13

IT WAS DIFFICULT to get through the afternoon and dinner with Raven’s note stirring restlessly in my pocket. What made it worse was that in our new capacity as wardens we were each expected to oversee a nestling table. I managed to get Etta’s table with Mary, Susannah, Myrtilene, and two girls whose names I instantly forgot, but I would have much preferred sitting with my friends. I briefly saw Beatrice and Dolores in passing, but only long enough for Beatrice to say they had some momentous news that we’d hear at dinner and for Dolores to give me a silent, but surprisingly firm, hug. Camilla Bennett flew by me on the stairs and quite startled me by announcing she’d gotten her “wings.” After a moment I realized she wasn’t talking about the kind of wings I was getting. Cam was an aviation enthusiast, so she no doubt meant she had taken flying lessons.

But for now I had to answer an endless litany of questions that ranged from “Why are there so many forks?” (from Susannah) to “Is that bacon in the soup?” (from a wide-eyed Etta) to “Is this what y’all eat up here?” (from Myrtilene) to “What’s this initiation all the girls are whispering about?” (from a frightened-looking Mary).

“Don’t worry,” I told Mary, “you’ll be safe. It’s just . . .” I found myself unable to finish. What else could I tell her? That everything she thought she knew about the world was about to be cracked in two? That she would be all right? Not everybody survived the initiation mentally intact. Miss Sharp’s uncle Taddie had become so agitated during the initiation that he’d run off, gotten lost in the woods, and never been the same again. Some girls became hysterical and left the school. Nathan’s sister, Louisa, was so haunted by what she had learned that she was drawn back into the woods and got stuck in Faerie. For all I knew there were girls who never made it back. What was I doing leading these innocent girls into danger? How different was I from van Drood abducting girls into the Hellgate Club?

“Actually, Mary—” I began.

“Actually, Mary,” a male voice drawled, “you’ll be perfectly fine because I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

Nathan plucked an apple from the basket on the table, tossed it into the air, and winked at me. Mary MacCrae dimpled and blushed.

“You must be Dame Beckwith’s son. We’ve heard all about you.”

“Don’t believe a word of it,” Nathan said, crunching into the apple. “Rumors fly around here—actually, a lot of things do.” Again he winked at me. I shifted uneasily in my seat and heard Raven’s note crinkling in my pocket.

“Second years don’t normally go to the initiation,” I said to Nathan, more to cover up my guilty secret than because I cared about the rules.

“Spoken like a strict warden,” Nathan rejoined. “But how could I resist accompanying such lovely ladies?” He gave Mary and Susannah a smile that reduced them to simpering puddles of giggles. Even Myrtilene was stretching her long neck to work her way into Nathan’s field of vision. I glanced across the room to where Helen was sitting two tables away and saw her scowling in our direction. Perhaps that was the whole point of Nathan’s performance—to make Helen jealous.

Or perhaps not. After a witticism that made the whole table burst into laughter Nathan bent down to retrieve a fallen napkin and whispered in my ear, “I’ll be keeping an eye on you, too, Ava.” Then he retreated with bows and smiles for the new girls.

“Oh, what a handsome and charming young man!” Mary MacCrae swooned with one hand pressed over her heart.

“And a very brave one,” Etta said, looking up from her nearly untouched plate.

Et tu, Etta? I almost said, but then I remembered that Nathan had rescued Ruth from the Hellgate Club. Of course he was a hero to Etta—as he clearly was to the rest of the girls. I had my work cut out getting them to quiet down when the first bell rang.

“Shh . . .” I hissed, pointing to the gold handbell in the middle of our table. “One of you has to ring the bell. It’s part of the tradition.”

All the girls except for Myrtilene looked toward Etta, who, smiling shyly, grasped the bell in her small hand and rang it fiercely.

The Great Hall filled with the clamor of ringing bells as the teachers of Blythewood filed onto the stage. I told the girls each of their names as they appeared: Vionetta Sharp, Rupert Bellows, Euphorbia Frost followed by Miles Malmsbury, returned from Faerie—both he and Miss Frost wearing elaborate ceremonial headdresses of lampsprite feathers, which I supposed the lychnobious people did not find objectionable—Martin Peale, the bell master, Matilda Swift, the archery mistress, and Mrs. Calendar, the ancient Latin mistress. I was looking out for Professor Jager, our science teacher and Beatrice and Dolores’s father, but instead a svelte gentleman in black tails, bow tie, white gloves, and spats glided onto the stage.

“Oh, look!” Mary cried. “It’s Herr Hofmeister, the dancing master.”

“But where’s Professor Jager?” I wondered aloud.

I looked across the hall to Beatrice and Dolores’s table. They were both sitting ramrod straight with their hands clasped tightly in front of them, eyes shining. Had something happened to their father? I tried to catch Helen’s eyes, but she was rolling them skyward as the elegant dancing master grabbed ancient Mrs. Calendar and spun her around to the delight and amusement of students and teachers alike.

I looked back to the center of the dais, where even Dame Beckwith was smiling indulgently at the dancing teacher’s antics. She pantomimed a little applause and then turned her gaze on the room, commanding silence with her clear gray eyes. When her gaze fell on me I felt a tingling down my shoulder blades. I suddenly recalled that Dame Beckwith possessed the power of compelling truth with her gaze. What if she could tell merely by looking at me that I was turning into a Darkling? Worse, what if her gaze could draw the wings right out of my back? I could feel them pressing against the tight laces of my corset. I imagined fabric splitting, my wings exploding into the air, the shocked and horrified faces of my friends and schoolmates and teachers . . . then the drawn bows of the Dianas and the lethal arrow to the heart.

But then Dame Beckwith smiled at me.

Instantly I felt a peacefulness pervade my soul. My wings subsided, my heart slowed. As she had last year, Dame Beckwith began by acknowledging those who had not returned to Blythewood. I thought of Sarah Lehman, my friend who had turned out to be a spy for van Drood and had perished in the fire during the battle with the tenebrae. As Dame Beckwith spoke proudly of our alumnae who’d gone into the world to spread the mission of the school to the four corners of the globe, I thought of the seniors who had graduated last year. It all sounded very inspiring, but I couldn’t forget what Omar had said, that the emissaries of the Order had combed through the temples and ashrams of India looking for magical adepts to use their skills—but not to invite them into the Order.

Then I realized Dame Beckwith was talking about Professor Jager.

“. . . and one of our esteemed professors has also gone into the world on a mission of the utmost importance. Professor Ernst Jager”—Dame Beckwith looked toward Beatrice and Dolores, who sat up even straighter and glowed with pride—“has gone abroad on a diplomatic mission of great delicacy and international significance. It is no exaggeration to say that the very fate of civilization as we know it hangs in the balance. That is how important the Order of the Bell is. You girls are the heirs to that tradition of service. Who knows what missions each of you may be called upon to perform in the difficult times that lie ahead.”

Dame Beckwith paused and allowed her gaze to travel around the room. As her gaze fell on each girl she sat a little straighter, and her eyes burned a little more fiercely. “Let us begin, then, as we do each year, by pledging ourselves to the light and pledging ourselves by the bell.”

After dinner the nestlings rushed upstairs to their cocoa parties, but I stopped Etta outside the dining hall.

“You didn’t eat anything,” I said, looking down at her plate. “I know you’re excited to be in a new place . . .” I faltered when I saw her blushing, then I blushed myself. “I am a complete idiot! Of course your family keeps kosher. I’ll speak to the cook immediately—”

“It’s all right, Avaleh. I spoke with my father before coming here, and he said that I should do the best that I could among the gentiles. I had planned just to eat dairy and fish, but then it came all mixed up. . . .”

“We’ll speak to the cook,” I said, squeezing Etta’s hand.  “I’m so sorry I didn’t make arrangements earlier.  If you come to the kitchen now, we’ll find something for you to eat.”

“I can just have hot cocoa and cookies,” Etta said, smiling. 

“If you’re sure,” I said.  She nodded, and I let her run upstairs to join her friends.  I stopped in the kitchen and talked to Ethel, the cook, about making sure that Etta was only served dairy and fish. 

Then I joined the rest of the second and third years in the Commons Room, where my classmates were eagerly catching each other up on their news. Cam Bennett had indeed gotten her pilot’s license. 

But her news was quickly drowned out by the announcement of several engagements, including those of Alfreda Driscoll and Wallis Rutherford. Helen oohed and aahed with the rest of us over their enormous diamond rings, but in an aside to Daisy and me said she thought it was gauche to get engaged before graduation. Daisy glanced nervously at me, and I, divining that Helen was anxious about her own marriage prospects, hastily changed the subject by asking Daisy to tell us her news.

Daisy looked uncertain for a moment, twisting her hands nervously and glancing from me to Helen.

“Spit it out, Daze,” Helen snapped. “It can’t be worse than all this engagement blather.”

“I’ve joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association,” she announced breathlessly. “Of course, the women in Kansas aren’t as dramatic as our sister suffragists in England who’ve broken windows and been arrested, but we did shout very loudly at our demonstration at the state capitol.”

This led to a discussion of the movement in England and the news that Blythewood alumna Andalusia Beaumont had been arrested at a demonstration with the radical suffragist Emily Wilding Davison and had engaged in a hunger strike in prison. A debate ensued over whether violence was ever justified and led to talk of other conflicts in Europe and the Jager twins’ announcement their father had been summoned to the court of the Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna to negotiate between the Serbians and the Austrians.

“There are dangerous forces at work in Europe,” Beatrice solemnly informed us as her sister Dolores looked gravely on. “Papa fears the shadows are gathering for an assault on the Order. Dolores and I, of course, offered to accompany him to Vienna, but he assured us that we would do the most good here at Blythewood. The dark forces will try to undermine the Order before they dare put their plans for European domination in motion. He told us that we must be vigilant here at Blythewood to guard against intruders.”

“There will be no intruders here,” Alfreda Driscoll announced, rattling the quiver of arrows on her shoulder. “Not with us as Dianas.”

It should have come as no surprise that Alfreda Driscoll, Wallis Rutherford, and Georgiana Montmorency had been elected to the elite squadron of protectors known as the Dianas, but still it didn’t make me feel particularly safe to have them running around the house with their bows drawn. I’d seen the Dianas in a hunting craze. Van Drood had told me that their training made them susceptible to being turned to his uses. I’d have to keep an eye on them.

“Come on,” Daisy whispered. “We should go upstairs and make sure the nestlings are all tucked in. They’ll have little enough sleep before we take them to the initiation.”

“I don’t remember any wardens going with us last year,” I said.

“They didn’t. And look what happened—we nearly got eaten by goblins. There aren’t enough Dianas to watch over all the nestlings. I suggested to Dame Beckwith that we go along so no one strays from the group.”

It was a sound plan, with the sole disadvantage that it would make it difficult for me to get away from the rest to meet Raven. I half wondered if that wasn’t Daisy’s intention. She’d been giving me queer looks all evening since Helen had made her pronouncement about early engagements, and when I asked after her beau, she’d turned beet red and said he was “just-fine-thank-you-very-much.” Had she broken it off with Mr. Appleby? I’d have to ask her. But first I would have to figure out a way of getting free of my friends’ well-intentioned interference.

When we opened our door later that night we saw that the Dianas were already going from door to door rousing the sleepy and confused nestlings. I hurried toward Etta’s room and found her helping Susannah and Mary into slippers and reassuring them that everything would be all right. Myrtilene, in a silk peignoir and paper curlers, was loudly complaining that it was terribly uncivilized to roust a lady from sleep in the middle of the night, until her cousin hissed at her to be quiet. When the nestlings gathered, I managed to position myself at the back of the group, just behind Etta and her friends. When Daisy waved me forward I told her that I would take up the rear to make sure there were no stragglers.

We proceeded down the wide stairs, lit only by the lamps the Dianas carried. Although I knew what the initiation consisted of, I found myself awed by the solemnity of the procession. In the flickering lamplight, the portraits of teachers and illustrious alumnae on the walls looked down upon us gravely, as if enjoining us to live up to the Blythewood tradition. In the Great Hall the stained-glass windows depicting women archers seemed to be standing guard against the darkness pressing in on the castle. But then we were passing through the wide-open doors and out into that darkness.

Our lamps cast insubstantial pools of light in the wide expanse of fog-shrouded lawn, the beams carving strange shapes out of the fog, and then shrinking to pinpoints when we passed into the forest. The nestlings, who had been whispering among themselves, went silent as we entered the woods. I opened up my inner ear and listened.

At first I heard nothing. All the forest sounds I had heard today—the sift of leaves, creak of branches, and stir of the wild things that lived there—had vanished. It was as if the wood knew it was being invaded and had gone to ground like a frightened hare. Or like an owl who stalks its prey on muffled wings. The Blythe Wood was listening to us, watching us, waiting . . .

I stopped and let the last girls go on ahead. Into that silence fell the sound of wings swooping down from a great height, heading straight toward me. It took every ounce of nerve in my body not to bolt, but I stayed still until those wings descended and swooped me up into the night.