“Would you girls please study . . . oh, goodness, I’m that scattered . . . the piano part, Steele, and this soprano vocal part, Clarke, for the end-of-year gala? I can think of no one better able to demonstrate our talents. Won’t you say yes?”
We glanced at each other; excelling at any course was a coveted position, but evidence suggested that our favourite teacher’s praise was not so complimentary as her censure. Meanwhile, Clarke was an outstanding vocalist—her tones were dizzyingly high, hovering midair as if a magical harp had been strummed. Students came to a bewildered halt in hallways whenever she practised her scales with that mathematical precision which was so innate in her.
“Of course.” Clarke took the small bundle of songs.
Then a strange thing occurred: head folding, Miss Lilyvale leant forward against her desk briefly. Her rosy cheeks had lost their blush during the course of the past two years, as if she had been bid to shoulder a stone up an endless mountainside; every month Miss Lilyvale became more of an automaton with something terribly pleading beneath the waxworks. She drew her fingers along the knob of her drawer, eyes briefly falling shut.
“Do you want something else of us?” Clarke asked.
She answered softly, “I can never have the things I truly want.”
“Are you all right, Miss Lilyvale?” I inquired, concerned.
“Oh! Heavens yes, I was only . . . distracted. Thank you for being so obliging,” our teacher said, smiling, and the strange moment was shattered.
“It’s in the desk,” Clarke announced as Miss Lilyvale bustled off to see that some younger girls were given appropriate parts. I was sixteen, Clarke thirteen, and thus as model pupils we were often left to our own devices—save for the inevitable Reckonings.
“What’s in the desk?”
“Whatever is haunting Miss Lilyvale.” Clarke studied her music. The charm of her distraction lay in the fact it was genuine; Becky Clarke could not lie if her life hung in the balance, and I shall soon cite statistical evidence to this effect. “This is rather high even for me, though I do like G major.”
“Never mind music,” I whispered as we quit the classroom. “Miss Lilyvale is stretched as tight as the catgut on her violin strings. You really mean to say you know what ails her?”
Clarke lifted the choral part as we walked. The birds outside the gloom-shrouded staircases were dumb that April afternoon, the carpets mute beneath our footsteps. “I went into the music room at half four yesterday because I thought I left my sketchbook, and Miss Lilyvale was reading a letter. When I appeared, she shoved it in the drawer she just touched so sadly.”
“And you think her correspondent is making her ill?”
“No one can say,” Clarke owned, tossing her flaxen curls though they were restrained under her chaste cap. “But if ever it looked as if a letter were strangling someone . . .”
The ensuing silence fairly crawled with questions.
Does Clarke wish me to intervene? I wondered, heart thrumming eagerly.
I had countless times thwarted hunger at Lowan Bridge, taking as much joy in naughtiness as in success; I had forged grades, pilfered supplies, told positively operatic lies. Queerly, Clarke had never minded these untruths, though I supposed that was thanks to her natural compassion, or else her practicality. In any event, I had learnt the principle swiftly: if I lied to Mr. Munt (or anyone else to do with the ultimate act of lying to Mr. Munt), I would be praised; if I lied to Clarke—all of these accidental falsehoods, bred of forgetfulness—I would be shunned until her ire burnt itself to cinders and she nuzzled into my shoulder like a cat seeking company.
So I had lied, and grown still better at it—for myself, and for my fellow prisoners. It only followed, since Miss Lilyvale was our unquestioned ally despite being a teacher, that I ought to ferret out what was wrong with her.
I wonder about the verb to ferret now I am grown. If a conjugation of a similar verb, to snake, existed, I believe that would have been closer to the truth—for my slithering, slinking capabilities had been honed by age sixteen to a nearly reptilian pitch.
? ? ?
I did not dream of inviting Clarke to raid Miss Lilyvale’s office that night, which in hindsight was a monstrous error; had we made the discovery together, we might have talked through what was best to be done.
Quietly, I eased my coarse frock on and skipped the apron, that material being too pale for untrammelled moonlight. I flinched as the door creaked, but no one stirred; if the girls knew one thing, it was that my disobedience tended to benefit the majority. Shutting the door behind me and risking further noise would have tempted Fate, so I stepped into the hallway, leaving a draught of air in my wake.