by Lyndsay Faye
Music class ensued immediately afterwards. Remembering Vesalius Munt’s opinion that spiritually contented artists were beings not to be found upon this teeming globe, I looked forward to Miss Lilyvale’s tutelage with intrigue. Was her virtue so potent it could withstand the moral ravages of even art? A simpler answer proved true: Miss Lilyvale’s musical ear was the happy amalgam of a deaf mockingbird’s and a colicky newborn’s, and thus could not have troubled her character in the smallest degree.
“Class, we have much to do today!” she called. “But first as ever, I will lead us in a hymn. Young ladies, here is our music. As this is a new piece—do think of it as an exercise in sight-reading.”
We stood all in a semicircle and sang Horatius Bonar’s latest opus. My ignorance of whether the Almighty’s glory swelled in the wake of our praise remains profound to this day; I can inform the reader, however, that no gain in sight-reading skills resulted. Taylor was present, and I greeted her afterwards, even as she mumbled George Louis, George Augustus, George William Frederick, George Augustus Frederick… .
“Taylor,” I whispered, “anything immediate?”
“Oh, go away, you horrid nosy thing,” cried Taylor, her eyes edged in pink. “I’ve had nothing to eat since the porridge, and meanwhile Granville is such a sweet girl, all those golden curls and her family from a simply ancient coffee fortune, and so the best sort of people, and she was made to slap herself in the face—herself, mind, and hard—after Mr. Munt caught her laughing over a sketch Fiddick did of Miss Hardbottle. Don’t touch me, I can’t bear anyone,” she sobbed, fleeing.
Mathematics followed, and theology, and French (at which I excelled, naturellement, and thus forever after avoided the red welts my classmates carried as souvenirs from Madame Archambault), and after we had crammed our heads full of geometry and the Book of John, the inevitable Reckoning followed.
I ate my stew and kept my head as low as any true acolyte.
I reproduce this workaday agenda to illustrate that we lived practically in one another’s pockets, so that in moments of emergency—which were as frequent as moments of breathing—we might offer help. If we succeeded thanks to cleverness and collaboration, we might fall asleep with a meal or even two, perhaps, rounding the hollows of our bellies. We were not friends; but so many others strove to make us wretched that we lacked the energy to turn upon one another save in the extremest necessity.
When I dropped exhaustedly next to Taylor at nine o’clock that first night as the sun vanished, I felt the same electric charge I have always gained from thwarting authority traversing the narrow ridge of my back.
You haven’t missed a meal yet, I thought. You could be very good at this. And the others might be made better off as well.
“Steele?” came a piping voice.
“Yes?” I answered Clarke.
“Good night,” said she, as Taylor’s warning toes jabbed me.
Grief is a strange passenger; it rides on one’s shoulder quiet as a guardian angel one moment, then sinks razor talons into one’s collarbones the next. No sooner had Clarke offered me this kindness than hot salt tears were soaking my pillow. My mother had once bid me good night, and good morning too; and my mother had loved me, and she had died for no reason I could discern, and was never coming back.
I would cry often for Mamma’s loss, as children are wont to do—but I could never have guessed that my own melancholy would lead to discoveries which once more dashed my world from its orbit.
• • •
The event which caused me fully to embrace my true nature took place some six months later.
By this time, I had come to know many facets of Lowan Bridge School. I knew that Taylor was secretly terrified not of being a governess but of being married to someone tyrannical, as her mother daily hid fresh bruises under flounces and lace; I knew that the curse of Fiona Fiddick’s life was that she was the funniest creature on earth, which meant that she weighed a stone less than she ought to have; I knew that under Fox’s dour attitude hid a girl who somehow always had an apple in her pillowcase, and never kept it for herself.
I knew that there were stables, unlocked ones, and horses available for caressing. I knew that the roof above our dormitory was accessible if one crept carefully, and that Clarke’s eyes as she mapped the swath of glittering black not obscured by the reek of London to the south of us were mossy pools in the moonlight, and that though she seldom laughed, she laughed at a stolen glimpse of the night sky most blithely of all, and her laugh was like the treble of a silver flute.
Sunday was both beloved and dreaded, for while we had no classes and were allowed to play on the lawn or read in quiet nooks, we were compelled to attend chapel. As we marched towards the elegant stone building on the day my life altered forever, a parade of dull blue soldiers plodding under stony November skies, the casual observer might have supposed we were going to be executed.
Sunday, after all, was the day Mr. Munt performed a weekly Reckoning, in order to catch out any sins we might have foolishly neglected to mention.
“Steele, will you help me with the Catullus assignment?” Fox’s ungainly form landed beside me in the third pew. “I can’t make heads or tails of it, and even if Miss Werwick doesn’t have a cane—”
“Of course,” I agreed. Censure from Madame Archambault was humiliating and painful, but Miss Werwick of all the teachers relished referring us to Mr. Munt, as if we were chess pieces (or, better still, ninepins).
Clarke sat upon my other side. “Anything immediate, mi’ladies?”
Clarke was wont to trill when she was well fed, as if beginning to compose a folk tune, and I adored her for it. I was about to answer in the negative when Miss Lilyvale advanced to take her seat before the pipe organ and commence our two hours of agony.
“With a true spirit of praise, girls, sing with me!” Miss Lilyvale called out.
A veil of authorial privacy will be drawn here; it would behove neither the reader nor the author to dwell upon musical atrocities which reside wholly in the past and cannot now be remedied.
After the initial three hymns had been sung, Mr. Munt ascended to the pulpit. Vesalius Munt was never more happy than when every student’s attention speared in his direction, fixed to him like nails as he stood before the crucifix.
“Happy Sabbath to you, my girls,” he announced, beaming, and the my stuck in our thorny throats, for it was the truest sentiment he would admit to all morning. “I encourage you to rest peacefully upon this holiest of days, and repose knowing that Christ died to save you from your own ignorance and infamy. Let us proceed with our weekly Reckoning, that we might cleanse our souls.”
A hand raised. Mr. Munt devised a demeaning punishment for the accused—and often for the accuser. There were no rules in this jungle, no trails we might tread so as to escape the tiger’s tooth. We were paying as much mind as we ever did, Fox and I and Clarke, ears pricked for danger, when I startled at the sound of my name.
“Steele means well,” my bedmate was drawling exhaustedly from two pews distant. “And she’s as clever and helpful as everyone says, and oh, it’s dreadful, but she … she doesn’t mean to, and I hate to say it.”
I turned to gape at her. Taylor’s face was bloodless, a mere illustration: black hair thickly inked, eye and lip hinted at in delicate pen strokes. Her beauty had been marred of late by her uselessness at memorisation, and she had forsaken sleep in favour of struggling alone over data which meant nothing to her; now she embraced the only option guaranteed to merit a hot meal. I did not marvel that it was me—I was a proximal target, even a sensible one, already having earned a reputation for lying my way out of scrapes.
“What is it that Steele did not intend to do, Taylor?” Mr. Munt rested a poised arm against the pulpit.
Taylor’s round eyes flew to my queer tilted almond ones. “She dreams.”
“What in God’s name is Taylor doing?” growled Fox.
“It’s my fault,” I assured her quietly. “
I didn’t notice she had got so frail. She has every reason to lie about me.”
“She isn’t lying,” I thought Fox muttered.
“Steele has simply terrible nightmares about her mother,” Taylor declared. “She doesn’t mean to scream, but she won’t stop.”
My heart stuttered.
Yes, I often awoke covered in sweat and raw-throated as a carrion crow and, yes, I dreamt of my mother; but I did not scream for her. Did I? Once or twice had I bitten back cries, but these were rarities, accidents.
Rising, I clasped my hands before my white apron. “I’m sorry for giving any trouble, but my mother died recently.”
“Over half a year hence,” Mr. Munt corrected.
“Mourning her is only natural. But please forgive me for disturbing the peace.”
“Natural?” Mr. Munt struck the flat of his hand against the podium as if smiting sin itself. “Let our hearts go out, girls, to this wayward lamb, who meditates on death when in the midst of God’s abundance.”
I bit the inside of my lip until I could taste all I had left of my mother, which was her blood.
“Steady,” Clarke chimed softly.
“Let Steele,” intoned Mr. Munt, “come to thank You, Lord, for your grace in orchestrating her removal from her mother’s evil influence.”
My hands gripping the pew had transformed into bleached bones.
“And let us never give up the hope that she may return one day to honest Christian practices!”
“Steady,” Clarke squeaked, gripping my skirt.
“Mourning my mother is not dishonest!” I cried.
I may as well have set off a bomb in the chapel; every eye swept to me in dismay. Contradicting Mr. Munt was tantamount to suicide; unfortunately, I had not yet grasped that suicide was the topic.
“Your mother,” Mr. Munt enunciated, relishing every syllable, “was a debauchee who perished deliberately by means of self-administered laudanum. She was thus buried with minimal services by the only minister willing to overlook her Gallic Catholic affiliations and willful self-slaughter, and your sainted aunt spared you the indignity of witnessing such a barren sight. Tell me, why should mourning your mother be praised as any sort of virtue when her tainted spirit so obviously haunts your own immortal soul? Your mother was a disgrace to the natural order—an embodied disaster.”
He had known all along, I realised.
There had been no mourners in crepe at my mother’s funeral, I understood: only the overripe aroma of earth unwilling to accept yet another unpaid houseguest. Suicide was high treason, for what greater violation existed than thwarting God’s will?
My sentence (a week of missing dinner) was announced and Taylor invited to rejoin the ranks of the fed; but the pit of my stomach swelled into a cavern long before hunger descended.
Mr. Munt had won; I had not been prepared for the truth. A small hand interlaced with mine.
“You don’t cry out so very often,” Clarke whispered, wide-eyed and earnest.
“I will now,” I managed hoarsely before disengaging myself and opening our prayer book with palsied fingers.
• • •
Ihave learnt since that a great many people are ill intentioned and yet behave well. I might have followed suit—winked into the mirror of a morning and worn a white sheep’s coat all the livelong day. Jane Eyre was told to pray to God to take away her heart of stone, that she might be gifted a heart of flesh; but my heart of flesh bled for my mother, my mother whom I would apparently never see again if I was good.
The wind howled that November night as if mourning a lost love; and the decision I reached in my hard bed with Taylor’s cold toes prodding my calves, sobbing as silently as I could, went as follows:
If I must go to hell to find my mother again, so be it: I will be another embodied disaster.
But I will be a beautiful disaster.
EIGHT
“I might have been as good as you,—wiser,—almost as stainless. I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure—an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?”
It would have been possible for me to survive Lowan Bridge for longer than the bleak seven years I spent there had Mr. Munt not taken it into his head to kill Clarke.
Oh, we were subjected to daily indignity, each Reckoning more creatively vicious than the last; but small moments of happiness touched us deeply. In a mansion, blessings are lost amidst bric-a-brac; in a pit, they shimmer like the flash of dragonfly wings.
There was Miss Lilyvale’s boundless capacity to ruin even the simplest music. There was Fiona Fiddick’s faculties for both humour and sewing, which enabled her to hide the words FEED ME in an embroidered nosegay of coral peonies which Miss Sheffleton proudly hung upon the classroom wall. There were horses, and riding lessons, and I learnt to love galloping through the daisy-dotted meadows, pretending I need never return. There were the holidays, when Mr. Munt was out lecturing, and there was Clarke’s fierce, small-lipped smile when she arrived back after Christmas with her carpetbag and delivered an impetuous peck to my cheek.
Reader, I had miraculously acquired a companion; Clarke’s existence owned me, opened me, left me helpless with stifled giggles at midnight. Becky Clarke was brilliant and ridiculous, an effortless scholar who insisted on honour when honour led only to missed meals; she was three years my junior, so I could shrug her off as an irritating protégée the instant anyone raised an eyebrow; and she responded to both compliments and criticism with the same casual piping responses, as if baffled anyone had noticed she was there at all. Her simplicity was droll, her mind captivating—had anyone asked whether I thought her a genius or an idiot, I should not have had a satisfactory answer.
“Would you like to watch the sun rise?” Clarke would ask when the weather was fine, and madly I would accompany her to the roof, yawning and cracking sluggish joints, and we would sit there quite contented, always gazing at the murky haze of London not so very far away from us, and seeming—as was perfectly true—nearer to its outskirts every year. She would hum soft songs whilst gazing at the firmament, and her head would find its way to my shoulder.
Meanwhile, we all grew longer limbs and harder hearts every year.
Granville passed away during the fever which swept through our school when I was eleven years old. Taylor wept dreadfully, saying that Ettie Granville had been the only person ever to understand her; I raided the charity salvage pile and delivered her monogrammed kerchief to my bedmate, who clutched me about the shoulders for all the world to see.
Influenza claimed Fox when I was thirteen; I orchestrated the theft of a bushel of apples to store in her memory and was caught out during a vengeful Reckoning. Clarke smuggled me broth in a hot-water bottle and watched me guzzle it as we both hid behind the bed frame.
We became adept at grieving, suffering agonies for a day or two, and then returning to our altered orbits. I grew accustomed to the facts of my mother’s death more slowly, the horrible truth that she had finally managed the trick she must have attempted long before, which was to die. The others treated me predictably poorly for a spell—who can escape the stigma of a lunatic for a mother—but we all hated Mr. Munt so ferociously, with every red pulse of life, that we had not time to hate one another.
All fell to pieces, however, when I had been at Lowan Bridge for seven years, and Clarke’s preoccupation with honour swerved from pleasant foolishness into fatal lunacy.
There we stood before Miss Lilyvale’s desk, awaiting instructions.
“Would you girls please study … oh, goodness, I’m that scattered … the piano part, Steele, and this soprano vocal part, Clarke, for the end-of-year gala? I can think of no one better able to demonstrate our talents. Won’t you say yes?”
We glanced at each other; excelling at any course was a coveted position, but evidence suggested that our favourite teacher’s praise was not so complimen
tary as her censure. Meanwhile, Clarke was an outstanding vocalist—her tones were dizzyingly high, hovering midair as if a magical harp had been strummed. Students came to a bewildered halt in hallways whenever she practised her scales with that mathematical precision which was so innate in her.
“Of course.” Clarke took the small bundle of songs.
Then a strange thing occurred: head folding, Miss Lilyvale leant forward against her desk briefly. Her rosy cheeks had lost their blush during the course of the past two years, as if she had been bid to shoulder a stone up an endless mountainside; every month Miss Lilyvale became more of an automaton with something terribly pleading beneath the waxworks. She drew her fingers along the knob of her drawer, eyes briefly falling shut.
“Do you want something else of us?” Clarke asked.
She answered softly, “I can never have the things I truly want.”
“Are you all right, Miss Lilyvale?” I inquired, concerned.
“Oh! Heavens yes, I was only … distracted. Thank you for being so obliging,” our teacher said, smiling, and the strange moment was shattered.
“It’s in the desk,” Clarke announced as Miss Lilyvale bustled off to see that some younger girls were given appropriate parts. I was sixteen, Clarke thirteen, and thus as model pupils we were often left to our own devices—save for the inevitable Reckonings.
“What’s in the desk?”
“Whatever is haunting Miss Lilyvale.” Clarke studied her music. The charm of her distraction lay in the fact it was genuine; Becky Clarke could not lie if her life hung in the balance, and I shall soon cite statistical evidence to this effect. “This is rather high even for me, though I do like G major.”
“Never mind music,” I whispered as we quit the classroom. “Miss Lilyvale is stretched as tight as the catgut on her violin strings. You really mean to say you know what ails her?”
Clarke lifted the choral part as we walked. The birds outside the gloom-shrouded staircases were dumb that April afternoon, the carpets mute beneath our footsteps. “I went into the music room at half four yesterday because I thought I left my sketchbook, and Miss Lilyvale was reading a letter. When I appeared, she shoved it in the drawer she just touched so sadly.”