Blythewood

by kindle@abovethetreeline. com

  “Because this is where I come when I’m thinking of running away. But then I look at these creatures . . .” She looked up at the hideous monsters carved on the column capitols. “And I remember why I’m here. We all come to Blythewood for a purpose. Are you really ready to give up yours already?”

  I thought about my questions about my mother. Then I thought about Tillie Kupermann. If she were in my place would she run away? “No,” I told Sarah, “I’m not ready to give up.”

  “Good,” she said, smiling at me. “Then we’d best get you to your next class. It’s all right you missed Latin—Mrs. Calendar is so blind she won’t have noticed you weren’t there—but you mustn’t skip archery. Miss Swift has an eye as keen as a hawk’s. I’m supposed to assist her today setting up targets, so if we don’t get there soon we’ll both be on her bad side.”

  I didn’t want that. Sarah was the best—perhaps the only— friend I’d made so far at Blythewood. The first friend I’d made since Tillie. I didn’t want to risk losing her.

  z o Z Sarah showed me a door on the far side of the cloister, hidden behind the roses, that let out onto the gardens. “My little secret,” she said. “It’s the best way to get out of the building without anyone seeing you.” The archery court was set up at the end of the gardens, so we were only a few minutes late for class. We found our classmates in a semicircle around Miss Swift, who was standing beside a marble statue of the goddess Diana drawing a bow. I slipped in between Helen and Daisy while Sarah began collecting stray arrows off the lawn and setting up targets.

  “Thank the bells,” Helen whispered. “Daisy was afraid you’d run away.”

  “So were you—” Daisy began, but was silenced by a glare from Miss Swift. Daisy’s face turned bright pink. I’d already discovered today that Helen couldn’t stay quiet for two minutes and Daisy had a horror being caught talking by our teachers.

  “Behold Diana,” Miss Swift continued, gesturing toward the statue. “The virgin huntress, a symbol of our Order. She dedicated herself to the hunt, forsaking marriage and children, as many of us here at Blythewood have.”

  “As if Miss Swift had many offers of marriage,” Helen whispered beside me while Daisy, still blushing, glared at her.

  “Why not?” I whispered. Miss Swift looked attractive enough to me, with a figure as lean and lithe as Diana. Only her mouse-brown hair, scraped back into a tight bun and fixed with an arrow-shaped pin, made her look a bit severe.

  “Oh, everyone knows that Blythewood teachers don’t marry.”

  “But what about Dame Beckwith? She was married.”

  “Oh, but she gave up teaching when she went away to be married, and then she came back when her husband died—”

  Daisy stomped on Helen’s foot to silence her and we all focused back on Miss Swift’s lecture, leaving me to wonder if Dame Beckwith’s sad eyes came from memories of her deceased husband.

  “Some of you may have practiced archery with your friends and brothers, at your summer cottages and lakeside camps. Perhaps you like how the sport shows off your figure and you’ve taken prizes at your local competitions—”

  “I came in first at Camp Wanasockie last summer,” Cam announced proudly.

  Miss Swift smiled. “Ah, that is precisely what I mean. Come up here, Miss . . .”

  “Bennett,” Cam said cheerily, pushing past the rest of us to stand between Miss Swift and the marble Diana. “Camilla Bennett. Cam for short.” She grinned at the rest of us and winked at Helen, who grimaced. “I’m a crack shot, if I do say so myself.”

  “Uh-oh,” Helen whispered. “She’s in for it now.”

  “A crack shot,” Miss Swift repeated, her upper lip curling. “How splendid. And what have you shot?”

  “What? Oh, well, targets, of course . . .”

  “Targets like these?” Miss Swift nodded to a tall blonde girl, one of the Dianas, whom she introduced as Andalusia Beaumont. She carried a canvas target to the edge of the woods, about thirty feet away from where Cam and Miss Swift stood. “Would you like to demonstrate your prowess?”

  She handed Cam a bow that was nearly as tall as Cam was, and an arrow fletched with black feathers. As Cam positioned herself at a right angle to the target, lifted the bow, and nocked the arrow in it, the sun struck the feathers. Prisms danced off them and I felt my stomach clench as I realized the feathers must be from a Darkling’s wing.

  When Cam released the arrow, it shot true and straight to the target and lodged with a satisfying thwack into the bull’seye—a thwack that was echoed in the woods by an ominous crash. Cam was smiling and lowering her bow when the brush behind the target exploded. A blur of horns and fur trampled the target and headed straight toward Cam.

  “What’s the matter, Miss Bennett?” Miss Swift asked calmly, handing her another arrow. “You’re a crack shot. Hadn’t you better take aim?”

  Cam’s eyes widened. She took the arrow with a shaking hand and tried to nock it in the bow. Most of the girls screamed and ran for the cover of the garden wall, but Miss Swift and Andalusia Beaumont stood calmly beside Cam as the horned creature ran toward them. Helen, Daisy, and I stood rooted to the spot—not so much out of bravery, I think, as because we were too shocked to move. I looked from the horned creature, which I noticed with a sickening sense of horror had only one eye, back to Cam, who finally got the arrow nocked, drew, and shot—a good six feet wide of the charging monster.

  Miss Swift nodded at Andalusia. The tall blonde coolly raised her loaded bow and shot the creature straight into its one eye. It slumped to the ground, twitched twice, and then stilled, thick blue gore pulsing from the arrow wound.

  It’s not human, I said to myself, forcing myself to look at the monster. It was like something out mythology.

  “Excellent shot, Miss Beaumont,” Miss Swift said, striding toward the fallen goblin and placing one slim-booted foot on its chest. “A cyclops can only be killed with a direct shot to its eye. You see, girls, archery at Blythewood is quite a different sport from what you’ve been used to. I am not here to teach you to be archers.” She wrenched the arrow from the cyclop’s chest. “I am here to teach you to be hunters. Now, if one of you would please go find Gillie in the garden and tell him there’s a bit of cleaning up to attend to, the rest of you can be measured for your bows.”

  The rest of the class was spent getting measurements taken and learning how to maintain our bows and arrows, but it was hard to concentrate very well while keeping an eye on the edge of the woods. I’d felt horrified at how human the lampsprites looked, but now I was horrified by how inhuman the cyclops looked—and at the thought that more creatures like that were roaming the woods. I think we were all relieved to go back into the castle, and to climb to the very top of the bell tower, for our bell ringing class in the belfry.

  We all crowded by the windows to admire the views. To the southeast lay the quaint Dutch village of Rhinebeck. Trim Victorian houses lined the streets, many of them with glass greenhouses for growing the violets the town was famous for. We could make out the train station and the tracks that led back to New York City. To the east lay a patchwork of farms—hay fields and apple orchards, and fenced paddocks in which horses, cows, and sheep grazed—a pretty, bucolic landscape like something out of a Dutch painting.

  It was hard to imagine what could threaten such peace and order . . . until you looked to the north and saw the Blythe Wood crouched along the river like an animal tensed to spring out at its prey—deep, dark, and secret. Looking into it was like looking into a deep pool on a summer day that you wanted to dive into despite knowing that you might drown in it, or the eyes of a beast that drew you into its depths.

  “What you feel when you regard the Blythe Wood, ladies—and gentleman,” Mr. Peale began, bowing to Nathan, “is the magnetic pull of Faerie. The existence of that other world alongside ours is an anomaly, an aberration. Where that world breaks into ours it disrupts the flow of magneto-electro energy between our worlds, like a vacuum that pulls
everything into its hungry maw.”

  “Hmm, Grandma, what big teeth you have!” Nathan whispered beside me. Helen slapped him on the arm and told him to stop being ridiculous, but her voice shook. The bristling pine trees did look like teeth.

  “To disrupt that energy we break up the sound waves with the bells. We have found that certain patterns interrupt the flow of malevolent energy. May I have six volunteers?”

  To my surprise, Nathan volunteered right away—and volunteered me and Helen and Daisy as well. Beatrice and Dolores insisted on making up the six. Mr. Peale directed us to each grab one of the ropes that hung down into the square stone chamber. The ropes were so thick it took both my hands to span mine. I expected it to feel rough, but the rope had been worn smooth by many ringers before me. It thrummed with a tension as if it were tethered to an animal straining at its lead. As if the bells were alive.

  Mr. Peale explained how the bells were numbered and counted us off so we knew our numbers. I was the sixth bell. “When I call your number you pull. For today I’ll point, but eventually you’ll remember when it’s your turn.”

  He commenced calling numbers while circling us, demonstrating by grasping our arms how to pull down smoothly and let up with control. The sound of the bells right over our heads was deafening—at first just a cacophony of sound that drove all thought from my head. But slowly, the rhythm worked its way into my body, coming in through my hands and the soles of my feet where the sound vibrated upward from the stone. Soon I knew when it was my turn before Peale called my number. My whole body thrummed with the vibrations of the bells.

  I caught sight of Nathan’s face and he grinned at me. His cheeks were ruddy and healthy looking, the shadows beneath his eyes faded, his eyes bright. The haunted boy mourning for his lost sister was gone—perhaps because he wasn’t alone anymore. I recalled what Gillie had said about ringing the bells— that you felt a part of something bigger than yourself. Even Dolores and Beatrice had cast off their habitual melancholy demeanor and were grinning.

  I hardly noticed that Peale had ceased calling numbers or that we each knew when to stop. The peal had its own logic that led to its ending. When we stopped, the pattern seemed to go on, floating out into the air above the treetops. I thought I heard an answering call in a bird singing deep inside the forest, singing the same tune that we had played, and then came the echo of the last bell, tolling sweet and sonorous from beneath the river its plaintive cry. Remember me, it said, remember me. I looked around at my fellow bell ringers and saw that their ruddy cheeks were damp and felt that mine were, too, but whether from perspiration or tears, I wasn’t sure.

  “Excellent!” Mr. Peale exclaimed, his face shining and pink as though he had been pulling the bells himself. “Mr. Beckwith, you especially will make a fine bell master. Now, if you will all turn to your campanology guide and mark the first two dozen changes to memorize by tomorrow . . .”

  17

  WE RUSHED DOWN the stairs, late for our last class of the day, literature with Miss Sharp, held in the library so that we could have access to the Order’s collection of great literature. By now my arms ached, my ears were ringing, and my head was full of discordant facts that jostled against one another like riders on the Sixth Avenue streetcar at rush hour: Latin names for sprite species, the dates of the three great wizard wars, an antidote for centaur bite. Mixed up with all these were a dozen warring emotions: the horror of seeing Miss Frost’s specimens, the terror of the cyclops attack, Nathan’s grief over losing his sister, my fear of being exposed as a freak, but also the sense of belonging I’d had ringing the bells.

  I wondered what I would find in the library. I had spent some of my happiest moments with my mother in libraries. I’d looked forward to seeing the one at Blythewood, but now I wondered how many more bloodthirsty stories were hidden behind the gilt-stamped leather spines on the floor-to-ceiling rows of books. No doubt Miss Sharp would soon explain that they held the secrets of evil fairies, and then she would assign two hundred pages to read and memorize by the morrow.

  As we settled into our seats she stood at the front of class in a blue serge skirt and high-necked white blouse from which her slender long neck rose like the stem of a lily. Her abundant blonde hair was piled high on her head in the Gibson Girl style. She stood, still and tall as a candle, her golden hair the flame, regarding us. Then she turned away and walked to a window. She pushed open the heavy leaded casement, letting in riverscented air and the trill of a lark. Still looking out the window she began to speak, her voice somehow part of the breeze and birdsong.

  “My heart aches, and drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

  Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.”

  I had never taken opiates myself, but I had seen my mother’s eyes dulled by the drug and I knew this was what she had felt. I felt that way myself right now, my brain over full of all the wonders and horrors of this strange and savage world I’d stumbled into. At least the poem was familiar. It was Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” one of my mother’s favorite poems

  “’ Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot

  Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

  Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”

  CAROL GOODMAN [ 203 Miss Sharp recited it as though she were addressing the bird outside the window but also, I felt, speaking to me directly. I felt the fatigue and confusion of the day fall away. On her voice I traveled past the weariness, the fever, and the fret and climbed on the viewless wings of Poesy to a tender night full of hawthorn, eglantine, and violets. When she got to the lines

  “Darkling I listen; and for many a time

  I have been half in love with easeful Death . . . “ I felt my eyes fill with tears at the thought that my mother must have felt this, too, perhaps as she drained the last drops of laudanum. It made me recall, as well, how I’d leaned toward the Darkling last night, wanting him to carry me away. Was it a spell they cast on humans? Is that how Louisa Beckwith had felt? Had she gone with her captor willingly?

  I glanced guiltily around the room, hoping that no one had noticed my emotion, but each girl was gazing enthralled at Miss Sharp as if the teacher were speaking directly to her. And not only the girls. Nathan wasn’t with us, but Rupert Bellows had come to the door of the library and leaned on the jamb, hands in the pockets of his rumpled tweed jacket, head back, eyes closed. He didn’t look like the man who had lectured us on the evils of the fairies. He looked like a man who wanted to believe there was still beauty in the world.

  There was one other listener in the room. Miss Corey the librarian, in the same hat and veil she’d worn last night at dinner, sat at one of the desks filling out index cards. When Miss Sharp came to the last stanza, the bells in the tower began to ring and I could see Miss Corey’s lips moving beneath her veil, mouthing the words with her.

  “Forlorn! The very word is like a bell

  To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

  Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.

  Adieu! adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?”

  The bells had ceased as she came to the end, save for that ghostly echo of the seventh bell ringing in the river valley like a shred of the waking dream we’d all fallen into. Miss Sharp turned to us and leaned back against the window frame.

  “After what you saw last night—and all you’ve heard and seen today”—she exchanged a look with the librarian and I wondered if she was thinking about Miss Frost’s specimens— “you must wonder today whether you wake or sleep. What I’d like you to remember is that the world is beautiful despite—and sometimes because of—all the darkne
ss in it, just as a white cameo is more beautiful against an ebony setting.”

  I startled at the image, reminded of how the Darkling’s face had looked like a beautiful cameo set against the ebony of his wings. Had she, too, seen a face like that? I was jarred out of this reverie by the word “assignment” and reached for my pen to copy down the no doubt long list of pages we would have to read for tomorrow, but instead she only told us to “take a walk by the river, watch the sun set, and write a poem about what you see.” Then she dismissed the class.

  When we didn’t move right away—three-quarters of the allotted hour for literature remained—she made a shooing motion with her hands as if we were a gaggle of geese. At last we all got up to go and drifted out of the class, each girl quiet and hugging her thoughts to herself. When I turned back, I saw that Miss Sharp had moved to the librarian’s desk and perched on a corner of it. She leaned down to look at something in a book the librarian held up, and as she did her hair slipped out of its pins and fell in a golden waterfall. Miss Corey lifted her head and looked up. Caught in the light, her veil cast a dappled pattern across her face. Then Miss Corey moved the veil aside to see something in the book Miss Sharp held open for her, and I saw that the dapples weren’t shadows from the veil but marks on her skin, like the spots on a fawn’s pelt. She said something and Miss Sharp tossed her head back and laughed, the sound like the nightingale’s song. I turned away—and nearly ran into Rupert Bellows.

  “Oh, Miss . . . er . . .”

  “Hall. Avaline Hall.”

  “Of course,” he said, looking over my shoulder to where Vionetta Sharp laughed. “Are you off to write poetry by the river? Miss Sharp’s recitation was very . . . er . . . inspiring, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh yes,” I concurred, “but . . .” I hesitated, not thinking it right to criticize my teacher.

  “But what?” Mr. Bellows demanded, his attention abruptly focused on me and not Vionetta Sharp. “Spit it out, Miss Hall. I expect nothing less than honesty from my pupils.”