Blythewood (17 page)

“I didn’t even know it was a real thing,” I objected. “I thought
if was just a fancy of my mother’s. How do you know about
them? I thought you didn’t know anything about the magical
side of Blythewood before you got here.”

“
Everyone’s
heard of the chime children!” she said, as if
I’d expressed ignorance of which fork to use with salad. “My
mother and her friends always compared what time their children were born. It was considered lucky to be born at the stroke
of
any
hour—I was born at precisely four just as tea was being
served—but most lucky to be born at midnight.”

“I don’t see how it’s lucky,” I said, noting the stares of a
group of girls going into Miss Frost’s class. “I hear these bells
in my head and see . . .
awful
things.”

“Oh well, that does sound unpleasant, but I’m sure they’ll
teach you how to control it here. Can you”—she pulled me
aside at the door to Miss Frost’s class—“read people’s minds?”

Helen looked disappointed. “That’s too bad. Maybe you
can learn.”
“Would you like me to know what you’re thinking all the
time?” I asked.
Her blue eyes widened and she blushed. “Oh, I suppose not.
Not that I ever think anything improper.” Her blush deepened.
It occurred to me that it might be entertaining to
pretend
to
Helen I could read her mind, but before I could imply the possibility, Sarah Lehman poked her head out of the classroom.
“This is the last class you want to be late for,” Sarah hissed.
“Trust me!”
Helen rolled her eyes. “I don’t even understand what deportment can possibly have to do with our mission. And it’s not
as if
I
need any training on the arts of social courtesy.”
I, too, had wondered what the deportment teacher could
possibly have to share with us, but I soon learned that the world
of Faerie was governed by etiquette rules even stricter than
those of New York society and that it was Miss Frost’s role to
enlighten us to the nature and habits of the indigenous species
as though she were instructing a group of missionaries about
to embark on a trip to the Amazonian jungle, with the aim that
we not get eaten by the natives. Lecturing in front of a deep
burgundy curtain, she informed us that the fairies loathed the
name “fairy” and would attack anyone calling them thus.
“They prefer to be called ‘the good neighbors,’ ‘the old folk,’
or, my personal favorite, ‘the gentry.’ The best way to gain control over a fairy, though, is to call it by its species name. That
will stun it so completely you will have time to either run away
or shoot it with an arrow. So, it is very important to learn the
different types of fairy. For that purpose I have collected an array of . . . ahem!” Miss Frost cleared her throat while glaring at
Sarah, who got up from her seat and dutifully approached one
side of the burgundy curtains. “An array of specimens!” Miss
Frost declared, with a flourish of her be-ringed hands.
The curtains swung open to reveal a glass-fronted bookshelf filled with colorful objects. The whole back wall seemed
to be papered with a design of multihued butterfly wings that
was reflected in an assortment of glass jars and trays. “You may
find it hard to believe, but in my youth I was an avid naturalist and collector. Many of these specimens were collected by
myself while accompanying my mentor, Sir Miles Malmsbury,
the noted zoologist and explorer. It was Sir Malmsbury who
pioneered the study of germ plasm in indigenous lychnobious
creatures.”
A faraway look entered Miss Frost’s eyes as she glanced at
a framed photograph on the wall of a middle-aged man with
bushy mutton-chops in a safari jacket, standing with one foot
propped up on a dead rhinoceros. Sarah brought her back by
asking if she’d like her to bring out the specimens now.
“Haven’t you done it already?” Miss Frost snapped.
Flinching at the reprimand, Sarah opened the case and removed a tray and a large glass jar. She handed them to girls on
either side of the room and asked them to pass them around.
Helen, Daisy, and I had taken seats in the back, so we were the
last to get the tray and the jar. As they were passed around a
heavy silence fell on the room, punctuated only by the screech
of chalk as Miss Frost wrote out a series of Latinate words that
all started with
lychnobia
—a word that I dimly thought had
something to do with lamps—
lychnobia arvensis
,
lychnobia
arborescens
,
lychnobia collina
,
lychnobia hirta
,
lychnobia orbiculata
,
lychnobia vallicola . . .
they sounded like varieties of some
kind of flower.
“And my personal favorite,” Miss Frost said as she wrote
the last name on the board, “
lychnobia pruina
, for obvious reasons.” She chortled and I saw the girls in front of me looking at
each other in puzzlement.
“The frost fairy,” Sarah said aloud. “You see, it’s like Miss
Frost’s name.”
A murmur of understanding went through the room,
but I was still confused. What did a frost fairy . . . ? The tray
arrived at our table. Daisy looked at it first and I saw all the
blood drain from her face. I worried she might faint. Helen took the tray from her hands, looked down, and quickly
passed it to me.
I thought, at first, that it was a tray of butterflies. Brilliantly
colored wings were spread out and pinned on an ivory baize
cloth. I felt a flutter in my stomach at the thought of the fragile
creatures captured and killed to create this display. It reminded
me of the moment in the fire when the girls ran to the windows
to escape the blaze and were forced out into the open air, their
arms spread wide.
I looked closer and saw that between the colorful wings lay
tiny human-like bodies, like little wax dolls.
Surely, that’s what
they are—waxwork dolls,
I thought. But as I stared longer at
them I noticed that in the center of each one’s chest was a pearl
hat pin and a small drop of blood. These creatures had been
pinned while alive. Then I looked up and saw the jar that was
being handed around. Bobbing inside, like a pickled egg, was
a tiny figure, its multicolored wings floating in the brine like
seaweed.
Bile rose in my throat. My head swam and dimly I heard
the bell in my head again, only this time it was the bass bell
tolling danger. What could the danger be? I wondered. These
poor creatures were already dead. They couldn’t hurt us and
we couldn’t hurt them anymore. But the bell was tolling
louder and faster, clanging in my head. I had to get out of there.
I lurched unsteadily to my feet and headed toward the door.
Behind me I heard Miss Frost’s voice droning on. “
Lychnobia
hirta
, or hairy fairy, is the most unappealing of the lot . . . Miss
Hall! Where do you think—?” A shattering of glass interrupted her. The reek of formaldehyde filled the room as I fled, not
looking back. I knew what I’d see—the glass jar holding the
preserved fairy had shattered. The danger the bells had been
warning me against was from myself.

I FLED THROUGH the nearest door, desperate for fresh air
after the reek of formaldehyde, and into an enclosed colonnaded garden.

All my worst fears had been realized. I wasn’t going to fit
into Blythewood at all. I was a freak. Mr. Jager was wrong—it
wasn’t a gift to hear the bells in my head, it was a curse. If it had
been a gift I would have stopped the Triangle fire and saved all
those girls who died. I would have saved Tillie. My mother had
changed the time on my birth certificate because she knew it
was a curse. She must have been afraid that the bells inside my
head would eventually drive me insane—and they nearly had.
Hadn’t I raved like a madwoman all those months in Bellevue
hospital? Clearly that was where I belonged.

I’d almost rather be there than here,
I thought, pacing the enclosed path and looking for a way out. The path was bordered
with columns made of the same honey-colored stone as the bell
tower and topped with capitals carved with monstrous creatures that leered and stuck out their multiple forked tongues at
me. What kind of a place was this that decorated their walls
with monsters and kept such grisly specimens? Yes, I knew that
such specimens were collected of animals, but the bodies of

the fairies looked
human
. And if they were human it couldn’t
be right to skewer them with hat pins and pickle them in brine.
The memory of the pickled fairy brought up a wave of nausea again. I ran behind a column and was sick in the rose bushes. When my stomach was empty I crawled a few feet away and
huddled behind a rhododendron bush with my back against the
stone wall.

The wall felt warm and solid on my back. I closed my eyes,
exhausted by the events of the morning, and must have drifted
off for a few moments. I awoke to the sound of a voice.

“You found my hiding place.” I opened my eyes and found
Sarah Lehman crouched next to me. “You look a little green,”
she commented.

“You do, too,” I said, tugging on one of the waxy rhododendron leaves. “It’s the light. What are
you
hiding from?”
“Miss Frost,” she said. “If she sees me unoccupied for two
minutes she thinks up a chore for me to do, like dusting her
Cabinet of Gruesome Curiosities.”
I shuddered. “Why do they allow her to keep those? It’s so
cruel!”
She nodded. “Yes, it
is
cruel. But no crueler than what those
creatures do to us. Look, do you see the figures on the capitals?”
She pointed up at the column above us. I looked up and saw that
there were tiny sprites carved into the honey-colored stone.
Their wings formed a delicate tracery in the marble. “Do you
know what this place is?”
“This place?” I asked, confused. “You mean this garden?”
“It’s a cloister,” she said. “One of the original ones from the
first abbey where the early sisters of the Order could walk in the
fresh air behind thick walls because they dared not walk outside. If they did they might encounter the lychnobia, the lampsprites. They looked harmless enough, but they led girls astray
into the forest, and once they were in the forest worse monsters
would come to devour them.” Sarah pointed up at another column. A hideous troll stretched his mouth open so wide that I
could see inside where a human hand flailed.
I flinched at the horror of it and turned back to Sarah. Her
face had taken on a greener hue that I didn’t think came solely
from the rhododendron leaves.
“That’s what probably happened to Louisa after those
poor
creatures
led her into the woods,” Sarah said.
“You mean Nathan’s sister? Did you know her?”
“She was my best friend,” Sarah said, wiping a tear from
her eye. “You see, I spend my holidays here because I’ve no
place else to go. Louisa felt sorry for me and was kind to me—
but then Louisa was kind to everyone. She even felt bad for the
little sprites. She told me just two weeks ago that she was going
to prove they weren’t evil. And then she disappeared.”
Sarah choked back a sob. “I think she must have followed
them into the woods to prove that they weren’t dangerous, but
then she never came back. So what she proved was that they
are
dangerous.” She turned to stare at me through the green gloom
of the rhododendron bushes. “I think that must have been what
happened to your mother, too.”
“Why do you think that?” I asked. I was remembering stories my mother told me about will-o’-the-wisps. She’d always
made them sound like lovely things. Would she have spoken of
them like that if they’d led her astray in the woods?
“It’s something I overheard Miss Frost saying to Dame
Beckwith.” She squeezed my hand, then added, “I overhear a lot
of things in my various jobs. No one notices
Sour Lemon
in the
corner dusting. If you’d like I could try to find out more about
your mother.”
“You could?” I asked, returning the pressure of her hand.
She smiled. “I’ll keep my ears open . . . only . . .”
“Only what?”
“I won’t be able to tell you what I find out if you run away
from Blythewood.”
“How did you know I was thinking of running away?” I
asked, the blood rushing to my face. What else did Sarah know
about what I’d been thinking? But her smile was reassuring.
“Because this is where
I
come when I’m thinking of running away. But then I look at these creatures . . .” She looked up
at the hideous monsters carved on the column capitols. “And I
remember why I’m here. We all come to Blythewood for a purpose. Are you really ready to give up yours already?”
I thought about my questions about my mother. Then I
thought about Tillie Kupermann. If she were in my place would
she run away? “No,” I told Sarah, “I’m not ready to give up.”
“Good,” she said, smiling at me. “Then we’d best get you to
your next class. It’s all right you missed Latin—Mrs. Calendar
is so blind she won’t have noticed you weren’t there—but you
mustn’t skip archery. Miss Swift has an eye as keen as a hawk’s.
I’m supposed to assist her today setting up targets, so if we
don’t get there soon we’ll both be on her bad side.”
I didn’t want that. Sarah was the best—perhaps the only—
friend I’d made so far at Blythewood. The first friend I’d made
since Tillie. I didn’t want to risk losing her.

Sarah showed me a door on the far side of the cloister, hidden
behind the roses, that let out onto the gardens. “My little secret,” she said. “It’s the best way to get out of the building without anyone seeing you.” The archery court was set up at the end
of the gardens, so we were only a few minutes late for class.
We found our classmates in a semicircle around Miss Swift,
who was standing beside a marble statue of the goddess Diana
drawing a bow. I slipped in between Helen and Daisy while
Sarah began collecting stray arrows off the lawn and setting up
targets.