Blythewood

by Carol Goodman

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “You can barely remember your declensions. How can you remember the name of the ship?”

  “That’s easy,” Helen replied. “Everyone’s heard of the Titanic. It’s the ship built to be unsinkable.”

  38

  THAT EVENING I had a nightmare. I was standing looking up at a range of great ice mountains, cliffs of black ice looming over me, making me feel smaller and smaller . . . because the cliffs were gliding steadily toward me to crush me in their icy maws. The worst part, the part that gripped me in an icy sweat, was when I realized that the cliffs were alive. They were ice giants come to smash me to bits and drag me to the bottom of the sea.

  I awoke in the dark to find Helen sitting on the side of my bed, her face in the moonlight as white and immobile as one of the ice cliffs.

  “It’s sunk,” she said, barely moving her lips.

  I thought she was talking about my dream at first, but then she said. “The Titanic has sunk.”

  “But that can’t be,” I replied blearily. “You just told me it was unsinkable . . .” But already I knew it was true—that it was just as in my dream. The ice giants had come to destroy the ship that carried Mr. Farnsworth . . . and my grandmother and Agnes and Helen’s parents.

  I got up and got dressed in a numb daze, barely hearing what Helen—and then others who came and went—had to say. There were conflicting reports. The Titanic was being towed into port by another ship, the Titanic was at the bottom of the ocean; everybody had been saved, nobody had been saved.

  Somehow I managed to get myself ready to travel to New York. Daisy had packed for both Helen and me. She wanted to come with us, but I heard myself telling her to stay. “We’ll need you when we get back,” I told her, although I was not sure what I meant.

  Then we were in the coach and Gillie was taking us to the train station. A fog covered River Road, just as it had on my first day at Blythewood—a cold fog that came, I felt sure, straight from the arctic sea where the ice giants had calved their lethal bergs and sent them to destroy the Titanic. Even now one might loom in the fog.

  “Poor lass,” Gillie said when he carried our bags down to the station. Helen stood like a statue, staring at the river as if watching for a ship to come out of the fog with her parents safely delivered.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “I hope her parents are all right.”

  “I hope so, too,” Gillie said, “but it was you I was talking about. You’re barely recovered from you own trials. How do your hands feel?”

  “My hands feel fine,” I said, flexing them under their light kid gloves. “My back still hurts, though, right along the shoulder blades. The fire must have run straight down them, but I’ll be all right. To tell the truth, I’m glad to be up and away—not that I’m glad for the reason,” I added, seeing that Gillie was staring at me oddly.

  “Nay, you’re right,” he said, “better for you to get away. You let us know when you hear any news . . . as soon as ye see Agnes Moorhen . . .” His voice faded and my mouth went dry. Agnes. I hadn’t even let myself think that Agnes might not be all right. Seeing the look on my face Gillie clamped his large hand to my shoulder. “She’ll have come through all right,” he said. “It would take more than a hunk of ice to sink our Agnes.”

  Helen was silent on the journey down, staring out the window at the fog-cloaked river. I’d never known her to go so long without uttering a word. When we arrived at the Grand Central Station she wanted to go straight to the White Star Line offices to get what information we could, but I convinced her we should go to her house first and wait for news. What news had reached the shipping offices now was likely not to be reliable.

  We took a taxi to Washington Square. It was strange to be in the city again, passing familiar sights that no longer looked familiar, perhaps because I had learned so much about the world since I had last walked these streets, and now I suspected every shadow or wondered if all the people on the streets were entirely human. Or perhaps it was because I’d never looked at those streets from the window of a taxicab.

  The van Beek townhouse was smaller than I had imagined it would be, a narrow brownstone with rooms painted in somber colors, the furniture draped in canvas looming out of the shadows like ghosts. The housekeeper apologized for not having the house ready and then burst into tears. I expected Helen to chide her but instead she patted the woman on the arm and said, “There, there, Elspeth,” and asked if there’d been any news. There was a stack of wires and letters, mostly from friends and family asking if Helen had heard anything. I convinced Helen to go to bed, promising her that we’d get up first thing in the morning and walk over to the White Star Line offices to check the lists of survivors. Before we went to bed I made Elspeth promise to wake me first if there was any news.

  The next three days were a blur of raised hopes, dashed expectations, and tortuous waiting. The early survivor lists were contradictory. Mrs. van Beek and my grandmother were listed as survivors on one and as victims on another. Agnes and Mr. van Beek weren’t mentioned on either. Nor could I find Mr. Farnsworth’s name on any of the lists.

  Finally on the night of the eighteenth we heard that the Carpathia had been sighted coming into harbor with the survivors. We rushed down to the pier where she was expected to dock and waited in the rain with the largest crowd I’d ever seen assembled. When the survivors began to disembark, the crowd came to life. Names were called out. Men and women pushed through the crowd to embrace survivors. Some fainted. Helen stood, her face stony, until she spotted someone.

  “Mama!” she cried, her face turning instantly younger. I could barely keep up with her as she pushed through the crowd. As we got nearer I saw that Mrs. van Beek was clutching the arm of another woman—my grandmother. I searched the faces around them, my heart sinking when I didn’t see Agnes . . . but then, a little way back up the gangplank I spied, above the heads of the crowd, a navy feather.

  “Agnes!” I cried. The feather twitched at the sound and a gloved hand shot up beside it. By the time I reached Helen and her mother and my grandmother, Agnes had reached them as well. I threw my arms around Agnes’s neck.

  “Well!” I heard my grandmother say. “I’m glad to see you’re happy one of us is alive.” I let Agnes go and threw my arms around my grandmother. Under her heavy wool coat she felt small and frail and her mouth seemed to be crumpling.

  “Now, now,” she tutted. “Let’s not make a fuss. You didn’t think Miss Moorhen would let me drown, did you? What do I pay her for if not to take care of such details?”

  Agnes rolled her eyes and whispered into my ear. “You should have seen the trouble I had getting her to wear a lifejacket.”

  I started to laugh at the image, but then I saw Helen. She was looking around the crowd, her eyes skittering from stranger to stranger until they landed back on her mother.

  “Where’s Daddy?” she asked.

  I stayed at the van Beeks’ through the rest of April and into early May, at first to see Helen through the early days of grief and then to help her sort through the morass of financial entanglement that descended on the van Beek household.

  It seemed that Mr. van Beek had fallen deeply into debt over the last few years, something to do with a bad investment and then an attempt to recoup his losses that went even worse. Intimations of his losses had been coming for months. Having failed to prevail on his wife to curtail expenses, Mr. van Beek had confided his concerns to Helen to see if she might talk sense to her mother. That had been the subject of all the letters going back and forth between Helen and her parents.

  The situation, though, was made far worse by Mr. van Beek’s death. I couldn’t make much sense of the explanations given by the men in dark suits who descended on the house like a murder of crows and, I saw, neither could Helen or her mother. So I called Agnes in to help. She came in a trim navy suit with a cerulean feather in her straw boater, and Mr. Green
feder in tow. Together they marshaled the lawyers and accountants into order. Within a day she’d written up a clear report for Mrs. van Beek and sent Mr. Greenfeder on errands around the city to see what could be done to investigate the circumstances of Mr. van Beek’s failed investments. When she was done, she left mother and daughter in the library and came out to talk to me in the parlor.

  “Will they be all right?” I asked, noting that even the feather in Agnes’s cap was wilting.

  She sighed. “I’ve outlined a plan by which, if they are willing to cut back and be frugal, they should be able to manage. I’m afraid the rest is up to them. If the mother were able to be a little stronger for Helen’s sake . . .” She faltered, perhaps remembering the example my mother set.

  “It’s all right,” I assured her. “I’ve learned why my mother did what she did. She may have been weak in the months before she died, but in the end . . .” My voice quivered, but I went on. “In the end she did what she did for me. She drank the laudanum to destroy the shadows, not because she had given in to them.”

  Agnes’s chin trembled and I reached out to squeeze her hand. It felt strange to be comforting the indomitable Agnes Moorhen. She must have felt it, too, because she smiled ruefully. “You’ve changed up there at Blythewood, and not just your new hair,” she said, laughing. “Although I do think that it’s quite fetching on you. But what I meant is that you’ve grown stronger.”

  I laughed. “Well, I didn’t have much choice, did I?”

  Agnes looked suddenly somber. “There’s always a choice. And I’m afraid you’re going to have to make some difficult ones in the future.” She looked around the van Beek parlor, peering behind the aspidistras as if someone—or something—might be lurking in the shadows. “There’s something I have to tell you about what happened on the ship. There was a man on board whom I recognized . . .”

  “Was it Judicus van Drood?” I asked.

  “How did you know?” Agnes cried, trembling at the sound of his name.

  “Because he was the man in the Inverness cape who followed me and my mother.”

  “But why . . . ?” Agnes’s eyes grew wide. “Wait . . . I remember when he taught at Blythewood your mother was his favorite student. There was some talk that they had formed an inappropriate relationship.”

  I shuddered, recalling van Drood’s name on the chart betrothing him to my mother. Was it possible that he was my father? I pushed away the thought. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Agnes.

  “Because I didn’t believe it for a minute! Evangeline Hall would never have had an improper relationship with a teacher—not even with Mr. van Drood, whom all the girls liked so much . . . although I always thought he was a bit strange. When we met him on board I was quite sorry that Mr. van Beek invited him to our table.”

  “Helen’s father knew him?”

  “Why yes, the families have known each other for generations. Mr. van Drood had been advising Mr. van Beek on some business matters . . . oh! I should have thought of that sooner. I wonder if van Drood’s advice led to the van Beek’s financial difficulties.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “What did van Drood talk about at dinner?”

  Agnes shook her head as if trying to scatter cobwebs. “It’s all rather a blur. I always had a headache after those dinners. I thought it was from the motion of the ship, but I don’t generally get seasick, as I told Mr. Farnsworth—”

  “Mr. Farnsworth! Mr. Herbert Farnsworth! The librarian of the Hawthorn School?”

  “Why, yes! He sat at our table. He was quite . . .” She dimpled and colored. “Learned. We had some fascinating conversations about books.”

  I quickly explained that Mr. Farnsworth had been carrying a book for me.

  “Ah,” Agnes said, “that explains a few things. He carried with him a leather portmanteau strapped across his chest at all times because, he explained, he had some important documents in it that he could not risk leaving unattended . . . oh my!” Agnes turned pale. “I’ve just recalled that Mr. van Drood took quite an interest in Mr. Farnsworth.”

  My mouth went dry. “What happened to Mr. Farnsworth?” I asked as gently as I could.

  Agnes shook her head and bit her lip. “I don’t really know. Mr. Farnsworth and I were on the deck the night we hit the iceberg. We saw Mr. van Drood standing on the foredeck staring into the sea. Then the iceberg appeared . . . everyone was so shocked at its appearance, but not Mr. van Drood. I remember I had the strangest feeling that he had summoned it.”

  I recalled the dream I’d had about the icebergs coming to life as ice giants and what Raven said about the ice giants leaving the woods and going back north. Had van Drood somehow gotten control of the ice giants? Had he lured them to the Titanic to destroy the ship?

  “What happened then?” I asked.

  “Chaos! I had to go find your grandmother and Mrs. van Beek and help them get into their life vests. Mrs. van Beek wanted to retrieve her jewels from the safe! Can you imagine? Mr. van Beek said he would wait for the jewels and sent us on ahead. Poor Mr. van Beek—we never saw him again! I saw Mr. Farnsworth once more. He helped us find a lifeboat with space to take us. I wanted to go back and help more people but he lifted me bodily from the deck and placed me in the boat! Then he started to give me his portmanteau—”

  “He was going to give you the book!”

  “Yes, but then he looked over his shoulder and changed his mind. Instead he . . .” Agnes blushed. “Well, let’s just say he gave me a very fervid good-bye. Then he was gone. I lost sight of him when the boat was lowered. That was the last time I ever saw him.”

  I squeezed Agnes’s hand. “When Mr. Farnsworth looked over his shoulder, did you see what he was looking at?”

  “No . . . I . . . well, now that you ask . . .” She furrowed her brow, trying to concentrate. “When I try to think about it everything gets all . . . shadowy.”

  “Do you think it could have been van Drood?”

  Agnes winced, as if in pain. Then she shook her head as if she were trying to clear water out of her ears.

  “Yes!” she said suddenly, a look of determination replacing the fog on her face. “Yes! I don’t know why I didn’t remember earlier. That man! He was following Mr. Farnsworth even then . . . even with the ship sinking! And Mr. Farnsworth must not have given me the book because . . .” A sob burst from Agnes’s mouth.

  “Because van Drood would have pursued you for it,” I said. “And no doubt drowned you and everyone in your lifeboat for it. He lured van Drood away from you.” Back onto a sinking ship, I almost said, thinking of someone who had flown through fire to save someone. “What a brave man!”

  “Yes,” Agnes said, wiping her eyes, “but I’m afraid he must have drowned in his heroic efforts. I did not see him among the survivors on the Carpathia.”

  “And did you see van Drood?”

  Agnes shook her head. “No . . . at least, I don’t think so . . . no, I’m sure. The only place I’ve seen that devil since is in my nightmares.”

  “Then let’s hope he drowned,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster. I had a dreadful suspicion, though, that it would take more than the Titanic sinking to destroy Judicus van Drood.

  39

  HELEN AND I left for Blythewood the next day. Mrs. van Beek insisted that Helen go. “Your kind Miss Moorhen and her friend Mr. Greenfeder have promised to look in on me and help me make some alterations in our domestic economy. You’d only be in the way. Best you go back to school. Who knows? Maybe you’ll marry that funny Beckwith boy and support your old mother in her dotage.”

  Helen blushed at the reference to Nathan and chided her mother, but I could tell that it was the reminder of Nathan that decided her. She’d had a letter from him expressing condolences for her father’s death that she must have read a dozen times on the train ride up to Rhinebeck.

&n
bsp; “He says Louisa is making some progress. She plays games of patience most of the day, but she’s willing to play bridge with the aunts and Uncle Taddie after tea. He says he’s taking her to a sanatorium in Marienbad this summer.”

  “Perhaps they’ll be able to help her,” I said, wondering if it was the same sanatorium that had been unable to restore Uncle Taddie’s mind entirely. “Does he . . . um . . . mention a boarder at Violet House?”

  Helen looked at me strangely. “He did say his aunts had a boarder who suddenly vanished. A clockmaker’s apprentice . . .” Her voice trailed off. The old Helen would have grilled me on my interest in a mere apprentice, but she only looked out the window, her eyes growing as vague as the mist rising off the river.

  Gillie met us at the train station. He took off his cap and bowed formally to Helen to express his sorrow for her father’s death, then turned away when he saw she was struggling not to cry. She lost that struggle when Daisy greeted her on the steps of the school. We shuttled her quickly up the steps then, knowing she’d hate for the other girls to see her crying. As we unpacked Daisy kept up a constant chatter about her plans to get us through finals.

  “I’ve organized all my notes and made a schedule,” she said, demonstrating a thick ledger book with color-coded flags for each subject. “Dolores and Beatrice are going to prep you for science and I’m going to quiz you on bell changes. Cam has gotten Miss Swift to agree to drop your practical in archery, seeing how Ava saved the school with that feather trick of hers, and Helen . . .”

  “And poor Helen’s father died?” she asked, a bit of her customary tartness returning. “Am I to be passed out of pity?”

  Daisy looked embarrassed. “Not at all. Miss Swift said she had no doubt you could shoot the tail feathers off the rest of the girls. She wants you to run the archery club next year.”