Blythewood

by Carol Goodman

  Not snakes, I told myself, tenebrae. I needed to drive them back with the bells. The repeater was still playing in my pocket, faintly and slowly, as if the mechanism was running down. I reached into my pocket and pressed the stem. Focusing on the tune, I lit the match again. The tenebrae recoiled into the corners of the room as the match flared, still snake-like, but at least now they were retreating. I lit the lantern and braced myself to go back into the corridor. I would find the passage that led to the candelabellum and pass through it.

  Where all those shadows dwell?

  Just pictures on the wall, I told myself, just as these writhing coils were just smoke and shadow. They couldn’t get inside me if I kept listening to the bells. I held the lantern high and focused on the sound of the chimes coming from the repeater. The tenebrae shrank away and pooled around the desk, fingering the pages of the ledger as if flipping through them, looking for something. . . .

  A page turned, and then another, and another, making a sound like dry leaves scraping over gravestones . . .

  Over your mother’s grave. You wanted to know her secrets. You wanted to know who your father was? Look!

  In spite of my resolve not to listen to the tenebrae, I couldn’t resist. I went to the ledger and held the lantern up to look at the page. At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It was a complicated chart, like an octopus with a hundred tentacles—moving tentacles. The tenebrae were swarming over the page, encircling a name at the bottom. Evangeline Hall. My mother’s name. What was it doing in Sir Malmsbury’s chart? Sir Malmsbury had disappeared twenty years ago. My mother would have been only a girl of fifteen, younger than I was now. I put my finger on her name and traced the line above it to where my grandparents’ names appeared: Throckmorton Hall and Hecatia van Rhys. Next to my grandmother’s name and my mother’s name were drawn tiny bells with circles around them—the icon for a chime child. Sir Malmsbury had drawn a line from one bell to the other. Tracing that line upward I saw that it connected circled bells from generation to generation. This was a family tree—of my family. A note in the margin read, “The chime child germ plasm travels through the matrilineal line, but may be strengthened by breeding to males descended from chime children.”

  By breeding? Bile rose in my throat. Sir Malmsbury was talking about my family as if we were cattle. He had studied my family—and others, I saw from the other branching diagrams on the page—just as he studied lampsprites, to figure out how we came by the ability to hear an inner bell and use the power of the chime child. I saw other family names on the chart—Sharp, Driscoll, Montmorency . . . He was trying to determine which family produced the most chime children. There were a few in the Sharp lines, but there were also several crescent moon symbols. I looked around the page for a legend to the icons and found a small box at the bottom. The crescent moon, I read, denoted a “tendency toward lunacy.”

  With a pang I saw that there was a crescent moon drawn next to my mother’s name. I scratched at it with my fingernail, wanting to strike it out, but as I did I scratched off a narrow strip of paper that had been glued next to my mother’s name—and connected to my mother’s name with a hyphen, as husband’s names were connected to their wives’. Beneath the strip was my father’s name! But why was it covered up?

  Because your father’s name was stricken from the ledgers.

  Perhaps because they weren’t married (I didn’t see the lowercase m that signified a marriage), but I didn’t care about that. I still wanted to see . . .

  The name was written in stark black ink, darker than the other writing on the page, as if Sir Malmsbury had pressed the pen harder—or perhaps it looked darker because the whole world around the name had grown dim by comparison. The name written where my father’s name should be was Judicus van Drood.

  “No!“ I said aloud, my fingernails digging into the page. “That monster is not my father!”

  I looked closer at the entry. There was no date of marriage. Sir Malmsbury had disappeared when my mother was only fifteen, three years before she would have been married. The notation had been made because of a betrothal—a thought that still roiled my stomach—or because Sir Malmsbury thought they should marry.

  Yes, that must be it. I looked over the chart again and understood. Sir Malmsbury was figuring out how to produce a chime child through breeding, and he’d come up with the pairing of Judicus van Drood and my mother. It didn’t mean they’d ever married.

  But I had been born a chime child.

  A coincidence?

  Or had my mother fallen in love with someone else with the chime trait?

  The answer to who that was might lie in this chart.

  I ripped the page out. The tearing sound scattered the tenebrae. The repeater was chiming madly, as if it had grown as agitated with my discovery as I had. I stuffed the page into my pocket, muffling the sound of the repeater. Holding up the lantern I strode from the room, scattering tenebrae in front of me. They were fleeing . . . or perhaps they were leading me on. I found the passage to the candelabellum chamber easily enough. At the door I hesitated. I pressed my ear to the door and listened, but there was no sound inside. It was only a room with bells. Dame Beckwith’s warning not to enter the chamber alone—that those who had done so had emerged insane—echoed in my ears. But it was the only way out.

  I turned the knob and entered the dark room, holding up my lantern, which cast the candelabellum’s shadow onto the wall and showed me the door on the other side. I had only to cross the room. I lowered the lantern, not liking the shadows it threw across the walls, and walked slowly over the stone-flagged floor, careful not to bump into the chairs and table, hardly daring to breathe. Halfway across the room, my hand brushed against my skirt, and the page I’d torn out of Sir Malmsbury’s ledger crackled.

  A crystal bell shivered in response. I froze and drew my shaking hand away from my skirt. The paper crackled back louder, as though it had caught fire. The bells of the candelabellum tinkled as if ringing an alarm. I gasped—and the intake of my breath stirred the delicate brass rings into motion. The bells began to play a tune that was different from the one they had played when Dame Beckwith had struck them.

  The candelabellum plays a different story depending what bell is struck first. What bell had I struck? What story would it tell?

  You don’t have to watch it, I told myself. I was only a few feet from the door. I could reach it with my eyes closed. I didn’t have to listen to the bells, which were playing a tune that sounded like the song my mother had used to sing me to sleep. . . .

  Could the candelabellum tell me my mother’s story? But how? It was made hundreds of years before my mother was born.

  Because the candelabellum contains the pieces that all stories are made of. All it had to do was rearrange the pieces and it could tell every story that ever happened and every story that would ever happen. It knew my mother’s story.

  I raised the lantern so fast the flame flickered. For a heart-stopping moment I thought it would go out, leaving me alone in the dark, but instead the flame pulsed and shot up, bursting the glass case of the lantern. I dropped it and it crashed onto the table. The fire gusted over the wood as I remembered the flames bursting through the windows of the Triangle and pouring over the examining tables, hungry for fuel. The fire soared up and lit all the candles at once.

  The rings moved faster, the bells rang my mother’s song, and the shadows leapt up on the walls and ceiling. A young man and woman. It might have been Merope and the prince, but it wasn’t. It was a young girl here at Blythewood, ringing the bells, learning to shoot arrows, flying a hawk, reading a book in the library. There was a young man with her in the library. He looked familiar, but just when I thought I recognized him his face would merge with the shadows, slipping in and out of the dark. I saw him walking with my girl, giving her a book, and then a letter . . . but she gave back the letter and the book. I saw her walking awa
y from him, and then running away into the woods, where a great winged creature swept down and stopped the other man from following her. As the man turned away, shadows leapt up around him, twining about his feet, growing wings and plucking at his sleeves, his hair, his skin. I saw him retreating to his library, to his books, walling himself up behind his books. I saw another woman trying to pull him away from his books, looking on with a worried face, but there was a wall of shadow between the young man and her. I saw him going down into the dungeon and to the candelabellum, where he watched the shadows whirl round and round. I could make out the girl’s face among those shadows, and wings. As the shadows grew, there was less and less light to see them by. They swallowed the light, just as they were swallowing the young man’s soul. They were filling him up, pouring in through his eyes as he watched the shadows, through his ears as he listened to the bells, his mouth as he gasped his beloved’s name.

  Evangeline!

  The bells played my mother’s name, and then I heard my mother’s voice, as clearly as if she had been in the room with me, give back his name. Then the shadows swallowed him and the music stopped. I was alone in the dark room with only the echo of a man’s name in my mother’s voice.

  Judicus.

  I’m not sure how long I sat there. Dimly I remembered that somewhere up above me Nathan was dragging Raven into the woods, but that seemed like another story that the shadows were playing.

  It was another shadow story. The reason the man in the story looked so familiar was that he reminded me of Nathan. The way he retreated into the library and hid behind his books. The way he snuck down into the candelabellum chamber and watched the shadows . . .

  Of course. That’s what Nathan had been doing. He had access to the dungeons. He wouldn’t have been able to resist the lure of the candelabellum, especially if he thought it could tell him how to find Louisa. But the stories the candelabellum told weren’t entirely reliable. They were made of light and shadow, and so the story changed depending on what you focused on—the light or the shadow. Nathan had been lured into the shadows, into believing that Raven held the key to finding Louisa. It wasn’t just Raven who would be destroyed if I didn’t find them. Nathan, too, was in danger of being swallowed by the shadows, just as Judicus van Drood had been.

  I got to my feet and crossed the darkness to the door. When I opened it, light poured in through the corridor beyond, which meant that the trapdoor to the library was open. I breathed a sigh of relief and turned to close the door to the candelabellum chamber. As I closed the door I heard the faint tinkle of bells—a last remnant of the song my mother used to sing to me, calling to mind the story I’d just watched. A story made up of light and darkness. Which had I focused on?

  Feeling as though I’d missed something, I turned and walked toward the light.

  34

  AS I WALKED up the stairs to the library I heard a murmuring voice.

  “Glory be to God for dappled things—

  For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow.”

  Miss Sharp was reciting a poem. It wasn’t one I’d heard before.

  “For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

  Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow and plough.

  And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.”

  It was a poem that celebrated the unusual, the marred, the imperfect—things neither light nor dark, but somewhere in between. It seemed a fitting anthem to my return from the dark into the light.

  “All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

  With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle dim;

  He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

  Praise him.”

  I reached the top step at the last line of the poem. Miss Sharp and Miss Corey sat at table, a tray with teacups and scones to one side. Both their heads, one gold, one russet, were bent over the same book. Miss Corey was not wearing her hat and veil. Without it I could see the dappled pattern that spread across her face. Miss Corey’s face was as mottled as the brindled, freckled things the poem celebrated. She looked like an exotic creature, as strange in her way as the fairies that populated Blythe Wood, but also quite lovely, which must be why Miss Sharp was reading a poem that celebrated such “counter, original, spare, strange beauty.” Miss Corey was certainly looking at her with gratitude—so intently that she didn’t see me. But when Miss Sharp looked up from the page, she startled, her eyes widening.

  “My bells! What’s happened to you, Ava? You look like you’ve been . . .”

  “In a fire,” Miss Corey finished, closing the book Miss Sharp had been reading from with a decisive snap as if she could erase what we had heard by closing the book on the poem.

  “Your face is covered with soot.” Her eyes grew even wider. “And there are feathers in your hair!”

  I patted my hair and plucked out a black feather—one of Raven’s from when we kissed. I blushed at the memory of it.

  “You’ve been with a Darkling,” Miss Corey said.

  “Yes,” I admitted, “but I can explain. He’s not evil. He’s been explaining things to me since we met on the winter solstice—”

  “You’ve been seeing him since then?” Miss Corey hissed. The blood that had suffused her cheeks a moment ago had drained away now, the strawberry-colored stains on her face standing out vividly against the white. Her eyes slid away from mine when I looked at her. Was that how it was going to be from now on? Would my reputation be so besmirched by my association with a Darkling that all my friends would turn from me? I didn’t have time to worry about that.

  “This is not the point!” I cried. “Nathan has taken him to the woods.”

  “Nathan has taken him?” Miss Sharp asked. “Don’t you mean the other way around?”

  “No, she doesn’t.” The voice came from the doorway, where Helen and Daisy stood. “We saw Nathan leading the clockmaker’s apprentice into the woods,” Daisy went on. “Only he’s not an ordinary apprentice, is he?”

  “He’s a Darkling,” Miss Corey answered before I could. “They’re devious creatures—ruthless, cunning, and inhuman.”

  Miss Sharp winced at the harshness of the last word. “Really, Lil, I thought you were more tolerant. You sound like the social Darwinists.”

  “We’re not talking about different sorts of people, Vi. You have no idea what these monsters are like. One of them killed my grandmother.”

  “Are you sure?” I interrupted. I hated to see two of my favorite teachers arguing. “Raven says that the tenebrae can disguise themselves as anything. Maybe it was one of them that killed your grandmother.”

  “Or maybe you’ve been mesmerized by the demon. When they found my grandmother she’d been ripped to shreds by one of the creatures, but she died begging my grandfather to open the window so she could see him one last time.”

  “Like Cathy in Wuthering Heights,” Daisy murmured, “begging Heathcliff to open the windows so she can smell the heather on the moors.”

  “Life is not a romantic novel,” Miss Corey said, wheeling on Daisy. Then turning back to me, “And the Darklings aren’t misunderstood romantic heroes. Life is a lot crueler than you can possibly imagine. You might as well learn that now.”

  “What a terrible thing to say, Lillian!” Miss Sharp said, her eyes blazing. “You’re the last person I would have thought would be cruel because someone was different.”

  All the color had drained out of Miss Corey’s face, leaving only the dark mottling of her skin, which now looked like an angry rash instead of the beautiful “dappled things” praised in the poem. “Perhaps I’m just trying to protect her from nightmares,” she said.

  “Protect whom from what nightmares?”

  The question came from the doorway. Mr. Bell
ows stood there, an apple in one hand, a book in the other. He looked innocently from Miss Corey to Miss Sharp and then to me, taking in my bedraggled state. “Ava certainly looks like she’s taken a fright.”

  “Ava’s been with a Darkling and Nathan is missing,” Miss Sharp said quickly, waving him into the room and shutting the door behind him. “We’re trying to decide what to do. Ava claims that Nathan took the Darkling.”

  “Whyever would Nathan do such a thing?” Mr. Bellows asked. “And how could he control a Darkling? I’m quite sure we haven’t covered that in the syllabus.”

  “He has your dagger!” I cried impatiently. “He’s been practicing shadow magic with it. I’m afraid Nathan’s been taken over by the tenebrae.”

  “Then we must find him immediately,” Mr. Bellows said, his face pale.

  “We’ll have to tell Dame Beckwith . . . ” Miss Sharp began, but Mr. Bellows shook his head.

  “She’s not here. Gillie drove her to Rhinecliff this morning after breakfast to take the train to the city for an emergency meeting of the Bell & Feather. She won’t be back until tonight. And then imagine her horror on hearing that her son is lost in the same woods where her daughter disappeared. She’ll send in the Hunt to flush out any Darklings in the woods—”

  “We can’t let her do that!” I interrupted. “Raven helped me. I can’t be the reason he and his kind are hunted down and killed!”

  “If we begin the search ourselves now we might find Nathan before Dame Beckwith returns.”

  “And how do you plan to get past the Dianas and their hawks?” Miss Corey demanded.

  “Wasn’t Gillie going to hold a workshop on imping the falcons’ tail feathers today?” Mr. Bellows asked. “The Dianas will be in the mews with their birds all afternoon.”

  “They leave one on duty,” Miss Corey objected.

  “But today it’s Charlotte Falconrath,” Mr. Bellow’s replied. “And she’s . . . well . . .”