Free Beyond Reason by Ken Englade

is uncharted territory.
     
    INVESTIGATORS HAD NOT YET LEARNED HOW TO EVALUATE Elizabeth’s information carefully. Although Gardner and Kirkland did not know it yet, most of what she was telling them was a skillful blend of fact and fantasy, a wellwoven tale craftily conceived to confuse and intimidate. Elizabeth did, in fact, go to St. George’s; she did go to Riddlesworth; and she did go to Wycombe (pronounced “Wickham”) Abbey. But her experiences were nothing like what she had described to the detectives.
    All schools have their cliques and subgroups, the small coteries of students who stick closely together, pointedly excluding others from their circle. This is particularly true in boarding schools, where the students not only attend classes together but live together, existing in a vacuum in an
isolated world of their own. And probably in boarding schools of no other nationality is this cliquishness as well developed as it is in supremely class-conscious Britain.
    The British are infamous for their snobbery. Class is stamped on every facet of a Britisher’s existence, from the choice of newspapers to the color of socks. And just in case the physical flags aren’t obvious enough, there is the unmistakable banner of language. To an American ear, the speech pattern perpetuated at Oxford and Cambridge is a caricature of itself, a sometimes barely intelligible mishmash of ingroup slang and strange pronunciation; a whole world of broad A ’s, nasal exclamations, and swallowed prefixes. Especially broad A ’s. Across the Atlantic bath is baath, tomato is tomaato, rather is raather.
    Snooty British women say raather a lot. It is a standing joke—a not-so-gentle jab—to describe a snob as being “very raather-raather.” Elizabeth Haysom got to be very raather-raather.
    But she may have been telling the truth when she told the detectives that the early days abroad were tough. As a stranger from Canada, a girl without strong ties to powerful British figures, notwithstanding her relationship to Lady Astor, she may have been snubbed when she first enrolled. But as she learned the language and customs, her life became easier. By the time she got to Wycombe Abbey, just as she was going into puberty, she seemed to be adapting well to the system.
    Wycombe Abbey School is in the town of High Wycombe, which is in the center of an area called the Chilterns, a forty-five-minute train ride from London’s Marylebone Station. This is the heart of some of the loveliest countryside England has to offer, a picture-book landscape of rolling green fields and bubbling streams, a favorite destination for citydwellers desperate for an escape from noise and grime.
    Wycombe Abbey School gets half its name from the town and half from the centerpiece of the campus, an imposing former cloister built of cold gray stone, complete with parapets, turrets, and pointy, gothic windows. Inside the austerelooking
structure are two dormitories, Ruben House and Pitt House, each one accommodating forty or more girls. There are eight other houses in the school, which also have a population of forty or more each. Five of the houses are in their own red-brick buildings, and three others are shoehorned into another large structure called Daws Hill House. Other edifices quarter laboratories, an art center, a music center, and a gymnasium. Naturally there is a chapel too. Surrounding the cluster of dormitories and school buildings are 160 acres of parklike grounds with flower-bordered walking paths criss-crossing the playing fields, broad lawns, and secluded groves of hardwoods. There is even a small lake.
    The single jarring note in this Edenic setting is the tenfoot-tall brick wall that separates the school from the town. No matter how well it is camouflaged by flora, the wall goes a long way toward destroying the feeling of unbridled spaciousness that is otherwise so strong. The wall, practical though it may be, forms a psychological as well as a physical