Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) (9 page)

11

“ARE WE REALLY
getting on this big train, Avaleh? I’ve never been on one before.”

I gaped open-mouthed at Etta as porters and passengers bumped into us on the crowded platform. Over the last two weeks, Etta had surprised us all. First, she had passed her entrance exams with flying colors. Although she had been pulled out of school at an early age to go to work in the factories, she had spent all her free time at the Seward Park library reading books and teaching herself Latin, which she claimed was much easier than Hebrew. Then she surprised us even more by asking if there would be any strange creatures at Blythewood, like Mr. O’Malley at the tavern, who had pointed ears and cloven hoofs, or Mrs. Golub from across the way, who had sharp teeth and a bone leg.

“The girl’s a
fianais,” Miss Corey had declared one afternoon while we were prepping Etta for her exams.

“Yes,” Miss Sharp concurred. Then she had explained to me. “It means a witness. A fianais can recognize the true nature of any being no matter how they are disguised. Let me guess,” she said gently to Etta, “you only started seeing these creatures recently, say, when you started your monthly courses.”

Etta blushed and nodded.

“A fianais comes into her ability at puberty. That’s how you knew Ruth had been replaced by a changeling,” she said, turning back to Etta. “And yes, you will encounter other creatures like Mr. O’Malley, whom I suspect is a cluricaune, and Mrs. Golub, who is most likely a Baba Yaga—”

“Vi!” Miss Corey cried. “She’s not supposed to know all that until the initiation!”

“I don’t think we can keep it from her any longer, Lillian. She sees we’re keeping secrets from her, and it’s just making her more nervous.”

So Miss Sharp had explained that there was a portal to Faerie in the Blythe Wood and that creatures from there sometimes strayed out—fearsome creatures such as trolls, goblins, and ice giants, but also the benign lampsprites and mischievous boggles (although Miss Sharp and Miss Corey had a heated argument about how benign boggles were).

“The Council will be sure to let Etta into Blythewood,” Miss Sharp said when she was done. “A fianais is invaluable to the Order. We haven’t had one in ages. Who knows what creatures have infiltrated our own ranks?”

I recalled what Omar and Kid Marvel had said about fairies and other magical beings hiding in plain sight in the city—
madges
. And I also remembered Omar’s story of how the Order exploited his magical abilities and those of others like him. Were we doing the right thing taking Etta to Blythewood? She looked worried—but not, as it turned out, for herself.

“What will you do with them once you find them?” she asked, her eyes avoiding mine.

“Destroy them, of course,” Miss Corey said briskly, slapping her notebook shut.

“
Kill
them?” Etta asked. “But what if they’re harmless? Mrs. Golub is certainly up to no good, but Mr. O’Malley wouldn’t harm anyone.”

“If Mr. O’Malley really hasn’t harmed anyone, he’d only be banished back to the Blythe Wood and Faerie,” Miss Sharp said more gently. “We’ve learned that some of the creatures of Faerie—like the lampsprites—are genuinely harmless. We’re changing our ways at Blythewood. You needn’t worry, Etta; you won’t be asked to bring harm to any creature that isn’t a danger.”

“Good,” Etta said. “I would never expose someone with a good heart to harm just because they were a little bit . . . different.” I suspected she knew what I was, but we never spoke of it, and I believed that she would never tell anyone what I was. But sooner or later I would have to tell someone at Blythewood before they discovered my secret. Hopefully, the Order would choose merely to banish me rather than kill me.

In the meantime, I owed it to Etta to stay at Blythewood until she was settled and out of danger. I think she clung to me because I’d come from the same place as her—the crowded tenements, the sweatshops, the Triangle factory. I remembered how afraid I’d been last year that the Blythewood girls would disdain me if they knew of my lowly origins. How silly that fear seemed now that I had a much bigger secret lurking beneath my tightly laced corset!

But I also remembered that I’d been as shocked by the trappings of genteel life—the clothes, the manners, the big houses—as by the revelation that there was magic in the world. So when Etta looked more amazed at the size of the train we were boarding than the fact we were on our way to a school that taught magic, I replied, “Yes! And look, here’s Helen. She’s not used to taking the train either.” That was clear from the number of bags Helen was struggling with. Last year Helen had been driven to school in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, but of course she couldn’t afford that now.

“I’ll help her with her luggage while you get us seats on the left side so you can see the river,” I told Etta. “It’s a lovely view!”

Reassured by my enthusiasm, Etta eagerly dashed into the car, dodging around a group of girls standing in the doorway. I stepped forward to unburden Helen of a large portmanteau and a hatbox.

“I thought you were going to miss the train,” I said. “What happened?”

“That ridiculous cab driver made such a fuss about my luggage. The man actually had the gall to suggest I might not
need
so many clothes. Can you imagine? Paulson would never have dared to comment on my wardrobe!”

If someone had reined in Helen’s and her mother’s clothing allowance, I thought, perhaps they wouldn’t have had to let their chauffeur go. To Helen I only said, “Well, I’m glad you made it. Etta’s very nervous and I think we need to do everything we can to reassure her—” At just that moment I heard Etta’s clear, sharp voice calling our names from inside the train.

“Avaleh! Helena! Come quickly, I’ve got us seats on the river side!”

“I
told
you the left side was the most desirable,” one of the girls blocking the doorway drawled in a Southern accent as we tried to edge around her. “My cousin Georgiana said that if we must take the train we ought to sit on the left. Now that
child
”—she glanced disdainfully at Etta, her pale blue eyes lingering on her plain homespun skirt and scuffed shoes—“has gone and taken the last seat on the river side, and she’s not even a Blythewood girl.”

“Why don’t you think she’s a Blythewood girl?” I asked as I attempted to duck under the wide brims of the girls’ hats. They were all covered with feathers; the one belonging to the Southern girl sported an entire dead pheasant. She turned on me, still blocking our way, and replied, “Why, she’s far too young, bless her little heart.”

“I’m fifteen,” Etta announced. “I’m just small for my age.”

“
And
,” Dead Pheasant Girl continued, “she’s hardly attired like a Blythewood girl.”

“Neither are you,” Helen observed, staring pointedly at the mounds of lace around the girl’s high collar, her pinched-in waist, hobbled skirt, and thin-soled slippers. “You’ll never be able to draw a bow with all those ruffles in your way, and you’ll faint from lack of oxygen the first time you try to ring the bells in that corset. Never mind what the falcons will do to that bird on your hat. You’ll be lucky to get through the front door without Blodeuwedd plucking you bald.”

Dead Pheasant Girl had been growing pink as Helen spoke, while her two friends stared at me as if I had sprouted wings, which I might at any moment do if the girls didn’t get out of our way.

“Are you a senior then?” a snub-nosed short brunette asked, her black button eyes going wide.

“Oh,” I demurred, embarrassed that I’d been lording it over a group of new girls. “No, I’m a fledgling, that’s a—”

“Second year!” the third girl, tall and thin with glasses, shouted out. “I’ve been studying the handbook.”

“Well then,” Helen said. “You should know that mere nestlings should defer to fledglings. Please step aside so we can join our friend.”

“I don’t recall any such rule from the handbook,” the studious girl remarked.

“Handbook?” Etta yelped. “I didn’t know there was a handbook. There’s plenty of room in the seats facing us. Why don’t you join us and we can all look at it together?”

“But then we’d be facing backward,” Dead Pheasant Girl replied. “I simply can’t ride backward; it gives me the vapors.”

“Well, I can,” the black-eyed girl piped up, cramming into the seat facing Etta. “I’ve never had the vapors a day in my life.”

“Nor I,” the studious girl remarked, slipping into the other rear-facing seat. “Although I think you may actually mean vertigo if you’re referring to the dizziness caused by the rearward motion of the train.”

“I can squeeze in with them because I’m so small,” Etta said with a mischievous smile for Dead Pheasant Girl, “and you can sit with Ava and Helen.
Nu
, then we will all be Blythewood girls together!”

Etta hadn’t even gotten to Blythewood yet and already she was making friends.

Helen looked at Dead Pheasant Girl as if she would like to pluck every feather off her hat. But with all the grace that decades of Old New York breeding had instilled in her, she simply said, “Would you care to join us? I’m sure we’ll all benefit from each other’s company.”

Unsurprisingly, Dead Pheasant Girl turned out to be a Montmorency—Myrtilene Montmorency of the Savannah Montmorencys, who I gathered from all of Myrtilene’s attempts to establish otherwise were rather the poorer side of the family.

“Our plantation was the finest in Georgia—that is, until the Yankees burned it to the ground during the War of Northern Aggression, of course,” Myrtilene confided to us.

“You mean the Civil War?” I asked with a strained smile. “The one the South started by seceding? And that ultimately freed the slaves?”

“Is that what they teach y’all at Blythewood?” Myrtilene asked.

Actually,
I wanted to say,
what they teach at Blythewood is that slavery was an evil institution instigated by trows and that the Order, vehement abolitionists, fought alongside the North to set things to right.
I recalled, though, what Omar had said to Miss Sharp. Yes, the Order had fought to free the slaves, but there were no Negro students at Blythewood.

Besides, Myrtilene Montmorency, black-eyed Mary MacCrae, and studious Susannah Dewsnap wouldn’t know about the magical side of Blythewood until the first night’s initiation. I’d thought it might be hard for Etta to keep her own knowledge a secret, but she didn’t seem to be having any trouble. She appeared far more interested in the everyday lives of her new friends than in the dark secrets she’d been made privy to these last few weeks.

Mary and Susannah, in turn, chatted amiably with Etta and peppered Helen and me with questions about the school.

“Do they have dances at Blythewood?” Mary asked. “I love to dance. I came up weeks early to attend Miss Montmorency’s ball and was just dazzled by the new steps.”

“That’s thanks to the new dancing master Uncle George hired for Georgiana’s ball,” Myrtilene remarked. “Herr Hofmeister. I understand he’s from Vienna. Georgiana has asked Uncle George to have Blythewood hire him.”

“Madame Musette was good enough for generations of Blythewood girls,” Helen said with a sniff.

I bit back a laugh, recalling how Helen had rolled her eyes at Madame Musette’s old-fashioned ways, but was touched by her loyalty to the ancient dancing teacher.

“We’ve never had a dancing master at Blythewood before,” I added. “It’s not . . .” I caught myself before saying it wasn’t part of the
old ways
. Since when had I become a defender of Blythewood traditions? Those
old ways
had exploited Omar and his kind and would probably get me kicked out.

“I declare! How do y’all prepare for your cotillions, then?” Myrtilene asked with a shake of her head that made the pheasant on top of her hat look like it wanted to take flight.

“I don’t know how to dance,” Etta said, her brow creasing. “Except for some folk dances I learned in the settlement house.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured Etta. “There are more important things to learn at Blythewood than how to do the latest quadrille.” But as I looked at Myrtilene preening at her reflection in the window I wondered if I knew Blythewood as well as I thought I did. Perhaps it really belonged to these new girls more than it did to me.

Any melancholy I felt on the journey, though, was dispelled by the sight of Gilles Duffy.

“Gillie!” I shouted, throwing my arms around the tiny elf-like man.

“Mmph,” he said, squeezing me in a surprisingly strong grip and then holding me out at arm’s length. “Let me have a look at ye, lass. Aye, you’ve come out of the fire right as rain.” Within the black depths of his eyes I saw a flash of green and felt the air on the riverside platform stir with the scent of the woodland. “But I knew ye would. You’re your mother’s daughter, all right.”

My eyes filled up with tears at the mention of my mother, and I felt a small hand slip into my right hand and the touch of another hand on my left arm. Helen and Etta had come to stand on either side of me.

“Hello, Gillie,” Helen said. “You’re looking well.”

“And you, too, Miss,” he said, doffing his shapeless tweed hat. Somehow he managed to convey in those few words his sympathy for Helen’s recent loss of her father without embarrassing her with mention of it. Then he turned to look at Etta. “And who’s this wee lass?”