A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  “Yes, that’s my point,” Ellis says, perhaps a bit impatiently. “It’s terribly convenient, isn’t it? The witches all die in witchy ways, no murder about it. Do you really believe that?”

  I don’t want to dignify that with an answer. Especially when we both know what the answer really is.

  “Fine,” I say. “But is that what you want to do in the book as well? I thought you were going to have Margery be the killer?”

  “Are you two planning to come down for supper?”

  I snap around toward the door at the sound of the voice. I was too quick to avoid looking suspicious; for her part, Ellis is perfectly unfazed by the appearance of Leonie Schuyler in my room. Today, Leonie wears a tartan skirt and a neat blazer furnished with an elaborately knotted silk scarf: the very picture of an old-fashioned schoolgirl. She no longer has the loose coils of before; now her hair is a cascade of braids entwined with delicate gold thread. She didn’t even mention she was going into the city, but she must have: everything about her looks professionally styled. For some reason I’m struck by the reality that the other Godwin girls have lives that don’t involve us—don’t involve Ellis.

  “That depends,” Ellis says. “It’s Kajal’s turn tonight, right? What did she make?”

  I wonder if Leonie can hear my heart beating from all the way across the room. It certainly feels like it’s about to pound its way right out of my chest.

  “Coq au vin,” Leonie says. “With a side of hasselback potatoes and salad. She made some kind of vegetarian version of the chicken for you, Ellis.”

  Vegetarian coq au vin sounds repulsive to me, but Kajal’s a fantastic cook, so I put aside my notebook and we follow Leonie downstairs. Ellis glances back at me as we descend, her hand trailing along the railing and her scarlet lips quirking, the only acknowledgment of our shared secret.

  Once she’s turned away I let my fingertips graze mahogany. I touch the same place she had touched, and it’s like a cord drawn taut between us—as intimate as skin.

  Things change in the days following that first Night Migration.

  Whether the magic was real or not, something bound us together in those woods. Leonie puts music on the record player, Kajal dances in a red dress. Even Clara seems to be more at ease, her smiles coming quicker when we laugh over dinner. It feels like Godwin again, the way it did before. Like we’re sisters.

  That first week is painted in vivid color. I read tarot for the other girls in the common room: Kajal half-drunk making me draw cards for her again and again until she gets the results she wants, Leonie draping a veil over her head like the High Priestess, Ellis curled up on the sofa studying the Magician. Clara plants herbs in window boxes that wilt two days later; she cries about it, even though they’re just plants, and for some reason I feel sorry enough to comfort her.

  It takes that whole week for me to define what’s happening, to say I’m happy, in those words. But I say it, a declaration made while standing on the coffee table with my arms outspread, a declaration that earns whoops and applause from the rest of them, Ellis helping me down with one black-gloved hand.

  I’m happy. Ellis was right: I’m getting better.

  I bury what’s left of my pills in the backyard under Tamsyn Penhaligon’s oak tree, pressing quartz into the soil above them. I don’t need them anymore. I’m not that person anymore. I’m not the girl who saw ghosts in every corner, who feared her mind was host to a darker and more parasitic presence.

  I’m going to be all right now.

  * * *

  —

  “We’ll have to learn how to forge handwriting,” Ellis muses as she writes the second set of Night Migration notes in her characteristic sloping script. “Whatever Margery used to lure her victims out into the woods wouldn’t have been written in her own hand.”

  It is starting to seem to me as if Ellis has an answer for everything. She wants us to break into a locked building just to find out if we can, to mark the locations of every security camera around Godwin House, to research the best way to remove bloodstains from clothing. I have no idea how much of this, if any, will make it into Ellis’s book.

  “I doubt Margery wrote notes at all,” I say, but Ellis shrugs and adds a flourish to Clara’s name on the final envelope.

  “Perhaps not. But this way’s more fun, don’t you think?”

  Tonight, Ellis chooses the location, one much closer than the clearing I sent us to last time. It’s a brief walk through the forest, dead leaves crunching underfoot and the beams of our flashlights bobbing amid the branches.

  Ellis and I get to the meeting place at 11:40, five minutes before Leonie is supposed to arrive, just early enough to try and get a fire started. Ellis is dressed in hues of charcoal gray and black; she all but blends in with the landscape, a shadow among shadows. Next to her, in ivory, I feel like a lantern. This time, we forgo the masks.

  “A new moon,” Ellis says, turning her face toward the starless sky. “I don’t know why the myths always pair a full moon with the uncanny. Total darkness is so much more paralyzing.”

  “I suppose under a new moon, you’re less likely to die by meeting a ghost than you are tripping over your own feet.”

  Ellis laughs. “Or perhaps you’ll be murdered by the two Godwin girls, in the woods, with the garrote.”

  Just two weeks ago, I would have flinched. Tonight, I smile with her instead.

  I crouch down on the forest floor and pick up a long stick, prod at the weak shambles of our fire. It’s still smoldering coals and flickering twigs—hardly the rapturous bonfire we’d envisioned. I blow on the coals, and sparks spray into the air like fireflies. We’d built a circle of stones to keep from accidentally burning the woods down, but that risk is starting to feel very distant indeed.

  “We should meet in a graveyard next time,” Ellis muses. She leans past me to light her cigarette on the flames, which have finally started to ignite the gathered timber.

  Leonie arrives soon thereafter, then the other two; they plop themselves down on the ground as if they’ve forgotten to care what happens to their tailored skirts.

  Ellis positions herself by the fire, posed such that the flames appear to be licking up the straight legs of her trousers, consuming her. She holds her book in both hands: a reverend presiding over her flock.

  “Ex scientia ultio,” she says.

  Only the crack and snap of smoldering wood answers her, like gunshots in the empty night. In the half-light we look like ghosts.

  I’ve never felt like this before. The Margery coven was different—constructed for alumnae connections and nepotism, not sisterhood. This…this is real.

  “What happened to the goat’s blood?” Kajal says.

  “It’s a poetry reading.” Leonie has clearly spotted the book in Ellis’s hand. I half expected it to come out sounding derisive, but it doesn’t. There’s an upward tilt to the words, delight making music of Leonie’s voice.

  Ellis lifts Averno and smiles.

  “It seemed appropriate,” she says, “given our name.”

  We stand in a circle around the fire and read—Ellis first, then she passes the book to Clara, who takes over. Around the circle two times, thrice. Ellis unearths a flask of bourbon from my bag, and we drink that, too, choking down the bitter liquor and telling ourselves it doesn’t taste like gasoline. By the time we have read the last poem, my mind feels pleasantly liquid, my thoughts floating on the surface of a golden sea. Clara clasps both my hands in hers and smiles like a child, Kajal dances in the bracken and Leonie lies on her back, dirt forgotten.

  “Look how easily they give over to emotion,” Ellis murmurs, her fingers slipping into my hair, her lips whisper-cool against my ear. “No drugs or magic necessary. Couldn’t the Dalloway Five have done the same?”

  But if this is magic, it isn’t the kind the Five practiced. I’m sure of
it. For once, the forest is empty of ghosts, the sky clear and glittering. Nothing evil can touch us like this. We’re dryads cavorting in autumn, wood spirits breathing out starlight.

  Eventually, though, even dryads must sleep. We stagger home in single file, bramble-cut and smelling of campfire smoke. The next day Ellis tears a poem out of Averno and pins it to her bedroom wall and tells me this is it, the beginning of everything, the first page of our story. A story that has no dark corners, just us, just happiness and freedom.

  Strangely, I believe her.

  * * *

  —

  Sunday, Ellis and I go down to the lake. Ellis has brought a picnic basket with cheeses, cranberry juice, fennel crackers, and a map of the surrounding terrain.

  The lake glitters gold in the early-morning sunlight, its surface calm and even. I know Alex’s body isn’t in there—the silted floor was searched by divers, every cave scoured along the shore—but I can’t help shivering.

  “What’s this?” I ask, pointing to the map.

  She unfolds it across the grass and gestures to the lake with her cheese knife. “The lake,” she says. “And here”—she points a half mile east, on Godwin grounds—“is where Cordelia Darling’s body was found.”

  So that’s what this is, then. Another murder, dissected and resolved.

  “With water in her lungs,” I murmur. Cordelia Darling had drowned on dry land, reason enough for some to suspect witchery.

  I just wish Ellis had brought me here to discuss a different Dalloway Five death. Anyone’s except Cordelia’s.

  Ellis has assembled a little sandwich of cheese between crackers; she offers it to me, and I take it just to have the distraction. The taste is sharp and peppery all at once.

  “You can see where Cordelia was found from here,” Ellis says, and she touches my chin, gently directs my face toward the sunrise. “Look.”

  Yes, I can see it. The patch of grass is as indistinguishable as any around it, especially from this distance. Godwin rises above Cordelia’s temporary grave on its wooded hill, shuttered windows and uneven gables: a shadowy tombstone.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” I tell her. “Someone drowned Cordelia, or she drowned on her own, and then she was carried a half mile that way. Mystery solved.”

  “Mmm, yes, the answer is rather obvious, isn’t it?” Ellis says with an arched brow; I can’t tell if she’s making fun of me.

  But this time, it’s my turn to have the upper hand. “The lake didn’t exist in the early eighteenth century,” I say. I tap the map. “This was just a valley. The lake itself was man-made as a flood prevention measure in 1904. There was just the Hudson, and it runs narrow through here.”

  Ellis’s brow furrows, and she hunches over the map again, presumably to examine the little topographic lines that show the steepness of the cliffs and depth of the valleys around Dalloway School. “Really?”

  I take another bite of cracker. “Really.”

  “Curious,” Ellis murmurs, and I can’t help but feel somewhat gratified that I’ve finally said something to throw her off balance. It feels like winning.

  “Besides, even eighteenth-century bigots knew that it’s not impossible to carry a skinny teenage girl half a mile across land,” I say, “soaking wet or otherwise.”

  Ellis looks up. “Yes. But we also know that it doesn’t take that much water to drown a person, considering. You could drown in your bathtub. You could drown in a shallow puddle of rainwater.”

  “You could,” I agree, “but then why not leave the body in the bathtub to be found later? Why take her outside? That only makes you more likely to get caught.”

  It’s enough to make Ellis fall into pensive silence for the next several minutes. I occupy myself with the cheese and crackers, and drink a long swig of sour juice straight from the bottle. Ellis squints out across the lawn toward where Cordelia’s body was found. The way her face scrunches up cuts a wrinkle right below the single freckle on her cheekbone.

  “Are we really doing all of these?” I ask her eventually, after she’s finally reached over to steal the cranberry juice from me.

  “All of them,” Ellis says, with a faint lilt of surprise to her tone. She looks at me. “What else, Felicity? There’s no better way for me to write about their deaths.”

  I sigh. “Lovely. When will we be finished? I do have my own thesis to work on, you know.”

  “It won’t take too long,” Ellis promises. “I have to be done by the end of winter if I want to get the book written and revised by deadline. I’ll need all of spring to work on revisions.”

  “Fine. But you still haven’t explained to me how Cordelia Darling’s body ended up drowned on dry land.”

  Ellis’s gaze cuts back toward the lake, her eyes narrowed against the bright sunlight. “Isn’t it obvious?” she says. “Whoever drowned her brought her out here to make it look like magic. They wanted the Dalloway girls to be blamed for it. And they got what they wanted.”

  I track a path along the ground, from the lake across the field, back up the hill toward Godwin House perched like a bird of prey upon the rocks, silently observing. If they’d been looking, someone in the house would have been able to see what happened. But they hadn’t looked, and so the mystery persists.

  “You said you’re writing Margery as the villain,” I mention eventually.

  “I am.”

  “Then why would she want to frame her own friends for the deaths? Why not frame the townspeople?”

  Ellis shrugs. “Who knows? The mind of a psychopath is an uninterpretable thing. Perhaps she thought it was more entertaining that way, to sow fear and hysteria among the coven—who can you trust, who can’t you, and so on.”

  I find myself unpersuaded, but I nod anyway.

  “There’s just one thing,” Ellis says. She dusts the cracker crumbs from her hands and pushes to her feet, offering to help me up after her.

  “And what is that?”

  “Pick me up.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Ellis’s brow arches. “If it was Margery who killed all the others, she would have needed to drag Cordelia Darling’s body out here, wouldn’t she? But we’ve seen the painting of her. She wasn’t a large girl.”

  Ellis is the furthest thing from a corpse. She’s bright-eyed and impatient, watching me with arms crossed over her chest and the wind blowing stray black hairs across her face. And yet when I crouch down to lift her she feels like dead weight in my arms. I take two steps and stumble, my breath lurching in my throat.

  “Steady now,” Ellis murmurs, her breath hot against my neck.

  I grit my teeth and take another step. “What did you eat for breakfast, rocks?”

  “Well, I am prodigiously tall for my age. I weigh quite a bit more than you do.”

  I make it another three feet then give up, unceremoniously dumping Ellis onto the grass and collapsing next to her, sweaty and breathless. She falls onto her back, arms splayed across the dirt, and for a moment I worry I’ve hurt her somehow, broken something when I let her go—but then she says:

  “Margery could have dragged her.”

  “What?”

  Ellis stays right where she is, loose-limbed and still. “Margery dragged her. She wouldn’t have needed to carry Cordelia across the field. There are other ways to transport a body. This isn’t proof she wasn’t involved.”

  My hands twist up in my dress. “I’m not going to drag you anywhere.”

  At last Ellis pushes herself up onto her elbows, fixing me in her gaze. “No,” she says after a moment. “You don’t have to. You could, though. If you tried.”

  She crawls back over to the picnic blanket, leaving me standing there, aching and damp-faced, behind her until she’s poured fresh glasses of juice and called for me, and I, obediently, follow.

  *
* *

  —

  “Go without me,” Ellis says the night of the Lemont House Halloween party the following week; she’s sitting in the common room on one of the high stools by the windows, gazing out down the hill, with her dark hair tumbling about her shoulders and ink stains on her sleeve. “I need to write.”

  We might have grown closer, but the four of us still make an awkward crew without Ellis’s grounding presence. Even so, we go without her. Leonie’s brought a flask; she passes it around as we traipse down the drive and across the quad, sharing Ellis’s bourbon (of course; no escaping Ellis’s influence, even in Ellis’s absence) and each other’s spit. I’m the only one who bothered dressing up—the others are all costumed in their usual plaid skirts and cable-knit sweaters, Leonie with a beret perched atop her head, and Kajal’s skinny legs all wrapped up in wool stockings. My Persephone costume seems absurd in juxtaposition.

  “I wish it was only Godwin House,” Clara sighs as we pass a knot of giggling first-years with their flimsy disguises: sexy nurse, sexy vampire, sexy priestess. “I wish we were here and no one else.”

  A murmur of agreement rolls from one of us to the next, and it’s only after I’ve said my part that I wonder if it’s even true. Do I wish we were alone? Do I think we’re so different from all the rest of them? Better, even?

  “A school just for Godwin girls,” I muse aloud, saying what I know they want to hear. “We’d establish our own new theoretical perspective on the classic literary canon. They’d cite us in books.”

  “Invite us to speak at conferences.”

  “Interview us in the Times.”

  “Debate whether we’re idiots or geniuses.”

  “We’re both,” Leonie says, and even Kajal laughs.

  But I can’t share their levity. A year ago Alex and I left this same party, went back to Godwin with the stolen Margery Skull concealed under my coat. We lit candles and spilled blood and called up the darkness.