Blythewood (18 page)

“Thank the bells,” Helen whispered. “Daisy was afraid
you’d run away.”
“So were you—” Daisy began, but was silenced by a glare
from Miss Swift. Daisy’s face turned bright pink. I’d already
discovered today that Helen couldn’t stay quiet for two minutes
and Daisy had a horror being caught talking by our teachers.
“Behold Diana,” Miss Swift continued, gesturing toward
the statue. “The virgin huntress, a symbol of our Order. She
dedicated herself to the hunt, forsaking marriage and children,
as many of us here at Blythewood have.”
“As if Miss Swift had many offers of marriage,” Helen
whispered beside me while Daisy, still blushing, glared at her.
“Why not?” I whispered. Miss Swift looked attractive
enough to me, with a figure as lean and lithe as Diana. Only her
mouse-brown hair, scraped back into a tight bun and fixed with
an arrow-shaped pin, made her look a bit severe.
“Oh, everyone knows that Blythewood teachers don’t
marry.”
“But what about Dame Beckwith? She was married.”
“Oh, but she gave up teaching when she went away to be
married, and then she came back when her husband died—”
Daisy stomped on Helen’s foot to silence her and we all
focused back on Miss Swift’s lecture, leaving me to wonder
if Dame Beckwith’s sad eyes came from memories of her deceased husband.
“Some of you may have practiced archery with your friends
and brothers, at your summer cottages and lakeside camps.
Perhaps you like how the sport shows off your figure and you’ve
taken prizes at your local competitions—”
“I came in first at Camp Wanasockie last summer,” Cam
announced proudly.
Miss Swift smiled. “Ah, that is precisely what I mean. Come
up here, Miss . . .”
“Bennett,” Cam said cheerily, pushing past the rest of us
to stand between Miss Swift and the marble Diana. “Camilla Bennett. Cam for short.” She grinned at the rest of us and
winked at Helen, who grimaced. “I’m a crack shot, if I do say so
myself.”
“Uh-oh,” Helen whispered. “She’s in for it now.”
“A crack shot,” Miss Swift repeated, her upper lip curling.
“How splendid. And what have you shot?”
“What? Oh, well, targets, of course . . .”
“Targets like these?” Miss Swift nodded to a tall blonde
girl, one of the Dianas, whom she introduced as Andalusia
Beaumont. She carried a canvas target to the edge of the woods,
about thirty feet away from where Cam and Miss Swift stood.
“Would you like to demonstrate your prowess?”
She handed Cam a bow that was nearly as tall as Cam was,
and an arrow fletched with black feathers. As Cam positioned
herself at a right angle to the target, lifted the bow, and nocked
the arrow in it, the sun struck the feathers. Prisms danced off
them and I felt my stomach clench as I realized the feathers
must be from a Darkling’s wing.
When Cam released the arrow, it shot true and straight to
the target and lodged with a satisfying
thwack
into the bull’seye—a
thwack
that was echoed in the woods by an ominous
crash. Cam was smiling and lowering her bow when the brush
behind the target exploded. A blur of horns and fur trampled
the target and headed straight toward Cam.
“What’s the matter, Miss Bennett?” Miss Swift asked calmly, handing her another arrow. “You’re a crack shot. Hadn’t you
better take aim?”
Cam’s eyes widened. She took the arrow with a shaking
hand and tried to nock it in the bow. Most of the girls screamed
and ran for the cover of the garden wall, but Miss Swift and
Andalusia Beaumont stood calmly beside Cam as the horned
creature ran toward them. Helen, Daisy, and I stood rooted to
the spot—not so much out of bravery, I think, as because we
were too shocked to move. I looked from the horned creature,
which I noticed with a sickening sense of horror had only one
eye, back to Cam, who finally got the arrow nocked, drew, and
shot—a good six feet wide of the charging monster.
Miss Swift nodded at Andalusia. The tall blonde coolly
raised her loaded bow and shot the creature straight into its one
eye. It slumped to the ground, twitched twice, and then stilled,
thick blue gore pulsing from the arrow wound.
It’s not human
, I said to myself, forcing myself to look at the
monster. It was like something out mythology.
“Excellent shot, Miss Beaumont,” Miss Swift said, striding
toward the fallen goblin and placing one slim-booted foot on
its chest. “A cyclops can only be killed with a direct shot to its
eye. You see, girls, archery at Blythewood is quite a different
sport from what you’ve been used to. I am not here to teach you
to be archers.” She wrenched the arrow from the cyclop’s chest.
“I am here to teach you to be
hunters
. Now, if one of you would
please go find Gillie in the garden and tell him there’s a bit of
cleaning up to attend to, the rest of you can be measured for
your bows.”
The rest of the class was spent getting measurements taken
and learning how to maintain our bows and arrows, but it was
hard to concentrate very well while keeping an eye on the edge
of the woods. I’d felt horrified at how human the lampsprites
looked, but now I was horrified by how inhuman the cyclops
looked—and at the thought that more creatures like that were
roaming the woods. I think we were all relieved to go back into
the castle, and to climb to the very top of the bell tower, for our
bell ringing class in the belfry.
We all crowded by the windows to admire the views. To
the southeast lay the quaint Dutch village of Rhinebeck. Trim
Victorian houses lined the streets, many of them with glass
greenhouses for growing the violets the town was famous for.
We could make out the train station and the tracks that led back
to New York City. To the east lay a patchwork of farms—hay
fields and apple orchards, and fenced paddocks in which horses, cows, and sheep grazed—a pretty, bucolic landscape like
something out of a Dutch painting.
It was hard to imagine what could threaten such peace and
order . . . until you looked to the north and saw the Blythe Wood
crouched along the river like an animal tensed to spring out at
its prey—deep, dark, and secret. Looking into it was like looking into a deep pool on a summer day that you wanted to dive
into despite knowing that you might drown in it, or the eyes of
a beast that drew you into its depths.
“What you feel when you regard the Blythe Wood, ladies—and gentleman,” Mr. Peale began, bowing to Nathan, “is
the magnetic pull of Faerie. The existence of that other world
alongside ours is an anomaly, an aberration. Where that world
breaks into ours it disrupts the flow of magneto-electro energy
between our worlds, like a vacuum that pulls everything into
its hungry maw.”
“Hmm, Grandma, what big teeth you have!” Nathan whispered beside me. Helen slapped him on the arm and told him to
stop being ridiculous, but her voice shook. The bristling pine
trees
did
look like teeth.
“To disrupt that energy we break up the sound waves with
the bells. We have found that certain patterns interrupt the
flow of malevolent energy. May I have six volunteers?”
To my surprise, Nathan volunteered right away—and volunteered me and Helen and Daisy as well. Beatrice and Dolores insisted on making up the six. Mr. Peale directed us to
each grab one of the ropes that hung down into the square
stone chamber. The ropes were so thick it took both my hands
to span mine. I expected it to feel rough, but the rope had been
worn smooth by many ringers before me. It thrummed with a
tension as if it were tethered to an animal straining at its lead.
As if the bells were alive.
Mr. Peale explained how the bells were numbered and
counted us off so we knew our numbers. I was the sixth bell.
“When I call your number you pull. For today I’ll point, but
eventually you’ll remember when it’s your turn.”
He commenced calling numbers while circling us, demonstrating by grasping our arms how to pull down smoothly and
let up with control. The sound of the bells right over our heads
was deafening—at first just a cacophony of sound that drove all
thought from my head. But slowly, the rhythm worked its way
into my body, coming in through my hands and the soles of my
feet where the sound vibrated upward from the stone. Soon I
knew when it was my turn before Peale called my number. My
whole body thrummed with the vibrations of the bells.
I caught sight of Nathan’s face and he grinned at me. His
cheeks were ruddy and healthy looking, the shadows beneath
his eyes faded, his eyes bright. The haunted boy mourning for
his lost sister was gone—perhaps because he wasn’t alone anymore. I recalled what Gillie had said about ringing the bells—
that you felt a part of something bigger than yourself. Even
Dolores and Beatrice had cast off their habitual melancholy
demeanor and were grinning.
I hardly noticed that Peale had ceased calling numbers or
that we each knew when to stop. The peal had its own logic
that led to its ending. When we stopped, the pattern seemed to
go on, floating out into the air above the treetops. I thought I
heard an answering call in a bird singing deep inside the forest,
singing the same tune that we had played, and then came the
echo of the last bell, tolling sweet and sonorous from beneath
the river its plaintive cry.
Remember me
, it said,
remember me.
I
looked around at my fellow bell ringers and saw that their ruddy cheeks were damp and felt that mine were, too, but whether
from perspiration or tears, I wasn’t sure.
“Excellent!” Mr. Peale exclaimed, his face shining and pink
as though he had been pulling the bells himself. “Mr. Beckwith,
you especially will make a fine bell master. Now, if you will all
turn to your campanology guide and mark the first two dozen
changes to memorize by tomorrow . . .”

WE RUSHED DOWN the stairs, late for our last class of
the day, literature with Miss Sharp, held in the library so
that we could have access to the Order’s collection of great
literature. By now my arms ached, my ears were ringing, and
my head was full of discordant facts that jostled against one
another like riders on the Sixth Avenue streetcar at rush hour:
Latin names for sprite species, the dates of the three great
wizard wars, an antidote for centaur bite. Mixed up with all
these were a dozen warring emotions: the horror of seeing
Miss Frost’s specimens, the terror of the cyclops attack, Nathan’s grief over losing his sister, my fear of being exposed
as a freak, but also the sense of belonging I’d had ringing the
bells.

I wondered what I would find in the library. I had spent
some of my happiest moments with my mother in libraries.
I’d looked forward to seeing the one at Blythewood, but now
I wondered how many more bloodthirsty stories were hidden
behind the gilt-stamped leather spines on the floor-to-ceiling
rows of books. No doubt Miss Sharp would soon explain that
they held the secrets of evil fairies, and then she would assign
two hundred pages to read and memorize by the morrow.

As we settled into our seats she stood at the front of class
in a blue serge skirt and high-necked white blouse from which
her slender long neck rose like the stem of a lily. Her abundant
blonde hair was piled high on her head in the Gibson Girl style.
She stood, still and tall as a candle, her golden hair the flame,
regarding us. Then she turned away and walked to a window.
She pushed open the heavy leaded casement, letting in riverscented air and the trill of a lark. Still looking out the window
she began to speak, her voice somehow part of the breeze and
birdsong.

“My heart aches, and drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.”

I had never taken opiates myself, but I had seen my mother’s
eyes dulled by the drug and I knew this was what she had felt. I
felt that way myself right now, my brain over full of all the wonders and horrors of this strange and savage world I’d stumbled
into. At least the poem was familiar. It was Keats’s “Ode to a
Nightingale,” one of my mother’s favorite poems

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Miss Sharp recited it as though she were addressing the
bird outside the window but also, I felt, speaking to me directly.
I felt the fatigue and confusion of the day fall away. On her voice
I traveled past
the weariness, the fever, and the fret
and climbed
on
the viewless wings of Poesy
to a tender night full of hawthorn,
eglantine, and violets. When she got to the lines

I felt my eyes fill with tears at the thought that my mother must
have felt this, too, perhaps as she drained the last drops of laudanum. It made me recall, as well, how I’d leaned toward the
Darkling last night, wanting him to carry me away. Was it a
spell they cast on humans? Is that how Louisa Beckwith had
felt? Had she gone with her captor willingly?

I glanced guiltily around the room, hoping that no one had
noticed my emotion, but each girl was gazing enthralled at Miss
Sharp as if the teacher were speaking directly to her. And not
only the girls. Nathan wasn’t with us, but Rupert Bellows had
come to the door of the library and leaned on the jamb, hands in
the pockets of his rumpled tweed jacket, head back, eyes closed.
He didn’t look like the man who had lectured us on the evils of
the fairies. He looked like a man who wanted to believe there
was still beauty in the world.

There was one other listener in the room. Miss Corey the
librarian, in the same hat and veil she’d worn last night at dinner, sat at one of the desks filling out index cards. When Miss
Sharp came to the last stanza, the bells in the tower began to
ring and I could see Miss Corey’s lips moving beneath her veil,
mouthing the words with her.