There’s just enough time to make the morning’s first stop—a little offering of appreciation for Felicity’s kindness last night—and then I’m off to breakfast, suddenly famished. As I’m late, I manage to avoid seeing Felicity, Pippa, and the others. Unfortunately, it means I cannot also avoid the now lukewarm eggs and porridge, which are every bit as bad as Ann predicted and then some. The porridge congeals on my spoon in cold, thick clumps.
“Told you so,” she says, finishing the last of a piece of bacon that makes my mouth water.
When we report to our first class, Mademoiselle LeFarge’s French lesson, my luck runs out. Felicity’s clique of girls is clumped together in their seats, waiting for me. They guard the back row of the small, cramped room so that I’m forced to walk the gauntlet past them to take a seat. Right. Here goes.
Felicity sticks out her dainty foot, stopping me in the narrow row between her wooden desk and Pippa’s. “Sleep well?”
“Quite.” I give it an extra cheeriness it doesn’t deserve, to show how little I’m bothered by schoolgirl pranks in the night. The foot remains.
“However did you manage it? Getting out, I mean?” Cecily asks.
“I have hidden powers,” I say, amusing myself with this rueful bit of information. Martha realizes she’s been left out of the night’s foolery. She can’t bring herself to say so. Instead, she tries to be part of them by mimicking me.
“I have hidden powers,” she singsongs.
My cheeks go hot. “By the way, I did secure the object you requested.”
Felicity is all attention. “Really? Where do you have it hidden?”
“Oh, I didn’t think it wise to hide it. Might not be able to find it again,” I say, cheerily. “It’s sitting in plain view on your chair in the great hall. I do hope that was the best place for it.”
Felicity’s mouth flies open in horror. I give her foot a little shove with my leg and move up to a desk in the front row, feeling the heat of their gazes on my neck.
“What was that all about?” Ann asks, folding her hands neatly on her desk like a model pupil.
“Nothing worth mentioning,” I say.
“They locked you in the church, didn’t they?”
I lift the lid on my desk to block out Ann’s face. “No, of course not. Don’t be silly.” But for the first time I see the hint of a smile—a real smile—tugging at the corners of her mouth.
“Will they never get tired of that one?” she mutters, shaking her head.
Before I can respond, Mademoiselle LeFarge, all two hundred pounds of her, sweeps into the room with a cheery “Bonjour.” She grabs a rag and rubs it vigorously across the already clean slate, prattling on in French the whole time, stopping to ask the occasional question, which, I’m panicked to discover, everyone has the answer to—in French. I haven’t the faintest idea what’s going on, French being a language I’ve always thought sounded vaguely like gargling.
Mademoiselle LeFarge stops at my desk, claps her hands together in discovery. “Ah, une nouvelle fille! Comment vous appellez-vous?” Her face hovers dangerously near mine so that I can see the space between her two front teeth and every pore on her wide nose.
“Beg your pardon?” I ask.
She wags a chubby finger. “Non, non, non . . . en Fran?ais, s’il vous pla?t. Maintenant, comment vous appellez-vous?” She gives me that hopeful, wide smile again. Behind me, I hear snickering erupt from Felicity and Pippa. The first day of my new life and I’m stumped before I begin.
It feels like hours before Ann finally volunteers a helpful “Elle s’appelle Gemma.”
What is your name? All those strangled vowel sounds to ask one bloody stupid question? This is the silliest language on earth.
“Ah, bon, Ann. Très bon.” Felicity is still stifling her laughter. Mademoiselle LeFarge asks her a question. I pray she’ll stumble through it like a cow, but her French is absolutely flawless. There is no justice in the world.
Each time Mademoiselle LeFarge asks me something, I stare straight ahead and say “Pardon?” a lot, as if being either deaf or polite will help me understand this impossible language. Her wide grin closes slowly into a scowl till she gives up altogether asking me anything, which is fine with me. When the grueling hour is finally over, I have learned to stumble my way through the phrases “How charming” and “Yes, my strawberries are very juicy.”
Mademoiselle lifts her arms and we all rise in unison, recite the goodbye. “Au revoir, Mademoiselle LeFarge.”
“Au revoir, mes filles,” she calls as we place books and ink-wells inside our desks. “Gemma, could you stay for a moment, please?” Her English accent is bracing as cold water after all that flowy French. Mademoiselle LeFarge is no more Parisian than I am.
Felicity nearly trips in her mad rush to get out the door.
“Mademoiselle Felicity! There’s no need to hurry.”
“Pardon, Mademoiselle LeFarge.” She glares at me. “I’ve just remembered that I need to retrieve something important before my next class.”
When the room thins out to just the two of us, Mademoiselle LeFarge settles her bulk behind her desk. The desk is clear except for a tintype of a handsome man in uniform. Probably a brother or other relative. After all, she is a mademoiselle, and older than twenty-five—a spinster with no hopes of marrying now, otherwise what would she be doing here, teaching girls as a last resort?
Mademoiselle LeFarge shakes her head. “Your French is in need of much work, Mademoiselle Gemma. Surely you know this. You will have to work very hard to stay in this class with the other girls your age. If I don’t see improvement, I will be forced to demote you to the lower classes.”
“Yes, mademoiselle.”
“You can always ask the other girls for help, if need be. Felicity’s French is quite good.”
“Yes,” I say, swallowing hard, knowing full well that I would rather eat nails than ask for Felicity’s help.
The rest of the day passes slowly and uneventfully. There are elocution lessons. Dancing and posture and Latin. There is music with Mr. Grunewald, a tiny, stooped Austrian man with a weary voice and a look of defeat stamped across his sagging face, every sigh saying that teaching us to play and sing is one step below being tortured slowly to death. We’re all competent, if uninspiring, with our music—except for Ann.
When she stands up to sing, a clear, sweet voice comes pouring out of her. It’s lovely, if somewhat timid. With practice, and a little more feeling, she could be quite good, actually. It’s a shame that she won’t ever get the chance. She’s here to be trained to be of service, nothing more. When the music is over, she keeps her head down till she finds her seat again, and I wonder how many times each day she dies a little.
“You have quite a nice voice,” I whisper to her when she takes her seat.
“You’re just saying that to be kind,” she says, biting a fingernail. But a blush works its way into her full, ruddy cheeks, and I know that it means everything to her to sing her song, if just for a little while.
The week passes in a numbing routine. Prayers. Deportment. Posture. Morning and night, I enjoy the same social outcast’s status as Ann. In the evenings, the two of us sit by the fire in the great hall, the stillness broken only by the laughter coming from Felicity and her acolytes as they pointedly ignore us. By week’s end, I’m sure I’ve become invisible. But not to everyone.
There is one message from Kartik. The night after I discover the diary, I find an old letter from Father pinned to my bed with a small blade. The letter, rambling and sloppy, had hurt to read, and so I had stuffed it into my desk drawer, hidden away. Or so I thought. Seeing it on my bed, slashed, with the words you have been warned scrawled across Father’s signature chills me to the bone. The threat is clear. The only way to keep myself and my family safe is for me to shutter my mind to the visions. But I find I can’t close off my mind without closing off the rest of me. Fear has me retreating inside myself, detached from everything, as useless as the scorched East Wing upstairs.