Free Eglantine by Catherine Jinks Page A

her why. In fact I left the library, then, and went to join Michelle under the staffroom windows. It’s the only safe part of the playground at lunchtime, because of all the rowdy boys and flying tennis balls that make the rest of the playground such a miserable place. I felt too embarrassed to hang around Mrs Procter. I knew what she must have been thinking. And I also knew that things could only get worse, because most people read the local paper on Tuesday afternoon, not Tuesday morning. Just about every teacher at school would have read or heard about Eglantine by the time Wednesday rolled around. My own teacher, Mr Lee, might start to wonder if I was as sensible as he’d always thought.
    When I got home, I saw the local paper on the kitchen table (opened at Bethan’s picture) and almost cried. Bethan, of course, was thrilled. Mum also seemed strangely pleased. But before I could point out that the stupid story had practically ruined my life , Mum drew my attention to a large, yellow envelope that was sitting near the newspaper, under her car keys.
    ‘It’s from the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages,’ she said. ‘I think your certificate must have come.’
    She was right. When I tore open the envelope, I found inside it a copy of Eglantine May Higgins’s death certificate. It told me that she had been seventeen years old at the time of her death; that she had been born in Glebe, New South Wales; that she had been buried at Rookwood Cemetery on the fifth of June, 1907; that her mother (whose maiden name had been Henrietta Botts) had belonged to the Church of England, and that her father had worked for the Bank of New South Wales.
    It also told me that Eglantine Higgins had died from ‘heart failure, deriving from a severe case of anorexia hysterica’.
    ‘What’s anorexia hysterica?’ I asked Mum, after glancing over the certificate. She looked up from Bethan’s photograph, and frowned.
    ‘Beg your pardon?’ she said.
    ‘Eglantine died of heart failure deriving from a severe case of anorexia hysterica. Do you know what that means?’
    ‘Let me see.’ Mum took the certificate. She studied it carefully. Then she said, ‘I’m not sure. I suppose anorexia hysterica is something like anorexia nervosa.’
    ‘What’s anorexia nervosa?’
    ‘Well, it’s . . . well, you know, Allie. It’s that thing that teenage girls get, where they starve themselves.’
    ‘Oh, that .’ Of course I knew about that. Tilly Smith’s sister had it. ‘But I thought it was a new thing, because of all the skinny models in advertising. Did they really have it back in 1907?’
    ‘I don’t know. Maybe anorexia hysterica was different. Maybe you should check the dictionary.’
    So I did. And I didn’t find anorexia hysterica. Under ‘anorexy’ I found ‘want of appetite’. Under ‘anorexia nervosa’ I found ‘a condition in which loss of appetite due to severe emotional disturbance results in emaciation’. Under ‘emaciated’ I found ‘lean or wasted in flesh’. Skinny, in other words. Very skinny.
    But what about anorexia hysterica?
    ‘Maybe it’s another term for anorexia nervosa,’ Ray said that night at the dinner table. ‘It sounds like it might be.’
    ‘I’ll look up the dictionary at school tomorrow,’ I remarked. ‘That dictionary’s a big dictionary. Not like ours.’
    ‘So Eglantine wasn’t strangled after all?’ Bethan inquired, sounding almost disappointed.
    ‘No, sweetie.’ Mum reached for the salt. ‘She died of heart failure, poor thing – probably because she was starving herself.’
    ‘Why was she starving herself?’ asked Bethan, and Mum replied that she didn’t know. Some girls did that, for some reason. It was a strange kind of sickness. But she hadn’t realised that girls used to do it in Edwardian times.
    ‘Of course, anorexia hysterica might be a slightly different thing from anorexia nervosa,’ Mum went on. Suddenly her eyes widened. ‘You know,’ she said,