A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  Even now I wonder if I’d be able to tell. If she’d been possessed by the spirit of one of those dead girls, if she’d performed her own rituals in the dark, calling up spirits she didn’t understand, spirits that would never leave her alone, would I scent it in the air like fine perfume?

  I claim a seat near the windows, sufficiently far from the center of the room that I hope to go unnoticed if this is one of those group projects that lets students pick their own partners. I’ll happily accept the dregs of who’s left after all the rich coven girls have been claimed.

  I’ve just settled in and opened my laptop when I glance over and spot Ellis Haley sitting at one of the other desks, a plain black notebook in front of her and a fountain pen in hand. She must sense me watching, because she meets my gaze and one corner of her mouth quirks up before the instructor raps her knuckles on the chalkboard.

  We begin inauspiciously, with a question—What is the history of art?—and a series of definitions. The project summary, when it’s distributed, isn’t as bad as I’d feared. There will be museum visits, even if most of them look as if they’re meant to be done independently. And the project isn’t due until the end of the semester.

  “With your partner,” the instructor says, “you will choose two works of art, and collaboratively you will write a research paper comparing these two works, situating them in their respective historical contexts. This is not the kind of project you can put off until finals week. To get a good grade, you will have to do extensive reading and research both into the construction of the works as well as their artists’ biographies, the sociocultural issues of their time, and how the works entered into dialogue with their contemporary societies. My standards will be high.”

  I wonder how broadly she has construed the term art—if I might be allowed to use architecture, or a book of George Eliot essays.

  Or I could write about art and the destruction thereof. About my mother’s hand holding that knife, the sound canvas makes when it rips.

  “I’ve randomly paired you up, with one group of three since we have an odd number….”

  The instructor reads off her list. Ellis is teamed up with Ursula Prince, who has an expression on her face like she’s won an award; I’m assigned Bridget Crenshaw. The moment the instructor says my name, Bridget’s hand snaps into the air.

  “I can’t work with Felicity,” Bridget says without even waiting to be called upon. “She makes me uncomfortable.”

  That’s code for I won’t work with a girl who killed her best friend.

  Under the desk, my hands clench into fists as every face in the room turns to stare at me. Bridget’s pink-lipsticked mouth is set in a mean smile, and no—I immediately know exactly what this is. It has nothing to do with Alex. It has everything to do with the fact that Bridget applied to Godwin House every year and never got in, and since Alex and I were the queens of Godwin House, that became our fault. As if we’d hoarded our popularity just to make sure Bridget never got any. Never mind that Bridget is part of the Margery coven; never mind that Bridget had doubtless been part of the decision to excise me from that club.

  I’m not queen anymore. This is a coup.

  “I’ll be Felicity’s partner,” a familiar voice says.

  I look.

  Ellis has one hand half raised, her pen thrust behind her ear. Ursula Prince, to her left, looks deeply disappointed.

  The Art History teacher makes a mark on her clipboard. “Very well. Bridget, you can work with Ursula. Unless you have a problem with Miss Prince, too?”

  A titter runs through the class, and Bridget’s cheeks darken; she says nothing.

  It shouldn’t feel like a victory, but it does. If Bridget thinks less of me because of what happened, because I had to leave school, then I want her humiliated. If she’s afraid of me because she thinks I killed Alex, well, then my wishes for her become even more uncharitable.

  After class I catch up to Ellis halfway across the quad, the September wind cutting through my thin linen shirt and making me shiver; I should have worn a sweater. Ellis, in a turtleneck that looks at least as flimsy as what I’m wearing, hardly seems to notice the cold.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I tell her.

  “Do what?” She spares me a sidelong glance. “I don’t want to work with Ursula Prince. It’s as simple as that.”

  As simple as that.

  Somehow, I don’t think it is.

  * * *

  —

  Fall deepens, that chill breeze turning to cold as the leaves go yellow and then scarlet. Only three weeks have passed since school started, but by October, knit tights and cashmere sweaters have made their appearance and I discover all my winter clothes are too large now. I head into town, accompanied by Kajal, of all people, to buy more. We try on tartan skirts and blazers, Kajal examining herself in the full-length mirror with one hand pressed to her flat stomach and her lips curving downward.

  “It looks good,” I offer from two steps behind her, still doing up the buttons on my shirt.

  She twists to the other side and looks at her reflection in profile. “It’s not very slimming.”

  Kajal is already one of the slimmest people I’ve ever seen.

  “You look fine,” I tell her. “I like it with the belt—very vintage.” It looks like something every single Ellis cliquer would wear. That’s the part I don’t say.

  Not that I have any moral high ground; I’ve piled my dressing room with tweeds and cardigans and jackets that have elbow patches. The difference is that I’ve always dressed like this for fall. Alex used to say I cared more about the aesthetic of autumn than about comfort.

  Kajal sighs. “I suppose.”

  Even so, she spends another minute staring at herself in that mirror, mouth knotting like she wishes she could take off her own body when she takes off that dress. For a moment I’m reminded of Florence Downpatrick, who’d been my roommate at Silver Lake. Florence had looked at herself the same way—always watching her reflection with narrowed eyes, like she hoped to find something wrong with it, or curling her fingers round her wrist as we sat reading in the common room, seeing how far she could slide those circled fingers up her forearm before they stopped touching.

  “It looks good,” I say again, but Kajal vanishes back into the dressing room without responding. I’m left standing in front of the mirror alone.

  I avoid my own gaze and look at the clothes instead. The skirt hits past my knees, its dark-blue color drawing out the blue threads in my herringbone tweed blazer. I look like a university professor. I’m thinner than Kajal, but that has nothing to do with dieting and everything to do with the fact I couldn’t keep food down for weeks toward the end of summer. It was as if something in my gut had rebelled against the idea of coming back here, rejecting everything I fed it like it hoped to wither away and die before I had the chance to face Dalloway again.

  The way Kajal’s always looked at me takes on new meaning now. Does she think I’m like her? Does she think we’re in silent competition with one another, that my reassurances carry with them the smug satisfaction of victory?

  Clara’s in the common room when we return, bags slung over elbows. I try to hide my flinch—before she turned around to look at us, I’d only seen the glint of red hair in late afternoon sunlight and the book perched on her knee. My heart was still trapped between my teeth, Alex’s name pressing against the backs of my lips. I could have sworn it was her.

  “Have a good time?” Clara asks, ice frosting her words. I frown on reflex.

  “Yes,” Kajal says. “The weather was nice.”

  “You might have thought to invite me. I need new winter clothes, too, you know.”

  Kajal shrugs. “Sorry.”

  She sweeps away toward the stairs without another word. My bags are heavy, and I can’t think of anything worse than staying d
own here with Clara when she’s in this mood, so I follow.

  “What’s her problem?” I murmur to Kajal as we round the steps to the next landing.

  “Clara’s new,” Kajal says, and waves a dismissive hand. “Ellis says she’s insecure. She doesn’t think she belongs with the rest of us because we already knew each other from before, and she just…”

  Kajal trails off as she reaches her room, tilting her head in a voiceless farewell as she vanishes within.

  Clara’s new. But so was Ellis, and these rules didn’t seem to apply to her.

  But maybe that’s precisely the problem: maybe Ellis is the one who ensures that you never really fit in.

  Not that I fit here, either. My first attempt at a senior year, I’d been living in Godwin for a year already—had stitched myself into the fabric of Godwin with knotted threads. I remember I’d wanted so badly to be accepted to the house. I had applied to Boleyn and Eliot as well, but Godwin was the ground on which the Dalloway Five had stood, the land on which they’d lived—and died. I had read in the library about Tamsyn Penhaligon’s death, her body found swinging from the oak tree behind Godwin eleven months after Flora Grayfriar’s murder. Although Tamsyn had been ruled a suicide, one of the records in the occult library said her face had been painted with blood: unfamiliar sigils traced over her cheeks and brow.

  That same tree stands right outside my bedroom. The first night I spent in Godwin, I’d pushed open the window and leaned out to press my palm against its bark. I’d imagined I could feel Tamsyn’s heart beating inside it, an echo to my own. The oak didn’t frighten me until later.

  The moment I open my bedroom door, a curse escapes my lips. It looks like an autumn storm has swept through, the trash bin tipped over and its contents spilled across the rug, Alex’s postcard torn from the wall and lying on the floor as if someone had read it and then, indifferent, discarded it.

  Her ghost.

  Only that can’t be true, I tell myself, sucking in a series of shallow breaths and willing my pulse to slow. There’s a more rational explanation: my window’s cracked open, the gauzy drapes shivering and the air cold as night. The oak stands silent and watchful, branches like black fingers against the sky.

  Ghosts don’t exist. I have to keep my head on my shoulders; I have to stay sane. I have to prove I deserve to be back here. I need to prove returning wasn’t a mistake.

  I curse again and cross the room to shut the window, twisting the latch shut. I could have sworn I’d closed the window before I left.

  I collect the detritus and put it all back in place. Some of Alex’s old letters have fallen from their homes, tucked between books on my shelves. That’s more than a coincidence, I think. It has to be. It has to be.

  I retrieve her letters, carefully separating them from the wastebasket contents and putting them in my desk drawer this time. I find all except one, the card Alex sent me from her family’s winter trip to Vermont. And no matter where I search—under the bed, behind my desk, even out on the lawn of Godwin House—I can’t find it anywhere.

  Here is the truth.

  What happened to Alex was no accident. Not just because she fell, because we’d fought, or because I cut the rope—but because of what happened last October.

  I’d recently decided on my thesis project: “I caution you against this,” Wyatt had said when I told her I wanted to study representations of witchcraft in literature. “You will struggle to get a thesis on witchcraft approved by the administration, no matter how good your scholarship. Dalloway is a respectable school—this isn’t the Scholomance.”

  “I don’t see the problem,” I’d said. “I’m not claiming the Dalloway witches were real. Just that conceptualizations of witchcraft existed in the eighteenth century, and that those were influenced by perceptions of female agency and mental illness at the time. I want to connect the reality of their lives to the fantasy of how women were presented on the page.”

  Wyatt had fixed me with a lancet gaze and said: “So long as you focus on the literature, Miss Morrow—not on flights of fancy.” And she’d signed the papers.

  But when I’d told my mother about my plans, she’d been appalled.

  “That school is a bad influence on you,” my mother had told me while I was home for Thanksgiving break a few weeks later. “I thought you knew better than to believe all that nonsense about witches.”

  Perhaps she was right to be afraid. Of course, at the time I’d scoffed. I don’t believe in witches, I’d insisted, and it was true. Before Dalloway, I had fancied myself a rationalist—too rational, in fact, to entertain the possibility that reality might contain more mysteries than my feeble mortal mind could understand. But there was something about the Dalloway Five that drew me in, embraced me in their cold dead arms. They were real: there was historical evidence for their lives, for their deaths. And I imagined their magic stitched like a thread across time, passed from mother to daughter, a glittering link from the founder to Margery Lemont to me.

  That had felt like a comfort once. After Halloween, it felt more like a curse.

  By that night, I’d had plenty of opportunities to embroil myself in lore and legend. My room at Godwin House was littered with scanned grimoire pages and notes on the uncanny. Alex watched all this with a sort of academic fascination; she’d never been able to understand why I was so drawn to darkness. She had always belonged in the light of the sun.

  “Don’t you think you’re taking this a little too seriously?” Alex asked the night everything went wrong, waving a match through the air to extinguish the flame. “You’ve been kind of over the top about this thesis business. Like, do you think you’re starting to get a little confused about reality here? Magic doesn’t exist, Felicity.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “I mean…yes?”

  She held my gaze for a long moment; I looked away first, back to the Ouija board set up between us. “This is important to me,” I confessed to the planchette. I dipped a cloth into salt water and wiped it over the board itself, cleansing it for the summoning. “Not because I believe in it, necessarily, but because they did.”

  “And you’re obsessed with them. The Dalloway Five.”

  “I’m not obsessed. This is our history—Godwin’s history. They killed a girl. That really happened, whether we believe in witchcraft or not. And we know they held a séance—that was documented in the trial. Whether they thought it was real or just make-believe, they performed a ritual to raise a ghost. And Flora died a few days later.”

  The primary sources I’d read in Dalloway’s library were inconsistent as to the nature of Flora Grayfriar’s death. The account I’d read in the library described an almost ritualistic killing, Flora’s throat slit and her stomach cut open, stuffed full of animal bones and herbs. But other contemporaneous writings said she was found with a musket ball in her gut, dead in the forest, shot like a beast. It should have been a simple thing, to determine how a girl died: Was she shot, or was her throat slit? Do I trust the trial documents, or the letters written by Flora’s mother? Who had more motive to lie?

  Either the Dalloway girls were witches, and they’d murdered Flora in some arcane deal with the devil, or Flora’s death had a far more mundane explanation. A hunting accident, maybe. A lovers’ quarrel. Or even a bigoted townsperson who heard about the séance and wanted to see the girls punished for meddling with powers they couldn’t contain.

  After all, Flora was the first death, but she wasn’t the last. Following her, every one of the Dalloway witches died in ways that were impossible to explain. All of their bodies were found on the Godwin House grounds, like the house itself was determined to keep them. It was almost as if they were cursed, as if they’d raised a spirit that was determined to see them all dead.

  The more likely explanation—that they’d been killed by religious mountain folk who feared women, fear
ed the magic they’d assigned to women—didn’t hold the same appeal.

  Regardless, Alex was right. I hadn’t been able to get the Dalloway Five out of my head for weeks. I’d even dreamed about them the previous night, Beatrix Walker’s hair like spun corn silk and Tamsyn Penhaligon’s bony fingers trailing along my cheek. They had found their way inside me, like fungal spores inhaled and taken root. Sometimes I felt like they’d always been there. I’d read about reincarnation, about girls born again and again, and imagined Margery Lemont whispering soft words in the back of my mind. Every time I touched her skull at Boleyn House, I felt her in my blood.

  Maybe I was losing my mind. Or maybe this was what it was to appreciate history, to truly understand it. When I read books, the boundary between my world and others shifted. I could imagine other realities. I envisioned the tales so clearly that it was as if I lived them.

  The story of the Dalloway Five was a story born in Godwin House. Why shouldn’t their legend be real?

  And if this ritual worked—if we spoke to them—we could put the mythos to rest once and for all.

  The scent of sandalwood rose in the air. We’d already turned off the lamp; I could only see Alex by the flickering candles, her skin glowing warm silver in their light.

  “All right, then,” Alex said. “Let’s summon old dead witches.”

  I’d written the summoning spell in my moleskin notebook: an incantation copied from an ancient tome in the library’s occult section. The process had been painstaking; no one in the eighteenth century, it seemed, had been possessed of legible handwriting. Of course, they didn’t have Ouija boards in the eighteenth century either, and this Hasbro-branded contraption I had bought at the independent bookstore in town hardly qualified as an accoutrement of real witchcraft. But it was better than nothing. I propped the notebook on my knees, and me and Alex both placed our fingers on the Ouija planchette, barely touching it.

  And even though I hadn’t spoken yet, all at once the room seemed darker—the corners deepening, the air heavy against my skin. I took in a shallow breath and read the spell aloud.