Read Online Pegasi and Prefects by Eleanor Beresford - Free Book Online Page B

I think it would be safest if I lead,” Cecily tells me, grinning. “I value my feet too much.”
    “Shut up, Cis,” I say, and let her take the lead. For my money she’s prettier than Diana, too, with her rich brown skin and full figure. Yet no one seems to gush over her the way they do over Diana. It’s an oddity.
    I’m starting to get hotter and sweatier in my dress than I ever feel on the field or pitch, and I can feel the ribbon slipping loose from my hair already. I don’t know if it’s permissible to let go of Cecily’s hand to put it back in or if that’s a terrible breach of etiquette.
    I feel in my heart that Saturdays, all things taken into account, are going to be a bit of a trial.
     
    My out of lessons hours are so crammed that I almost welcome History as a precious chance to slack off a bit. It’s one of the hours at which Miss Carroll gathers up all the brilliant hopes for England’s womanhood to coach for university and scholarship exams, so I suppose it’s natural that we plodders left behind seize the chance to take it easy a bit. Especially since we share the lesson with those bright scholars in the Fifth considered unsuitable for further studies in Latin.
    Miss Spears is a new mistress engaged only last term when Miss Logan gave us up as a bad joke. Unlike Miss Logan, who was content to name a chapter and have us take notes, Miss Spears is keen on modern teaching methods. She asks us to read up on subjects in our precious prep. hours and then tries to engage us in intellectual conversation about what we’ve read. It’s pretty gruesome, sitting staring at our laps while Miss Spears gazes around with bright, hopeful eyes, transparently hoping for someone to be moved at last to enthusiasm and insight. Esther, safely off with the other bright sparks, is cruelly offering odds on how long it will take her optimism to break utterly and the poor teacher to resign herself to set us copying out chapters in our exercise books.
    At least we’re better off than the juniors. According to rumour they’re chosen in turn to dress up and act scenes out of history, a particularly merciless form of torture for the shy ones.
    Today’s theme at least interests me a little. Miss Spears had us read up on myths and accounts of the unheralded arrival and abrupt departure of the elves. I’m mostly interested because it seems pretty certain that until the elves arrived, the world was tame and there were no magical beasts at all: no unicorns, no sea beasts in the oceans, no yowies and bunyips to enliven Cecily’s childhood rides, no nameless terrors haunting the night. It seems impossible that there could ever have been a time in which there were just lesser, earthly animals with no magic to them at all. Right now, if I concentrate, I can feel the spiky minds of the fairies outside the window.
    I might just make Miss Spears faint by actually asking a question. It’s hovering on my lips when Gladys gets in first with a complaint.
    “I don’t see why we have to read up on myths. It’s not proper history at all,” she says, her brow black. She is always in a bad temper after Esther and the other luminaries are taken off or coaching. Everyone expected her to be part of the chosen circle, and it must sting a little to be here in the dunces’ class. “My father says that there’s no proof the elves ever really existed—they’re just a story made up to explain magical abilities and new species that developed naturally, through processes of evolution. All it takes is the proper scientific approach to find out why some people have some gifts and not others, and why they are sometimes passed on through families, and how horses grew wings and horns and—”
    “Lizards turned into dragons?” murmurs Corona.
    Gladys wheels on her. “What’s so silly about that? Elves visiting Earth to bring us magic is just as silly. Why on earth would they turn up, give us all magical gifts, and then go away again?”
    Miss