Blythewood (21 page)

IT COULD HAVE been any man wearing the same outfit as
my pursuer in the city, I reasoned with myself as I followed Mr.
Bellows and my roommates through the residential streets of
Rhinebeck. Lots of men no doubt wore the Inverness cape, a
style made popular by the illustrations in Mr. Conan Doyle’s
detective stories. It was none of my business if Miss Frost chose
to meet one at the tavern in the middle of the day. As for Nathan
being there . . . although I’d like to ask if he’d noticed the man
drinking with Miss Frost, he’d probably interpret the question
as a criticism—and then ask me what
I
was doing in the village
instead of studying.

Shaking off the gloom the sight of that Inverness cape had
cast over me, I focused on my surroundings instead. The village
streets of Rhinebeck were lined with regal maple trees, their
last red and gold leaves drifting down into the gardens of pretty
Victorian houses painted in cheerful colors. I noticed, too, that
many of the houses had their own glass greenhouses. So many
sparkling glass roofs made the village appear to be a crystal
fairy-land.

“Many of the residents have taken up the cultivation of violets,” I heard Mr. Bellows explain to Helen and Daisy, “but none
are so devoted as the Misses Sharp.”

“Sharp?” I asked, catching up with my companions. “Are
they relations of our Miss Sharp?”
“Her aunts. That’s where I’ve been invited to tea . . . ah, and
here we are. As you can see, they’re so enamored of the
Viola
odorata
, commonly known as the sweet violet, that they have
painted their house in its colors.”
Mr. Bellows waved his hand in a flourish toward a gabled
Italianate house painted in a rich violet hue, its molding and
verge board trim painted white and yellow like the center of a
violet. Two black cast-iron urns overflowing with unseasonably blooming violets stood on either side of the front door.
A glass conservatory on the side of the house sparkled in the
sunshine.
“Come along,” Mr. Bellows said, opening up the front gate
and leading us up a path bordered on both sides by banks of
more violets blooming out of season. “Tea at Violet House is
usually around four o’clock.”
“Won’t Miss Sharp’s aunts mind unexpected guests?”
Helen asked in a worried tone, which I guessed had more to do
with the fear that Miss Sharp would reprimand us for leaving
the school than the impropriety of showing up unannounced
for tea. I’d noticed that Miss Sharp was the only teacher whose
opinion mattered to Helen.
“I don’t think so,” Mr. Bellows said, turning and frowning
at Helen. “I rather get the idea that the household is run on . . .
er . . . rather spontaneous principles.”
As if to illustrate that point, a gentleman in a rumpled
cream-colored linen suit and broad-rimmed hat wandered out
of the back garden at that moment, a book in one hand and a
violet-patterned teacup in the other.
“Is it time for tea?” he inquired of Mr. Bellows. “I’m afraid
my clock has stopped.” He removed a small brass-plated clock
from his jacket pocket and shook it. “Blasted thing! I was waiting for the bells to set it—” Just then the church bells began to
ring the hour. “Ah, there they are! Do you know the rhyme?

“Oranges and lemons
Say the bells of St. Clement’s
You owe me five farthings
Say the bells of St. Martin’s.”

Mr. Bellows eagerly chimed in. The two men walked up the
porch steps, trading verses of the rhyme as the church bells
tolled.

“‘And here comes a chopper to chop off your head’!” the
gentleman in white concluded triumphantly just as the front
door was opened by Vionetta Sharp.

“Uncle always has to have the last line,” Miss Sharp said.
“Don’t you, Uncle Taddie?” She gave him the sort of indulgent
smile one might give a child.

“I’ve brought my teacup,” Uncle Taddie said, handing Miss
Sharp the violet-patterned cup. “Emmy says I can’t have any
more tea if I don’t bring back the cups.”

“That’s perfectly right, Uncle, as we would soon run out of
cups if they all remained in the tower with you, and then we
wouldn’t be able to have these lovely young women for tea.”

“I found these three wandering the streets of the village
being accosted by drunken sailors,” Mr. Bellows announced
rather loudly. I guessed that he had been composing the speech
while walking here. “I thought it best to bring them along. I
brought these, too,” he added in a lower voice, thrusting the
bouquet of violets toward Miss Sharp.

“Rather like bringing coals to Newcastle,” a female voice
remarked. The door opened wider and Miss Corey appeared.
She was wearing a white lace tea dress rather than her usual
plain shirtwaist and skirt, and a straw hat rather than the heavy
cloche she usually wore. Although she still wore a veil, it was
a lighter one, a rose-colored net that cast only a faint shadow
over her face.

“Oh, Miss Corey,” Mr. Bellows said in a subdued tone, “I
didn’t know you’d be here.”
“Nor I you,” Miss Corey replied primly. “And I certainly
didn’t expect to see any Blythewood girls. They’re not supposed
to leave the school grounds without permission, and I’m quite
sure no one would have given them permission on Halloween.”
“Well, now that they have they might as well have tea,”
Miss Sharp said, smiling, and then, in a lower, more ominous
tone, added, “It will be better if we walk them back.” Then she
relieved Mr. Bellows of the bouquet as we stepped into a foyer
paved with lilac and jonquil-yellow tiles and dominated by an
enormous grandfather clock. She held the flowers to her nose
and inhaled deeply.
“Ah, Parma violets, my favorite. Aunt Emmaline won’t
grow them because of an unpleasant incident with an Italian
prince that occurred in Naples on her grand tour. I shall secrete
them away until it is time to go.” She slipped the violets into a
carpetbag that stood on a marble-topped table. “Come along.
Tea is served in the conservatory.”
Miss Sharp led us to a glass-roofed room on the side of the
house. Although it was a brisk fall day outside, the room was
as warm as the tropics. Potted palms and aspidistras filled the
corners of the room, ferns trailed from baskets hanging from
the glass ceiling, and pots of violets stood on every available
surface along with a great assortment of framed pictures and
clocks. Brightly colored birds flitted inside wire cages or darted
freely amongst the ferns and palm trees. Although the room
was as cluttered as my grandmother’s parlor in New York City,
it was a great deal cheerier—and the plump woman in lavender silk and mauve lace sitting in a high-backed wicker chair,
although around the same age as my grandmother, was a great
deal more welcoming.
“I knew there would be unexpected guests for tea,” she
cried out at the sight of us. “Didn’t I say so, Hattie?” she asked
a tiny birdlike woman perched on a footstool to her right. The
tiny woman—she was so small I wondered if she wasn’t a species of fairy—looked up from her needlepoint and nodded.
“You did, and I promptly told the cook to make extra
sandwiches and Victoria sponge cake, as you are always right
about such things.” She turned and looked over her beak-like
nose at us.
“My sister Emmaline predicted the stock market crash of
ninety-three and had father move all our holdings into gold.
Come sit down, children. Doris will be in with the tea in a moment. We always have tea at four.”
She glanced up at an imposing grandfather clock, the kind
that has a sun and a moon that move around with the hour. This
one also had a dial painted with an apple tree in varying stages
of foliage—bare, budding, fully leaved, and blazing red—to
represent the seasons. According to the clock it was a quarter
past two, in the middle of the night, in the summer.
“Oh dear, that one’s wrong,” Aunt Harriet said, glancing
at a smaller clock on the mantelpiece, which said that it was
half past six. “Our father was an horologist, you see. He made
beautiful, rather complicated clocks, but since he passed away
we haven’t been able to figure out how to keep the clocks going right. But never mind—the church bells have just gone four
o’clock. Doris will be in soon.”
We sat and introduced ourselves to Miss Sharp’s two aunts.
“I believe we are fifth cousins on the maternal side with your
uncle Hector,” Aunt Harriet remarked to Helen.
To me Aunt Emmaline mentioned she’d been at Blythewood with my grandmother. “She was an excellent archer.”
By the time the tea trolley was rolled in by Doris—an ancient woman even older than the two sisters—it was clear that
the Sharp sisters were well acquainted with Blythewood’s secret, but that their brother Thaddeus was not. Or at least the
sisters preferred to think he was not. Whenever a detail about
the school was brought up the sisters lowered their voices to a
conspiratorial whisper and bent their heads together, but because they were both a little deaf they spoke so loudly anyone
could have heard them.
“Is Euphorbia Frost still teaching deportment?” Aunt Emmaline asked loudly, and then in an equally loud whispered
aside to her sister, “And still preaching about the evils of fraternizing with F-A-I-R-I-E-S?”
“As if any fairy would be caught dead fraternizing with
her.” Aunt Harriet chuckled.
I glanced at Uncle Taddie and saw that he was following
the conversation avidly as he stuffed cucumber sandwiches
into his mouth, his eyes bright as the hummingbird that had
alighted to drink from a saucer of sugar water Aunt Harriet
had put out. Did the two women really think he wasn’t in on
the secret? Miss Sharp gave her aunts a warning look when
Emmaline tried to ask Daisy if she’d seen any lampsprites
in the woods, and steered the conversation to more neutral
topics, such as the new archery equipment ordered by Miss
Swift and a concert program being organized by Mr. Peale for
Christmas.
Eventually lulled by this conversation—and the copious
quantities of tea sandwiches, scones with clotted cream, and
sponge cake—Taddie fell into a doze and began to snore. Taking that as a signal to abandon all caution, Emmaline leaned
forward and asked us all what kind of fairies we’d seen on our
first night and whether we’d caught sight of any since then.
Daisy, who was the best at the classifications we memorized in
Miss Frost’s class, listed off the species we’d encountered so far.
“Lampsprites, horn goblins, piskies, fenodorees . . .”
“Any boggarts or boggles in the house?” Harriet interrupted.
“In the house?” Daisy asked, alarmed. “What do you mean,
in the house? The bells keep all the fairies out and the Dianas
patrol the grounds  .  .  .” She faltered and Emmaline smiled
craftily.
“Ah, you see, why would the Dianas have to patrol if the
bells kept all the fairies out?”
“It’s because the bells don’t work on all the fairies,” Harriet
said. “In our time there was a boggle living in the pantry. The
cook tolerated it because it kept out the mice, but it also liked to
play tricks on the girls.”
“We’d wake up with cattails braided in our hair and our
shoes full of tadpoles,” Emmaline said, her eyes shining.
“It was a marsh boggle,” Harriet explained. “It only did that
to girls it liked.”
“But I thought all the fairies were evil!” Daisy cried. “That’s
what Dame Beckwith told us. And that’s what we learn in Miss
Frost’s class.” Daisy’s voice shook when she mentioned Miss
Frost. I knew she hated looking at the specimens.
“Of course that’s what they teach you.” Harriet patted
Daisy on the hand and offered her a plate of bread and butter. “The mission of Blythewood is to protect the world from
the creatures who wander out of Faerie. India thinks it would
be confusing to teach that there are gradations among the fay
from innocent mischief-making to unadulterated evil. And as
for Euphorbia Frost—well, she wouldn’t have the imagination
to conceive of gradations of good and evil in her narrow worldview, let alone differences among the individuals of any one
species. She’s a very closed-minded person who worshipped
her mentor, Sir Miles Malmsbury, and slavishly adheres to the
old ways, which teach us that
all
fairies are evil and that in order
to destroy them we must obey a set of rigid rules invented in the
fifteenth century!”
“You mustn’t get so upset, Hattie,” Emmaline cut in. “You’ll
bring on another bout of dyspepsia. My sister feels things very
strongly,” she explained to us. “And some of the Order’s rules
are rather . . .
limiting
.”
“Limiting?” Harriet spluttered. “Try draconian! Their
rules on marriage, for instance . . .”
“I’m sure these girls are not old enough to be worried about
marriage yet, Aunt,” Miss Sharp said with a warning look at
her aunt. And then to us: “My grandfather Thaddeus Sharp began to question the old ways before he died.”
“He believed that young people ought to be trusted with the
truth,” Aunt Harriet averred with a thump of her walking stick.
“I agree entirely,” Mr Bellows said, jostling the teacup on
his knee in his excitement. “As a historian I am committed to
the truth. I believe our girls are mature and intelligent enough
to appreciate shades of gray. I was shocked to learn that there are
certain books in the library that are removed from the shelves
to keep students from reading them.” He cast a reproachful
look at Miss Corey.
“Don’t look at me,” she said, her veil trembling. “It’s not my
choice. If it were up to me I’d make all information available to
every student. But the Council tells me every year what books I
must place in the Special Collections Room.”
“
That’s
what’s in the Special Collections?” Helen asked. “I
thought it was a bunch of moldering antiques.”
“Many of them
are
moldering,” Miss Corey replied, “but
most are there because they are deemed too . . .
controversial
for
students.”
“What controversy?” I asked, recalling the discussions I’d
overheard Agnes having with Caroline Janeway and Vionetta
Sharp and how Agnes had looked bitter when she referred to
the “old ways.” What I really wanted to ask was whether their
father had thought the Darklings were completely evil, but Uncle Taddie chose that moment to snort loudly and startle awake.
The aunts exchanged a look and Emmaline asked Taddie if he
wouldn’t mind going into the greenhouse and gathering three
poesies “for the girls before they left.” When he’d gone Aunt
Emmaline told us Taddie’s story.
“As we mentioned before, my father believed that young
people ought to be trusted with the truth, so even though Taddie was deemed too frail to attend Blythewood—let alone Hawthorne—our father took him into the Wood for the initiation.
Taddie became so frightened that he ran off and was lost in
the woods for three days. When we found him he was quite . . .
distracted
. He never would say what happened to him and he
was never the same again. We try not to talk about the fairies
around him. The incident quite devastated Mother and had unfortunate consequences for us all.” She looked nervously at her
sister, who was suddenly intent on tidying the tea things, and
then continued. “Of course Father couldn’t very well continue
proposing that Blythewood change their policies when his own
son had been so . . . damaged by his encounters with the wee
folk.”
“Unfortunately there are scores of such incidents recorded
in the annals,” Miss Corey said to Aunt Emmaline. “As I’ve said
before, I’d be happy to do some research into what treatments
have proved useful in handling such cases.”
Aunt Emmaline sighed. “That’s very considerate of you,
dear, but Father brought Taddie to all the experts in Europe.
He spent a year at a sanatorium in Marienbad that specializes
in
psychical traumata
brought on by encounters with the fay. It
only made him worse. What calms him now are working with
the violets and tinkering with Father’s old clocks—although,
frankly, I’m afraid that he’s made rather a mess with the clocks.
I believe Father was attempting something more complicated
than telling time, but I don’t think anyone else will ever figure
out exactly what he was doing with them . . . Oh, here’s Taddie
now. What lovely poesies you’ve brought for the girls, Taddie!”
Uncle Taddie presented us each with a bouquet of violets
surrounded by heart-shaped leaves and bound with lilac ribbon. Taking this—and Mr. Bellows’ anxious consultations of
his pocket watch—as a cue to leave, we made our farewells.
Aunt Emmaline gave us each a parcel of cakes to take back
with us and told us not to mind what her sister Hattie had said
about boggles. “I’m sure they’re better about keeping them out
these days, although you need to be especially careful tonight
because of its being All Hallows’ Eve. You’d best hurry back before nightfall.”
Before we left, Emmaline pulled me aside in the foyer and
whispered to me, “You’re a chime child just like me, aren’t you?”
“How . . . ?”
“One chime child can always recognize another once you’ve
learned how to use the bells . . . but you haven’t learned yet, have
you? You come see me one day and I’ll show you how to find an
object to focus the bells.”
I thanked her and said I would like that. Then I hurried after my party, who were being escorted down the path by Uncle
Taddie. He seemed sad to see us go, and I half thought he might
follow us back to the school. But when we got to the gate the
church bells began to ring the hour and he froze on the path as
if they were the signal to go no farther. Nodding his head, he
held one finger up and recited a rhyme to go with the rhythm of
the bells. I did not think that this verse was part of the original
poem, though.