Walden spent Saturday evening slogging through her marking and carefully scheduling several emails to send at 8 A.M. on Monday. Ten o’clock found her still dressed—not in ratty pyjamas tonight, thank you Marshal Kenning—and still at her desk, poking at the draft of Monday’s school assembly. Assemblies were a bit of a dark art; no tougher crowd than six hundred adolescents who had heard three of these a week for years—Monday, Wednesday, Friday—and would rather be asleep. Walden’s assembly-writing was further hindered by her distaste for the tried-and-true genre of ‘personal anecdote with an awkwardly forced moral.’ Halfway through writing she remembered with a groan that she’d also agreed to take next week’s non-denom assembly. Non-denom was the optional alternative assembly for the students who didn’t want to attend Wednesday morning chapel, which was most of them. More than a third of Chetwood’s pupils were Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Jain. Most of the rest were carol-service-only, which Walden couldn’t fault, since it had also been her approach to chapel when she was a student here. She attended most Sundays now, because the music was nice and Ezekiel was an excellent speaker, but she would not have described herself as religious.

The knock on the door was a surprise, but also a bit of a relief. Walden felt that she’d reached a détente with Laura Kenning today. Perhaps this encounter would be the next stage of their reset. And she wasn’t wearing pyjamas this time. “Come in!” she called.

It wasn’t Kenning.

Aneeta was in slippers, tracksuit bottoms, and a puffy pink outdoor coat. She must have walked across the road from Scrubs like that. Walden was shocked. She could not think of another time when a student had dared to disturb her after hours in her suite, which was tucked out of the way in Brewers and right next door to the extremely off-limits thaumic engines. She was not a housemistress or a form tutor—she was senior enough not to be really part of the pastoral structure at all—and while she always tried, on principle, to be kind and pay attention, she knew very well that she was not one of the approachable teachers. Walden had people skills, because you needed them to do the job well, but they were learned and practised. Warmth did not come naturally to her. Children with problems usually took those problems to someone else. Even after hours, there were always staff on duty in the boarding house: a night porter, Marshals on patrol, and several younger teachers who lived in the flats on the ground floor and could be woken up in emergencies.

Aneeta’s expression was a dreadful mixture of misery and embarrassment. She hovered in the doorway, cringing as if she expected to be shouted at. “Sorry” was the first thing she said.