One Macabre Afternoon to Begin

It’s a terrible story and one way to tell it is this: two girls in love and a fog of wasps cursed the place forever after.

Maybe you think you already know this story because of the movie made of it. Not so, but you’ll discover that soon enough. For now, let me acquaint you with Vespula maculifrons: the eastern yellow jacket. If you’re imagining some do-gooder honeybee humming about the pastel pages of a children’s book, don’t.

Eastern yellow jackets are aggressive when provoked, relentless when defending their underground home. They don’t make honey, but might I offer you instead the desiccated insect paste they use to grow their masses? A given colony’s workers are all stinging, sterile females who, in autumn—when they’ve been laid off from their busywork and can sense that the coming freeze will bring their deaths—just want to fly around, bored and gorging on carbs. (But then, don’t we all?) Because they also feed on carrion, some people refer to them as meat bees. That’s technically incorrect, but it sounds good.

Most crucially for our purposes here, you should know that when they’re in distress, yellow jackets release a pheromone to call on potentially thousands of their angry friends to help them come get you.

In this case the you was Clara Broward and my God was she ever in love with Florence “Flo” Hartshorn. And my God did that fact ever upset Clara’s wretched cousin Charles, who was just now chasing Clara through the thick woods surrounding the Brookhants School for Girls. The air in those woods was weighted with the scent of fern rot and ocean tide, apple mash and wet earth. And more than that, it was humming with the trill of yellow jackets. A few were probably already swirling around Clara like dust motes sprung from the beating of a rug, their buzzing pitch threaded to her pulse as her messy steps propelled her toward a clearing, and the Black Oxford orchard, where apples felled in a recent storm now spoiled in the heat.

And it was hot, the day humid and gray—one of those overripe summer days that sometimes linger into fall. And waiting there in the orchard with those spoiling black apples, lolled beneath a tree with juice dripping from her chin, was Flo—the love of Clara’s young life. A life about to end.

Two lives about to end, careful Readers.

We know that the year was 1902, and the state the tiniest in the nation: Rhode Island. We know that the Brookhants fall term had been in session for six weeks. And we know that Clara took off into that section of woods, onto the orchard path, because several of her classmates watched her do it. She’d just been delivered back to campus after a weekend stay at her parents’ house across the water in Newport, a house that they were then readying to close for the season.

Cousin Charles had been the one tasked with driving Clara to campus. More than a few students had noted this because what he’d driven her in was still something of a loud and chugging novelty, even for the wealthy Brookhants population: a gas-powered automobile. And not just any automobile, but a Winton—same as the Vanderbilts—which is exactly why Charles had gone out and bought the damn thing, along with the even stupider driving goggles that went with it. And he was, of course, wearing them when they pulled through the Brookhants gates, and then, as he slowed, he pushed them up, which smooshed his hair back into a nest atop his horrible head. Maybe some of the girls had, in fact, later said that he looked rakish and fine, but for now let’s discount their certainly incorrect opinions.

The important thing to know is that Charles and Clara were arguing as they arrived. And they continued to argue, the onlookers said, as he parked his loud contraption in the circle drive before Main Hall. They seemed to say their goodbyes very unhappily, Charles lunging from the car before gathering Clara’s belongings only to dump them on the ground, all the while continuing to lecture her. Then he climbed back into the driver’s seat and pouted there, his arms folded tight across his chest, his dumb face bitter as a cranberry and nearly as red.

But whatever the commands she’d just been given, Clara did not stoop to gather her things and go inside her dormitory, as one might have expected of her.

As, it seems, Charles was expecting of her.

Instead, she left the pile of clothing and cases and walked a few yards to a cluster of her gape-mouthed fellow students. She then asked where she could find Flo. Several of those students, including a third-year, Eleanor Faderman,^* told her to try the orchard. They told her that’s where Flo had been headed earlier.

With this news, Clara started her march across the wide lawn, which ended in a playing field rimmed with woods: where began the orchard path.

During these moments, stupid Charles still stewed behind the steering wheel, his great engine chugging. But he did not then pull down his goggles and drive away from campus. Instead, he watched Clara. Watched, disbelieving, each step she took away from him and toward the tree line.

And then she disappeared completely into the dark mouth that was the path’s entrance.

This is where the onlooking classmates begin to differ in their accounts. Some later insisted that Clara knew her knuckle-dragging cousin had left the car to chase after her. Those students claimed that she’d started to run even before reaching the woods, seeing or sensing Charles coming fast behind.

Others said she didn’t know, hadn’t seen.

And Clara herself could never say again.

Certainly, she would have been sweating, in the heavy afternoon heat of that bruised day, and this would have been part of the call to the first yellow jackets who found her. And unfortunately, everything about her clothing—the day dress with ruffled lace, the shoes more slipper than not—was most unsuited for an activity like running through the woods. Though it should be said that Clara often found her clothing unsuited for activities with Flo, usually just because she had too much of it on.

Flo herself solved the problem of unsuitable women’s clothing by wearing the castoffs of her older brother. Or sometimes Flo’s mother, when she hadn’t spent all of her monthly allowance from Flo’s grandparents, would even buy Flo a pair of pants or men’s boots. But then Flo’s mother was a sculptor, and her friends were all artists, most of them European. She liked to find ways to flout convention and usually supported the same instincts in her daughter. (When, Readers, she was remembering to remember that she had a daughter.)

Clara’s parents, on the other hand, were fourth-generation Americans shaped predominately by the conventions of their gilded social class. A few smart investments—steel and timber did the trick—and they’d watched their inherited wealth grow to numbers so high that even they could scarcely conceive of them. As such, they had a fastidious respect for the orderly following of the rules and systems from which they benefited. It all made them feel quite secure in the correctness of their position within the social order, and security was Clara’s mother’s favorite feeling, outranked only by virtuous womanhood. (She was cousin Charles’s favorite aunt, after all.)

That terrible afternoon, Charles, wanting to slow Clara, had perhaps called out to her, announcing his gaining presence. Surely his voice would have been as startling to her as the drift of a phantom, her path suddenly narrower—the low branches more like claws, her breath too shallow for her pace.

Even before what happened happened, Brookhants students had plenty of stories about those woods. They had stories about Samuel and Jonathan Rash, the brothers who had farmed the land more than a hundred years prior, stories about their spite-filled feud and its strange, resulting tower.

The students also had stories about the fog that gathered and hung in the woods, heavy as gray hopsacking dunked in a well. It blew in from the ocean only to drape itself over every leaf and briar, filling gaps and crevices, lingering for too long and hiding too much. And they of course had stories about the yellow jackets, everywhere, always, the humming of the yellow jackets, the flick of them about you. The woods were haunted, the students said. The woods were the source of sinister nighttime things that might scuttle their way across the lawns and up a vine-choked wall and in through your open window, until they were at the foot of your bed, now stomach, now pillow.

But you had to cross through the woods to get to the orchard, and usually, at least for Clara, every single time before this time, the orchard had been worth it.

The orchard, with Flo, and with Flo’s hands and mouth, too.

It’s worth mentioning that some of the Brookhants students also had stories about Flo and Clara. There were several girls who knew them well, their friends—girls who joined their club: the Plain Bad Heroine Society. And there were others, many others, who admired them. A few who probably envied them. But there was also a group, small but not insignificant, who felt quite bothered by them, who were wary of them; wary of their ideas and passions and the boldness with which they seemed to claim them.

Maybe this small but not insignificant group was even afraid of them.

The Black Oxford is an apple more associated with Maine than with Rhode Island. It was a somewhat old-fashioned and unusual variety, even in 1902, but you could still find them then in various places across New England. Brookhants was one of those places. Its orchard had nearly two dozen trees sprouting plum-black apples, like something planted by a witch in a fairy tale.^* The orchard was a place that, before Flo, Clara had visited only once or twice in her previous years of Brookhants education. But then came black-apple-eating, soft-kissing/hard-kissing, well-traveled, sure-of-foot-and-voice, fluent-in-Italian-and-adequate-in-French, and just generally delirious-making Flo. And came Mary MacLane’s book. And everything changed.

(Though not in that order. The book came first.)

This was something else the onlookers later argued about: Was Clara carrying the book when she took off toward the woods that day?

That a copy, a much-loved and underlined and page-marked copy, was found near the bodies, is undisputed. The Story of Mary MacLane (the scandalous debut memoir of its namesake nineteen-year-old) had a deep crimson binding when the dust jacket was removed. A red book was not hard to spot when left almost indecently splayed against a cluster of ferns so enormous they looked like half-opened green parasols. Even in such a gruesome scene, the book stood out. Much was later made of the underlined section it was found opened to:

I have lived my nineteen years buried in an environment at utter variance with my natural instincts, where my inner life is never touched, and my sympathies rarely, if ever, appealed to. I never disclose my real desires or the texture of my soul. Never, that is to say, to any one except my one friend, the anemone lady.

—And so every day of my life I am playing a part; I am keeping an immense bundle of things hidden under my cloak.

It was no secret on campus how enthralled with that book both Flo and Clara were. (And, more broadly, with Mary MacLane herself.) As you likely already know, they’d formed the Plain Bad Heroine Society as a way to show their devotion.

But who brought the book into the trees that day isn’t as certain as the fact that a copy was with them in their final moments. Some of the onlookers said Clara was carrying nothing at all on her march from the motorcar, while others swore that they saw the book gripped in her hand as she crossed the lawn. Though she’d been seen with it so frequently that school year, it’s natural to wonder if they might have imagined that part.

It was, after all, the book, the one that brought her and Flo together, the one that said, printed there on the page, the things Clara had once believed were her private thoughts alone. It was the book that Clara so often thought that truly, truly, she could have written herself. She could have had it sewn to her palm and still be unencumbered by it.

And if you asked Clara’s mother, she would have told you that Clara might as well have had that vile book sewn to her hand for the length of their summer in Newport, because there it had been, day in and day out.

Later, when Clara’s traveling case was searched—for it had been left there on the ground next to the car^* where Charles had dumped it—no copy of The Story of Mary MacLane was found. This would seem to suggest that Clara Broward did take her book with her into the woods that day.

It would seem to suggest that, except for this: in a letter sent after her daughter’s unfortunate death, Mrs. Broward told her sister, in great detail, of the cold comfort she had taken in burning Clara’s copy of that hateful book in the flames of her bedroom fireplace. She wrote that she began at page one, tore it free, fed the fire, and continued on until the red binding flapped empty, like a mouth with no teeth. And then she burned the empty mouth.

Mrs. Broward certainly believed that she did this to the only copy of Mary MacLane’s memoir that she knew her daughter to have ever owned.

Of course, all of this was only spoken of later.

Perhaps you already know that when the story of Flo’s and Clara’s deaths reached the press, Mary MacLane herself, then staying nearby at a seaside hotel in Massachusetts, was asked to issue a statement. She’s reported to have said, “I wish I could have known those girls.” This was both uncharacteristically short for a Mary MacLane statement to the press in those days and the thing that the two of them no doubt would have wanted to hear the most from her.

Before we move on, one more thing about that copy of the book found with the bodies. It was handled by faculty and police, Pinkertons and even Flo’s and Clara’s bereaved family members (not one of whom claimed it as belonging to their kin). And then, not so long after, it was misplaced. Officially misplaced, anyway. Lost. Unable to be located when it was asked after by reporters who felt sure they’d missed something the first time they’d gone through it and who now wanted another look.

Even Principal Libbie Brookhants^* herself could not find it. She was the school’s young if capable founder. She knew its grounds and buildings better than anyone else left alive, and she told those doubting reporters that she had made a point of looking for the copy in question in every place on campus that it might have conceivably ended up; it simply could not be found.

The book was gone.

This part won’t get more pleasant with my stalling so we might as well get on with it. And just so you know: the facts, such as they are, get foggier from here on out, too.

We know, based on where the girls were later found, that at some point Clara veered from the orchard path. Whether this was due to Charles’s gaining speed or some tactic meant to prevent that from happening, I cannot say, but it proved a fateful choice.

To be sure, that path had its own difficulties, but now a tangle of hailstorm-downed branches and thick undergrowth snagged at the soft fabric of Clara’s dress and tripped up her steps. When she was found, her skirt was clogged with thorns and twigs, shredded from the things in the understory that had caught her.

In fact, Clara seemed to forge directly into a section of woods that the Brookhants students called the Tricky Thicket, an area of bizarrely dense growth—the trees leafier, the brambles bramblier—fed by a hot spring. It was said that even in winter, even with snow otherwise all around, the ground in that patch stayed thawed and ferns grew lush and green, and ripe blackberries might be found.

Perhaps thinking it would provide her with cover, Clara now much more slowly made her way through this thicket. And if she’d also been looking backward, every so often, checking on Charles’s unhinged approach, then that too would have hindered her speed.

Though they’d left the path, the two cousins were now close enough to the orchard, to Flo, that she would have heard their shouts. Or screams. It’s likely that this was why she came running toward them, hoping for Clara but finding Charles first. When that stupid man was brought from the woods, he had a black eye and a bleeding face swollen from more than stings alone.

“She charged me like a drunken bear,” he told a reporter from the Providence Daily Journal. He was talking about Flo, who, he said, had attacked him. In an interview given from his sickbed he called her “a real she beast. More animal than girl. She had something in her hand, a stone or stick.” He also said that her actions toward him had proved him right, and that what he’d previously told Clara about Flo was now made undeniably true. “That girl was no lady! She was a ruffian bastard—some foreign-born devil who exerted her depraved influence over my cousin. Clara was only too female-minded to see it.”

When asked why he had been chasing his cousin in the first place, Charles had said, as if obvious: “We had not finished our conversation to my satisfaction. And before we could do so she openly defied me, playing up to her schoolmates. I knew that her mother, my beloved aunt, would want me to correct that sort of insolence at once. So I did.”

Charles explained that during her weekend at home, Clara had been issued an ultimatum regarding her family’s expectations for her future comportment at Brookhants: if Clara wanted to continue to attend the school for her senior year, and to graduate with her class, she would immediately discontinue her friendship with Florence Hartshorn and cease all activities related to The Story of Mary MacLane. (And as you now know, Mrs. Broward apparently believed that even continuing to possess a copy of that book was an activity related to it.)

Wretched Charles might have admitted that Flo attacked him, but why and how she did so was as unclear (and speculated about) in 1902 as it is today. Was it only to interrupt his pursuit of Clara? Or did Flo witness something else between them? Something worse? And when did she do it, exactly—before the yellow jacket attack or while it was already underway?

Because in the end, Readers, the yellow jackets are the thing. I told you that at the start.

What Clara did, in the middle of the Tricky Thicket, was step over a fallen log and directly into a ground nest of them. And this particular ground nest was of a size not only unusual, but seemingly impossible for a northern state like Rhode Island.

Yellow jacket colonies in places as far north as New England are supposed to last only one season. They can’t overwinter, because the region is too frozen and food scarce for anyone but the queen, fed fat off the sweets of her minions, to survive. In places like Florida, warm even in January, it’s not so unusual for ground nests to continue season after season—for decades, sometimes, with dozens of queens ordering around thousands of workers—the cycle of birthing and feeding, eating and building, churning along without pause. But that’s not supposed to be the way in Rhode Island, which has a winter with snow and cold and frozen ground.

Just not in the Tricky Thicket.

And so here it was: a yellow jacket nest to build your nightmares from, its paper chambers stretching in underground layers until it was almost the size of three of Charles’s cars parked in a row. And Clara’s foot, slipping off the edge of a mossy log, landed in the uppermost layer of the nest’s papery frame, where it promptly sank and sank, up to her knee it sank, wrenching her to a stop. She would have had only moments to comprehend what had happened, why the ground had given way, because now the yellow jackets were coming, furious and streaming up from the rip like a rattling chain shot into the sky.

Remember that a yellow jacket is not a honeybee. A honeybee has a barbed stinger that lodges in flesh, which means that it can sting you only once before it leaves that stinger in you and dies.

But a smooth-stingered yellow jacket can and will sting you multiple times.

And thousands of vengeful, broken-homed yellow jackets stinging you multiple times?

Charles later said that he heard his cousin’s screams, but there was simply no time to reach her: Clara was swallowed up by the swarm at once, as if she now wore a writhing mummy wrap of yellow jackets, a pulsing black-and-yellow outline that smothered her until she was now them.

At some point Flo must have charged toward Clara, presumably to help her, and was at once wrapped in her own cloak of yellow jackets. And Charles—of course, fucking Charles—ran away. But not before pushing his now-useful driving goggles over his eyes. The goggles and the running away did not prevent him from being stung, nor did they keep him from swelling with hives and passing out on the path leading back to the school. But they did help to keep him alive.

Later, horrible Charles would say that he’d found great purpose and meaning in the fact of his life being spared that day. By all accounts he used that purpose to idle away his remaining days, spending his inheritance while failing at several half-hearted business ventures and in general behaving like the brutish, moneyed bowl of rancid bowels that he was. This behavior lasted for a period of several years, until he was killed on the maiden voyage of a very big ship that met a very bad end.^* But thankfully this story is not about cousin Charles, so let us leave him to his turbid depths.

Death from anaphylaxis is not known to be gentle. There were some signs, in the shape of the smashed undergrowth, in the piles of vomit found nearby, that our strong, young heroines did struggle together for a time.

How long Flo and Clara clung to each other, how hard they might have worked to move beyond the yellow jackets, the nest, is impossible to ascertain—and would, I’m sure, be quite difficult to put into words, even if we did know. Given the sheer number of stings each received—and so many of them to their faces—it couldn’t have been long before they both succumbed to the thickening dark from which they would not wake.

That they might have had the chance, in their final moments, to say just how much they meant to one another, the real desires and textures of their souls, is a most doubtful thing given the horror of their circumstances. What is important to remember, Readers, is that they had said these things to each other before those circumstances befell them.

They were discovered very near to the place in the nest where Clara’s foot had made the tear. There were so many angry yellow jackets still swarming the area, like a buzzing net draped over the whole of the thicket, that the responding Brookhants faculty, and soon after, the Tiverton police, determined that a controlled fire was the only way to get near enough to bring the girls out.

Brookhants students later told stories of flaming yellow jackets making their way from their now-burning nest, through the woods and onto campus, before drowning themselves, bodies hissing, in the fountain in front of Main Hall. Apparently, there were so many singed yellow jacket carcasses floating dead atop its surface the following morning that students began dipping their hands in to take them: death souvenirs. Eventually, the groundskeeper was sent to clear them with a net. Despite this carcass-skimming, the water is said to have soon turned fetid, an oily black algae growing along its sides and surface. So rank was this water, so unclean, that within days the school had no choice but to drain, scrub, and refill the fountain. This, like so many Brookhants stories, may only be the stuff of dorm-room-lights-off legend.

Brookhants students later told stories of flaming yellow jackets . . . drowning themselves, bodies hissing, in the fountain.

But then, stranger things have happened. Even, especially, at Brookhants.

That our complicated, wonderful heroines were found twined together, hands clasped and heart to heart, has never been disputed. But given the time it took to rouse awful Charles and make enough sense of his stupid mutterings to locate them, and then to assess the situation, bring the supplies, and burn the nest—coupled with the number of stings each girl received—it is of no surprise that Flo’s and Clara’s mortal bodies had not fared well.

Any exposed skin was welted: their hands and necks and, the worst, their faces, which were now balloon masks of protruding lips and swollen eyes. Clara’s eyes had been bleeding, the tracks of blood dried down her cheeks. The attack was so severe, so ferocious, that their topography of red hives, a telltale sign of the anaphylaxis, was quite obscured by bruising. The unfortunate students who saw them carried out of the woods—for in their makeshift planning, the officials had forgotten to bring sheets to cover them—said their faces looked like bitten and rotting Black Oxford apples. More than one girl made that comparison.^*

I did tell you this story was ghastly.

You might think it an improvement on said ghastliness that within three years of this terrible day, the Brookhants School for Girls was closed, its buildings left empty and wanting for students who would not arrive. But you should also know that before that happened, three more heroines died on the property, each in a most troubling way.

It’s true, of course, that all death is troubling to those of us left alive to bear witness, but certainly among the most troubling of all are the ugly, unexpected deaths of young people just starting to understand who and how they might be in the world. Or how they might remake the world to better be in it.

Perhaps equally troubling are the deaths of older people submerged in deep regret.

Everything else to come in these pages comprises the story of three heroines from the present and more heroines from the past and how they all collided around Brookhants, and a book, and also a book about Brookhants.

I’ll say it again: Brookhants, and a book, and a book about Brookhants.

And who, you ask, am I? The voice telling you to come this way, to follow me? Some hazy apparition with a beckoning hand? A thousand yellow jackets shaped to look like a body with intention, one prone to scatter into diverging paths if provoked?

I can promise you that by the time we reach the end, you’ll know me much better than I’ll know you. (And if I seem to know things I shouldn’t, or couldn’t possibly, well that’s part of our bargain. I’ll cite my research when I can, but when I can’t: I do now ask for your trust in me to fill in the gaps as I see fit. I can see quite a lot from this vantage point.)

Finally, let me say, right up front, how sorry I am about all the potential for puns. I cannot help that the school’s name is Brookhants^* and that it’s said to be haunted. Whether it was, in fact, haunted even before Clara, Flo, and the yellow jackets depends on where and how you start the story of Brookhants, and for how many years you’re willing to trace it.

I told you, this is only one way to tell it. And only one place to end it.

And perhaps it hasn’t ended yet.

So let’s begin.