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Authors: Emily Diamand

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If you enjoyed VOICES IN STONE,
you might like to discover the spooky goings-on
at St Mark’s College for Girls in
THE BLUE LADY by Eleanor Hawken.

Read on to find out more …

Headmistress Beaton

St Mark’s College for Girls

Oxfordshire

England

4
th
May 1786

Dear Brigadier Marshall,

It is with deepest regret that I write to inform you of the sudden death of your daughter, Isabelle. Miss Isabelle Marshall’s body was discovered on the steps of the school soon after sunrise this morning.

As you know, Sir, Isabelle was expelled from St Mark’s College for Girls only two days ago. I must make it clear to you that despite her recent expulsion from our guardianship, the school accepts no responsibility for Isabelle’s death. Given her condition in recent months, we cannot help but feel that her tragic fate was unavoidable.

Isabelle’s body is currently with the police pending a post-mortem investigation. Her immortal soul is now in His judgement, and all at St Mark’s will pray for her.

With deepest regret,

Headmistress Beaton

I was never the sort of girl who believed in ghosts. I never played with Ouija boards, held séances or felt afraid of the dark. That stuff was for other people, not me. But that all changed when I went to live at St Mark’s College.

Unlike the other girls at St Mark’s, I hadn’t lived away from home since the age of eight. I didn’t come from a posh family who had a house in the country and a yacht in France. The only time I’d ever been to France was when Mum and I did a day trip using ferry tokens she’d saved up from a newspaper. Boarding school wasn’t for girls like me. I ended up there by mistake.

The mistake happened last December, when Mum’s friend Lynn invited her to an army officers’ Christmas
ball. Lynn’s brother is a major in the army and had just got back from a tour of Afghanistan. Apparently his wife used to write to him every week while he was out there, and then one week the letters stopped. Two months later he had another letter from her – only this time all she sent him were divorce papers. Lynn wanted to set Mum up with this guy – although I wasn’t keen. Mum’s had enough loser boyfriends without adding a jilted army officer to the list.

But that night, at the ball, Mum accidentally sat on the wrong table and chatted to a guy who she thought was Lynn’s brother. Turns out the man she was taking to wasn’t Lynn’s brother, but Lynn’s brother’s boss. His name was Lieutenant Colonel Phillip Walker. They got married eight months later. And thirteen days after the wedding, Phil was posted to Germany. Instead of taking me to Germany and putting me into a German school, Mum and Phil decided to send me to an English boarding school. So it was all just one big mix-up – if Mum had chatted to the right guy that night, I would never have been sent to St Mark’s. If I’d never gone to St Mark’s, then I’d still believe there’s no such thing as ghosts …

Emily Diamand’s debut novel,
Flood Child
(first published as
Reaver’s Ransom
), won the inaugural
Times
/Chicken House award for Children’s Fiction in 2009, was shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award in the same year and was awarded Best Young Adult Fiction in 2011 by the American Library Association.
Ways to See a Ghost
, the first book featuring Isis and Gray, was published in 2013.

First published in Great Britain in 2015
by Templar Publishing
Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V 0AT
www.templarco.co.uk

Copyright © Emily Diamand, 2015

The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978–1–783–70093–6

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Templar Publishing is part of the Bonnier Publishing Group
www.bonnierpublishing.com

BOOK: Voices in Stone
11.72Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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