“I don’t really think we should go quite this far,” Alexandra Blessing, Belle Christie’s best friend, said quietly. Alex’s graceful height said she must be at least eighteen; her wide, worried eyes said she, like the rest of Belle’s group of friends from Miss Greensley’s School of Comportment for Young Ladies of Quality, was twelve. They all wore the uniform of white dress and black pinafore with a straw hat, but they were all completely different. The wild, red-haired Victoria; the twins Thomasina and Philomena, who looked alike but behaved nothing at all the same; Elizabeth and Harriet, best friends and class truants; and most of all, Princess Augusta, tall, plain, and funny, released for a semester’s art course by her strict royal parents. They had all run away for the afternoon.
Priory Bay Beach, not far from the village of Nettelestone where Miss Greensley’s school sat just beyond in its own red brick mansion and vast gardens, was not usually somewhere the girls went alone. Only on large school picnics. It boasted soft, gold sand and warm waves, but just behind it was thick woodland, and at the south end, a rocky curve. It was rumored that ghost monks prowled the woods from the long-destroyed priory. Not that a well-educated, well-bred Greensley girl would believe that. Most of them anyway.
The girls had spread their picnic baskets just at the edge of the forest shade, a delicious treat of sweets and ham and bottled fruit from the school kitchens, purloined by Victoria, with some help from the twins. Thomasina was already dipping into the lemon tarts, while her bossy, bluestocking sister lectured her. Belle slipped off her shoes and sat on the fringed edge of the blanket to dip her toes in the sand and sip at the lemonade while she watched Princess Augusta paint the scene. Belle loved reading in class, but she loved being with her friends even more. Ever since her mother died and her father vanished abroad, she had felt so lonely. But not now. Not with her Greensley Girlfriends.
Victoria peeled off her woolen stockings and ran toward the waves, the garnet comb in her auburn hair shining. Her parents rarely came to the school, or even wrote, but they often sent lovely jewels to Victoria, her great pride.
“Those old monk ghosts can’t get us here, Alex,” Victoria called.
“Not all of us, anyway,” Elizabeth teased.
“They’ll only snatch the teachers,” Alex muttered uncertainly, but she did take off her shoes to wade in the surf.
“Look this way,” the princess called, and they all waved and smiled.
“You see.” Harriet laughed. “Nothing at all wicked this way comes.”
Until they heard the echo of laughter from the forest. But even that couldn’t come between the friends...