white_hart (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_hart) wrote2007-07-07 10:22 pm
white_hart) wrote2007-07-07 10:22 pm
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[Fic] A New Spell, part 2
Buffy/Chalet School crossover,set immediately after the end of Buffy season 6 and about 45 years after Prefects of the Chalet School. Buffy the Vampire Slayer belongs to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy, the Chalet School belongs to the estate of Elinor M Brent-Dyer. Part 1 is here.
Oxford, 1957
Oxford in November was chilly, grey and damp. The fog that rose from the city’s rivers shrouded it each morning, often barely burning off by midday.
Len Maynard gazed out of the window of her study-bedroom into the fog. She’d imagined Oxford as an extension of her schooldays, with more freedom and no Juniors to supervise, but it was very different. Her sister Con had thrown herself into it with gleeful abandon, living in a whirlwind of friends and parties that made Len wonder how they had ever thought of Con as a dreamer, but Len herself was thrown off-balance by the differentness. And of course, she missed Reg, and no-one else she’d met was engaged. She knew that Con’s group of friends included several boys, and part of the reason she often turned down invitations was that she wasn’t certain whether having fun with these boys would count as disloyalty or not. Not that she’d told Con that, and she knew that her sister just regarded her with a certain amount of pity, thinking that she was hopelessly ‘square’. The other old Chalet girls who were still at Oxford seemed similarly happy with their lot; Mary-Lou Trelawney, in the final year of her archaeology degree now, had told Len robustly that she’d get used to it soon enough, and she should ‘buck up’ and ‘make the most’ of her ‘opportunities’.
The trouble was, Len wasn’t quite sure how to do that. She and Con had agreed on the train from Berne to Paris that they wouldn’t crowd each other, and Len had thought she was as keen as Con to escape being known first and foremost as ‘one of the Maynard triplets’. Although of course most of the people who knew them both here thought they were twins. She’d tried to make friends with the other girls who lived on her staircase, but most of them were second and third years and already had their own friends, while two of the other three freshers had been to the same school and tended to socialise with other girls they had known there, and the fourth girl, Emily, had been distant and unapproachable the few times Len had tried to start up conversations. Her tutorial partner, Susan, was a pleasant enough girl from Doncaster whose only outside interest appeared to be horseriding, something Len knew nothing about.
At the same time, she wasn’t quite looking forward to going home at the end of term. Of course, it would be simply super to see Reg again, and Mamma and Papa and the tinies, but almost without realising it she was becoming used to being able to live by her own timetable, and to being in a busy city with shops and theatres, cinemas and cafes, which she could visit as she chose. She didn’t relish the idea of being back on the Platz and having to ask permission to go into Interlaken just to buy a new pair of stockings or some writing-paper.
She turned back to the letter she was writing.
My dearest Reg
Of course I understand that you’re far too busy with your work at the San to come to Oxford, and I do see that Papa is right that it might not be considered quite proper, even though we are engaged. And it’ll be quite divine to have you at the Tiernsee with us in the summer. I do miss you, though, and I would love to show you Oxford. It’s such a beautiful city, quite as lovely as Zurich or Berne.
My work is going very well. It’s at a far higher level than school, but I expected that, and my tutor was very pleased with my last essay. They do keep us busy, though!
I’m surprised it’s snowed so early this year – you must be in for a hard winter! Here it’s just grey and damp – so different from the dear old Platz! I hope we can get some skiing in when I’m home for Christmas!
Len frowned at the letter, wishing the jolly tone didn’t sound so forced. She put the letter to one side and started making notes for her next tutorial essay instead. She hadn’t got very far when there was a knock at her door. Probably Con, she thought, and almost gave in to the temptation to pretend she wasn’t there before the politeness she’d been trained in since childhood won out and she called ‘Come in!’ in a voice that was as falsely cheery as her half-written letter.
When the door opened, however, it revealed not Con, but the normally-distant Emily.
‘Hello, Len. Can I ask a favour of you?’
‘As my headmistress would have said, you certainly can; the question is, may you?’ She laughed at Emily’s bewildered look. ‘Ask away! I’m getting nowhere with letter-writing or my next essay, so I may as well make myself useful to you.’
‘Oh, thank you! I know we don’t know each other terribly well, but – you’re doing languages, and you speak German, don’t you? I wondered whether you could translate something for me? It’s rather old, and I don’t know how much the language will have changed. I suppose it’ll be a bit like reading Chaucer in English to modern eyes…’
‘Well, I’m willing to give it a try, and I studied a little mediaeval German at school. Do you have it with you?’ Emily nodded, and handed over a sheet of exercise-paper on which several lines of German had been copied down. ‘If you’d like to put the kettle on the fire while I look over this, there’s a tin of cocoa on the mantelpiece, and mugs on the shelf there.’
The German was indeed very old; Len suspected that it was far older than the mediaeval stuff she’d studied with Sally-go-round-the-moon back at the Chalet School, and privately opined that it was closer to Beowulf than Emily’s suggestion of Chaucer. However, she could make most of it out; a list of ingredients, although for no recipe Len could imagine, not even the odd domestic potions which they had occasionally had to guess at as part of Saturday night entertainments at school, and then details on how to combine them – in a cauldron? – and then something that she could only describe as an incantation. Historical curiosity, she supposed, some kind of social history study, but even as she thought that she could feel the power in the words, almost taste it as a chalkiness at the back of her mouth, and when she looked up Emily was standing there with a mug of cocoa in each hand and staring at her open-mouthed.
‘Len – your feet!’ was all she managed to gasp out, and Len suddenly realised that she was hovering a few inches off the ground. With an effort of will she made herself return to floor level.
Emily still looked astonished, although her mouth had closed. ‘None of us have ever been able to do anything like that! Have you done magic before?’
‘Magic? Magic is in stories! But what was that? And what was I reading?’
‘That was magic. You were reading a spell; one of us found it, and we weren’t sure what it was supposed to do, although it was obviously powerful. And just reading it made you levitate!’
‘Us? But – who? And how did I levitate?’
‘We’re a coven. There aren’t many of us, and even fewer who have much talent. But oh, Len, you’re a natural!’
Oxford, 1957
Oxford in November was chilly, grey and damp. The fog that rose from the city’s rivers shrouded it each morning, often barely burning off by midday.
Len Maynard gazed out of the window of her study-bedroom into the fog. She’d imagined Oxford as an extension of her schooldays, with more freedom and no Juniors to supervise, but it was very different. Her sister Con had thrown herself into it with gleeful abandon, living in a whirlwind of friends and parties that made Len wonder how they had ever thought of Con as a dreamer, but Len herself was thrown off-balance by the differentness. And of course, she missed Reg, and no-one else she’d met was engaged. She knew that Con’s group of friends included several boys, and part of the reason she often turned down invitations was that she wasn’t certain whether having fun with these boys would count as disloyalty or not. Not that she’d told Con that, and she knew that her sister just regarded her with a certain amount of pity, thinking that she was hopelessly ‘square’. The other old Chalet girls who were still at Oxford seemed similarly happy with their lot; Mary-Lou Trelawney, in the final year of her archaeology degree now, had told Len robustly that she’d get used to it soon enough, and she should ‘buck up’ and ‘make the most’ of her ‘opportunities’.
The trouble was, Len wasn’t quite sure how to do that. She and Con had agreed on the train from Berne to Paris that they wouldn’t crowd each other, and Len had thought she was as keen as Con to escape being known first and foremost as ‘one of the Maynard triplets’. Although of course most of the people who knew them both here thought they were twins. She’d tried to make friends with the other girls who lived on her staircase, but most of them were second and third years and already had their own friends, while two of the other three freshers had been to the same school and tended to socialise with other girls they had known there, and the fourth girl, Emily, had been distant and unapproachable the few times Len had tried to start up conversations. Her tutorial partner, Susan, was a pleasant enough girl from Doncaster whose only outside interest appeared to be horseriding, something Len knew nothing about.
At the same time, she wasn’t quite looking forward to going home at the end of term. Of course, it would be simply super to see Reg again, and Mamma and Papa and the tinies, but almost without realising it she was becoming used to being able to live by her own timetable, and to being in a busy city with shops and theatres, cinemas and cafes, which she could visit as she chose. She didn’t relish the idea of being back on the Platz and having to ask permission to go into Interlaken just to buy a new pair of stockings or some writing-paper.
She turned back to the letter she was writing.
My dearest Reg
Of course I understand that you’re far too busy with your work at the San to come to Oxford, and I do see that Papa is right that it might not be considered quite proper, even though we are engaged. And it’ll be quite divine to have you at the Tiernsee with us in the summer. I do miss you, though, and I would love to show you Oxford. It’s such a beautiful city, quite as lovely as Zurich or Berne.
My work is going very well. It’s at a far higher level than school, but I expected that, and my tutor was very pleased with my last essay. They do keep us busy, though!
I’m surprised it’s snowed so early this year – you must be in for a hard winter! Here it’s just grey and damp – so different from the dear old Platz! I hope we can get some skiing in when I’m home for Christmas!
Len frowned at the letter, wishing the jolly tone didn’t sound so forced. She put the letter to one side and started making notes for her next tutorial essay instead. She hadn’t got very far when there was a knock at her door. Probably Con, she thought, and almost gave in to the temptation to pretend she wasn’t there before the politeness she’d been trained in since childhood won out and she called ‘Come in!’ in a voice that was as falsely cheery as her half-written letter.
When the door opened, however, it revealed not Con, but the normally-distant Emily.
‘Hello, Len. Can I ask a favour of you?’
‘As my headmistress would have said, you certainly can; the question is, may you?’ She laughed at Emily’s bewildered look. ‘Ask away! I’m getting nowhere with letter-writing or my next essay, so I may as well make myself useful to you.’
‘Oh, thank you! I know we don’t know each other terribly well, but – you’re doing languages, and you speak German, don’t you? I wondered whether you could translate something for me? It’s rather old, and I don’t know how much the language will have changed. I suppose it’ll be a bit like reading Chaucer in English to modern eyes…’
‘Well, I’m willing to give it a try, and I studied a little mediaeval German at school. Do you have it with you?’ Emily nodded, and handed over a sheet of exercise-paper on which several lines of German had been copied down. ‘If you’d like to put the kettle on the fire while I look over this, there’s a tin of cocoa on the mantelpiece, and mugs on the shelf there.’
The German was indeed very old; Len suspected that it was far older than the mediaeval stuff she’d studied with Sally-go-round-the-moon back at the Chalet School, and privately opined that it was closer to Beowulf than Emily’s suggestion of Chaucer. However, she could make most of it out; a list of ingredients, although for no recipe Len could imagine, not even the odd domestic potions which they had occasionally had to guess at as part of Saturday night entertainments at school, and then details on how to combine them – in a cauldron? – and then something that she could only describe as an incantation. Historical curiosity, she supposed, some kind of social history study, but even as she thought that she could feel the power in the words, almost taste it as a chalkiness at the back of her mouth, and when she looked up Emily was standing there with a mug of cocoa in each hand and staring at her open-mouthed.
‘Len – your feet!’ was all she managed to gasp out, and Len suddenly realised that she was hovering a few inches off the ground. With an effort of will she made herself return to floor level.
Emily still looked astonished, although her mouth had closed. ‘None of us have ever been able to do anything like that! Have you done magic before?’
‘Magic? Magic is in stories! But what was that? And what was I reading?’
‘That was magic. You were reading a spell; one of us found it, and we weren’t sure what it was supposed to do, although it was obviously powerful. And just reading it made you levitate!’
‘Us? But – who? And how did I levitate?’
‘We’re a coven. There aren’t many of us, and even fewer who have much talent. But oh, Len, you’re a natural!’