The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

by Anton Disclafani

  I sat up, so that my face was only an inch from hers. “Who, Mary Abbott? Who saw Sissy?” Today played quickly through my mind: all the girls turning away, but not from me; all the girls staring, but not at me.

  But Mary Abbott didn’t know, or wouldn’t tell me. She looked worried, and I wondered if she was afraid of Leona. Because I knew who had told. Leona, who hadn’t been at the dance, who had probably been at the barn; walking back, she could have so easily seen Sissy and Boone. She was the only girl I knew here who would tell on Sissy. Who would hurt another girl so terribly in order to hurt me.

  But anyone could have seen Sissy last night—she had been so careless. I felt a flash of anger, again. How could she have been so careless? I looked at Mary Abbott, who picked at my bedspread. Could it have been her? I didn’t think so—I had always been her focus, her eyes burning so consistently into my back it felt like a strange sort of plague. Me, not Sissy.

  I took Naari into the mountains that night while everyone else was at dinner. The light lasted until eight o’clock these days, and so I stayed out until I could see the faint outline of the stars.

  It was so easy to close my eyes and see Sissy’s fine brown hair, her wide-set eyes; I could see her face more vividly than I could my mother’s, my brother’s, my father’s. When I left I would ask for a photograph. Mary Abbott said Sissy would be sent home in the next day or so, now that word was starting to spread, and though I didn’t particularly trust Mary Abbott, I knew she was right. Mrs. Holmes would find out; she always did. And if Sissy was sent home because of a boy, she would never be allowed to marry that boy, the one who had shamed her, marked her otherwise pristine reputation. All her plans, all her life, in shambles. She who had been so sure just yesterday of how my family should have acted. Who could say what her family would do, would think of her, regardless of how she might defend herself? Certainly not Sissy herself. Not having permission to marry Boone might be the least of Sissy’s troubles.

  I saw Mr. Albrecht’s silhouette in the barn as I dismounted. It was too late to remount and ride around until he disappeared.

  “Thea,” he said, and nodded.

  “Hello.”

  “No more classes for you. Just the nightly trail rides.”

  I shrugged. His accent lent such a strange rhythm to his speech.

  “I don’t think I’ve had a chance to congratulate you on your success,” he said, and extended his hand. “Well done.”

  I let him shake my hand, his coarse palm around my small, relatively soft one. “Thank you.” And I felt near tears again, inexplicably. I placed my other palm on Naari’s broad forehead. It would be as if I had died, once my scent disappeared, once she learned to stop expecting the sound of my boots against the floor in the afternoons, once she became used to the noises and smells of another girl. But I would always remember my first horse. I would never forget.

  Mr. Albrecht looked at me for what seemed like a long moment. “You’re a talented horsewoman. You could stay with it.” He stressed the word stay, because of his accent.

  “And do what?”

  “You could do things that have not been done before,” he said, still holding my hand.

  I looked away. “Perhaps.”

  There was still kindness in the world, at Yonahlossee. It almost seemed irrelevant.

  {22}

  I rose early the next morning and dressed carefully, tucked my shirt neatly into my skirt, polished a scuff mark from my boot. I looked over at Sissy, who was sleeping on her back, her arms flung out beside her. I smiled. Last night she had told me that the girls knew about her and Boone; she didn’t seem worried, though. She’d seemed a little bit proud. I’d acted surprised. She clearly had no idea of how far the rumor had traveled, how it had snaked its way through camp to Mrs. Holmes’s ears.

  As I examined myself in the mirror I was nearly certain I could feel Mary Abbott watching me, but when I turned around and looked her eyes were shut, her mouth closed in a thin line.

  I got to the Castle early, to catch Mrs. Holmes before breakfast. The dining hall was nearly empty, except for a few second-years sitting at a table. I took the long way around them, and as I was passing the kitchen, the door swung open.

  “Hello,” Emmy said, and looked away, down to a spot on the floor. She carried a trayful of glasses, a dish towel slung over her shoulder. The door swung shut behind her.

  I said nothing, and began to walk by when she spoke again.

  “Aren’t you going to say hello to me?”

  “Hello,” I said. “Hello, hello, hello. I’m on my way to see Mrs. Holmes.”

  Emmy gave a short laugh. We had never really spoken before. She held herself more elegantly than her sister, didn’t have the wandering eye, but their voices were the same, high, so thickly accented I had to pay attention to understand them.

  “Docey feels poorly for you.” She shifted the tray in her hands.

  “Pardon?”

  “My sister. She feels poorly for you.” She spoke quickly, almost impatiently.

  “Oh,” I said, at a loss.

  “But we have a different feeling about this,” she continued. “I was there. You can say what you will about Mrs. Holmes, and girls always do, but she’s a good soul. A good soul,” she repeated firmly, almost primly.

  I thought about all those afternoons in the library, Emmy lurking behind closed doors. I leaned against the wall, a cold sweat on my brow.

  “Does she know?” I asked quietly. I turned and stared at the table of second-years watching us; nobody conversed with the servants here. But this table I could handle—these girls were from Kentucky, and they looked away quickly.

  “Isn’t that something you should have thought on before?” She shifted the tray again. Her arms trembled, and I almost reached out to take it from her.

  She waited, as if for an answer. I looked from the tray, crowded with glasses, to her face, watching me imperiously.

  “Thought on?” I asked, and Emmy lowered her eyes. I had shamed her, and it had been so easy. “This isn’t any of your business.”

  As I began to walk away for the second time, Emmy shrugged. “Not from me she doesn’t. Know,” she added.

  I was glad no one had heard me mock Emmy, a servant, born with none of the advantages I had known since birth. I’d never once thought of her as someone who could be cutting. But just now I could have been sparring with Leona, or Katherine Hayes.

  I turned around before I entered the stairwell and saw Emmy setting out the glasses on the table where the second-years sat, her eyes downcast, her face expressionless. Then I saw Henny, sitting at our table, a book in front of her. She saw me and I instinctively held my hand up in a wave, before I could think better of it. Henny only raised her eyebrows.

  Even though I had more serious problems than Henny’s cold shoulder, I still cared. If Yonahlossee had taught me anything, it had taught me that it was impossible not to care, not to marvel at the mysteries of girls’ affections, which were hard won and easily lost. If no one knew about me and Mr. Holmes, then why was Henny acting so coldly?

  It was a question that occupied my mind as I climbed the stairs, slowly, half hoping she wouldn’t be there. But then I’d just have to come back.

  “Thea,” Mrs. Holmes said, and looked up from her desk as I passed through her door. She pointed to the chair as if she had been expecting me. Mr. Holmes stood behind his wife, looking out her window, but when he heard my name he turned around, his hands in his pockets, always in his pockets, a confused expression disfiguring his handsome face. I stood in the doorway for a moment, noticed that my own hands were trembling. I clasped them behind my back and went to the chair.

  “You wanted to see us?” Mrs. Holmes asked, absentmindedly pruning the potted ivy that sat on her desk, snapping the dead leaves away with a flick of her fingers.

  You, I might have said,
I wanted to see you. I lifted my head. “Yes.”

  “About what?”

  “Sissy.”

  She gave a little gasp. It was satisfying to shock her. He watched me impassively. Did he know me so well that he had predicted what was coming? Had he felt it this morning, had he insisted on accompanying Mrs. Holmes to her office? That would have meant that he knew me better than I knew myself, because I hadn’t even known I would go this far. And no one knew me that well.

  “I know someone says she saw Sissy in the woods. With Boone Roberts from Harris Academy?” I couldn’t keep my voice from lilting into a question. Mrs. Holmes had stopped her pruning, now held a leaf in midair, her mouth parted. “But it wasn’t her. It was me.”

  Now she looked confused, an expression I had never seen cross her face before. She looked mystified, for an instant, before she composed herself. She should have been headmaster, not her husband. And for all practical purposes, she was.

  “Yes?” she asked. “And? Tell us.”

  I hadn’t been sure I’d be able to do what I had to do next. But the way Mrs. Holmes used “us,” the way she gestured at me like I was harmless, nothing more than a girl—Mr. Holmes caught my eye, and I suddenly felt so exhausted. So reckless.

  I looked Mrs. Holmes in the eye. “Ask Eva,” I said. “My bed was empty.” I paused. My voice wavered, and I took a deep breath. When I spoke again my voice was clear. “Sissy is loved. Her family is loved. No one will want to see her go, least of all her father, her grandfather.” I didn’t need to spell out what I meant; if nothing else, Mrs. Holmes was a shrewd woman. “Especially if they think it might be a mistake. And I’ll see to it that they think it’s a mistake. People won’t care as much when I am sent home.” I shook my head. “Do you see? It won’t get you anywhere, punishing Sissy.”

  “I see,” Mrs. Holmes said. “I see perfectly well. How interesting all of this is. But let me ask you this: Have you thought about what got you here? Have you thought that perhaps it is best for Sissy to be sent to a place where she will not be tempted?”

  I looked at her in wonder. “Where would that be? We’re already on the top of a mountain.”

  Mrs. Holmes turned briefly to her husband, as if to say, Do you see this girl in front of me, so impudent, so presumptuous? She shook her head, gave a hard little laugh. Mr. Holmes looked outside the window again, and I knew he wanted nothing more than to be absent from this. He would never help me; he was not capable of it. Mrs. Holmes had always handled the disciplining of the girls, the unpleasant parts of keeping order.

  “You’re so lovely, Thea, just like your mother was. So lovely. Do you think you own the world? Do you think you have any say in what the world does with you? So lovely, so naive.”

  “Beth,” Mr. Holmes said, a warning, but she acted as if she hadn’t heard him.

  She crumpled the dead leaf in her fist and flung it into the wastebasket.

  “Your mind works in ways I do not understand, Thea. Usually I understand all my girls. You will pretend to have gone behind Sissy’s back with her fiancé?”

  I must have looked surprised—and I was—because she continued.

  “Yes, I knew they were engaged. I know everything, Thea.” She smiled, and pressed a finger to her lips. “I don’t think you really want to go home.”

  I thought of how regal my house looked on a gray day, its stately lines illuminated by the sky like ash behind it. I wanted to go to that home, the home of my childhood, the home that included Georgie, the home where my family loved me without reservation. But that home was gone now, sold to strangers.

  “How could you want to go home?” she asked, her voice softer. “Do you know why they sent you here?”

  Mr. Holmes’s hand encircled his wife’s upper arm, gently, as if she were a child. “Enough, Beth.”

  But of course I knew why they had sent me here. I almost laughed.

  Mrs. Holmes ignored her husband. “They thought you might be carrying a child,” she said. She stared at me, but it was she who looked stricken, not I. “They would have known soon enough, but your mother always was a worrier,” she said, and turned her head sharply. “Henry. You’re hurting me.”

  I could see how tightly Mr. Holmes gripped his wife’s arm. “That’s enough,” he said quietly. “There’s no use in all this.”

  “She’d rather I deal with the poor child, I suppose. I was always the problem-solver, between the two of us. I used to think that pretty girls didn’t have to worry so much about the mechanics of life, the simple procedures. But your father, what of him? He’s a doctor, he would have known soon enough whether or not you carried your cousin’s child.” She gave a little gasp, and put her hand over her mouth. Mr. Holmes let go, then, and Mrs. Holmes massaged her arm where his hand had been, a faraway look in her eyes. Her face had softened. I thought of all her plants in their slender bottles. It seemed incredible that she felt any sympathy for me. It was so easy to deceive people.

  “She needed to know,” Mrs. Holmes said, breaking the silence. Then she turned to me. “She should know what awaits her at home.”

  I shook my head, though no response was required of me. I remembered Mother checking my sheets every day before I left. I remembered what Mrs. Holmes had said when I first met her, to see her if I noticed anything about my body. Of course.

  “It’s not a surprise,” I said quietly. It would have been a surprise if Mrs. Holmes had told me that Georgie was well again, that Mother had forgiven me. That my parents had considered and acted upon the worst possible scenario was really no surprise at all.

  “I’ll have to make an announcement, you know. I’ll have to make an example of you.”

  “I know,” I said quietly.

  Mrs. Holmes spoke again, softly now; I had to strain to hear her. “Do you know why your mother was friends with someone like me? We didn’t travel in the same circles, no. You’d never even heard of me when you came here. . . .” She trailed off, then shook her head, quickly, and continued. “Your mother was something of a fast girl at Miss Petit’s. Not unlike you, Thea. I was Miss Petit’s favorite. Your mother was given a choice: leave in disgrace, or align herself with me. She wasn’t stupid, your mother. She fell into line. But I like to think that we were friends. I like to think that eventually she loved me as I loved her.” She did not know about me and Mr. Holmes; of that I felt certain. A small mercy.

  “My mother was fast?” I asked.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Holmes said. “The fastest.” Her faraway voice had returned.

  —

  In the dining hall the tables were still being set. Docey looked at me curiously, and I smiled at her, eager to be kind to someone. Emmy was nowhere to be seen. I sat on a bench out of everyone’s way. The smell of frying bacon was so pungent I felt sick to my stomach. More girls streamed in, their eyes small from sleep. They barely glanced in my direction as they passed by; strangely, I felt a vague sense of disappointment. I didn’t matter anymore. I glanced at the clock; I had spent only ten minutes in Mrs. Holmes’s office, which seemed impossible.

  What were Mr. and Mrs. Holmes doing right now in her office? Perhaps assigning blame, deciding whose fault it was that a girl—two girls, if Sissy was counted—had slipped from their grasp. Or perhaps Mr. Holmes was soothing his wife, had drawn her near, was telling her that this strange thing that had just happened, with Thea Atwell from Florida, was fine, would be fine.

  I closed my eyes against the movement in the dining hall and put my head in my hands. There was a dull ache at the nape of my neck.

  I had destroyed one family, and then come close to destroying another. The pain in my head deepened, I didn’t know how I would be able to rouse myself when Sissy came in.

  Sissy was late, of course. I would wait. I saw Katherine Hayes walk in, chatting with Leona, which was odd. Alice Hunt gaped at them. I almost smiled—I’d never seen a person look so
astonished.

  Mrs. Holmes burst through the stairwell, her face red. Mr. Holmes followed close behind, speaking urgently under his breath. Girls turned in their chairs, startled. Leona and Katherine stopped in their tracks. We’d never seen Mr. and Mrs. Holmes exchange a harsh word. To see them fight, openly—this was unheard of. Everyone started whispering, all at once, the hum of all those voices torture. I shut my eyes, put my hands over my ears.

  “Thea?” A tap on my shoulder. I opened my eyes. Docey, with her darting eye. “Are you all right?” she whispered.

  Beyond Docey I saw Sissy enter the Castle with Eva. Everyone turned in her direction, the whispering died down, and I watched Sissy notice—scan the room, slowly, put her hand to her throat. I put my own hand to my throat. I’d never seen Sissy frightened before. I saw Henny whisper something to Jettie. She was so typical, Henny—I understood then that’s what I’d always hated about her. Of course she would look smug. She was too dull to seem any other way.

  Mrs. Holmes raised her voice at the other end of the room, and everyone looked away from Sissy.

  “Thea,” Docey said, more urgently, “you should go. Go!” she said again, and tried to pull me up.

  Time was operating according to a different clock. Everything was moving too slowly. Mrs. Holmes watched Mr. Holmes wind his way through the tables, now set with platters of thick fried bacon, tureens of oatmeal; he was searching for something, as he walked, quickly checking each table, girl after girl averting her eyes. He stopped at my table, and Mary Abbott pointed behind him, and Mr. Holmes followed her finger to me.

  Everyone was deadly silent, the hum evaporated. He tilted his head to the door, as if we were alone, back in his library, surrounded by all of his books. Have you read all of them? I’d asked. Most, he’d said, and laughed. I’m old. I’ve had plenty of time to read. I’d smiled, because he was so young, we both knew that. Then I’d accepted his hand, let him pull me from the couch.

  Now, in this dining hall where I’d eaten hundreds of meals, Mr. Holmes still seemed young, if being young meant you seemed untouched by the world. He wasn’t untouched, I knew that better than anyone, but he didn’t seem haunted, there was no eerie look in his eyes. He looked like an immortal.