by Victoria Lee
“Yes, I know about Dickinson,” says Ellis.
“Not just that,” Leonie says. “Godwin might be the smallest house on campus, but it’s also the oldest. It was here before the rest of the school was even built. Deliverance Lemont—the founder—lived here with her daughter.”
“Margery Lemont,” Ellis says, and I am frozen in the armchair, ice water in my veins. “I read about what happened,” she adds.
I should have gone upstairs when I had the chance.
“Creepy, right?” Clara says. She’s smiling. I can’t help but stare at her. Creepy: the word fails to encapsulate what Margery Lemont had been. I can think of better terms: Wealthy. Daring. Killer. Witch.
“Oh, please,” Kajal says, waving a dismissive hand. “No one really believes in that nonsense.”
“The deaths were real. That much is a historical fact.” Leonie’s tone is almost pedagogic; I wonder if her thesis involves archival work.
“Yes, but witchcraft? Ritual murder?” Kajal shakes her head. “More likely the Dalloway Five were just girls who were too bold for their time, and they were killed for it. Like what happened in Salem.”
The Dalloway Five.
Flora Grayfriar, who was murdered first, by the girls she’d thought were friends.
Tamsyn Penhaligon, hanged from a tree.
Beatrix Walker, her body broken on a stone floor.
Cordelia Darling, drowned.
And…Margery Lemont, buried alive.
Before last year, I had planned to write my thesis on the intersection of witchcraft and misogyny in literature. Dalloway seemed like the perfect place for it, the very walls steeped in dark history. I had studied the Dalloway witches like an academic, paging through the stories of their lives and deaths with scholarly detachment—until the past reached out from parchment and ink to close its fingers around my throat.
“You’re lucky you got accepted to Godwin your first year at Dalloway,” Leonie says to Ellis, deftly guiding the conversation out of choppy waters. “It’s so competitive; most people don’t get accepted until they’re seniors.”
“I’m a junior,” Clara points out, to general disregard.
I resist the urge to retort: I was, too.
“Didn’t they say all the witches died here at Godwin House?” Ellis says, lighting a fresh cigarette. The smell of her smoke curls through the air, acrid as burning flesh.
I can’t be here.
I shove back my chair and stand. “I think I’ll head to bed now. It was lovely meeting all of you.”
They’re staring at me, so I force a smile: polite, good girl, from a good family. Ellis exhales her smoke toward the ceiling.
By the time I make it upstairs to my dark room and its old familiar shapes, I’ve identified the feeling in my chest: defeat.
The tarot cards are still on my bed. I grab the deck and shove it back into the hole it came from, push the baseboard into place.
Ridiculous. I’m ridiculous. I should never have used them again. Tarot isn’t magic, but it’s close enough; I can practically hear Dr. Ortega’s voice in my head, murmuring about fixed delusions and grief. But magic isn’t real, I’m not crazy, and I’m not grieving.
Not anymore.
I debated attending the party at all. The inhabitants of Boleyn House throw the same soiree at the start and finish of every semester—Moulin Rouge themed, girls with long cigarette holders sipping absinthe and checking glued-on lashes in the bathroom mirror—and I’d always attended before. But that was when I had all of Godwin House with me. Alex and I used to dress monochrome: me in red, her in midnight blue. She’d have a hip flask tucked into her beaded clutch. I’d lean out the fourth-story window and chain-smoke cigarettes—the only time I ever smoked.
This time it’s just me. No dark mirror-self. And the red dress I wore last year hangs off me now, my collarbone jutting like blades from shoulder to shoulder and my hip bones visible through the thin silk.
I recognize some of the faces, students who had been first-years and sophomores during my first attempt at a senior year; they wave at me as they drift past, on to more promising prospects.
“Felicity Morrow?”
I glance around. A short, bob-haired girl stands at my elbow, all big eyes and wearing a dress that has clearly never seen an iron in its life. It takes a second for the realization to sink in.
“Oh—hi. It’s Hannah, right?”
“Hannah Stratford,” she says, beaming still wider. “I wasn’t sure you’d remember me!”
I do, although only as a vague recollection of the little first-year who’d tagged along after Alex like Alex was the very embodiment of sophistication and not a messy girl who always slept too late and cheated a passing grade out of French class. No, outside of Godwin House, Alex was seamless, refined, the model of effortless perfection, who managed to wear her parvenu surname like a goddamn halo.
My stomach cramps. I press a hand against my ribs and suck in a shallow breath. “Of course I remember,” I say, drawing a smile onto my lips. “It’s good to see you again.”
“I’m so glad you decided to come back this year,” Hannah says, solemn as a priest. “I hope you’re feeling better.”
All at once, that smile takes effort. “I’m feeling fine.”
It comes out sharply enough that Hannah flinches. “Right. Of course,” she says hurriedly. “Sorry. I just mean…sorry.”
She doesn’t know about my time at Silver Lake. She can’t possibly know.
Another breath, my hand rising and falling with my diaphragm. “We all miss her.”
I wonder if it sounds disingenuous coming from my mouth. I wonder if Hannah hates me for it, a little.
Hannah chews her lower lip for a moment, but whatever she’d thought of saying she abandons in favor of another bright grin. “Well, at least you’re still in Godwin House! I applied this year, but no go, unfortunately. But then again, everyone applied. I mean, obviously.”
Obviously?
I don’t even have to ask the question. Hannah rises up on the balls of her feet, leans in, and whispers it like a secret: “Ellis Haley.”
Oh. Oh. Mismatched puzzle pieces slide, at last, into place. Ellis is Ellis Haley. Ellis is Ellis Haley, novelist: bestselling author of Night Bird, which won the Pulitzer last year. I’d heard about it on NPR; Ellis Haley, only seventeen and “the voice of our generation.”
Ellis Haley, a prodigy.
I manage to say, “Isn’t she homeschooled?”
“That’s right. You wouldn’t know, I guess. She transferred here this semester, for her senior year. I suppose she wanted to get out of Georgia.”
Hannah is still talking, but I don’t really hear her. I’m too busy combing through my memories of the past week, trying to remember if I did anything humiliating.
Everything I’d done was humiliating.
“I’m going to get a drink,” I tell Hannah, and escape before she can announce she’ll join me. The only thing worse than listening to Hannah tell me how sorry she is about what happened would be listening to her wax rhapsodic about Ellis Haley.
The Boleyn girls have set up a makeshift bar in their kitchen, their faculty adviser conveniently absent—as all our faculty go conveniently absent whenever we throw parties; our parents don’t pay this school to discipline us after all—and there are more varieties of expensive gin than I know how to parse. I pour myself a glass of what’s closest, then a second glass when that one’s gone.
I don’t even like gin. I doubt that any of the twenty girls who live in Boleyn House like gin; they just like how much this particular gin costs.
No one talks to me. For once, I’m glad. Instead I get to watch them talk to each other, their sidelong glances skirting past me like they’re trying not to be caught looking, conversation dropping low when they realize I’m
there.
Everyone knows, then.
I don’t know how they figured it out—or, well, maybe I do. Gossip travels fast in our circles. Even with Ellis Haley at Dalloway School, I am the most interesting person here.
I tip back the rest of my drink. They’ll get over it. Once classes start, someone will invent a worse story to tell around the fireplace than Felicity Morrow, the girl who…
Even in my mind, I can’t say it.
I pour myself another glass.
Every house at Dalloway has its secrets, a relic of the school’s history. As Leonie had so astutely pointed out, Dalloway was founded by Deliverance Lemont, the daughter of a Salem witch and allegedly a practitioner herself. Some secrets are easier: a secret passageway from the kitchen to the common room, a collection of old exam papers. Boleyn’s, like Godwin’s, is darker.
Boleyn’s secret is an old ritual, a nod from the present day to a time when bad women were witches and passed their magic down to their daughters, generation to generation. And if the magic has died by now, diluted by technology and cynicism and too many years, students of certain Dalloway houses still honor our bloody inheritance.
Boleyn House. Befana House. Godwin.
When I was initiated into the Margery coven, I pledged my blood and loyalty to the bones of Deliverance’s daughter, the dead witch Margery Lemont. I might not be part of Boleyn House, but the initiation ritual bound me to five girls each year from these three houses, chosen to carry Margery’s legacy.
More or less, anyway; last year I saw one of the Boleyn initiates drinking tequila out of the Margery Skull’s eye socket like it was a particularly macabre sippy cup.
The Skull is supposed to be here, at the Boleyn House altar. I could drift down the hall with gin running hot in my veins, find the girl in red standing guard by the crypt door, and murmur the password:
Ex scientia ultio.
From knowledge comes vengeance.
I close my eyes, and for a moment I can see it: the single slim table draped in black cloth and bearing thirteen black candles. The thirteenth candle atop the Margery Skull, wax melting over its crown like a dark hand grasping bone.
But the Skull isn’t there anymore, of course. It’s been missing for almost a year.
None of the Boleyn girls seem concerned. Even the girls I recognize from previous visits to the Boleyn crypt are drunk and laughing, liquor sloshing over the rims of their cups. If they worry about a dead witch seeking revenge for her desecrated remains, it doesn’t show.
We’ve all heard the ghost stories. They’re told at Margery coven initiation rites, handed down from older sister to younger like a family heirloom: Tamsyn Penhaligon seen outside a window with her snapped neck, Cordelia Darling with her sodden clothes dripping water on the kitchen floor, Beatrix Walker murmuring arcane words in the darkness.
Tales meant to frighten and entertain—not meant to be believed. And I hadn’t believed. Not at first.
But I still remember the dark figure blooming from the shadows, the guttering candlelight, and Alex’s white, stricken face.
I turn and stalk down that hall toward the crypt. The girl in red is there, but she isn’t the somber, stoic figure she ought to be. She’s on her phone, tapping away at the screen, which lights her face in an eerie bluish glow, smirking at something she’s just read.
“Remember me?” I say.
She looks up. The grin drops from her face between one heartbeat and the next, a new expression stealing its place: something flat and guarded and hard to read. “Felicity Morrow.”
“That’s right. I’ve been enjoying the party.”
Her weight shifts to the other foot, and her arms rise to hug around her waist, fingertips pressing in against that red cardigan. “I heard you were back at school this year.”
She’s afraid of me.
I shouldn’t blame her for it, but I do. I hate her, all at once. I hate that she is the one standing in scarlet to guard the crypt, I hate the invisible threads that tie her to the other girls in our coven, the knots between her and Bridget Crenshaw and Fatima Alaoui and the rest of them, tethers I used to think were unbreakable.
I hate that I don’t even remember her name.
“I haven’t received a note yet,” I say.
She shakes her head very slightly. “You won’t be getting one. Not this year.”
I knew it. I guessed it when none of them wrote to me while I was gone, despite all those flowers they sent to Alex’s mother for the funeral, their figures like a murder of crows huddled at Alex’s grave site even though none of them knew her. None of them really knew her, not like I did.
Suddenly I’m coldly, brutally sober. I set my empty glass aside on the nearest table and look at this girl with her scarlet Isabel Marant sweater and expensive manicure, her lipsticked mouth that would have whispered about Alex when she thought Alex couldn’t hear: scholarship, rustic, aspirant.
“I see,” I say. “And why is that?”
She might be afraid of me, but now it’s for a different reason entirely. I know how to adopt my mother’s crisp consonants and Boston vowels to effect. It’s an introduction without ever having to repeat my name.
The girl’s cheeks flush as red as her cardigan. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It wasn’t my decision. It’s just…you took this all so seriously, you know.”
It’s a comment that demands a response, but I find myself voiceless. So seriously. As if the skull, the candles, the goat’s blood…as if that was all a joke to them.
Or maybe it was. Alex would have said that witchcraft was about aesthetics. She would tell me that this coven was created for sisterhood—for the Margery girl with a knowing smile at that corporate gala introducing you to the right person at the right time. Connections, not conjure.
My smile feels tight and false on my lips, but I smile all the same. That’s all we ever do at this school: insult each other, then smile.
“Thank you for the explanation,” I say. “I understand your position completely.”
Time for another drink.
I make my way back into the kitchen, where the gin has been replaced by an unfamiliar green drink that tastes bitter, like rotten herbs. I drink it anyway, because that’s what you do at parties, because my mother’s blood runs in my veins and, like Cecelia Morrow, it turns out I cannot face the real world without the taste of lies in my mouth and liquor in my blood.
I hate that it’s true. I hate them more.
My thoughts have finally tilted hazy, all blue lights and blurred shapes, when I see her. Ellis Haley has arrived, and she’s brought her new cult in tow: Clara and Kajal and Leonie. None of them dressed for the theme, but somehow they become the knot around which the rest of the party shifts and contorts. I’m no better. I’m staring, too.
Ellis is wearing lipstick for the occasion, a red so dark it’s almost black. It will leave a mark on everything her mouth touches.
Our eyes meet across the room. And for once I’m not even tempted to turn away. I lift my chin and hold her gaze, sharp beneath straight brows, somehow clear despite the empty absinthe glass she holds in hand. I want to crack open her chest and peer inside, see how she ticks.
Then Ellis tilts her head to the side, bending down slightly as Clara rises up to murmur something in her ear. That rope tethered between us draws taut; she doesn’t look away.
But I do, just in time to catch the twist to Clara’s pink lips, the brief and brutal gesture with two fingers: scissors snapping shut.
Something cold plunges into my stomach; even chasing it with the rest of my drink doesn’t thaw the ice. I abandon my empty glass on the table and push my way through the crowd, using elbows where words fail.
I make it all the way outside before lurching forward to spill my guts across the lawn. I’m still gasping, spitting out bile, as someone yells
from the porch: “Go to rehab!”
Oh. Right. It’s only nine p.m.
I wipe my mouth on the back of a shaky hand, straighten up, and dart down the walkway toward the quad. I don’t look back. I don’t let them see my face.
At Godwin House I brush my teeth, then pace the empty halls, a terrible restlessness crawling up and down my spine. I can’t sleep yet. I can’t climb into my chilly bed and stare at the wall, waiting for the rest of them to get home, craning my ears to hear the sound of my name on their lips.
I make a cup of tea instead, stand at the kitchen counter sipping it until some of that dizzy drunk feeling fades. That gets me to nine-thirty, and then I have to put the dishes away and figure out something else. I draw a three-card tarot reading: all swords. I glimpse a light on, through the crack beneath Housemistress MacDonald’s door, but I’m not quite so pathetic yet as to seek her company.
As usual I end up in the common room.
The problem is, I don’t have anything I want to read. I peruse the shelves, but nothing jumps out at me. I feel as if I’ve read everything—every book in the world. Every title seems like a reiteration of something that came before it, the same story regurgitated over and over.
I make a fine literature student, don’t I?
This house seems too quiet now. The silence bears down on me like a weight.
No, it is too quiet—it’s unnaturally quiet—and when I glance back I see why.
The grandmother clock that sits between the fiction and poetry shelves has gone silent. Its hands are stuck at 3:03.
The same time I had the nightmare.
I draw closer, steps slow. The floorboards creak under my weight. I stare at the white face of that clock, at those black blades pointing nearly at a right angle to each other, mocking me. The silence thickens. I can’t breathe; I’m suffocating in thin, depressurized air—
“I suppose we’ll have to get it repaired,” someone says, and I spin around.
