3. What Exactly Constitutes an Attic Person #3
A ragtag regiment of children round the corner.
Mostly boys, mostly white, no older than ten or eleven.
They’re ununiformed but well dressed, self-consciously neat, tugging at their shirt collars, and they’re obviously trying to keep quiet but finding it impossible, because there’s constant muttering interspersed with the occasional shrill outburst that’s quickly shush-shush-shussssshed.
At the rear, a stern-looking woman with her grey hair in a bun is chivvying them along.
‘That’s intake,’ says Westby, as they pause to let the group stream past. ‘New firsties.’
‘It’s July,’ Briar says, and Westby gives them a sideways, inscrutable look.
‘Indeed. School years work differently around here - no six weeks of summer hols for the wicked. No prep school, either, so we’re not tainted by any other institutes.
Plus they don’t like us to go home very much, if they can help it.
We get a week here and there, quick stop off for Mummy to tell us we’re too thin and Daddy to ask if we’ve beaten anyone at rugby yet.
I’m a seventh year, a legal adult thank you very much, and I’m still stuck here.
Not quite as stuck as this lot, though. They bring the pip harvest in for initiation now, and then lock them up until Christmas, just to make sure. ’
‘Christmas?’ says Briar, accosted with an unsolicited memory of the first December without Seb.
Before Temple, they’d always stayed up until midnight on Christmas Eve at Grove House to swap second-hand paperbacks, the more outlandish the cover the better, then met up after lunch at the farm on the big day so that they could eat sickly slices of Briar’s mum’s hazelnut yule log and watch The Sound of Music.
For pudding, they’d pound enormous bags of village shop fudge by the fire until their tongues were furry with sugar, and then they’d lie on the floor with the cat and play old-fashioned card games Seb had learned from his brothers until they inevitably fell asleep.
The first year without him, December had been a yawning void. Briar was too wounded, too embarrassed, to walk to Grove House and demand to know why, after the lesser insults of the summer and the October half term, Seb had committed the ultimate crime and abandoned Christmas.
Except now it seemed that was a miscalculation.
If the new students were called to Temple as early as July, then Seb hadn’t necessarily stopped trying to reach Briar soon after his acceptance letter dropped through the door, as Briar had always thought.
He’d already packed up and left. Every time Briar had passed the driveway to Grove House that summer, slumped down in the passenger seat of their mum’s tiny car, they’d thought of Seb inside, excitedly making preparations for magic school.
But Seb hadn’t been there. They’d been looking the wrong way.
He’s in Westby’s year. The knowledge that Briar is almost certainly no more than half a mile away from him right now makes them feel . . . twitchy.
‘Yeah,’ says Westby, although it comes out more like yah. ‘You signed an NDA, didn’t you? Nice and ironclad? No room for wriggling?’
‘Yes.’
‘A gentleman always checks. Anyway, yes, Christmas - have to make sure the infants are properly indoctrinated before they head home, so that they don’t start bragging about the Work the moment they cross the threshold of the Range Rover.
They have initiation, and the Trials, and then a little light summer school before term truly begins. ’
Briar looks closer at the children shuffling past. Tailored dress trousers, monogrammed cardigans, Italian loafers.
The handful of girls are wearing pleated skirts and velvet headbands; Victorian ghosts, all.
Their illicit, muttered conversations are taking place in well-polished RP.
They look like a flock of baby bankers breaking for lunch to find sushi.
Briar can practically smell the wealth on them, just as potent as soap and leather polish, as the last boy, freckled and bowl-cutted, trots past.
‘Little advice from me to you,’ says Westby, as they resume walking. ‘Avoid the scholars. I outrank the pips but even the pips outrank you, I’m afraid, and as they’ve got nobody to whip, they’ll come after you like ants on a Pringle.’
‘I see,’ says Briar, not seeing at all.
Westby steers them towards a wooden bridge that crosses the moat, and they both clomp across it and into the courtyard.
It’s packed with uniformed students - scholars, Briar mentally corrects, so fucking pretentious - some alone and some in clusters, all of them on the move, talking and laughing and handing off coffees and sugared baked goods to each other with the bellowing good humour of market stallholders.
Briar can never remember the difference between envy and jealousy, but whatever it is they’re feeling, it’s crushing.
Their heart is a bug. It’s a grape in Sean’s hand-cranked wine press.
This should have been me. Dashing across the courtyard with a satchel full of magic.
Blazer flung over one shoulder, croissant in hand, not a care in the world.
What was it these kids put on their application forms that made them so obviously special, when Briar clearly wasn’t? Why wasn’t little Briar allowed to put on a stupid waistcoat and tie and find out who they were supposed to be in a place full of endless possibilities?
It’s a childish thought, but it all just feels so unfair.
‘How did you know?’ they ask Westby suddenly, aware they sound a bit sweaty and desperate.
‘Hmmm?’ says Westby, dodging a flying cinnamon swirl that somebody has just tossed overhand to a friend.
‘That you were . . . magic,’ says Briar. ‘That you could do the Work, I mean. Did you know? Before? Did you feel different? How did the school know you were meant to be a scholar?’
Westby looks faintly amused. ‘Quirk of genetics. Born to it. You do get the occasional new names, but not often, and they must be distant relations. I suppose my family name’s written in a book somewhere.
They get it wrong sometimes, but they have it all pretty well sussed - hardly anybody goes home before term starts.
’ He catches sight of something over Briar’s shoulder and his expression darkens.
‘Watch out,’ he says sharply. ‘Mons on patrol.’