Blythewood

by Carol Goodman

  Blythewood

  CAROL

  GOODMAN

  Viking

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA)

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA)

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  For more information about the Penguin Group visit www.penguin.com

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), 2013

  Copyright © Carol Goodman, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Goodman, Carol.

  Blythewood / Carol Goodman.

  pages cm

  Summary: “After a summer locked away in a mental institution, seventeen-year-old orphan Ava Hall is sent to Blythewood, a finishing school for young ladies that is anything but ordinary.”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-101-62347-3

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Boarding schools—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Identity—Fiction. 5. Love—Fiction. 6. Social classes—Fiction. 7. Triangle Shirtwaist Company—Fire, 1911—Fiction. 8. Hudson River Valley (N.Y. and N.J.)—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.G61354Bly 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2013011236

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For Maggie, my fiery girl

  Contents

  Title page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  Acknowledgments

  1

  I HEARD THE bells that morning as I was entering Washington Square Park. I stopped just past the arch and looked south to see if the sound might be a streetcar but I didn’t see one. Then I looked north, through the arch and up Fifth Avenue, listening for the bells of Grace Church playing the quarter hour—but it wasn’t the tune they played. And if the bells weren’t from Grace Church or a streetcar, that meant they were my bells, the ones I heard inside my head, the ones I’d been hearing for the last six months whenever something bad was going to happen.

  I felt a tingling on the back of my neck and knew there was someone behind me. I whirled around to find Tillie Kupermann’s laughing face, her fresh-scrubbed cheeks rosy in the cold winter sunlight, her red curls already escaping from her Gibson Girl pouf. With her starched white shirtwaist tucked neatly into her slim dark skirt, you might have taken Tillie for a Gibson Girl, until you noticed the darning stitches on her collar or that instead of a tennis racket or a golf club she was carrying a tin lunch pail.

  “Listening to the angel on your shoulder again?” she asked.

  “How do you know I’m not listening to the devil on my shoulder?” I replied.

  “Wrong shoulder,” she chirped, slipping her arm in mine. “Everyone knows the devil sits on your left shoulder. And besides, I know you, Avaline Hall. You’re on the side of the angels.”

  I laughed at that and let myself be led by Tillie through the park, past a group of young men—law students, I thought, from the books under their arms and the rumpled look of their tweed coats and trousers, on their way to the law library next to our building. One doffed his hat, revealing hair slicked back with a quantity of brilliantine pomade, and called out to Tillie as we passed by:

  “I enjoyed your speech last night at the union hall, Miss Kupermann. You’ve converted me to your cause.”

  Tillie’s mouth quirked into a smile. I tightened my grip on her arm and tried to keep her walking, but she swirled around to face the men, her skirts swishing above her ankle-high boots to reveal a provocative glimpse of red stocking. “So the next time we strike, you’ll be on the picket line with us?” she asked with a brazen smile.

  The pomaded young man clutched his hat to his breast. “On the picket lines, in the Jefferson Market courts, to the very depths of the Tombs themselves, I vow to defend your honor, m’lady.”

  Tillie tilted her head back, her slim throat gleaming white in the morning sun. “I don’t need anyone to defend me, sir. But if you are ever in a scrape don’t hesitate to call on me!”

  His companions hooted like owls at Tillie’s comment as she turned smartly on her heel, and I heard the pomaded gentlemen mutter something in Yiddish that sounded like farbrente maydlakh. Tillie laughed out loud and kept walking, so quickly I had to skip to keep up with her.

  “Tillie,” I hissed, “talking about striking could cost you your job! I thought the strike was settled last year. And what’s this about you giving a speech last night?”

  “The strike was settled without us getting half our demands. We still don’t have a union shop . . .” Tillie listed off her grievances as we crossed Washington Square and headed down Washington Place past peddlers selling shiny copper pots and pans, and food carts hawking roasted potatoes, chestnuts, and pickled herring. “There’s still work to be done! You should come to the meetings.”

  I shook my head. Tillie knew I would never go to her union meetings or Marxist classes. Mother had raised me to keep my head down and never talk to strangers—especially young men, whom she’d regarded with deep suspicion. I would never banter with the young law students as Tillie had just done. They might spend their days just one building away from the factory where Tillie and I worked, but they were worlds away from girls like us, and I didn’t have Tillie’s hope that those worlds could be bridged.

  “What was that he called you?” I asked as we neared the factory on the corner of Greene Street.

  “Farbrente maydlakh,” she said, fingering a lock of my chestnut hair, a far less dramatic shade of red than Tillie’s own. “He meant both of us, bubbelah, because of our hair. It means ‘fiery girls.’”

  There was a line for the freight elevators; we weren’t allowed in the passenger elevators.

  “Come on,” Tillie said, pulling me toward the staircase. “If we’re late Mr. Bernstein will lock the doors on us. I’ll race you.”

  She was off in a flash of red stockings that stayed just out of reach for nine flights of stairs. We were out of breath and bent over with cramps of laughter, gasping, but we managed to slip through the door a minute before Mr. Bernstein, the foreman, closed the door, locking it behind us. We hung up our coats in the dressing room and hurried to our machines. Tillie was at the end of the back row, a much better place than my spot against the wall below the windows overlooking Washington Place for getting out ea
rly at closing time, when all the girls bunched up at the door waiting for Mr. Bernstein to check their purses for stolen lace or ribbons. When I was settled, I spared a moment to look down the long sewing table to where Tillie sat. She was helping a new girl find her place—a tiny malnourished sprite in an oversized dress. Her hands were shaking as Tillie put the scissors in them.

  “Don’t worry, Etta, I’m going to look after you,” she told the girl, with a smile that warmed the unheated loft. They were the same exact words Tillie had said to me on my first day here four months ago.

  I’d been even more of a mess than little Etta, driven to take a job in the loud, crowded factory after my mother had died. The only work I knew was trimming hats. Mother had had clients among the richest women in the city—“the four hundred,” as she called the cream of New York society. She’d had a deft hand and keen eye for knowing just where to add a feather and tweak a brim and which ribbon suited which color of felt. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we managed. Mother always said it was better to be a pauper than a slave to money, and although she sometimes lapsed into melancholic silences, she always rallied herself when she saw me looking worried.

  Until the day she saw the man in the Inverness cape.

  It was my sixteenth birthday. Mother had promised me a walk in Central Park after we delivered one last hat to a client on Fifth Avenue. As we were leaving, my mother abruptly halted on the sidewalk, staring across the avenue at the entrance to the park. Following her gaze I’d seen a man in an Inverness cape who’d lifted his Homburg hat in greeting. His face, dappled by leaf shadow, was indistinct but I could feel the intensity of his gaze. I found myself unable to look away. As I stared at him I heard a bell begin to toll. I thought it might be coming from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. My mother grabbed my hand and dragged me toward an approaching omnibus. She’d pushed me on, despite my protestations that she had promised me a walk in the park. She had refused to answer when I asked who the man was. “No one,” she insisted, and then repeated, “No one.”

  Each time she said “no one” I heard the bell toll. It kept tolling as we rode the omnibus down Fifth Avenue, and eventually I realized that the sound wasn’t coming from one of the churches—it was coming from inside my head. It faded after we’d ridden south of Fourteenth Street, leaving a faint ringing in my ears.

  That night my mother had complained of a chill in her chest and sent me to the chemists for a bottle of laudanum. From that day on, she began to drink it regularly. She went out less and less, sending me to deliver hats to our clients, but always warning me not to talk to strangers. Before she got sick, my mother would spend hours in the local libraries—the Astor, the Seward Park, the Hudson Park branch—looking through strange and obscure books while I read the histories, novels, and poetry she recommended, and also as many of Mrs. Moore’s novels about girls’ school as I could find. But after she got sick, she sent me out for books and then spent her days reading on a chaise longue in front of the window. No matter how many times we changed apartments she always managed to find one that overlooked the river, which she said reminded her of her beloved Blythewood, the girls’ boarding school she’d attended north of the city on the Hudson. She kept an engraving of the school on her bedside table, where another woman might keep a photograph of her husband. But my mother had no photographs of my father, nor would she ever tell me anything about him.

  Nor would she tell me who the man in the Inverness cape had been. “No one,” she repeated when I asked. “No one.”

  When I told her that I had heard a bell in my head when I looked at him, she looked frightened, but then she squeezed my hand and said, “That’s because you were born at midnight on New Year’s Eve. You’re a chime child. The bell will warn you when you’re in danger.” I’d thought she was raving from the laudanum—after all, the time on my birth certificate was 12:15. But one day about a month later I was delivering a hat to a client and I heard the bell again. I rushed home and found my mother on the chaise longue, an empty bottle of laudanum and a long black feather from one of her hats lying by her side, her body as cold and lifeless as the winter wind coming in through the open window.

  When I told Mother’s clients that she had died of consumption, they closed their doors on me and found someone else to buy their hats from. If I’d told the truth—she’d died of an overdose of laudanum—they would have done the same, even if drinking laudanum wasn’t catching.

  Though maybe it was.

  In the weeks after she died I’d sometimes pick up the empty green bottle that I’d found lying beside her and turn it over in my hand, looking into its mouth as if it were a green pool on a hot day. What oblivion had my mother sought there? Might I find relief from the bells I heard?

  I knew well enough where to go and what to tell the chemist—I’d done it often enough for Mother—but so far I hadn’t. Instead, I’d put the bottle away, along with the black feather, which didn’t seem to go with any of the hats she’d been trimming, and found work at the Triangle Waist factory.

  On my first day I was so clumsy with the scissors it was a wonder I didn’t cut off my own fingers. I don’t think I’d have made it through the day if Tillie Kupermann hadn’t taken me under her wing and shown me how to trim the loose threads without nicking the fabric. Later, when I was promoted to the sewing machines, she taught me how to sew a straight seam. She covered for me when I had my spells—as I’d come to think of the moments when I heard the bells—and never asked what caused them. I heard them less when I was with her.

  When little Etta was settled in her work, Tillie looked up, saw me, and stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes. Suppressing a laugh, I ducked my head and picked up a sleeve from the basket at my feet, smoothed it out on my machine, and focused on sewing a straight seam. When that one was done I dropped it in the trough that ran down the middle of the table and picked up another. And another, and another. I sewed the same seam on hundreds of sleeves each day, as if I were a girl in one of mother’s stories, condemned by a jealous goddess to perform the same silly task over and over again—sorting barley from millet or gathering fleece from bloodthirsty sheep to break the curse and win back the handsome prince. But at the end of each day all I had for my labors were calloused fingertips and a constant ache in my back.

  Besides, how would a prince find me here? Even if I could bring myself to defy Mother’s rules about not speaking to boys, the only males here were the arrogant cutters on the eighth floor, the stoop-shouldered tailors, and the runners who delivered the baskets of unfinished sleeves—raw-boned lads just off the boat from Italy or Poland who hardly spoke English. I rarely spared the time to look up when they dropped off my basket. Today, though, one got my attention by knocking it over.

  “Clumsy boy!” I cried, bending over to retrieve the fallen sleeves. “If those get soiled Mr. Bernstein will take it out of my pay.” As I grabbed for them, he seized my hand. A vibration went through my entire body, an electric current that flared and sparked like the wires that ran above the streetcars, and a bell sounded inside my head—not the deep bass note I heard when something bad was about to happen, but a sweet, high treble bell.

  “You have to go,” he hissed in my ear, his warm breath, which smelled like apples, spreading heat through my body. I looked up into dark eyes flecked with gold, skin the color of a fresh peach, and black ringlets falling over a high, sculpted forehead. My whole body shuddered like a bell that had been struck. My hand, which looked small in his, was trembling. For a moment the din of the factory—the whirr of the sewing machines, the shouts of the foreman to hurry up, the street noise from the open windows—all receded. I felt as though the two of us were standing alone in a green glade starred with wildflowers, the only sound the wind soughing through the encircling forest. . . .

  But then the sounds of the factory came rushing back and I remembered where I was—and who I was. A poor girl who made seven and a half dollars a we
ek at the Triangle Waist factory. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “I’m not the one who has to go—you are!” I snatched my hand out of his and glanced quickly around the room to see if Mr. Bernstein was near, but he was on the far side of the room talking to Mr. Blanck, one of the owners, who had brought his daughters in today to see where their papa made all the money to keep them in pretty frocks and lace pinafores. The sight of these girls, with their smooth, untroubled faces and clean soft hands, steeled me. I turned back to the dark-eyed youth who—idiot!—was still crouched beside me.

  “We’re lucky that everyone’s looking at the pretty girls, but in a moment Mr. Blanck will look over here and see that precious seconds are being lost in the production of his fortune. I will be fired and then I will starve to death—but before I do, I will track you down and sever every one of those silly curls from your head. And”—I picked up a pair of scissors—“I can’t guarantee I’ll spare your scalp. Understand?”

  I snapped the scissors for emphasis and he started back, his mouth gaping. I bent my head down to my sewing machine and, willing my hands to stop shaking, sewed another seam. And another and another, until the shadow he cast was gone.

  I worked steadily until lunchtime, when Tillie came to share her stuffed cabbage with me. I told her I had to work through lunch to make my quota because the idiot new boy had put me behind.

  “There’s a new boy?” Tillie asked through a mouth full of cabbage.

  Usually Tillie’s undisguised interest in the male gender amused me, but I had no time for it today. “Dark-haired lad,” I answered, biting the words off as I tossed a sleeve into the trough. “Italian, I think, or maybe Greek. A right proper idiot.”

  “Oh,” Tillie said. “I’ll keep an eye out for him. Did you see Mr. Blanck’s daughters? They had such lovely dresses.” She sighed. “And their hats! One had an entire bird on the crown! Do look at them if they come through again. Maybe you can copy it for me.”