Outrunning Her Shadow

Chapter Three - Intrusion

After being led inside and walked through the lengthy process of signing dozens of forms, collecting their room keys and having their student I.Ds renewed, Miss Hunt gave them a thorough tour of the whole house. The Housemistress was treating the day as a fully planned out royal engagement, neglecting the fact that Will and Kate were both well used to the layout of Ivy House by now, or at least as much as they needed to be considering they wouldn't be living there for the year.

It was still a comforting feeling seeing where her daughters would be eating each night, where they would be doing their homework and where they would be hanging out with their friends. Having a clear idea of what the common room looked like would help when she was missing her two eldest girls, with its plush chairs and bean bags, whiteboards where the day's events were organised, a large TV at the center of everything, pictures of all the girls of the house and their achievements covering the walls. It was one of the smaller houses at Marlborough and therefore one of the cosiest, offering a lovely home away from home for Ellie and Alex.

Kate hardly listened to Miss Hunt as she spoke. She was more focused on watching Ellie repeatedly leaving the group and introducing herself to the girls running the various club sign up stations that had been set up around the common room, and writing her name down on more registers than Kate could count. The girls on the other side of the tables all seemed shocked and excited to be speaking with Ellie, but this didn't seem to faze her daughter at all, it was clearly helping. All the energy of the first day back, as well as the raging, chaotic atmosphere of an all-girls boarding house was quite something to be a part of. Kate wasn't in Royal mode, she was even struggling to stay in Mum mode and starting to wish it was her going back to school instead.

"Would Miss Hunt notice if I threw on a Marlborough skirt and boarded with Ellie?" she whispered to Will, who smirked and seemed quietly excited about the idea.

In the end the tour proved useful, showing that despite the layout of Ivy being roughly the same as the year before, more rooms had been squeezed in to increase its capacity. Ms Hunt told them that they could house an extra twenty girls this year but that they were still struggling to satisfy a high demand for places, continuing the trend that had started when Ellie first enrolled at the school.

"How about the girls rooms?" asked Will, wanting to move them along.

"We'd like to get them settled in quickly." Kate added, doing her best to avoid sounding rude.

"Of course, right this way." Ms Hunt led them upstairs to a long corridor lined with pastel yellow walls and polished wooden doors. It had the 'start of year' look with no signs of use or ownership, but some girls were already decorating their doors with posters and stickers.

Kate greeted some girls and parents as they passed each other and waved to a gaggle of younger girls who had gathered at the end of the corridor just to watch them.

Ellie stuck to the back of the group and happily greeted each girl she recognised, doing her best to avoid standing out as anything like royalty whilst still sticking close to her parents. Alex was more in her element, hugging old friends she hadn't seen in months and repeatedly falling behind and making them wait for her.

Alex has always been happy go lucky.

They were led to a more secluded corridor on the third floor where the larger, more exclusive rooms sat open and ready. Ellie and Alex were on the same floor but several doors down from each other, a way of satisfying both the school rules of separating different year groups in the House and Kate's insistence that her kids be close enough to look out for one another.

On the way they left Alex and Will to sort out her room, and met Anna with a few more protection officers who were weaving their way between other parents and students dragging their suitcases through the narrow corridors.