Blythewood (16 page)

Our first class was in the North Wing lecture hall, which resembled the Third Street Vaudeville House, only the seats that
rose in a semicircle around the stage were uncushioned and the
performer wasn’t a dancer in spangles and feathers but an earnest young man in a tweed suit, which was much too heavy for
the warm weather, and gold-rimmed glasses. Still the story he
told was as fabulous as anything I’d ever seen on a vaudeville
stage (including Varney the Sword Swallower and the magical
feats of the Amazing Houdini).

Rupert Bellows took off his glasses, gripped the podium on
both sides, leaned forward, and told us that the history of the
world was “one long story of the fight between good and evil.”

“Last night you encountered the face of evil, but it is not
always so plainly disclosed. In this class you will learn how evil
forces have been secretly at work behind the scenes for centuries. The barbarians that overran the gates of Rome? Mongolian centaurs! The bubonic plague? Spread by goblin-rats!
Napoleon’s attack on England? Instigated by a succubus! And
wherever evil arises, the Order has been there to strike it down.
The Order established their schools throughout the world:
Mont Cloche in the Pyrenees, the Glockenkloster in Vienna,
the Gymnasium Klok in Holland. That is the tradition you are
heir to. . . . Some of you are
literally
heirs to the men and women
who created those schools.”

His voice full of emotion, Mr. Bellows paused and took
off his glasses to rub the fog that had clouded them. I looked
around the room at the assembled girls in their white shirtwaists and dark skirts and noticed that although many of them
were from the Dutch and English families of Old New York,
some were from other countries, like the Jager twins, or a Russian girl named Grushenka whom I’d heard someone whisper
was related to the Tsar’s family, or a shy Spanish girl named Fiamma who spoke hardly any English. They were all riveted by
Mr. Bellows’s lecture, their eyes burning.

Only one student didn’t seem to be under Mr. Bellows’ spell
and that was the only boy in the class. Nathan Beckwith sat in
the last row, his chair tipped back, a straw boater tilted over his
eyes. “Is it all left to the women, then?” he drawled. “Doesn’t
seem quite sporting.”

Mr. Bellows put his glasses back on and regarded Nathan coolly. “The prince who rode to the aid of the bell maker’s daughters sacrificed himself for their safety. His knights
founded a knighthood to serve the sisters of the Order. Those
accepted into the knighthood train at Blythewood’s brother
school, Hawthorn. I believe you’re familiar with the institution, Mr. Beckwith.”

Nathan snorted. “I didn’t see any evidence of knighthood
training, only a bunch of boring old men lecturing on obedience and service.”

Mr. Bellows colored deeply and gripped the podium as
though he wished it were Nathan’s neck. “Perhaps you’ll feel
differently when you learn whom we knights serve.” He went
on to tell us that the women of the Order had learned the four
elemental magics of the fairies—the magics of earth, air, fire,
and water—and how to communicate with the falcons and
train them to aid us in the hunt against the most brutal creatures, the goblins and trows. “They learned from the master
hunters themselves—the Darklings.”

Mr. Bellows pronounced the name in an ominous voice
that created a rustling in the room as girls shifted uneasily and
rubbed their arms as if they were suddenly cold. I felt a shiver,
too, but not of fear. I was remembering how the dark-winged
boy in the woods had looked at me and how his eyes had made
me feel warm. I’d wanted to lean into his arms and let him carry
me up . . .

“They studied the Darklings because they were their worst
enemies. It was a Darkling who abducted and killed Merope.”
The words broke into my head like the lash of a whip. What
was I doing daydreaming about one of these monsters? If the
other girls knew what I was thinking they would shun me—
worse even than if they thought I was mad. I would be a pariah.
There was a sharp cracking noise behind me. Startled, I
turned, half expecting that my thoughts had summoned the
Darkling, but it was only Nathan, who had tilted forward on his
chair and was now following with full attention as Mr. Bellows
retold the story of the bell maker’s daughters—only this time
explaining that it was a Darkling who had stolen the youngest
daughter.
“After Merope’s abduction, the Order of the Bells was
founded to protect the world against the fairies and the Darklings. We study our enemies to learn how to hunt them down
and we use the bells, made of iron and our own blood, to keep
them at bay.”
“And what about the girls they steal? What do we do about
getting them back?”
The question came from the back of the room. I knew
it was Nathan because he was the only boy here, but I hardly
recognized his voice. Gone was the bored, upper-class drawl
he’d first affected—gone, too, the excited boyish voice I’d heard
in the woods last night. There was an anger and gravity to his
voice now that made him sound years older. I glanced back and
saw that he’d taken off his hat and raked his hair back off his
forehead. His pale gray eyes flashed silver. A muscle twitched
above his clenched jaw.
“That is not my area of expertise,” Mr. Bellows began in a
faltering voice totally unlike the one he’d used to lecture us.
“Then what good are you?” Nathan demanded. “What
good is it to learn the history of these bastards”—several girls
gasped—“if we don’t do anything about them stealing our
own?”
There was a stunned silence as Mr. Bellows put his glasses
back on and stared back at Nathan.
“Now we know why he got kicked out of Hawthorn,” Helen
whispered under her breath.
But Mr. Bellows didn’t throw Nathan out. Instead he said,
“You make an interesting point, Mr. Beckwith, and I sympathize with your outrage. Why don’t you stay after class a
moment to discuss the issue with me. The rest of you—read
the first hundred pages in Claveau’s
History of the Order of
the Bells
and write a three-page
pensée
on the doctrine of bell
magic for class tomorrow. Class dismissed.”
We gathered our books and filed out past Nathan, who sat
fuming in his seat. I tried to catch Nathan’s eye to show him I
wouldn’t ostracize him, but he stared straight ahead in such a
rage that I doubted he saw any of us.
“Why is Nathan so angry?” I asked Helen when we were in
the hall.
Helen looked around and then pulled me into an alcove.
“Nathan’s sister Louisa disappeared a week ago. Dame Beckwith said she went to a sanatorium in Switzerland, but I overheard Mother tell another Blythewood alumna that she
vanished
.”
“Nathan’s sister is the girl who went missing?” I asked, appalled. “Dame Beckwith’s own daughter? Why didn’t you tell
me? Why is everybody keeping it a secret?”
Helen looked puzzled at the question. “Well, it would seem
rude to talk about the headmistress’s daughter like that.”
“Rude?” I barked, startling both Helen and myself. “A
girl’s gone missing and you’re all worried about the rules of etiquette?”
“You needn’t get yourself all in a twist about it. You sound
like one of those suffragettes! Actually, you sound a bit like
Louisa the last time she was at our house for tea. Honestly,
when I first heard she’d gone missing I was sure she’d run off
to England to march with Mrs. Pankhurst, but when I saw Nathan here I knew it must be more serious than that, and after
last night . . .”
Her voice faltered. In the brief time I’d known her Helen
hadn’t looked unsure about anything, but right now she looked
worried.
“You think he’s come back to find her?”
“Yes,” she admitted, “but if she went missing in the woods
he must realize it’s hopeless. No one could survive alone in
those woods, except . . .”
“Except who?” I asked.
“Except your mother. I think that’s why Nathan was asking me about her. She disappeared into the woods for a whole
month and
she
came back.”

I WALKED TO our next class—science with Mr. Jager—in
a daze, trying to make sense out of what Helen had told me.
My mother had gone missing in the Blythe Wood for a whole
month. What had happened to her there? I tried to imagine
what it would be like to be all alone in those woods with the
fearsome creatures that roamed through them. How had my
mother survived? Had she seen something so awful there that
she’d never been able to recover? Was that why we moved so
often, why she begged me not to talk to strangers? Was she running from something she had seen in the woods—the source of
the hunted, shadowed look in her eyes? It was the same look, I
realized now, that Nathan had in his.

Growing up alone with my mother, isolated from all family, moving too often to make friends, I sometimes daydreamed
about what it would be like to have a sister or a brother, someone
with whom I could share my thoughts—and the responsibility
of looking after my mother. After she died and I went to work,
I saw other girls walking to the factory with, or met after work
by, their brothers, and envied them. But now I imagined what it
would be like to have a sister and lose her. Worse, to know she
was lost in those woods with the monsters we’d seen last night.

Poor Nathan. Those shadows under his eyes, his brittle, hard
way of talking—it was all because he was walking around with
a hole inside him.

I reached the laboratory, a long narrow room that ran along
the north side of the castle beside the conservatory, and stood
for a moment in the doorway. The room was arranged with
long high tables that reminded me of the layout of the Triangle
factory, except that instead of sewing machines each table was
supplied with a spirit lamp, glass beakers, and covered baskets.
Mr. Jager stood at the front of the room, head down, shuffling
through a stack of notes. He didn’t have Mr. Bellows’s commanding presence and his students were obviously taking advantage of his distraction to gossip with one another.

Helen waved for me to come join her at a table at the front of
the room with Daisy, Cam, Beatrice, and Dolores. I suspected
Helen had chosen our seat to be near the Jager twins, because
they would be able to help us the most with the work. It was a
good idea. I had no idea what went on in a science class in a regular school, let alone a school that trained its students to fight
fairies and demons. Would we be concocting magic potions?
Turning each other into toads? Crafting explosive devices like
the one that had killed Tsar Alexander II in Russia? My gentle
mother had never taught me such things. I would need all the
help I could get. But instead of joining my friends at their table I
took a seat at the last table in the back, which was empty except
for Nathan.

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Why aren’t you sitting with
your friends?”
I shrugged. “They don’t look as if they need me.”
“And you think I do?”
I met his icy stare. “Helen told me about your sister.”
“And did she tell you that we’re not allowed to talk about
her? That once a girl goes missing at Blythewood her name is
struck from the rolls and never mentioned again? That they believe to say the name of a
lost girl
is to conjure the black-hearted
monsters that stole her?”
I shook my head, struck dumb by the hostility in his voice.
I’d thought yesterday that Nathan’s cool demeanor was a pose
he adopted to seem more alluring to girls, but I saw now that
the flirtatiousness was a pose that he wore over his icy resolve—there to get what he needed, gone when it would do him
no good. I turned away from his cold glare and wondered if it
was too late to change seats, but Mr. Jager had collected himself
sufficiently to begin class—or at least he had stopped shuffling
papers and was looking up at the room, a dazed expression in
his watery brown eyes as if he wasn’t sure why two dozen girls
were sitting in front of him.
Mr. Jager cleared his throat and said something inaudible
under the hum of the girls’ voices. A girl in the second row giggled. Beatrice glared at her and made a loud shushing sound.
Mr. Jager looked mournfully at the girl and waved a large bony
hand, as if to say it was no matter to him if we listened or not.
Instantly the girl’s hands flew to her mouth and she made
a muffled noise. I couldn’t see from where I sat what had happened to her but I saw the horrified expressions of the other
girls as she jumped to her feet and ran from the room with one
hand clamped over her mouth. Something was dribbling from
between her fingers. Something red. A drop fell on the floor by
my feet. I cringed away from it, but Nathan reached across me
to pick it up.
“Jelly beans,” he remarked.
“Ja,” Mr. Jager said with a sigh. “My daughters tell me that
American children enjoy zese trifles and that I should consider
giving them out as rewards for good behavior. Would anyone
else . . . ?”
We all shook our heads close-mouthed, not wanting to find
our own mouths full of jelly beans, apparently Mr. Jager’s idea
of suitable punishment for talking or laughing in class.
“No? Good. I will commence my talk on magic, then.
Ahem!” Mr. Jager cleared his throat, held up his rumpled notes,
and launched into a long-winded, convoluted discourse on the
nature of magic. I understood about every fifth word. It didn’t
help that he spoke with a thick Viennese accent or that he held
the pages so close to his mouth that his voice was muffled or
that many of the words I did hear—
prestidigitation, psychometry, necromancy
—I didn’t understand. One would need to be a
magician to decipher them. After about ten minutes he lowered
his notes and looked out at us, his large melancholy eyes growing sadder as they took in our utter confusion.
“Perhaps, Papa,” Beatrice said softly, “if you explained in
your own words?”
Mr. Jager sighed. “Very well. You see there are four kinds
of magic in the world, each related to one of the essential elements—air, earth, fire, and water. Air magic is what the fairies practice . . .” He paused to see if we were following along.
Beatrice nodded hopefully and we all followed suit. “Basically, it’s sympathetic magic. I create a bond between two things,
say between Mees . . . er . . .” He looked down at Daisy.
“Moffat,” Daisy squeaked. “Miss Daisy Moffat of Kansas
City, Kansas, sir.”
“Er . . . yes. I create a bond between Mees Daisy Moffat of
Kansas City, Kansas . . .” He reached down and plucked a hair
from Daisy’s head. “And, say . . .” He dug into the basket on the
front table and came up with a pair of embroidery scissors. He
held them up in one hand so we all could see him wrap Daisy’s
hair around their handle. “The basis of fairy magic is that all
things are connected by air. I can reinforce that connection by
blowing on the object while thinking of the person I want to
connect it to.”
Mr. Jager glanced between Daisy and the scissors and then
blew on the scissors. Daisy shivered . . . then giggled. “It tickles!” she announced.
“Hmph.” Mr. Jager frowned. “Ja, I suppose it does. That was
a piece of your soul leaving your body. We can all take comfort
in the fact that our final parting of soul and body will . . .
tickle
.
It should mean that I’ve created a bond. Let’s see.” He held up
his hand. The silver scissors seemed to be trembling. I thought
it was because Mr. Jager’s hand was shaking until the scissors
stood upright on its sharp points. A halo of glitter surrounded
the scissors. Mr. Jager lowered his hand and the scissors took
two dainty steps onto the table.
“Aw,” Daisy said, tilting her head, “it’s cute.”
The scissors tilted one empty circle of its handle in the same
motion, eliciting coos from the circle of girls.
“Sympathy for the simulacrum is natural,” Mr. Jager said
in a mournful voice. “But to be avoided.” He blew on the scissor
creature and Daisy’s hair puffed out behind her. Daisy laughed.
He filled a beaker with water and emptied it on the scissors. This
time Daisy gasped, spitting water out of her mouth. “Hey!” she
squawked. “That’s not . . .”
Mr. Jager struck a match to the spirit lamp and reached for
the scissors. Without realizing that I’d moved I was suddenly
between Mr. Jager and the table. I grabbed the scissors, which
writhed in my hands, snapping at my fingers. Behind me Daisy
was flapping her arms.
“Stop!” I cried, not sure if I was speaking to Mr. Jager, Daisy, or the scissors. A bell was ringing in my head. Not the danger bass, but the treble. I closed my eyes and listened to it chime
twelve times. When it was done, I opened my eyes. The scissors
lay lifeless in my hands. Daisy sat in her chair, limp and damp,
but unburned. The air around her was full of smoke and glitter.
“Very interesting,” Mr. Jager said, almost smiling. “What
time of day were you born?”
I gaped at him, furious but stunned.
“What does that . . . ?”
“Was it at midnight, by any chance? On the very stroke of
midnight while the bells tolled the hour?”
I nodded, unable to speak. “How . . . ?”
Mr. Jager reached into the basket and withdrew a handbell.
He rang it once. The chime cleared the smoke and glitter from
the air.
“The second kind of magic, and the most important to the
order, is earth magic. We learned that bells forged of iron, with
a drop of human blood, could dispel air magic. Then we learned
that by ringing the bells in certain patterns we could keep the
fairies away—or draw them closer to kill them.
“Only certain people can use the bells—you all have been
tested to see if you possess the ability—and only the rarest of
people can use earth magic
without
a bell. You, Miss Hall, are
one of those: a chime child, born at the stroke of midnight. You
have special powers. You can hear things others can’t . . . and
see
things others don’t.”
I thought of the smoke coming out of the mouth of the man
in the Inverness cape and the crows circling the roof of the Triangle factory. I thought of the delusions I’d had during my stay
at the Bellevue Pavilion for the Insane. Were those the kind of
things Mr. Jager meant? I glanced uneasily behind me at the
rest of the class, who were staring at me. Soon enough, they’d
be telling everyone that Georgiana Montmorency had been
right—I
was
a freak, just like the bearded lady at Dreamland in
Coney Island.
“I’d wager that some of things you see are not pleasant,”
Mr. Jager said in an uncharacteristically gentle voice.
I nodded weakly, tears springing to my eyes as some of
those visions floated before my eyes—girls with fire in their
hair, snakes made out of smoke lurking in the corners.
“That’s the price that the chime child pays, but in exchange
you are granted great powers. Out of all your class, you have the
potential for the most power. Now, to move on. Let’s discuss
the two other forms of magic—water magic and fire magic,
also sometimes called shadow magic. The latter is strictly forbidden.”