Wake up.” Maud’s face floated white as paste in the dark, and behind it Melody’s face, and behind that, Coral’s. When Jenny sat up she saw that Ella May and Tilly were also there. The whole Good Manners Club. Maud’s voice was a hiss. “Come with us.”
They made Jenny go first up the stairs. “Shhh!” Melody told her once, although she was already making as little noise as an Indian. They went up one flight and then another, until they were in the tower room.
“You’re not afraid to be here, are you?” Maud asked.
Outside, the fog was so thick that no lights shone through. “No,” said Jenny, with a sense of being trapped. She knew there was no right answer to that question. Maud excelled at questions without right answers.
“You need to toughen up,” Maud said. “When you’re adopted, you’ll probably sleep by yourself. You can’t be such a baby about it. None of the rest of us mind the dark.”
Jenny thought she didn’t mind the dark, either. What she minded was being shut up. But even that was all right, because she knew the door didn’t lock. She needed only to wait as long as she could, letting the other girls go back to their beds, and then go out again. She could go anywhere she liked, out to the barn with the dog and the mule, or into the downstairs parlor to sleep. Or out to the street. She often went for walks when she couldn’t sleep. As long as you were wherever you were expected when morning came, no one knew. Jenny took a seat on the settee that smelled of dead horses. The door shut with a click.
The room was cold and stank of dust and the bitter Chinese tea Miss Hayes drank. Jenny’s breath was coming as fast as if she’d run up the stairs.
She didn’t hear the girls, but they would wait for her. She couldn’t leave yet. She must stay still as long as she possibly could. The silence pressed against her ears until it turned her pulse into a metronome.
Jenny put her hands on her knees and played scales over them. Two minutes, she told herself. An egg cooking. She kept her hands arched and tried to keep her fingering even. Give every note the same time to breathe. Instead she found herself playing faster and faster, lost track of when the egg was done.
She rose and picked her way through the clutter of charitable donations. There was a stuffed squirrel with its tail raised, and a hat rack with dangerous points on which she scratched her arm. There was a broken music stand, and a large cracked vase for umbrellas. Jenny reached the door and turned the knob.
It spun like a pinwheel. She panicked. She grabbed the doorknob tightly, pulled with both hands. The knob rattled in its socket, could be wiggled this way and that like her loose tooth.
Maud must have known it was broken, or arranged for it to be broken. Generally the boys stayed out of things between the girls, but Duffy Phelps would do anything Maud wanted, and Mrs. Lake said he was a wizard with a hammer, could fix anything. The thought that the boys might have known what Maud had planned was a special humiliation for Jenny.
By now she was gasping for air and unable to speak. No one would hear her, anyway. She stumbled back to the settee and flung herself onto it. Her face was already hot with tears, and now she began to weep with her mouth open, making faces that stretched her cheeks. Whenever she took a breath there was a noise like barking. She wiped her nose on the hem of her nightgown, because she had nothing else, and then fell asleep.
She awoke cold as well as terrified. She found a woman’s dress, velvet with the hem kicked out, smelling of mothballs. She pulled its skirt over her as she lay on the settee. The pulse in her ears was deafening and yet she was convinced that something hungry was in the room with her. There’d been a rustle, the tick-tock of claws, only her heart was too loud for her to hear this.
She rose. Whatever was hungry retreated with a scrabble, but it would be back when it saw what a little girl she was. She was exactly what something hungry would want. Jenny had to get out. She crept to the nearest window.
Outside, the world was gone. There were no stars, no scrub, no sand, no city. Nothing above and nothing below. A vast and milky ocean rolled against the glass.