Blythewood

by kindle@abovethetreeline. com

  “It’s just that now there will be a dozen students walking along the riverside attempting to write a poem. It will hardly be a place conducive to writing poetry.”

  Rupert Bellows stared at me for a moment and then tilted his head back and laughed. “By Jove, you’re right. My suggestion to you is to find your own brooding place. When I was at Cambridge it was on a punt in the River Cam. You’ll need a place to yourself here or you’ll go mad.” He glanced at Miss Sharp as if he knew where his own madness lay.

  “Thank you, Mr. Bellows,” I said, “I think I know where that might be.”

  Rupert Bellows gave me a distracted smile, but I knew he hadn’t heard me. Like the fellow in the poem, he was still in his own waking dream.

  z o Z Instead of going to the riverside, I climbed to the fourth floor and slipped out the landing window onto the catwalk. I’d noticed when I was out here with Nathan that there was a ladder leading up to the roof. What better place to brood, I thought, than up among the pigeons and chimneys. Rooftops had been my sanctuaries in the city; they could be here, too. But when I climbed to the top of Blythewood Castle I found I didn’t have the roof to myself. I would have to share it with Gillie.

  He was sitting on a stool outside a wooden shed built into the corner of the crenellated tower. The falcon mews, I guessed. Through the open door I could see two rows of falcons and hawks standing on their perches, their heads turning to me as I approached. The motion set up a jingle, which came from the bells attached to their talons. They were each wearing an elaborately tasseled hood, making them look like ladies in their best tea hats. The bird perched on Gillie’s gloved hand, though, did not look like a lady in a tea hat. It was huge, at least two feet tall, all but dwarfing tiny Gillie, with downy white and silver feathers, talons the length of my ring fingers, a wide heart-shaped face, and great yellow eyes that followed my every movement. A barn owl, I thought, recognizing it from an Audubon print I’d seen once at the Astor library.

  “Ah, Miss Hall,” Gillie crooned as though I were another bird that needed to be settled. “I might have guessed you’d find your way up here. It was your mother’s favorite roost.”

  “She often fed the pigeons on our fire escape,” I said, my throat tight with the memory of my mother’s face bathed in light as she leaned out the window murmuring to the birds. “And she talked to them,” I added. “Was she . . . I mean, is that one of the things we learn here—to talk to birds?”

  Gillie laughed in an eerie high-pitched tone that made the owl shift restlessly on his hand. “What do ye think, Blossom? Are ye up for a little polite conversation?”

  “Blossom?” I asked, laughing at the incongruously cheerful name for the somber-faced creature.

  “Aye, her proper name is Blodeuwedd, from the Welsh, but that’s a mouthful even for me. It means ‘flower face,’ so I call her Blossom. I don’t like to think what she calls me.” He lifted his arm up so that the owl’s face was near his own. She ducked her head and let out a long, mournful hoot that made me shiver. “Ah, she’s talking to you already. She likes you. Tell her something that ye’d not want to tell that gaggle of girls down below and see what she says.”

  Feeling foolish, I leaned closer to the owl, who cocked her head and regarded me with a yellow eye the size of a gold doubloon, and whispered, “I don’t know if I belong here.”

  In answer, Blossom lifted her great wings and hopped from Gillie’s hand to my shoulder, where she hooted into my ear. She was lighter than I would have thought, but her talons clutched my shoulder with an inexorable grip that I did not doubt could have broken my skin and crushed my bones.

  “See, Blossom thinks ye belong and she don’t take to just anybody.”

  “But not everyone thinks I should be here,” I said, gingerly stroking the owl’s feathers. “On account of my mother being expelled.”

  Gillie muttered something under his breath that I guessed was an expletive in his native Scots tongue. “Your mother was the finest, truest girl who ever trod the halls and paths of Blythewood and she had already decided to leave before those old biddies expelled her. She told me so herself, standing right where ye stand now. ‘Gillie,’ she said, ‘I cannot stay in a place that persecutes poor, helpless creatures.’”

  “Helpless creatures? Did she mean Miss Frost’s specimens?”

  Gillie scowled, his dark eyebrows swooping together like two hawks fighting over a morsel. “Aye, she didn’t like to see the wee lampsprites splayed out like that—I don’t like it myself. Not that they aren’t dangerous. The sprites have led many a traveler into harm’s way.” Gillie lifted his dark head and looked north toward the Blythe Wood. “My job is to go after the girls that are led astray before they’re caught by the bigger creatures. There are terrible creatures in the woods, Miss—goblins that will eat the flesh right off your bones, kelpies that’ll drag you into the river and suck the last breath out of your gullet, boggarts that’ll . . . well, never mind what the boggarts will do to you.”

  “What about the Darklings?” I blurted out.

  Gillie frowned. “Have ye seen one of them?”

  I nodded. “Last night on our way back from the Rowan Circle. One swept down and scared off all the other creatures.”

  “If it did that it was because it wanted you to itself. The Darklings are the worst of all of them put together. Some say the first Darkling was an angel that fell from heaven for love of a woman and that’s why they’re so cruel to the lasses.”

  “Gillie . . . I found one of their feathers beside my mother on the day she died. Is it possible—” I stopped, startled by how Gillie’s face had darkened. Blossom, sensing her master’s distress, ducked her head and hooted.

  “They must’ve come for her at last, poor girl. I believe one caught sight of her in the woods and took a fancy to her. They say that once one of them demons fixes on a lass it won’t stop until it has her—or she’s dead. When she went missing that last year, they all thought she was gone for good, but I wasn’t having that. I went into the woods and found her and brought her back.”

  “You found her?” I asked. “Did she tell you where she’d been?”

  He shook his head. “She wouldn’t say. But I think she’d been with the Darklings. She . . .” He leaned closer and whispered even though we were alone on the roof except for the birds. “She had a black feather in her hair. I think she left Blythewood to get away from them creatures, but one must’ve followed her.” Gillie ducked his dark head in the same motion as Blossom. He even seemed to bristle like a preening bird. “The monsters must’ve gotten her at last.”

  18

  GILLIE’S PRONOUNCEMENT ENDED my first day of classes on a somber note, but in the days that followed, I was too busy to brood, on the roof or elsewhere. In Mrs. Moore’s boarding-school books the girls had plenty of time for cocoa parties and high jinks. But the teachers at Blythewood gave far too much homework. Each day was taken up with classes, archery practice, and bell ringing. Each night there was enough Latin to translate, spells to memorize, potions to learn, and history books to read to keep us swotting till lights out.

  Even Miss Sharp, who had given us a break on the first day, assigned us Great Expectations for the first week and Jane Eyre for the second. I saved that reading for the last each night so I’d go to sleep thinking about Jane or Pip instead of Latin spells to disarm pixies or the secret history of the Crimean War.

  If other girls were having difficulty adjusting to this odd education, they didn’t let on. As for me, there was so much that was strange and exotic, so much to absorb of the rituals and mysteries of girls’-school living, that I wasn’t sure what to be shocked by anymore—that Georgiana Montmorency received fresh boxes of kid-leather gloves each week because she never wore a pair twice or that fairies existed? That someone might take for granted the ability to borrow any book in the world at any time or that some of those books were grimoires filled with spells?

  Soon I was so caught up in the rhythm of routine a
t Blythewood that I ceased to wonder at its strangeness and simply tried to keep up. I could never have done it without Daisy and Helen. Although Mr. Jager had predicted I had the potential to excel in magic because I was a chime child, my magical abilities were unpredictable and volatile. When I tried to make a porcelain figurine come to life it exploded into a million pieces. After that I was forbidden to try any sympathetic magic for fear that anyone I bound to an object would get hurt.

  “It could be that the earth magic in you is so strong it cancels out all air magic,” Dame Beckwith remarked one day at tea after I had broken all the teacups in the room.

  My friends had clearer and more useful powers. Daisy, we soon discovered, was not only the best Latin student in our year, but also had a preternatural ability to memorize any fact or figure presented to her once.

  “I used to memorize all the accounts at Papa’s store,” she replied after scoring 100s in all our first exams. “Mr. Appleby says I’d make a fine bookkeeper if ever we began our own business.”

  “Mr. Appleby will have to wait for your services,” Helen declared. “You’re going to be our secret weapon to get through midterms.”

  Helen, although not an exemplary scholar, turned out to be a Roman general when it came to organizing study sessions. She enlisted Dolores and Beatrice to help with species classi

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  fications and potions and Cam to drill us in bell changes and practice archery. “I’m surprised she’s so determined not to fail,” Daisy remarked to me one day when Helen had run down to the lab to “nick” test tubes and Bunsen burners so we could practice conjuring, and then banishing, a goblin fog. “I thought she hated it here. If she fails won’t she be able to go back to New York City for all the dances and parties she’s missing?”

  “I don’t think Helen likes to be second best at anything. You saw her at archery when Charlotte Falconrath shot farther than her.”

  Daisy paled at the memory. Miss Swift often called one of the Dianas from their patrols on the edge of the woods to demonstrate a particular shot. It annoyed Helen because she felt that she was good enough at the sport that she should be called to demonstrate. She tolerated the experience when it was Andalusia Beaumont, whom even Helen admired, or Natasha Petrov, a Russian girl whose father had been the gamekeeper for the tsar. But if it was Charlotte Falconrath or Dorothy Pratt, both of whom Helen had grown up with, Helen would seethe with resentment. When Miss Swift asked both Charlotte and Helen to shoot together to demonstrate a technique for distance shooting and Charlotte’s arrow went a yard farther, Helen stomped across the lawn to retrieve her arrow from the edge of the woods, past where we were allowed to go.

  Since that first day, we had all kept a respectful distance from the woods. Only the Dianas, who patrolled the edge of the woods by day with their falcons, and Gillie, who patrolled by night with his owl, Blodeuwedd, went so close. But Helen, enraged by being bested by her rival, ignored Miss Swift’s shouts and marched straight to the verge of the forest—so close she was in the shadow of a pine tree—grabbed her arrow and turned, brandishing it in the air like one of the angry Picts threatening the Roman legions we were reading about in Mr. Bellows’s class. The blue-faced troll that leapt out of the woods behind her might indeed have been one of those ancient Picts. We all gasped while Miss Swift raised her bow and shot the troll between its eyes before it reached Helen. Then she had given Helen ten demerits.

  The demerit system at Blythewood was designed to keep us from breaking the rules. A hundred demerits meant you were expelled. By the end of my first month, I had ten for being late to Latin class when Nathan blew up an experiment in science class and I had to change my shirtwaist. Daisy had ten for the same reason (it had been a big explosion) and Helen had thirty—ten from the troll episode, ten for being late to Latin after the explosion, and ten for egging on Nathan to set off the explosion.

  Nate had eighty. Twenty for the explosion, thirty for tardies, ten for stealing Miss Frost’s bustle and putting it on the statue of Diana, ten for sneaking into town at night and getting drunk at the Wing & Clover, and ten for throwing up on Miss Frost’s shoes the next day.

  We all wondered if Nate would make it through midterms. The only class he excelled in (and showed up for regularly) was bells. Helen, who hated bells because of her fear of heights, dismissed this as the one class where brute strength was an asset, but Nathan’s skill at bell ringing came from more than his strong arms—which, truthfully, were weaker than Cam’s when he started out. He had a good head for numbers and could memorize a complicated-change ringing pattern after seeing it once; he had a deep, powerful voice that could be heard over the bells; enjoyed bossing people around and so was a natural for calling changes; and, most importantly, he loved it and so it was the one class he applied himself to and never missed.

  I thought I knew why he loved it so much. When you were ringing the bells you couldn’t think of anything else. Your mind was blank except for the sound of the bells and the pattern of the change ringing. It was the only time I didn’t think about my mother, or the fire, or being a chime child, or the Darkling who still flitted through my dreams. I suspected it was the only time that Nathan wasn’t thinking about his sister Louisa.

  But he wouldn’t be able to keep ringing the bells if he flunked his midterms and was forced to leave Blythewood. He told me in October that although his mother had prevailed on the Council to let him attend Blythewood, she would have to send him back to Hawthorn if he didn’t pass his exams.

  “Weren’t you expelled?” Helen asked one day while we were all studying in the Commons Room.

  “Not exactly. I sort of left without permission, but the Headmaster says he’ll have me back—not that I want to go.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t want to go there,” Cam remarked to him. “I’d give my eyeteeth to be a knight!”

  “It isn’t what you think,” Nate replied. “They don’t teach any magic or swordplay or anything remotely interesting for a while. Initiates spend their first year sleeping on a bare stone floor in an unheated cell and bathing in an icy tarn. Mr. Bellows says it’s all about subjugating the flesh and training the senses, or some such hogwash. They don’t teach the good stuff until the third year, and I don’t have time for that.”

  “I’m surprised you’re not studying harder.” The words were out of my mouth before I realized how they sounded. Nathan glared at me. “I mean,” I explained, “if this is the ‘stuff’ you’re in a hurry to learn . . .”

  “But it’s not,” Nathan said, flinging his notebook to the floor. “All this nonsense about fairy phylums . . .”

  “Phyla,” Beatrice Jager corrected, earning a vicious glare from Nathan.

  “Who cares?” Nathan cried, storming out of the library.

  Nathan stopped coming to our study sessions, while our teachers kept piling on work as we got closer to the exam day on the first of November. Our stacks of notes piled up as fast as the autumn leaves falling from the trees and drifting across the lawn outside the window of the Commons Room, where we studied.

  “I swear,” I complained the day before the exams, “these facts are falling out of my head as quickly as they go in. Why do they keep giving us more to memorize?”

  “To weed out the weak.” The voice came from the table across the room where Georgiana, Alfreda, and Wallis were studying—or rather where Alfreda and Wallis prepared crib sheets for Georgiana and fetched her cups of tea and plates of cake. “Haven’t you been paying attention in Miss Frost’s class? Good breeding always shows in the end.”

  “She’s been talking about lampsprites and other fairies,” Daisy objected. “Not people.”

  “The same rules apply,” Georgiana said, dusting the powdered sugar from a Victoria sponge cake off her fingertips. “It’s even more important for the Order to keep our bloodlines pure. We’ve been entrusted with the hereditary make-up to resist and repel evil. That’s why it’s so important that we keep our bloo
dlines pure. If we breed indiscriminately”—she looked pointedly at me—“we risk weakening or even perverting our race.”

  “Ava’s mother is from one of the oldest families of the Order,” Helen said, rising to my defense.

  “Yes,” Georgiana replied sweetly. “But does anyone know who her father was? Does she even know?”

  I felt the blood rise to my face and heard the bass bell clanging in my head. “That’s none of your business,” I bit out between gritted teeth.

  “Oh, but it is,” Georgiana went on. “Miss Frost says it’s our duty as women of the Bell to choose fit mates to protect the bloodline of the Order—or to remain unwed if no fit mate is available.” Georgiana laughed as if that possibility was absurd for someone of her beauty and wealth. “In fact, she says that nature protects those of the best blood from undesirable matches because impure mates will appear repugnant to the truly pure woman.”

  “Are you implying,” I asked, the bell ringing so loudly in my head that I could hardly hear myself speak, “that my mother chose an undesirable mate?”

  “Well,” Georgiana said, spreading her hands so that the light reflected off her diamond rings. “Why else do you have so much trouble doing magic? Why else is your power so . . . erratic? Why do things break around you?”

  To punctuate her sentence, the teacup in Alfreda’s hand shattered in perfect concert with the gong of the bass bell in my head. Alfreda squeaked, but Georgiana went on smiling. “You see? Temper, like madness, is an undesirable trait that’s been bred out of the Order. Your father might have been a crude laborer, or even a mental patient.”

  The next teacup to break came hurtling across the room straight at Georgiana’s head. Daisy gasped—I thought because I’d never made anything fly before—but then I saw she was staring at Helen, who was holding the matching saucer to the lobbed teacup. Helen’s face was white with rage.