“Don’t swear, Madeleine,” Miss Crafter cautioned her. “Can anyone substantiate that?”
“I can, Miss Crafter,” Rose said. “Maddy was near me, more than an arm’s length from her. Deborah simply fell.” Her hand described the arc of Deborah’s inelegant descent.
“She’s going to need cold compresses,” Miss Amanda decided, after examining the ankle. “It will be all right in a few days. It isn’t broken. There, that will be a lesson to you, girl, not to make sport of others. It may be that your own conscience tripped you up.”
“Yes, Miss Crafter.” John, the manservant, appeared, and Deborah was helped, with difficulty, back to bed.
Deborah was confined to her room for three days until Miss Crafter pronounced her fit again. Miss Abigail visited her in the afternoon to give her a reading assignment and to hear her recitation of a French fable.
It was only the first of the accidents that seemed to occur around Madeleine. Miss Letitia skidded and slipped on a perfectly dry floor in the schoolroom when she made a derogatory comment about Madeleine’s progress in algebra.
“I think Mad Madeleine’s found a guardian angel,” Daisy, one of the younger girls, suggested.
Part of friendship is play, and the others were beginning to be frightened of the run of bad luck that befell people who did or said anything ill to Madeleine, even in fun. They began to leave her alone. Having lately become accustomed to having friends, Madeleine felt lonely and bereft.
Never mind, the little inner voice said. You have me.
* * *
Miss Amanda had not failed to notice the strange run of circumstances that dogged Madeleine Gentry.
“She was up to some kind of ill behavior,” Amanda told her sister. “I thought something like this might happen the night she interrupted the servants’ reading class. Madeleine is just the kind of girl who will see how far she can go, and press out against her limits every time until she is stopped. That first morning that we found her drunk, I spoke to Mrs. Harper, who confirmed that the girl had been at her party the evening before. I wrote to her father, informing him of her behavior. I had discovered long ago that she had a small hoard of invitation cards for various parties. She has been accustomed to an active social life. Barring her getting ill on punch or champagne and sleeping through the next day, I thought that if these little outings took the edge off her energy, she might become a useful member of our society.
“He informed me that if I could see to it that she would come to no harm, he was agreeable that she should be allowed to continue attending the parties, and if I chose, there was no reason to inform her I knew she was going,” Miss Amanda smiled. “Reverend Gentry understands that his daughter enjoys thinking she’s gotten away with something she knows is wrong. Stolen fruit is sweeter than that to which we are entitled. Up until now, I thought our ruse might be working.
“I missed her only once” when she went abroad one. midnight without a set destination. It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized she had gone out without my knowing it. Something happened to her that evening, and I believe that her. alteration in behavior is a result of it.”
“I wonder what it could have been?” Miss ‘Abigail said.
“I don’t know,” Miss’ Amanda replied, tapping her fingers with her pen. “And I am terribly afraid we are going to find out. Something about the current run of circumstances reminds me of a story told me by Captain Gregson, in which an outside influence took hold of an innocent life, and subtly altered the aura around it.”
“You can scarcely use the words ‘innocent life’ to refer to Madeleine Gentry,” Miss Abigail said, laughing. “Wandering fearlessly abroad by herself at night like a gypsy.”
“That’s exactly why I do say she is an innocent,” Miss , Amanda said. “She hasn’t the sense to know, that, she might be placing herself in danger.”
* * *
The advanced cooking class consisted of the six eldest girls under the tutelage of Miss Letitia. She was pleased with their progress, having guided them over the course of weeks through the mysteries of the kitchen from the simple preparation of vegetables to the killing and dressing of a fowl for the oven. The latest week’s adventure was the making of bread.
Even Madeleine was able to eke savage pleasure out of folding, pummeling, and throwing down the heavy mass of dough. She was floury to the, hairline before Miss Letitia checked on her portion and pronounced it ready to set aside for rising.
“But it’s getting soft now,” Madeleine complained, brushing stray hairs off her hot face. “Should I not continue?”
Letitia smiled. “It is precisely why you should not continue. When it reaches this texture, soft and elastic like the flesh of your cheek” —she touched the girl’s face gently— “then it is perfect. Any more, and the bread will refuse to rise correctly. It will be tough and fibrous.”
Disappointed, Madeleine surrendered her bowl of dough.
Hers, along with the other girls’, was put away onto pantry
“That will take a while before we need to see it again,” Miss Letitia said, with an air of mystery. “Therefore we will undertake another project in the duration. Rose,” she directed, “will you find the sack of brown sugar, and you, Elizabeth, the white. Daisy, please measure out a cup of butter-no more. Madeleine, since you are the strongest, please take that bag of nuts and the hammer and bowl, and begin to break them out of the shells. The meats need not remain intact. Deborah, as Madeleine passes them to you, please chop the nuts into pieces about this big.” She held up her finger and thumb about a centimeter apart.
Rose, her eyes dancing, asked, “Are we making sweets?”
“We are,” Miss Letitia confirmed. “You have worked hard and well, you have earned a treat. We have pecans, we have peanuts, we will make nut brittle.”
The girls clapped their hands for joy, and began to assemble the ingredients.
Candy! Madeleine loved sweets. Willingly, she set to work on the nuts. The peanuts she set aside to open with her fingers, but the pecans took skill and care with the hammer. If she struck them too hard, they smashed into greasy powder. If she struck them too lightly, they slipped out under the hammer’s face and spun across the wooden tabletop. The right tap cracked the shell neatly around the center, and she could pull forth a whole nutmeat.
“My parents are coming at the weekend,” Deborah said, as she deftly chopped the nuts into fragments and whisked them into a bowl. “Mother wrote that if I have improved in French she will buy me a new bonnet.”
“How nice!” Daisy exclaimed.
“Madam Levallier on Market Street makes lovely spring hats,” Madeleine put in. “I remember my mother—”
“Where will you go?” Daisy interrupted.
“I’m not sure yet. Of course, my grandmother thought I should make it myself, but Mother said I should have a fashionable hat for this season.”
“I’ve heard that the fashion in France is an arrangement of pheasant—” Madeleine began.
“Perhaps if you do well in Astronomy,” Daisy interrupted again, making a mischievous face at Deborah, “she will buy you a dress to go with it!”
The other girls laughed. Madeleine felt put out that she was being ignored, but her task demanded her whole attention. There were a lot of nuts in the sack, and each needed to be treated as carefully as the first. If she lifted her head to join the conversation, she was likely to miss the nut she was breaking, and bring the hammer down on her fingers.
The girls whose only jobs were to measure ingredients soon joined Miss Letitia at the stove with the huge iron frying pan. It took Deborah only a moment at a time to chop up all the meats Madeleine produced, so she could come and go between her place at the table and the merry group watching the sugar melt over the fire, leaving Madeleine alone.
Madeleine felt her cheeks grow pink, and the bubbling of anger risi
ng inside her, as she watched the others chatting happily, leaving her out. Savagely, she brought the hammer down on a nut, and missed. She struck her own finger solidly, and shrieked. There was a tremendous crash inside the pantry, and the girls spun around. She glared at, them, holding her throbbing hand.
Miss Letitia looked from Madeleine to the pantry door. She ran over, threw it open. Every pan of bread was upside down on the floor, with the exception of Madeleine’s.
“Madeleine, you’ve spoiled a week’s worth of bread,” Miss Letitia chided her.
“I didn’t do it,” Madeleine protested, surprised. “I hit my hand, that’s all.”
“That was a spiteful thing to do,” Miss Letitia insisted. “And to compound your action by lying! For shame!”
Madeleine started to speak, and decided nothing she could say would change the angry teacher’s mind. Still clutching her wounded finger, she fled the room. She dashed to the front hall, yanked open the door and stumbled out of the house. As she passed the parlor, a heavy bronze figure on the parlor mantelpiece rose up into the air, and crashed down, breaking the marble mantel in two before dropping into the fire and scattering embers and ashes.
“Don’t let the sugar burn, girls!” Miss Letitia called, as she ran after Madeleine.
Miss Amanda heard the crash, and arrived in the hall with Miss Abigail only a step behind her. “What is amiss here?” she asked, viewing the mess through the open door of the parlor. “Great heavens! What is all this? What is going on?”
Miss Letitia explained. “And then she must have broken your mantel. What a wretched brat! Mad Maddy, indeed!”
Miss Amanda went into the parlor. She scooped the embers away from the statue, and brought a cloth duster to try and lift the bronze out of the fire. “It’s impossible. She couldn’t have done this. I can’t raise this alone. Captain Gregson brought this to me, and placed it on the mantel himself. I couldn’t move it. When the girls dust they have to go around it unless they have John’s help.” It took all three women to move the statue onto the tiles surrounding the hearth.
“Madeleine is strong, but to do this she would have to be a freak,” Miss Abigail commented.
“People have tremendous strength when they are in a fit of rage,” Miss Letitia suggested.
Miss Amanda shook her head. “No, something else has happened. I sense it. There is something amiss here greater than just a girl’s hurt feelings. Letitia, will you keep order here? Abigail, come with me.” Miss Amanda removed her shawl and put on her coat and hat. “Have Emily summon a coach for us,” she said. “There’s no time to harness ours.”
The two sisters hurried to the Gentry house. Mrs. Gentry was surprised to see them, but invited them out into the garden.
“We need to speak privately,” Amanda said.
* * *
“What do you mean, Madeleine is missing?” demanded Reverend Gentry, after Miss Amanda explained.
“She ran out of the house,” Miss Amanda repeated patiently. “She appears to have had an altercation with some of the other girls, but I fear there is more to it than that. I believe she left the house on the sly one night that I do not know about, and something very odd happened to her then.”
“What?” Mrs. Gentry demanded, and Miss Amanda realized that she knew nothing of her agreement with Mr. Gentry. “I thought that yours was a respectable school. How could you have allowed such goings-on?”
“Now, now, my dear, I knew all about it,” Mr. Gentry said, clearing his throat abashedly.
“She has never been without protection,” Miss Amanda said.
“Nor without chaperonage. You must take my word for that.”
“She’s done no more than we’d do if she was going from our home,” Reverend Gentry said, trying to placate his wife. “But what other problem is it you allude to?”
“I can only pin down her change in behavior as far back as the day she began wearing a gold necklace. She has been telling the girls that it came from you. I wonder if you would tell me what you know about that necklace, Mr. Gentry?”
“The necklace!” he exclaimed. “Big gold beads and a little face-like thing in the center?”
Miss Amanda inclined her head.
Mr. Gentry struck the arm of his chair. “It was stolen a couple of months ago from my offices. I never dreamed that my own daughter ...” He threw up his hands. “I suppose I ought to have guessed. Nothing else was taken, though there were items of far greater value in the warehouse. Madeleine’s always been a magpie, loves shiny baubles. I had it locked up in a drawer, but she knew where to find the keys.”
“Why was it locked up?” Miss Amanda pressed him. “It is not strictly because it is valuable, is it? Otherwise would you not have had it at home?”
“No, frankly speaking,” Mr. Gentry said. “It’s supposedly responsible for the deaths of two men. One killed by the other, who threw himself over the side of the ship that brought the necklace home to me from the Spice Islands.”
“As I feared,” Miss Amanda said, her forehead drawing down gravely. “My fiancé has told me many mysterious tales of the islands. He’s mentioned artifacts that can drive men mad.”
Mr. Gentry snorted. “Personally, I don’t believe a word of it.
The darkies on my crew said it had bad joujou, but you know how they are. Once I heard that, I knew the story wouldn’t stop at the wharf. I couldn’t sell it in Boston. No one would touch it, and as a man of God, I don’t think I could stomach making money off such a profane thing. I was going to have it smelted down.”
“Where would she have gone, Mr. Gentry? Mrs. Gentry?” Miss Amanda pressed them. “If she felt she was in trouble, where or to whom would she run?”
Mrs. Gentry looked hurt. “I always felt that if she was unhappy, she would come to me,” she said. “Or my husband’s aunt, though she knows that we don’t approve.”
“The warehouse,” Gentry said, without hesitation. “From a small child, Madeleine always liked to hide in my office or in the storerooms. My men know her. Do you think she’s there?” he asked, as Miss Crafter stood up. Miss Abigail followed suit.
“I’m sure of it,” the headmistress said. “Will you accompany us? I fear we may need help with ... her.”
* * *
Madeleine cowered in the corner of her father’s office, listening to the inner voice enumerating horror after horror that ought to befall the cruel women who had teased and abandoned her. Fire and woe shall be their part! They should revere you, hold you up as a superior being.
“I don’t understand,” Madeleine wailed. “Why should they do those things?”
It’s what you’ve always wished, isn’t it, having them admire and worship you? It should come true.
“No, I don’t want it.”
But you do. You crave their admiration. You’ve always wanted it.
“But not that way, not through terror. I want them to follow and admire me because ...”
Because they like you? None of them like you. What reason have you ever given them? You scorn their offers of friendship, make fun of them, steal their belongings, bully and berate them.
“Oh, God, if that was ever true, I am sorry for it now!”
Whatever was within her caused a huge shudder to pass through her body, and she shrieked in fear as the inner voice commanded: Don’t speak that name again, or I will rend you apart, like the hurricanes tear up the huts of the islanders.
Madeleine subsided, sinking over her clasped hands in utter despair. She wished she had learned more prayers than the last lines after which she could say “Amen” and escape from the dreariness of church on Sundays. Her father had never managed to instill in her any of the fiery faith he felt, the exaltation he knew from God’s love. She felt that she was far away from her Creator’s help. All she could remember was the poetry she had learned at Miss Crafter’s school. She had t
hought the words so beautiful, but there was no protection in them, no comfort.
She wished Miss Crafter was there with her. The headmistress seemed cool under any circumstances, but would she even care if her most obstreperous pupil was in deadly danger, especially from an unseen foe? No one would believe her if she told what the voice had been saying to her. A sob broke from her lips. Madeleine knew that she was alone with this demon, and she didn’t even know what had made it choose her to plague.
The voice within began to speak again, laughing at the despair of its prisoner-host. Madeleine tried to shut it out, burrowing into her dusty comer like a lost waif.
* * *
“Madeleine?” her father’s voice called from the front of the warehouse. She could see him and a clutch of other figures silhouetted against the afternoon sky. “Are you here, my dear?”
“F-f-” she began, but the voice within seemed to have control of her vocal chords, and choked off her reply.
“There you are, Madeleine,” Gentry said, spotting her in the comer. “Come out of there, my dear. We’re not angry. We want only to talk to you.”
Madeleine rose gladly, but to her horror, her throat was emitting a snarling sound, like the growls of a beast.
“What is wrong with my daughter?” Mrs. Gentry cried. “Miss Crafter, I am holding you responsible. You have no control over these girls. She is worse than ever she was at home. I’m withdrawing her from your school.”
“Now is not the time to discuss it, Mrs. Gentry. Get down!” Miss Amanda grabbed the angry woman’s arm and dragged her behind a packing crate.
Without seeming effort, Madeleine picked up the desk chair. She held it effortlessly over her head, baring her teeth in a hideous laugh, then sent it hurtling across the office to crash into the wall behind them.
The Crafters Book Two Page 26
