The memory of the pickled fairy brought up a wave of nausea again. I ran behind a column and was sick in the rose bushes. When my stomach was empty I crawled a few feet away and huddled behind a rhododendron bush with my back against the stone wall.
The wall felt warm and solid on my back. I closed my eyes, exhausted by the events of the morning, and must have drifted off for a few moments. I awoke to the sound of a voice.
“You found my hiding place.” I opened my eyes and found Sarah Lehman crouched next to me. “You look a little green,” she commented.
“You do, too,” I said, tugging on one of the waxy rhododendron leaves. “It’s the light. What are you hiding from?”
“Miss Frost,” she said. “If she sees me unoccupied for two minutes she thinks up a chore for me to do, like dusting her Cabinet of Gruesome Curiosities.”
I shuddered. “Why do they allow her to keep those? It’s so cruel!”
She nodded. “Yes, it is cruel. But no crueler than what those creatures do to us. Look, do you see the figures on the capitals?” She pointed up at the column above us. I looked up and saw that there were tiny sprites carved into the honey-colored stone. Their wings formed a delicate tracery in the marble. “Do you know what this place is?”
“This place?” I asked, confused. “You mean this garden?”
“It’s a cloister,” she said. “One of the original ones from the first abbey where the early sisters of the Order could walk in the fresh air behind thick walls because they dared not walk outside. If they did they might encounter the lychnobia, the lampsprites. They looked harmless enough, but they led girls astray into the forest, and once they were in the forest worse monsters would come to devour them.” Sarah pointed up at another column. A hideous troll stretched his mouth open so wide that I could see inside where a human hand flailed.
I flinched at the horror of it and turned back to Sarah. Her face had taken on a greener hue that I didn’t think came solely from the rhododendron leaves.
“That’s what probably happened to Louisa after those poor creatures led her into the woods,” Sarah said.
“You mean Nathan’s sister? Did you know her?”
“She was my best friend,” Sarah said, wiping a tear from her eye. “You see, I spend my holidays here because I’ve no place else to go. Louisa felt sorry for me and was kind to me—but then Louisa was kind to everyone. She even felt bad for the little sprites. She told me just two weeks ago that she was going to prove they weren’t evil. And then she disappeared.”
Sarah choked back a sob. “I think she must have followed them into the woods to prove that they weren’t dangerous, but then she never came back. So what she proved was that they are dangerous.” She turned to stare at me through the green gloom of the rhododendron bushes. “I think that must have been what happened to your mother, too.”
“Why do you think that?” I asked. I was remembering stories my mother told me about will-o’-the-wisps. She’d always made them sound like lovely things. Would she have spoken of them like that if they’d led her astray in the woods?
“It’s something I overheard Miss Frost saying to Dame Beckwith.” She squeezed my hand, then added, “I overhear a lot of things in my various jobs. No one notices Sour Lemon in the corner dusting. If you’d like I could try to find out more about your mother.”
“You could?” I asked, returning the pressure of her hand.
She smiled. “I’ll keep my ears open . . . only . . .”
“Only what?”
“I won’t be able to tell you what I find out if you run away from Blythewood.”
“How did you know I was thinking of running away?” I asked, the blood rushing to my face. What else did Sarah know about what I’d been thinking? But her smile was reassuring.
“Because this is where I come when I’m thinking of running away. But then I look at these creatures . . .” She looked up at the hideous monsters carved on the column capitols. “And I remember why I’m here. We all come to Blythewood for a purpose. Are you really ready to give up yours already?”
I thought about my questions about my mother. Then I thought about Tillie Kupermann. If she were in my place would she run away? “No,” I told Sarah, “I’m not ready to give up.”
“Good,” she said, smiling at me. “Then we’d best get you to your next class. It’s all right you missed Latin—Mrs. Calendar is so blind she won’t have noticed you weren’t there—but you mustn’t skip archery. Miss Swift has an eye as keen as a hawk’s. I’m supposed to assist her today setting up targets, so if we don’t get there soon we’ll both be on her bad side.”
I didn’t want that. Sarah was the best—perhaps the only—friend I’d made so far at Blythewood. The first friend I’d made since Tillie. I didn’t want to risk losing her.
Sarah showed me a door on the far side of the cloister, hidden behind the roses, that let out onto the gardens. “My little secret,” she said. “It’s the best way to get out of the building without anyone seeing you.” The archery court was set up at the end of the gardens, so we were only a few minutes late for class. We found our classmates in a semicircle around Miss Swift, who was standing beside a marble statue of the goddess Diana drawing a bow. I slipped in between Helen and Daisy while Sarah began collecting stray arrows off the lawn and setting up targets.
“Thank the bells,” Helen whispered. “Daisy was afraid you’d run away.”
“So were you—” Daisy began, but was silenced by a glare from Miss Swift. Daisy’s face turned bright pink. I’d already discovered today that Helen couldn’t stay quiet for two minutes and Daisy had a horror being caught talking by our teachers.
“Behold Diana,” Miss Swift continued, gesturing toward the statue. “The virgin huntress, a symbol of our Order. She dedicated herself to the hunt, forsaking marriage and children, as many of us here at Blythewood have.”
“As if Miss Swift had many offers of marriage,” Helen whispered beside me while Daisy, still blushing, glared at her.
“Why not?” I whispered. Miss Swift looked attractive enough to me, with a figure as lean and lithe as Diana. Only her mouse-brown hair, scraped back into a tight bun and fixed with an arrow-shaped pin, made her look a bit severe.
“Oh, everyone knows that Blythewood teachers don’t marry.”
“But what about Dame Beckwith? She was married.”
“Oh, but she gave up teaching when she went away to be married, and then she came back when her husband died—”
Daisy stomped on Helen’s foot to silence her and we all focused back on Miss Swift’s lecture, leaving me to wonder if Dame Beckwith’s sad eyes came from memories of her deceased husband.
“Some of you may have practiced archery with your friends and brothers, at your summer cottages and lakeside camps. Perhaps you like how the sport shows off your figure and you’ve taken prizes at your local competitions—”
“I came in first at Camp Wanasockie last summer,” Cam announced proudly.
Miss Swift smiled. “Ah, that is precisely what I mean. Come up here, Miss . . .”
“Bennett,” Cam said cheerily, pushing past the rest of us to stand between Miss Swift and the marble Diana. “Camilla Bennett. Cam for short.” She grinned at the rest of us and winked at Helen, who grimaced. “I’m a crack shot, if I do say so myself.”
“Uh-oh,” Helen whispered. “She’s in for it now.”
“A crack shot,” Miss Swift repeated, her upper lip curling. “How splendid. And what have you shot?”
“What? Oh, well, targets, of course . . .”
“Targets like these?” Miss Swift nodded to a tall blonde girl, one of the Dianas, whom she introduced as Andalusia Beaumont. She carried a canvas target to the edge of the woods, about thirty feet away from where Cam and Miss Swift stood. “Would you like to demonstrate your prowess?”
She handed Cam a
bow that was nearly as tall as Cam was, and an arrow fletched with black feathers. As Cam positioned herself at a right angle to the target, lifted the bow, and nocked the arrow in it, the sun struck the feathers. Prisms danced off them and I felt my stomach clench as I realized the feathers must be from a Darkling’s wing.
When Cam released the arrow, it shot true and straight to the target and lodged with a satisfying thwack into the bull’s-eye—a thwack that was echoed in the woods by an ominous crash. Cam was smiling and lowering her bow when the brush behind the target exploded. A blur of horns and fur trampled the target and headed straight toward Cam.
“What’s the matter, Miss Bennett?” Miss Swift asked calmly, handing her another arrow. “You’re a crack shot. Hadn’t you better take aim?”
Cam’s eyes widened. She took the arrow with a shaking hand and tried to nock it in the bow. Most of the girls screamed and ran for the cover of the garden wall, but Miss Swift and Andalusia Beaumont stood calmly beside Cam as the horned creature ran toward them. Helen, Daisy, and I stood rooted to the spot—not so much out of bravery, I think, as because we were too shocked to move. I looked from the horned creature, which I noticed with a sickening sense of horror had only one eye, back to Cam, who finally got the arrow nocked, drew, and shot—a good six feet wide of the charging monster.
Miss Swift nodded at Andalusia. The tall blonde coolly raised her loaded bow and shot the creature straight into its one eye. It slumped to the ground, twitched twice, and then stilled, thick blue gore pulsing from the arrow wound.
It’s not human, I said to myself, forcing myself to look at the monster. It was like something out of mythology.
“Excellent shot, Miss Beaumont,” Miss Swift said, striding toward the fallen goblin and placing one slim-booted foot on its chest. “A cyclops can only be killed with a direct shot to its eye. You see, girls, archery at Blythewood is quite a different sport from what you’ve been used to. I am not here to teach you to be archers.” She wrenched the arrow from the cyclop’s chest. “I am here to teach you to be hunters. Now, if one of you would please go find Gillie in the garden and tell him there’s a bit of cleaning up to attend to, the rest of you can be measured for your bows.”
The rest of the class was spent getting measurements taken and learning how to maintain our bows and arrows, but it was hard to concentrate very well while keeping an eye on the edge of the woods. I’d felt horrified at how human the lampsprites looked, but now I was horrified by how inhuman the cyclops looked—and at the thought that more creatures like that were roaming the woods. I think we were all relieved to go back into the castle, and to climb to the very top of the bell tower, for our bell ringing class in the belfry.
We all crowded by the windows to admire the views. To the southeast lay the quaint Dutch village of Rhinebeck. Trim Victorian houses lined the streets, many of them with glass greenhouses for growing the violets the town was famous for. We could make out the train station and the tracks that led back to New York City. To the east lay a patchwork of farms—hay fields and apple orchards, and fenced paddocks in which horses, cows, and sheep grazed—a pretty, bucolic landscape like something out of a Dutch painting.
It was hard to imagine what could threaten such peace and order . . . until you looked to the north and saw the Blythe Wood crouched along the river like an animal tensed to spring out at its prey—deep, dark, and secret. Looking into it was like looking into a deep pool on a summer day that you wanted to dive into despite knowing that you might drown in it, or the eyes of a beast that drew you into its depths.
“What you feel when you regard the Blythe Wood, ladies—and gentleman,” Mr. Peale began, bowing to Nathan, “is the magnetic pull of Faerie. The existence of that other world alongside ours is an anomaly, an aberration. Where that world breaks into ours it disrupts the flow of magneto-electro energy between our worlds, like a vacuum that pulls everything into its hungry maw.”
“Hmm, Grandma, what big teeth you have!” Nathan whispered beside me. Helen slapped him on the arm and told him to stop being ridiculous, but her voice shook, and I recalled her fear of heights.
“To disrupt that energy we break up the sound waves with the bells. We have found that certain patterns interrupt the flow of malevolent energy. May I have six volunteers?”
To my surprise, Nathan volunteered right away—and volunteered me and Helen and Daisy as well. Beatrice and Dolores insisted on making up the six. Mr. Peale directed us to each grab one of the ropes that hung down into the square stone chamber. The ropes were so thick it took both my hands to span mine. I expected it to feel rough, but the rope had been worn smooth by many ringers before me. It thrummed with a tension as if it were tethered to an animal straining at its lead. As if the bells were alive.
Mr. Peale explained how the bells were numbered and counted us off so we knew our numbers. I was the sixth bell. “When I call your number you pull. For today I’ll point, but eventually you’ll remember when it’s your turn.”
He commenced calling numbers while circling us, demonstrating by grasping our arms how to pull down smoothly and let up with control. The sound of the bells right over our heads was deafening—at first just a cacophony of sound that drove all thought from my head. But slowly, the rhythm worked its way into my body, coming in through my hands and the soles of my feet where the sound vibrated upward from the stone. Soon I knew when it was my turn before Peale called my number. My whole body thrummed with the vibrations of the bells.
I caught sight of Nathan’s face and he grinned at me. His cheeks were ruddy and healthy looking, the shadows beneath his eyes faded, his eyes bright. The haunted boy mourning for his lost sister was gone—perhaps because he wasn’t alone anymore. I recalled what Gillie had said about ringing the bells—that you felt a part of something bigger than yourself. Even Dolores and Beatrice had cast off their habitual melancholy demeanor and were grinning.
I hardly noticed that Peale had ceased calling numbers or that we each knew when to stop. The peal had its own logic that led to its ending. When we stopped, the pattern seemed to go on, floating out into the air above the treetops. I thought I heard an answering call in a bird singing deep inside the forest, singing the same tune that we had played, and then came the echo of the last bell, tolling sweet and sonorous from beneath the river its plaintive cry. Remember me, it said, remember me. I looked around at my fellow bell ringers and saw that their ruddy cheeks were damp and felt that mine were, too, but whether from perspiration or tears, I wasn’t sure.
“Excellent!” Mr. Peale exclaimed, his face shining and pink as though he had been pulling the bells himself. “Mr. Beckwith, you especially will make a fine bell master. Now, if you will all turn to your campanology guide and mark the first two dozen changes to memorize by tomorrow . . .”
17
WE RUSHED DOWN the stairs, late for our last class of the day, literature with Miss Sharp, held in the library so that we could have access to the Order’s collection of great books. By now my arms ached, my ears were ringing, and my head was full of discordant facts that jostled against one another like riders on the Sixth Avenue streetcar at rush hour: Latin names for sprite species, the dates of the three great wizard wars, an antidote for centaur bite. Mixed up with all these were a dozen warring emotions: the horror of seeing Miss Frost’s specimens, the terror of the cyclops attack, Nathan’s grief over losing his sister, my fear of being exposed as a freak, but also the sense of belonging I’d had ringing the bells.
I wondered what I would find in the library. I had spent some of my happiest moments with my mother in libraries. I’d looked forward to seeing the one at Blythewood, but now I wondered how many more bloodthirsty stories were hidden behind the gilt-stamped leather spines on the floor-to-ceiling rows of books. No doubt Miss Sharp would soon explain that they held the secrets of evil fairies, and then she would assign two hundred pages to read and memorize by the morrow.
As we settled into our seats she stood at the front of class in a blue serge skirt and high-necked white blouse from which her slender long neck rose like the stem of a lily. Her abundant blonde hair was piled high on her head in the Gibson Girl style. She stood, still and tall as a candle, her golden hair the flame, regarding us. Then she turned away and walked to a window. She pushed open the heavy leaded casement, letting in river-scented air and the trill of a lark. Still looking out the window she began to speak, her voice somehow part of the breeze and birdsong.
“My heart aches, and drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.”
I had never taken opiates myself, but I had seen my mother’s eyes dulled by the drug and I knew this was what she had felt. I felt that way myself right now, my brain over full of all the wonders and horrors of this strange and savage world I’d stumbled into. At least the poem was familiar. It was Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” one of my mother’s favorite poems
“’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”
Miss Sharp recited it as though she were addressing the bird outside the window but also, I felt, speaking to me directly. I felt the fatigue and confusion of the day fall away. On her voice I traveled past the weariness, the fever, and the fret and climbed on the viewless wings of Poesy to a tender night full of hawthorn, eglantine, and violets. When she got to the lines