Out on the lawn, some of the younger girls play happily in a circle, ducking under each other’s arms, falling to the ground in fits of laughter while their mothers hover nearby, fretting over soiled dresses and hair shaken free of ribbons and bonnets. Two girls skip past us, arm in arm, reciting the poetry they’ve learned for today’s occasion, something to show how much they’ve become small buds of ladies.
“She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro’ the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look’d down to Camelot.”
Overhead, the clouds are losing their fight to keep the sun. Patches of blue peek out from behind larger clumps of threatening gray, holding on to the sun with slipping fingertips.
“Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.”
The girls throw back their carefree heads and laugh riotously at their dramatic reading. The wind has shifted to the east. A storm isn’t far off. I can smell the moisture in the air, a fetid, living thing. Isolated drops fall, licking at my hands, my face, my dress. The guests squawk in surprise, turn their palms up to the sky as if questioning it, and dash for cover.
“It’s starting to rain.”
Felicity stares straight ahead, says nothing.
“You’ll get wet,” I say, jumping up, angling toward the shelter of the school. Felicity makes no move to come inside. So I go on, leave her there, even though I don’t feel right about it. When I reach the door, I can still see her, sitting on the wet bench, getting drenched. She’s opened up her father’s note to the wet, watching it erase every pen mark on the soggy page, letting the rain wash them both clean as new skin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE EVENING IS THE MOST DISMAL YET. COLD, HARD rain falls in sheets from the sky, letting us know that summer is over for good now. A clammy chill seeps into our bones, makes fingers, backs, and hearts ache. Thunder rumbles closer and closer, competing with the steady drum of the rain. The occasional flash of lightning streaks the sky, light spreading down and out in a smoky crackle. It bounces around the mouth of the cave.
We are all here. Wet. Cold. Silent. Miserable. Felicity sits on the flattened boulder, braiding the same section of hair, unbraiding, braiding it again. Every bit of her fire is gone, washed out to wherever the rain takes things.
Pippa wraps the ends of her cape about her, paces, moaning. “He’s fifty! Older than my own father! It’s too horrible to contemplate.”
“At least someone wants to marry you. You’re not a pariah.” It’s Ann, taking a break from holding the palm of one hand over the candle flame. She dips it lower and lower till she’s forced to pull back fast. But her wince lets me know she’s burned herself on purpose—testing once again to make sure she can still feel something.
“Why does everyone want to own me?” Pippa mumbles. She’s got her head in her hands. “Why do they all want to control my life—how I look, whom I see, what I do or don’t do? Why can’t they just let me alone?”
“Because you’re beautiful,” Ann answers, watching the fire lick at her palm. “People always think they can own beautiful things.”
Pippa’s laugh is bitter, tinged with tears. “Ha! Why do girls think that being beautiful will solve every problem? Being beautiful creates problems. It’s a misery. I wish I were someone else.”
It’s a luxury of a comment—one that only pretty girls can make. Ann answers this with a sharp snort of disbelief.
“I do! I wish I were . . . I wish I were you, Ann.”
Ann is so stunned, she holds her hand to the flame a second too long, pulling it back with an audible gasp. “Why on earth would you want to be me?”
“Because,” Pippa sighs, “you don’t have to worry about these things. You’re not the sort of girl people are constantly fussing over so there’s no room to breathe. No one wants you.”
“Pippa!” I bark.
“What? What did I say now?” Pippa moans. She’s completely unaware of her stupid cruelty.
Ann’s face clouds over, her eyes narrow, but she’s too beaten down by her life to say anything and Pippa is too selfish to notice. “You mean I don’t stand out,” Ann says flatly.
“Exactly,” Pippa says, looking at me with triumph that someone in the cave understands her misfortune. A second passes and now it dawns on Pippa. “Oh. Oh, Ann, I didn’t mean it like that.”
Ann switches hands, puts the left one to the candle.
“Ann, darling Ann. You must forgive me. I’m not clever like you are. I don’t mean half of what I say.” Pip throws her arms around Ann, who can’t resist having someone, anyone, pay attention to her, even a girl who sees her as just a convenience, like the right necklace or hair ribbon. “Come on, tell us a story. Let’s read from Mary Dowd’s diary.”
“Why should we bother when we know how it all ends?” Ann says, going back to her candle. “They die in the fire.”
“Well, I want to read from the diary!”
“Pippa, can’t you let it alone tonight?” I sigh. “We’re not in the mood.”
“That’s fine for you to say. You’re not the one being married against your will!”
The sky rumbles while we sit in our separate corners, alone in our togetherness.
“Shall I tell you a story? A new and terrible one? A ghost story?”
The voice, a faint echo in the great cave, belongs to Felicity. She turns around on the rock, faces us, wraps her arms across bent knees, hugging them close. “Are you ready? Shall I begin? Once upon a time there were four girls. One was pretty. One was clever. One charming, and one . . .” She glances at me. “One was mysterious. But they were all damaged, you see. Something not right about the lot of them. Bad blood. Big dreams. Oh, I left that part out. Sorry, that should have come before. They were all dreamers, these girls.”
“Felicity . . . ,” I start, because it’s her and not the story that’s beginning to frighten me.
“You wanted a story, and I’m going to give you one.” Lightning shoots across the cave walls, bathing half her face in light, the other in shadows. “One by one, night after night, the girls came together. And they sinned. Do you know what that sin was? No one? Pippa? Ann?”
“Felicity.” Pippa sounds anxious. “Let’s go back and have a nice cup of tea. It’s too cold out here.”
Felicity’s voice expands, fills the space around us, a bell tolling. “Their sin was that they believed. Believed they could be different. Special. They believed they could change what they were—damaged, unloved. Cast-off things. They would be alive, adored, needed. Necessary. But it wasn’t true. This is a ghost story, remember? A tragedy.”
The lightning’s back, a big one, two, three of light that lets me see Felicity’s face, slick with tears, nose running. “They were misled. Betrayed by their own stupid hopes. Things couldn’t be different for them, because they weren’t special after all. So life took them, led them, and they went along, you see? They faded before their own eyes, till they were nothing more than living ghosts, haunting each other with what could be. What can’t be.” Felicity’s voice goes feathery thin. “There, now. Isn’t that the scariest story you’ve ever heard?”
The rain beats down relentlessly, mixing with the strangled sounds of Felicity’s sobbing. Ann has stopped torturing her hands. Now she stares through the flame at cave walls that show her history, promise nothing. Pippa twirls her engagement ring round her finger till I fear she’ll break it off.
Maybe it’s the steady downpour driving me mad. Maybe it’s the thought of lovely Pippa, married off to a man she doesn’t love, who doesn’t love her, only wants to acquire her. Maybe it’s imagining Ann squelching her voice to work for pompous aristocrats and their hateful children. Or Felicity trying to hold back her tears. Maybe it’s that every word she’s said is true.
Whatever the reason, I’m thinking now of a way out, of bringing the magic back from the realms. I’m thinking of those mothers today in their ornate dresses and their vacant lives. And I’m thinking of my mother’s warning that I’m not ready to use my full powers yet.