Blythewood (19 page)

“Forlorn! The very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?”

The bells had ceased as she came to the end, save for that
ghostly echo of the seventh bell ringing in the river valley like
a shred of the waking dream we’d all fallen into. Miss Sharp
turned to us and leaned back against the window frame.

“After what you saw last night—and all you’ve heard and
seen today”—she exchanged a look with the librarian and I
wondered if she was thinking about Miss Frost’s specimens—
“you must wonder today whether you wake or sleep. What I’d
like you to remember is that the world is beautiful despite—and
sometimes because of—all the darkness in it, just as a white
cameo is more beautiful against an ebony setting.”

I startled at the image, reminded of how the Darkling’s face
had looked like a beautiful cameo set against the ebony of his
wings. Had she, too, seen a face like that? I was jarred out of
this reverie by the word “assignment” and reached for my pen
to copy down the no doubt long list of pages we would have to
read for tomorrow, but instead she only told us to “take a walk
by the river, watch the sun set, and write a poem about what you
see.” Then she dismissed the class.

When we didn’t move right away—three-quarters of the
allotted hour for literature remained—she made a shooing motion with her hands as if we were a gaggle of geese. At last we
all got up to go and drifted out of the class, each girl quiet and
hugging her thoughts to herself. When I turned back, I saw that
Miss Sharp had moved to the librarian’s desk and perched on
a corner of it. She leaned down to look at something in a book
the librarian held up, and as she did her hair slipped out of its
pins and fell in a golden waterfall. Miss Corey lifted her head
and looked up. Caught in the light, her veil cast a dappled pattern across her face. Then Miss Corey moved the veil aside to
see something in the book Miss Sharp held open for her, and I
saw that the dapples weren’t shadows from the veil but marks
on her skin, like the spots on a fawn’s pelt. She said something
and Miss Sharp tossed her head back and laughed, the sound
like the nightingale’s song. I turned away—and nearly ran into
Rupert Bellows.

“Oh, Miss . . . er . . .”
“Hall. Avaline Hall.”
“Of course,” he said, looking over my shoulder to where Vionetta Sharp laughed. “Are you off to write poetry by the river?
Miss Sharp’s recitation was very . . . er . . . inspiring, wasn’t it?”

“Oh yes,” I concurred, “but . . .” I hesitated, not thinking it
right to criticize my teacher.
“But what?” Mr. Bellows demanded, his attention abruptly
focused on me and not Vionetta Sharp. “Spit it out, Miss Hall. I
expect nothing less than honesty from my pupils.”
“It’s just that now there will be a dozen students walking
along the riverside attempting to write a poem. It will hardly be
a place conducive to writing poetry.”
Rupert Bellows stared at me for a moment and then tilted
his head back and laughed. “By Jove, you’re right. My suggestion to you is to find your own brooding place. When I was
at Cambridge it was on a punt in the River Cam. You’ll need
a place to yourself here or you’ll go mad.” He glanced at Miss
Sharp as if he knew where his own madness lay.
“Thank you, Mr. Bellows,” I said, “I think I know where
that might be.”
Rupert Bellows gave me a distracted smile, but I knew he
hadn’t heard me. Like the fellow in the poem, he was still in his
own waking dream.

Instead of going to the riverside, I climbed to the fourth floor
and slipped out the landing window onto the catwalk. I’d noticed when I was out here with Nathan that there was a ladder
leading up to the roof. What better place to brood, I thought,
than up among the pigeons and chimneys. Rooftops had been
my sanctuaries in the city; they could be here, too. But when I
climbed to the top of Blythewood Castle I found I didn’t have
the roof to myself. I would have to share it with Gillie.

He was sitting on a stool outside a wooden shed built into
the corner of the crenellated tower. The falcon mews, I guessed.
Through the open door I could see two rows of falcons and
hawks standing on their perches, their heads turning to me as
I approached. The motion set up a jingle, which came from the
bells attached to their talons. They were each wearing an elaborately tasseled hood, making them look like ladies in their best
tea hats. The bird perched on Gillie’s gloved hand, though, did
not look like a lady in a tea hat. It was huge, at least two feet tall,
all but dwarfing tiny Gillie, with downy white and silver feathers, talons the length of my ring fingers, a wide heart-shaped
face, and great yellow eyes that followed my every movement.
A barn owl, I thought, recognizing it from an Audubon print I’d
seen once at the Astor library.

“Ah, Miss Hall,” Gillie crooned as though I were another
bird that needed to be settled. “I might have guessed you’d find
your way up here. It was your mother’s favorite roost.”

“She often fed the pigeons on our fire escape,” I said, my
throat tight with the memory of my mother’s face bathed in
light as she leaned out the window murmuring to the birds.
“And she talked to them,” I added. “Was she . . . I mean, is
that
one of the things we learn here—to talk to birds?”

Gillie laughed in an eerie high-pitched tone that made the
owl shift restlessly on his hand. “What do ye think, Blossom?
Are ye up for a little polite conversation?”

“Blossom?” I asked, laughing at the incongruously cheerful
name for the somber-faced creature.
“Aye, her proper name is Blodeuwedd, from the Welsh, but
that’s a mouthful even for me. It means ‘flower face,’ so I call
her Blossom. I don’t like to think what she calls me.” He lifted
his arm up so that the owl’s face was near his own. She ducked
her head and let out a long, mournful hoot that made me shiver.
“Ah, she’s talking to you already. She likes you. Tell her something that ye’d not want to tell that gaggle of girls down below
and see what she says.”
Feeling foolish, I leaned closer to the owl, who cocked her
head and regarded me with a yellow eye the size of a gold doubloon, and whispered, “I don’t know if I belong here.”
In answer, Blossom lifted her great wings and hopped from
Gillie’s hand to my shoulder, where she hooted into my ear. She
was lighter than I would have thought, but her talons clutched
my shoulder with an inexorable grip that I did not doubt could
have broken my skin and crushed my bones.
“See, Blossom thinks ye belong and she don’t take to just
anybody.”
“But not everyone thinks I should be here,” I said, gingerly
stroking the owl’s feathers. “On account of my mother being
expelled.”
Gillie muttered something under his breath that I guessed
was an expletive in his native Scots tongue. “Your mother was
the finest, truest girl who ever trod the halls and paths of Blythewood and she had already decided to leave before those old
biddies expelled her. She told me so herself, standing right
where ye stand now. ‘Gillie,’ she said, ‘I cannot stay in a place
that persecutes poor, helpless creatures.’”
“Helpless creatures? Did she mean Miss Frost’s specimens?”
Gillie scowled, his dark eyebrows swooping together
like two hawks fighting over a morsel. “Aye, she didn’t like to
see the wee lampsprites splayed out like that—I don’t like it
myself. Not that they aren’t dangerous. The sprites have led
many a traveler into harm’s way.” Gillie lifted his dark head
and looked north toward the Blythe Wood. “My job is to go
after the girls that are led astray before they’re caught by the
bigger creatures. There are terrible creatures in the woods,
Miss—goblins that will eat the flesh right off your bones, kelpies that’ll drag you into the river and suck the last breath out
of your gullet, boggarts that’ll . . . well, never mind what the
boggarts will do to you.”
“What about the Darklings?” I blurted out.
Gillie frowned. “Have ye seen one of them?”
I nodded. “Last night on our way back from the Rowan
Circle. One swept down and scared off all the other creatures.”
“If it did that it was because it wanted you to itself. The
Darklings are the worst of all of them put together. Some say
the first Darkling was an angel that fell from heaven for love of
a woman and that’s why they’re so cruel to the lasses.”
“Gillie . . . I found one of their feathers beside my mother
on the day she died. Is it possible—” I stopped, startled by how
Gillie’s face had darkened. Blossom, sensing her master’s distress, ducked her head and hooted.
“They must’ve come for her at last, poor girl. I believe one
caught sight of her in the woods and took a fancy to her. They
say that once one of them demons fixes on a lass it won’t stop
until it has her—or she’s dead. When she went missing that last
year, they all thought she was gone for good, but I wasn’t having that. I went into the woods and found her and brought her
back.”
“You found her?” I asked. “Did she tell you where she’d
been?”
He shook his head. “She wouldn’t say. But I think she’d
been with the Darklings. She . . .” He leaned closer and whispered even though we were alone on the roof except for the
birds. “She had a black feather in her hair. I think she left Blythewood to get away from them creatures, but one must’ve followed her.” Gillie ducked his dark head in the same motion as
Blossom. He even seemed to bristle like a preening bird. “The
monsters must’ve gotten her at last.”

GILLIE’S PRONOUNCEMENT ENDED my first day of
classes on a somber note, but in the days that followed, I was
too busy to brood, on the roof or elsewhere. In Mrs. Moore’s
boarding-school books the girls had plenty of time for cocoa
parties and high jinks. But the teachers at Blythewood gave far
too much homework. Each day was taken up with classes, archery practice, and bell ringing. Each night there was enough
Latin to translate, spells to memorize, potions to learn, and history books to read to keep us swotting till lights out.

Even Miss Sharp, who had given us a break on the first day,
assigned us
Great Expectations
for the first week and
Jane Eyre
for the second. I saved that reading for the last each night so I’d
go to sleep thinking about Jane or Pip instead of Latin spells to
disarm pixies or the secret history of the Crimean War.

If other girls were having difficulty adjusting to this odd
education, they didn’t let on. As for me, there was so much that
was strange and exotic, so much to absorb of the rituals and
mysteries of girls’-school living, that I wasn’t sure what to be
shocked by anymore—that Georgiana Montmorency received
fresh boxes of kid-leather gloves each week because she never
wore a pair twice or that fairies existed? That someone might
take for granted the ability to borrow any book in the world at
any time or that some of those books were grimoires filled with
spells?

Soon I was so caught up in the rhythm of routine at Blythewood that I ceased to wonder at its strangeness and simply
tried to keep up. I could never have done it without Daisy and
Helen. Although Mr. Jager had predicted I had the potential to
excel in magic because I was a chime child, my magical abilities
were unpredictable and volatile. When I tried to make a porcelain figurine come to life it exploded into a million pieces. After
that I was forbidden to try any sympathetic magic for fear that
anyone I bound to an object would get hurt.

“It could be that the earth magic in you is so strong it cancels out all air magic,” Dame Beckwith remarked one day at tea
after I had broken all the teacups in the room.

My friends had clearer and more useful powers. Daisy, we
soon discovered, was not only the best Latin student in our
year, but also had a preternatural ability to memorize any fact
or figure presented to her once.

“I used to memorize all the accounts at Papa’s store,” she
replied after scoring 100s in all our first exams. “Mr. Appleby says I’d make a fine bookkeeper if ever we began our own
business.”

“Mr. Appleby will have to wait for your services,” Helen
declared. “You’re going to be our secret weapon to get through
midterms.”

Helen, although not an exemplary scholar, turned out to be
a Roman general when it came to organizing study sessions.
She enlisted Dolores and Beatrice to help with species classi

“I’m surprised she’s so determined not to fail,” Daisy remarked to me one day when Helen had run down to the lab to
“nick” test tubes and Bunsen burners so we could practice conjuring, and then banishing, a goblin fog. “I thought she hated it
here. If she fails won’t she be able to go back to New York City
for all the dances and parties she’s missing?”

“I don’t think Helen likes to be second best at anything.
You saw her at archery when Charlotte Falconrath shot farther than her.”

Daisy paled at the memory. Miss Swift often called one
of the Dianas from their patrols on the edge of the woods to
demonstrate a particular shot. It annoyed Helen because she
felt that she was good enough at the sport that she should be
called to demonstrate. She tolerated the experience when it was
Andalusia Beaumont, whom even Helen admired, or Natasha
Petrov, a Russian girl whose father had been the gamekeeper
for the tsar. But if it was Charlotte Falconrath or Dorothy Pratt,
both of whom Helen had grown up with, Helen would seethe
with resentment. When Miss Swift asked both Charlotte and
Helen to shoot together to demonstrate a technique for distance shooting and Charlotte’s arrow went a yard farther, Helen stomped across the lawn to retrieve her arrow from the edge
of the woods, past where we were allowed to go.