Blythewood

by Carol Goodman

  Dame Beckwith touched the toe of her boot to the sprite’s ribs and, like an ember stabbed by a fire poker, its body collapsed into a pile of gray ash.

  “—how to hunt them down and destroy them.

  “So, girls, now that you know the Blythewood mystery, I ask you: Are you ready to take up the fight against evil?”

  My fellow nestlings stirred. I looked at the faces of the girls I’d come with. Cam, with her hair sticking up in spikes, Daisy with her lacy high-necked nightgown and wide innocent eyes, Helen with her snobbery and entitlement, Beatrice and Dolores with their world-weary melancholy—all these differences seemed to have fallen away. I saw a dozen sets of burning eyes, lifted chins, and firm jaws. I thought of Tillie suddenly, of how she looked when she stood up to the bosses, and I thought of what Mr. Greenfeder had called us: farbrente maydlakh. Fiery girls. If Tillie were here, how eagerly would she take up this fight!

  “Yes,” Cam burst out. “I want to do something. I want to make a difference.”

  An answering murmur swept through the circle. Yes, me too! It was impossible not to be swept up in the enthusiasm. Who wouldn’t want to fight evil, to push back the tide of darkness?

  “Then join me in your second oath of the night. You have already sworn yourself to Blythewood. You now may swear yourselves to the Order of the Bells.”

  Dame Beckwith held up the golden handbell. The robed figures on the edges of the circle each held up a handbell as well and lowered their hoods. I saw the faces of our teachers illuminated by torchlight, glowing with a fervor that transformed them from ordinary schoolteachers to knights and ladies in a medieval stained-glass window. Even Euphorbia Frost’s heavy face shone with passion. Only Lillian Corey’s face remained unseen behind her veil.

  “You have only to say, ‘I pledge myself to the Order of the Bells.’ But to be sure, we ask that you repeat the words seven times to the chiming of the bells.” She rang her bell—as did all the teachers—and we all repeated the words, once for each time the bells rang. Each time I said the words I felt them sinking deeper inside of me, reverberating with the chimes, the vibrations clearing away all other thoughts and doubts. This was why I had always heard the bells in my head! I had always been meant to come here. When the bells rang the seventh time I felt sure that I truly belonged to the Order.

  I began to say the oath for the seventh and last time, but as I did I saw something stir in the fog. Something with black wings and a flash of eyes that looked . . . familiar. Could it be one of the Darklings Dame Beckwith had spoken of? I gasped and looked around to see if anyone else had spotted it, but all my classmates were looking at the bell in Dame Beckwith’s hand, their eyes shining as brightly as its gold in their fervor and certainty.

  I was the only one who was looking into the shadows—and the only one, I suspected, who had failed to finish her vows.

  13

  WE WERE ESCORTED out of the grove, our teachers ahead ringing their handbells and the Dianas bringing up the rear with their bows drawn. The ghastly goblins scattered at the sound of the bells, but I still heard rustling in the underbrush and caught glimpses of the floating lights amid the fog-bound trees. I didn’t see any sign of the Darkling. Perhaps I had imagined it.

  “Perhaps it was all a dream,” Daisy whispered, echoing my thought about the Darkling. “Perhaps we’ll wake up in our own beds and realize it was all a dream.”

  “I only dream of nice things,” Helen insisted. “Of cotillions and dances, lace dresses and diamond earrings. I would never, ever dream of horrible slavering monsters!” She swatted angrily at a low-hanging branch and swore in a most unladylike fashion when it snapped back and hit her in the face.

  “You must keep up with the others,” admonished the Diana behind us, a stern-looking girl with spectacles and sharp chin whom I recognized as the girl who’d run by me chasing a falcon yesterday. “You’re already the last in the queue and I’m not allowed to linger behind.”

  “You needn’t take that tone with me, Charlotte. Everyone knows the Falconraths are only chosen for the Dianas because they own the land that borders on the school.”

  “You’re a fine one to speak, Helen. The van Beeks are only tolerated here because of your mother’s friendship with Dame Beckwith.”

  “How dare you! My mother would never presume on India Beckwith. Why, I didn’t even want to come here. I begged Mother and Daddy to let me stay home, and Dame Beckwith herself came to implore me to come.”

  “Then why don’t you leave,” Charlotte Falconrath suggested, jutting out her sharp chin. “You were given a chance before the initiation. Why don’t you just slink off in the dark like the other cowards?”

  “Dame Beckwith said there was no shame attached to those who left,” Daisy cut in. Charlotte and Helen both turned to stare, as startled as I was to hear Daisy speak up. Charlotte recovered from her surprise first.

  “That’s what we tell the girls who leave, but of course it’s not what we say amongst ourselves. You wouldn’t know that, not being one of our kind.”

  “Leave her out of this,” Helen growled. “Daisy has just as much right to be here as you or I do.”

  “Maybe, but what right does she have”—Charlotte’s eyes raked me with undisguised disdain—“after what her mother did?”

  The words were hardly out of her mouth before Helen was upon her, fists flying. Charlotte was so shocked at the attack that she automatically drew back her arms, releasing the arrow she’d been holding ready. It shot into the woods and hit something that yelped. We all looked at each other.

  “Now look what you made me do—” Charlotte began, but then her eyes widened with terror. Something was coming out of the woods toward us. Something big.

  “Draw another arrow!” I yelled at Charlotte, but she had already turned and fled, running toward the house—which is what we all should have done. But when I grabbed Daisy’s hand and pulled, she was frozen to the spot. Helen grabbed a stick from the ground and brandished it. I did the same and stood, prepared to meet the thing that was coming for us. From the noise it was making in the underbrush it seemed to be as large as a rhinoceros. It broke through the fog with a crash, fair hair flying, arms pinwheeling, spraying blood. Helen cocked back her stick to strike it, but I grabbed her arm.

  “It’s Nate!” I shouted, recognizing the pale, drawn face just before Helen struck him.

  “Nate?” Helen cried, falling to her knees beside him as he fell to the ground. He was clutching his shoulder, from which protruded Charlotte’s arrow. “What are you doing here?”

  “I followed you . . .” he gasped. “They told us about the fairies at Hawthorn, but I wanted to see it for myself. Mother forbade me—she said the initiation was only for girls—so I snuck out.”

  “But if you were outside the circle, why didn’t the goblins and sprites attack you?” I asked, appalled at the thought of being outside with those creatures—and then realizing that we were outside the circle with them now.

  “I climbed a tree and hid,” Nate said. “Besides, they didn’t look so fearsome until Mother provoked that fire thingum. And look—it was one of her amazons that mortally wounded me.”

  “Pshaw!” Helen clucked. “It’s only a scratch.” She pulled his shirt back to uncover the place where the arrow was lodged an inch into his skin. “I suppose I can pull it out.”

  “No!” Nathan screamed. “Are you daft? I’ll bleed to death!”

  “Well, then we’ll take you to your mother and she’ll see to it,” Helen said. “She was a nurse in the Second Boer War.”

  “But then she’ll know I was out in the woods and she’ll send me away again. No, I suppose you had better take it out, but let me brace myself—” Before he could finish, Daisy reached out her tiny hand and wrenched the arrow cleanly free of Nathan’s shoulder. Nathan screamed and grabbed his arm.

  “Well done!” I told Dai
sy. “Now let’s wrap his arm. Here.” I tore off the ruffled flounce at the bottom of my nightgown and handed it to Helen to wrap around Nathan’s arm. We each had to sacrifice a ruffle from our gowns to staunch the blood, but when we were done the bleeding had stopped and Nathan, although pale, was still conscious—and speaking.

  “Are you sure I don’t need a few more lengths of bandage?” he asked, ogling our bare ankles.

  Helen swatted him. “The only cloth I’m going to sacrifice for you is a gag for your mouth, Nathan Beckwith. Now if you can walk, we’d better be getting back to the house or we’ll be punished for breaking curfew.”

  “I think we have a worse problem.” Daisy’s voice, hardly louder than the creak of branches, made me look up from Nathan’s face to hers. She was staring into the woods behind my back, her eyes huge as a startled deer’s. The hair on the back of my neck rose and a cold chill crept down my spine. The bass bell was tolling inside my head and had been for several minutes, I realized, only I’d been too busy tending to Nathan to notice it. I turned, slowly.

  There were dozens of creatures: the rat-faced goblin men, the glowing lampsprites, and others we hadn’t seen before—hairy dwarfs with bulbous noses, green-scaled lizard men, goat-horned women—all creeping stealthily closer to us.

  “We’re surrounded,” Daisy whimpered. “What can we do?”

  What could we do? We had no weapons—no bell, or bow and arrow, or lantern fire. I saw one of the lizard men lick its lips with a long forked tongue, drool dripping off sharp fangs. It opened its mouth wide. I was sure it meant to lunge and bite us, but then it did something even more frightening. It spoke.

  “Hunn . . . gree!”

  “Did it just say it was hungry?” Daisy asked, wide-eyed.

  “Well I don’t think it’s asking us for tea!” Helen cried. “I believe it means to eat us.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Nathan growled, his good hand curling around a stick. “I’ll beat them back while you girls run.”

  “No,” I said, the word coming out of my mouth before I’d known I was going to speak. “We’ll stand together.” I found the stick I’d dropped and grasped it. I rose to my feet slowly and the others followed. I could hear Helen’s quick, shallow breaths and a soft whimper from Daisy and a creak of wood as Nathan shifted the stick in his hand. Back in the circle, while the rest of my classmates took their oaths, I’d felt like I was on the outside looking in, but now I felt like I belonged—maybe not to Blythewood, but to this little group of four. I clenched my arm and swung back the branch and braced myself for the attack.

  But it came not from the woods but from above. A great whoosh of wind and roar of wings crashed into the clearing like a black whirlwind descending from the clouds. The creature landed a few feet in front of us, its back to us, huge black wings beating the air. One of the goblins darted beneath its feet but the winged creature grabbed it and flung it against a tree, where it slid limply to the ground. The goblins, sprites, and other creatures scattered, evaporating into the fog as suddenly and stealthily as they had appeared. Then the winged creature turned to face us.

  I heard Helen and Daisy gasp. My mother had taken me to the Metropolitan Museum once and we’d seen a Greek sculpture of Adonis. This young man, dressed in only loose trousers, had the same beauty, the same fine white limbs and muscular chest—all the whiter against the ebony gloss of the enormous wings spread out behind him. His wings were the same color as his tumbling dark hair and bottomless black eyes—eyes I had seen before, on the day of the Triangle fire and nearly every night in my dreams since then.

  “You!” I cried, the word escaping from my lips. His lips parted, but before he could speak Nate ran at him with his stick raised. The dark-winged boy flexed one wing and swatted Nate away like a fly. Then he turned back to me, and his eyes locked on mine. He took a step forward. As his wings beat, the air stirred around me like warm water lapping against my skin. I should have felt afraid, but I didn’t. The bass bell was no longer ringing in my head. Instead the treble bell chimed sweetly as a crystal chandelier swaying in a breeze. He tilted his head, as though listening.

  He heard them. The dark-eyed boy could hear the bells inside my head. The thought filled me with joy. Because if someone else could hear the bells inside my head it meant I wasn’t crazy.

  But then the tinkling was replaced by a solemn knell, the leaden bells of Blythewood ringing midnight. The boy looked up, his white profile a cameo carved against the ebony of his wings. When he turned back his eyes were as fearful as when he’d seen the crows swooping down on us on the roof of the Triangle building. I felt the same tingle of electricity flowing between us as I had then. I took a step forward, my hand raised, but he flexed his wings and took off, the force of his wings’ draft knocking me backward as he rose into the night.

  Something fluttered down to earth in his wake. I knelt and picked it up. It was a long black feather, identical to the one I had found on the floor beside my mother on the day she died.

  The boy who had saved me from the fire, who haunted my dreams, was one of the Darklings Dame Beckwith had warned us about. And a Darkling had been with my mother when she died.

  14

  WE WERE ABLE to sneak back into the house because Nathan knew of a back door near the scullery that was never locked.

  “Won’t Charlotte have told them we were left behind?” I asked.

  “And get herself in trouble for abandoning us?” Helen scoffed. “Not her. The Falconraths are notorious cowards. One of her ancestors was executed for desertion in the Revolutionary War.”

  “My bet is that she told the others that you returned,” Nathan added. “Otherwise there’d already be a search party out looking for us.”

  “Won’t your mother know you were gone?” I asked him, unsettled by the idea that we all could have gone missing with no one the wiser.

  “Mother stays up all night in her study working. I doubt she’d notice if the castle burned down around her—and besides, my room is two floors below hers in the North Wing.” He shrugged and then winced at the pain in his shoulder.

  “But won’t she notice that you’ve been hurt?” I asked.

  “Not unless I fling myself between her and her books and drip blood over some priceless ancient manuscript. Honestly, I’ll be fine, but you three will get kitchen duty for a week if anyone catches you outside your room. You’d better hurry up.”

  Daisy plucked at my sleeve, anxious to go. Helen was watching Nate and me warily.

  “You’ve certainly become chummy with Nathan in a short time,” Helen remarked when we’d left him.

  “I’m worried about his injury. And not only that. He seems . . . haunted somehow.”

  Helen snorted. “Haunted by gambling debts and jealous husbands, perhaps. Don’t let Nathan fool you. That sensitive soul pose is just an act to make girls fall for him. Clearly it’s worked with you. You obviously have a crush on him.”

  “I do not—” I began, but Daisy, who was ahead of us on the stairs, stopped dead and wheeled around.

  “Are the two of you really arguing over a boy when we have just learned that the world is populated by fairies and monsters—which is definitely not what I was brought up to believe—and we are the ones supposed to protect people from them?”

  “Of course it’s a shock—” Helen began.

  “Did you really not know?” Daisy demanded. “Even with all the van Beek women who have gone here?”

  Helen shook her head. “I’d heard stories, but nothing like this.”

  “And you.” Daisy turned to me. “Your mother went here. She never told you?”

  “No,” I said. “Whenever she spoke of Blythewood it was with fondness and longing. I knew there were secrets she wasn’t telling, but I thought they had to do with my father.”

  “Perhaps your father was killed by one of those monsters,” Helen sugg
ested.

  “I’ll bet it was a Darkling,” Daisy said. “One of the creatures that Dame Beckwith told us were so beautiful they tricked the Order into believing they were good. You can see why.” Daisy’s voice grew faint. “The one we saw was beautiful.”

  “But deadly,” Helen said.

  “But he saved us!” I blurted out. I couldn’t tell them that it wasn’t the first time he had saved me.

  “I thought he was going to abduct one of us from the way he was staring.” Helen shivered and wrapped her arms around herself.

  “He was staring at Ava,” Daisy said. “It looked like he was going to grab her, but then the bells rang. That’s what saved us from him. Remember what Dame Beckwith said—the fairies can make themselves look beautiful to fool us. Who knows what that Darkling really looks like. He could be a monster. And it’s up to us to protect the world from his kind. I feel . . .” Daisy lifted a hand and placed it over her heart. She was shaking so hard she swayed on the steps. I reached out a hand to steady her, afraid that the shock had been too much for her and she was going to faint or have a convulsion of some kind, but when she spoke her voice was steady and strong as the toll of the bells in the tower. “I feel as if, for the first time in my life, I have found my purpose.”

  Only when I was in bed did I allow myself to think about what I had seen. Daisy and Helen likely assumed that my quiet while we got into bed came from the shock of “the revelation of the Rowan Circle (as, we would learn on the morrow, the Blythewood girls called the first night’s events). They couldn’t know it came from the shock of discovering that the boy who had saved me from the Triangle fire was a Darkling—the sworn enemy of the Order.

  But maybe he hadn’t been trying to save me. He’d shown up at the factory just before the man in the Inverness cape had. And then I’d seen him whispering in the man’s ear—to distract him, I’d thought at the time, but what if he’d really been working with the man in the cape? After all, I’d woken up in Bellevue after the fire. Mr. Greenfeder said he thought the boy had left me on the pavement, but maybe he was the one who had carried me to Bellevue—right into Dr. Pritchard’s and the caped man’s hands.