by Libba Bray
“Your complexion’s fine.” I pretend to fiddle with my collar.
She’s not bought off so easily. “It’s all right. I know I’m plain. Everyone says it.” There’s a hint of defiance in her eyes, as if she’s daring me to say it isn’t true. If I disagree, she’ll know I’m lying. If I say nothing, she’ll have her worst fears confirmed.
“Strawberries, you say? I’ll have to try some.”
The glazed calm is back. She was hoping for the lie from me, for one person to disagree and tell her she’s beautiful. I’ve failed her.
“Suit yourself,” she says, leaving me alone at last to wonder whether I’ll ever make a single friend at Spence.
There’s just enough time to make the morning’s first stop—a little offering of appreciation for Felicity’s kindness last night—and then I’m off to breakfast, suddenly famished. As I’m late, I manage to avoid seeing Felicity, Pippa, and the others. Unfortunately, it means I cannot also avoid the now lukewarm eggs and porridge, which are every bit as bad as Ann predicted and then some. The porridge congeals on my spoon in cold, thick clumps.
“Told you so,” she says, finishing the last of a piece of bacon that makes my mouth water.
When we report to our first class, Mademoiselle LeFarge’s French lesson, my luck runs out. Felicity’s clique of girls is clumped together in their seats, waiting for me. They guard the back row of the small, cramped room so that I’m forced to walk the gauntlet past them to take a seat. Right. Here goes.
Felicity sticks out her dainty foot, stopping me in the narrow row between her wooden desk and Pippa’s. “Sleep well?”
“Quite.” I give it an extra cheeriness it doesn’t deserve, to show how little I’m bothered by schoolgirl pranks in the night. The foot remains.
“However did you manage it? Getting out, I mean?” Cecily asks.
“I have hidden powers,” I say, amusing myself with this rueful bit of information. Martha realizes she’s been left out of the night’s foolery. She can’t bring herself to say so. Instead, she tries to be part of them by mimicking me.
“I have hidden powers,” she singsongs.
My cheeks go hot. “By the way, I did secure the object you requested.”
Felicity is all attention. “Really? Where do you have it hidden?”
“Oh, I didn’t think it wise to hide it. Might not be able to find it again,” I say, cheerily. “It’s sitting in plain view on your chair in the great hall. I do hope that was the best place for it.”
Felicity’s mouth flies open in horror. I give her foot a little shove with my leg and move up to a desk in the front row, feeling the heat of their gazes on my neck.
“What was that all about?” Ann asks, folding her hands neatly on her desk like a model pupil.
“Nothing worth mentioning,” I say.
“They locked you in the church, didn’t they?”
I lift the lid on my desk to block out Ann’s face. “No, of course not. Don’t be silly.” But for the first time I see the hint of a smile—a real smile—tugging at the corners of her mouth.
“Will they never get tired of that one?” she mutters, shaking her head.
Before I can respond, Mademoiselle LeFarge, all two hundred pounds of her, sweeps into the room with a cheery “Bonjour.” She grabs a rag and rubs it vigorously across the already clean slate, prattling on in French the whole time, stopping to ask the occasional question, which, I’m panicked to discover, everyone has the answer to—in French. I haven’t the faintest idea what’s going on, French being a language I’ve always thought sounded vaguely like gargling.
Mademoiselle LeFarge stops at my desk, claps her hands together in discovery. “Ah, une nouvelle fille! Comment vous appellez-vous?” Her face hovers dangerously near mine so that I can see the space between her two front teeth and every pore on her wide nose.
“Beg your pardon?” I ask.
She wags a chubby finger. “Non, non, non . . . en Français, s’il vous plaît. Maintenant, comment vous appellez-vous?” She gives me that hopeful, wide smile again. Behind me, I hear snickering erupt from Felicity and Pippa. The first day of my new life and I’m stumped before I begin.
It feels like hours before Ann finally volunteers a helpful “Elle s’appelle Gemma.”
What is your name? All those strangled vowel sounds to ask one bloody stupid question? This is the silliest language on earth.
“Ah, bon, Ann. Très bon.” Felicity is still stifling her laughter. Mademoiselle LeFarge asks her a question. I pray she’ll stumble through it like a cow, but her French is absolutely flawless. There is no justice in the world.
Each time Mademoiselle LeFarge asks me something, I stare straight ahead and say “Pardon?” a lot, as if being either deaf or polite will help me understand this impossible language. Her wide grin closes slowly into a scowl till she gives up altogether asking me anything, which is fine with me. When the grueling hour is finally over, I have learned to stumble my way through the phrases “How charming” and “Yes, my strawberries are very juicy.”
Mademoiselle lifts her arms and we all rise in unison, recite the goodbye. “Au revoir, Mademoiselle LeFarge.”
“Au revoir, mes filles,” she calls as we place books and ink-wells inside our desks. “Gemma, could you stay for a moment, please?” Her English accent is bracing as cold water after all that flowy French. Mademoiselle LeFarge is no more Parisian than I am.
Felicity nearly trips in her mad rush to get out the door.
“Mademoiselle Felicity! There’s no need to hurry.”
“Pardon, Mademoiselle LeFarge.” She glares at me. “I’ve just remembered that I need to retrieve something important before my next class.”
When the room thins out to just the two of us, Mademoiselle LeFarge settles her bulk behind her desk. The desk is clear except for a tintype of a handsome man in uniform. Probably a brother or other relative. After all, she is a mademoiselle, and older than twenty-five—a spinster with no hopes of marrying now, otherwise what would she be doing here, teaching girls as a last resort?
Mademoiselle LeFarge shakes her head. “Your French is in need of much work, Mademoiselle Gemma. Surely you know this. You will have to work very hard to stay in this class with the other girls your age. If I don’t see improvement, I will be forced to demote you to the lower classes.”
“Yes, mademoiselle.”
“You can always ask the other girls for help, if need be. Felicity’s French is quite good.”
“Yes,” I say, swallowing hard, knowing full well that I would rather eat nails than ask for Felicity’s help.
The rest of the day passes slowly and uneventfully. There are elocution lessons. Dancing and posture and Latin. There is music with Mr. Grunewald, a tiny, stooped Austrian man with a weary voice and a look of defeat stamped across his sagging face, every sigh saying that teaching us to play and sing is one step below being tortured slowly to death. We’re all competent, if uninspiring, with our music—except for Ann.
When she stands up to sing, a clear, sweet voice comes pouring out of her. It’s lovely, if somewhat timid. With practice, and a little more feeling, she could be quite good, actually. It’s a shame that she won’t ever get the chance. She’s here to be trained to be of service, nothing more. When the music is over, she keeps her head down till she finds her seat again, and I wonder how many times each day she dies a little.
“You have quite a nice voice,” I whisper to her when she takes her seat.
“You’re just saying that to be kind,” she says, biting a fingernail. But a blush works its way into her full, ruddy cheeks, and I know that it means everything to her to sing her song, if just for a little while.
The week passes in a numbing routine. Prayers. Deportment. Posture. Morning and night, I enjoy the same social outcast’s status as Ann. In the evenings, the two of us sit by the fire in the great hall, the stillness broken only by the laughter coming from Felicity and her acolytes as they pointedly
ignore us. By week’s end, I’m sure I’ve become invisible. But not to everyone.
There is one message from Kartik. The night after I discover the diary, I find an old letter from Father pinned to my bed with a small blade. The letter, rambling and sloppy, had hurt to read, and so I had stuffed it into my desk drawer, hidden away. Or so I thought. Seeing it on my bed, slashed, with the words you have been warned scrawled across Father’s signature chills me to the bone. The threat is clear. The only way to keep myself and my family safe is for me to shutter my mind to the visions. But I find I can’t close off my mind without closing off the rest of me. Fear has me retreating inside myself, detached from everything, as useless as the scorched East Wing upstairs.
The only time I feel alive at all is during Miss Moore’s drawing class. I had expected it to be tedious—little nature sketches of bunnies nuzzling happily in the English countryside—but Miss Moore surprises me again. She has chosen Lord Tennyson’s famous poem, “The Lady of Shalott,” as an inspiration for our work. It’s about a woman who will die if she leaves the safety of her ivory tower. Even more surprising is that Miss Moore wants to know what we think about art. She means to have us talk and risk giving our opinions instead of making painstaking copies of cheery fruit. This throws the sheep into complete confusion.
“What can you tell me about this sketch of the Lady of Shalott?” Miss Moore asks, placing her canvas on an easel. In her picture, a woman stands at a tall window looking down on a knight in the woods. A mirror reflects the inside of the room.
It’s quiet for a moment.
“Anyone?”
“It’s charcoal,” Ann answers.
“Yes, that would be hard to dispute, Miss Bradshaw. Anyone else?” Miss Moore casts about for a victim among the eight of us present. “Miss Temple? Miss Poole?” No one says a word. “Ah, Miss Worthington, you’re rarely at a loss for words.”
Felicity tilts her head, pretends to consider the sketch, but I can tell she already knows what she wants to say. “It’s a lovely sketch, Miss Moore. Wonderful composition, with the balance of the mirror and the woman, who is rendered in the style of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, I believe.” Felicity turns on her smile, ready to be congratulated. Her apple-polishing skills are the true art here.
Miss Moore nods. “An accurate if somewhat soulless assessment.” Felicity’s smile drops fast. Miss Moore continues. “But what do you think is going on in the picture? What does the artist want us to know about this woman? What does it make you feel when you look at it?”
What do you feel ? I’ve never been asked that question once. None of us has. We aren’t supposed to feel. We’re British. The room is utterly silent.
“It’s very nice,” Elizabeth offers, in what I’ve come to realize is her no-opinion opinion. “Pretty.”
“It makes you feel pretty?” Miss Moore asks.
“No. Yes. Should I feel pretty?”
“Miss Poole, I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to respond to a piece of art.”
“But paintings are either nice and pretty or they’re rubbish. Isn’t that so? Aren’t we supposed to be learning to make pretty drawings?” Pippa pipes up.
“Not necessarily. Let’s try another way. What is taking place in this sketch right now, Miss Cross?”
“She’s looking out the window at Sir Lancelot?” Pippa phrases it as a question, as if she’s not even sure of what she’s seeing.
“Yes. Now, you’re all familiar with Tennyson’s poem. What happens to the Lady of Shalott?”
Martha speaks out, happy to get at least one thing right. “She leaves the castle and floats downstream in her boat.”
“And?”
Martha’s certainty leaves her. “And . . . she dies.”
“Why?”
There’s a bit of nervous laughter, but no one has an answer.
Finally, Ann’s bland, cool voice cuts the silence. “Because she’s cursed.”
“No, she dies for love,” Pippa says, sounding sure of herself for the first time. “She can’t live without him. It’s terribly romantic.”
Miss Moore gives a wry smile. “Or romantically terrible.”
Pippa is confused. “I think it’s romantic.”
“One could argue that it’s romantic to die for love. Of course, then you’re dead and unable to take that honeymoon trip to the Alps with all the other fashionable young couples, which is a shame.”
“But she’s doomed by a curse, isn’t she?” Ann says. “It’s not love. It’s beyond her control. If she leaves the tower, she will die.”
“And yet she doesn’t die when she leaves the tower. She dies on the river. Interesting, isn’t it? Does anyone else have any thoughts? Miss . . . Doyle?”
I’m startled to hear my own name. My mouth goes dry instantly. I furrow my brow and stare intently at the picture, waiting for an answer to announce itself. I can’t think of a blessed thing to say.
“Please do not strain yourself, Miss Doyle. I won’t have my girls going cross-eyed in the name of art.”
There’s a burst of tittering. I know I should be embarrassed, but mostly, I am relieved not to have to make up an answer I don’t have. I retreat inside myself again.
Miss Moore walks around the room, past a long table holding partially painted canvases, tubs of oil paints, stacks of watercolors, and tin cups full of paintbrushes with bristles like straw. In the corner, there’s a painting propped on an easel. It’s a nature study of trees and lawn and a steeple, a scene we can see echoed through the bank of windows in front of us. “I think that the lady dies not because she leaves the tower for the outside world, but because she lets herself float through that world, pulled by the current after a dream.”
It is quiet for a moment, nothing but the sound of feet shuffling under desks, Ann’s nails drumming softly on the wood as if it were an imaginary piano.
“Do you mean she should have paddled?” Cecily asks.
Miss Moore laughs. “In a manner of speaking, yes.”
Ann stops drumming. “But it wouldn’t matter whether she paddled or not. She’s cursed. No matter what she does, she’ll die.”
“And she’ll die if she stays in the tower, too. Perhaps not for a long time, but she will die. We all will,” Miss Moore says softly.
Ann can’t let it go. “But she has no choice. She can’t win. They won’t let her!” She leans forward in her seat, nearly out of it, and I understand, we all do, that she’s no longer talking about the lady in the picture.
“Good heavens, Ann, it’s just a silly poem,” Felicity gibes, rolling her eyes. The acolytes catch on and add their own cruel whispers.
“Shhh, that’s enough,” Miss Moore admonishes. “Yes, Ann, it’s only a poem. Only a picture.”
Pippa is suddenly agitated. “But people can be cursed, can’t they? They could have something, an affliction, that’s beyond their control. Couldn’t they?”
My breath catches in my throat. A tingle starts in my fingertips. No. I won’t be pulled under. Begone.
“We all have our challenges to bear, Miss Cross. I suppose it’s all in how we shoulder them,” Miss Moore says gently.
“Do you believe in curses, Miss Moore?” Felicity asks. It seems a dare.
I am empty. A void. I feel nothing, nothing, nothing. Mary Dowd or whoever you are, please, please go away.
Miss Moore searches the wall behind us as if the answer might be hiding there among her pastel watercolor still lifes. Red, ripe apples. Succulent grapes. Light-dappled oranges. All of them slowly rotting in a bowl. “I believe . . .” She trails off. She seems lost. A breeze blows through the open windows, overturning a cup of brushes. The tingling in my fingers stops. I am safe for now. The breath I’ve been holding whooshes out in a rush.
Miss Moore rights the brushes. “I believe . . . that this week we shall take a walk through the woods and explore the old caves, where there are some truly astonishing primitive drawings. They can tell you far more about art than
I can.”
The class erupts in cheers. A chance to get out of the classroom is joyous news indeed, a sign that we have more privileges than the younger classes. But I’ve got a sense of unease, remembering my own trip to the caves and the diary of Mary Dowd still in the back of my wardobe.
“Well, it’s far too beautiful a day to be stuck here in this classroom discussing doomed damsels in boats. You may start your free period early, and if anyone asks, you are merely observing the outside world for artistic inspiration. As for this,” she says, scrutinizing her sketch, “it needs something.”
With a flourish, Miss Moore draws a neat mustache on the Lady of Shallot. “God is in the details,” she says.
Except for Cecily, who strikes me more and more as a secret goody-goody, we’re giggling over her boldness, happy to be naughty with her. Miss Moore’s face comes to life with a smile, and my unease slips away.
When I rush full-speed into my room to retrieve Mary Dowd’s diary, I run headlong into the back of Brigid, who is supervising the training of a new upstairs maid.
“I’m terribly sorry,” I sputter with as much dignity as I can, considering that I’m flat on the floor with my skirts up to my knees. Running into the broad Brigid is a bit like flinging myself into the side of a ship. There’s a ringing in my head and I fear I may go deaf from the crushing force of her.
“Sorry? Aye, and you should be,” Brigid says, yanking me to my feet and straightening my hem to a modest level. The new maid turns away, but I can see her slender shoulders bobbing from her stifled laughter.
I start to thank Brigid for helping me to my feet, but she’s only just begun her tirade.
“Carrying on in that way, galloping like a stallion about to meet the gelder’s knife! Now, I ask you, is that any way for a proper lady to conduct ’erself? Hmm? Now wot would Missus Nightwing say if she was to see you makin’ such a spectacle o’ yerself?”
“I am sorry.” I look down at my feet, hoping this passes for contrition.