Murder Most Unladylike: A Wells and Wong Mystery by Robin Stevens

love, but different somehow, and so quite all right with everyone.) I was as much taken with the Honourable Daisy Wells as anyone else, and so things might have gone on if it were not for something that happened halfway through my first term at Deepdean.
    It was late on a Thursday afternoon, and Miss Lappet was struggling to give us a lesson about Charles I. ‘Don’t be so slow,’ she snapped at Beanie, who had just given her third wrong answer in a row. ‘Great heavens, I might as well be speaking Hottentot. Before I go quite mad – and I shall , mark my words – I don’t suppose by some miracle Daisy will prove to know when – Lord grant me patience – the Long Parliament was first called?’
    Daisy was idly drawing something in her exercise book. Caught off guard, she looked up. ‘Third of November 1640,’ she said without even pausing to think.
    Miss Lappet gaped at her. ‘Why – Daisy!’ she gasped, amazed, sitting down in her chair with a heavy plump. ‘That’s the very day! However did you remember that?’
    I happened to be looking at Daisy at the time, and for the merest of seconds something rather like panic flashed across her face. Then she blinked and the look disappeared, replaced by vague wide-eyed surprise. ‘Oh! Did I really?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘What luck! Fancy that, Miss Lappet. I must be learning something after all.’
    ‘Wonders shall never cease,’ said Miss Lappet. ‘Now if you could only recreate that in your essays they might become almost respectable.’
    Daisy blinked up at Miss Lappet. ‘I’m afraid that’s quite out of the question, Miss,’ she said in tones of deep despair.
    ‘Of course it is,’ sighed Miss Lappet as the rest of the second form giggled supportively.
    The lesson continued, but I was thinking about Daisy’s answer. She had known it so very quickly – quicker than even I could manage. If it had been anyone else, I would have thought them a swot – but Daisy Wells did not swot. Everyone knew that.
    Nevertheless, I could not help suspecting that she had known the answer. It had not just been a lucky guess. Over the next few weeks I watched Daisy closely in all our lessons, and as I did so I became convinced that, far from being someone who struggled just enough for the mistresses to be encouraging and the other girls to think her a card, Daisy knew everything she was ever asked.
    She wanted to seem a fool, and she was pausing or flubbing her responses because she had decided that a particular fact was not something she ought to remember. The Daisy Wells we all pashed on was, in short, not real at all, but a very clever part. I watched her running about, shrieking, turning cartwheels and looking as though she did not care about anything apart from beating St Simmonds at lacrosse on Saturday, and I began to see that all the time there was a different Daisy underneath. A Daisy who not only knew the name of every one of the men who had helped Guy Fawkes in his plot but the reason why Belinda Vance in the fifth form was staying so late at school, and what Elsie Drew-Peters said to Heather Montefiore to make her cry. She was always gathering up information on people – not to blackmail them or do anything awful like that, that’s not Daisy at all – but just to know things.
    Daisy always has to know things.

5
    As soon as we got back up to House after Games that afternoon, Daisy began to work on her top-secret plan. Thursday afternoon tea, which is served in the House Dining Room to all girls not at Socs that day, is cream buns. I had two, which was blissful, but I could not help noticing that Daisy spent most of her tea not eating at all. She was deep in conversation with the fifth former Alice Murgatroyd. This was odd. There were lots of rumours going round about Alice – that she has a secret cigarette stash in her tuck box, for example – and it is simply not usual for girls from different forms to spend afternoon tea together. But just as