A Great and Terrible Beauty

Page 16

"Grace, charm, and beauty," Felicity says as she breezes past. I wonder what she would look like if someone were to cut off all her hair in her sleep. My first evening at prayers has not made me into a particularly charitable girl.
Outside, the mist has thickened into a gray soup that settles around our legs. Down the hill lies the hazy outline of the enormous school, broken by thin slivers of lights from the various windows. Only one wing remains completely dark. I figure it to be the East Wing, the one destroyed by the fire. It sits, curled and quiet as the gargoyles on the roof, as if waiting. For what, I don't know.
Movement. To my right. A black cloak running through the trees, disappearing into the mist. My legs have gone rubbery.
"Did you see that?" I ask, voice shaking.
"See what?"
"Out there. Somebody running about in a black cape."
"No. It's the fog. Makes you see things."
I know what I saw. Someone was waiting there, watching us.
"It's cold," Ann says. "Let's walk faster, shall we?"
She steps briskly ahead of me, letting the fog consume her till she's only a blue spot, a shadow of a girl, fading into nothing.
CHAPTER SIX
I'm being watched. The feeling stays with me during a tedious dinner of lamb and potatoes followed by pudding. Who would be watching me and why? That is, who else besides the girls of Spence, who eye me and whisper to each other, stopping only when Mrs. Nightwing reprimands one girl for letting her fork droop.
When dinner is finished, we are allowed a free period in the great hall. This is the time we're given to be at easeto read, laugh, socialize, or just sit about. The great hall is just thatenormous. A massive fireplace commands the center of one wall. Six beautifully engraved marble columns form a circle in the middle of the room. Mythical creatures have been carved into each onewinged fairies, nymphs, and satyrs. Strange decor, to say the least.
At one end of the room, the younger girls sit playing with dolls. Some have gathered to read, some to embroider, and some to gossip. In the best possible corner, Pippa and Felicity are holding court with a few other girls. Felicity has cordoned off a sitting area and turned it into her own fiefdom complete with exotic scarves that make it seem like a sheik's tent. Whatever she's telling the others seems to have them hanging on her every word. I have no idea how thrilling it might be, since I've not been invited. Not that I want to be invited. Not much, anyway.
Ann is nowhere to be found. I can't very well stand in the center of the room like an imbecile, so I find a quiet seat near the roaring fire and open my mother's diary. Though I haven't looked through it in a month or so, I'm in the mood to torture myself tonight. In the firelight, Mother's elegant handwriting dances on the page. It's surprising how just the sight of her words on paper makes tears sting at my eyes. So much about her has begun to fade away. I want to keep holding on. And so I read, flipping through page after page of notes about teas and visits to temples and housekeeping lists, until I come to this, her very last entry:
June 2 nd Gemma is cross with me again. She wants desperately to go to London. That will of iron is formidable, and I am quite exhausted by it all. What will her birthday bring? It is agonizing to wait, and torture to have her loathe me so .
Sentences go blurry, words run together as the tears pool. I wish I could go back and change everything.
"What are you doing?" Ann asks, hovering over me.
I wipe at my wet cheeks with the back of my hand, keep my head down. "Nothing."
Ann takes a seat and pulls out some knitting from a basket. "I like to read, too. Have you ever read The Perils of Lucy, A Girl's Own Story ?"
"No. I can't say that I have." I know the type of book she meanscheap, sentimental claptrap about put-upon girls triumphing over adversity without ever losing that sweet, kindhearted, feminine softness everyone seems to prize so highly. The kind of girls who would never cause their families to worry and suffer. Girls nothing like me. The bitterness is too much to contain. "Oh, wait," I reply. "That's the one where the heroine is some poor, timid girl at boarding school who gets bullied by everyone for being such a sap. She reads to the blind or raises a lame brother or perhaps even a blind and lame brother. And in the end everyone discovers she's really a duchess or some such who goes off to live like a queen in Kent. All because she took her punishment with a smile and a sense of Christian charity. What poppycock!"
My breath keeps catching in my chest. I've been overheard by the embroider-and-gossip set, who giggle in shocked delight at my bad manners.