Blythewood

by Carol Goodman

  Both women were sobered by mention of my mother.

  “I was very sorry to hear about your mother,” Miss Sharp said gravely. “She was a few years ahead of me at school and I admired her greatly.” I saw a shadow pass over her face and I wondered if she was thinking about the circumstances of her expulsion, but instead she said, “What I said earlier about Blythewood being so perfect that no other place would measure up—I didn’t mean that we should just accept the way things have been done there forever. There are those of us who think there should be changes—especially after this most recent occurrence.”

  Agnes made a strangled sound and pulled Miss Sharp abruptly away. They bent their heads together and whispered while I stood a few feet away feeling foolish. After a few minutes they returned to me.

  “I’m sorry, Ava,” Agnes said, her face pale beneath her freckles. “Vionetta and I had a few . . . er . . . details to discuss about what you’ll need for school.”

  “Yes,” Miss Sharp concurred with a bright but brittle smile. “The place has changed so much since we went there . . . is still changing. . . . But I’m sorry to prattle on so when you must be exhausted after your exam. Congratulations again. I look forward to seeing you in my literature class. And you”—she turned to Agnes—“come visit! You can always stay at my aunts’ house in town.”

  Then she took her leave of us, hurrying toward the Grand Central Station, while Agnes and I walked over to Fifth Avenue and turned north.

  “I’m so pleased that Vionetta Sharp will be your teacher. She was top of our class, but never the least bit conceited about it.”

  Agnes kept up a bright, happy chatter as we walked back to my grandmother’s house, opening her enormous umbrella as rain began to fall. She was so happy that I couldn’t bear to tell her about what I had seen at the end of my interview. I must have imagined it, I concluded, and if I were imagining such things, how long would it be before I was having the sort of delusions I’d had at Bellevue? What if Dr. Pritchard had been right and I really did belong in an insane asylum? After all, my mother had had delusions and had killed herself by drinking laudanum. What if there was some family history of insanity and these were the first signs? No, I decided as we entered the marble foyer and Agnes ran to tell my grandmother—returned from her trip upstate—the good news, I wouldn’t ruin the celebration and my chances of going to Blythewood by telling anyone what I had seen.

  The news that I was expected to report to Blythewood the next day threw my grandmother’s household into turmoil. Servants were dispatched to Ladies’ Mile to collect the items we had ordered. A large trunk was hauled out of the attic and deposited in my room. The dresses and skirts that had come from Miss Janeway’s were packed into the trunk folded in layers of tissue paper. Since there was no time to send my blouses back to Miss Janeway’s to have the Blythewood insignia added, Agnes volunteered to sit up with me and teach me how to sew it myself.

  I was glad for some occupation. Since we’d come back from my interview with the Council, it had been raining so heavily we couldn’t go out for our usual walk in the park. The rain filled my grandmother’s luxurious mansion with shadows and made it feel like a mausoleum. Even my mother’s cheerful yellow-and-white bedroom felt gloomy.

  As I bent over my sewing, I thought I spied things moving in the corners—wisps of shadows like the smoke-things I’d seen at the hospital—but whenever I looked up there was nothing there but the shadows of the curtains moving in the breeze. Agnes looked as nervous as I felt, jumping whenever a gust of rain hit the window.

  “Is there something wrong, Agnes?” I finally asked. “Is it anything to do with what Miss Sharp was saying? About the ‘recent occurrence’?”

  Agnes’s needle slipped and she stabbed her finger. A drop of blood fell on the lace trim of the blouse she’d been embroidering. “Vi shouldn’t have said anything,” she said, jumping to her feet to douse the blouse in the washbasin. “It’s nothing you need to concern yourself with. You’ll be fine at Blythewood,” she added, scrubbing furiously at the spot of blood as if erasing it could banish whatever dark thoughts she’d been entertaining, which I suspected had to do with whatever she and Miss Sharp had been whispering about.

  Agnes gave me a smile that was as artificially bright as the silk flowers women were wearing on their hats this season as she hung the damp blouse from the curtain rod to dry. Then she picked up a shirtwaist I had just finished embroidering.

  “You’ve caught on to the feather stitch brilliantly!” she said, obviously determined to change the subject. “There’s nothing to worry about at all!”

  I went to bed early, but I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. I had dreams in which I was running through a dark nighttime wood pursued by I knew not what. Hounds bayed and horns trumpeted as I scrambled through thick thorny underbrush that tore at my bare feet and arms. I could hear the dogs getting closer, their howls growing wilder as they smelled me.

  An arrow whizzed past me, the hard edge of its fletch scratching my cheek, the tip striking a tree trunk with a thwonk just ahead of me. The air was suddenly full of arrows flying past me like a flock of birds flushed from the undergrowth. A spring of teals, I found myself gibbering crazily, a flight of sparrows, a tiding of magpies. I was crying out the terms as if they could save me from the approaching hounds (a sleuth of hounds . . . no, a howl of hounds), as if they were magic spells, but they did no good. I could feel the heat of the hounds’ breath on my heels and hear the gnash of their teeth . . . and then, through the thick bramble a hand was reaching for me, pulling me to safety.

  I looked up and saw a face lit by moonlight—the face of the dark-eyed youth who had rescued me from the fire, his dark ringlets a wild halo around his face, a halo that seemed to burst into a corona of black wings silhouetted against the moon.

  I felt that same spark I’d felt when I first saw him, only now it swelled into a flame as he took my hand and pulled me up out of the bramble, the hounds snapping at my feet as we rose in the air. He held me tightly against his chest and we flew high above the forest. I looked below and saw a silver river unspool beneath us, swathed in long strands of fog, and beside the river, a stone tower rising out of the silver mist. My heart raced at the sight of the long fall, but then I heard, beneath the beat of wings, the beat of his heart and felt steadied by its slow, dependable rhythm and the strength of his arms.

  I won’t let you fall.

  I heard the words in my head but I knew they came from him, just as I knew he meant what he said.

  But then something flew past my face and I heard the awful sound of iron hitting flesh and his cry . . . and then we were falling, the silver mist rising to meet us, the bells in the tower tolling our death knell. I reached out for him but came away with only a handful of feathers.

  I startled awake, flailing my arms out to break my fall, and found myself in my bed in my grandmother’s house, clutching the black feather—which I’d taken to keeping under my pillow—in my sweaty hands. The rain had stopped, and moonlight poured through the open window, a chill breeze rustling the lace curtains with a sound like wings. The bells of a nearby church were tolling midnight. I got up to close the window. As I crossed the room I noticed a strange pattern on the walls and floor—a pattern of black feathers splayed over the moonlight.

  Black wings against the moonlight, the face of the dark-eyed youth who had become a winged creature . . .

  I held up my hands and saw the imprint of feathers on my white skin and, looking down, the same pattern on my white nightgown and bare feet. I was covered in feathers, a creature like the youth in my dream.

  Something banged against the windowpane. I ran to the window and looked down. Below in the courtyard I saw a figure standing beneath a tree looking up at me. The winged youth! I thought. At the thought that he’d come back for me I realized how much I’d been longing for him, how much I wanted to believe he was real. That he had s
aved me—and that he had a good reason for leaving me on the sidewalk and letting them take me to Bellevue. Because I didn’t want to believe that he had delivered me into Dr. Pritchard’s hands and that he was in league with the man in the Inverness cape.

  A bell began to toll. But hadn’t the church bells just tolled midnight? I looked back down and caught my breath as the figure removed his hat and bowed to me. It wasn’t the winged youth; it was the man in the Inverness cape, standing below my window, watching me. The bass bell was tolling inside me madly now, as he straightened up and smiled at me, ejecting a wisp of smoke from his mouth.

  Something brushed against my hand and I jumped. I looked back down and saw that the man had vanished. Had he ever been there? I saw it was only my lace blouse brushing my hand, the damp one Agnes had hung from the curtain rod. That’s what had cast the shadow feathers across the room. That, and the noise of it rustling like feathers, had created my dream. But what had created the vision of the man in the Inverness cape? Had my dream about the winged boy summoned him? Were they somehow connected?

  The bell inside my head had quieted now. I closed the window, hung the blouse in the closet, put the black feather away in my trunk, and went back to bed. But it took a long time before I could close my eyes and not feel like I was falling.

  7

  THE RAIN BEGAN in the night and followed me upstate to Rhinebeck.

  “Sit on the left side of the train,” Agnes had told me at the Grand Central Terminal, “so you can see the river.”

  But the river was cloaked in fog, a white gauzy layer that muffled the landscape like a funeral shroud. I felt muffled myself, numb to any excitement about starting at Blythewood. That had been quelled when Agnes told me she wouldn’t be accompanying me on the journey.

  “Mrs. Hall needs me right now for the fall Council meeting at the Bell & Feather club. But don’t worry, Gillie will pick you up. You’ll get on with Gillie.”

  I didn’t want to “get on” with Gillie. I wanted to cling to the only shred of familiarity I had left, and that was Agnes. I’d even felt sad saying good-bye to my grandmother. When I thanked her for all my new clothes and for sending me to Blythewood, her eyes had watered. She’d become so flustered searching for a handkerchief that I’d handed her one of my new ones embroidered with my initials and the Bell and Feather insignia. She waved it off impatiently and complained of late-summer allergies, then squeezed my hand and admonished me to “uphold the family name at Blythewood.”

  “Always remember you’re a Hall. The Hall women have always gone to Blythewood.”

  But not always graduated, I thought sourly now, staring out at the mist-shrouded river. What if that was all they saw at Blythewood—the illegitimate daughter of a girl who’d gotten herself pregnant senior year and gone off to live in poverty, then died of a laudanum overdose? The daughter of a madwoman, a girl who’d worked in a factory and spent five months in Bellevue? Although Agnes had promised me that no one would know how I’d spent my summer, still I was afraid that they’d be watching me for signs of madness.

  They wouldn’t have far to look. That hallucination at my interview of the Council women turning into crows, the dream I’d had of being borne aloft by a winged dark-eyed youth, the appearance of the man in the Inverness cape below my window—all could be signs of madness. My mother’s delusions had begun when she saw the man in the Inverness cape on my birthday and believed herself followed. And then I had seen the same figure at the Triangle Waist Company and Bellevue hospital. Dr. Pritchard had told me that I had imagined him at the factory the day of the fire. Certainly I had imagined the smoke coming out of his mouth. I had hoped that the delusions had been caused by the drugs I was given in the hospital, but then why had I seen him again last night?

  I was so mired in these dreary thoughts that I didn’t hear the conductor call my station. Only when the sign flashed out of the mist did I rouse myself to leap to my feet and wrestle my carpetbag out of the overhead luggage rack. Would my trunk be taken out of the luggage compartment automatically? Why hadn’t I asked Agnes about that? Oh, why wasn’t Agnes with me?

  Departing passengers were pushing past me in the aisle as the train slowed. I tried to squeeze past a stout woman in purple bombazine whose wide-brimmed hat spanned the entire aisle.

  “Pardon me,” I said as she glared at me from under a beaded veil, “I just want to make sure the porter knows to get my trunk.”

  “If you gave the proper orders at boarding there will be no problem,” the woman in bombazine announced in loud, ringing tones, not moving an inch. “If not, it is not for the rest of us to suffer for your lack of preparedness. You will just have to wait.”

  “But my trunk . . .”

  “We all have trunks, young lady, but apparently not all of us have manners.”

  Squelched by her imperious tone and unable to navigate past her broad bustle (Who wears bustles anymore? I wondered irritably. They went out in the nineties!), I waited until the matron in bombazine descended from the train. We were the last ones down. I was relieved to see my trunk waiting on the platform, but less happy to see my companion commandeer the last porter to carry her trunk up the long flight of stairs. The platform was at the bottom of a steep cliff next to the river, but apparently the station was at the top of the cliff. Seeing no way to transport my trunk up the steps by myself and not being willing to leave it, I sat down on it and stared out at the river—or rather at the fog. The only sign of the river was the lap of water and the low moan of foghorns.

  Whoever Gillie was she could bloody well find me here, or I’d take the next southbound train back to the city. I’d go straight to Miss Janeway and beg her to make me an apprentice. I didn’t need Blythewood for that. I didn’t need Blythewood at all.

  “Hall! Hall!”

  A loud, booming voice that I at first took for a foghorn coming from the river penetrated my bout of self-pity.

  “Hall! Hall!”

  I looked up and saw a small, dark and very damp figure emerging from the fog. My first startled impression was that one of the kelpies from my mother’s stories had risen from the Hudson to drag me into the water and drown me.

  “Hall?” It boomed, advancing on me with a clinking sound as if it were dragging the anchors of drowned ships. “Miss Avaline Hall?”

  As the figure came closer I saw that it was a neat, compact man in a long, black waxed raincoat and a wide-brimmed hat of the same waterproof material that shadowed his face. Water streamed off his hat and the shoulders of his coat. The clinking came from an enormous ring of keys hooked onto his belt. I was pretty sure that kelpies didn’t carry keys.

  “Are ye Miss Avaline Hall?” he asked in a thick Scottish brogue.

  I admitted I was.

  “Gillie,” he said, reaching for my trunk.

  Did he think I had Gillie in my trunk?

  “Gilles Duffy, that is,” he added when I didn’t budge from the trunk. “But the girls all call me Gillie.” He tilted back his hat, revealing a deeply lined face and eyes as dark as mountain tarns. Despite the worn look of his face, his hair was pitch black without a hint of gray—it almost seemed to have a dark-green sheen to it, as if in his damp state he had grown moss. His expression dared me to laugh at the girlish name, which I thought now oddly suited for a creature who looked like he might have gills. “If you like I’ll carry you with the trunk, but you might find the ride a bit bumpy.”

  “Oh!” I cried, leaping to my feet at the thought of entering my new school slung over the shoulder of the stern Gilles like a sack of potatoes—an image made all the more ridiculous by his small stature. He hardly looked strong enough to carry my trunk. “I beg your pardon. Shall I get a porter to bring it up?”

  But Gillie, despite his diminutive size, was already hauling my trunk up on his shoulders as if it were a box of feather pillows. He turned to climb the steps.

  �
��Miss Moorhen told me a Gillie would be meeting me, but I thought you’d be a girl,” I said as I hurried to follow, hardly able to keep up with his pace even though he was weighted down by my heavy trunk.

  Gillie snorted. “If I know Agnes Moorhen—and I figure I do—she was playing a little joke on you. The girls think it’s funny to call me Gillie, but it doesn’t bother me. Where I’m from a Gillie is the man that watches over the land and manages the hunt. And that’s what I do at Blythewood. I tend the hunting falcons and keep an eye on the creatures of the river and woods. It’s an honorable job.”

  We’d come to the top of the stairs where a black glossy coach emblazoned with the Bell and Feather insignia waited for us. Gillie tossed my trunk up on top as if tossing his hat on a coat rack.

  “My mother said that all work is honorable if you do it with honor,” I said, remembering that she’d told me that when I complained about the calluses on my fingertips from sewing or that we had to deliver our hats to the servants’ door.

  “Your mother was a kind soul. Mayhaps too kind for her own good,” Gillie said gruffly, tugging his hat over his eyes so I couldn’t see his expression. Before I could ask how well he’d known my mother and what he meant about her being too kind, a sharp rapping from inside the coach interrupted us.

  “It is rude,” a trilling voice announced, “to engage in personal conversation when a third member of your party waits.”

  Gillie’s mouth quirked into a crooked smile. “Begging your pardon. Miss Avaline Hall, may I introduce Miss Euphorbia Frost, Mistress of Deportment.”

  A veiled face appeared at the window of the coach. I recognized the woman in bombazine from the train. “You most certainly may not! It is customary when making introductions to name the most important person first.”