Ravencliffe

by Carol Goodman

  “And,” Dead Pheasant Girl continued, “she’s hardly attired like a Blythewood girl.”

  “Neither are you,” Helen observed, staring pointedly at the mounds of lace around the girl’s high collar, her pinched-in waist, hobbled skirt, and thin-soled slippers. “You’ll never be able to draw a bow with all those ruffles in your way, and you’ll faint from lack of oxygen the first time you try to ring the bells in that corset. Never mind what the falcons will do to that bird on your hat. You’ll be lucky to get through the front door without Blodeuwedd plucking you bald.”

  Dead Pheasant Girl had been growing pink as Helen spoke, while her two friends stared at me as if I had sprouted wings, which I might at any moment do if the girls didn’t get out of our way.

  “Are you a senior then?” a snub-nosed short brunette asked, her black button eyes going wide.

  “Oh,” I demurred, embarrassed that I’d been lording it over a group of new girls. “No, I’m a fledgling, that’s a—”

  “Second year!” the third girl, tall and thin with glasses, shouted out. “I’ve been studying the handbook.”

  “Well then,” Helen said. “You should know that mere nestlings should defer to fledglings. Please step aside so we can join our friend.”

  “I don’t recall any such rule from the handbook,” the studious girl remarked.

  “Handbook?” Etta yelped. “I didn’t know there was a handbook. There’s plenty of room in the seats facing us. Why don’t you join us and we can all look at it together?”

  “But then we’d be facing backward,” Dead Pheasant Girl replied. “I simply can’t ride backward; it gives me the vapors.”

  “Well, I can,” the black-eyed girl piped up, cramming into the seat facing Etta. “I’ve never had the vapors a day in my life.”

  “Nor I,” the studious girl remarked, slipping into the other rear-facing seat. “Although I think you may actually mean vertigo if you’re referring to the dizziness caused by the rearward motion of the train.”

  “I can squeeze in with them because I’m so small,” Etta said with a mischievous smile for Dead Pheasant Girl, “and you can sit with Ava and Helen. Nu, then we will all be Blythewood girls together!”

  Etta hadn’t even gotten to Blythewood yet and already she was making friends.

  Helen looked at Dead Pheasant Girl as if she would like to pluck every feather off her hat. But with all the grace that decades of Old New York breeding had instilled in her, she simply said, “Would you care to join us? I’m sure we’ll all benefit from each other’s company.”

  Unsurprisingly, Dead Pheasant Girl turned out to be a Montmorency—Myrtilene Montmorency of the Savannah Montmorencys, who I gathered from all of Myrtilene’s attempts to establish otherwise were rather the poorer side of the family.

  “Our plantation was the finest in Georgia—that is, until the Yankees burned it to the ground during the War of Northern Aggression, of course,” Myrtilene confided to us.

  “You mean the Civil War?” I asked with a strained smile. “The one the South started by seceding? And that ultimately freed the slaves?”

  “Is that what they teach y’all at Blythewood?” Myrtilene asked.

  Actually, I wanted to say, what they teach at Blythewood is that slavery was an evil institution instigated by trows and that the Order, vehement abolitionists, fought alongside the North to set things to right. I recalled, though, what Omar had said to Miss Sharp. Yes, the Order had fought to free the slaves, but there were no Negro students at Blythewood.

  Besides, Myrtilene Montmorency, black-eyed Mary MacCrae, and studious Susannah Dewsnap wouldn’t know about the magical side of Blythewood until the first night’s initiation. I’d thought it might be hard for Etta to keep her own knowledge a secret, but she didn’t seem to be having any trouble. She appeared far more interested in the everyday lives of her new friends than in the dark secrets she’d been made privy to these last few weeks.

  Mary and Susannah, in turn, chatted amiably with Etta and peppered Helen and me with questions about the school.

  “Do they have dances at Blythewood?” Mary asked. “I love to dance. I came up weeks early to attend Miss Montmorency’s ball and was just dazzled by the new steps.”

  “That’s thanks to the new dancing master Uncle George hired for Georgiana’s ball,” Myrtilene remarked. “Herr Hofmeister. I understand he’s from Vienna. Georgiana has asked Uncle George to have Blythewood hire him.”

  “Madame Musette was good enough for generations of Blythewood girls,” Helen said with a sniff.

  I bit back a laugh, recalling how Helen had rolled her eyes at Madame Musette’s old-fashioned ways, but was touched by her loyalty to the ancient dancing teacher.

  “We’ve never had a dancing master at Blythewood before,” I added. “It’s not . . .” I caught myself before saying it wasn’t part of the old ways. Since when had I become a defender of Blythewood traditions? Those old ways had exploited Omar and his kind and would probably get me kicked out.

  “I declare! How do y’all prepare for your cotillions, then?” Myrtilene asked with a shake of her head that made the pheasant on top of her hat look like it wanted to take flight.

  “I don’t know how to dance,” Etta said, her brow creasing. “Except for some folk dances I learned in the settlement house.”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured Etta. “There are more important things to learn at Blythewood than how to do the latest quadrille.” But as I looked at Myrtilene preening at her reflection in the window I wondered if I knew Blythewood as well as I thought I did. Perhaps it really belonged to these new girls more than it did to me.

  Any melancholy I felt on the journey, though, was dispelled by the sight of Gilles Duffy.

  “Gillie!” I shouted, throwing my arms around the tiny elf-like man.

  “Mmph,” he said, squeezing me in a surprisingly strong grip and then holding me out at arm’s length. “Let me have a look at ye, lass. Aye, you’ve come out of the fire right as rain.” Within the black depths of his eyes I saw a flash of green and felt the air on the riverside platform stir with the scent of the woodland. “But I knew ye would. You’re your mother’s daughter, all right.”

  My eyes filled up with tears at the mention of my mother, and I felt a small hand slip into my right hand and the touch of another hand on my left arm. Helen and Etta had come to stand on either side of me.

  “Hello, Gillie,” Helen said. “You’re looking well.”

  “And you, too, Miss,” he said, doffing his shapeless tweed hat. Somehow he managed to convey in those few words his sympathy for Helen’s recent loss of her father without embarrassing her with mention of it. Then he turned to look at Etta. “And who’s this wee lass?”

  “This is Etta,” I told him. “We were at the Triangle factory together, and Miss Sharp and Miss Corey discovered she’s a . . .”

  “Fianais,” Gillie said, his eyes flashing a violent shade of acid green. The gentle woodland breeze turned into a stiff gale. “Aye, I can see that.”

  I looked down at Etta and saw that she was staring wide-eyed at Gillie. Hell’s Bells! I’d only discovered by chance last year that Gillie wasn’t entirely human. He was a Ghillie Dhu, a sort of woodland elf that protected the creatures of the woods, rescued lost girls, and, I’d begun to suspect, controlled the weather. He’d told me that Dame Beckwith knew what he was, but I didn’t think the rest of the Order did.

  The other girls—Myrtilene with her nose in the air, Susannah and Mary struggling to keep up with all their bags and hatboxes (and Myrtilene’s, too, I suspected)—were approaching, looking curiously between Gillie and ourselves. Would Etta give Gillie’s identity away?

  “Is this the valet?” Myrtilene sniffed. “Why, he’d have to stand up twice to cast a shadow!”

  A sudden gust blew Myrtilene’s hat clear off her head and sent it, dead pheasant
and all, soaring over the river, which had become suddenly choppy as the ocean.

  “He’s not a valet,” Etta declared. “He’s a”—I tried to catch her eye, but she went on—“caretaker.”

  She invested the word with a significance that went far beyond a job title. Gillie’s eyes simmered a mellow green. “Aye, lass, that’s what I am and I’m proud of it. I promise to take good care of ye and keep ye from all harm.”

  Etta had given him his proper name, but without revealing his magical nature to the other girls—certainly not to Myrtilene, who, having given up on retrieving her hat from the river, gave Gillie a dismissive glance and addressed a point a few inches above his head.

  “I’m pleased as punch y’all are getting reacquainted, but are you fixing to load up our baggage?”

  Gillie looked at Myrtilene as though he’d like to chuck her many bags into the river along with her, but instead he hauled one of Helen’s trunks onto his shoulder.

  “I’ll come back for yers,” he said to Myrtilene. “You can wait here with it or come up to the coach. Only . . .” He eyed the river. Although the day was bright and clear, fog was gathering over the water, creeping toward the shore. A fog that hadn’t been there before and that I was pretty sure was of Gillie’s making. “I wouldna tarry too long beside the water. Ye never know what might be lurkin’ in the fog.” He gave me a wink as he passed by me. “Or what might come out of it.”

  12

  BY THE TIME Gillie had carried all our trunks up to the top of the station the fog had dissipated and it was once again a fine, clear day. So fine that Gillie had brought the open-air trap instead of the gloomy coach I’d ridden in last year. Etta sat in the back with her new friends Susannah and Mary, chattering as cheerily as the birds flitting through the sycamores above our heads.

  “She certainly has adapted quickly,” Helen said quietly. I thought I detected a slight tone of resentment in her voice. Helen, after all, had had to adapt to quite a lot in the last few months.

  “I think it’s part of being a fianais,” I whispered back. I glanced anxiously at Myrtilene sitting on the other side of Helen to make sure she wasn’t listening, but she was busy trying to pin a new hat on her head—this one festooned with artificial cherries and a dead sparrow—so I went on. “Part of being a witness makes her very sensitive to other people and gives her the ability to ask people just the right questions to open them up.”

  “Hmph,” Helen sniffed. “Where I come from we call that the art of polite conversation . . . although I suppose Etta didn’t learn that on the Lower East Side. I’m glad she’s making friends,” she added grudgingly. “We won’t have to worry about her.”

  “We still need to keep an eye on her to make sure she’s safe. If van Drood realizes at any point that the changeling has taken Ruth’s place he’ll come looking for Ruth and Etta.”

  “We’d know if that had happened, though. Mr. Marvel and Mr. Omar will be watching the Hellgate Club, and Mr. Greenfeder has promised to bring in his friends at the police force if he thinks anything has gone amiss.”

  “I still wish we could have done something for those girls,” I said.

  Helen sniffed. “You can’t go around saving everyone. Most of those girls are there because they made the wrong choices.”

  “How can you say that, Helen? Ruth was kidnapped!”

  “She wouldn’t have been kidnapped if she hadn’t been meeting a man she hardly knew at Coney Island. Honestly, I think it’s appalling how girls act these days—even Blythewood girls. Look at this new crop with their newfangled dances. Do you know that there’s one called the Turkey Trot? I heard that some young women were fired from their jobs for doing it on their lunch hour. Imagine going around acting like a bird in public!”

  “Helen, we go to a school that trains us to hunt like falcons.” I shifted uncomfortably to ease the ache in my shoulder blades. “Innocent young girls are being kidnapped from the streets of New York and being held against their will in places like the Hellgate Club. Kid Marvel says there are magical beings hiding all over the city, and Omar told us that the Order has been exploiting people like him for centuries. But you’re affronted by a dance called the Turkey Trot?”

  “It sounds undignified,” she replied, ignoring all my other points. “And I don’t like these new girls coming in and changing things before they even know what it means to be a Blythewood girl. I don’t like—”

  “Change?” I asked more gently, slipping my hand over hers. Helen’s home life had changed beyond recognition. Of course she wanted Blythewood to stay the same.

  “No.” Helen sighed, squeezing my hand. “I expect I don’t. Ah, but look, we’re almost there.”

  We’d passed through the tall iron gates inscribed with the motto Tintinna Vere, Specta Alte—Ring true, aim high—and were climbing the hill. As we did, the bells began to toll, ringing us home. I saw Helen’s face rinsed clean of all the worries and fears of the last few months. Etta, Susannah, and Mary fell silent to listen. Even Myrtilene stopped fussing with her hat and stretched her long neck to catch the first glimpse of Blythewood as we crested the hill.

  There it was! As magical as I’d remembered, the worn centuries-old stone glowing gold in the bright sunshine, the bell tower rising against the blue mountains in the distance like a proud battlement standing guard over the valley. The solid castle walls radiated safety and protection just as the bells spoke of home, but the bells evoked something else in me. They seemed to vibrate in my blood. While I felt the longing for Blythewood that the bells were meant to engender in all of our Order, also it came with an unbearable sadness.

  Raven had once told me that the bells of Blythewood aroused a sorrow in the Darklings for all they had lost. I felt that sorrow now. It felt like being cast out. And I knew that if I were unveiled as a Darkling and sent away from Blythewood I’d feel this sorrow every day of my life. It was the sorrow my mother had felt, I saw now, that had compelled her to keep an engraving of the castle on her bedside table.

  I looked away from the castle and caught Etta’s eyes fastened on me. They were wide and brimming with tears. What a burden it must be to feel so deeply what others felt! I gave her a brave smile, hoping to spare her my pain and she, not fooled at all, said, “You will be all right, Avaleh, I promise.”

  “Of course Ava will be all right,” Helen said. “We’re back at Blythewood, where nothing has changed in centuries. Look, there’s Daisy! She’s gotten here early to get us a good room.”

  I doubted that had been Daisy’s sole purpose in coming early. She was wearing a sash—the mark of a warden—and I recalled that she’d said in one of her rare, brief letters that she would be taking a job this term. It was usually something scholarship girls did, and I wondered if Daisy’s father, a prosperous Kansas City merchant, had suffered a reversal in fortune. Whatever her motive, it was delightful to see Daisy standing in the thick of the arriving girls, making order out of chaos. In just the time it took us to reach the circular driveway I saw her order Georgiana to remove her luggage from the front steps, tell a chauffeur to move his Rolls-Royce, and rescue a new girl’s hat from being plucked from her head by an escaped falcon.

  “I see one of the Dianas has lost her falcon already,” I said, recalling that the Dianas came early to school and spent their first three days and nights “waking” their birds to train them. “Is that a new falcon?” I asked, admiring the elegant white hunting bird. “I don’t remember it from last year.”

  “That’ll be Georgiana Montmorency’s gyrfalcon,” Gillie, who’d come around to help us out of the trap, said. “Mr. Montmorency bought special a pair of fine gyrfalcons for her and Miss Driscoll. They’re both Dianas this year.” From his tone, it was clear how he felt about Georgiana and Alfreda being selected—a choice that doubtless had more to do with their fathers’ donations to the school than their talent as huntresses.

  “Of course
Georgiana’s a Diana,” Myrtilene said as she edged in front of everyone to be the first to disembark. “We Montmorencys are born sportswomen and natural leaders. Why, I’ve been riding to the hounds since—”

  Myrtilene’s discourse on Montmorency excellence was cut short by Georgiana’s falcon diving straight at her head and plucking the dead sparrow from her hat.

  “I told you to control that bird,” Daisy scolded as she came toward the trap, but when she saw Helen and me she threw up her hands and called our names. Helen pushed past the affronted Myrtilene and dove into Daisy’s open arms, pulling me with her. I was surprised at how strong Daisy’s arms were—and at how good it felt to be enclosed within them. Maybe Etta was right; I would be all right here.

  “I thought you two would never get here!” Daisy cried, stepping back to look at us. “I’ve got so much to tell you!”

  “You can start by telling us why you’re a warden,” Helen said. “I know it’s not because you’re on scholarship. Didn’t your father just open up a new store in Saint Louis?”

  “Really?” I asked, sounding peevish to my own ears. “Why didn’t you write and tell me that?”

  “Why, I didn’t think it was the sort of thing you’d be interested in,” Daisy replied simply. “But Helen kept writing and asking me questions—”

  “I was raised to show a polite interest in my friends’ affairs,” Helen interrupted. “As I am doing now by inquiring why you have become a warden. Is it because they’ve substituted this attractive purple-and-green sash for that hideous plaid one?”

  I noticed now that the sash Daisy wore wasn’t the same as the one Sarah Lehman had worn last year. Daisy’s had some sort of motto on it as well that did not appear to be the school’s motto.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Daisy laughed. “It’s purple and green because those are the colors of the suffragist movement. I’ve spent the summer campaigning for women’s votes. The Kansas legislature is voting on the referendum in November. I really ought to be home in Kansas picketing, but Dame Beckwith convinced me that I could do more good here—and she let me switch the warden sash for a ‘Votes for Women’ one. Here—” She dug into her pocket and handed me and Helen each a tin badge with the “Votes for Women” slogan and green-and-violet ribbons. “You can wear them with your sashes.”