“Oh, go away, you horrid nosy thing,” cried Taylor, her eyes edged in pink. “I’ve had nothing to eat since the porridge, and meanwhile Granville is such a sweet girl, all those golden curls and her family from a simply ancient coffee fortune, and so the best sort of people, and she was made to slap herself in the face—herself, mind, and hard—after Mr. Munt caught her laughing over a sketch Fiddick did of Miss Hardbottle. Don’t touch me, I can’t bear anyone,” she sobbed, fleeing.
Mathematics followed, and theology, and French (at which I excelled, naturellement, and thus forever after avoided the red welts my classmates carried as souvenirs from Madame Archambault), and after we had crammed our heads full of geometry and the Book of John, the inevitable Reckoning followed.
I ate my stew and kept my head as low as any true acolyte.
I reproduce this workaday agenda to illustrate that we lived practically in one another’s pockets, so that in moments of emergency—which were as frequent as moments of breathing—we might offer help. If we succeeded thanks to cleverness and collaboration, we might fall asleep with a meal or even two, perhaps, rounding the hollows of our bellies. We were not friends; but so many others strove to make us wretched that we lacked the energy to turn upon one another save in the extremest necessity.
When I dropped exhaustedly next to Taylor at nine o’clock that first night as the sun vanished, I felt the same electric charge I have always gained from thwarting authority traversing the narrow ridge of my back.
You haven’t missed a meal yet, I thought. You could be very good at this. And the others might be made better off as well.
“Steele?” came a piping voice.
“Yes?” I answered Clarke.
“Good night,” said she, as Taylor’s warning toes jabbed me.
Grief is a strange passenger; it rides on one’s shoulder quiet as a guardian angel one moment, then sinks razor talons into one’s collarbones the next. No sooner had Clarke offered me this kindness than hot salt tears were soaking my pillow. My mother had once bid me good night, and good morning too; and my mother had loved me, and she had died for no reason I could discern, and was never coming back.
I would cry often for Mamma’s loss, as children are wont to do—but I could never have guessed that my own melancholy would lead to discoveries which once more dashed my world from its orbit.
? ? ?
The event which caused me fully to embrace my true nature took place some six months later.
By this time, I had come to know many facets of Lowan Bridge School. I knew that Taylor was secretly terrified not of being a governess but of being married to someone tyrannical, as her mother daily hid fresh bruises under flounces and lace; I knew that the curse of Fiona Fiddick’s life was that she was the funniest creature on earth, which meant that she weighed a stone less than she ought to have; I knew that under Fox’s dour attitude hid a girl who somehow always had an apple in her pillowcase, and never kept it for herself.
I knew that there were stables, unlocked ones, and horses available for caressing. I knew that the roof above our dormitory was accessible if one crept carefully, and that Clarke’s eyes as she mapped the swath of glittering black not obscured by the reek of London to the south of us were mossy pools in the moonlight, and that though she seldom laughed, she laughed at a stolen glimpse of the night sky most blithely of all, and her laugh was like the treble of a silver flute.
Sunday was both beloved and dreaded, for while we had no classes and were allowed to play on the lawn or read in quiet nooks, we were compelled to attend chapel. As we marched towards the elegant stone building on the day my life altered forever, a parade of dull blue soldiers plodding under stony November skies, the casual observer might have supposed we were going to be executed.
Sunday, after all, was the day Mr. Munt performed a weekly Reckoning, in order to catch out any sins we might have foolishly neglected to mention.
“Steele, will you help me with the Catullus assignment?” Fox’s ungainly form landed beside me in the third pew. “I can’t make heads or tails of it, and even if Miss Werwick doesn’t have a cane—”
“Of course,” I agreed. Censure from Madame Archambault was humiliating and painful, but Miss Werwick of all the teachers relished referring us to Mr. Munt, as if we were chess pieces (or, better still, ninepins).
Clarke sat upon my other side. “Anything immediate, mi’ladies?”
Clarke was wont to trill when she was well fed, as if beginning to compose a folk tune, and I adored her for it. I was about to answer in the negative when Miss Lilyvale advanced to take her seat before the pipe organ and commence our two hours of agony.
“With a true spirit of praise, girls, sing with me!” Miss Lilyvale called out.
A veil of authorial privacy will be drawn here; it would behove neither the reader nor the author to dwell upon musical atrocities which reside wholly in the past and cannot now be remedied.