A Great And Terrible Beauty (26 page)

We understand each other. We share a secret.

Not a terrible secret like the one that binds me to my family and to Kartik, but a deliciously forbidden secret that bands us together. Anticipation races through our veins, stretching our skins tight to the point of bursting. It’s all we can do to get through the day and wait for night to come so that we can open that door of light into the realms again. We are as one. There will be no outsiders. No intruders on our experience.

During our music lesson, Mr. Grunewald drones on for the whole of the hour about the merits of a particular opera. Elizabeth, Cecily, and Martha listen like the good girls they are, taking perfect little notes, their heads bobbing up and down in unison. Listen, write, listen, write.

We don’t jot down a word of it. We’re elsewhere in a land where we can be anything we choose. Mr. Grunewald calls Cecily to the piano to play her Assembly Day piece for us. Her fingers plod out a careful, correct minuet.

“Ah, good, Miss Temple. Very precise.” Mr. Grunewald is pleased, but we know the feel of real music now, and it’s difficult to feign interest in the merely pretty.

After class, Cecily pretends her playing was awful. “Oh, I simply butchered it, didn’t I? Tell the truth.”

Martha and Elizabeth protest, tell her she was brilliant.

“What did you think, Fee?” It’s easy to see that she wants Felicity’s praise.

“Very nice” is all Felicity says.

“Just nice?” Cecily forces a laugh that’s meant to sound devil-may-care. “My, it must have been truly awful, then.”

“It was a lovely waltz,” Felicity says, getting it wrong. She can barely keep the smile from her face. I look away, trying not to break into the same ridiculous grin.

“It wasn’t a waltz. It was a minuet,” Cecily corrects. She’s pouting openly.

Elizabeth peers at us as if she doesn’t know who we are.

“Why are you looking at us that way, as if we’re specimens?” Pippa asks.

“I don’t quite know. There’s something different about you.”

We exchange quick glances.

“There is something different, isn’t there? Come now, if you’ve a secret you’d best share it.”

“That would be telling, wouldn’t it?” Felicity smirks. The light is shining through the hall window. It makes the dust dance in the air.

“Pippa, darling, you’ll tell me, won’t you?” Elizabeth puts her arm around Pippa, who twirls away from her embrace.

Cecily is quite put out. “The old Pip and Fee wouldn’t have kept secrets from us.”

“But those old girls are gone.” Felicity gives a radiant smile. “They are dead and buried. We are new girls for a new world.”

And with that we push past them, leaving them behind us in the hall like so much dust floating slowly down to earth.

Miss Moore has prepared canvases for us. There is muslin stretched taut over framing, watercolors at the ready. Can bucolic beach scenes and flower arrangements be far behind? I note the bowl of fruit placed on a table in the center of the room. Another still life. If she wants a still life, we could just as easily paint the futures Spence is preparing us for day by day. I expect better from Miss Moore.

“A still life?” My voice drips with disdain.

Miss Moore stands by the windows. Silhouetted against the sky’s gray glare, she looms like a scarecrow. “Do I sense dissatisfaction, Miss Doyle?”

“It isn’t terribly challenging.”

“The world’s greatest artists have seen fit to paint still lifes from time to time.”

She has me there, but I’m not going down without a fight. “How much challenge is there in an apple?”

“We shall find out,” she says, handing me a smock.

Felicity inspects the bowl of fruit. She selects an apple, bites into it with a loud crack.

Miss Moore takes it from her hand and returns it to the bowl. “Felicity, please do not eat the exhibit or I shall be forced to use wax fruit next time and then you’ll have a nasty surprise in store.”

“I guess it’s a still life after all,” I sigh, dipping my brush into the red paint.

“It appears I am in the midst of a rebellion. You didn’t seem to mind painting so much the other day.”

Felicity shares one of her sly grins. “We are not the same as the other day. Indeed, we are utterly changed, Miss Moore.”

Cecily exhales loudly. “Don’t try to reason with them, Miss Moore. They are impossible today.”

“Yes,” says Elizabeth, adopting a nasty tone. “They are new girls for a new world. Isn’t that right, Pippa?”

There are more furtive glances that do not go undetected by Miss Moore. “Is this true, Miss Doyle? Are we in the midst of a private revolution?”

She catches me off guard. It always feels strange to be on the other end of Miss Moore’s microscope lens. It’s as if she knows what I’m thinking. “We are,” I say at last.

“Do you see what I mean?” Cecily huffs.

Miss Moore claps her hands together. “We could do with something new. I am overthrown. They are your canvases for the hour, ladies. Do as you will.”

We erupt in cheers. The brush seems suddenly lighter in my hand. Cecily isn’t happy, though.

“But Miss Moore, Assembly Day is only two weeks away, and I won’t have anything decent to show my family when they arrive,” she says, pouting.

“Cecily’s quite right, Miss Moore,” Martha joins in. “I don’t care what
they
want. I can’t show my family some primitive sketch of a cave wall. They would be appalled.”

Miss Moore raises her chin, looking down on them. “I wouldn’t want to be the cause of such distress to you and your families, Miss Temple and Miss Hawthorne. Here. The fruit bowl is yours. I’m sure your parents would enjoy a still life.”

Felicity wanders over to some clay. “May I make a sculpture, Miss Moore?”

“If you wish, Miss Worthington. Ye gods, I don’t know if I am holding class or the class is holding me.” She hands Felicity a lump of clay for molding.

“To make certain the afternoon is an educational one after all,” Miss Moore says, glancing at Cecily, “I shall read aloud from
David Copperfield
. Chapter One: ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. . . . ’”

At the end of the hour, Miss Moore examines our paintings, murmuring both praise and correction. When she comes to my painting—a large, misshapen apple taking up the whole of the canvas—she purses her lips for what seems a long time. “How very modern, Miss Doyle.”

Cecily lets out a sharp laugh when she sees it. “Is that supposed to be an apple?”

“Of course it’s an apple, Cecily,” Felicity snaps. “I think it’s marvelous, Gem. Quite
avant-garde.
”

I’m not satisfied. “It needs more light on the front to make it shiny. I keep adding white and yellow, but that only washes everything out.”

“You need to add a bit of shadow back here.” Miss Moore dips a brush in sepia and paints a curve along the outside edge of my apple. Immediately, the shine on the apple is apparent, and it looks much better. “The Italians call this
chiaroscuro
. It means the play of light and dark within a picture.”

“Why couldn’t Gemma simply add the white to make the apple shine?” Pippa asks.

“Because you don’t notice the light without a bit of shadow. Everything has both dark and light. You have to play with it till you get it exactly right.”

“What do you propose to call that?” Cecily’s tone drips disdain.

“
The Choice
,” I blurt out, surprising myself.

Miss Moore nods. “The fruit of knowledge. Most interesting, indeed.”

“Do you mean as in Eve’s apple? As in the Garden of Eden?” Elizabeth asks. She’s diligently trying to add sepia shadows to her painting now, and it’s making her fruit look bruised and ugly. But I’m not going to tell her that.

“Let’s ask the artist. Is that what you intended, Miss Doyle?”

I have no idea what I meant, really. I fumble to make sense of it. “I suppose it’s any choice to know more, to see beyond what’s there.”

Felicity throws me a conspiratorial glance.

Cecily shakes her head. “Well, it’s not a very accurate name. Eve didn’t choose to eat the apple. She was tempted by the serpent.”

“Yes,” I argue, thoughts coming out half-formed. “But . . . she didn’t have to take a bite. She chose to.”

“And she lost paradise in the bargain. Not for me, thank you. I’d stay right there in the garden,” Cecily says.

“That, too, is a choice,” Miss Moore points out.

“A much safer one,” Cecily argues.

“There are no safe choices, Miss Temple. Only other choices.”

“Mama says that women were not meant to have too many choices. It overwhelms them.” Pippa repeats this as if it’s a lesson well taught. “That’s why we’re supposed to defer to our husbands.”

“Every choice has consequences,” Miss Moore says, sounding far away.

Felicity picks the apple from the bowl and finds her bite mark. The sweet white meat has browned in the air. She sinks her teeth in and makes a clean new mark.

“Delicious,” she says, her mouth juicy full.

Miss Moore comes back to us with a laugh. “I see Felicity doesn’t complicate the matter with too much deliberation. She’s a hawk, diving in.”

“Eat or be eaten!” Felicity takes another mouthful.

I’m thinking of Sarah and Mary, wondering what horrible choice they made. Whatever it was, it was powerful enough to shatter the Order. And that leads me to the choice I made the day I ran from my mother in the marketplace. The choice that seems to have put everything in motion.

“What happens if your choice is misguided?” I ask, softly.

Miss Moore takes a pear from the bowl and offers us the grapes to devour. “You must try to correct it.”

“But what if it’s too late? What if you can’t?”

There’s a sad sympathy in Miss Moore’s catlike eyes as she regards my painting again. She paints the thinnest sliver of shadow along the bottom of the apple, bringing it fully to life.

“Then you must find a way to live with it.”

THE
AFTERNOON
IS A
FINE
ONE
,
AND
THE
GROUNDS
AND
gardens of Spence are blooming with girls—on bicycles, playing pantomimes, strolling, gossiping. The four of us have taken up a game of lawn tennis. We’re playing doubles, Felicity and Pippa against Ann and me. Each time my racquet touches the ball, I fear I’m in danger of decapitating someone. I think it is safe to say that I may add tennis to the long list of skills I shall not acquire. By sheer luck, I manage to hit the ball to my opponents. It sails past Pippa, who watches it go by with all the enthusiasm of a cook watching water come to a boil.

Felicity throws back her head in exasperation. “Pippa!”

“It isn’t my fault. That was a dreadful serve!”

“You should have reached for it,” Felicity says, twirling her racquet.

“It was clearly out of reach!”

“But so much is within our reach now,” Felicity says, cryptically.

The girls watching us play may not know what she means, but I do. Pippa is having none of it, however.

“This is dull, and my arm aches,” she complains.

Felicity rolls her eyes. “Fine, then. Let’s take a walk, shall we?”

We bequeath our racquets to an eager, pink-cheeked foursome. Our game ended, we link arms and roam through the tall trees, past a group of younger girls who are playing Robin Hood. The trouble is that they all want to be Maid Marian and no one wants to be Friar Tuck.

“Will you take us into the realms again tonight?” Ann asks, when their voices have faded to a hum behind us.

“You couldn’t keep me away.” I smile. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“Who?” Pippa asks, bending to pick acorns.

“My mother.”

Ann gapes. Pippa’s head pops up. “But isn’t she—”

Felicity interrupts. “Pippa, help me gather some goldenrod to bring to Mrs. Nightwing. That should put her in a happy mood tonight.”

Dutifully, Pippa follows Felicity on her mission and soon we’re all looking for the September blooms. Down by the lake, I see Kartik leaning against the boathouse, arms crossed, watching me. His black cloak flutters in the wind. I wonder if he knows about his brother’s fate. For a moment, I feel a bit sorry for him. But then I remember the threats and taunts, the smirking way he tried to order me about, and all my sympathy vanishes. I stand tall and defiant, staring straight back at him.

Pippa wanders over. “Good heavens, isn’t that the Gypsy who saw me in the woods?”

“I don’t recall,” I lie.

“I hope he doesn’t try to blackmail us.”

“I doubt it,” I say, trying to feign lack of interest. “Oh, look—a dandelion.”

“He is rather handsome, isn’t he?”

“Do you think so?” It’s out of my mouth before I can stop it.

“For a heathen, that is.” She tosses her head in a coy fashion. “He seems to be looking at me.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that Kartik could be watching Pippa and not me, and for some reason, this bothers me. As infuriating as he is, I want him to be gazing only at me.

“What are you looking at?” Ann asks. Her hands are full of drooping yellow weeds.

“That boy over there. The one who saw me in my chemise the other night.”

Ann squints. “Oh. Him. Isn’t he the one you kissed, Gemma?”

“You didn’t!” Pippa gasps in horror.

“She did,” Ann says, matter-of-factly. “But only to save us from the Gypsies.”

“You were with the Gypsies? When? Why didn’t you take me?”

“It’s a rather long story. I’ll tell you on the way back,” Felicity chides. Pippa is squawking about the way we’ve kept vital information from her, but Felicity’s eyes are on Kartik and then me with an understanding that makes me feel suddenly like running for cover. And then she has her arm around Pippa’s shoulders, telling her the story of our adventures in the Gypsy camp in a way that completely exonerates me. I am a noble, self-sacrificing girl who endured his kiss only to save us. It is so convincing that I almost believe her myself.