There was a moment of silence, and I thought that the man was going to argue again. But he just looked at his watch once more, and then gave a dramatic sigh. “All right. I’ll go to the third floor first, then. But I will be back. I need to look at every room.” And without further comment, he marched away.
Matron put her head in her hands, and she looked rather surprised when she lifted it again to find herself surrounded by a swarm of us. I had been swept along by Scarlet, but honestly I was as curious as she was.
“What’s going on, Miss?” Penny demanded.
“Who was that man?” Scarlet asked.
Matron muttered something under her breath, and whatever it was, it didn’t sound particularly flattering. “An inspector,” she said finally. “Sent by the new owner. Wants to look around and, I don’t know, measure the place or something. Well, not on my watch! Nothing goes on in these dormitories without my say-so!”
I shared a glance with Scarlet. I was fairly sure that wasn’t exactly true.
There was a rush of perplexed muttering as everyone began to debate exactly what this meant. Matron looked around at all of us, and then suddenly seemed to remember exactly where she was and what was going on.
“I can’t believe you lot are out of bed before the bell! I didn’t think that was possible! Shoo, the lot of you!”
She waved us back into our rooms where, sure enough, the screeching bell rang out to tell us it was time to wake up.
“Bit late for that,” Scarlet grumbled. “What do you think the inspector’s going to do? Do you think he knows about the secret rooms?”
I frowned as I pulled my uniform from the wardrobe. “I don’t know. The stairs to the ones in the basement were destroyed by the library fire, and the ones on the third floor are locked.”
“And they were mostly full of broken old furniture, anyway,” my twin finished. “But there could be more that we still don’t know about or haven’t found a way to get into. If he’s so keen to poke his nose in everywhere, he’ll want to know every single one, surely?”
She had a point. “Let’s just hope Mrs Knight doesn’t tell him anything,” I said. If there were more secrets to uncover at Rookwood, then we couldn’t let Henry Bartholomew be the one to find them first.
At breakfast, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see Henry standing by the door to the dining hall. He had a clipboard too, with a sheaf of notes on it – presumably given to him by his inspector.
I was planning to ignore him and walk into the hall. Scarlet, though, had other ideas.
She marched straight up to him. “What are you doing?” she asked.
Henry lifted his eyes from the clipboard and smiled down at her. His teeth were white and perfect. “Hello,” he said cheerfully. “Good morning to you too!”
Scarlet folded her arms and frowned at him. “Good morning? We got woken up early by your inspector trying to measure our rooms!”
“Mr Hardwick? Well, yes,” he said, his pleasant expression not wavering. “It needs to be done, I’m afraid. I must see what state the old building is in before I decide what I want to do with it.”
I tried to pull my twin away gently, but she wasn’t finished.
“What about what we want? Does that not matter to you at all?” she demanded.
He gave a sort of quiet laugh. “Look – what’s your name, girl?”
“Scarlet.”
“Look, Scarlet, I wouldn’t worry. This inspection is about safety. You don’t want the old place falling down on your heads, do you? It’s just something that has to be done.” He raised his palms to the ceiling in the universal gesture for I can’t do anything about it, honest. Then he patted her gently on the shoulder. “I’m sure whatever conclusion we come to will suit everybody.”
He flashed her yet another winning smile, then walked off, hands in his pockets and whistling.
“Hmmph,” Scarlet said.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She turned to me. “I wanted answers. I thought it would be easiest to get them straight from the source.”
“I’m not sure that helped,” I said, finally managing to drag her into the bustling dining hall.
She shook herself free of my arm. “It did no harm,” she insisted. “But he didn’t exactly give us anything useful. Thinks he’s a charmer, clearly. But he’s a snake!”
I thought about it for a moment as we pushed our way towards the serving hatch. “You think so? I mean, what if he’s genuinely nice?”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “He’s the son of Mr Bartholomew. You really think he’s doing all this out of the goodness of his heart?”
I winced. She was probably right. But then again, shouldn’t we be the first to admit that children weren’t the same as their parents?
It was at that moment that Ariadne and Ebony walked in. Ariadne waved as they came over to join us in the queue. Scarlet turned to her. “Where were you two this morning?”
Ebony wrinkled her nose. “What do you mean?”
“We just woke up,” Ariadne said, yawning.
I couldn’t help but laugh a little at that. Ariadne was a very heavy sleeper, and she’d been up so late translating our mother’s messages, I wasn’t surprised that she hadn’t heard the commotion.
“I was up till all hours thinking about everything from yesterday,” Ebony explained. “I was sound asleep this morning.”
We filled them in about the inspector and our encounter with Henry.
Ariadne tried unsuccessfully to pat down a piece of her hair that was sticking up at an odd angle. “I suppose that makes sense. He wants to see if the building is worth saving. Or whether they should knock it down and use the land to build on.”
“Surely it’s worth saving,” Ebony said. “A place like this? It’s full of history. It should be treasured.” The radiator pipes beside us chose that moment to clank miserably, and a gust of wind blew the window open. Ariadne ran over to shut it.
“That’s what I’m worried about, though,” Scarlet told her. “That it’s the history they’re really after. The secrets that are here.”
I didn’t know if I believed that. “What if he really does just want to make money off the place? Is that better or worse?”
No one had an answer.
Several of our lessons that day were graced by the distracting presence of Mr Hardwick, the inspector. The teachers, most of them having unsuccessfully tried to shoo him away, agreed to allow him to look around each classroom. It was hard to conjugate French verbs and discuss Oliver Twist in English with him pottering up and down at the back of the class.
Every so often, he would stop, say “Hmm,” a little too loudly, and pull out a tape measure. Next he would be scribbling notes on his clipboard, the sound of the pencil scratching in all our ears. Then he’d be kneeling to peer at the skirting board, or standing on tiptoe as he tried to examine the ceiling.
“I swear,” said Scarlet during the last lesson of the day, “if he says hmm like that one more time, I’m going to strangle him with that bloomin’ tape measure!”
I watched as Mr Hardwick went over to the fireplace at the side of the room, one of the remnants of the old house, paused, and then said, “Hmmmmm …”
Scarlet jumped up out of her seat, but