A Great and Terrible Beauty

Page 102

"We've got to find that photograph," I say.
"We tell Mrs. Nightwing we're searching for a lost glove. She lets us search high and low. We scour the rooms one by one," Ann suggests.
Pippa groans. "It will take us a year."
"Let's each take a floor, shall we?" I say.
Pippa gives me her large doe eyes. "Must we?"
I push her toward the school. "Yes."
After an hour of searching, I still haven't found it. I've paced the third floor so many times, I'm sure I've worn the carpets thin. With a sigh, I stand in front of the existing class photographs, willing them to talk, to tell me something about where I might find what's missing. The ladies do not oblige me. I'm drawn to the photograph from 1872, with its rippled surface. Gently, I remove it from the wall and turn it over. The back of the photograph is smooth, not ruined at all. Turn it back over and there's the wavy front. How can that be? Unless it's not the same photograph at all.
Hurriedly, I tug at the corners of the photograph, as if I'm pulling back a carpet. There is another photograph behind the one in the frame. A buzzing starts in my ears. Eight graduating girls sit grouped on the lawn. In the background is the unmistakable outline of Spence. At the bottom, in fine print, it reads Class of 1871 . I've found it! Names are written along the bottom in a cramped hand.
Left to right Millicent Jenkins, Susanna Meriwether, Anna Nelson, Sarah Rees-Toome
My head bobs. My finger traces up to Sarah. She turned her head at the moment the picture was snapped, leaving a blurred profile that's hard to read. I squint but can't really make out much.
My finger moves on to the girl next to her. My mouth goes dry. She's looking directly into the camera with her wise, penetrating eyes I've known my whole life. I look for her name, though I already know the one I'll find, the one she abandoned and left to die in a fire years before I was even born. Mary Dowd.
The girl staring back at me from that class of 1871 is Mary Dowd, my mother.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I wait until the others are settled at dinner, then slip away to my room. In the gathering darkness, it fades by degrees. Shapes fade into impressions of things. Everything is stripped down to its essence. I am ready. Eyes closed, I summon the door. The familiar pulsing travels through my veins, and I step through, alone, into the other world, the garden, where sweet- smelling flowers fall around me like ash.
"Mother," I say, and my voice sounds strange and hard in my ears.
A soft wind blows. Behind it, like rain, is the smell of rose water. She is coming.
"Find me if you can," she says with a smile. I won't return it. I won't even look at her. "What is it?"
My mother is not at all the woman I thought she was. I've never really known her. She is Mary Dowd. A liar and a sorceress. A killer.
"You're Mary Dowd."
Her smile falls. "You know."
Some part of me has been holding out hope that I'm mistaken and that she'll laugh, tell me it's a silly mistake, explain it all away. The truth is a blow.
"No one came to you, told you all those things about me. You knew. You were a member of the Order all along. Everything you've told me is a fabrication."
Her voice is surprisingly soft. "No. Not everything."
I'm blinking back tears. "You lied to me."
"Only to protect you."
"That's another lie." I feel such hate; I'm nearly sick with it. "How could you?"
"It was all so very long ago, Gemma."
"And that excuses everything? You led that little girl into the East Wing. You killed her!"
"Yes. And I spent every day of my life atoning for it." A bird sings a hollow evening song from a branch. "Everyone assumed I had died, and in a way, I had. Mary Dowd was gone and in her place was Virginia. I made a new life for myself, with your father, and then Tom and you."
The tears fall hot and wet on my cheeks. She tries to take my hand, but I step away.
"Oh, Gemma, how could I tell you what I'd done? That's the curse of mothers, you know. We're never prepared for how much we love our children, for how much we wish we could protect them by being perfect." She blinks fast, trying not to cry. "I thought I could start again. That it was all forgotten and I was free. But I wasn't." Her voice is tinged with bitterness. "Slowly, I began to realize that you were different. That the long-dead power of the Order and the realms was starting again in you. I was afraid of that. I didn't want you to have that burden. I thought by saying nothing I could protect you until perhaps it would pass and fade into legend again. No more. But I was wrong, of course. We can't escape destiny. And then it was too late, and Circe found me before I'd had a chance to tell you everything."