A Great And Terrible Beauty (30 page)

There’s a lump in my throat that will not go away. I offer the sugar bowl to Tom. Ann is watching his every move with fascination, though he’s hardly noticed her.

“So,” Tom says, dropping three lumps of sugar into his tea. “Miss Bradshaw, has my sister driven you out of your wits yet with her forthright manner?”

Ann blushes. “She’s a most genial girl.”

“Genial? We are speaking of the same Gemma Doyle? Grandmama, it seems Spence is more than a school. It’s a house of miracles.”

Everyone has a polite laugh at my expense, and truly, I don’t mind. It’s so nice to hear them laugh, I wouldn’t care if they poked fun at me all afternoon. Father fumbles with his spoon as if he’s not quite sure what to do with it.

“Father,” I say gently. “Could I pour you some tea?”

He gives me a weak smile. “Yes, thank you, Virginia.”

Virginia. At my mother’s name, an embarrassed quiet descends. Tom stirs his tea around and around, chasing it with his spoon.

“It’s me, Father. It’s Gemma,” I say quietly.

He squints, turns his head to one side, studying me. Slowly he nods. “Oh, yes. So it is.” He goes back to playing with his spoon.

My heart’s a stone, sinking fast. We make polite conversation. Grandmama tells us of her garden and her visiting and all about who is not speaking to whom these days. Tom prattles on about his studies while Ann hangs on his every word as if he were a god. Father is lost to himself. No one asks how I am or what I am doing. They could not care less. We’re all looking glasses, we girls, existing only to reflect their images back to them as they’d like to be seen. Hollow vessels of girls to be rinsed of our own ambitions, wants, and opinions, just waiting to be filled with the cool, tepid water of gracious compliance.

A fissure forms in the vessel. I’m cracking open. “Is there any news about Mother? Have the police found anything new?”

Tom sputters. “Ho-ho! At it again, are we? Miss Bradshaw, you’ll have to excuse my sister. She has a keen sense of the dramatic. Our mother died of cholera.”

“She knows. I told her,” I say, watching for their reactions.

“I’m sorry that my sister has had such a poor joke at your expense, Miss Bradshaw.” His words to me through gritted teeth are a warning. “Gemma, you know that cholera took poor Mother.”

“Yes, her cholera. Amazing that her cholera didn’t kill us all. Or perhaps it is. Perhaps it’s coiled in our blood, suffocating us all slowly with its poison each day,” I spit back with an equally venomous smile.

“I think we’d best change the topic. Miss Bradshaw certainly does not need to be subjected to such histrionics.” Grandmama dismisses me with a sip of her tea.

“I think my poor mother is an excellent topic of conversation. What do you think, Father?”

Come on, Father. Stop me. Tell me to behave, to go to hell, something, anything. Let’s see some of that old fighting spirit.
There’s nothing but the syrupy whistle of wet air going in and out of his slack mouth. He’s not listening. He’s lost in his own reflection, the one staring back at him, bloated and distorted, in the shiny hollow of the teaspoon he’s twirling between skeletal fingers.

I can’t stand the sight of them huddled together against the truth, deaf and dumb to anything remotely real. “Thank you for coming. As you can see, I’m getting along quite well here. You’ve done your duty, and now you’re free to go back to whatever it is you all do.”

Tom laughs. “Well, that’s a fine thank-you. I’m missing a cricket match for this. Weren’t they supposed to civilize you here?”

“You’re being childish and rude, Gemma. And in front of your guest. Miss Bradshaw, please excuse my granddaughter. Would you care for more tea?” Grandmama pours it without waiting for a response. Ann stares at the cup, grateful for something to focus on. I’m embarrassing her. I’m embarrassing everyone.

I rise. “I have no desire to ruin everyone’s pleasant afternoon, so I shall say goodbye. Are you coming, Ann?”

She glances shyly at Tom. “I haven’t finished my tea,” she says.

“Ah, at last a real lady among us.” Tom applauds lightly. “Bravo, Miss Bradshaw.”

She smiles into her lap. Tom offers cakes and Ann, who has never refused a morsel of food in her life, declines as a well-born, properly bred lady should, lest she seem a glutton. I’ve created a monster.

“As you wish,” I grumble. I bend at Father’s knees, take hold of his hands, and pull him away from the table. His hands shake. Perspiration beads on his forehead. “Father, I’m going now. Why don’t you walk with me?”

“Yes, all right, darling. See the grounds, eh?” He attempts a half-smile that fades into a grimace of pain. Whatever Grandmama has given him isn’t enough. He’ll need more soon, and then he’ll be lost to us all. We take a few steps, but he stumbles and has to right himself on a chair. Everyone looks up and Tom is quickly by my side, ushering him back to the table.

“There now, Father,” he says a bit too loudly, so that it can be overheard. “You know Dr. Price said you mustn’t walk on that ankle yet. That polo injury must heal.” Satisfied, the heads go down in the room, save for one. Cecily Temple has spotted us. With her parents in tow, she’s headed to our table.

“Hello, Gemma. Ann.” Ann’s face is the picture of panic. Cecily sizes up the situation. “Ann, will you be singing for us later? Ann has the sweetest voice. She’s the one I told you about—the scholarship student.”

Ann shrinks down low in her chair.

Grandmama’s confused. “I thought you said your parents were abroad. . . .”

Ann’s face contorts and I know she’s going to cry. She bolts from the table, knocking over a chair on the way.

Cecily pretends to be embarrassed. “Oh, my, I hope I haven’t said the wrong thing.”

“Every time you open your mouth and speak it’s the wrong thing,” I snap.

Grandmama barks, “Gemma, whatever is the matter with you today? Are you ill?”

“Yes, forgive me, everyone,” I say, tossing my wadded napkin onto the table in a heap. “My cholera is acting up again.”

Later, there will need to be an apology—
sorry, so sorry, can’t explain myself, sorry.
But for now, I’m free from the tyranny of their need masquerading as concern. Gliding through the ballroom and down the stairs, I have to put a hand to my stomach to keep from breathing too fast and fainting. Thankfully, the French doors are open to allow a breeze and I walk out onto the lawn, where a game of croquet has sprung up. Fashionable mothers in large-brimmed hats knock brightly colored wooden balls through narrow hoops with their mallets while their husbands shake their heads and gently correct them with an arm here, an embrace there. The mothers laugh and miss again, deliberately, it would seem, so as to have their husbands stand close again.

I pass unnoticed through them, down the hill to where Felicity sits alone on a stone bench.

“I don’t know about you, but I’ve had quite enough of this absurd show,” I say, forcing a surly camaraderie into my tone that I don’t feel at all. One hot tear trickles down my cheek. I wipe it away, look off at the croquet game. “Has your father come yet? Did I miss him?”

Felicity says nothing, just sits.

“Fee? What’s the matter?”

She passes me the note in her hand, on a fine white card stock.

My dearest daughter,

I am sorry to tell you on such short notice but duty calls me elsewhere, and duty to the Crown is of the utmost importance, as I’m sure you would agree. Have a jolly day, and perhaps we shall see each other again at Christmastime.

Fondly,

Your father

I cannot think of anything to say.

“It’s not even his handwriting,” she says at last, her voice flat. “He couldn’t even be bothered to pen his own goodbye.”

Out on the lawn, some of the younger girls play happily in a circle, ducking under each other’s arms, falling to the ground in fits of laughter while their mothers hover nearby, fretting over soiled dresses and hair shaken free of ribbons and bonnets. Two girls skip past us, arm in arm, reciting the poetry they’ve learned for today’s occasion, something to show how much they’ve become small buds of ladies.

“She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces thro’ the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She look’d down to Camelot.”

Overhead, the clouds are losing their fight to keep the sun. Patches of blue peek out from behind larger clumps of threatening gray, holding on to the sun with slipping fingertips.

“Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried

The Lady of Shalott.”

The girls throw back their carefree heads and laugh riotously at their dramatic reading. The wind has shifted to the east. A storm isn’t far off. I can smell the moisture in the air, a fetid, living thing. Isolated drops fall, licking at my hands, my face, my dress. The guests squawk in surprise, turn their palms up to the sky as if questioning it, and dash for cover.

“It’s starting to rain.”

Felicity stares straight ahead, says nothing.

“You’ll get wet,” I say, jumping up, angling toward the shelter of the school. Felicity makes no move to come inside. So I go on, leave her there, even though I don’t feel right about it. When I reach the door, I can still see her, sitting on the wet bench, getting drenched. She’s opened up her father’s note to the wet, watching it erase every pen mark on the soggy page, letting the rain wash them both clean as new skin.

THE
EVENING
IS
THE
MOST
DISMAL
YET
.
COLD
,
HARD
rain falls in sheets from the sky, letting us know that summer is over for good now. A clammy chill seeps into our bones, makes fingers, backs, and hearts ache. Thunder rumbles closer and closer, competing with the steady drum of the rain. The occasional flash of lightning streaks the sky, light spreading down and out in a smoky crackle. It bounces around the mouth of the cave.

We are all here. Wet. Cold. Silent. Miserable. Felicity sits on the flattened boulder, braiding the same section of hair, unbraiding, braiding it again. Every bit of her fire is gone, washed out to wherever the rain takes things.

Pippa wraps the ends of her cape about her, paces, moaning. “He’s fifty! Older than my own father! It’s too horrible to contemplate.”

“At least someone wants to marry you. You’re not a pariah.” It’s Ann, taking a break from holding the palm of one hand over the candle flame. She dips it lower and lower till she’s forced to pull back fast. But her wince lets me know she’s burned herself on purpose—testing once again to make sure she can still feel something.

“Why does everyone want to own me?” Pippa mumbles. She’s got her head in her hands. “Why do they all want to control my life—how I look, whom I see, what I do or don’t do? Why can’t they just let me alone?”

“Because you’re beautiful,” Ann answers, watching the fire lick at her palm. “People always think they can own beautiful things.”

Pippa’s laugh is bitter, tinged with tears. “Ha! Why do girls think that being beautiful will solve every problem? Being beautiful creates problems. It’s a misery. I wish I were someone else.”

It’s a luxury of a comment—one that only pretty girls can make. Ann answers this with a sharp snort of disbelief.

“I do! I wish I were . . . I wish I were you, Ann.”

Ann is so stunned, she holds her hand to the flame a second too long, pulling it back with an audible gasp. “Why on earth would you want to be me?”

“Because,” Pippa sighs, “you don’t have to worry about these things. You’re not the sort of girl people are constantly fussing over so there’s no room to breathe. No one wants you.”

“Pippa!” I bark.

“What? What did I say now?” Pippa moans. She’s completely unaware of her stupid cruelty.

Ann’s face clouds over, her eyes narrow, but she’s too beaten down by her life to say anything and Pippa is too selfish to notice. “You mean I don’t stand out,” Ann says flatly.

“Exactly,” Pippa says, looking at me with triumph that someone in the cave understands her misfortune. A second passes and now it dawns on Pippa. “Oh. Oh, Ann, I didn’t mean it like that.”

Ann switches hands, puts the left one to the candle.

“Ann, darling Ann. You must forgive me. I’m not clever like you are. I don’t mean half of what I say.” Pip throws her arms around Ann, who can’t resist having someone, anyone, pay attention to her, even a girl who sees her as just a convenience, like the right necklace or hair ribbon. “Come on, tell us a story. Let’s read from Mary Dowd’s diary.”

“Why should we bother when we know how it all ends?” Ann says, going back to her candle. “They die in the fire.”

“Well, I want to read from the diary!”

“Pippa, can’t you let it alone tonight?” I sigh. “We’re not in the mood.”

“That’s fine for you to say. You’re not the one being married against your will!”

The sky rumbles while we sit in our separate corners, alone in our togetherness.

“Shall I tell you a story? A new and terrible one? A ghost story?”

The voice, a faint echo in the great cave, belongs to Felicity. She turns around on the rock, faces us, wraps her arms across bent knees, hugging them close. “Are you ready? Shall I begin? Once upon a time there were four girls. One was pretty. One was clever. One charming, and one . . .” She glances at me. “One was mysterious. But they were all damaged, you see. Something not right about the lot of them. Bad blood. Big dreams. Oh, I left that part out. Sorry, that should have come before. They were all dreamers, these girls.”

“Felicity . . . ,” I start, because it’s her and not the story that’s beginning to frighten me.

“You wanted a story, and I’m going to give you one.” Lightning shoots across the cave walls, bathing half her face in light, the other in shadows. “One by one, night after night, the girls came together. And they sinned. Do you know what that sin was? No one? Pippa? Ann?”