“Sorry, sorry. It’s not in the budget, they said. Took it to the Bursar, do you know what he told me? ‘Maybe next year, Todd.’ Maybe next year! Well, when those boilers go, we’ll be lucky if it’s a whimper and not a bang. Even if we’re not cleaning up an explosion, I tell you, you’ll still have ice forming up on the inside of your classroom windows all through January. You’re going to need those old fireplaces in your suite, Dr Walden.” Todd was meticulously hierarchical—Walden suspected him of finding it funny—and refused point-blank to call her Saffy. “Meanwhile the Bursary lot are sitting in their swish offices in the new building counting pennies. The kids’ll be freezing their fingers and toes off over in Scrubs. You can tell ’em it’s a history lesson. Not in the budget! What do they think the budget’s for?”

Walden had some sympathy for the Bursar’s plight, because she’d been in the meetings and seen the spreadsheets. Chetwood was rich, of course, with its ancient foundation and its hefty school fees. But it was also poor, because the whole institution was just enormously expensive to run. A boarding school was an education crossed with a hotel, and in the twenty-first century, the parents who paid eye-watering sums to send their offspring here expected the education to be first-rate and the hotel at least three stars. Day-to-day running costs, on top of staff payroll, ate up an astonishing amount of those eye-watering sums. And the ancient and gorgeous school site might photograph beautifully, but almost nothing in it was fit for purpose. The oldest parts of the school—the chapel, its adjoining colonnade making up the west side of the quad, and the Old Refectory at the other end—were Grade II listed antiquities, part of the original fourteenth-century foundation. Their cold, stony grandeur went hand in hand with the eye-watering cost of the heating bills. The other three sides of the quad were a Georgian replacement for a previous collection of sixteenth-century buildings. The classrooms were cavernous high-ceilinged affairs adorned with classical-ish plasterwork of dubious quality, all exactly the wrong size for twenty-eight desks and a smartboard. Hugging the back of the chapel was School House, also a victim of nineteenth-century enthusiasm for replacing things. In the school archives there were some sketches of the original School House, which had been a rather pleasant traditional farmhouse dating probably from Tudor times, with a substantial kitchen garden. Now it was a red-brick attempt at Gothic fantasia, featuring a small tower which was notable for being out-of-period for every possible period the Victorian architect could have had in mind.