Authors: Carol Goodman
I WALKED OUT with Miss Sharp, whose calm demeanor
suggested she had experienced nothing unusual in the library.
Her open, cheerful countenance belied any suspicion of a subterfuge. Had I imagined the giant crow attacking her? Was I
hallucinating as I had at Bellevue? The thought made me feel
sick. I’d hoped those visions had been a result of the shock of
the fire, the blow to my head from the fall, or the drugs Dr.
Pritchard had given me. But if I were still hallucinating . . .
“Congratulations, Miss Hall,” Miss Sharp said as we came
down the stairs. “I’m sure you’ll do very well at Blythewood.
You have an admirable command of classics and mythology.
Your mother taught you well. She would be very proud of you.”
“It seems she was preparing me for that exam all along.”
“Perhaps.” Miss Sharp paused at the bottom of the stairs
and turned to me, a troubled look on her smooth elegant features. Had she seen the crow attack after all? I wondered. “Or
perhaps she was only sharing with you what she loved. At its
best Blythewood instills a love of learning in its girls, and a
wish to share that knowledge with others.”
“You attended Blythewood?”
She smiled—a sad smile, I thought. “Most faculty are alum
nae. I did my bachelor’s degree at Barnard College and I’ve been
teaching at Miss Spence’s school, but I’ve missed Blythewood
terribly. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to get this appointment. I’m afraid there is one flaw in Blythewood.” She touched
my arm and looked at me gravely. I wondered if she was going
to tell me that the school was
mired in the old ways
, but instead
she leaned closer and whispered, “It’s so perfect that no place
will ever measure up. You’ll always long to go back.”
Agnes was waiting for me outside. When she saw Miss Sharp
her face lit up.
“Vi!” she cried.
“Aggie!”
The two women threw their arms around each other and
twirled around on the sidewalk, nearly colliding with a stout
businessman in a bowler hat and eliciting disapproving looks
from a clutch of ladies exiting a dressmaker’s. They were oblivious, though, to anyone but each other—even to me—as they
traded particulars of their lives since graduation. When Agnes
learned that Vionetta Sharp would be teaching at Blythewood,
she turned to me. “Now I haven’t any reservations at all about
you going, with Vi there to look after you. That is if . . .”
“She got in,” Miss Sharp announced. “She did brilliantly
on her exam.”
“I knew she would,” Agnes said, pulling one of her oversized hankies from her bag and dabbing her eyes. “Evangeline
taught her well.”
Both women were sobered by mention of my mother.
“I was very sorry to hear about your mother,” Miss Sharp
said gravely. “She was a few years ahead of me at school and I
admired her greatly.” I saw a shadow pass over her face and I
wondered if she was thinking about the circumstances of her
expulsion, but instead she said, “What I said earlier about Blythewood being so perfect that no other place would measure
up—I didn’t mean that we should just accept the way things
have been done there forever. There are those of us who think
there should be changes—especially after this most recent occurrence.”
Agnes made a strangled sound and pulled Miss Sharp
abruptly away. They bent their heads together and whispered
while I stood a few feet away feeling foolish. After a few minutes they returned to me.
“I’m sorry, Ava,” Agnes said, her face pale beneath her
freckles. “Vionetta and I had a few . . . er . . . details to discuss
about what you’ll need for school.”
“Yes,” Miss Sharp concurred with a bright but brittle smile.
“The place has changed so much since we went there . . . is still
changing. . . . But I’m sorry to prattle on so when you must be
exhausted after your exam. Congratulations again. I look forward to seeing you in my literature class. And you”—she turned
to Agnes—“come visit! You can always stay at my aunts’ house
in town.”
Then she took her leave of us, hurrying toward the Grand
Central Terminal, while Agnes and I walked over to Fifth Avenue and turned north.
“I’m so pleased that Vionetta Sharp will be your teacher. She
was top of our class, but never the least bit conceited about it.”
Agnes kept up a bright, happy chatter as we walked back
to my grandmother’s house, opening her enormous umbrella
as rain began to fall. She was so happy that I couldn’t bear to
tell her about what I had seen at the end of my interview. I must
have imagined it, I concluded, and if I were imagining such
things, how long would it be before I was having the sort of
delusions I’d had at Bellevue? What if Dr. Pritchard had been
right and I really did belong in an insane asylum? After all, my
mother had had delusions and had killed herself by drinking
laudanum. What if there was some family history of insanity
and these were the first signs? No, I decided as we entered the
marble foyer and Agnes ran to tell my grandmother—returned
from her trip upstate—the good news, I wouldn’t ruin the celebration and my chances of going to Blythewood by telling anyone what I had seen.
The news that I was expected to report to Blythewood the next
day threw my grandmother’s household into turmoil. Servants
were dispatched to Ladies’ Mile to collect the items we had ordered. A large trunk was hauled out of the attic and deposited
in my room. The dresses and skirts that had come from Miss
Janeway’s were packed into the trunk folded in layers of tissue
paper. Since there was no time to send my blouses back to Miss
Janeway’s to have the Blythewood insignia added, Agnes volunteered to sit up with me and teach me how to sew it myself.
I was glad for some occupation. Since we’d come back from
my interview with the Council, it had been raining so heavily
we couldn’t go out for our usual walk in the park. The rain filled
my grandmother’s luxurious mansion with shadows and made
it feel like a mausoleum. Even my mother’s cheerful yellowand-white bedroom felt gloomy.
As I bent over my sewing, I thought I spied things moving
in the corners—wisps of shadows like the smoke-things I’d
seen at the hospital—but whenever I looked up there was nothing there but the shadows of the curtains moving in the breeze.
Agnes looked as nervous as I felt, jumping whenever a gust of
rain hit the window.
“Is there something wrong, Agnes?” I finally asked. “Is it
anything to do with what Miss Sharp was saying? About the
‘recent occurrence’?”
Agnes’s needle slipped and she stabbed her finger. A drop
of blood fell on the lace trim of the blouse she’d been embroidering. “Vi shouldn’t have said anything,” she said, jumping to
her feet to douse the blouse in the washbasin. “It’s nothing you
need to concern yourself with. You’ll be fine at Blythewood,”
she added, scrubbing furiously at the spot of blood as if erasing
it could banish whatever dark thoughts she’d been entertaining,
which I suspected had to do with whatever she and Miss Sharp
had been whispering about.
Agnes gave me a smile that was as artificially bright as the
silk flowers women were wearing on their hats this season as
she hung the damp blouse from the curtain rod to dry. Then she
picked up a shirtwaist I had just finished embroidering.
“You’ve caught on to the feather stitch brilliantly!” she said,
obviously determined to change the subject. “There’s nothing
to worry about at all!”
I went to bed early, but I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. I had
dreams in which I was running through a dark nighttime wood
pursued by I knew not what. Hounds bayed and horns trumpeted as I scrambled through thick thorny underbrush that tore
at my bare feet and arms. I could hear the dogs getting closer,
their howls growing wilder as they smelled me.
An arrow whizzed past me, the hard edge of its fletch
scratching my cheek, the tip striking a tree trunk with a
thwonk
just ahead of me. The air was suddenly full of arrows flying past
me like a flock of birds flushed from the undergrowth.
A spring
of teals
, I found myself gibbering crazily,
a flight of sparrows, a
tiding of magpies
. I was crying out the terms as if they could save
me from the approaching hounds (
a sleuth of hounds . . . no, a
howl of hounds
), as if they were magic spells, but they did no
good. I could feel the heat of the hounds’ breath on my heels
and hear the gnash of their teeth . . . and then, through the thick
bramble a hand was reaching for me, pulling me to safety.
I looked up and saw a face lit by moonlight—the face of the
dark-eyed youth who had rescued me from the fire, his dark
ringlets a wild halo around his face, a halo that seemed to burst
into a corona of black wings silhouetted against the moon.
I felt that same spark I’d felt when I first saw him, only now
it swelled into a flame as he took my hand and pulled me up out
of the bramble, the hounds snapping at my feet as we rose in
the air. He held me tightly against his chest and we flew high
above the forest. I looked below and saw a silver river unspool
beneath us, swathed in long strands of fog, and beside the river, a stone tower rising out of the silver mist. My heart raced
at the sight of the long fall, but then I heard, beneath the beat
of wings, the beat of his heart and felt steadied by its slow, dependable rhythm and the strength of his arms.
I heard the words in my head but I knew they came from
him, just as I knew he meant what he said.
But then something flew past my face and I heard the awful sound of iron hitting flesh and his cry . . . and then we were
falling, the silver mist rising to meet us, the bells in the tower
tolling our death knell. I reached out for him but came away
with only a handful of feathers.
I startled awake, flailing my arms out to break my fall, and
found myself in my bed in my grandmother’s house, clutching
the black feather—which I’d taken to keeping under my pillow—in my sweaty hands. The rain had stopped, and moonlight poured through the open window, a chill breeze rustling
the lace curtains with a sound like wings. The bells of a nearby
church were tolling midnight. I got up to close the window. As
I crossed the room I noticed a strange pattern on the walls and
floor—a pattern of black feathers splayed over the moonlight.
Black wings against the moonlight, the face of the dark-eyed
youth who had become a winged creature . . .
I held up my hands and saw the imprint of feathers on my
white skin and, looking down, the same pattern on my white
nightgown and bare feet. I was covered in feathers, a creature
like the youth in my dream.
Something banged against the windowpane. I ran to the
window and looked down. Below in the courtyard I saw a figure standing beneath a tree looking up at me.
The winged youth!
I thought. At the thought that he’d come back for me I realized
how much I’d been longing for him, how much I wanted to believe he was real. That he had saved me—and that he had a good
reason for leaving me on the sidewalk and letting them take me
to Bellevue. Because I didn’t want to believe that he had delivered me into Dr. Pritchard’s hands and that he was in league
with the man in the Inverness cape.
A bell began to toll. But hadn’t the church bells just tolled
midnight? I looked back down and caught my breath as the
figure removed his hat and bowed to me. It wasn’t the winged
youth; it was the man in the Inverness cape, standing below my
window, watching me. The bass bell was tolling inside me madly now, as he straightened up and smiled at me, ejecting a wisp
of smoke from his mouth.
Something brushed against my hand and I jumped. I looked
back down and saw that the man had vanished. Had he ever
been there? I saw it was only my lace blouse brushing my hand,
the damp one Agnes had hung from the curtain rod. That’s
what had cast the shadow feathers across the room. That, and
the noise of it rustling like feathers, had created my dream. But
what had created the vision of the man in the Inverness cape?
Had my dream about the winged boy summoned him? Were
they somehow connected?
The bell inside my head had quieted now. I closed the window, hung the blouse in the closet, put the black feather away in
my trunk, and went back to bed. But it took a long time before I
could close my eyes and not feel like I was falling.
“Sit on the left side of the train,” Agnes had told me at the
Grand Central Terminal, “so you can see the river.”
But the river was cloaked in fog, a white gauzy layer that
muffled the landscape like a funeral shroud. I felt muffled myself, numb to any excitement about starting at Blythewood.
That had been quelled when Agnes told me she wouldn’t be accompanying me on the journey.
“Mrs. Hall needs me right now for the fall Council meeting
at the Bell & Feather club. But don’t worry, Gillie will pick you
up. You’ll get on with Gillie.”
I didn’t want to “get on” with Gillie. I wanted to cling to the
only shred of familiarity I had left, and that was Agnes. I’d even
felt sad saying good-bye to my grandmother. When I thanked
her for all my new clothes and for sending me to Blythewood,
her eyes had watered. She’d become so flustered searching for
a handkerchief that I’d handed her one of my new ones embroidered with my initials and the Bell and Feather insignia. She
waved it off impatiently and complained of late-summer aller
“Always remember you’re a Hall. The Hall women have always gone to Blythewood.”
But not always graduated,
I thought sourly now, staring out
at the mist-shrouded river. What if that was all they saw at Blythewood—the illegitimate daughter of a girl who’d gotten herself pregnant senior year and gone off to live in poverty, then
died of a laudanum overdose? The daughter of a madwoman,
a girl who’d worked in a factory and spent five months in Bellevue? Although Agnes had promised me that no one would
know how I’d spent my summer, still I was afraid that they’d be
watching me for signs of madness.
They wouldn’t have far to look. That hallucination at my
interview of the Council women turning into crows, the dream
I’d had of being borne aloft by a winged dark-eyed youth, the
appearance of the man in the Inverness cape below my window—all could be signs of madness. My mother’s delusions
had begun when she saw the man in the Inverness cape on my
birthday and believed herself followed. And then I had seen the
same figure at the Triangle Waist Company and Bellevue hospital. Dr. Pritchard had told me that I had imagined him at the
factory the day of the fire. Certainly I had imagined the smoke
coming out of his mouth. I had hoped that the delusions had
been caused by the drugs I was given in the hospital, but then
why had I seen him again last night?
I was so mired in these dreary thoughts that I didn’t hear
the conductor call my station. Only when the sign flashed out
of the mist did I rouse myself to leap to my feet and wrestle
my carpetbag out of the overhead luggage rack. Would my
trunk be taken out of the luggage compartment automatically? Why hadn’t I asked Agnes about that? Oh, why wasn’t
Agnes with me?
Departing passengers were pushing past me in the aisle as
the train slowed. I tried to squeeze past a stout woman in purple
bombazine whose wide-brimmed hat spanned the entire aisle.
“Pardon me,” I said as she glared at me from under a beaded veil, “I just want to make sure the porter knows to get my
trunk.”
“If you gave the proper orders at boarding there will be no
problem,” the woman in bombazine announced in loud, ringing tones, not moving an inch. “If not, it is not for the rest of
us to suffer for your lack of preparedness. You will just have to
wait.”
“But my trunk . . .”
“We all have trunks, young lady, but apparently not all of us
have manners.”
Squelched by her imperious tone and unable to navigate
past her broad bustle (
Who wears bustles anymore?
I wondered
irritably.
They went out in the nineties!
), I waited until the matron in bombazine descended from the train. We were the last
ones down. I was relieved to see my trunk waiting on the platform, but less happy to see my companion commandeer the last
porter to carry her trunk up the long flight of stairs. The platform was at the bottom of a steep cliff next to the river, but apparently the station was at the top of the cliff. Seeing no way to
transport my trunk up the steps by myself and not being willing to leave it, I sat down on it and stared out at the river—or
rather at the fog. The only sign of the river was the lap of water
and the low moan of foghorns.
Whoever Gillie was she could bloody well find me here, or
I’d take the next southbound train back to the city. I’d go straight
to Miss Janeway and beg her to make me an apprentice. I didn’t
need Blythewood for that. I didn’t need Blythewood at all.
“Hall! Hall!”
A loud, booming voice that I at first took for a foghorn coming from the river penetrated my bout of self-pity.
“Hall! Hall!”
I looked up and saw a small, dark and very damp figure
emerging from the fog. My first startled impression was that
one of the kelpies from my mother’s stories had risen from the
Hudson to drag me into the water and drown me.
“Hall?” It boomed, advancing on me with a clinking sound
as if it were dragging the anchors of drowned ships. “Miss Avaline Hall?”
As the figure came closer I saw that it was a neat, compact
man in a long, black waxed raincoat and a wide-brimmed hat
of the same waterproof material that shadowed his face. Water
streamed off his hat and the shoulders of his coat. The clinking
came from an enormous ring of keys hooked onto his belt. I was
pretty sure that kelpies didn’t carry keys.
“Are ye Miss Avaline Hall?” he asked in a thick Scottish
brogue.
I admitted I was.
“Gillie,” he said, reaching for my trunk.
Did he think I had Gillie in my trunk?
“Gilles Duffy, that is,” he added when I didn’t budge from
the trunk. “But the girls all call me Gillie.” He tilted back his
hat, revealing a deeply lined face and eyes as dark as mountain
tarns. Despite the worn look of his face, his hair was pitch black
without a hint of gray—it almost seemed to have a dark-green
sheen to it, as if in his damp state he had grown moss. His expression dared me to laugh at the girlish name, which I thought
now oddly suited for a creature who looked like he might have
gills. “If you like I’ll carry you with the trunk, but you might
find the ride a bit bumpy.”
“Oh!” I cried, leaping to my feet at the thought of entering
my new school slung over the shoulder of the stern Gilles like
a sack of potatoes—an image made all the more ridiculous by
his small stature. He hardly looked strong enough to carry my
trunk. “I beg your pardon. Shall I get a porter to bring it up?”
But Gillie, despite his diminutive size, was already hauling
my trunk up on his shoulders as if it were a box of feather pillows. He turned to climb the steps.
“Miss Moorhen told me a Gillie would be meeting me, but I
thought you’d be a girl,” I said as I hurried to follow, hardly able
to keep up with his pace even though he was weighted down by
my heavy trunk.
Gillie snorted. “If I know Agnes Moorhen—and I figure
I do—she was playing a little joke on you. The girls think it’s
funny to call me Gillie, but it doesn’t bother me. Where I’m
from a Gillie is the man that watches over the land and manages the hunt. And that’s what I do at Blythewood. I tend the
hunting falcons and keep an eye on the creatures of the river
and woods. It’s an honorable job.”
We’d come to the top of the stairs where a black glossy
coach emblazoned with the Bell and Feather insignia waited
for us. Gillie tossed my trunk up on top as if tossing his hat on
a coat rack.
“My mother said that all work is honorable if you do it with
honor,” I said, remembering that she’d told me that when I complained about the calluses on my fingertips from sewing or that
we had to deliver our hats to the servants’ door.
“Your mother was a kind soul. Mayhaps too kind for her
own good,” Gillie said gruffly, tugging his hat over his eyes so
I couldn’t see his expression. Before I could ask how well he’d
known my mother and what he meant about her being too kind,
a sharp rapping from inside the coach interrupted us.
“It is rude,” a trilling voice announced, “to engage in personal conversation when a third member of your party waits.”
Gillie’s mouth quirked into a crooked smile. “Begging your
pardon. Miss Avaline Hall, may I introduce Miss Euphorbia
Frost, Mistress of Deportment.”
A veiled face appeared at the window of the coach. I recognized the woman in bombazine from the train. “You most
certainly may not! It is customary when making introductions
to name the most important person first.”
Gillie looked as if he might have a different opinion as to
who was most important here, but he obligingly repeated the
introduction, ending by mentioning that I would be sharing the
coach with her.
“That is completely unacceptable. I believed that this conveyance had been sent exclusively on my behalf. How am I to
preserve the proper distance necessary for the relationship between teacher and pupil if I am forced to be crammed in with
that rather damp individual?”
It was true that I was getting damper by the minute. A peek
inside the coach revealed that Miss Frost’s ample skirts occupied half of the interior; her hat and carpetbag the other half.
“I willna leave her here,” Gillie growled. “Not with what’s
been goin’ on. And she can’t ride outside on the box with me.
It’s raining auld wives and pipe staves out here.”
Miss Frost sniffed. “All the more reason to make haste.
This abominable river climate is giving me the vapors.”
Beneath the shadow of his hat Gillie’s face grew darker. His
eyes, black a moment ago, flashed green—the color of the sky
before a thunderstorm. The color of the sky above us now, I noticed, my eyes drawn up by the sound of wind. The trees beside
the station were thrashing in a sudden gust, the rain was spitting like an angry cat, and the air smelled like singed wires. I
had the feeling that if we stood here a moment longer we’d all
be blown away into the river. I reached out and touched Gillie’s
gloved hand. He startled at my touch and I was afraid I’d broken
some unspoken Blythewood rule. Inside the coach, Miss Frost
sniffed.
“I don’t mind riding outside,” I said. “I’ve got a waterproof
on and I’ll have a better view of the school this way.”
“Perfectly correct,” Miss Frost said. “If a bit wordy. A simple ‘I am happy to accommodate Miss Frost’ would have done.”
“I am happy to accommodate Miss Frost,” I parroted, my
eyes still on Gillie. Had I offended him? He might be a servant
at Blythewood, but I was just an ex–factory girl and once-upona-time hat trimmer. I likely had more in common with Gilles
Duffy than the girls I was about to meet. I somehow knew that
if I started out on the wrong side of Gillie, nothing would go
right at Blythewood.
Gillie narrowed his eyes at me, the green fading to black,
and grunted. “I don’t mind sharing the box with you if you
don’t. As long as you promise not to scare the horses.”
I couldn’t imagine what I could do to scare the enormous
workhorses yoked to the coach, but I eagerly nodded. “I’ll be
very still and quiet,” I promised.
Gillie grunted again. “That’ll do, then,” he said, offering me
his hand to help me up onto the box. Though he didn’t smile, he
squeezed my hand as he helped me up—probably just to keep
me from falling, but it made me feel better. When I took my seat
on the hard, uncushioned “box” (really just a plank of wood) I
noticed that the rain and wind had stopped. And
that
, I decided,
was at least a good omen.