Hawthorn (5 page)

I looked up from the letter and saw Helen's face shining in the moonlight. She was looking at the long white scroll pinned over Mr. Bellows's desk. The honor roll. In our day—only yesterday for Helen and me but years ago now—the roll had held the names of the students who got a perfect score on the history final. But now the roll held the names of the dead. Henry Higginbottom, Hawthorn Hall '14, fallen at the Marne, August 1914; James Jenkins, Hawthorn Hall '14, fallen at Ypres, October 1914 . . .

The list went on and on.

“All these Hawthorn boys,” I said, reading the names over again as if by memorizing them I could save them. “No wonder Nathan enlisted. He knew them from the summer he spent at Hawthorn. He wouldn't have felt right not joining up.”

“That idiot!” Helen cried, wiping her face. “He must have thought it would be ripping good fun. Look, here's a picture of the Hawthorn Hall class of 1914.” She pointed to a photograph tacked to the corkboard of the castle, our brother school in Scotland, in front of which stood a group of young men in graduation robes. One of them held a placard that read “Class of 1914.” They were all laughing and smiling, their ruddy faces impossibly young. Too young to be heading off to a war in just a few months. I recognized Nathan in the back row.

“Nathan must have transferred to Hawthorn after—”

“After we disappeared.” Helen finished my thought for me.
“Of course. He would have blamed himself for not going with us into the woods. So he went off to Scotland and then off to war to get himself killed. And all because we fell down a hole into Faerie.”

“Helen, we don't know that it would have been any different if we were here. This war”—I waved my hands at the newspaper articles, the maps, the lists of the dead—“was bigger than all of us. Even if we'd been here we couldn't have stopped it.”

Helen's eyes widened and she opened her mouth to say something, but before she could a sound startled both of us. It came from above us, in the bell tower. One of the bells was tolling.

“Come on,” Helen said. “Someone's up there and I've got some questions for them.”

She grabbed the spirit lamp and limped out of the room. Even with her injured ankle it took me a few minutes to catch up with her at the foot of the bell tower stairs. “Helen!” I grabbed her arm. “We don't know who's up there. We have to be careful.”

“Why?” she bit back. “What do we have to lose? We've already lost everything.” She shook off my arm and clumped up the stairs, shouting as she went. “Who's there? In the name of the Order of the Bells I demand you show yourself!”

We reached the landing below the belfry—or what used to be the belfry. Open sky yawned where the six bells of Blythewood once hung. The bells themselves lay on the stairwell in a tumble of molten bronze. I didn't like to imagine the force that could have melted the bells. But I could only make out five bells. The sixth bell was hanging from a platform. Someone had built
a shelter in the ruin of the belfry. It looked like a nest, like Raven's tree house in the woods . . .

I shoved past Helen and scrambled over the barricade of bells. There was a rickety wooden ladder braced against the crumbling stone wall—just like the ladder leading up to Raven's nest. When I put my foot on the first rung, though, what I remembered was Raven lifting me bodily from the roof of the Triangle factory onto the ladder leading to the neighboring roof. I remembered how his hands had felt around my waist—
and
I was remembering that I hadn't seen his name on the list of the dead. And why would I? Darklings didn't fight in human wars. He would have carried the souls of the dead from the battlefield—and then he would have come back to wait for me. Who cared how many years it had been. Darklings were long-lived and even if he were an old man I would love him still.

A burlap sack hung over the opening to the shelter. I pushed it aside—and wings burst over my head. I nearly fell backward but Helen was behind me, steadying me.

“Blodeuwedd!” she cried at the sight of the huge barn owl. A face appeared in the opening, so lined and withered I thought it was a carving in the wood until he opened his mouth and spoke in a thick Scottish brogue I recognized as the voice of Blythewood's caretaker, Gillie.

“Och, my lost lasses,” he crooned. “You've come back at last.”

HELEN PUSHED PAST
me to throw herself into the caretaker's arms. Gillie was slight, but he caught Helen up and held her, patting her awkwardly on the back. “There, there, lass,” he crooned, leading Helen into his little hut. “Gillie won't let no harm come to ye now that yer back.”

I followed them inside and looked around the makeshift shack cobbled together from wood scraps. I thought I recognized the backboard from the hockey goal post and desktops from our classrooms still bearing the carved initials of generations of Blythewood girls. There was barely room in the little hut for tiny Gillie. A bedroll stood in one corner, and there was a camp stove and a lantern, and a chair with torn upholstery, to which he led Helen. When he had her settled, plumping the cushion behind her head and turning the heat up on the stove, he turned to me.

Gillie's face had always struck me as ancient. He
was
ancient. He was a Ghillie Dhu—a sort of woodland elf who returned lost children to their homes. I'd seen his green eyes change color with the weather—and seen the weather change with his moods—but I'd never seen them sunken so deep in his lined face or looking so defeated.

“Ye look just the same as the last day I saw you,” he said, gazing at me.

“It
is
the last day we saw you,” I said. “For us.”

“Ah, you strayed into Faerie, then.” He shook his head and turned to put a kettle on the stove. “'Twas what I told the Dame must have happened. She sent three expedition parties to find you but them that came back said you weren't anywhere to be found.”

“I don't think we were in Faerie
proper—”
I began, but Helen broke in.

“Were people lost looking for us?” she asked.

“Aye, Miles Malmsbury and Euphorbia Frost. Nathan was lost for a while—”

“Nathan went into Faerie looking for us?” Helen's face looked hectic and pink in the stove light.

“Three times. The last time he was gone for two months. When he came back, he was no' the same. He had an idea that he might find ye in Scotland, so he transferred to Hawthorn Hall. Then the war broke out and that gave him something else to fight for . . .” Gillie's voice trailed off and his eyes turned a muddy green.

“We saw the telegram in Mr. Bellows's classroom,” I said, wishing to spare Gillie the burden of having to tell us that Nathan was dead and also to give Helen a moment to regain her composure. “And we saw the newspaper clippings about the war. Tell us what happened. What was the war
for
?”

Gillie shook his head and made the tutting sound he made when some girl left the door to the hawk mews open or did something else foolish. “What's any war for? Some foolishness
in the Balkans started it the summer after you vanished, some addled fool shot the archduke and his lady. Then one thing led to another, one country declarin' against another, then the other taking up arms because they had a treaty with the first. To tell the truth, I found it hard to follow. But before ye could say Jack Flash, the Hun were marching through Belgium into France and then on to England. And they didna march alone; they marched with the shadows.”

“The
tenebrae
?” I asked, feeling a chill. “Do you think van Drood was behind the war?”

“Aye. Although, the Bells know, there's enough evil and foolishness in man to have started the war themselves, but there's no doubt van Drood was spurring it on. The Order sent emissaries to stop him—Professor Jager and his girls to Vienna, Miss Sharp and Miss Corey under cover of driving an ambulance and tending to the wounded—although sure enough they had plenty of real tending to do in the end. Mr. Bellows joined the army and most of the boys from Hawthorn Hall. Our girls, too—Miss Camilla dressed up as a boy and flew fighter planes. Miss Dolores wrote stories for the newspaper. And Miss Daisy—well, you won't hear too much about what she did because it was all secret, but after her feller died—”

“Mr. Appleby?” Helen cried. “Mr. Appleby died?”

“Yes, fallen at the Battle of the Somme. Miss Daisy took it awful bad. I had it from the Dame that Miss Daisy was working for something called ‘Intelligence' and that she went behind enemy lines. She sent back stories that the men in charge were all taken by the shadows and van Drood was running things.”

I was going to ask something about van Drood but Helen
spoke first. “Do you mean to say that Daisy was a spy?” Helen asked.

“Aye,” Gillie said, his eyes gleaming like emeralds. “One of the best! She sent back reports that saved hundred of boys before she fell silent.”

“Fell silent?”

“Aye,” Gillie nodded solemnly. “She must've been caught in the end but they said she never gave up a single name of her fellows.”

“No, she wouldn't.” Helen bit out the words between clenched teeth. “She was the bravest and best of us. What happened to . . . the others?”

“Mr. Bellows was killed on the Somme trying to drag a young soldier back from no-man's-land—that's what they called the bit in between the trenches. Miss Corey and Miss Sharp were running a field hospital when it was bombed. Miss Corey was able to pull Miss Sharp out of the rubble but she was burned something terrible. Miss Corey brought her back to Violet House to mend, but then the fight came here.”

“Came here? But why? What did America have to do with the war?”

“Naught at first. She stayed out of it until the Germans sunk one of her ships. But then, just before we entered the fight, the Germans joined with Mexico and sent great machines over the border. Tanks, they call 'em. Great iron monsters. I know it were the shadows that made them. Then the airships came, raining fire from the sky. They attacked New York—”

“New York!” Helen cried. “How dare they!” But then her outrage turned to fear. “Oh, Gillie, do you know what
happened to my mother . . .” Her voice cracked. Helen only ever complained about her mother, but in that instant I saw how much she loved her. I squeezed her hand. I didn't like how Gillie was looking at Helen.

“I'm sorry, lass. Your mother was so upset at your vanishing she took sick. The doctors' bills used up the last of her savings. Mrs. Hall—your grandmother, Ava—took her in.” He looked at me, his eyes the deep green of fathomless depths. “They were both killed in the first bombing of New York.”

“But couldn't the Order do anything?” I demanded, trying not to picture my grandmother and Mrs. van Beek crushed under the rubble of that marble mausoleum on Fifth Avenue. “They built that machine in the Woolworth Building—”

“Aye, we thought we could protect the city with that gadget, but van Drood was able to worm his way into our ranks and take over the Woolworth Building and use our own weapons against us. And there he sits today, like a fat spider at the center of his web surrounded by the corpses of his prey, ruling over a dead city—”

“A dead city—New York?” I cried, remembering the city in all its varied life from the teeming streets of the Lower East Side to the throngs of shoppers on Ladies' Mile to the well-dressed promenaders in Central Park. “Is everybody there dead, then?”

Gillie turned to me and I saw something I'd never seen before. His eyes that ranged through every shade of green had turned a milky white as if whatever he was picturing had blinded him. “As good as,” he said. “The ones taken by the shadows do his bidding and live in his towers, but the others—”

Gillie stopped abruptly and cocked his head like
Blodeuwedd listening for a mouse. I opened my Darkling ears and heard a low hum that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Gillie leapt up, transformed from old man to agile elf, and extinguished the lamp and stove. He shoved Helen and me both down to the floor. The hum had become a roar like a train bearing down on us. The noise scraped at my Darkling ears like iron claws, silencing even the toll of my inner bell. It was trying to get inside my brain and scoop out everything that made me human. A ghastly white light sliced through the cracks in the roof, crazed beams skittering over Gillie's nest as if looking for us. I shrank from the light as if its very touch might burn.

Looking up through a gap in the ceiling I saw that something had blotted out the stars. It looked like a giant black crow, razor-sharp claws extended to grab us, beak open to eat us. I squinted against the glare and saw that it was a zeppelin painted like a crow. The searchlights came through the crow's eyes. “Who . . . what . . . ?” I whispered.

“Scavengers,” Gillie hissed. “They comb the ruins looking for survivors and scrape you clean of everything that made you what you were—hope, love, laughter—and leave a hollowed husk behind, biddable slaves who work in van Drood's factories.”

“Factories?” I asked. “What kind of factories?”

“Great sprawling monsters full of gears and motors. The workers are chained to their machines and worked until their fingers bleed.”

A vision rose in my head of a dream I'd had when I was a prisoner in Bellevue after the Triangle fire—a hallucination from the drugs Dr. Pritchard gave me—or so I'd thought. In it
I was back at the Triangle factory seated at my sewing machine sewing sleeves. When I looked down the long table I saw that the girl next to me, and all the girls at the impossibly long table, were sewing their own flesh to the machines. Their blood filled the long trough in the middle of the table and ran down to the end where van Drood sat, mouth open, drinking the girls' blood.

I snapped out of the vision. “But why?” I cried. “What does van Drood get out of such a world?”

“He gets his way,” Gillie said darkly, the blank white of his eyes mercifully snapping back to an angry acid green. “When he was a teacher here he had an awful time controlling the girls. They can be right mischievous sometimes, especially when they smell fear on a new teacher. They'd laugh at him and pull pranks, and argue when they didna want to do the work. Well now, in this world he's created, no one ever laughs or pulls pranks or argues. Neither do they love or dream. As for whether he's happy sitting up there in his tower I canna say . . . ah, there are the lads!”

Through the mind-numbing hum I heard a sharp whistle. Above the zeppelin two winged shapes appeared. My heart wrenched at the sight. Darklings. They weren't all dead. Gillie hadn't said anything about Raven. He might still be alive. But if he were one of these Darklings, he might not be alive much longer. The zeppelin's searchlights had swung around, trying to catch them in their glare, but the Darklings darted through the air, nimbly evading the scorching light. I had a glimpse of two Darklings—a male and a female—and then the sky exploded
in ugly yellow phosphorous that smelled like rotten eggs and burnt feathers. I started to cry out but Gillie clamped his hand over my mouth.

“It's all right, lass, the Darklings are too quick for the scavengers. Look.” He pointed toward the river where the two Darklings were silhouetted against the sparkling water. The zeppelin was moving toward them. “They've led them away. They'll lead them on a merry chase now, up and down the river. Last month they lured one out to the Shawangunks and crashed it into the ridge. We'll be safe now for a bit.” Gillie helped Helen up into her chair and turned the stove back on.

“Did the Darklings fight in the war?” Helen asked.

“Aye, some did. Some joined the human armies and others worked in secret to sabotage the enemy. These fellows protect the few of us that are left.” Gillie handed Helen and me our tea in cracked teacups with the Bell and Feather emblem. He poured some condensed milk from a can and started to open a can of beans, but then looked up and grinned. “Och, here comes the rest of our tea now.”

Blodeuwedd had returned with a squirrel dangling limp from her talons. “Thank ye, girl,” Gillie said, taking the squirrel and holding it up in the lamplight. Catching sight of Helen's stricken face he chuckled. “Or perhaps ye'd rather a biscuit? I have a few left from Miss Hattie.”

“Miss Hattie is still alive?” I asked, trying to imagine the elderly lady living in these conditions. As grief-stricken as I was about my grandmother I couldn't imagine
her
living on squirrels.

“Aye, she and Miss Emmy take in refugees at Violet House
and transmit wireless messages to other outposts of the Order. We have no' given up yet, lasses, only—” Gillie's face grew darker. “Only there are fewer and fewer of us holding out and more and more of them. The Dame thinks that van Drood must have found the third vessel and released the last of the shadows and that's why the war's gone so bad.” Gillie lowered his voice. “There's a legend that the last of the vessels contained the most evil of the shadows—the nastiest bits of evil, the ones that drain a person of all hope—and that when they were released the balance between good and evil tipped over to the bad.”