Blythewood (26 page)

Daisy also seemed possessed by a new fervor after her “revolt” in Miss Frost’s class. “Are there any books by Sir Malmsbury?” she asked Miss Corey one day as the latter was helping
Miss Sharp pick out books for a class project.

“Why yes,” Miss Corey replied. “I’ll get them for you as
soon as I’ve done helping Vi—er . . . Miss Sharp.”
“I’ll fetch them,” Nathan volunteered, jumping to his feet
and opening the trapdoor mechanism.
“Well, um . . .” Miss Corey hesitated until Miss Sharp laid
her hand on hers and asked whether the library had a copy of
the secret fairy journals of Charlotte Brontë. Nate used her distraction to head down by himself and emerged some time later
covered by dust and bearing a collection of leather-bound journals, which Daisy eagerly dived into.
Even Helen gave up complaining about missing the New
York season and applied herself to all her studies. I suspected
that it was not from love of poring over old books, which often made her sneeze and which she complained soiled her nice
clothes, but from the time she got to spend with Nathan. Just as
I suspected that Mr. Bellows’s enthusiasm for spending time in
the library stemmed in equal parts from scholarly ardor and the
glow of Vionetta Sharp’s smile when he brought her, as he did
almost every day, a bouquet of violets from town. I think we all
basked in that glow.
While Miss Corey and Nathan brought the books out from
the Special Collections Room, Miss Sharp would stir the coals
in the grate and put a kettle on for tea. She seemed at those
moments like some ancient goddess of the hearth—the Greek
Hestia, or Roman Vesta, or one of the Scottish hearth hobs we
learned about in Miss Frost’s class, fairies who lived in fireplaces. The honey-colored light that streamed in through the
leaded glass windows bathed her face and turned her hair to liquid gold. As she handed out the teacups she had a kind word for
each of us. As we read she would come around to refill our cups,
tuck a shawl around Miss Corey’s shoulders, brush crumbs off
Mr. Bellows’s jacket, save Helen’s sleeve from an ink spill, tuck
an errant pin into my hair, feed Nathan a biscuit, and straighten
Daisy’s collar—all her motions binding us in a warm glow that
lessened the gloom of what we were reading.
The books Nathan brought us to read were all the ones that
dealt with shadow attacks on the Order. There were many. The
prioress of a Benedictine convent wrote in the fourteenth century that just before the Black Death ravaged the neighboring
village she spied a murder of crows perched on the town walls,
and that when she ordered the bell ringers to toll a peal they
melted away “like smudges of ash” only to be replaced by a single figure of a winged man.
In a fifteenth-century bestiary I found a reference to “a
Darknesse of Shadoes” next to an illustration of rats melting
into black puddles. In the margin of the text was a drawing of
a winged man. The scribe had written next to it “Angel or Shadoe?”
My circle of friends and teachers may have made it easier
to deal with this grim material during the day, but at night
the images—of crows flaking into ash and rats melting into
puddles—made their way into my dreams. Worse, the images
reversed themselves. I would be walking down Fifth Avenue
with my mother, her boot heels clicking on slick cobblestones,
and then her boot would land in a puddle and the puddle would
turn into a nest of rats that swarmed over her, carrying her
away from me. Or I was at the Triangle Waist factory, sitting
next to Tillie, large flakes of ash floating through the air. When
I looked up from my sewing and looked at Tillie I saw that the
ash had turned to bats, which clung to her, sucking the blood
from her veins. They were swarming over all the girls, tangled
in their hair, I felt them in my hair, too, crawling over my skin.
I would wake up in a cold sweat, batting at the empty air.
One night I awoke and heard a pattering on the windowpanes above my bed. Shadows flitted over the glass. I lay for
a moment, very still, watching the shadows moving, feeling a
cold dread creeping over me as I grew sure that they had come
for me because I was part of them. The girl who went to classes, and laughed with her new friends, and worked so hard to
impress her teachers was an illusion—a trick of the daylight.
I didn’t really belong at Blythewood. The real Avaline was the
girl who carried laudanum home to her mother and worked
in a factory. The real Avaline belonged in the Pavilion for the
Insane. The real Avaline dreamed of monsters and
longed
for
them. I belonged to the shadows and now they had come to take
me back. I had only to lie still and they would take me.
A floorboard creaked, breaking my frozen spell. Daisy
was standing beside my bed, her long white nightgown spattered with the moving shadows. I sat up to warn her away, but
she was already crouching on my bed, her face pressed to the
window.
“Look!” she whispered. “It’s snowing!”
I crouched beside her and looked out. Fat snowflakes
swirled through the night, lit by a half-hidden moon. Already
the lawn was covered with a glittering white blanket. The hedges and statues in the garden had been transformed into fanciful ice sculptures, the great pine trees at the edge of the woods
mantled in white looked like women in ermine cloaks.
“Isn’t it . . .
magical
?” Daisy asked in a hushed voice.
“Yes,” I agreed. More than all the spells and potions and
bell changes we had learned,
this
felt like the true magic of Blythewood, as if a bit of Faerie dust had blown out of the woods
and spread itself across the school grounds. Seeing the school
like this felt like seeing its secret self. It made me feel like I belonged here.
But even that magic had its dark side.
In the morning Miss Swift, accompanied by Gillie and a
hooded falcon, roused us all from our dorm rooms to gather
on the lawn near the edge of the woods for a “tracking class.”
There in the pristine white snow we found the cloven hoof
marks of centaurs, the long clawed scratches of goblins, and,
most frightening of all, a trail of blood that ended with a long
black feather.
“As we approach the winter solstice we must all be on our
guard,” she lectured us. “Like All Hallows’ Eve, the solstice is
a time when the barriers between the worlds grow thin. Fairies and demons slip though the gap and venture into our world.
They’re particularly brazen at this time of year and use the
snow as cover for their incursions. Observe.”
She nodded to Gillie and he removed the hood from the falcon’s head. Immediately the bird was alert, eyes searching the
ground. She cocked her head and strained at her jesses. Gillie
made a clicking sound in his throat that sounded just like the
falcon’s trill, and released her. She flew straight off his hand
and dove into the snow. She came up almost immediately with
something in her talons. Gillie cast a feathered lure down to
distract the bird away from her prey and quickly scooped up the
struggling animal when the falcon released it.
Only it wasn’t an animal. It was a tiny winged sprite like
the ones Miss Frost kept pinned in her classroom—but alive.
This one was covered in white down and had blue eyes. Gillie
cupped it in his gloved hands as it beat its wings furiously.
“Who can identify it?” Miss Swift demanded.
“
Lychnobia riparia
,” Daisy said breathlessly, “commonly
known as a hyter sprite. They can transform themselves into
birds—usually sand martins. Native to East Anglia. There’s a
legend that they lead stray children home.”
Miss Swift snorted. “Completely erroneous, as are all such
legends of fairies helping children. There’s a similar story about
your namesake, eh, Gillie?”
“Aye,” Gillie answered hoarsely. “The Ghillie Dhu was said
to find lost children and lead them home, just like the hyter
sprites. This one is just a wee thing. Shall I let it go?”
“And let it tunnel its way through the snow into the castle?
That’s what they do. They get into the root cellar and granary
and eat up all the oats and apples.
Vermin
.” She sniffed. “I’m
sure Miss Frost will be happy to have it as a specimen. Bag it
and give it to Daisy to bring to her.”
Gillie lifted his black eyes up to Miss Swift. For a moment
I saw a flash of green in them and his hands opened to let the
sprite out, but when it tried to fly up it landed with a thud back
in his hands. “It’s broken its wing,” he said sadly, “and probably
wouldna last the winter.” He took a soft leather sack out of his
hunting bag, popped it over the sprite’s head, tied the sack shut,
and handed it to a wide-eyed Daisy.
“Make sure Miss Frost is quick about it,” he said gruffly.
Then he whistled for his falcon and stomped off in the snow.
Miss Swift rolled her eyes. “Very well. I suppose it’s time for us
all to go. Class dismissed.”
I walked back to the castle between Helen and Daisy, Helen
complaining about the cold and being up so early she hadn’t
had a chance to curl her hair, Daisy cradling the bag holding
the condemned hyter sprite in her arms. When we got to the
house, Daisy suddenly wheeled on Helen.
“How can you go on about your hair when this poor creature is about to die?” she cried.
Then before Helen or I could say anything she ran toward
the North Wing classrooms, sobbing.
“What’s wrong with her?” Helen asked. “It’s not like the
lampsprite’s
human
.”
“Do we really know that?” I asked. “I mean, no, they’re not
human
, but they’re not animals either. The reason Miss Frost
hates them so much is because she blames them for leading Sir
Malmsbury astray.”
“Well, not that I generally agree with Miss Frost, but she
does have a point here. The important thing to remember is
that these creatures are not like us.”
I stared at Helen, who had paused by a gilded mirror to fuss
with her hair. “And just because someone is not like you, that
means it’s okay to torture and kill them?”
“Oh please, now you sound like those horrible radicals
preaching from their soapboxes in Union Square.”
“Some of those ‘horrible radicals’ were my friends,” I said,
thinking of Tillie, “and the people who they were speaking up
for were people like my mother and me and all the girls at the
Triangle.”
Helen made a face in the mirror. “Everyone agrees that the
Triangle fire was most regrettable.”
“
Most regrettable?
” I cried. “You make it sound like a failed
tea party. Girls were burned alive and all because no one cared
enough about their lives to install proper fire escapes or trusted
them enough to leave the doors unlocked—”
“Well,” a voice came from behind me, “girls like that
do
steal. We had a maid once who stole my pearl earrings.”
I turned and found Georgiana Montmorency standing
with a cluster of girls. My argument with Helen had drawn a
little crowd. These were the same girls who had cheered me a
few weeks ago, but there were all looking at me queerly now.
“I had no idea you worked as a seamstress, Ava,” Georgiana
said, raising her eyebrows at Alfreda and Wallis. The rest of
the girls were staring at me as if I’d suddenly sprouted horns.
It was the way they looked at the lampsprites when they examined them. A factory girl was as much a different species as a
lampsprite in their eyes. Georgiana, seeing that the tide of public opinion had turned against me, smiled sweetly. “I have some
shirtwaists that need mending if you’re looking to earn some
extra money. Who knows? Perhaps they were made by your
friends at the Triangle. I’m afraid they’re rather slipshod.”
I don’t know why this insult was the one that finally broke
me. I heard the bass bell in my head and instead of trying to
slow it I made it speed up and, somehow, I made it change tone
until it was a high screech inside my head. The mirror behind
Helen shattered. I turned to see if Helen was all right. Glass
shards glittered in her hair like new-fallen snow. Her eyes were
wide and frightened. She was looking at me as if she saw a monster. I couldn’t blame her; it’s what I felt like. I turned and fled,
the other girls scattering away from me in fear, and ran blindly
through the halls until I turned a corner and ran into Nathan.
“Ah, Ava, I was looking for you . . .” He stopped when he
saw the tears streaming from my face.
“Why?” I cried. “Do you have some mending for me to do?
Or do you want a display of my freakish powers?”
He stared at me, open-mouthed, and then slowly smiled.
“Neither,” he answered. “I want to show you a display of
my
freakish powers.” Then he grabbed my hand and dragged me
into the empty library and before I could protest he opened the
trapdoor behind the fireplace and started dragging me down
the spiral stairs.
“Where are we going?” I asked. “We’re not allowed down
here without a teacher.”
Nathan snorted. “Do you really care what anyone here
thinks after the way they’ve talked about you?”
“You heard them?” I asked, glad that he was ahead of me on
the dark stairs and couldn’t see the blood rise to my face.
“Helen’s little lecture on social inferiors and Georgiana’s
offer for you to slave over her blouses for a few pennies? Yes.
I heard that and much more. You think these girls are your
friends just because they smile to your face? Do you think
they’ll ever see you as an equal?”
We’d come to the corridor at the bottom of the stairs. Nathan held up his lantern in front of the wall, lighting up a row of
filing cabinets. “Do you know what these are?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Genealogical records,” he replied. “The Order has kept
track of the bloodlines of their members since the original six
sisters and six knights. They’ve made careful notes of abilities
and flaws so that they could breed a better warrior. Why do you
think Sir Malmsbury studied lampsprites? So he could understand how to breed people.”
“That’s . . . that’s . . .”
“Disgusting? Heartless?”
I nodded, dumbstruck.
“Yes, but can you tell me you’re really surprised, with all
Helen’s silly blather about marriage and finding a suitable husband?”
“But what about girls like Daisy?”
“Outsiders? They bring them in when they find a desirable
trait to introduce into the stock. If Daisy is deemed acceptable
after three years here, she’ll find herself matched up to a proper boy from Hawthorn. If not, well . . . the Order isn’t totally
heartless. They offer her employment.”