Siân Shipley: Dream of the Dance (Jinny Stories 1, Jinny 13): preorder out Sept 11 2025

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Sixteen-year-old Jinny Manders stood on the hard, dark shoreline of Finmory Bay, watching with delighted eyes as her blazing chestnut mare leaped and pranced beneath a heavy sky. Against the black sands, the rippling quicksilver sea and the leaden, roiling clouds, Shantih was fire and air. Once, she had charged around a circus ring, maddened by the crack of a ringmaster’s whip, but now she danced for the sheer ecstasy of living—

“MANDERS!”

A cross voice rang out over the sand, shattering the illusion completely. With a dazed blink, Jinny found herself in the dreary beige confines of Inverburgh Comprehensive’s science lab once more.

Mr McClay, the physics teacher, was a hair’s breadth from her nose, and the other students were stifling laughter in their hands.

“Sorry,” she said, still half in thrall to her daydream. “I didn’t understand the question…”

“Thinking, we were, that you had died in your seat,” he snapped, pop-eyed and furious. “With the rigor mortis upon you.”

“I’m not dead.”

“Are you sure? For it’s five minutes I’ve been shouting, and no more answer from yourself than a corpse. Now, since you’re back in the land of the living, answer the question. Are you, or are you not, late for your appointment with the careers advisor?”

Jinny looked down at her watch and groaned.

The giggling intensified.

“GET OUT.”

Crimson, Jinny crammed everything haphazardly into her bag, dashing out of the classroom to another chorus of laughter, hating Mr McClay, and only noticing her art teacher when she collided with him in the doorway.

“Sorry!” she gasped again. “Didn’t mean to forget… only I was thinking about Shantih, and—”

“Say no more,” Mr Eccles said, only half-wearily. “I’m coming with you.”

“Shouldn’t it be Miss Lorimer?” Jinny asked, thinking of her long-suffering guidance tutor.

“Well, Miss Lorimer and I had a chat before registration this morning and decided that given the circumstances, I’d probably be the better option,” he explained as they hurried along the deserted corridors, “since you’re obviously not going to become an accountant—”

“Never.”

“Or a classicist, or a historian… or a scientist.”

“I can’t help it!” Jinny felt herself flush again. “I do try to pay attention! The solar system was fab… I went home and drew a horse for every planet. Dapple-grey for Mercury… Thoroughbred, with a sulphury, wreathing mane. A bright gold Akhal-Teke for Venus… Jupiter was a Clydesdale, massive and roan, with the Great Red Spot on its side.”

“And let me see... Shantih the burning sun, the centre of the universe, while they all danced around her?” Mr Eccles did his best not to laugh.

“How did you guess?”

“Easily.”

“I am trying. I am. Except sometimes, some of it’s so tedious that I just sort of drift away. Algebra… conjugations… electrons and circuits and the insides of plugs…”

“Can’t make horses out of those,” Mr Eccles admitted.

“No,” Jinny agreed, “you can’t.”

Hair and eyes, suit and soul—everything about Ms Murray the careers advisor was squat and grey. Not the iron-deep hue of the sea in winter, not the stormy shade of November skies, not even the friendly twinkle of polished pewter. She was as square and as inspiring as a breeze-block.

Jinny looked into the dull, joyless eyes which were raking over her untucked shirt, fraying blazer and tangled hair, and knew at once that her careers interview was not going to go well.

“The worst,” she grumbled to herself, flopping untidily onto the plastic chair, making it screech loudly across the floor.
Mr Eccles looked as if he was hiding a laugh again.

“Not the most auspicious start, Jenny.” Ms Murray flicked a bland glance at the clock behind her, which showed ten to twelve.

Jinny’s slot had been scheduled for eleven.

“Jinny. It’s Jinny,” Jinny corrected her, as Ms Murray wrote poor timekeeper, unkempt at the top of a crisp white page.

“Let’s not beat around the bush. I’ve a record of your marks here. Nothing particularly exceptional. Unless you manage to surprise everybody in your Standards, you’ll not be setting the world alight. Best aim within your means.”

This, from the human equivalent of a drab, wrung-out dishcloth, made Jinny bite the inside of her cheek indignantly. Granted, her academic record had been rather chequered in the past, but knowing her parents’ leniency had limits (and that her time with Shantih would be the first thing to suffer when she reached them), she had applied herself to the best of her ability during her final years at secondary school. The black hole of physics was insurmountable, but she was by no means the worst student in the year, and didn’t feel she wholly deserved Ms Murray’s pessimistic appraisal of her.

“Jinny’s my most gifted pupil. She’s absolutely exceptional,” Mr Eccles declared firmly.

“And you teach…?”

“Art.”

A raised eyebrow let them both know exactly what the careers advisor from the newly built Inverburgh College of Further Education thought about art.

“We’ve no art department. Absolutely no call for it. No viable career options at all. Best keep it as a nice little hobby and set your sights on something more realistic. We offer a wide range of useful, practical courses designed to set you up for success in your working life… perhaps not applied mathematics, going by your performance, but a secretarial course? Business studies?”

Jinny cast Mr Eccles a look of horror.

The idea of having to learn about typing, shorthand and photocopying… commercial utility rates and overheads, or awful, abstract concepts like projections and taxes—the sort of things her father was always bemoaning—made her shudder.

“No. And absolutely no.”

Unimpressed, Ms Murray ignored Jinny’s remark, and rifling through some pamphlets, waved them at her one after the other.

“Hairdressing and beauty?”

“No.”

“Catering?”

“No.”

“Floristry?”

“No.”

“Nursing?”

“No.”

“Childcare?”

“NO.”

The word uncooperative and the phrase unwilling to compromise joined poor timekeeper and unkempt as Ms Murray regarded Jinny disparagingly.

“With that mindset, the College of Further Education will find it very difficult to place you.”

“Good. If there’s no art department there’s absolutely no point me going. Rather have razor blades stuck under my fingernails.”

Ms Murray looked as though she’d quite like to tell Jinny that the Inverburgh College of Further Education didn’t want her either, but managed to confine herself to a dry little sniff.

“You’ll be needing to consider options outside further education then.”

“Such as?” Mr Eccles spoke a little more coolly than Jinny was expecting and she suddenly felt very fond of him.

“McLeans is hiring.”

McLeans was the monstrous new supermarket on the outskirts of Inverburgh, a commercial, fluorescent, pre-packaged hellscape. Mrs Simpson—proprietor of the sell-everything shop in Glenbost—told anybody who would listen that it was going to put her out of business any day now, and had been dolefully predicting her imminent closure for the past eighteen months.

“No. I don’t think so,” Mr Eccles said, before Jinny could draw breath.

“She’s not got the temperament for banking.”

“No,” Jinny shot back. “I’ve not.”

“Kinnears won’t look at her. Nor Ogilvies… or Connollys.”

Kinnears was a national estate agents with a large string of offices across Scotland, Ogilvies a sprawling, luxurious hotel way out past Brandoch Country Club where Jinny had once ridden in a long-distance race. Connollys was a paper-mill. Jinny felt she would have rather been struck down by the Bubonic Plague before setting foot in any of them, and said so, bluntly.

“Well,” concluded Ms Murray as she ran out of advice to impart. “In that case, there’s evidently nothing more to be done for you.”

The final, underlined word on her paper was rude.

People
Jinny Manders, Mike and Petra Manders, Mr and Mrs Manders, Ken Dawson. Tam, Miss Tuke, Mr McKenzie, Sue Horton, Clare Burnley, Mr Eccles

Horses
Shantih, Bramble, Darach, Esk, Saxifrage Ursula