After the initial three hymns had been sung, Mr. Munt ascended to the pulpit. Vesalius Munt was never more happy than when every student’s attention speared in his direction, fixed to him like nails as he stood before the crucifix.
“Happy Sabbath to you, my girls,” he announced, beaming, and the my stuck in our thorny throats, for it was the truest sentiment he would admit to all morning. “I encourage you to rest peacefully upon this holiest of days, and repose knowing that Christ died to save you from your own ignorance and infamy. Let us proceed with our weekly Reckoning, that we might cleanse our souls.”
A hand raised. Mr. Munt devised a demeaning punishment for the accused—and often for the accuser. There were no rules in this jungle, no trails we might tread so as to escape the tiger’s tooth. We were paying as much mind as we ever did, Fox and I and Clarke, ears pricked for danger, when I startled at the sound of my name.
“Steele means well,” my bedmate was drawling exhaustedly from two pews distant. “And she’s as clever and helpful as everyone says, and oh, it’s dreadful, but she . . . she doesn’t mean to, and I hate to say it.”
I turned to gape at her. Taylor’s face was bloodless, a mere illustration: black hair thickly inked, eye and lip hinted at in delicate pen strokes. Her beauty had been marred of late by her uselessness at memorisation, and she had forsaken sleep in favour of struggling alone over data which meant nothing to her; now she embraced the only option guaranteed to merit a hot meal. I did not marvel that it was me—I was a proximal target, even a sensible one, already having earned a reputation for lying my way out of scrapes.
“What is it that Steele did not intend to do, Taylor?” Mr. Munt rested a poised arm against the pulpit.
Taylor’s round eyes flew to my queer tilted almond ones. “She dreams.”
“What in God’s name is Taylor doing?” growled Fox.
“It’s my fault,” I assured her quietly. “I didn’t notice she had got so frail. She has every reason to lie about me.”
“She isn’t lying,” I thought Fox muttered.
“Steele has simply terrible nightmares about her mother,” Taylor declared. “She doesn’t mean to scream, but she won’t stop.”
My heart stuttered.
Yes, I often awoke covered in sweat and raw-throated as a carrion crow and, yes, I dreamt of my mother; but I did not scream for her. Did I? Once or twice had I bitten back cries, but these were rarities, accidents.
Rising, I clasped my hands before my white apron. “I’m sorry for giving any trouble, but my mother died recently.”
“Over half a year hence,” Mr. Munt corrected.
“Mourning her is only natural. But please forgive me for disturbing the peace.”
“Natural?” Mr. Munt struck the flat of his hand against the podium as if smiting sin itself. “Let our hearts go out, girls, to this wayward lamb, who meditates on death when in the midst of God’s abundance.”
I bit the inside of my lip until I could taste all I had left of my mother, which was her blood.
“Steady,” Clarke chimed softly.
“Let Steele,” intoned Mr. Munt, “come to thank You, Lord, for your grace in orchestrating her removal from her mother’s evil influence.”
My hands gripping the pew had transformed into bleached bones.
“And let us never give up the hope that she may return one day to honest Christian practices!”
“Steady,” Clarke squeaked, gripping my skirt.
“Mourning my mother is not dishonest!” I cried.
I may as well have set off a bomb in the chapel; every eye swept to me in dismay. Contradicting Mr. Munt was tantamount to suicide; unfortunately, I had not yet grasped that suicide was the topic.
“Your mother,” Mr. Munt enunciated, relishing every syllable, “was a debauchee who perished deliberately by means of self-administered laudanum. She was thus buried with minimal services by the only minister willing to overlook her Gallic Catholic affiliations and willful self-slaughter, and your sainted aunt spared you the indignity of witnessing such a barren sight. Tell me, why should mourning your mother be praised as any sort of virtue when her tainted spirit so obviously haunts your own immortal soul? Your mother was a disgrace to the natural order—an embodied disaster.”
He had known all along, I realised.
There had been no mourners in crepe at my mother’s funeral, I understood: only the overripe aroma of earth unwilling to accept yet another unpaid houseguest. Suicide was high treason, for what greater violation existed than thwarting God’s will?
My sentence (a week of missing dinner) was announced and Taylor invited to rejoin the ranks of the fed; but the pit of my stomach swelled into a cavern long before hunger descended.
Mr. Munt had won; I had not been prepared for the truth. A small hand interlaced with mine.
“You don’t cry out so very often,” Clarke whispered, wide-eyed and earnest.
“I will now,” I managed hoarsely before disengaging myself and opening our prayer book with palsied fingers.