Blythewood (9 page)

“What happened to her?” I cried, my hand clenched around
the feather in my pocket—a single black feather that had lain
beside my mother’s body. Is that why my mother had kept a
black feather? Because of the story? Gillie held up his hand and
brought the horses to a stop.
“Listen,” he said.
At first all I heard was the drip of water from the trees on
either side of the road, but then I heard it: bells. First one and
then another . . . and then a chorus of them.
“They’re ringing us home, Miss. Showing us the way
through the fog. See, the horses know.”
The horses’ ears were indeed twitching toward the sound.
Gillie snapped the reins and we veered left, off the road, toward
the sound of the bells.
A black iron arch loomed out of the fog. I could just make
out the words “Blythewood School” and below “Tintinna Vere,
Specta Alte” as we passed below the gate. The road went steeply
up, the fog lightening as we climbed and the sound of the bells
growing louder. Even from this distance I could feel what Gillie
had meant. The bells seemed to make my blood thrum. They
seemed to be inside me, the way the bass bell rang inside me,
but these bells didn’t make me afraid. They made me feel as I
had when I’d slowed the bell inside me to calm Etta. Safe.
When we reached the top of the hill I looked down and saw
that below us the fog still clung to the ground, but rising up out
of the white mist, as if floating in midair, was a square tower
hewn out of honey-colored stone. As the bells stopped ringing, the mist scattered, revealing first the outlines of a turreted
castle—the same castle as the one in the engraving my mother
had kept by her bed. It looked like a castle in a fairy tale, and I
wondered if Gillie’s story had somehow transported me into a
fairy-tale land. Then, listening to the bells as they, one by one,
ceased to ring, I noticed something.
“There’s only six,” I said to Gillie.
“Aye. For hundreds of years the seven bells rang in the
prince’s bell tower. The knights and the six bellmaker’s daughters installed the seven bells in the tower and turned the
prince’s castle into an abbey, with a monastery for the knights,
and a convent for the sisters, who together founded the Order
of the Bells. Young men and women from all over the world
flocked to the abbey drawn by the sound of the bells. They believed that the tolling kept the wild creatures and fairies of the
woods at bay and that so long as the seven bells rang from the
tower the demons would stay in their own land. The Order of
the Bells became a great abbey, famous for the learning of its
sisters and monks. Some of the men and women who were educated there chose a monastic life, but others went out into the
world and became great leaders. The Order spread throughout
Europe, founding schools wherever there was evil to fight.
“But eventually the Order did its job so well that folk no
longer saw a need for them. The Order’s power faded, and the
abbeys fell into ruin or were destroyed in wars. Even the original abbey in Scotland, Hawthorn Abbey, was ransacked during
the Reformation. The last remnants of the Order came together from all over Europe and decided to bring the original bell
tower and the convent over here and found Blythewood.
“Three barges it took to bring her up the river. The last
barge held the tower and the bells packed within it on account
of the legend that the bells must always stay in the tower, but as
the barge came around that bend there”—Gillie pointed to the
river where a high cliff protruded from the western shore—“a
storm came up. They say you could hear the bells ringing out in
the storm, even though they were packed in straw, and that they
could be heard as far away as Albany. The ship listed hard to
port and the tower began to slide into the water, but at the last
minute the ship righted itself and only one bell from the tower
was lost.”
“The smallest bell?” I asked. “The treble?”
“Aye, the one named Merope. She fell to the bottom of the
river, where she remains today. But some say that when her sister bells ring out you can still hear her. Listen.”
The last of the bells had finished chiming now. There was
a silence and then, faint, but clear, the chime of another bell. It
seemed to come from the river. Perhaps it was just an echo, I
told myself, but would an echo pierce my heart as this bell did? I
could feel it vibrating through my blood and the marrow of my
bones. I’d heard this bell before. It was the treble bell I’d heard
when the dark-eyed boy had touched my hand.

WE CLIMBED THE hill and came into a circular driveway
crammed with vehicles, trunks, shrieking girls, and muttering
moving men. I saw right away that most girls had arrived at Blythewood in their own conveyance, either horse-drawn carriages gilded with old family crests or long, sleek automobiles, their
prows adorned by silver figures like the mastheads of oceangoing vessels. One such leviathan barreled past us on the drive,
horn blaring like the call of a sea monster, nearly sending us
careening over onto the lawn. Gillie muttered under his breath
in Scots, his face darkening under lowered brows.

“The Montmorencys still act like they own the place even
though the house was made over to the Order years ago.”
The long black vehicle plowed through the crowd like the
Lusitania
coming into port. When it reached the front door a
figure emerged, a girl swathed in a velvet coat like a cocoon,
topped by a cloud of rose-gold hair that caught the sunlight as
if the sun had come out especially to alight on it. Two other girls
standing at the doorway dropped their bags into the arms of
their servants and screamed “George!” in one shrill voice.
George?
A small crowd quickly surrounded George, moths to the
flame of her Gibson pouf, blocking the entranceway. Liveried
servants stood weighted down by trunks while the girls called
to one another.
“Fred!”
“Wallie!”
The names—did all the girls have boys’ names here?—fluttered through the air like brightly colored birds. Of course, I realized, they would all know each other. Even the new girls must
have grown up together and gone to the same dances and teas.
With a pang I remembered spotting Tillie’s bright red head
across the park and hearing her voice calling my name or looking across the rows of sewing machines and catching a smile
from her. I remembered what it felt like to have a friend. Would
I ever find that here among these bright, carefree girls?
“Och, you’d think it had been a year they haven’t seen each
other, not just the summer,” Gillie muttered as he helped me
down from the box. And then, in a lower voice, he added, “Don’t
worry, Miss, they only sound like the hounds of hell. Most of
them are all right . . . though
some . . .”
He broke off to stride over
to the knot of girls blocking the entrance, scattering them like
geese. They did sound like geese—which, come to think of it,
was what the hounds of hell were supposed to sound like. I was
bracing myself to plunge into the melee when a rapping from
inside the carriage brought me up short.
“It is only polite to assist your elders when disembarking
from an elevated vehicle,” Miss Frost drawled.
“Oh . . . here.” I opened the door and held out my hand to
help Miss Frost. She clutched my hand with a pincer-like grip.
Her skirts rustled as she stepped down. I started to withdraw

my hand, but she tightened her hold and drew me toward her,
so close I could smell her tea-rose perfume and, beneath it, a
bitter smell that was somehow familiar.

“Congratulations on getting Mr. Duffy to unburden himself,” she hissed between yellowed teeth. “I haven’t heard him
string that many words together in the twenty years I’ve taught
here. But he left something out.”

The thought of Miss Frost crouched inside the carriage like
a black spider, listening to our conversation, was unnerving.
“When the knights found the seventh bell,” she went on,
“there was an impression in the snow of the girl’s body. It had
filled with blood. But there were no signs of her body being
dragged away.”
She reared her head back like a snake about to strike and
tapped her lorgnette case against my forehead. “What do you
suppose
that
signified?”
“That she wasn’t dragged away by wolves?” I suggested tentatively, the image of a girl’s body drawn in blood in the snow
making me feel slightly faint.
“Exactly!” Miss Frost rewarded me with another tap of
her lorgnette case. Then she leaned forward, releasing a whiff
of the bittersweet smell again, and whispered, “She was taken
from above
. Never forget, ‘
Tintinna vere,
’ but most of all . . .” She
tapped the lorgnette case against the underside of my jaw, jerking my head up so abruptly that I heard my teeth click. ‘
Specta
alte!
Girls who keep their eyes on the ground have a habit of
disappearing,” she hissed. Then she whirled around and swept
past the servants with their trunks and a covey of giggling girls
whom Miss Frost glared into silence.
My own trunk lay on the bottom step. A thin girl in a black
skirt, white shirtwaist, and plaid sash stood next to it, a marbled notebook folded against her flat chest. Her brown hair was
parted severely on the side and pulled back into a tight bun. She
reminded me of one of Tillie’s socialist friends.
“Don’t worry about Miss Frost,” she said, walking toward
me. As she moved I heard a faint chiming sound coming from
her, as if she had been belled like a cat. “Our theory is that she
was a naturalist’s experiment gone terribly wrong—an attempt
to preserve a specimen of genus Old Biddy circa 1893. Hence
the aroma.”
“She did smell as if she’d been . . .
pickled.
”
The girl smiled, revealing a dimple in her left cheek and
lessening the severity of her expression.
“It’s to do with her specimens. Lucky me, I’m to be her assistant this term. I’ll probably end up smelling like her.” She
made a face, and then seeing my confusion, said, “Sorry, your
head must be positively spinning and I’m
supposed
to be your
orientation. Everything’s in a bit of a kerfuffle this last week
because . . . well, never mind. I’m Sarah Lehman.” She held out
her bare hand. I took off my glove to shake hers. “But everybody
calls me—”
“Lemon!”
The summons came from the rose-gold girl with the unlikely name of George. She had moved slightly to the side of
the doorway at Gillie’s command, but she was still taking up a
lot of space on the stairway, surrounded by her suite of matching oxblood leather trunks, half a dozen pale blue hatboxes,
and her admiring throng of friends. I could tell by the dilation
of her nostrils and a stiffening in her shoulders that Sarah had
heard her, but she remained facing me.
“
Sour Lemon!”
George said more loudly. “I’m talking to
you.”
“As I was saying,” Sarah said to me, ignoring the girl named
George, “everyone calls me Lemon. But only one girl is rude
enough to call me
Sour
.” Sarah turned on her heel to face
George, who had taken a step forward at the same time and so
was forced to take a step back, backing into her trunks and toppling over the hatboxes on top.
The two girls who had greeted her first—Fred and Wallie?
—
went running after the hats that tumbled out of the boxes in a
flurry of feathers. They looked like they were chasing after a
brood of wild turkeys—a sight so comical I burst out laughing.
“Do you think it’s funny?” George rounded on me, violet eyes flashing, rose-gold hair smoldering like a just-lit fuse.
Those violet eyes were roving over my rain-drenched hat, damp
waterproof, soaked skirt hem, and muddy boots, all of which
screamed out the fact that I’d traveled here on a public train and
not in a private car. But it was my hand her eyes fastened on—
bare because I’d just removed my glove to shake Sarah’s hand.
“Oh,” she said. “Don’t you have the wrong door? I believe
the servants’ door is around back.”
Blood rushed to my cheeks and I heard the bass bell tolling
in my head.
Ridiculous
, I scolded myself,
this ninny is no danger!
Tillie would knock her down with a right hook.
Suddenly George doubled over and pressed her hands over
her ears as if she were in pain. The moment I saw her cringing
my anger faded—and with it the bell. She looked up, her violet
eyes wide with disbelief. Her friends fluttered around her, but
she kept her eyes on me.
I forced a smile on my face. “No, this is my door, but . . .” I
cast a glance down at the trampled assortment of hats. “I believe hat deliveries are made at the rear.”
Then before she could reply Sarah was pushing me past her
and through the front door. “Oh my!” Sarah cried. “Georgiana will be in shock until teatime. Alfreda and Wallis will have
their hands full.”
“Why do they all go by boys’ names?” I asked as Sarah
steered me past another clutch of reunited best friends crowding the foyer.
“They were named for their fathers—George Montmorency, Alfred Driscoll, and Wallace Rutherford, the three richest
men in America and benefactors of Blythewood—”
She was interrupted by a blur of feathers hurtling through
the air followed by a high-pitched shriek. I ducked under the
missile, which nearly knocked my hat off. A breathless girl,
skirts hiked up, followed in pursuit. She wore a single heavy
leather glove with leather straps hanging from it.
“Did you see a peregrine falcon go by here?” she cried.
“It went into the hall, Charlotte. You’re supposed to have
him tethered, you know.”
“Of course I know that, but he slipped his jesses, the confounded creature! Swift will have my head.” The girl turned
and ran into the hall in pursuit of her falcon.
“That’s Charlotte Falconrath. The Bells know she only got
picked as a Diana because the Falconraths are an old family.
Their name even means ‘keeper of the falcon’! The Dianas have
to train their falcons before school starts by staying awake with
them for three days and nights. By now falcon and girl should
be bonded but it doesn’t look as though Charlotte’s bird wants
to bond. Not that I can blame it.”
“So only Dianas get to have falcons?” I asked, feeling a sudden stab of desire. Even though I’d only caught a glimpse of the
peregrine, it had given me a curious feeling of elation to see it
streaking by me.
“Yes,” she said with a wistful sigh, “and
somehow
the Dianas are always girls from the oldest and richest families. . . .
Oh, but that won’t be a problem for you, will it?”
I blinked at her, more confused than ever, until I realized
that she was including me among the ranks of the privileged. I
noticed now the telltale marks of darning around Sarah Lehman’s shirt cuffs and the worn spot on her belt where she’d had
to pull it one notch tighter. To her, I must look like a rich girl in
my new clothes.
“Oh, I’m not rich!” I blurted. “I used to work in a factory!”
I didn’t add that I’d spent the last five months in the Bellevue
Pavilion for the Insane.
“Really?” Sarah’s eyes narrowed as she looked down at her
notebook. “But you’re not listed as a scholarship student here.”
“My grandmother is sending me to Blythewood. There are
scholarships?” Why hadn’t my mother ever mentioned that?
“One for every class, ‘for young ladies who show exceptional talent despite their
unfortunate
circumstances.’ By unfortunate circumstances they mean quite literally being born without a fortune. In my case, to poor Polish immigrants . . . but you
don’t need to hear my hard-luck story. We’re encouraged not to
dwell on our familial circumstances once we have been lifted
out of them and elevated to the role of Blythewood girl—even if
we have to do half a dozen jobs to supplement our scholarships
while we’re here. We’re supposed to be all united in our grand
mission here at Blythewood, but you’ll find girls like Georgiana
Montmorency are rather unforgiving when it comes to social
status. I suggest you leave out the
factory
in your background.”
“I think the secret’s out,” I said, holding up my callused palm.
Sarah took my work-worn hand in hers. “Then you and I
will stick together,” she said, squeezing it. “It’s good to know
there’s another girl like me here.”
I nodded gratefully. I’d been so worried about fitting in
with the carefree girls in their white dresses that I’d seen in my
mother’s pictures that it hadn’t occurred to me I might look like
one of those girls to someone from my own background. It was
a relief to know there was at least one girl at Blythewood I could
be myself with, even if she had just confirmed my suspicion
that I would have to hide that self from my other classmates.
“Come along,” Sarah said, leading me out of the narrow
foyer and into a huge vaulted space. My head tilted back so far
my hat nearly fell off once more. The only place I’d ever seen
approaching this in grandeur was Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on
Fifth Avenue in New York City, where my mother had sometimes taken me to sit and rest between delivering hats to the
mansions north of the cathedral.
But this wasn’t a church. The long room ended not in an
altar but in a raised podium on which stood a long table upon
which sat seven hand bells. Nor were the stained-glass windows that lined the west wall overtly religious. In each one a
graceful female figure stood, armed with bow and arrows and
holding aloft a hand bell.
“The Great Hall,” Sarah said from behind me. “Don’t worry, you’ll be seeing plenty of it. Dinner will be in here tonight.”
I noticed now that a flock of girls, their black skirts covered
by white starched aprons, were covering the long tables that
filled the hall with white tablecloths.
“Come along, we’ve got four flights to go up. The nestlings—
first-year students like yourself—room on the fourth floor of
the South Wing. Second years, or fledglings, on the third floor,
third years—or falcons—on the second floor. In other words,”
Sarah added as we reached the first landing and she paused to
let me catch my breath, “you have to earn a room closer to the
dining hall and classrooms. That is, all except the Dianas, who
room in the North Tower Room. By the time you’re in your
third year like me you’re used to climbing stairs. Frankly, I miss
the views from the upper floors. I think they should reverse the
order of floors, only I suppose they’re afraid—”
Sarah was interrupted by the sound of male laughter echoing in the stairwell.
“It can’t be,” she muttered under her breath, hurrying up
the next flight of stairs. She was right about getting used to
the stairs. Even though I had been accustomed to the walk-up
tenement buildings I had lived in with my mother, my time in
Bellevue had weakened my legs and Sarah easily outpaced me.
By the time I reached the third-floor landing Sarah was remonstrating with a tall flaxen-haired beauty in a frilly blue silk tea
dress and a large feathered hat tilted coquettishly over her delicate features.
“You’re supposed to be in your room unpacking, Helen,”
she was telling the blonde girl. “I am acting warden this term
and can assign you demerits for rule infractions. You haven’t
even changed yet!” I noticed that though Sarah had identified
herself as a social inferior to the other girls, she had no trouble
speaking up to them. She reminded me of Tillie in her forthright manner—if Tillie had ever had the chance to go to a fancy
boarding school.
“Don’t be a bore, Lemon,” the girl said with a toss of her
pretty curls. “My cousin Sophronia told me that the warden job
is just a sop to give scholarship girls an extra few pennies. Besides, Nathan says this blue brings out my eyes.”
Both girls turned toward the window. I followed their gazes to a young man who was lounging along the window seat,
hands in the pockets of his striped trousers, his legs crossed.
The sun caught his fair hair and turned it silver, but threw his
face in shadow so it was impossible to read his expression. His
pose suggested boredom, and so did the languid drawl with
which he addressed the girls.
“So I did. It’s bad enough I’m going to spend the next nine
months looking at women dressed like nuns.” He gave Sarah’s
neat skirt and shirtwaist a disparaging look. “You can’t begrudge me a last bit of color before the veil drops over us all.”
“What do you mean, nine months?” Sarah asked, her voice
so icy I felt the chill of it three feet away. “You don’t mean to say
you’ve been kicked out of yet another school? I thought you’d
been sent to Hawthorn.”
“Please don’t ever mention that beastly place to me,” he remarked, shamming a shiver. “D’you know they get you up at
dawn to run bare-chested over the moors?” He shuddered and
recrossed his legs, moving a fraction of an inch forward, enough
so I could see that he possessed the finely carved features of a
Greek statue, his skin pale as marble, his eyes the weathered
gray of worn granite. And a heart as hard as stone, I wagered,
from his indolent manner. But then those eyes looked up from
beneath a fringe of silver lashes and lit up with a flicker of life.
It was like striking a match to kindling. What had seemed cold
was now warm—or perhaps the warmth had been kindled in
me at the thought that he’d lit up at the sight of me.
“Is
this
the new girl you were telling me about, Helen? The
one whose mother—”
Helen drove the toe of her boot into the boy’s shin.
That’s
why he was looking at me with so much interest. I was a bit of
scandal.
“No wonder Hawthorn gave you the boot, Nathan Beckwith,” Sarah said. “You haven’t the sense the Lord gave a toadstool. Go make trouble elsewhere. Even if your mother
is
headmistress, I can’t believe she’s given you free reign of the girls’
dormitory.”
Ah, so that explains his presence here
, I thought as Nathan
peeled himself off the window ledge, tipped an imaginary hat
to Sarah and Helen and then bowed low to me.