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Chapter One

Chapter One

It was early when Lyndsey opened her eyes. She always awoke early, often not long after the sun came up. As soon as the morning light hit her eyelids, then she wanted to be up. She looked around to see if all the figures in the beds around her were indeed still asleep. They were. Lyndsey swung her legs down off the small iron bed and placed her feet onto the cool wooden floorboards. As quietly as she could, she stood up. A cool breeze caught her bare legs and made her shiver. Like many mornings before, she found herself wishing she might have a new nightdress. The one she was wearing came barely past her knees and was greatly repaired and patched up. There was a small coarse blanket on the end of her bed which she picked up and wrapped around her slim shoulders. Careful not to wake anyone up, Lyndsey left the dormitory and slipped out into the corridor.

Once outside in the narrow low ceilinged corridor, Lyndsey walked to the far end and looked up to where there was a window with a wide ledge. She could just about reach the ledge with her fingertips if she lifted her arms right about her head. It took a lot of effort and scrambling feet for her to manage to pull herself up and onto the ledge, where she settles herself down comfortably to look out of the window.

Reaching out her small hand, she pushed open the attic window and took long deep breaths of the fresh early morning air. Lyndsey loved this time of day. She would often make her way up here so that she could watch the sun rising over the city. She could see people moving inside their houses and could hear the chirrups of birds as they too started to wake. Her eyes drifted over the rooves of the houses which stretched as far as she could see. They shone silver in the pale sunlight and Lyndsey wondered, as she always did, whether her family was out there somewhere. There were only a few orphans at the school. The dormitory in which Lyndsey slept contained only four girls. Lyndsey was the only one who was a foundling, having been left on the steps of the school when she was barely a week old. The other orphaned girls were charity cases that Miss Ferris took on every now and again. They had come to the school, as most of the girls had, around the age of five. Lyndsey had always been there, reluctantly raised by the staff. They had tried to place her with local families but she had always been returned within a week and so it was decided before she was two years old that it would be better to stop trying and the school was where she had been ever since.

Lyndsey liked to watch people from her window in the attic. She liked to imagine what they might be talking about. She was very high above them but she could sometimes hear a little of what they were saying and they were just simple mundane things, things that made her smile. She liked to pretend they were her friends. The other girls were not her friends. They thought she was strange and teased her for not having any family. Even the other orphaned girls she shared a room with were mean to her. They liked pointing out that even though their parents were gone, they at least had their own name while Lyndsey's name was chosen for her by one of the school staff. Lyndsey did not know who had given her her name but she stood strong that it was as much her name and their names were theirs.

In the early morning quiet, Lyndsey looked around the streets below her and tried to listen hard. A few times when she had been looking out of the window, she had thought she could hear a voice on the wind. She knew it wasn't one of the people down on the street because it sounded sometimes like the person was speaking right into her ear and at other times like it was miles and miles away. She had never managed to understand what the voice was saying but something about it made Lyndsey feel like whatever it was, it was meant for her. She would have liked to listen longer that morning but she was broken out of her thoughts by the loud voice of one of the matrons. Not wanting to get into trouble, Lyndsey dropped lightly down onto the floor and hurried back to the dormitory where the other girls were already awake and getting dressed. They were used to her wandering around so did not bother to ask where she had been. They didn't speak to her much at any time. Silently, she slipped out of her nightdress and into her navy school smock. It too, like all of her clothes, was a little small and much repaired. Once she was dressed, Lyndsey went to the small water basin in the corner of the room and washed the dust and grime from her hands as best she could, before taking her turn in front of the single cracked mirror to tie up her unruly golden hair. A few curls had already escaped the clumsy bun before she had even made it out of the dormitory and she heard a few sniggers from the girls walking behind her as she passed the main school dormitories on the floor below.