Blythewood (31 page)

I walked across the snow-covered lawn toward the castle,
which glowed honey gold in the morning sun like an enchanted
castle in a fairy tale. The last echo of the last bell rang through
the valley, tolling not Merope’s death, if I believed what Raven
had told me, but her farewell to her sisters. Although I’d spent
only one night in the woods I felt as though it had been a hundred years since I’d left Blythewood. What if I had strayed into
Faerie and been gone twenty years, like Rip van Winkle, And
all my friends had grown up and gone away without me?
But here were Daisy and Helen running across the lawn toward me, their faces shining with relief. I felt a corresponding
leap of joy in my heart and rushed to meet them, nearly slipping
in the snow.
“Oh, thank heavens!” Daisy cried, flinging her arms around
me. “We were so frightened! If you weren’t back after matins
we were going to have to tell Gillie.”
“I knew you would rescue her,” Helen said, looking over my
shoulder.
I whirled around, thinking that Raven had reappeared,
but it wasn’t Raven behind me; it was Nathan. The tips of his
fair hair were heavy with ice, his skin nearly the same blue as
his eyes. He looked like one of the ice giants we’d run into last
night, and for a moment I was afraid that he’d been turned to ice
by them—that when the sun struck him he would shatter into
a million pieces.
“Ava didn’t need me to rescue her,” he said with a smile that
chilled me to the bone. Had he seen me with Raven? Would he
tell Helen and Daisy that I had spent the night with a Darkling?
“In fact,
she
rescued
me
. We spent the night huddled in a hollow
tree. See”—he held up my bandaged hand—“she scraped her
hand on a thorn bush.”
He fixed me with an icy stare that I understood completely:
Go along with the story or I’ll tell them you spent the night with a
Darkling.
I hadn’t even thought through how much I would tell
my friends, but one look at Helen and Daisy told me that they
would never understand—at least not until I could prove that
Darklings weren’t evil. And for that I needed to find the book—
A Darkness of Angels
. So I smiled back at Nathan and lied.
“Yes, that’s what we did. We’re frozen clean through.” I
shivered, not having to pretend; I did feel suddenly cold. “I’d kill
for a cup of hot cocoa.”
“Of course, let’s get you both inside.” Helen took Nathan’s
arm and led the way for Daisy and me. As I watched them walking in front of us I realized that Nathan’s lie hadn’t only hidden
where I had spent the night—it hid where he had as well.

THE DOVES WERE right about the winter: it was a hard
one. Not just because of the bitter cold, relentless winds, driving snow, and day after day of gray skies with barely a glimpse
of sun. Along with the awful weather, a pall had settled over
Blythewood like an icy fog that had fallen between the rest of
the world and us. The Jager twins seemed to go into a virtual
hibernation, and even chipper Cam Bennett came back from
vacation unusually subdued.

“It was just so peculiar to have to keep secrets from Mater
and Pater,” she told us at the welcome-back dinner.
Even Georgiana Montmorency was too listless to think of
rumors to start about me.
The lawns were too icy for us to practice archery. Our only
exercise was walking up and down the interminable stairs and
bell ringing. Gone, though, were the sprightly tunes we had
practiced for the Christmas concert. Instead we rang changes
that sounded like funeral dirges. They were designed, Mr. Peale
explained, to beat back the ice giants that inhabited the Blythe
Wood at this time of year. Recalling the monsters I’d encountered in the woods the night of the solstice I couldn’t argue. The
frigid wind that blew through the belfry felt as though it had

come straight from the Arctic Sea. The rime-covered trees at
the edge of the forest looked like frozen sentinels—an army
camped at our doorstep. Whenever I glanced at the woods—
from the belfry tower, the landing windows, or the rooftop
mews—it seemed as if the woods had moved closer to the castle, hemming us in a little more.

I confided my impression to Gillie one day when I had
volunteered to help him imp a wounded bird. I was holding a
young tiercel,
gentling
it, as Gillie had instructed, by playing
the bells in my head. The falcon had responded almost immediately by going limp in my arms so that Gillie could clip off her
broken wing feathers and graft on new donor feathers. When I
told Gillie I thought the woods were moving closer I expected
him to laugh off the idea, but instead he glanced uneasily over
his shoulder.

“Aye, them Jotuns are wee tricky devils. They can take the
shapes of trees or rocks and bide their time till some unwary
traveler passes too close by. Y’see the ice on the river?” He
pointed his clipper toward the Hudson, which was now entirely
frozen over. Along the banks great chunks of ice had piled up.
“I’ve heard tell that the ice giants can assume the shape of an
iceberg and lie in wait for a ship to pass, then it seize the hull in
their teeth and drag it down to the ocean floor along with all its
crew and passengers.”

The falcon stirred restlessly in my arms, shaking the bells
on her jesses, and I realized I’d let the bells in my head speed up
in the same jangly rhythm.

“Aye, Jessie, you watch out for those devils now.” He released the wing he had been working on and nodded to me
to let the bird go. Jessie hopped onto Gillie’s gloved hand and
stretched out her repaired wing. “Good as new,” Gillie said.
“You see, lass, we’re none of us doomed to be just one thing. We
can change our feathers just like Jessie here.” He swung his arm
forward, releasing the falcon into the sky. She soared across the
lawn toward the woods. Gillie held his hand over his eyes to
shade them from the glare of sun on ice. In the shadow of his
hand his eyes looked mournful. “I wish all broken things were
so easy to fix,” he said, leaving me to wonder what had broken
in Gillie’s life.

With the ice so impassable, the Dianas no longer patrolled
the lawn. Instead they Dianas stalked the halls, restless as
housecats kept indoors. One day I found Charlotte Falconrath
sobbing in a broom closet. When I asked what was wrong she
told me that her father had arranged a match for her and she
was to be married just after graduation.

“I only just met him at Christmas! He’s old and fat, but
mother says he comes from good blood!”
I thought of the bloodline charts in the dungeon and felt a
chill go through me. But when I tried to comfort Charlotte, she
snapped, “What do you know of it? With your history they’ll
never make
you
marry!”
Not everyone was quite as sympathetic to the Dianas’
stress. “Why do I feel as if they’re on guard to keep us
in
more
than to keep anything out?” Helen remarked one frigid February evening in the Commons Room over an interminable game
of flush and trophies.
I glanced around the room and noticed one of the Dianas,
Augusta Richmond, a statuesque brunette from Charleston, at
the entrance to the Commons Room, bow drawn, eyes alert.
Beyond her in the hallway, Charlotte Falconrath was standing
at the foot of the stairs. Her bow was drawn as well—which
was alarming considering Charlotte’s poor aim and precarious
mental state lately.
“Who would want to go out in
this
?” Daisy said, shivering.
The wind rattled the windows of the Commons Room as if in
reply.
“They’re afraid of winter fever,” Beatrice informed us after
laying down a flush of spades and calling trophy. “I read about
it in
Sieges and Campaigns of the Dark Ages
. It’s what happens
when an Order is under siege in its castle. Sometimes a girl goes
crazy and runs out into the woods and throws herself right into
the hands of the demons.”
“I thought
Sieges and Campaigns
wasn’t assigned for another month,” Daisy said.
“I read ahead,” Beatrice replied with a smirk. “There’s an
account of a nunnery in the Pyrenees that was cut off from the
outside world for three months. When the villagers reached
them after the spring thaw they found them all dead except for
one girl who had holed herself up in the belfry. She claimed that
the nuns had gone crazy and started killing each other.”
“Ugh! I knew it was unhealthy to wall up so many women
together,” Helen said.
“The men aren’t any better,” Beatrice said smugly. “An order of monks on an island in Scotland got it in their heads that
they were being attacked by ice giants. They set fire to the monastery to melt them.”
I recalled what Gillie had said about the frost giants disguising themselves as icebergs. Maybe the monks hadn’t been
crazy. But I kept that thought to myself. We all became, I think,
a little wary of expressing ourselves too freely in case a careless word or snappish response would be seen as a symptom of
winter fever.
The one person I could have talked to, Raven, was as unreachable as the Pyrenees. The frozen woods were off limits.
He’d said he would find a way to see me, but weeks went by
without any sign from him. During the day I paced the quiet
halls of Blythewood, staring out the windows for a trace of him
in the winter sky. At night I tossed and turned, worrying that
he had frozen to death in his treetop nest—or that he had better
things to do than come looking for me. He was an otherworldly
being entrusted with the ferrying of souls and I  .  .  . I was an
ex–factory worker and schoolgirl. So maybe I was also a chime
child who was supposed to be able to defeat the shadow master,
but I couldn’t even do that unless I found
A Darkness of Angels
,
and so far I’d had no luck.
I spent as much time as I could in the library, seeking an
opportunity to sneak into the Special Collections, but with no
one going out it was hard to do. Worse, our little group in the library had grown irritable. Since break there seemed to be some
unspoken tension among our teachers. Miss Sharp still stoked
the fire, set out biscuits, and poured tea, but she moved around
the room like a trapped bird in a cage, trying to divide herself
evenly between Miss Corey and Mr. Bellows. She would pour
half a cup for Mr. Bellows, then catch a glance from Miss Corey
and jerk the teapot toward her already-full cup, splashing tea
across the stacks of ancient books, setting Miss Corey fluttering over the books like a mother hen gathering her chicks under
her wing.
Only Nathan was quicker to protect the books. He had taken himself off to a window seat overlooking the river and made
a nest of books like a peregrine on a cliff. Since coming out of
the woods on the solstice he had been devoted to reading. I tried
to ask him where he had spent the night in the woods, but he
had brushed off my question.
“I could ask you the same thing, Ava.”
Before the night in the woods I might have confided in
Nathan. The boy who laughed about opium dens and teased
me about how many books I read might have understood that
the Darkling boy Raven wasn’t evil. But not the Nathan who
had come out of the woods. He no longer laughed or teased or
played pranks. He was like the boy in the fairy tale who gets a
splinter of the goblin’s evil mirror in his eye and whose heart
turns to ice. All he did was hole himself up in his window seat
and read. I was afraid that if I told him that I’d seen Louisa in
Faerie he would go running off into the frozen woods to save
her. Without knowing how to get her out, he could get himself
killed by the Jotuns or wind up trapped in Faerie himself.
I thought of talking to Miss Sharp or Mr. Bellows about
Nathan but they were both so distracted I hated to bother
them. Helen insisted that Nathan was just in one of his usual funks. Daisy asked if anything had happened the night we
spent in the woods to change him, but without confessing that
I hadn’t been with Nathan that night I couldn’t answer the
question truthfully.
My friends, as if knowing I was keeping a secret from them,
became secretive themselves. Helen received long letters from
her parents every post, which she read with unusual concentration and covered up whenever Daisy or I walked near her. She
hid them in a locked trunk, an uncharacteristic worried look
settled over her brow, and she nearly bit Daisy’s head off when
Daisy accidentally spilled a bottle of ink on her shirt cuff.
“D’you think I’m made of money?” she cried in an aggrieved
voice that sounded as if it belonged to someone else.
Daisy began making herself scarce from our room. She
said she was doing work for Miss Frost, but when I looked for
her once in Miss Frost’s specimen room she wasn’t there.
“That flibbertigibbet!” Miss Frost exclaimed. “She’s always
late and she lost one of my best specimens. I ought to fire her.”
“I could help Ava look for her friend,” said Sarah, who was
standing on a stepladder dusting the floor-to-ceiling glass case
of pinned sprites. “I’ve finished organizing the sprites by genus
and phylum.”
“I need you to pick up my physicfrom the chemists, girl.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sarah replied. When Miss Frost turned her
back, though, Sarah splayed herself against the glass, spreading
her arms wide, dropping her head and letting her tongue loll
out, mimicking the pose of the pinned sprites. I suppressed a
giggle, the first bit of merriment I’d felt in a while.
Sarah had been helping with my homework since Helen
and Daisy were both acting so strange. I’d also seen her tutoring
Nathan, which made me a little jealous, but I tried not to mind
because I enjoyed her company. She was the only girl I could
talk to about my days in the city, the only one who knew the
vaudeville theaters and the sweatshops and the food carts like
I did—and the longer I was at Blythewood, the more I found I
missed them. I also learned that her own mother had died a few
years ago—of a dysentery outbreak in Five Points.
“I remember that,” I told her. “My mother brought food and
fresh water to the sick.”
“What a valiant woman your mother must have been!” Sarah said, and then when she saw the tears in my eyes, she asked
what she’d said wrong.
“She
was
valiant, but then she changed.” I told her about
my mother’s strange obsessions and drinking laudanum, but
I couldn’t confide to her that I’d spent a night with a Darkling—not until I found the book that proved that the Darklings
weren’t evil.
The only way I could think of to get into the Special Collections was to volunteer to help Miss Corey carry books up. Now
that Nathan was so distracted with his own reading, Miss Corey always carried the lantern downstairs and held it up while
pointing to the books she wanted brought up, making it difficult to search for
A Darkness of Angels
on the shelves. A layer
of dust covered the spines and many of the shelves were double
stacked. The day I left Sarah dusting specimen cases, I had the
idea of volunteering to dust the books so Miss Corey wouldn’t
get her clothes so dirty.
“Perhaps that’s not a bad idea,” she replied. “Vi
is
always
saying I look like a chimney sweep. But won’t you mind being
down here all alone?”
“Not at all,” I lied. “Why should I?”
“It’s just that it’s so close to the candelabellum.” She looked
nervously toward the door at the end of the corridor. Now that
I looked toward the door it
did
give me a strange feeling to think
of those bells hanging in the dark, the pictures lurking in them
like sleeping dragons. As I stared at the door I thought I even
heard a faint tinkling.
“It
is
peculiar,” I said, “to think of the founding families
bringing over the original dungeons with the castle.”
“These rich people,” Miss Corey said irritably, “who can
ever understand why they do the things they do? Why does Rupert Bellows buy violets every day for Vionetta when she could
get them for free from her own aunts’ greenhouse? Go ahead
and dust, if you like. I’m sure Vionetta and Rupert will prefer
that we don’t look like grimy paupers.”
It had never occurred to me that Miss Corey might not be
as well off as Miss Sharp or Mr. Bellows. Truthfully, I hardly
thought about my teachers’ lives beyond Blythewood. Someday, though, I would have to make my own way in the world
beyond these walls. I didn’t know whether my grandmother intended to help me financially, or what strings might be attached
to any help she offered. And as for marriage . . . what if Charlotte Falconrath was right and no one would marry me because
I was a freak? Better to remain unmarried, though, than to be
matched up like a prize cow or to trade a dowry for a house in
town, summers in Newport, and a handsome dress allowance.
I’d wager the Darklings didn’t talk about dowries and
bloodlines when they married. If they married.
“My mother always said it was better to be a pauper than a
slave to money,” I told Miss Corey.
Miss Corey gave me a startled look from under her veil.
“Evangeline was very wise,” she said, squeezing my hand.
“Thank you for offering to dust the books, Ava. I’ll bring down
an extra lantern and some dust cloths.”
I spent the rest of the afternoon down in the Special Collections Room carefully dusting and inspecting each book, but
I didn’t find
A Darkness of Angels
. I did find, though, a catalogue
of special collections in other libraries run by the Order. I discovered it just as Miss Corey called me to come up for tea. I slid
the catalogue behind one of the shelves and hurried up the spiral stairs, promising myself that I’d look through it later. At tea
I casually asked Miss Corey if she’d ever worked at any other
libraries.
“I worked at the Order’s library in Edinburgh,” she replied,
“until the head librarian absconded with all the funds and several priceless books.”
“Oh, I remember that!” Miss Sharp exclaimed, sipping her
tea. “What a scandal! Did they ever apprehend him?”
“No, but they recovered the books when he tried to sell
them in Scotland. They’re in the special collections in the Hawthorn School in Scotland. I worked there, too, for a year before
coming back to the States.”
“Can’t imagine why you’d leave Scotland for this backwater,” Mr. Bellows remarked.
“If you don’t like it here,” Miss Corey replied, “I hear there’s
an opening at Hawthorn.”
I didn’t follow the rest of their conversation. I bided my
time through tea and then waited for everybody to leave. Nathan took forever, rearranging the books in this window seat
and making Miss Corey promise not to disturb the order of his
stacks.
“I have a system,” he said. “I think I’m on to something.”
“That’s fine, Nathan, but they’ll all have to go back in the
Special Collections by spring break.”
“I’ll be done with them by then,” Nathan assured her. “Or
else it will be too late.”
He left without explaining what he meant. I offered to help
Miss Corey straighten and lock up. She seemed touched by my
offer. “Perhaps you might want to be a librarian, Ava. You’d
make a fine one.”
“I would like that very much,” I said, feeling guilty as I
slipped the library key from its ring before handing her keys
back to her. “I do love libraries.”
“I’ll talk to Dame Beckwith about having you assist me.
Perhaps she could even pay you a small salary. Then you’d feel a
bit more . . .
independent
.”
I was so touched I almost confessed and gave her back the
key, but I couldn’t bear to ruin her good opinion of me. And I
wanted to get another look at that catalogue. After dinner Daisy disappeared, stuffing a roll and apple in her pocket and making a vague excuse that she’d forgotten something somewhere.
Helen, rereading a letter from home, didn’t even look up when I
said that I’d forgotten my Latin textbook in the classroom in the
North Wing. Charlotte Falconrath tried to stop me as I passed
through the Great Hall, but I distracted her by telling her that
Cook had put out fresh-baked cookies in the Commons Room.
I hurried past the empty classrooms, which looked eerie in
the moonlight. Someone had left a window open, letting in an
icy breeze that ruffled the large maps that hung in the history
room. I thought I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see
the shadow of wings on the corridor wall. I ran to the window,
hoping that it would be Raven, but it was only Blodeuwedd flying past a window with a long mournful hoot. I rushed on to the
library, my hands shaking as I fitted the key in the lock.
“If you want to become a librarian, you’ll have to learn to
be quieter.”
I nearly shrieked at the voice inches from my ear. I whirled
around. For a second I thought one of the ice giants had found a
way in from the forest. A figure pale and still as a frozen statue
stood in the moonlit corridor, its eyes cold as ice chips. Then
the figure moved and I recognized Nathan.