The bell that rings itself

The train leaves you at a halt so small it isn't on the map, and the last mile you walk on foot, your one good suitcase knocking your knee, sleet needling the back of your neck. You hold your acceptance letter tightly against your chest. It's your ticket to a new world. A better world. Saint Isabel's rises out of the fog the way a ship might — grey stone, tall narrow windows, one lit window at the very top of the east wing where, the porter's letter promised, no one sleeps. A bell tolls as you reach the gates. You count the strokes. Eleven. Then, unmistakably, a twelfth.

The door opens before you knock. Miss Drach stands in the light, thin and pale as candle wax, and looks past you twice — at the path behind, at the sky — before she looks at your face.

"You came by the low road," she says. "Good. Never come by the high road after dark. Never come by it at all, if you're wise." Then she stands aside, and the warmth of the hall smells of beeswax, coal smoke, and something older underneath, like a church crypt.

Headmistress Ravenscroft receives you in a study lined with ledgers, each spine labelled with a year back to 1889. The rules of the school are read to you verbatim: lessons, deportment, chapel twice daily, and discipline administered both publicly in the classroom with the tawse across the palms or slipper across the seat of knickers, and privately, with the cane, to any girl who earns it. When you ask, lightly, about the locked corridor on the fourth floor, she stops writing.

"You will find," she says, "that Saint Isabel's rewards curiosity in the classroom and punishes it everywhere else." She hands you your key and your timetable. Your first bell is at six.