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"I'm sorry girls," though it had to be said, the Headmistress did not sound at all sorry, "but the rules are very clear. No pets."

"But Miss Annersley -" Mary-Lou, ever irrepressible, met the steel-blue eyes of her preceptress and was repressed for at least a minute or... less. "But Miss Annersley, it followed Verity-Anne home, truly! And then we saw it was hurt, and well, we're Guides."

Miss Annersley blinked, her austere disapproval almost, almost rocked. "I do not see -"

"We're supposed to help anyone -"

"- Or anything!" Vi added.

"- Yes, or anything hurt and in need of care and attention. It's, it's... the right thing to do, Miss Annersley! After all, we don't want it to get worse, or get really sick and die!"

"At least, not die in the middle of the hockey field," Hilary murmured.

Verity-Anne, the tiny, fairy-like youngest who had started this all by befriending the biggest dragon imaginable, coaxing it back to the School, and then settling it on the (no longer) immaculate field, said nothing as she petted an uninjured foreleg - that was bigger than her by more than Miss Annersley wanted to think about - very gently.

The group of schoolgirls all huddled closer to their rescued and injured new 'pet' and stared at the Headmistress with tragic eyes.

Miss Annersley considered whether pointing out that the five-inch gash - scratch? - on the other foreleg was hardly going to kill something as massive as a dragon, and that the school's temperamental and much-feared cook was going to be more than a little irate if asked to prepare... what on earth did you feed these things for breakfast? Sausages? Scrambled eggs? Juniors? In any case, the School could not be expected to feed the creature. And it could not stay where it was, the Middles had PE in an hour and a game against St Scholastika this afternoon and how she was going to explain those scorch marks on the green...

The dragon growled (or purred, it was impossible to say which) and bent its massive head so that tiny Verity-Anne could stroke it again.

Miss Annersley sighed.

No, they couldn't keep it, not even if the girls took up Mary-Lou's suggestion of clearing out the biggest potting shed for it to sleep in (would it even fit? - and why was she even considering that?) but it was going to be hard to convince Verity-Anne, the mooniest but most stubborn of her students, to tell the thing to go away.

No, it was not going to be hard, it was going to be impossible.

Perhaps while they used their guide training to bandage that gash - scratch - no, just a scrape, on its leg and the bump on its head she would come up with something better than "no pets"...

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"Oh my," Alice said finally, watching from a safe distance, "I have never seen such a thing as roses that talk, and certainly not roses that talk... and eat Queens!"

"Perhaps you should think again about the feast at the end of your game," the Gnat murmured in her ear, "or at least decline the crown you will be offered."

Alice, who had dearly wanted a crown, watched the last little bit of the Red Queen - a buckle-shoe-clad foot! - disappearing into the petal covered centre of the biggest red rose... and decided that she did not want it that dearly...

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"Oh I say!" Bertie had a discomforting notion that he should have something more perspicacious to say at this point, but he had never been the one for the perfect bon mot, that was Jeeves' forte, what?

Dash it all, it was deucedly outside the bounds of reason to expect the perfect, sweetly tempered phrase to be plucked from his flabbergasted noggin when this... what what what? - was pointing some sort of domestic thingumybob on a stick at him. The whatwhatwhat itself put Bertie appallingly in mind of an unspeakably overlaquered, perambulating pepperpot, and he could just see Jeeves eyeing it with that disapproving dead fish eye look of his before showing it the door.

That is, if even Jeeves could find the door in this bally frightful tangle of corridors they'd so blithely swanned into and that Bertie would be more than happy, to the tiptop of his being, to swan right back out again.

And to top off the whole gruesome catastrophe, the whatwhatwhat was blessed a cacophonous honk that made Honoria Glossop's glass-shattering tones like the song of a well-contented nightingale.

"EX-TER-MIN-ATE!"

Now that was ungentlemanly to a fault, though Bertie had to concede, even as he scarpered down yet another of the blasted corridors with it whizzing-rumbling-honking and hot on his heels... could a whatwhatwhat be a gentleman at all?

If he ever found his way out of this frightful spot, he'd have to ask Jeeves.

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"It was quite clever of you, dear," Miss Marple said in her gentle, relentless way, peering at the murderess as she continued to knit, "to substitute that sugar rose on the totally harmless birthday cake with a poisoned one, knowing that Evadne-Ann, known to be such a greedy girl, would sneak into the dining room and eat it before the party, so that everyone would naturally think that it was meant to kill the birthday girl... you.

"You hated her so very much, didn't you?"

Evadne-Anne's friend sank down in the over-stuffed armchair opposite, and put her head in her hands. "Since we were at school together, and yes, she stole food even then."

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"So tell me," Miss Marple poured from the small, delicately patterned china teapot, one cup for her, one for her guest.

"When did you guess that your late husband poisoned his first wife?"

Her guest looked back at her with large, rapidly blinking, all too innocent eyes. "I have no idea what you mean, Miss Marple. Would my dear departed Albert do such an awful thing? Even to someone who drank coffee instead of tea, and preferred cats to dogs, and wore," with a not quite slight enough shudder, "trousers, of all things, to church?" She shook her head. "Who was so awful, really, but who was very, very rich?"

Miss Marple watched her from over the rim of her cup.

"As you are very very rich now, dear."

It would take time, but the truth would come out before the tea was cold.

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"What could have happened?" Mary-Lou gasped, clasping her hands dramatically.

It wasn't that she wanted to be dramatic, she prided herself of being sensible, forcefully and loudly sensible. However she was now faced with her Headmistress, two Senior Mistresses, Matron and the so often self-proclaimed founding stone of the school Joey Bettany Maynard. All of them purple of face, sprawled in a ghastly and appallingly unladylike manner over their armchairs and... well, Mary-Lou wasn't an expert on dead bodies, being a properly brought up young lady. She had never seen such a sight before. But at this minute she was absolutely, definitely, completely certain that these were five purple, sprawled and dead bodies.

"Miss Cochrane, this is awful! What will we do? Who could possibly have done this?"

The other founding stone of the School gazed at Mary-Lou with hooded eyes and a calm - no, it couldn't be! an almost contented - look on her face. "I'm sure I don't know, Mary-Lou," she said as she poured from the delicate, flower-bedecked china teapot into two cups, and held one out with a smile, though for some reason she didn't touch her own.

"Here, this will help."

Mary-Lou was affronted. "Tea? Miss Cochrane, at a time like this, you think we should have tea?"

"Of course. Wasn't it Joey," her eyes flicking to their mutual and now ex-friend, and the smile grew, "who always said, every time she butted in, that listening to her endless advice over endless cups would make it all better? Her very last words were 'make the tea, Grizel, and we'll tell you again just what you should do'." She sighed. "Joey had such great faith in butting in, doing things her way... and in tea making everything better."

"This. Is. Not. Better!"

Grizel cocked her head, and spoke very, very softly. "Isn't it?"

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"So." Miss Wilson looked around the cosy - if somewhat over-chintzed and definitely over-spiderwebbed - sitting room and sighed. "I suppose we can't exactly claim this has been a successful end of term."

Miss Annersley said nothing. This was not surprising, given her current form as a... well, Miss Wilson may be a doyen of science mistresses but she had to admit she wasn't sure if her fellow preceptress was a giant, cardigan-wearing, powder-blue arachnoid or just some giant alien... thing out of the appallingly written trash (who was this American 'Lovecraft' hack anyway?) she kept confiscating from Middles with no taste in literature.

The same Middles who had therefore switched their reading materials to some sort of old 'imaginary spells' book and were even now frantically running around trying to evade the arachnoid/insectoid/goodnessknowswhatoid teaching staff, especially Sally Denny who looked like a melting, over-sugar-iced abomination in the form of a giant pink and white slug on legs. Lots of legs. Lots of very small, very very fast-moving legs.

And they wouldn't talk about Matron.

They wouldn't even think about Matron.

They would try not to wonder how Matron had eaten the School's Kaffee und Kuchen, the contents of four linen storerooms, three laundry maids, six of the Lower Third's contraband stashes (and Miss Wilson wasn't sure about some of the Lower Third themselves) and the visiting Bishop of Innsbruck.

She sighed again. So uncouth to eat their visitors just before the school fete was due to start...

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Now really, this was just, just... "dash it all, Aunt Agatha!"

Bertie couldn't really think of anything better to say to what looked - to his aghast, appalled and utterly affrighted gaze - like the mortal remains of the dearly departed, decently buried blood of his blood, looming over his breakfast table and glowering with hideous, hollow eyes and sanguinary mouth at his uneaten (because any cove that could eat - no matter how impeccably cooked by his peerless ex-manservant - when a spectre of an aunt, who was terrifying enough when not dearly departed, was glowering was made of sterner stuff than even the venerated heroes of the long Wooster lineage and said peerless ex-manservant was a decidedly unpeerless blot of blood, body and brains on the living room carpet, a blot that he would have been tutting about disapprovingly had the blot not been... him) breakfast and coffee: mortal remains that to Bertie, untrained though he was in the art of spectral apprehension, seemed to have crawled out of the suitably sombre but aesthetically impeccable tomb in Steeple Bumpleigh cemetery that she had been interred in just last month and ankled it on mouldering ankles all the way here to Berkeley Mansions... simply to loom and glower at her guiltless nephew as if her nightmarish demise (at the hands of the selfsame peerless ex-manservant and who would have thought it when she, all hale and hearty and in the land of the living, had tried to have Bertie turn off such an inimitable, irreplaceable and dashed clever gentleman's gentleman with an previously unbeknownst background in fatally permanent cure-alls for ailments?) was all his fault for hiring his not at the time blot of an ex-manservant in the first place and bringing him all the way to Bumpleigh Hall to save his master Bertie from her pestiferous matrimonial plans...

Aunt Agatha's mortal remains wagged a putridly rotten finger at him, as if she - it? - Jeeves would know, or at least he would have before expiring at the mortal remains' hands - and sat in the chair opposite, shedding bits of herself all over the table and the uneaten breakfast, the last perfect eggs, b and s Bertie would ever have, and clearly intending to stay, atrocious as the thought was, maybe forever...

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Verity-Anne Carey was the very picture of a perfect little schoolgirl, tiny and delicate with golden curls, a pale pointed face and dreamy, deep blue eyes; her voice, as she politely advised her Headmistress of the rather distressingly deadly disorder in the Buttercup dormitory, was sweet and silvery. One would never have imagined that this primly angelic child in an oh so proper and perfectly neat uniform - not a speck of anything unpleasant on it, such as, say, blood and brains - could have woken that morning, picked up the dormitory prefect's hockey stick, and methodically bashed in the head of several of the loudest and most annoying of her fellow Upper IV students.

And Matron, for good measure.

Not that her Headmistress did not entirely understand why, but it really was against the rules, not quite in the spirit of their august institution... and would not be easy to explain to the parents planning to attend the school fete in three days time.

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"Calm down, it's not as if it's my blood!"

"No," the deep, bone-jarring voice from behind made the young, tipsy revellers jump. The Count's lips stretched in a hungry, sharp-toothed smile and leaned past her to take the wineglass filled with a thick crimson liquid: a thick, warm crimson liquid, that slicked his too-red mouth with a darker, more sanguinary hue.

"But it's now mine."

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The newly bereaved Mrs William Collins née Lucas had behaved with the uttermost propriety during the funeral, dressed head to food in modest black and touching a fine lawn handkerchief to her dry eyes. Now at last alone, she sat down with her baby boy in his cradle by her side - the same baby boy whose birth had, though no one was indelicate enough to mention it, secured the entail to Longbourn House and a comfortable future for himself and his mother - with enough black-edged notepaper to answer the condolences received since her dear husband's untimely but relatively unmarked death.

She took up her delicate teacup, pausing for a minute to gaze into the dark, unsweetened liquid. Her dear husband had, before his short illness and unexpected passing, always preferred his tea heavily, very heavily sweetened, although it had to be said that he hardly noticed the taste, being distracted as he always was when taking tea with her or others, such as the also and oh so coincidentally deceased de Burgh mother and daughter, by the sound of his own flow of grandiloquence.

In some ways, it was a blessing, He had been very happy drinking his morning brew and listening to himself at that last breakfast. Mrs Collins had smiled, nodded, and watched; the tea was soon drunk, the teapot and cup carefully washed and dried, and the little packet of arsenic safely hidden away for future need.

And now... Charlotte took a sip, and relaxed. Yes, she had been very pleased to be married, anything had been better than an ageing spinster, but life as a dowager would now be much more agreeable.

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I tell my thoughts on the murders of London, my darkest theories and most unlikely accusals, to a sleek, street-born black cat with a white-masked face and one eye. My theories often start as absurd, ridiculous, even mad, but for a bowl of milk at sunrise and dusk and scraps of my fish dinner, he will listen patiently, offer no arguments against me, poke no holes in my logic, give no yea or nay to my suspected killers.

I named him Bonaventure. Unlike his namesake, he is no philosopher; he is a mercenary like all cats and answers to nothing but his own whims. I know he cares nothing for the crimes and sins I try to shed God's light on, both in my own little parish and when commanded throughout young King Richard's vivid, vibrant, fiercely violent city, but it does help that there is someone to just listen.

And for that, and his odd moments of affection when I need it, I thank him, and thank my Lord for giving him to me.

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"Oh."

Miss Wilson very carefully did not side-eye her fellow copreceptress, but it was close. 'Oh' was hardly the appropriate reaction to the Middles having, in an apparently genuine but overenthusiastic attempt to follow their domestic science teacher's careful instructions and create a delicious fish dinner... and ended up exploding the kitchen, scorching most of the lower levels of the School and enveloping the whole place in utterly nauseating wafts of massively overcooked - as in burnt black - seafood.

The said domestic science teacher, covered in bits of cod and cabbage, had been carried off to the doctors at the nearest sanitarium, purely for her burns to be checked and of course not at all for her understandable but unacceptable harangue about the intelligence, parentage and probable fate of the girls in question. The girls had been packed off there too, as much to be rid of them for a while as concern for their health.

Miss Wilson sneezed as charcoaled cod irritated her nose. Miss Annerlsey's 'oh' was hardly appropriate, true; but then the appropriate reaction, very much stronger than the forbidden slang, was not really wise, even now...

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Alice was very very tired of this feast.

The golden crown on her head was heavy, getting heavier with every course that was brought in and then whisked away before anyone could eat. And the throne was oh, so very hard and cold to sit on!

And the other guests - did they always look so lean, so ragged, so evil, so hungry...?

She wondered how soon she could leave and find her way back to the mirror to go home, but then another course was announced – fish again? And wasn't that fish one of the guests at the start? It was all so curious and curiouser and how did she get back to the house with the mirror and why was the Red Queen smiling so hard while stabbing at the plate with her fork, and oh why were the courses eating the guests?

And oh, now the pudding was back and looking so closely at her, was it looking for a place to carve its own serving as she had from it?

This feast had to end soon, soon, please soon...

In the great armchair on the other side of the looking glass, a black kitten batted softly at a little girl's face.

The little girl did not wake up.

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"Nonsense," Joey Maynard says with a huge, breezy smile, ushering her guests - the two Heads of the Chalet School - into her large, sunny and definitely over-chintzed sitting room where her prized, over-flowery tea set and plates of cakes await. "Hilda, my dear Hilda, you know as well as I do there is no such thing as a problem too big for tea."

Miss Annersley sighs and sends that look to her copreceptress; Miss Wilson returns both with interest. They both love Joey, of course - doesn't everyone who is anyone love Joey? It is just that, at times it is hard to remember why.

"Joey, think about it. The Middles have smuggled two baby bears into their dormitories, Karen the cook has gone mad and put poison in the staff's puddings, the drains have backed up again into the lower floors and all the end of term sale items are now... well, quite unsellable, our head gardener is suddenly allergic to roses and cabbages, the juniors all insist they are seeing ghosts and refuse to go to bed at night, five of the prefects have come down with chicken pox and two may be sleepwalking. And out French mistress has run away..."

"With your husband," Miss Wilson finishes, watching the smile freeze and congeal.

Miss Annersley shakes her head sadly. "I don't quite think tea will help with any of these, the School appears to be doomed... but," with a sigh which Miss Wilson echoes, because, because both Heads are very fond of tea, "but we may as well have this while we wait for the doom to fall."

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The funeral service was finished, the dearly departed laid in the little village churchyard and covered with earth, and everything was going according to plan, her nephew's plan at least, and he drew a deep breath, turned and walked - slowly, deliberately, being oh so careful not to look eager or nervous or guilty - back towards the road back to the village.

No one suspected, no one would suspect that his aunt had not died, peacefully and naturally, of simple old age. No one would care enough; after all, apart from her little circle of gossipy old biddies, all of whom were still there in their best black and whispering amongst themselves at the gravesite, no one even liked Mrs Price-Ridley. They were probably relieved to be free of her sanctimonious mind, grasping, domineering manner and vicious tongue.

Even if the old biddies weren't - even if they wanted to imagine scandal and sin everywhere as she did, even if they did get a thrill imagining all sorts of foul play - what could three or four elderly women in tiny, unimportant St Mary Mead do about it? Nothing.

All he now had to do was wait, and be patient... and so he walked on, dreaming of his aunt's wealth that would come to him as next of kin and what he would do with it.

And not noticing the thoughtful, clever, and very very damning blue eyes watching him all the while.

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"Dash it all, Aunt Agatha, you're being jolly unreasonable! Just because Jeeves turns into an appalling eldritch abomination of unutterable iniquity every other weekend is no reason to give him notice! He is still fiendishly first-rate with a flat-iron on my plus-fours and smalls, his seventeen tentacles make him a whizz at producing the needful eggs and b or rarest roast beef - or something deucedly delicious, let it not be said Bertram Wooster asks too many bally questions - whenever needed, and I don't have the foggiest what extra and execrably evil kick he gives his hangover cure, but it's still the ticket for the morning after a night of normal and not at all evil on the town.

"And he's promised not to eat any of my pals..."

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"It is a truth universally acknowledged," Miss Annersley, preceptress and one of the headmistresses of the Chalet Seminary for Young Gentlewomen, said in a gentle, impeccably well-bred tone, "that a single doctor in possession of an acceptable salary and good placement at a sanitarium must be in want of a schoolmistress as a wife."

Miss Wilson, also preceptress and the other headmistress, chimed in in a voice just slightly less gentle and more... peccable. "We hear that no less than three such physicians have recently joined your husband's august establishment. A fine thing for our lady instructresses."

They each turned a formidable gaze to their guest, the wife of the founder of the said Sanitarium, Sir James Russell.

"Sir James must bring them to visit the Seminary as soon as they come," Miss Wilson went on after a pause. "To avoid impropriety, we can as always arrange for the music master to become unwell and require medical attention, and our mistresses can therefore be respectably introduced."

Lady Russell was reduced to occupying herself with her tea cup in silence, for what was there to say? After all, as the founder of the Seminary when she met and acquired the affections of Sir James, could it not be said that Madge Bellamy was the first of no less than fourteen such schoolmistresses to have secured their own futures - and extremely suitable marriages - in just such a manner?

It was after all such an advantageous arrangement for both institutions...