Ravencliffe

by Carol Goodman

  “No, Gillie,” I said. “The girls are all under a spell. We can break it, we think. Can you guard the front door for us and make sure no one tries to take the girls away?”

  “Aye,” he growled. “Those bastards will take my girls o’er my dead body!” He lurched away down the hall toward the front stairs. I watched him go worriedly, hoping that focusing on a mission would keep him from transforming back into a Ghillie Dhu.

  Just then three girls in matching doll costumes flitted out of the dressing room, humming the winter polka from Die Puppenfee, and headed toward the ballroom. The sound of hearty male voices was rising up from the stairs along with that awful stench of smoke. The orchestra was tuning up. The dance was about to begin. I took a deep breath and, repeater in hand, dove into the dressing room.

  For a moment it called to mind the Triangle factory at closing hour on the day of the fire: girls in rows chattering together, running back and forth in a frenzy. Instead of smoke the air was full of tulle swathes billowing out from the girls’ costumes as they spun around and around. Just watching them made me dizzy. I found myself humming the polka . . .

  I pressed the repeater to my ear and looked around for Daisy and Helen. Fortunately they were standing together comparing their costumes. Helen was wearing a shade of lavender I knew she wouldn’t be caught dead in. I marched over to them and grabbed them each by their arms and started pulling them toward the door. They both squawked, but I told them we were going to the ballroom because it was time for their dance. That seemed to satisfy them both so well they began dancing as we left the room. I handed Helen over to Nathan and waltzed with Daisy around a corner and whisked her into an alcove. I held up the repeater and played the tune.

  “That’s not my part,” Daisy said, frowning.

  “It’s a new piece that Herr Hofmeister wants you to learn,” I said. “You must concentrate, Daisy.” I played it again for her. She tilted her head back and forth and began to shake. Terrified that I’d somehow broken Daisy, I screamed for Nathan. He came running with Helen.

  “It’s all right,” Helen cried, putting her arm around Daisy. “This happened to me, too. In my case I think it was the shock of finding myself in mauve. Daisy is no doubt just realizing—”

  “I broke off my engagement with Mr. Appleby!” she wailed, pulling a lace handkerchief from her bodice.

  Helen straightened her back, took Daisy by the shoulders, and looked her in the eye. “I will personally explain everything to Mr. Appleby and you will marry him if that’s what you want, and Ava and I will be your bridesmaids in whatever dreadful dresses you choose.”

  Daisy flung her arms around Helen and pulled me into their embrace. “I was so afraid to tell you both because Helen was so angry at the other girls getting engaged and Ava—well, I know you might never get married because you love a Darkling.”

  That was why she’d kept her engagement from me?

  “Ahem.” Nathan cleared his throat. “Far be it from me to interrupt your wedding planning, but we have a school full of girls to de-mesmerize.”

  “Right,” Helen said in a businesslike way while wiping a tear from her eye. Daisy handed Helen her own handkerchief, which Helen quickly passed to me, as if I were the one in need of it. “Let’s memorize this tune,” she said to Daisy.

  Nathan and I left Helen and Daisy practicing the de- mesmerism tune and headed back to the dressing room. As we rounded the corner, though, we ran into Mrs. Calendar waltzing around the landing, humming the Chinese mazurka from Die Puppenfee. “Ah, there you are! Why aren’t you children dancing? You, Nathan Beckwith, you’ve always been a lazy, ne’er-do-well. If you don’t apply yourself you’ll break your mother’s heart.”

  As Mrs. Calendar berated Nathan I saw the shadows rising in his eyes. I grabbed hold of the Latin teacher and held the repeater up in front of her face. At first it had no effect. Years of memorizing Latin declensions and conjugations had given her a mind like a steel trap. Once I got through to her, though, she sprang into action. “We must rescue Dame Beckwith first. She’s in the ballroom.”

  As we approached the ballroom, a flock of girls in pink gauze and tulle flitted past us, twittering like sparrows. Nathan tried to grab the last two in the troop, but they leaped nimbly out of his grasp and joined their cohorts. We’d only managed to de-mesmerize a handful of girls, whom Daisy was trying to corral back into the dressing room. The rest of the girls were streaming into the ballroom. We were caught up in the flow. The ballroom seemed to be spinning like the Hellgate, with colorful bits of flotsam and jetsam caught inside it. I pulled Mrs. Calendar off to the side so I could get my bearings.

  The whirlpool was made of dancing couples spinning around the polished marble floor, the girls’ dresses bright as tropical fish. The orchestra was playing on the balcony, which was swathed with evergreen boughs. The walls had been draped in heavy garlands of evergreen and sprinkled with some white dust to look like snow. In the corners of the room the pine boughs had been arched over sleighs, their benches upholstered in red velvet and dripping with furs. Here the board members and the older women of the Order sat, the women sipping cider, the men puffing their cigars, the smoke from which hung in the air over the dancing couples.

  I looked again at the dance floor. The girls’ partners were all young men, handsomely attired in black evening coats and smart red ascots, sprigs of holly pinned to their lapels. They were moving so fast, though, that I couldn’t make out the men’s faces. They all blurred into one featureless face . . .

  I tottered on my feet and Mrs. Calendar—frail little Mrs. Calendar—righted me with a firm shake.

  “Get ahold of yourself, girl!” she snapped. “Now’s not the time to swoon. There’s Dame Beckwith.”

  As we made our way around the edges of the ballroom I kept my eyes on Mrs. Calendar’s ramrod-straight back and grasped my repeater in my hand. When I tried playing it, though, it repeated the waltz that the orchestra was playing, so I recited Latin declensions and kept my eyes off the dance floor, not wanting to look at those blank faces.

  I tripped over the leg of a man sitting in one of the sleighs. He grabbed my arm and I felt his whiskers brush my face and smelled the reek of tobacco on his breath. “Watch yourself, girl.”

  I stared at the old man. His face was fat and red, rimmed with white muttonchops. His eyes were clouded over by cataracts. He looked like someone’s harmless old grandfather, but then I saw, swimming beneath his cataracts, smoke-gray shadows like the tenebrae I’d glimpsed beneath the ice.

  “Leave her alone, Winthrop Clay,” Mrs. Calendar said, pulling me away. “Everyone knows you drove your own wife into the madhouse.”

  “You know these men?” I whispered as we left Winthrop Clay puffing on his cigar, eyes vacant as his empty punch glass.

  “I grew up with most of them. Played croquet with Winty Clay in Newport. Thought he was sweet on me.” She smiled up at me, her wizened old face looking for a moment youthful. “But the Order had other ideas for us. Married me off to a man twice my age.”

  “That’s awful!” I said.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “It was. When he died I wasn’t allowed to remarry because I’d had no children.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not sure what else to say.

  “I was too, for a while, but then I was allowed to go back to my studies and teach. I’ve come to think of you girls as my children. As for this lot,” she snorted, “look at Winty now. His wife, Elvira, wound up in the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane down in Poughkeepsie. And look at Maunsell Livermore.” She pointed to a cadaverous gentleman lurking behind the refreshment table. “Lost all his money in the crash of ninety-three and has been knocking around his old mansion like a ghost ever since. In fact, the men of the Order have been going downhill since the crash. No wonder they want to marry you all off. They need new money to shore up the endowment.”

  I
followed Mrs. Calendar to the refreshment table, where Dame Beckwith was chatting with Maunsell Livermore and a portly gentleman whose enormous girth was barely restrained by a scarlet cummerbund.

  “. . . all of good stock,” Scarlet Cummerbund was saying as we drew up to them. “Young men of good families—wealthy families . . . er, p’haps not old families like us, if you take my meaning.”

  “No, not old families,” Maunsell Livermore drawled. “But wealthy ones. And that’s what we need right now.”

  “Infusion of new blood, don’t you know,” Scarlet Cummerbund puffed, smoke billowing out of his fat red lips.

  “Infusion of new money,” Livermore echoed. “Just the ticket. Never mind your fancy breeding charts. What the Order needs now are financial resources.”

  “I suppose so,” Dame Beckwith said uncertainly, tucking a strand of silver hair behind her ear—I don’t think I’d ever seen a single strand come loose before. “But where did you say you found these young gentlemen?”

  “Found us,” Scarlet Cummerbund said, bellowing forth more smoke . . . but when had he taken another puff of his cigar? “Enterprising lads. They want to raise their stock by marrying into the old families. Sound reasoning, I say.”

  “The soundest,” Livermore purred, smoke dribbling down his chin. “Good investment, what?”

  “I suppose so,” Dame Beckwith said, blinking in the smoke. “Oh, here’s Mrs. Calendar. You know her, of course.”

  Both men blinked at the Latin teacher and then simultaneously said, “Junessa Calendar,” and bowed.

  “And here’s Miss Avaline Hall, one of our brightest students and from a very old family indeed.”

  “Hall?” Livermore said. “Ah yes, believe I played snooker with your grandfather, Throckmorton. Good stock, the Halls. You should be dancing.”

  “Yes, you should be dancing,” Scarlet Cummerbund echoed, blowing smoke rings up into the air. He wasn’t even holding a cigar, I realized with a chill. Worse, the smoke rings summoned one of the black-clad young men. He clicked his heels together as if he were in a military parade and bowed to me. As he lifted his head I braced myself to look at his face—terrified that he had none—but the man had the requisite, if bland, features: brown hair, brown eyes, thin nose, brown mustache, red lips.

  “Would you care to dance, Miss?” he asked in a smooth, polite voice.

  “Oh, thank you, but no, not now—”

  “Nonsense, Ava,” Dame Beckwith said. “You must dance.”

  “Yes, you must,” Livermore and Cummerbund said in unison.

  “No, really—”

  But the polite, bland-featured gentleman had already taken my elbow and was leading me onto the dance floor. I tried to free myself, but his grip was like iron. I looked back at Mrs. Calendar, who was leading Dame Beckwith into one of the sleighs. She would free Dame Beckwith if anyone could. I’d put up with this one dance and then rejoin my friends.

  My partner put his arm around my waist and spun me deftly into the whirl of dancers. I let out a little gasp at the speed and he said, “Don’t worry, Miss, I’ve got you.”

  That was exactly what I was worried about. His arm around my waist felt like an iron manacle. I looked into his bland face, searching for malice in his brown eyes, but saw nothing there but polite expectancy. He was humming along with the music like a child.

  “Who are you?” I began, and then, recalling my manners, amended, “We haven’t been formally introduced. My name is Avaline Hall.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Hall,” he replied. “I’m . . . I’m . . .” For half a second he lost the rhythm of the dance and we nearly collided with another couple—Myrtilene, I saw, and her dance partner. Then my partner laughed.

  “Well, ain’t that the darndest thing. I seem to have forgotten my name. But don’t you worry your little head about that. I do remember that my father owns the largest chain of dry good stores east of the Mississippi and I went to all the best schools. I’m sure my name will come back to me by the time we’re standing in front of the altar.”

  “I have absolutely no intention of marrying you, Mr. . . . Whoever-you-are.”

  My partner laughed. “That’s what all the girls say, but they don’t mean it.”

  “Well, I do mean it. Please take me off the dance floor now.”

  “Look, it’s time for one of those divert-i-ments you gals are so good at. Come, let’s watch it together.”

  Still gripping my waist, my partner pulled me off the dance floor. A troop of dancers dressed like China dolls pirouetted out and began to perform a jerky ballet. I saw Herr Hofmeister standing in the doorway waving his baton, directing the girls’ movements, plucking the air with his gloved hand as though playing an invisible harp. One of the Chinese dolls—could that be Cam Bennett?—moved at his direction as if connected to him by strings. I felt my partner’s arm twitching to the same rhythm.

  “That’s what all the girls say,” he murmured. “Pleased to meet you. All the best schools. But they don’t mean it.” I looked around and saw that all the young men were mouthing similar inanities. And it didn’t seem to bother the girls—our girls. There was Beatrice Jager beaming at her partner as if he were reciting Plato, when all he was saying was “I do love croquet” over and over again. And there was Wallis Rutherford goggling at a chinless specimen prattling on about wanting at least a dozen children.

  On the fringes of the crowd I spied Nathan and Helen and Daisy working to separate out our girls to de-mesmerize them, but their dancing partners wouldn’t let them go. When Nathan tried to pry Susannah Dewsnap out of one man’s grip he backhanded Nathan in the jaw without a change of expression and calmly remarked that he preferred yachting in Oyster Bay to Nantucket. And all the while the men kept their eyes on Herr Hofmeister’s twirling baton.

  That was it—Hofmeister was controlling them. We had to stop Hofmeister. We needed the bells. What had happened to our teachers? Had they been caught?

  I squirmed against my partner’s arm, but he only tightened his grip.

  “Let me go!” I screamed.

  He turned to me, his face blank as paste, and said, “That’s what all the girls say, but they don’t mean it.”

  My blood turned cold at his words and then curdled when each and every one of the young men turned toward me in unison and spoke in van Drood’s voice. “That’s what your mother said, but she didn’t mean it.” Then like clockwork the young men swept their partners onto the dance floor.

  As I struggled against my captor’s grip, the ballroom doors slammed open with a bang that disrupted the flow of the dance. For a moment the girls, arrested in their movements, stumbled like automatons whose clockwork had broken. Their partners also stopped and looked toward the door to see what had caused the disruption, their bland, plump faces registering the annoyance of men used to getting their way. Who—or what—had come?

  I turned to see the wide doorway darkened by a cluster of cloaked figures. They stood in a V formation, the tallest figure at the point, their cloaks dripping with icicles as though they had swum here beneath the frozen river. I thought of the tenebrae under the ice—but then the lead figure took a step forward and whisked his cloak back over his shoulders with a sound like . . . wings.

  “Raven!” I breathed.

  “We heard you were having a dance,” he said in his clear, rich voice, sweeping his plumed cap off his head. Under his cloak he was dressed in black leather pants, a black leather vest, and a flowing white shirt. He looked like a pirate from one of Mr. Pyle’s illustrated adventure books. “I guess our invitations were lost in the mail.”

  28

  “DARKLINGS!” DAME BECKWITH hissed.

  “They’re here to help,” I said, trying to wrench myself out of my captor’s arms. When Raven saw me struggling he crossed the dance floor in two strides and loomed inches from my captor’s face.
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  “Let her go,” he growled in a barely human voice.

  “I lost her mother to one of you.” My captor spoke in van Drood’s voice. “I won’t lose her, too. Now why don’t you leave. Your kind aren’t welcome here.”

  Raven seemed momentarily taken aback by van Drood’s voice coming out of the rosy lips of the bland-faced man, but he recovered quickly. He looked around the ballroom at the coterie of well-dressed young men frozen like players in a tableau vivant. Then he turned back to the one who still gripped my arm. He stooped his head within a hair of the man’s ear and growled. “You’re not even brave enough to show yourself in person, van Drood. No wonder Evangeline Hall chose Falco over you.”

  The man holding me made a hissing sound, like air leaking out of a pneumatic tire, and his hands fell from my arms. Raven swept me away from him onto the dance floor. The orchestra had begun to play again—but a completely different tune from the syrupy strains of Die Puppenfee. Glancing up at the balcony I saw that a group of Darklings had taken the musicians’ places. The music had a rhythm that made my feet skip over the dance floor. As we spun around the room I saw the Darklings shouldering away the investors, who huffed and puffed but retreated. Around me girls came awake, their cheeks turning pink beneath the pasty doll makeup, their limbs loosening and breaking free of the puppet master’s strings.

  “This is what you planned with Nathan,” I said.

  “Yes,” Raven admitted. “And I wish I could dance all night with you, but your Nathan has another plan.”

  “He’s not my Nathan,” I objected.

  “You may have to tell him that,” Raven whispered in my ear, the heat of his breath sending shivers all the way down my spine. “But right now it looks like he wants you to go with him.”

  He’d danced me to the door, where Nathan, Helen, and Daisy waited for me. Nathan took my hand, but his eyes were on Raven.

  “Can you handle things from here?” he asked.