Gillian Shields
Destiny
Dedication
For Sasha and Gabriel
Epigraph
Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name.
—John Donne, “Air and Angels”
In your hands is my destiny.
—Psalm 31:5
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Everything is connected. The people you pass on the street,…
One
I’ve done something crazy and stupid and wicked, and you’re…
Two
A new academic year is beginning this September at Wyldcliffe…
Three
I didn’t know whether I would survive approaching her. I…
Four
All I hoped for as the new term began was…
Five
Yesterday I passed through the secret ways again, to visit…
Six
Waiting, waiting, waiting for our destinies to unfold—that’s all it…
Seven
I have just returned from another visit to the Ridge,…
Eight
If only I knew my mother better. If only I…
Nine
I want to go to the moors again, to the…
Ten
We were just waiting in the dark. I couldn’t bury…
Eleven
It was so like Sarah to want to help Laura.
Twelve
They say I was taken ill. I don’t really remember.
Thirteen
I have been thinking endlessly, fighting myself and my fears.
Fourteen
Helen slipped back to class later that morning, her face…
Fifteen
Everything has changed in a few brief moments this afternoon,…
Sixteen
I wasn’t very happy that our trip to Uppercliffe Farm…
Seventeen
I hope you will trust me, Wanderer, that everything I…
Eighteen
Lost in time, lost between worlds, like Sarah’s people…. As…
Nineteen
All would be well, and all manner of things would…
Twenty
Velvet was furious.
Twenty-One
I thought I could ignore everything Lynton said and live…
Twenty-Two
It seems strange not to share this with Sarah and…
Twenty-Three
My meetings with Lynton are followed by restless nights. I…
Twenty-Four
I should be thinking only of Laura and my mother…
Twenty-Five
I can’t simply be friends with Lynton. I am trying,…
Twenty-Six
Helen was like a white rose blossoming in a late,…
Twenty-Seven
We go to the caverns tonight. In these last few…
Twenty-Eight
What have I done? How can we ever survive this…
Twenty-Nine
I have been writing for so long that my wrist…
Thirty
The sound of the waterfall is all around me. I’m…
Thirty-One
All I could do was pray. There was a part…
Thirty-Two
Wyldcliffe was burning. We stared in horror, spellbound, at the…
Thirty-Three
Agnes’s passing left a sweet, tender pain in my heart,…
Thirty-Four
Confused accounts are emerging of what caused last week’s fatal…
Thirty-Five
In the damp November days after the fire we spent…
Thirty-Six
November slipped away and December arrived with snow. It lay…
Back Ads
About the Author
Other Books by Gillian Shields
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Everything is connected. The people you pass on the street, the child looking up with trusting eyes, the old woman bent down with memories, the beggar on the corner. We weave in and out of one another’s lives, like circles within circles, and everything is for a purpose.
We were meant to meet Helen. Her life connected with ours, and together we did things that we could never have even imagined alone. She was the best of us, and this is her story.
It isn’t a story about magic; it’s about miracles. The miracle of friendship, and courage and sisterhood. And the miracle of love—the greatest power of all—that came down and touched us as Helen embraced her destiny. Crazy Helen Black, they said—but we know better. We believe in everything she did, everything she was.
So when you next pass the girl who doesn’t fit in, at school or in the mall or walking down the street with her shoulders hunched and her eyes dark with loneliness, just stop for a moment and ask yourself—what power is she hiding deep within her soul? And ask yourself where your own powers are leading you. To the light, or into the shadows? We all have to make that choice sometime. We have to make our destinies happen.
This is Helen’s story. Read it, and then make your own choices. And may your destiny be as strange and beautiful as her own.
In sisterhood,
Evelyn Johnson and Sarah Fitzalan
One
FROM THE DIARY OF HELEN BLACK
WYLDCLIFFE, SEPTEMBER 13
I’ve done something crazy and stupid and wicked, and you’re the only person I can tell. My Wanderer, I need you so badly.
When I scribble my thoughts to you in this diary, it’s almost as though you are here with me again, like you used to be, in the old days.
I can’t even tell Evie and Sarah what I’ve done, because I know it was wrong. But can you understand that I had to know what would happen? I had to see if I could make things different. To know whether freedom was possible for her—and for me.
The idea was tormenting me all summer, like a voice in my head. “Go and try it when you get back to Wyldcliffe, just see if it works, you won’t do any harm….”
But who can tell what harm we do? They say that every action affects someone else, like a tiny stone falling and starting an avalanche. Everything is connected.
If what I have done hurts Evie or Sarah, I’ll never forgive myself.
I went to the hills,
Where the wind blows
Over the high ground.
I looked for the prisoner
Who chains my heart.
I found a broken bird,
And a forgotten song.
I found myself.
The worst thing of all is that I know I will go and do it all again tomorrow. I hope that my sisters will forgive me, but I have to do this. And I have to do it alone.
I was crazy Helen Black, bent over my diary, snatching at words to ease my pain, pouring my heart out to a lost dream. The only person I could talk to was my Wanderer, and he wasn’t even really there, only in my secret memories. I was alone, I always had been, always would be, and that was that.
The people I should have turned to, Sarah and Evie, were the ones I was most careful to hide the truth from. All my life I had craved friendship, but now I had found it, I hardly knew what to do with it. Ironic, isn’t it? I had even found my family at last—my dad, Tony, and his new wife, Rachel, and their two gorgeous kids. They were so kind to me, but I didn’t feel I belonged with them. On my visit to their home in the summer vacation, I had been awkward and self-conscious, craving their acceptance but not really knowing how to accept myself. I didn’t know how to break out of the protective cage I had built around my heart for years, so we never got to
know one another properly. Despite their kind words and good intentions and my father’s promise to write to me often, I knew that Tony and Rachel were secretly relieved when it was time for me to go back to boarding school and they could get on with their own life. And I was glad to leave, liberating them of the burden of trying to be nice to me. But when I arrived at Wyldcliffe on a blustery September day, things started to get even tougher.
It’s not that my friends weren’t waiting for me. There they were, running down the platform when I got off the train at the little country station at the head of Wyldcliffe’s windswept valley. They threw themselves at me with hugs and smiles. My friends. They were so special, both of them. Evie Johnson—sensitive, passionate, with long red hair and sea-gray eyes. She had known love and loss and she still grieved under that welcoming smile. Evie’s mystic element was water, connecting her to the river of time and the flow of the years. And Sarah—dear, dear Sarah, my sister of earth; good and grounded and caring, a queen of the green forests and wild mountains, with curling brown hair and dancing brown eyes and a heart that was true and steady as an oak tree. Ordinary girls, other people might have thought, but I knew they were unique and wonderful and powerful.
I told myself I wasn’t good enough for them. They deserved a better fate than to be tied to my miserable doom. I wanted them to be free of me, so I turned away from them and scribbled my secrets to a long-lost ghost.
Another September, another school year, another return to Wyldcliffe Abbey School for Young Ladies. But there was someone else waiting for me at Wyldcliffe. She was there, drawing me back to those dark hills. She was waiting for me. Our battle wasn’t done yet. As I sat once again in the gloomy classrooms and tried to concentrate on French and history, my thoughts wandered up to the moors, where a beloved enemy was waiting for me to make the next move. What was she thinking? What was she planning? And did she ever think of me?
I had to find out, and I had to make sure that Evie and Sarah didn’t guess what I was about to do.
It was easy to sneak out of the school, now that I had my powers back. Now that I could step through the air again I could at least escape for a little while, and that’s all I did at first. When it all got too much—the noise of the school, the endless talk-talk-talk of the other students, the black looks from the mistresses because I wasn’t paying attention in class—I took the secret paths through the air and walked over the moors, reveling in the winds and the clouds and the call of the birds. Even the sympathy and concern of Evie and Sarah seemed too much sometimes. Stifling. They didn’t mean to be like that, but I could sense them watching me, the little glances between them—Is Helen all right? Is she coping? What’s going on with her? It made me feel like a prisoner.
If I sound ungrateful, I didn’t mean to be. And if my friends watched me closely, it was only because they cared. I was grateful, deep down. I loved Sarah and Evie. I would have died for them. But I still felt cut off and different. I still feel like that abandoned child in the orphanage.
That’s why I needed my Wanderer, even though he had left me long ago. I told him my secrets in hot, hasty words that spilled out like blood into my diary, instead of actually talking with my friends. But that wasn’t enough. More than anything, I needed my mother.
I tried to forget that she was Celia Hartle, the Priestess, who hated the very sound of my name. I ached to have what I had never known, and clung to any scrap of hope, telling myself that it was a new term, a new day, and a new beginning. And so I went to the moors alone, passing by the secret ways. I know I shouldn’t have, but I was driven to it by my restless, hungry heart. I went to the circle of stones on the Blackdown Ridge, where my mother’s spirit was trapped in the great, lonely rock.
And I spoke to her.
Two
THE WYLDFORD CHRONICLE
LOCAL NEWS ROUNDUP
SEPTEMBER 14: A new academic year is beginning this September at Wyldcliffe Abbey School for Young Ladies. The school has always been an important institution in the local area, bringing not only prestige to this remote corner of the country, but employment opportunities. Gardeners, cleaners, cooks, and many others have made their living at the exclusive girls’ boarding school. However, the Chronicle has learned that all that might be about to change, as the school, which is over a hundred years old, is now threatened with possible closure.
The troubles began when the respected High Mistress, Celia Hartle, who had led the school for many years, went missing in mysterious circumstances. Her body was found on the moors above the school’s Victorian Gothic mansion, and an open verdict was returned by the coroner. Was it a heart attack, suicide, or something more sinister?
The teacher who took the reins while Mrs. Hartle was missing, Miss Pauline Raglan, then hurriedly left the school due to “family problems,” and the appointment of a new High Mistress, Miss Miriam Scratton, was similarly blighted. Miss Scratton was tragically killed in an automobile accident last term, and her death has set tongues wagging. It is only just over a year ago that one of the Wyldcliffe students drowned in the lake on the school grounds, and questions are now being asked as to whether the three deaths are connected in any way.
There have always been rumors about Wyldcliffe’s history, and the place has been called “cursed,” but these stories have usually been dismissed as gossip and legend. For instance, it is said locally that a former inhabitant of Wyldcliffe Abbey, Lady Agnes Templeton, was in fact murdered and that her ghost walks at night. Indeed, some elderly residents go so far as to say that Lady Agnes will one day return to Wyldcliffe to save it from great danger. And now less colorful, more disturbing stories are being circulated.
It is rumored that Wyldcliffe is the base for some kind of pagan cult, whose existence has been hushed up over the years. There has never been any proof of such claims, but these persistent rumors, combined with the unfortunate recent deaths, have caused enrollments at Wyldcliffe School to plummet. Even its famously upper-crust traditions have been falling out of favor as the twenty-first century progresses. “Girls nowadays want to get good grades to prepare them for college, not learn how to hold a knife and fork correctly. Wyldcliffe’s day is over,” said one disgruntled former pupil, who didn’t want to be named.
It is known that Miss Scratton had wanted to introduce a program of modernization, but whether this will now take place and whether the school can survive without it remains to be seen.
Three
FROM THE DIARY OF HELEN BLACK
SEPTEMBER 14
I didn’t know whether I would survive approaching her. I was shaking with fear, crouching at the foot of the tallest stone on the Ridge, which loomed over me like a black tower. I tried to breathe the fragrant air of the moors to calm myself as I leaned against the rock and listened for my mother’s voice.
She sensed me. She welcomed me. She spoke to me from deep inside her prison, and her voice echoed in my head. It was heavy with sorrow, weighed down with regret for what she had done, and how she had fought against us.
I know, Wanderer, I know! Don’t tell me! You think I am fooling myself, dabbling in dangerous, self-indulgent games. Maybe I am, but just listen! I told you that Celia Hartle hates the sound of my name, but perhaps she has truly changed? What if the long days and nights she has spent as a prisoner have really made her see things differently? Maybe she even sees me differently now. And besides, isn’t everyone capable of redemption? If we don’t believe that, we are all lost in darkness forever.
Reaching out to my mother’s mind was extraordinary. We are both creatures of air, and although she has turned her back on the true meaning of the Mystic Way, she can still send her thoughts to me on the wind’s breath. And she seemed so altered from how she had been before, humble and quiet, not like the Celia Hartle I remembered. She showed me tender images of when I was a baby, during the few weeks before she took me to the children’s home. She said she wished she could go back to do things differently. To start again.
I
know what you are thinking—can I trust anything that she says? But do I even have to decide about that yet? Can’t I just enjoy this secret time, before Evie and Sarah find out and tell me, “You can’t do this, don’t be so stupid, don’t be so crazy”?
Now, after all these years, it seems that Celia Hartle might be willing to be a mother to me at last. I want to believe that, Wanderer. Let me believe it, just for today. She wishes she could start again…. I wish with all my heart that I could free her, body and soul, and turn back time so that everything could be different for both of us, clean and pure, like a new song, with no past, only a future.
Oh, I know that isn’t possible. She is hidden in her prison of stone and earth, and I cannot follow her into that eternal tomb. There is so much that divides us, and always will.
But I can still hope.
Four
THE WITNESS OF EVELYN JOHNSON
All I hoped for as the new term began was an end to our long battle. It was time for us to finish this. The dark spirit of the Priestess was hidden in the black rock on the top of the windswept ridge, but although we had trapped her there at the end of the previous term, her twisted soul threw a shadow on our lives, like the ogre of the mountains in a child’s story. While she was still there we couldn’t be truly free, especially not Helen.
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