Blythewood

by Carol Goodman

  “I thought Sieges and Campaigns wasn’t assigned for another month,” Daisy said.

  “I read ahead,” Beatrice replied with a smirk. “There’s an account of a nunnery in the Pyrenees that was cut off from the outside world for three months. When the villagers reached them after the spring thaw they found them all dead except for one girl who had holed herself up in the belfry. She claimed that the nuns had gone crazy and started killing each other.”

  “Ugh! I knew it was unhealthy to wall up so many women together,” Helen said.

  “The men aren’t any better,” Beatrice said smugly. “An order of monks on an island in Scotland got it in their heads that they were being attacked by ice giants. They set fire to the monastery to melt them.”

  I recalled what Gillie had said about the frost giants disguising themselves as icebergs. Maybe the monks hadn’t been crazy. But I kept that thought to myself. We all became, I think, a little wary of expressing ourselves too freely in case a careless word or snappish response would be seen as a symptom of winter fever.

  The one person I could have talked to, Raven, was as unreachable as the Pyrenees. The frozen woods were off limits. He’d said he would find a way to see me, but weeks went by without any sign from him. During the day I paced the quiet halls of Blythewood, staring out the windows for a trace of him in the winter sky. At night I tossed and turned, worrying that he had frozen to death in his treetop nest—or that he had better things to do than come looking for me. He was an otherworldly being entrusted with the ferrying of souls and I . . . I was an ex–factory worker and schoolgirl. So maybe I was also a chime child who was supposed to be able to defeat the shadow master, but I couldn’t even do that unless I found A Darkness of Angels, and so far I’d had no luck.

  I spent as much time as I could in the library, seeking an opportunity to sneak into the Special Collections, but with no one going out it was hard to do. Worse, our little group in the library had grown irritable. Since break there seemed to be some unspoken tension among our teachers. Miss Sharp still stoked the fire, set out biscuits, and poured tea, but she moved around the room like a trapped bird in a cage, trying to divide herself evenly between Miss Corey and Mr. Bellows. She would pour half a cup for Mr. Bellows, then catch a glance from Miss Corey and jerk the teapot toward her already-full cup, splashing tea across the stacks of ancient books, setting Miss Corey fluttering over the books like a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wing.

  Only Nathan was quicker to protect the books. He had taken himself off to a window seat overlooking the river and made a nest of books like a peregrine on a cliff. Since coming out of the woods on the solstice he had been devoted to reading. I tried to ask him where he had spent the night in the woods, but he had brushed off my question.

  “I could ask you the same thing, Ava.”

  Before the night in the woods I might have confided in Nathan. The boy who laughed about opium dens and teased me about how many books I read might have understood that the Darkling boy Raven wasn’t evil. But not the Nathan who had come out of the woods. He no longer laughed or teased or played pranks. He was like the boy in the fairy tale who gets a splinter of the goblin’s evil mirror in his eye and whose heart turns to ice. All he did was hole himself up in his window seat and read. I was afraid that if I told him that I’d seen Louisa in Faerie he would go running off into the frozen woods to save her. Without knowing how to get her out, he could get himself killed by the Jotuns or wind up trapped in Faerie himself.

  I thought of talking to Miss Sharp or Mr. Bellows about Nathan but they were both so distracted I hated to bother them. Helen insisted that Nathan was just in one of his usual funks. Daisy asked if anything had happened the night we spent in the woods to change him, but without confessing that I hadn’t been with Nathan that night I couldn’t answer the question truthfully.

  My friends, as if knowing I was keeping a secret from them, became secretive themselves. Helen received long letters from her parents every post, which she read with unusual concentration and covered up whenever Daisy or I walked near her. She hid them in a locked trunk, an uncharacteristic worried look settled over her brow, and she nearly bit Daisy’s head off when Daisy accidentally spilled a bottle of ink on her shirt cuff.

  “D’you think I’m made of money?” she cried in an aggrieved voice that sounded as if it belonged to someone else.

  Daisy began making herself scarce from our room. She said she was doing work for Miss Frost, but when I looked for her once in Miss Frost’s specimen room she wasn’t there.

  “That flibbertigibbet!” Miss Frost exclaimed. “She’s always late and she lost one of my best specimens. I ought to fire her.”

  “I could help Ava look for her friend,” said Sarah, who was standing on a stepladder dusting the floor-to-ceiling glass case of pinned sprites. “I’ve finished organizing the sprites by genus and phylum.”

  “I need you to pick up my physic from the chemists, girl.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sarah replied. When Miss Frost turned her back, though, Sarah splayed herself against the glass, spreading her arms wide, dropping her head and letting her tongue loll out, mimicking the pose of the pinned sprites. I suppressed a giggle, the first bit of merriment I’d felt in a while.

  Sarah had been helping with my homework since Helen and Daisy were both acting so strange. I’d also seen her tutoring Nathan, which made me a little jealous, but I tried not to mind because I enjoyed her company. She was the only girl I could talk to about my days in the city, the only one who knew the vaudeville theaters and the sweatshops and the food carts like I did—and the longer I was at Blythewood, the more I found I missed them. I also learned that her own mother had died a few years ago—of a dysentery outbreak in Five Points.

  “I remember that,” I told her. “My mother brought food and fresh water to the sick.”

  “What a valiant woman your mother must have been!” Sarah said, and then when she saw the tears in my eyes, she asked what she’d said wrong.

  “She was valiant, but then she changed.” I told her about my mother’s strange obsessions and drinking laudanum, but I couldn’t confide to her that I’d spent a night with a Darkling—not until I found the book that proved that the Darklings weren’t evil.

  The only way I could think of to get into the Special Collections was to volunteer to help Miss Corey carry books up. Now that Nathan was so distracted with his own reading, Miss Corey always carried the lantern downstairs and held it up while pointing to the books she wanted brought up, making it difficult to search for A Darkness of Angels on the shelves. A layer of dust covered the spines, and many of the shelves were double stacked. The day I left Sarah dusting specimen cases, I had the idea of volunteering to dust the books so Miss Corey wouldn’t get her clothes so dirty.

  “Perhaps that’s not a bad idea,” she replied. “Vi is always saying I look like a chimney sweep. But won’t you mind being down here all alone?”

  “Not at all,” I lied. “Why should I?”

  “It’s just that it’s so close to the candelabellum.” She looked nervously toward the door at the end of the corridor. Now that I looked toward the door it did give me a strange feeling to think of those bells hanging in the dark, the pictures lurking in them like sleeping dragons. As I stared at the door I thought I even heard a faint tinkling.

  “It is peculiar,” I said, “to think of the founding families bringing over the original dungeons with the castle.”

  “These rich people,” Miss Corey said irritably, “who can ever understand why they do the things they do? Why does Rupert Bellows buy violets every day for Vionetta when she could get them for free from her own aunts’ greenhouse? Go ahead and dust, if you like. I’m sure Vionetta and Rupert will prefer that we don’t look like grimy paupers.”

  It had never occurred to me that Miss Corey might not be as well off as Miss Sharp or Mr. Bellows. Truthfull
y, I hardly thought about my teachers’ lives beyond Blythewood. Someday, though, I would have to make my own way in the world beyond these walls. I didn’t know whether my grandmother intended to help me financially, or what strings might be attached to any help she offered. And as for marriage . . . what if Charlotte Falconrath was right and no one would marry me because I was a freak? Better to remain unmarried, though, than to be matched up like a prize cow or to trade a dowry for a house in town, summers in Newport, and a handsome dress allowance.

  I’d wager the Darklings didn’t talk about dowries and bloodlines when they married. If they married.

  “My mother always said it was better to be a pauper than a slave to money,” I told Miss Corey.

  Miss Corey gave me a startled look from under her veil. “Evangeline was very wise,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Thank you for offering to dust the books, Ava. I’ll bring down an extra lantern and some dust cloths.”

  I spent the rest of the afternoon down in the Special Collections Room carefully dusting and inspecting each book, but I didn’t find A Darkness of Angels. I did find, though, a catalogue of special collections in other libraries run by the Order. I discovered it just as Miss Corey called me to come up for tea. I slid the catalogue behind one of the shelves and hurried up the spiral stairs, promising myself that I’d look through it later. At tea I casually asked Miss Corey if she’d ever worked at any other libraries.

  “I worked at the Order’s library at Hawthorn,” she replied, “until the head librarian absconded with all the funds and several priceless books.”

  “Oh, I remember that!” Miss Sharp exclaimed, sipping her tea. “What a scandal! Did they ever apprehend him?”

  “No, but they recovered the books when he tried to sell them in London. They’re back in the special collections at Hawthorn. I worked at the Order’s library in London after that, and then I came here.”

  “Can’t imagine why you’d leave London for this backwater,” Mr. Bellows remarked.

  “If you don’t like it here,” Miss Corey replied, “I hear there’s an opening at Hawthorn.”

  I didn’t follow the rest of their conversation. I bided my time through tea and then waited for everybody to leave. Nathan took forever, rearranging the books in this window seat and making Miss Corey promise not to disturb the order of his stacks.

  “I have a system,” he said. “I think I’m on to something.”

  “That’s fine, Nathan, but they’ll all have to go back in the Special Collections by spring break.”

  “I’ll be done with them by then,” Nathan assured her. “Or else it will be too late.”

  He left without explaining what he meant. I offered to help Miss Corey straighten and lock up. She seemed touched by my offer. “Perhaps you might want to be a librarian, Ava. You’d make a fine one.”

  “I would like that very much,” I said, feeling guilty as I slipped the library key from its ring before handing her keys back to her. “I do love libraries.”

  “I’ll talk to Dame Beckwith about having you assist me. Perhaps she could even pay you a small salary. Then you’d feel a bit more . . . independent.”

  I was so touched I almost confessed and gave her back the key, but I couldn’t bear to ruin her good opinion of me. And I wanted to get another look at that catalogue. After dinner Daisy disappeared, stuffing a roll and apple in her pocket and making a vague excuse that she’d forgotten something somewhere. Helen, rereading a letter from home, didn’t even look up when I said that I’d forgotten my Latin textbook in the classroom in the North Wing. Charlotte Falconrath tried to stop me as I passed through the Great Hall, but I distracted her by telling her that Cook had put out fresh-baked cookies in the Commons Room.

  I hurried past the empty classrooms, which looked eerie in the moonlight. Someone had left a window open, letting in an icy breeze that ruffled the large maps that hung in the history room. I thought I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see the shadow of wings on the corridor wall. I ran to the window, hoping that it would be Raven, but it was only Blodeuwedd flying past a window with a long mournful hoot. I rushed on to the library, my hands shaking as I fitted the key in the lock.

  “If you want to become a librarian, you’ll have to learn to be quieter.”

  I nearly shrieked at the voice inches from my ear. I whirled around. For a second I thought one of the ice giants had found a way in from the forest. A figure pale and still as a frozen statue stood in the moonlit corridor, its eyes cold as ice chips. Then the figure moved and I recognized Nathan.

  “You were spying on me!” I accused him.

  “I wanted to know where your sudden interest in library economy came from. Now I see that you’re really interested in a career in book thievery.”

  “I am not,” I hissed. “I just wanted to have a look at something.”

  “Something you couldn’t look at with everyone else here?”

  “As if you don’t hoard your books to yourself, too, Nathan. I’ve seen you hunched over them like a hawk mantling its prey.”

  Nathan laughed at the image. For a moment he looked like the old Nathan, but then his eyes turned chilly again. “I suppose you know all about birds of prey now,” he said.

  “So you did see me with the Darkling that night,” I said, glad it was too dark where I stood in the hall for him to see me blush. “Why didn’t you tell the others?”

  “Because I saw other things in the woods that night that I’m not ready to tell anyone about. I’m willing to hide your secret if you’re willing to hide mine.”

  I knew it was a deal I shouldn’t make, but my fingers were itching to get a look at that catalogue. Once I’d found A Darkness of Angels I could prove the Darklings weren’t evil and find a way to rescue Louisa from Faerie. Then I could tell Nathan everything and find out what he was hiding. “Fine,” I said. “I suppose you ambushed me here so I could let you into the library, too.”

  “Actually, I don’t need you for that,” he said, taking a ring of keys out of his pocket. “I stole these from my mother months ago. I just thought it would be fun to give you a scare.”

  If Nathan had looked like he was having fun I would have been angrier, but it was clear he was in the throes of winter fever, pursuing his mysterious obsession. “Then let’s go in, shall we? I won’t bother you if you don’t bother me.”

  He unlocked the door and waved me in. “Ladies first,” he said with mock courtesy.

  The moonlight was bright enough to light the library, but I would need a lantern to go down to the Special Collections. Descending those spiral stairs with the moonlight pouring down them felt like climbing into the well I’d envisioned when the crows had attacked me. I was relieved when Nathan offered to go down with me.

  “So what was worth fooling Miss Corey for?” he asked when we reached the bottom.

  “It’s a catalogue,” I said, taking the book out of its hiding place, “of other libraries belonging to the Order. I thought I might find a book I’m looking for.” I flipped through the pages, searching the alphabetical list . . . and found it. A Darkness of Angels by Dame Alcyone. Alcyone. That was the name of one of Merope’s sisters. There was a copy in the Hawthorn School library in Scotland.

  “Hm,” he said, looking over my shoulder. “Are you going to Scotland to find it?”

  “Hardly,” I said, “but I can write to the librarian at Hawthorn. The address is on the first page.” I flipped to the beginning of the catalogue and copied down the address. I was closing the book when I heard a noise from the candelabellum.

  I turned to Nathan to see if he had heard it, too. I wasn’t sure what would be worse—if I was imagining noises in the candelabellum chamber or if something was making the bells move on their own. The minute I saw Nathan’s frightened face, I knew which was worse. I thought of the figures we’d seen in there—shadow crows and shadow wolves, but worst
of all, the prince who’d succumbed to the shadows and become a shadow master. What if he were in the candelabellum chamber?

  The door knob turned.

  Nathan extinguished the lantern, plunging the archive into darkness save for the circle of moonlight coming down from the stairwell. He pushed me behind a filing cabinet and squeezed in beside me while the door creaked open, making so much noise it covered the sound of our breathing and my heart beating—out of fear, I told myself, not from the warmth of Nathan’s body pressed against mine.

  A lumpen figure loomed in the doorway, cast in shadow by a ruddy wedge of light that angled toward us. I thought of the red eyes that had fixed onto mine in the teacup vision and imagined the light came from them. The figure lumbered into the corridor and paused, holding a lantern up to one of the shelves. I was afraid he would find us when the light reached us, but evidently the intruder found what he was looking for. He took something off the shelf and turned to go, pausing in the circle of moonlight. He looked up . . . only it wasn’t a he. Shining greasily in the moonlight was the face of Euphorbia Frost.

  She stared at the open doorway to the stairwell for several long seconds. Then she looked around the corridor, peering into the shadows. She was staring straight at us, her eyes shimmering red in the light from her lantern, which, I saw now, was shaded by a red silk scarf. I was sure that she’d seen us, but then I remembered that she was nearsighted. She groped for her lorgnette, but she was holding too many things in her hand to raise it to her eyes.

  “Careless!” she muttered, clucking her tongue. Then she lifted the thing she’d taken from the shelf. Something glimmered glassily in the moonlight and the room was suddenly full of the smell of spirits. Miss Frost lifted the bottle to her mouth and took a long swallow of the clear liquid. Then she smacked her lips, belched, and went back into the candelabellum chamber.

  When the door had closed behind her, and the sound of her retreating footsteps had faded, Nathan exploded in a paroxysm of giggles. I elbowed him in the ribs to hush him, but laughter was bubbling up in my own mouth.