat at the next table congratulating ourselves once again on having chosen French instead of chemistry. Not only was it a more useful subject, we felt, but significantly better for our stress levels. And French always sounded so sophisticated, no matter what you actually said.

  “Il a porté la petite chouette dans ses bras,” I said solemnly. (“He carried the little owl in his arms.”)

  “Mais oui, la pauvre chouette,” Charlotte concurred. (“But yes, the poor owl.”)

  We grinned at each other over our plates. And then, all of a sudden, events took a very bizarre turn. One minute there was a buzz of loud chatter about lessons, schedules, and homework; the next minute silence had descended abruptly on the room.

  The reason for this was that Dr. Meier had just dropped his plateful of stew. Or rather, from what I’d seen out of the corner of my eye, he’d thrown his plate of stew. Just like that. He’d drawn back his arm and hurled the plate like a discus. It hit the wall behind the teachers’ table with a dull thud and left behind a smear of lentil stew as it slid to the floor. (Oh, mon dieu!)

  Miss Whitfield and Mrs. Bröder-Strauchhaus ducked, narrowly avoiding the flying plate, and everyone turned to look at Dr. Meier, who was now climbing up onto the counter of the serving hatch with a strangely vacant look in his eyes. He swung himself onto the countertop with an elegance I wouldn’t have thought possible at his age, kicked aside the large pan from which Miss Berkenbeck had been dispensing the stew, and pulled Miss Berkenbeck herself up onto the counter beside him. The whole thing happened so quickly that she didn’t even have time to protest. A moment later, Dr. Meier put his arms around her, tipped her backward, and …

  … kissed her!

  It was a very long and a very thorough kiss.

  It was such a bizarre sight that my brain had trouble processing it. I watched as though hypnotized as Miss Berkenbeck lay suspended in Dr. Meier’s arms and their lips met.…

  After a while several of the students began to clap hesitantly. This seemed to distract Dr. Meier for a moment. He must have loosened his grip on Miss Berkenbeck, at any rate, because she finally managed to extricate herself and, scarlet-cheeked, slapped him hard in the face. Then she jumped down off the countertop and ran out of the room.

  “La pauvre chouette,” murmured Charlotte.

  Dr. Meier blinked and looked around the dining hall in bewilderment. The outline of Miss Berkenbeck’s hand was clearly visible on his face.

  * * *

  That afternoon, Dr. Meier’s passionate display was the talk of the school. Miss Berkenbeck was said to have locked herself in the utility room, deeply embarrassed, and insisted she was never coming out again. Dr. Meier, on the other hand, didn’t seem to know what had come over him, and sat in my dad’s office looking thoroughly befuddled.

  So while my dad was (presumably) persuading our poor history teacher that he was suffering from some kind of psychological disorder, Hannah, Charlotte, and I assembled on one of the sofas in the student conservatory for a crisis meeting. We’d been planning to do our homework and discuss how (with my dad’s help, if necessary) we could get our library back. But for some time now Charlotte had been constantly glancing at her phone, seeming a little distracted. And it was hard to concentrate because one of the younger girls was practicing something that bore a vague resemblance to an ancient Britney Spears song on the piano in the next room. On top of all that, Helena von Stein and her friends were sitting on the sofa next to ours, giggling at something on Helena’s tablet.

  At the tables around us, meanwhile, rumors were flying like Dr. Meier’s plate of stew. The students were shocked by the incident in the dining hall. Nothing like this had ever happened at Stolzenburg before. And to think it had been Dr. Meier, who’d always seemed so quiet and straightlaced. I’d been taken aback by the projectile stew and the kiss, too, of course—although …

  “I kind of predicted that was going to happen,” I told Charlotte and Hannah.

  “Sure,” said Charlotte. “How could anyone not have seen that coming?”

  “No, I mean it. I was thinking yesterday that it looked like there might be a bit of a romance blossoming—”

  “It was more like an ambush, if you ask me. I don’t think there was any blossoming involved.” Charlotte was still staring down at the smartphone in her lap.

  “But still,” I said. “I just had this feeling yesterday that the pair of them…” I thought about what I’d written in the diary. “You know what—I can prove it.”

  “You what?”

  “Yes, I can pr—”

  “This definitely has to go on the homepage,” I heard Helena say. “This is amazing—our first scandal, and on the very first day of term! We have to edit this and upload it ASAP.…” I suddenly realized what Helena and her friends had been watching on the tablet. Poor Miss Berkenbeck! There must have been loads of people who had recorded the incident in the dining hall on their phones.

  “Don’t do that,” I interrupted, in the loud, firm voice I used when my dad started panicking about one of his imaginary illnesses and had to be dissuaded from calling for an ambulance. He’d once been absolutely convinced he was having a heart attack, when in fact he’d merely had a stitch from running up the stairs too fast.

  Helena looked up. “Are you talking to us?”

  “Yes, I am,” I said, still using my ambulance voice. “I don’t know why Dr. Meier did what he did. But don’t you think it’s embarrassing enough for everyone involved without you posting it online?” I thought of Miss Berkenbeck closeted away in the utility room, and prayed there wasn’t any Wi-Fi signal down there.

  “Whether it’s embarrassing or not is beside the point. As a journalist, I have a duty to report it,” said Helena. “And I’m going to post that video.”

  “Please, Helena. Think of how it’ll affect them both. It was probably just a moment of madness. If you post it, everyone will see it and people will be making fun of them for months.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it goes. I know you and Charlotte think you can just cover up embarrassing stories and pretend they never happened, but the carpet at Buckingham Palace says different.” She fixed Charlotte with a meaningful look, causing her to blush to the roots of her hair. “It happened. And if we don’t upload the video, somebody else will.”

  “But what about the school’s reputation?” I persisted.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, a video like that might go viral. It might give people the wrong impression of Stolzenburg. I think we should discuss it at the next school council meeting. As the s
chool council rep, I believe—”

  “Oh, Emma, would you get off your high horse for once? This is not about school politics—it’s about the freedom of the press.”

  “Or perhaps it’s just voyeurism,” said Darcy from behind me. “Excuse me, could I come past?”

  As we’d been talking, Helena and I had both leaned forward into the gap between our two sofas. We moved apart now to let Darcy through. I’d had no idea he was in the conservatory, too. But he must have been sitting at one of the tables behind us talking to some of the Year 12s there. “If anything does come back to you, let me know,” he called back to them over his shoulder. Then he turned to Helena. “Emma’s right: You should delete that video,” he said, and pushed past us toward the door.

  A few moments later, whoever was mangling Britney Spears songs in the next room stopped playing, and another, much more talented pianist launched into a rendition of the Moonlight Sonata.

  But, of course, Helena did not delete the video. Instead she pointedly turned her back on me and set to work editing the file on her tablet. Her friends watched and made suggestions about music to accompany the video (“What about ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’?—No: ‘I Was Made for Lovin’ You.’”)

  I leaned back against the sofa cushions and sighed. “Okay,” I said at last to Hannah and Charlotte. “What are we going to do about the library?”

  “I still reckon we should get hold of a crowbar, break in, and start squatting in there,” Hannah declared. Charlotte stared down at her phone without a word.

  The problem was that although my dad had promised to look into the matter of the library for us, he was always super busy during the first few days of term. When I’d told him that morning about our plight, he’d said he’d deal with it over the weekend. The thing that had worried me most about his reaction was that he hadn’t seemed at all taken aback by Darcy’s behavior—instead he’d admitted that the de Winters did retain certain proprietary rights over the castle. And when we went to the library at break time to retrieve the TV and take it back to the computer room, we discovered that not only did the de Winters still own the building: They were also apparently in possession of the odd key. I assumed it was Darcy, anyway, who’d locked the door to the west wing library (and all the other doors in the corridor) overnight. It was alarming how quickly he and Toby Bell had commandeered hundreds of square feet of the castle for their own use. And what were they planning to use it for? I wondered.

  Toby had told Charlotte that Darcy had been determined to come to Stolzenburg all along, and that the supposed European road trip had just been a cover to hide the real reason for the trip from his parents. Darcy had wanted to stay at Stolzenburg for a few weeks to give himself time to reflect, as Toby had put it. About his twin sister, and about her disappearance four years earlier. I was surprised to hear that Darcy’s parents had no idea where he was. In my math lesson I’d toyed with the idea of sending Lord and Lady de Winter a message. (“Dear Lord and Lady de Winter, you probably don’t know this but your son is not currently in Rome admiring the Colosseum: He’s here at Stolzenburg. I’m sure you’d prefer it if he came home. And we’d quite like our library back.…”) But then I thought better of it—perhaps it was a little childish to go running to Darcy’s parents behind his back.

  “We’re bound to find something in the caretaker’s workshop that we can use as a crowbar,” Hannah mused. “Although it would be a shame to damage the carved oak doors.”

  “My dad would have a heart attack,” I said. Possibly even a real one.

  “Perhaps we should look for a different place for Westbooks, then?”

  “No. We were there first. This is our school.” I felt anger rising up in me again. But since I’d vowed not to let Darcy de Winter get to me anymore, I decided to change the subject. I turned to Charlotte, who still wasn’t saying a word but was now typing something into her phone. “Is your phone okay? Has it frozen again?”

  Charlotte shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s just that I messaged him hours ago and he hasn’t replied.” She showed me the chat she’d been having with Toby over the past day and a half. It was already hundreds of messages long.

  “Wow, he must really like you,” I said. The messages he’d sent the night before were seriously romantic, full of over-the-top metaphors. But then, at about half past seven this morning, the chat had come to an abrupt end. I’m off to Cologne for a few days, not sure when I’ll be back. Bye! he’d written, followed by a surfer emoji.

  Charlotte had replied: Oh, that’s a bit out of the blue, and then a little later: What are you up to in Cologne? But Toby hadn’t replied, not even an hour later when Charlotte had asked him if there was a reason why he was ignoring her.

  “That’s weird,” I murmured, while Charlotte carried on staring at her phone as if convinced she could conjure up a message from Toby through sheer force of will. “Maybe he’s got an important meeting in Cologne. Maybe his battery’s just dead,” she said. “I hope nothing’s happened to him.”

  And I hoped for his sake that he wasn’t about to break my best friend’s heart.

  July 1794

  When a girl is destined to be a heroine, Fate will lead her to the very thing that makes that heroism possible.

  5

  The following day everything became clearer—and at the same time more complicated. It was a day that started off just like any other. But by the evening, events had taken a positively bizarre turn. At dusk, as Charlotte and I walked across the grounds on the way back from our swimming lesson (we were in a bit of a hurry because we wanted to get back to our rooms in time to dry our hair before dinner), there was nothing to suggest that in a few moments the world as we knew it was going to be turned upside down. But as we were passing the largest of the fountains in the center of the park, somebody burst out of the undergrowth and came sprinting toward us.

  “Run!” shouted Toby. “Come on, quick!” He looked panic-stricken, his gaze darting in all directions. His clothes were dirty and torn as if he’d come crashing through the woods at full speed. His face was spattered with mud, and he was bleeding from a scratch on his left cheek. His hair was full of leaves and twigs. And he was wearing only one shoe. All in all, he was in a pretty bad way. Like someone who was running for his life. Although, of course, that couldn’t be the—

  “Or hide!” he yelled. “Come on!”

  “Toby!” cried Charlotte. “What’s happened?”

  We’d come to a halt as soon as we’d spotted Toby, and now he drew level with us. Instead of answering Charlotte’s question he grabbed us each by a shoulder and hurled himself to the ground, pulling us down with him. My knees slammed into the gravel and I hit my chin on the edge of the fountain.

  “Ow!” I shouted. “Are you insane?”

  Charlotte groaned in pain. “My elbow!” she muttered.

  “Shhhh!” said Toby, trying to press our heads closer to the ground.

  Was he out of his mind?

  I tried to wriggle out of the headlock he had me in. The gravel crunched under my grazed knees.

  “Quiet,” Toby said again through gritted teeth, and tightened his grip on me. I gasped for air as he peered over the top of the fountain toward the trees at the edge of the wood, where (as far as I could see, with my nose wedged in Toby’s armpit) nothing was moving.

  Toby was clearly delusional. If we didn’t want to make him even more berserk, we had to resist the temptation to panic at all costs. “Excuse me,” I said in a polite but muffled voice. “I’m having a bit of trouble breathing down here.” (And what little air I was getting wasn’t particularly fragrant.)

  “Shhh!” Toby repeated, but he did loosen his grip enough for Charlotte and me to edge away from him a little.

  “What’s going on?” asked Charlotte under her breath. “Who are we hiding from?”

  “We thought you were in Cologne,” I whispered.

  Toby put a finger to his lips without taking his eyes off the outskirts
of the wood. But after several minutes had gone by without any kind of movement in the trees, he seemed to relax a little. “Do either of you have a phone on you?” he asked, in a barely audible voice. “My battery is dead, and we need to call the police.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Here,” said Charlotte, passing him her smartphone.

  We listened as Toby explained to the emergency services that he had been pursued from the village to the castle by a full-grown lion. A lion!

  Interestingly, the lady on the other end of the phone did not seem particularly surprised by this information. I heard her say that we should stay calm, then something about an old and toothless but still dangerous animal and a specially trained team being on its way. “Thanks,” Toby whispered, and hung up.

  Charlotte gaped at him. “A lion? Really? Here in the woods?”

  I, too, was shocked by the news. Possibly more shocked than Charlotte and Toby put together.

  “Yes,” said Toby. “From what that woman was saying, it’s escaped from the circus a few miles away. I stopped at the gas station in the village on my way back, and it suddenly jumped out at me. It must be quite old, not used to hunting in the wild anymore—it tried to pounce on me and missed. But there was no way I could get back to my car, so I made a run for it and it chased me all the way up the hill.”

  A shiver ran down my spine. This was one of those stranger-than-fiction situations. It was too surreal to be true, and yet it was actually happening. In fact, it was happening exactly the way I’d …

  “Are you sure it was a real lion?” asked Charlotte.

  But I had no doubt whatsoever that it was a real lion. And I didn’t even cry out when the big cat appeared at the edge of the wood and started prowling up and down among the trees.

  I was starting to realize what was going on.

  We ducked down behind the fountain and waited for the specially trained task force from the police or the fire brigade or whoever the emergency services lady had sent us. The lion slipped out of the shadow of the trees, padded across the neatly trimmed lawn, and lay down under a rhododendron bush, where it appeared to doze off. Its mane was dull and matted, and its skin hung in loose folds from its skinny body. It was true that the poor creature didn’t exactly look to be in peak hunting condition. But I was sure it would still have been perfectly capable of killing a human being if it wanted to. And by now it was so close that we hardly dared breathe. Charlotte pressed closer to Toby’s side while I, despite my good intentions, finally started to panic. Not because I was afraid of being eaten by the lion, but because I’d finally figured out why it had turned up here in the first place.