Blythewood

by Carol Goodman

  I shivered at the idea of the woods knowing anything.

  “High time,” Helen said, dismissing Daisy’s fancy with a flip of her braid. “Daddy sent me a new spring dress from Paris.”

  At breakfast there was a posy of violets at each table, with a handwritten note that read “Happy Spring! From the Sharps of Violet House.” While the girls exclaimed over how kind it was of Miss Sharp’s aunts to send us flowers, I stared at my place setting. Lying on my plate was a letter postmarked from Scotland. I picked it up with shaking hands and nearly cut myself with the butter knife I used to open it.

  “Ava’s gotten a love letter,” Helen remarked drily.

  But this was even better than a love letter.

  Dear Miss Hall, the letter read,

  I was most interested to receive your enquiry about the book A Darkness of Angels, especially coming from Evangeline Hall’s daughter. I knew your mother well and I was most terribly grieved to hear of her death. I thought of her recently when I found a copy of A Darkness of Angels here at Hawthorn. I believe she would have wanted me to bring it to you personally. As luck would have it, I am planning a voyage to the colonies in April. I think it is best that I bring the book with me. I will wire to you when I have embarked and make arrangements for our meeting. In the meantime, I urge you to tell no one about our correspondence. For reasons I will explain later I prefer that no one know I am travelling with the book. I look forward to meeting you in April.

  Yours,

  Herbert Farnsworth

  Archivist, The Hawthorn School

  “Ava!” Sarah’s voice at my ear penetrated my daze as I was reading the letter over a second time. “Dame Beckwith is making an announcement.”

  I looked up to see Dame Beckwith standing on the dais commanding the room to attention with her penetrating gaze. I caught her eye guiltily and stuffed the letter into my pocket. She nodded as if she’d been waiting expressly for my attention to begin.

  “I would like to wish you all a happy first day of spring,” she said. “The weather has certainly cooperated with the calendar. In honor of the day I have decided to suspend normal classes.”

  A great shout went up in the hall, a spontaneous release of all the tension that had built up during the cold months. Even Dolores Jager let out a little yip of excitement. Dame Beckwith waited for the noise to die down before adding, “I’ve asked for our teachers to hold a class on the signs of spring in the gardens instead.”

  There was a perfunctory moan, but it wasn’t heartfelt. One class wasn’t much and at least it was outside. Dame Beckwith looked around the room with that way she had of seeming to meet each girl’s eyes and see into each girl’s heart.

  “I understand that it’s been a difficult winter for some of you, perhaps especially for those of you who are new here or have suffered losses.” Her gaze had paused on Nathan. “But I hope you will take these early signs of spring as a token that the darkest days are past us. We have survived another winter. As Cicero tells us, Dum spiro spero. While there is life there is hope of a new beginning.”

  She moved her eyes away from Nathan, and I saw that they were shining with unshed tears. Perhaps she was telling Nathan that even though she had lost a daughter she was able to go on because she still had him.

  “There’s a little ritual we enact here at Blythewood on the first day of spring to mark that new beginning. We reset and wind all the clocks . . . ah, here is our clockmaker now.” She lifted her chin and waved her hand to the back of the Great Hall. I turned with everyone else, my heart thudding. Could it be . . . ?

  At first my heart sank with disappointment. A stooped old man tottered into the hall, his back bowed under the weight of a heavy toolbox.

  “Mr. Humphreys will be making his way around the place all day. Please stay out of his way, girls, and make him and his assistant feel welcome.”

  Assistant?

  Coming in behind old Mr. Humphreys, carrying two more toolboxes, a tweed cap pulled low over his eyes, was a tall strapping young man in a canvas smock. He glanced around the room, sunlight reflecting off the round lenses of his spectacles, until he found me. The smile he gave me felt like sunlight piercing the drear fog of the last few weeks.

  “Do you know that workman?” Helen asked, her lip curling on the word workman. I looked at her to see if she really didn’t recognize him. But all Helen saw was a lowly servant sent to fix something. She would never look past the worker’s smock and recognize the Darkling we’d met in the woods. I glanced at Daisy, but she was busy pilfering food for the sprites. Only Sarah guessed that the clockmaker’s assistant was my “beau,” but that was all right. She didn’t know that he was a Darkling.

  Relieved, I turned back to catch Raven’s eye again and somehow convey that I’d find him—but I saw that someone else had recognized him. It was Nathan, who was glaring at the clockmaker’s assistant with a look of pure hatred. Nathan glanced from Raven to me, his lip curled in a cruel grimace. Then he fled the hall into the North Wing.

  Raven stood watching him go while Mr. Humphreys talked with Dame Beckwith. My tablemates were cheerfully discussing what changes of wardrobe they needed to make for the outdoor class.

  “Come along, Ava,” Helen was saying to me. “I know your grandmother sent you a new dress from Paris because my mother said they went shopping together. We might as well make ourselves look pretty even if the only males to see us are an ancient workman and his assistant. Nathan seems to have disappeared as usual.”

  “Someone should go after him,” I said, getting to my feet. I saw Raven bend down and whisper in old Mr. Humphreys’ ear. Then with a sharp glance toward me, Raven followed Nathan into the North Wing. Was he trying to tell me to follow him? Or had he gone after Nathan to keep him from revealing his identity? Either way, I had to go find them.

  “I don’t need to change,” I told Helen. “I’ll meet you in the garden later.”

  “If you’re going after Nathan perhaps I should go, too,” Helen remarked querulously. “I’ve known him longer.”

  Mercifully, Sarah restrained her. “I think it’s better if Ava goes alone,” Sarah said, giving me a knowing look over Helen’s head. Clearly she thought I had an assignation with my beau. “Why don’t I help you unpack that dress? You might need help pressing its ruffles.”

  I shot Sarah a grateful look and hurried from the hall into the North Wing. With classes cancelled for the day it was deserted. I started down the hall, but halfway down I heard a noise coming from Miss Frost’s classroom. Miss Frost hadn’t budged from her room since the night I’d followed her into the dungeons, so I doubted it was her. I peered cautiously around the door frame and found Raven standing in front of the specimen cases, his face drained of color.

  “I know,” I said, coming quietly into the room. “It’s awful . . .”

  He turned to me, his eyes wide and glassy. “It’s an abomination. What kind of monster would do this to poor innocent creatures?”

  I shook my head. “Miss Frost seems to think that she’s somehow honoring the memory of her mentor—”

  “Honoring?” Raven spit the word out of his mouth as if it were a piece of rotten meat. “Do you honestly think this has anything to do with honor?”

  “No!” I cried, stung by the way he was looking at me. “My roommate saved one of the sprites and we brought her to Gillie last week to have her wing fixed. Gillie has been tending a whole conflagration in his quarters. And a lot of people in the Order think this is wrong.”

  “And yet they let it go on,” Raven said in an icy voice. “Do you know what happens to a lampsprite’s spirit if her body isn’t allowed to disintegrate back into the air?”

  I shook my head, but Raven wasn’t looking at me. He was opening one of the glass doors and gently unpinning a sprite. As he cradled it in his hands a tear dropped from his eye onto the creature. He crossed to the window, opene
d it, and brought his hand up to his lips so close I thought he meant to kiss the tiny creature, but instead he gently blew on it. The sprite fell apart into dust that swirled in the air. A bit of it landed on me and I heard a voice piping inside my head.

  Thank you for releasing me, Darkling.

  A translucent image of a sprite flickered briefly in the air above our heads and then vanished into the breeze. I felt a tremor, as if the earth below my feet was shaking, and then I was shaking, trembling uncontrollably. Raven turned to me, startled, then wrapped both his arms around me and pulled me tightly to his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured into my ear. “I forgot the effect a spirit’s passing could have on a human. You’re feeling the space between the worlds. It will pass in a moment.”

  His hands moved over my back and arms, brushing off the sprite dust and warming my skin. The chill vanished, but his hands felt so good on me that I didn’t tell him that. Instead, when he brushed his fingers across my face I covered his hand with mine and leaned my cheek into the bowl of his palm. I felt as though he held all of me in his hand—as he had gently cradled the tiny sprite—and as if I might as easily disintegrate at a touch of his lips.

  Then his lips were on mine, and instead of disintegrating, I felt heat surge though me, from my lips to my toes, lighting up every molecule in my body. I’d never felt so . . . whole.

  His hand moved to the back of my neck, gently cradling my head to bring me closer to him. I wrapped my arms around his back and felt the soft velvet of his wings straining against his smock, ready to burst through the thin fabric. I wanted them to; I wanted him to carry us away from here, back to his nest. But then I remembered why I’d called him here: the tenebrae lurking in the dungeons. I needed him to help me get rid of them.

  Reluctantly, I pulled out of his embrace, put one hand on his chest and one on his lips. As I did I saw something flicker over his shoulder. Had his wings broken free?

  But then the flicker resolved into a flash of steel—a knife blade slashing through the air toward Raven’s throat.

  I screamed and struck at the blade with my bare hands. Cold steel sliced into my skin. Raven whirled around, his wings now splitting his smock and unfurling so fast they knocked me backward against the windowpanes. My vision blurred for a moment. When it cleared I saw Nathan holding a blade to Raven’s throat.

  “You’ve taken enough of our women, fiend! You can’t have Ava—and you’re going to give me back my sister!”

  “We don’t have your sister, frailing! She wandered into Faerie.”

  “It’s true, Nathan. I saw her there on the solstice.”

  “As did I,” Nathan said, shifting his eyes toward me without moving his dagger from Raven’s throat. “This monster has been holding her prisoner there. Now he’s going to show me how to get her out.”

  “But if he lets you in, you’ll be trapped. And he can’t get Louisa out.”

  “Is that what he told you?” Nathan said scornfully. “You’ve been beguiled by his lies.”

  “They’re not lies, Nathan. There’s a book that tells the truth. Raven says it will prove the Darklings aren’t evil—”

  “Raven?” Nathan sneered, pressing the blade deeper into Raven’s throat. I saw him flinch and his wings flex. Why didn’t Raven knock the blade from Nathan’s hands? I knew he was strong enough. But then I noticed a trail of smoke rising off the blade and winding around Raven. “I didn’t know you monsters had names. But I have learned a lot about you.” He twisted the blade and the coils of smoke tightened around Raven, making him wince in pain. “I’ve even learned to use the shadows to entrap you.”

  “Shadow magic is strictly forbidden, Nathan. Don’t you remember what Mr. Jager said?”

  Nathan sneered. “Do you think I care about the rules when it comes to getting my sister back? You wouldn’t care either, Ava, if this monster didn’t have you under his sway.”

  “He’s not a monster and I am not under his sway.”

  Nathan turned to me, his gray eyes clouded over, something dark writhing behind them. “Then you’re a traitor. You’ve betrayed us,” he snarled, his upper lip curling away from his teeth, letting out a wisp of smoke.

  “You stupid boy,” Raven said coldly. “You’re the one who has betrayed your kind. By using shadow magic you’ve let the tenebrae inside you—and let them into Blythewood.”

  “Shut up!” Nathan cried, twisting the dagger. Raven let out a cry and sank to his knees. “You’re lying. You’re going to get Louisa back for me. Now!”

  “Nathan . . .” I took a step forward but Nathan twisted the blade and snarled at me.

  “Stay back. If you come any closer I’ll make him pay. I can’t trust you not to try your chime magic on me.” He looked wildly around the room, his eyes coming to rest on the glass specimen case. “There.” He waived the blade in the direction of the case. “Open it up.”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “Stop lying! I saw you go in there one night. Open the case. You can stay down there until I get back with Louisa. Then we’ll see if you’re just this monster’s victim or a traitor. Open it, I say, or I’ll make this fiend wish he were dead.” He twisted the blade and Raven writhed in pain. I quickly ran to the case and opened it. A dark shape billowed out of it, filling my mouth with smoke. I turned to beg Nathan to reconsider, but he was already shoving me into the choking darkness. I fell to my knees and heard the door slam behind me, sealing me inside with the shadows.

  33

  I POUNDED ON the door, screaming for help, until I realized that no one was coming for me. Everyone was outside in the gardens, enjoying the spring sunshine, while I was trapped underground with the tenebrae and Nathan dragged Raven into the woods on a fool’s mission to save Louisa. If Nathan forced Raven to show him the door to Faerie it was likely he’d enter it—and never come out. The other alternative was that Raven would refuse and Nathan would kill him. I couldn’t bear to think of either scenario. I had to get out of here, find help, and go after them. But how?

  I turned away from the door to face the dark stairs and immediately felt a wave of panic sweep over me. Without a lamp I was in complete darkness. I could feel the tenebrae writhing around me, pressing their way into my mouth and nose . . . and into my mind.

  I was back in the Triangle fire, smoke billowing around me, choking me, forced between two choices—death by fire or by jumping. I had two choices here, too—I could let the tenebrae inside me or I could throw myself down the stairs and hope my neck broke. Those were the choices my mother had faced. I saw now that she had done the harder thing. It would be easier to let the Darknesses inside me. They were already whispering to me, telling me how easy my life would be with them at the helm. No more difficult choices. They would steer me toward a life of riches and power. I’d never have to worry about money or work again. And I wouldn’t have to choose between Nathan and Raven. Nathan was already with the tenebrae, and Raven—Raven was an illusion. What future could there be between a Darkling and a human? I only felt the way I did toward him because he had beguiled me, seducing me with his kisses.

  But at the thought of Raven’s lips on mine I felt a warmth that beat back the tenebrae. No, that kiss had been real. The memory of it was like a sweet bell ringing in my head.

  The bells. I had used them to break free of van Drood. I could use them now to fight the tenebrae—and I had the repeater to help. I took it out of my pocket and pressed the stem. The two tiny figures struck the bells, playing a tune. At first the bells sounded tinny and faint, like funeral bells whose clappers had been muffled. I thought it was because the tenebrae were already in my head and they were muffling the bells, but as I focused on the sound it became clearer . . . and louder. As they rang I felt the tenebrae retreating down the stairs from me.

  And as my mind cleared I remembered the passage that led through the candelabellum chamb
er to the special collections. If I could find my way there I could reach the library and get out through the trapdoor. Of course, it meant going through the candelabellum chamber by myself . . .

  But I wouldn’t think about that now. I started down the steps, keeping one hand on the damp wall and one on the repeater, which now played a tune that was echoed by the bells in my head. When I reached the bottom of the stairs I felt panic rising as I realized I had no light to guide my way. It was pitch black in the tunnel—as black as the well I’d fallen into after the crow attack. Even now the tenebrae could be crawling inside me . . .

  Unless they’re already inside you.

  The voice was an insidious whisper at my ear. Unless they’ve been inside you all along, making you mad.

  “No,” I said aloud. “I’m not mad.”

  Aren’t you? What kind of girl falls in love with a demon?

  “Raven’s not a demon,” I cried. “He showed me the truth about the Darklings.”

  The truth? In a teacup?

  How did the shadows know about what Raven had shown me in the teacup?

  I heard laughter.

  We know because we were there. Inside you. We’ve always been inside you, just as we were inside your mother. We passed from her blood to yours. Tainted blood. That’s why you don’t fit in here at Blythewood. They all know your blood is tainted. If you don’t believe us, look . . .

  Somehow I had found myself in a doorway. The tenebrae had led me forward. I should run back. But where to? Then I caught a whiff of gin and paraffin. I’d found my way to Sir Malmsbury’s study, where, I recalled, there was a lamp and matches on the desk. I felt my way into the room, dreading the thought of the cases full of tiny skulls leering at me in the dark, and found the lamp and matches next to the open ledger, just where I remembered them. With fumbling hands, I struck a match, lighting up a roomful of snakes.

  I screamed and dropped the match, plunging me back into the dark with the horrible creatures.