Blythewood

by kindle@abovethetreeline. com

  “Yes, like stray cats,” Sarah Lehman said as she sat down at the head of our table.

  “What are you doing here?” Helen asked.

  “I’m your head girl. Every nestling table’s got one to show you how things are done.” She smiled sweetly. “And to make sure you stay in line. Oh, look, watercress soup. My favorite!” A girl dressed in pale gray had brought a tureen and a covered basket that smelled deliciously of freshly baked bread, but since no one at the other tables touched theirs, we didn’t either. Three other girls sat down across from us.

  “Hullo!” A girl with short dark hair and a heavy fringe stuck out her hand. “I’m Cam, short for Camilla, Bennett, and these are my roommates, Dolores and Beatrice Jager. They’re twins, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  It was impossible not to notice. The girls were not only identical in features—long sallow faces, aquiline noses, deepset brown eyes—but they also wore their thick brown hair in identical plaits piled high on their heads and the same hornrimmed glasses balanced on their long noses.

  “Jager?” Helen inquired. “What kind of name is that?”

  The girls exchanged a guarded look. The girl on the left— Beatrice, I thought—answered for both of them. “We are Austrian on our father’s side. Our mother was English. Our father was just given the appointment of professor of natural sciences.”

  “Oh, the new science professor.” Helen leaned across the table and we all leaned in with her to hear her whisper, “I hear the old one just up and vanished. The rumor is she eloped with a traveling Bible salesman. Imagine!”

  The two sisters regarded each other soberly and again Beatrice answered for them. “Scientists are just as likely to fall victim to the tender emotions as anyone else. Our father fell in love with our mother while employed as her instructor. They ran away together and lived in a cottage until she died giving birth to us. My sister and I . . .” she gave her sister Dolores a baleful look, “have concluded it is best to avoid the romantic emotions altogether.”

  “Oh!” Helen remarked, her blue eyes gone wide at this story. “How extraordinary! I’ve never met—”

  We didn’t get to hear the types of people Helen van Beek had never met—a list that would have been, I guessed, quite extensive—because at that moment a bell rang, a clear sweet chime that pierced through the cacophony of a hundred girls’ chatter. It came from the front of the hall, where a figure in a hooded cloak stood on the dais holding a gleaming gold handbell aloft. With a flick of her wrist she sounded the bell again and the sound swallowed every last scrap of conversation and shuffle of feet as if the bell were a dark pit that absorbed sound and transformed it into ringing silence. Then an echo of the first bell rang from one of the tables, and then from another and another, until the hall was filled with the sound of bells.

  “One of you must ring our bell,” Sarah said, pointing to the gold bell in the middle of our table. I looked to Helen, expecting that she would seize this honor, but before she could reach for the bell, Daisy had grabbed it. She held it up and gave it a firm shake when it was our turn.

  “Brava!” Cam said, reaching across the table to clap Daisy on the shoulder. “Thatta girl!”

  “Yes,” Helen conceded. “Well done, Daisy.” But then she added under her breath, “It’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch out for.”

  While the tables were ringing their bells, a procession filed out onto the dais. I recognized Vionetta Sharp, her blonde hair and violet eyes set off by her purple robe. She was followed by a tall, gangly man whose robes flapped loosely over tweed trousers. He ducked his head when he came onto the dais as if embarrassed to be the center of attention, but when one of the students shouted “Bellows!” he looked up, brushed back his hair, and grinned boyishly.

  “That’s Rupert Bellows,” Sarah whispered. “Our history teacher. All the girls have crushes on him. It’s quite ridiculous how they swoon over him.” Despite her professed indifference to the history teacher, Sarah’s eyes were fastened on him, as were the eyes of all the girls in the hall. The very temperature in the hall seemed to warm when he smiled, but that warmth vanished with the appearance of the next teacher. Euphorbia Frost steered onto the dais like a great ship coming into port, her bulk under layers of robes soaking up all the light in the room and all but swallowing up the slight, nervous-looking man following in her wake.

  “Martin Peale,” Sarah whispered. “The bell master.” “Peale?” Cam giggled. “D’you think he went into that profession because of his name?”

  “Possibly,” Sarah answered seriously. “The Peales have been bell ringers at Blythewood since its founding. Just as Matilda Swift is the third Swift to be archery mistress.” Sarah tilted her chin toward the next teacher arriving on the dais, a tall slim brunette with an angular face, hair scraped back unfashionably tight, and keen dark eyes that scanned the farthest corners of the room as though alert for prey.

  “How old is Blythewood?” I asked as a slight elderly woman, whom someone identified as Mrs. Calendar, the Latin teacher, tottered across the stage.

  “The castle was brought over in the seventeenth century by the founding families,” Sarah replied promptly. “And the school opened in eighteen sixty-one, so we’re celebrating our Golden Jubilee this spring.”

  “But that’s impossible,” I said. “Gilles Duffy told me he’d been here since the castle was brought over.”

  “I’m surprised you got more than two words out of Gillie,” Sarah said. “You must have misunderstood him. What did he—?”

  She was interrupted by Beatrice crying out, “There’s Papa! Doesn’t he look dignified in his robes?” Mr. Jager looked more somber than dignified, I thought. He was a large man with abundant gray hair, unruly eyebrows, and a face lined with woe. His heavy-hooded eyes looked out at his new pupils with an expression of unutterable sadness as if he saw a church full of mourners instead of girls on the first day of school.

  “Poor Papa,” Beatrice said. “You can tell he’s thinking of Mama. She was his student here at Blythewood. I’m afraid being here has brought back painful memories of the first time he met her.”

  Mr. Jager glanced around the room, no doubt seeking out the table where his daughters sat. He smiled sadly when he saw them, but when he saw me his eyes widened with surprise. Perhaps he had recognized my resemblance to my mother. I leaned over to ask Beatrice and Dolores what years their father had taught at Blythewood, but was interrupted by a gasp from Daisy.

  “Why is that woman wearing a veil?”

  Looking up, I saw that the last teacher to reach the stage was a slim woman wearing a close-fitting bell-shaped hat with a short-netted veil.

  “That’s Lillian Corey,” Sarah whispered. “She’s the librarian. No one knows why she wears that veil.”

  “Really?” Daisy asked, “Do you think—”

  But Sarah shushed Daisy. “No one talks about it. Now quiet, Dame Beckwith is ready to address us.”

  The woman who had first appeared on the dais stood now in front of the teachers. She held aloft the golden handbell, but she didn’t need to ring it to command silence. With one hand she drew back her hood, revealing silver hair piled high over a smooth white forehead and gray eyes the same color as her son’s. She had only to look at a whispering girl to silence her. Her gaze seemed to take in all of us, and when it reached me I felt she was looking into my very being. I sat up straighter, squared my shoulders, and lifted my chin as if her eyes were magnets drawing me upright. I felt that same magnetic pull on my soul—and a desire to be better.

  After her gaze moved on I glanced around to see that she had had the same effect on all the girls—but not on the one boy in the room. Nathan Beckwith was standing in the rear of the great hall, leaning against a tapestry of a hunting scene. He was giving his mother the same look with which the hunter in the tapestry regarded the stag he was about to spear. As if he’d finally caught his prey.

  “Girrrls of Blythewood,” Dame Beckwith began, rolling the r
, “new and old, welcome. It does my heart good to look out and see so many of you returned safe and sound.” Someone made a sound like a half-strangled laugh. I turned to see Nathan Beckwith leaving the hall. Dame Beckwith resumed, with a deeper note of sadness in her voice. “I am reminded, though, of those who have not returned to us, those who have lost their way in the dark.”

  My throat tightened as I thought of Tillie Kupermann and all the girls who had died in the fire. But she couldn’t be thinking of them. Was she referring to the girl who had recently gone missing from Blythewood? Had the girl really just run off, as Helen thought, or had something terrible happened to her?

  But then Dame Beckwith’s eyes fell on me and I wondered if she was thinking about my mother, who, if Nathan was right, had gone missing from Blythewood but had come back. Where had she gone, and for how long? And why would Dame Beckwith have been telling Nathan about it? Maybe, in a way, Mother had never completely come back from wherever she’d disappeared to. She had always seemed like a lost soul, but I’d thought that was just her nature. Now I wondered if she’d seen something—or someone—that had changed her.

  I lifted my chin, intending to meet Dame Beckwith’s gaze with defiance, but the look of pity in her eyes melted my resolve to a fervent desire to succeed at Blythewood and remove the apparent tarnish of my mother’s memory.

  “Here at Blythewood we begin each year by pledging ourselves to the light,” she continued. “We pledge by the bell.” She held up the gold bell, her hand so steady that the bell remained silent. “Our forebears knew that the power of the bell is to warn of evil’s approach and to ward it off. No matter what differences we may have”—here I thought I saw her eyes fall on the veiled librarian, Lillian Corey—“we must remember that our mission unites us. Let us now recite the Blythewood oath with one hand over our hearts and one hand on the bell.”

  I’d read about school oaths in Mrs. Moore’s books about girls’ schools. But still it seemed a queer practice to pledge to a bell. Or perhaps it felt queer to me because of the bells I’d been hearing in my head. Did I want to pledge an oath to that? True, the sound had warned me of danger, but it had also made me fear for my sanity. All around the room girls placed their right hands over their hearts and their left on the bells on their tables. Helen, eager to show she knew what to do, was the first one to touch the bell on our table, followed by Cam, Beatrice, Dolores, and Daisy. Only Sarah and I hadn’t touched it. I saw Sarah’s eyes on mine, as if she guessed my hesitation. She gave me an encouraging smile as she lifted her own hand. We touched the bell at the same instant. I thought I felt a faint vibration.

  “For the new girls you have only to repeat after me,” Dame Beckwith said in her loud, ringing voice. “I solemnly swear to uphold the honor, traditions, rules, and mysteries of Blythewood.”

  As I repeated the words the vibration under my fingertips seemed to grow. Was my hand trembling—or the hand of one of the other girls? But all our hands appeared to be steady.

  “To stand by my sisters in peril and adversity, to lead my life in a fashion that will be a shining example to all.”

  I stared at the bell, willing the vibration to cease. There were etchings in the metal that went around the circumference of the bell: “Maia-Electra-Taygete-Alcyone-Celaeno-SteropeMerope”—the names of the seven sisters who had made the original bells. I focused on the names to keep my hand from trembling.

  “And I swear to hold the enemies of my sisters as my enemies,” Dame Beckwith concluded. “Amen.”

  That was the last of it. I repeated the words hurriedly, glad to be at an end, but as I spoke, the bell beneath my fingers began to chime. The rest of the girls were so startled that they drew their hands away from the bell. All except me. I looked up and saw Daisy staring. I quickly withdrew my hand.

  “Which bell was it that rang?” Dame Beckwith demanded, her voice urgent. I knew instantly that to make the bell ring must mean something bad. It must mean that my first guess was right—I did not belong at Blythewood with these beautiful and educated girls. The stain of my parentage and the taint of madness had signaled me out. Somehow the bell knew I didn’t belong here and it was ringing out to unmask me just as the magic harp sang out in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” At the next table Georgiana Montmorency leaned over to whisper into Alfreda Driscoll’s ear. There was no way to hide. I had to admit that I had made the bell ring.

  I opened my mouth, but Helen spoke first. “It was our bell, Dame Beckwith. I accidentally pushed it.”

  Daisy’s eyes widened at the lie. “That’s not so,” she began. Helen glared at her, but Daisy went on firmly. “We all pushed it.”

  Dame Beckwith sighed. “Be more careful next time. The bells are only to be rung at the correct times. But since this is your first day”—she smiled—“we shall say no more about it.”

  11

  WHEN DINNER WAS over—a delicious meal of roast fowls and savory pies, baked apples, and pudding—and we were dismissed to our rooms, I drew Helen aside on the stairs.

  “Why did you say you pushed the bell?” I asked. “You know you didn’t.”

  Many of the older girls had rushed into the Commons Room for a card game they called flush and trophies, but Sarah had gently hinted that the nestlings traditionally repaired to their rooms on the first night for cocoa parties. She had dispatched Daisy to pick up the supplies in the kitchen and Helen and me to go upstairs to start a fire in our fireplace.

  Helen shrugged. “My cousin told me about a girl who was thrown out of Blythewood on her first day because her touch made the bell ring. I didn’t want you thrown out. Who knows who I’d wind up with as a roommate?”

  I blinked at her, surprised that I already rated high enough in Helen’s estimation that I was preferable to an unknown. “But why do you suppose it rang for me?”

  Helen leaned closer, even though there was no one in sight, and whispered.

  128 Blythewood “They say the bells—even the small handbells—can sense an intruder. Personally I think it’s total rot. How can a metal bell sense anything? I’ve been catching dribs and drabs of these Blythewood superstitions since I was a baby. I think all of it— including the stories of the missing girls—is a bunch of nonsense designed to give the place an aura of mystery so we don’t all die of boredom walled up here like nuns studying Latin and bell ringing while other girls are dancing at balls and finding husbands.”

  Her blonde curls trembled with genuine anger. Blythewood was so lovely—and so much finer than any place I had ever been before going to my grandmother’s house—that it had not occurred to me that some of the girls here would have preferred to be elsewhere. “So if you ask me, that bell rang because one of us bumped into the table. I’d wager it was that awful galumphing Camilla.”

  “Well, thank you for taking the blame anyway,” I said as we reached our floor. “I would have hated to be expelled on my first night.”

  “Expelled on your first night? That would be an accomplishment even for me.”

  The disembodied voice startled me all the more for being male and for coming from an open window.

  “Nate!” Helen cried, rushing to the window. “Are you trying to break your neck?”

  I followed Helen to the window and craned my head out beside her to see Nathan Beckwith sitting cross-legged on a narrow cast-iron catwalk that hugged the west side of the castle. His fair hair and pale skin looked ruddy in the light of the setting sun, which was just sinking behind the mountains on the other side of the river.

  “Not at all,” Nathan replied. “Although I am touched to hear your concern about my neck. Oh, hullo,” he said, noticing me. “You’re the girl who made the bell ring, aren’t you? I colored deeply. “Is that what people are saying?” I asked. “I don’t know about people,” Nathan replied with a sniff as if the general herd of humanity was beneath his notice. “I was in the kitchen cadging leftovers from Cook when I overheard my mother say to old Peale that he should keep an eye on you when you handle
the bells. Capital of you to step in like that and take the blame, Helen.”

  Beside me Helen blushed and dimpled, trying not to smile. “Well, I couldn’t let her get kicked out, could I? We’ll both be, though, if anyone sees us talking to a boy in dormitory.” Helen glanced nervously behind us. The landing was still empty, but on the stairs we could hear voices of girls making their way up. “Come on out here, then,” Nathan suggested. “No one will see you and you can watch the sunset with me. Don’t you want a breath of fresh air before you’re stuck inside all night with a bunch of giggling girls drinking cocoa?”

  A moment ago I’d been looking forward to the cocoa party. It was another detail I’d read about in Mrs. Moore’s books— nighttime dormitory feasts where girls sat around in their nightgowns braiding each other’s hair and telling ghost stories—but now I wondered if rumors of my making the bell ring were spreading around the school. How well would I fit in with the other girls if they thought I was an intruder? Suddenly I felt as though I were suffocating.

  “That sounds lovely,” I said, edging past a startled Helen and picking up my skirts to climb through the window. Nathan Beckwith’s gray eyes widened with surprise. Apparently, he hadn’t thought we’d be brave enough to join him.

  “Well, shove over,” I said, “unless you want us both to end up cracked like eggs on the flagstones below.”

  Behind me, Helen yelped and exclaimed, “Well, I suppose one of us has to get the fire going for cocoa.” When I looked back she was gone.

  “That’s funny,” I said, settling myself on the catwalk. “Why would she go?”

  “Fear of heights,” Nathan explained, grinning.

  “Really? I wouldn’t have thought Helen van Beek was afraid of anything.”

  “That’s what she likes people to believe, but when we were ten I dared her to climb up to the roof of her house and she froze there. I had to carry her down.”