Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) (18 page)

“I knew I could count on you. The Council has suggested we have a Christmas dance.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “A . . . dance?”

“It’s exactly what we have to do right now,” she said firmly. “I’ve already spoken to Herr Hofmeister about it. He’s full of ideas and he asked me to assign him an assistant. I suggested you.”

“Me? But I don’t even like to dance.”

“Life is full of doing things we don’t enjoy, Avaline,” she said grimly. “The discipline will be good for you and keep you out of trouble.” She raised her eyes to mine. They were clear and sharp, all sign of tears gone. “Unless there’s something else you’re doing with your evenings you’d like to tell me about.”

I swallowed hard, willing myself not to think about Raven and our moonlit flights lest she divine them with her penetrating gaze. “No,” I said, “just studying. I’m afraid I’ll fall behind—”

“You did brilliantly on your exams,” she said. “I always find that the busier I am the more I can get done. I know you’ll do a good job. In fact, I’m counting on you to make this dance a success. The future of Blythewood depends on it.”

I left Dame Beckwith’s office in a fog as deep as the one outside on the river. I wasn’t sure what to be more befuddled by—that the Council in all their wisdom had responded to the news of an underworld racket of abducting girls by suggesting we throw a dance, or that I’d aced my exams. At least I had a suspicion about the solution to the latter.

“Yes, we replaced your exams,” Helen readily admitted when I confronted her and Daisy.

“I used a forgery spell to fake your handwriting,” Daisy said proudly. “Helen snuck into Dame Beckwith’s office.”

At least they seemed to have made up with each other for the purpose of this caper.

“What else could we do?” Helen asked innocently. “You would have gotten thrown out otherwise.”

“B-but we’ll
all
be thrown out if Dame Beckwith finds out.”

“Dame Beckwith has bigger fish to fry,” Helen said. “A dance! How completely absurd. And run by that silly man!”

“He
is
rather dotty,” Daisy concurred. “But rather sweet. He reminds me of my uncle Gustav. I wonder if outsiders will be invited?”

“I certainly hope not!” Helen cried. “My mother would jump at the chance to send her ancient bachelors. We’ll all look like perfect fools. I personally will have nothing to do with it.”

“Well,
I
think it sounds like fun,” Daisy said, glaring at Helen, their truce apparently at an end. “I’ll help you, Ava. Just let me know what I can do.”

I would have liked to send Daisy in my stead, but I didn’t want to get her in any more trouble than she’d already risked on my behalf. So that evening after dinner I reported to the large room on the second floor that had been converted into a dancing studio by rolling up the old rugs, polishing the hardwood floors, and installing a wall of mirrors.

“Ah, Fraulein Hall!” Herr Hofmeister simpered, clicking his heels together and bowing. “I was wondering when I would have the pleasure of your company. Your absence from my dance classes has not gone unnoticed.”

“Well, er, I already took dancing classes with Madame Musette.”

“Ah, Madame Musette,” he murmured, shaking his head sorrowfully. “A quaint old dear, but unfortunately hopelessly out of date and too blind to see what her students need. Take you, for example.” He tucked his stick beneath his arm and, before I quite knew what he was up to, whirled me around to face the mirrors and put his hands on my shoulders. I gasped aloud. Would he feel my wings beneath my bones?

“Look at yourself in the mirror, Fraulein.” It was an order, not a request. I half expected to see myself revealed as the winged monster I had seen in the Hall of Mirrors at Coney Island, but all I saw was a nervous-looking redhead cowering beneath the foppish dancing master’s gaze.

“See how your shoulders are hunched over as though you were hiding from someone?” He pressed his hands on my shoulders, forcing them down. “And your shoulder blades.” He lowered his hands and I flinched, sure now that he would feel the wings. “They are as tight as bow strings. You must stand up straight, but remain relaxed and flexible, like a willow bending in the wind, lest you
snap
!” He rapped his stick against the floor, making me jump.

“You will learn all this in my dance class.”

“Actually, I just came to say that Dame Beckwith has put me in charge of the Christmas dance.”

“
Ach du lieber!
But then you must certainly attend my classes. How else will you understand what I am attempting to achieve?”

I conceded he had a point.

“Excellent! We will discuss the program and necessary arrangements for the Christmas dance after class, and I will provide you with extra lessons to make up for the time you have missed. You will not regret it, Fraulein. You shall see a marvelous transformation by Christmas. I will have you flying around the ballroom!”

Although it made me feel disloyal to Madame Musette, I had to admit that Herr Hofmeister’s dance classes did transform me. It wasn’t just that my posture improved—he was right, I
had
been hunching over—but that my state of mind did, too. Perhaps I had been inwardly cowering, so afraid of being revealed as a monster that I had begun to see myself as one. When I was dancing in Herr Hofmeister’s class, though, I did not think of myself as a monster. I didn’t think at all. The complicated steps and the hundred and one instructions (
chin up, tummy in, we’re not on the hockey field, Miss Bennett
) chased every thought from my brain. It was a welcome respite.

In addition, Herr Hofmeister had decided that it wasn’t enough to have a dance; we had also to put on divertissements from a ballet as the evening’s entertainment. He chose a Viennese ballet called
Die Puppenfee
,
which was about a fairy doll in a toy shop and her troupe of dancing dolls. This meant we needed costumes for Chinese, Spanish, Austrian, Japanese, and harlequin dolls, and it fell to me to take the girls’ measurements and send them to Blythewood’s dressmaker, Caroline Janeway, in the city.

When I thought about Rue and the other girls at the Hellgate Club I felt guilty that I was using my time planning a dance, but Dame Beckwith had said the Council was looking for them. And Raven—on one of the rare nights I was able to get away—promised me that he and the other fledglings were combing the waterfronts searching for the new location of the Hellgate Club. The constant rain that beat at the ballroom windows assured me that the changelings were traveling back and forth on the river also looking for Rue, but after a while the thrum of the rain merged with the music and the steady beat of Herr Hofmeister’s stick, and I didn’t think of Rue or Raven anymore. Even when I wasn’t in class the music was in my head, driving out every other thought. If I forgot the music for a moment, some other girl humming it brought it back.

The only ones
not
humming Herr Hofmeister’s dance tunes were Helen and Nathan—Helen because of her staunch loyalty to Madame Musette and continuing feud with Daisy, and Nathan because he was afraid of being swarmed by partnerless females.

“We all take turns being the boy,” I told him one day in November.

“Oh and how is
that
going to work at the Christmas dance? All those girls dancing with each other hardly seems festive.”

“Maybe some girls like to dance with other girls,” I suggested.

“Oh!” he said, looking surprised and then awkward. “Do, er, you?”

I thought about it for a moment. I actually had been enjoying dancing with my friends. Cam had turned into an especially graceful lead and Daisy, although still chilly with me and Helen, followed as if she could read my mind. But I had not experienced anything like the thrill I got flying wing tip to wing tip with Raven. Not that I would tell Nathan that.

“I don’t really care,” I told Nathan, “but I suppose some of the other girls would. I’ll talk to Herr Hofmeister about it at our next meeting.”

“
Ach du lieber!
Of course we need men!” Herr Hofmeister exclaimed when I asked. “I’ve already discussed the situation with my patron, Mr. Montmorency, and he has agreed to come to the dance with a few of his associates.”

“Oh,” I said, recalling the smoke-filled room I’d glimpsed at Georgiana’s summer ball, “but they’re so . . .
old
.”

Herr Hofmeister looked surprised and slightly affronted. “No older than I! And they are all excellent dancers. But have no fear, I will ask Mr. Montmorency to organize some of his younger acquaintances, perhaps some of the junior officers at Mr. Driscoll’s bank.”

“Hm . . .” Bank clerks sounded only minimally more fun than old men. “I have a friend who is a lawyer—Samuel Greenfeder. Perhaps he’d invite some of his friends.”

“Best to check with Dame Beckwith,” Herr Hofmeister said. “We don’t want any of the wrong element.”

I bristled at the idea that anyone would consider Sam Greenfeder
the wrong element
, but when I went to Dame Beckwith she distractedly told me that it was fine with her if I invited some of my friends from the city. As I left her office I heard her humming one of Herr Hofmeister’s tunes. Apparently she, too, had been taken over by the dance craze.

I bumped into Daisy outside Dame Beckwith’s office. “Oh,” she said, turning pink. “Did Dame Beckwith say we could invite friends to the ball?”

“Why? Is there someone you want to invite?”

She went from pink to beet red. “No . . . maybe . . . what business is it of yours if I do?”

She ran off in a flurry of petal-pink petticoats that were definitely not regulation school wear. I considered following her to find out what was going on, but then thought better of it and, humming the Chinese polka from
Die Puppenfee
, waltzed my way back to the dance studio.

20

SAM GREENFEDER WROTE
back to me that he would be honored to attend the Blythewood Christmas dance and so would a dozen of his young lawyer friends. He also added that he had some information I would be interested in that he did not feel comfortable imparting in the mail, but that he would tell me when we next saw each other in person. Intrigued, I decided to take the train into the city the first weekend of December. I had to approve the costumes for the dance at Miss Janeway’s anyway, and since my schoolwork was finally back on track (Dame Beckwith had been right—having more to do had only made me more efficient) and preparations for the dance were shaping up nicely, I thought a weekend in the city seemed like a perfect reward.

I asked Helen and Daisy if they wanted to go with me, but they both declined, Daisy because she was supervising a nestling tracking hike and Helen because she’d volunteered to go along—which seemed suspicious to me, considering they were still hardly speaking to each other. As I rode out in Gillie’s trap I saw the troop of nestlings entering the Blythe Wood under the watchful supervision of Professor Malmsbury and two armed Dianas. Helen was trailing behind the group, scanning the treetops. Since Halloween she had been looking longingly at the woods and asking me a lot of questions about the Darklings.

“No Darkling is likely to provide you with a townhouse on Fifth Avenue and a summer cottage in Newport,” I had told her.

“There are more important things,” Helen had shocked me by replying. Now I saw why she had volunteered to go into the woods with the nestlings.

“Thank the Bells we don’t have to tromp through those nasty old woods!” Myrtilene Montmorency giggled to Susannah Dewsnap and Mary MacCrae. The three girls had tagged along to the station.

“And just how did you get out of it?” I asked.

“Don’t you remember? We’re to do a divertissement for the Christmas dance—the Spanish doll’s dance from
Die Puppenfee.
We’ve been traveling to Herr Hofmeister’s private studio in Riverdale for special instruction on weekends.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to recall if Herr Hofmeister had mentioned this to me. It seemed that the preparations for
Die Puppenfee
were getting entirely out of hand. “Couldn’t Herr Hofmeister teach them to you at school?”

“Oh,” Mary gushed, “but we get to dance with his star pupils, and the Riverdale studio is so marvelous. It’s in a mansion. I only wish that this confounded rain would stop! The view from the grand ballroom is so lovely when it’s clear.”

I listened to all the many wonders of Herr Hofmeister’s Riverdale mansion all the way to the station and then all the way to the city. Apparently the ballroom floor was paved with multicolored marble so polished you could see the reflection of your dancing shoes in it. When the sun hit the crystal chandeliers they sent rainbows spinning around the room. The other students wore the most marvelous silk dresses and came from all over the world. By the time the girls got off at the Spuyten Duyvil stop in Riverdale my head felt stuffed full of mazurkas and castanets. The bustle of New York City was a relief when I left Grand Central Station and caught a streetcar to Miss Janeway’s dress shop in Stuyvesant Square.

Caroline Janeway greeted me warmly, if a tad hurriedly. “Your Herr Hofmeister has been keeping us all up to our eyebrows in tulle.”

“I’m sorry if he’s giving you too much to do. He tends to be a bit . . .
fussy.
”

“He’s like a bride with her trousseau! He has insisted we import the embroidered trim for the Austrian doll from Vienna even though I have a perfectly good embroiderer, Frau Schirmer, here in the city. And the Japanese doll must have a hand-painted kimono from Kyoto, the Spanish doll real Spanish lace from Seville . . .” Miss Janeway pulled out lengths of the fabric as she talked. “It’s costing the school a fortune. I was shocked that Dame Beckwith would approve such lavish expenditure, especially now.”

“Why
especially now
?” I asked.

Miss Janeway looked around the shop, even though there were no customers. She sent her assistant Cosette downstairs to bring up the fairy doll costume. When Cosette was gone, Miss Janeway leaned over the counter.

“I’ve heard some of my clients—Council members—talking,” she whispered. “The school’s endowment was badly reduced last spring because of a failed investment.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised. “I never thought about Blythewood having an endowment.”

Miss Janeway laughed. “Did you think the place runs on fairy dust?”

I blushed. “I guess I never
thought
about what it runs on. Everyone seems so rich.”

“Even the wealthiest must put their money
somewhere
, and someone convinced the Council to put it into some risky investment that failed. Of course, there’s still money, but what concerns me is . . .” She looked around the shop again nervously and lowered her voice even lower. “I overheard one of the alumnae talking about a financial plan to recoup the losses by investing in a new building downtown. She said it was supposed to be a sure thing and they had gotten in ‘on the ground floor,’ but it also sounded as if all of the endowment had been sunk in this one investment—as well as the fortunes of our wealthiest alums.”

“Well, they wouldn’t have invested all the school’s money if it wasn’t a sure thing, right?”

Caroline Janeway shook her head. “I’m afraid wealth doesn’t last forever. My family lost our fortune in the crash of ninety-three. Oh, don’t look so sorry for me. I’m quite happy with my lot, but look at the van Beeks. Who would have thought their fortune could vanish as it did?”

“Yes, Helen said poor Mr. van Beek had made some unwise investments—” I looked up from the lace on the counter. “Oh! I wonder if the same advisors who led Mr. van Beek into ruin also misadvised the Council. Mr. Greenfeder has been investigating Mr. van Beek’s affairs. I’m having tea with him and Agnes later. Shall I ask him to look into the investments the Council is making now?”

Miss Janeway bit her lip and considered the question as though it were a crooked seam. “Only if he can be very discreet in his inquiries. If it gets out that the investment is shaky . . . well, rumors like that can start a panic.”

“I’m sure Mr. Greenfeder would be most discreet.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling mischievously, “except in his affection for our Miss Moorhen. Anyone can see he’s besotted with her—except for her. Do ask him to look into it. If the school is being compromised, well . . .” She looked up as Cosette came in all but drowning in mounds of pink satin and tulle, humming a refrain from
Die Puppenfee
. “
The Fairy Doll
will be Blythewood’s swan song.”

After giving instructions for the costumes to be shipped to Blythewood, I walked west on Fourteenth Street toward the Jane Street Tea Room mulling over all that Miss Janeway had told me. I had not grown up with money. My mother had made a sparse living as a seamstress and hat trimmer. If a client didn’t pay on time we would subsist on meager fare—day-old bread soaked in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar was one of my mother’s favorite “hard times” meals, which she claimed tasted exactly like the baked Alaska at Delmonico’s—but we always managed somehow. Up until the last months of my mother’s life, when she was haunted by her fear of van Drood, we had been happy together in our various little apartments near the river. In fact, as I neared the Jane Street Tea Room, I recognized the streets we had lived on and smelled the salt breeze coming off the Hudson.
I could come back here
, I thought. If Blythewood lost its endowment I could get a job as a seamstress and a little apartment near the water and at night Raven and I could fly up the dark river to the Shawangunks—or perhaps we could live in one of the little farmhouses in the valley beneath the Gunks. We could raise cows and sell milk to people in the city . . .

I might be able to manage, but what about all the other girls at Blythewood? What about those like Etta, for whom Blythewood was a chance to better themselves? I couldn’t quite see girls like Alfreda Driscoll and Georgiana Montmorency living in tenement flats or rustic Catskill dairy farms. And while I wouldn’t grieve too hard for Georgiana, there were other girls at Blythewood I would hate to see reduced to poverty, not to mention the teachers. And if Blythewood ceased to train girls, who would protect the world against evil?

By the time I reached the Jane Street Tea Room I had worked myself up into a proper tizzy. Only the sight of Sam Greenfeder, dressed in his best Sunday suit with his unruly red hair brilliantined into submission, and Agnes Moorhen, trim and spruce in navy serge with a bright yellow feather nodding from her hat, brought me to my senses.
They would stop it
, I thought. Agnes and Sam would not let Blythewood founder.

“Oh, Mr. Greenfeder,” I cried as he got up to pull out a chair for me. “Do tell me you’ve found out who ruined Mr. van Beek. I think the same person must be trying to ruin Blythewood and we must stop him!”

Sam looked to Agnes, who gave him a curt nod that made the yellow feather bob. “Yes,” he said, pushing my chair in and taking his own seat across from me, “you may be right. I’ll tell you all that I’ve discovered about Mr. van Beek’s affairs, but first . . .” He looked nervously toward Agnes again and she sighed.

“Oh, for Bell’s sake, Sam, I’ll tell her. We’ve found Mr. Farnsworth. And we think he knows where your book is.”

Agnes insisted I have my tea before they told me the story of finding Mr. Farnsworth. “You’re looking too thin,” she said. “Are they working you too hard? I hear this new dancing master rules the girls like an Austrian regimental sergeant.”

“Herr Hofmeister?” I asked through a mouthful of watercress sandwiches. I was cramming in as many as I could to satisfy Agnes’s concerns and get to Sam’s story. “He’s more like an anxious nursemaid than a military sergeant, but please, tell me about Mr. Farnsworth. How did he survive the
Titanic
? And what do you mean he knows where the book is? Does he have it?”

For answer Agnes handed me a scone slathered in clotted cream and raspberry preserves. Only when I had jammed it in my mouth did she nod to Sam to proceed.

“Well,” he said, holding up one finger as if he were presenting a case to a jury, “I began by examining the records of survivors and looking for any who had suffered from exposure and required medical attention. I found that several crew members had been remanded to various sailors’ rest homes throughout the Northeast. I tracked down each one—”

“He traveled from Cape May, New Jersey, to Portland, Maine,” Agnes broke in, looking proudly at Sam. “On his days off, he interviewed over twenty seamen.”

“All of whom had lost their memories,” Sam said, glowing with Agnes’s praise. “The doctors all thought their conditions were caused by the psychic trauma of the ship sinking or guilt over the deaths of so many passengers, but I began to suspect that some of them had been tampered with.”

“Tampered with?” I asked, feeling a chill. I recalled the weeks I had spent in the Bellevue Pavilion for the Insane, drugged into a hallucinatory stupor, convinced by Dr. Pritchard that I was insane. “Who was tampering with them?” I asked, the clotted cream turning sour in my mouth.