Blythewood

by Carol Goodman

  Growing up alone with my mother, isolated from all family, moving too often to make friends, I sometimes daydreamed about what it would be like to have a sister or a brother, someone with whom I could share my thoughts—and the responsibility of looking after my mother. After she died and I went to work, I saw other girls walking to the factory with, or met after work by, their brothers, and envied them. But now I imagined what it would be like to have a sister and lose her. Worse, to know she was lost in those woods with the monsters we’d seen last night. Poor Nathan. Those shadows under his eyes, his brittle, hard way of talking—it was all because he was walking around with a hole inside him.

  I reached the laboratory, a long narrow room that ran along the north side of the castle beside the conservatory, and stood for a moment in the doorway. The room was arranged with long high tables that reminded me of the layout of the Triangle factory, except that instead of sewing machines each table was supplied with a spirit lamp, glass beakers, and covered baskets. Mr. Jager stood at the front of the room, head down, shuffling through a stack of notes. He didn’t have Mr. Bellows’s commanding presence and his students were obviously taking advantage of his distraction to gossip with one another.

  Helen waved for me to come join her at a table at the front of the room with Daisy, Cam, Beatrice, and Dolores. I suspected Helen had chosen our seat to be near the Jager twins, because they would be able to help us the most with the work. It was a good idea. I had no idea what went on in a science class in a regular school, let alone a school that trained its students to fight fairies and demons. Would we be concocting magic potions? Turning each other into toads? Crafting explosive devices like the one that had killed Tsar Alexander II in Russia? My gentle mother had never taught me such things. I would need all the help I could get. But instead of joining my friends at their table I took a seat at the last table in the back, which was empty except for Nathan.

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “Why aren’t you sitting with your friends?”

  I shrugged. “They don’t look as if they need me.”

  “And you think I do?”

  I met his icy stare. “Helen told me about your sister.”

  “And did she tell you that we’re not allowed to talk about her? That once a girl goes missing at Blythewood her name is struck from the rolls and never mentioned again? That they believe to say the name of a lost girl is to conjure the black-hearted monsters that stole her?”

  I shook my head, struck dumb by the hostility in his voice. I’d thought yesterday that Nathan’s cool demeanor was a pose he adopted to seem more alluring to girls, but I saw now that the flirtatiousness was a pose that he wore over his icy resolve—there to get what he needed, gone when it would do him no good. I turned away from his cold glare and wondered if it was too late to change seats, but Mr. Jager had collected himself sufficiently to begin class—or at least he had stopped shuffling papers and was looking up at the room, a dazed expression in his watery brown eyes as if he wasn’t sure why two dozen girls were sitting in front of him.

  Mr. Jager cleared his throat and said something inaudible under the hum of the girls’ voices. A girl in the second row giggled. Beatrice glared at her and made a loud shushing sound. Mr. Jager looked mournfully at the girl and waved a large bony hand, as if to say it was no matter to him if we listened or not.

  Instantly the girl’s hands flew to her mouth and she made a muffled noise. I couldn’t see from where I sat what had happened to her but I saw the horrified expressions of the other girls as she jumped to her feet and ran from the room with one hand clamped over her mouth. Something was dribbling from between her fingers. Something red. A drop fell on the floor by my feet. I cringed away from it, but Nathan reached across me to pick it up.

  “Jelly beans,” he remarked.

  “Ja,” Mr. Jager said with a sigh. “My daughters tell me that American children enjoy zese trifles and that I should consider giving them out as rewards for good behavior. Would anyone else . . . ?”

  We all shook our heads close-mouthed, not wanting to find our own mouths full of jelly beans, apparently Mr. Jager’s idea of suitable punishment for talking or laughing in class.

  “No? Good. I will commence my talk on magic, then. Ahem!” Mr. Jager cleared his throat, held up his rumpled notes, and launched into a long-winded, convoluted discourse on the nature of magic. I understood about every fifth word. It didn’t help that he spoke with a thick Viennese accent or that he held the pages so close to his mouth that his voice was muffled or that many of the words I did hear—prestidigitation, psychometry, necromancy—I didn’t understand. One would need to be a magician to decipher them. After about ten minutes he lowered his notes and looked out at us, his large melancholy eyes growing sadder as they took in our utter confusion.

  “Perhaps, Papa,” Beatrice said softly, “if you explained in your own words?”

  Mr. Jager sighed. “Very well. You see there are four kinds of magic in the world, each related to one of the essential elements—air, earth, fire, and water. Air magic is what the fairies practice . . .” He paused to see if we were following along. Beatrice nodded hopefully and we all followed suit. “Basically, it’s sympathetic magic. I create a bond between two things, say between Mees . . . er . . .” He looked down at Daisy.

  “Moffat,” Daisy squeaked. “Miss Daisy Moffat of Kansas City, Kansas, sir.”

  “Er . . . yes. I create a bond between Mees Daisy Moffat of Kansas City, Kansas . . .” He reached down and plucked a hair from Daisy’s head. “And, say . . .” He dug into the basket on the front table and came up with a pair of embroidery scissors. He held them up in one hand so we all could see him wrap Daisy’s hair around their handle. “The basis of fairy magic is that all things are connected by air. I can reinforce that connection by blowing on the object while thinking of the person I want to connect it to.”

  Mr. Jager glanced between Daisy and the scissors and then blew on the scissors. Daisy shivered . . . then giggled. “It tickles!” she announced.

  “Hmph.” Mr. Jager frowned. “Ja, I suppose it does. That was a piece of your soul leaving your body. We can all take comfort in the fact that our final parting of soul and body will . . . tickle. It should mean that I’ve created a bond. Let’s see.” He held up his hand. The silver scissors seemed to be trembling. I thought it was because Mr. Jager’s hand was shaking until the scissors stood upright on its sharp points. A halo of glitter surrounded the scissors. Mr. Jager lowered his hand and the scissors took two dainty steps onto the table.

  “Aw,” Daisy said, tilting her head, “it’s cute.”

  The scissors tilted one empty circle of its handle in the same motion, eliciting coos from the circle of girls.

  “Sympathy for the simulacrum is natural,” Mr. Jager said in a mournful voice. “But to be avoided.” He blew on the scissor creature and Daisy’s hair puffed out behind her. Daisy laughed. He filled a beaker with water and emptied it on the scissors. This time Daisy gasped, spitting water out of her mouth. “Hey!” she squawked. “That’s not . . .”

  Mr. Jager struck a match to the spirit lamp and reached for the scissors. Without realizing that I’d moved I was suddenly between Mr. Jager and the table. I grabbed the scissors, which writhed in my hands, snapping at my fingers. Behind me Daisy was flapping her arms.

  “Stop!” I cried, not sure if I was speaking to Mr. Jager, Daisy, or the scissors. A bell was ringing in my head. Not the danger bass, but the treble. I closed my eyes and listened to it chime twelve times. When it was done, I opened my eyes. The scissors lay lifeless in my hands. Daisy sat in her chair, limp and damp, but unburned. The air around her was full of smoke and glitter.

  “Very interesting,” Mr. Jager said, almost smiling. “What time of day were you born?”

  I gaped at him, furious but stunned.

  “What does that . . . ?”

  “Was it at midnight, by an
y chance? On the very stroke of midnight while the bells tolled the hour?”

  I nodded, unable to speak. “How . . . ?”

  Mr. Jager reached into the basket and withdrew a handbell. He rang it once. The chime cleared the smoke and glitter from the air.

  “The second kind of magic, and the most important to the order, is earth magic. We learned that bells forged of iron, with a drop of human blood, could dispel air magic. Then we learned that by ringing the bells in certain patterns we could keep the fairies away—or draw them closer to kill them.

  “Only certain people can use the bells—you all have been tested to see if you possess the ability—and only the rarest of people can use earth magic without a bell. You, Miss Hall, are one of those: a chime child, born at the stroke of midnight. You have special powers. You can hear things others can’t . . . and see things others don’t.”

  I thought of the smoke coming out of the mouth of the man in the Inverness cape and the crows circling the roof of the Triangle factory. I thought of the delusions I’d had during my stay at the Bellevue Pavilion for the Insane. Were those the kind of things Mr. Jager meant? I glanced uneasily behind me at the rest of the class, who were staring at me. Soon enough, they’d be telling everyone that Georgiana Montmorency had been right—I was a freak, just like the bearded lady at Dreamland in Coney Island.

  “I’d wager that some of things you see are not pleasant,” Mr. Jager said in an uncharacteristically gentle voice.

  I nodded weakly, tears springing to my eyes as some of those visions floated before my eyes—girls with fire in their hair, snakes made out of smoke lurking in the corners.

  “That’s the price that the chime child pays, but in exchange you are granted great powers. Out of all your class, you have the potential for the most power. Now, to move on. Let’s discuss the two other forms of magic—water magic and fire magic, also sometimes called shadow magic. The latter is strictly forbidden.”

  Helen grabbed my arm on the way to Miss Frost’s class. “Why didn’t you tell me you were a chime child?”

  “I didn’t even know it was a real thing,” I objected. “I thought if was just a fancy of my mother’s. How do you know about them? I thought you didn’t know anything about the magical side of Blythewood before you got here.”

  “Everyone’s heard of the chime children!” she said, as if I’d expressed ignorance of which fork to use with salad. “My mother and her friends always compared what time their children were born. It was considered lucky to be born at the stroke of any hour—I was born at precisely four just as tea was being served—but most lucky to be born at midnight.”

  “I don’t see how it’s lucky,” I said, noting the stares of a group of girls going into Miss Frost’s class. “I hear these bells in my head and see . . . awful things.”

  “Oh well, that does sound unpleasant, but I’m sure they’ll teach you how to control it here. Can you”—she pulled me aside at the door to Miss Frost’s class—“read people’s minds?”

  “No!” I insisted.

  Helen looked disappointed. “That’s too bad. Maybe you can learn.”

  “Would you like me to know what you’re thinking all the time?” I asked.

  Her blue eyes widened and she blushed. “Oh, I suppose not. Not that I ever think anything improper.” Her blush deepened. It occurred to me that it might be entertaining to pretend to Helen I could read her mind, but before I could imply the possibility, Sarah Lehman poked her head out of the classroom.

  “This is the last class you want to be late for,” Sarah hissed. “Trust me!”

  Helen rolled her eyes. “I don’t even understand what deportment can possibly have to do with our mission. And it’s not as if I need any training on the arts of social courtesy.”

  I, too, had wondered what the deportment teacher could possibly have to share with us, but I soon learned that the world of Faerie was governed by etiquette rules even stricter than those of New York society and that it was Miss Frost’s role to enlighten us to the nature and habits of the indigenous species as though she were instructing a group of missionaries about to embark on a trip to the Amazonian jungle, with the aim that we not get eaten by the natives. Lecturing in front of a deep burgundy curtain, she informed us that the fairies loathed the name “fairy” and would attack anyone calling them thus.

  “They prefer to be called ‘the good neighbors,’ ‘the old folk,’ or, my personal favorite, ‘the gentry.’ The best way to gain control over a fairy, though, is to call it by its species name. That will stun it so completely you will have time to either run away or shoot it with an arrow. So, it is very important to learn the different types of fairy. For that purpose I have collected an array of . . . ahem!” Miss Frost cleared her throat while glaring at Sarah, who got up from her seat and dutifully approached one side of the burgundy curtains. “An array of specimens!” Miss Frost declared, with a flourish of her be-ringed hands.

  The curtains swung open to reveal a glass-fronted bookshelf filled with colorful objects. The whole back wall seemed to be papered with a design of multihued butterfly wings that was reflected in an assortment of glass jars and trays. “You may find it hard to believe, but in my youth I was an avid naturalist and collector. Many of these specimens were collected by myself while accompanying my mentor, Sir Miles Malmsbury, the noted zoologist and explorer. It was Sir Malmsbury who pioneered the study of germ plasm in indigenous lychnobious creatures.”

  A faraway look entered Miss Frost’s eyes as she glanced at a framed photograph on the wall of a middle-aged man with bushy mutton-chops in a safari jacket, standing with one foot propped up on a dead rhinoceros. Sarah brought her back by asking if she’d like her to bring out the specimens now.

  “Haven’t you done it already?” Miss Frost snapped.

  Flinching at the reprimand, Sarah opened the case and removed a tray and a large glass jar. She handed them to girls on either side of the room and asked them to pass them around. Helen, Daisy, and I had taken seats in the back, so we were the last to get the tray and the jar. As they were passed around a heavy silence fell on the room, punctuated only by the screech of chalk as Miss Frost wrote out a series of Latinate words that all started with lychnobia—a word that I dimly thought had something to do with lamps—lychnobia arvensis, lychnobia arborescens, lychnobia collina, lychnobia hirta, lychnobia orbiculata, lychnobia vallicola . . . they sounded like varieties of some kind of flower.

  “And my personal favorite,” Miss Frost said as she wrote the last name on the board, “lychnobia pruina, for obvious reasons.” She chortled and I saw the girls in front of me looking at each other in puzzlement.

  “The frost fairy,” Sarah said aloud. “You see, it’s like Miss Frost’s name.”

  A murmur of understanding went through the room, but I was still confused. What did a frost fairy . . . ? The tray arrived at our table. Daisy looked at it first and I saw all the blood drain from her face. I worried she might faint. Helen took the tray from her hands, looked down, and quickly passed it to me.

  I thought, at first, that it was a tray of butterflies. Brilliantly colored wings were spread out and pinned on an ivory baize cloth. I felt a flutter in my stomach at the thought of the fragile creatures captured and killed to create this display. It reminded me of the moment in the fire when the girls ran to the windows to escape the blaze and were forced out into the open air, their arms spread wide.

  I looked closer and saw that between the colorful wings lay tiny human-like bodies, like little wax dolls. Surely, that’s what they are—waxwork dolls, I thought. But as I stared longer at them I noticed that in the center of each one’s chest was a pearl hat pin and a small drop of blood. These creatures had been pinned while alive. Then I looked up and saw the jar that was being handed around. Bobbing inside, like a pickled egg, was a tiny figure, its multicolored wings floating in the brine like seaweed.

 
Bile rose in my throat. My head swam and dimly I heard the bell in my head again, only this time it was the bass bell tolling danger. What could the danger be? I wondered. These poor creatures were already dead. They couldn’t hurt us and we couldn’t hurt them anymore. But the bell was tolling louder and faster, clanging in my head. I had to get out of there.

  I lurched unsteadily to my feet and headed toward the door. Behind me I heard Miss Frost’s voice droning on. “Lychnobia hirta, or hairy fairy, is the most unappealing of the lot . . . Miss Hall! Where do you think—?” A shattering of glass interrupted her. The reek of formaldehyde filled the room as I fled, not looking back. I knew what I’d see—the glass jar holding the preserved fairy had shattered. The danger the bells had been warning me against was from myself.

  16

  I FLED THROUGH the nearest door, desperate for fresh air after the reek of formaldehyde, and into an enclosed colonnaded garden.

  All my worst fears had been realized. I wasn’t going to fit into Blythewood at all. I was a freak. Mr. Jager was wrong—it wasn’t a gift to hear the bells in my head, it was a curse. If it had been a gift I would have stopped the Triangle fire and saved all those girls who died. I would have saved Tillie. My mother had changed the time on my birth certificate because she knew it was a curse. She must have been afraid that the bells inside my head would eventually drive me insane—and they nearly had. Hadn’t I raved like a madwoman all those months in Bellevue hospital? Clearly that was where I belonged.

  I’d almost rather be there than here, I thought, pacing the enclosed path and looking for a way out. The path was bordered with columns made of the same honey-colored stone as the bell tower and topped with capitals carved with monstrous creatures that leered and stuck out their multiple forked tongues at me. What kind of a place was this that decorated their walls with monsters and kept such grisly specimens? Yes, I knew that such specimens were collected of animals, but the bodies of the fairies looked human. And if they were human it couldn’t be right to skewer them with hat pins and pickle them in brine.