A Great And Terrible Beauty (6 page)

The vicar, whose name is Reverend Waite, leads us in prayers that all begin with “O Lord” and end with our somehow not being worthy—sinners who have always been sinners and will forever more be sinners until we die. It isn’t the most optimistic outlook I’ve ever heard. But we’re encouraged to keep trying anyway.

I have to watch Ann and the others to see when to kneel, when to rise, and when to mouth along to the hymn. My family is vaguely Anglican, like everyone else, but the truth is that we rarely went to church in India. On Sundays, Mother took me for picnics under hot, cloudless skies. We’d sit on a blanket and listen to the wind whip across dry land, whistling to us.

“This is our church,” she’d say, combing fingers through my hair.

My heart’s a tight fist in my chest while my lips form words I don’t feel. Mother told me that most of the English only prayed with heart and soul when they needed something from God. What I want most from God is to have my mother back. That isn’t possible. If it were, I’d pray to anyone’s god, night and day, to make it so.

The vicar sits and Mrs. Nightwing stands. Ann moans slightly under her breath.

“Oh, no. She’s going to make a speech,” she whispers.

“Does she do this every vespers?” I ask.

“No,” Ann says, giving me a sidelong glance. “She’s doing it for your benefit.”

Suddenly, I can feel every pair of eyes glaring at me. Well, this should get me off to a rousing start with everyone.

“Ladies of Spence Academy,” Mrs. Nightwing begins. “As you know, for twenty-four years, Spence has enjoyed a reputation as one of England’s finest finishing schools. While we can and will teach you the necessary skills to become England’s future wives and mothers, hostesses and bearers of the Empire’s feminine traditions, it will be up to each of you to nurture and feed your souls, and to apply yourselves with grace, charm, and beauty. This is the Spence motto: Grace, charm, and beauty. Let us all rise and say it together.”

There is a great rustling as fifty girls stand at attention and recite the pledge, chins tilted upward toward the future. “Thank you. You may be seated. For those girls who have returned to us this year, you shall set the example for the others. For those who are new to us”—Mrs. Nightwing scans the chapel till she finds me next to Ann—”we expect nothing less than your very best.”

Thinking this is our dismissal, I rise from the pew. Ann pulls on my skirt.

“She’s just begun,” she whispers.

And, indeed, Mrs. Nightwing astonishes me by prattling on about virtue, the well-mannered girl, suitable breakfast fruits, the unfortunate influence of Americans on British society, and her own fondly remembered school days. Time has no meaning. I feel as if I have been left in the desert to die and am waiting eagerly for the vultures to begin their work and end my misery.

Candle shadows stretch long over the walls, making our faces look haunted and hollow. The chapel is hardly a comforting site. It’s ghostly. Certainly not someplace I’d want to be alone after dark. I’m shivering at the thought of it. At last, Mrs. Nightwing finishes her long-winded address, which makes me utter my own silent prayer of gratitude. Reverend Waite reads a benediction and we’re dismissed for dinner.

One of the older girls stands at the door. When we reach her, she sticks out her foot and sends Ann sprawling to the floor. Her eyes dart past us where they find Felicity and Pippa a few heads behind.

I give Ann my hand and help her to her feet. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she says, giving the same straight-ahead stare that seems to be her only expression.

The girl steps around her. “You really should be more careful.” The others stream past us, casting glances at us, giggling.

“Grace, charm, and beauty,” Felicity says as she breezes past. I wonder what she would look like if someone were to cut off all her hair in her sleep. My first evening at prayers has not made me into a particularly charitable girl.

Outside, the mist has thickened into a gray soup that settles around our legs. Down the hill lies the hazy outline of the enormous school, broken by thin slivers of lights from the various windows. Only one wing remains completely dark. I figure it to be the East Wing, the one destroyed by the fire. It sits, curled and quiet as the gargoyles on the roof, as if waiting. For what, I don’t know.

Movement. To my right. A black cloak running through the trees, disappearing into the mist. My legs have gone rubbery.

“Did you see that?” I ask, voice shaking.

“See what?”

“Out there. Somebody running about in a black cape.”

“No. It’s the fog. Makes you see things.”

I know what I saw. Someone was waiting there, watching us.

“It’s cold,” Ann says. “Let’s walk faster, shall we?”

She steps briskly ahead of me, letting the fog consume her till she’s only a blue spot, a shadow of a girl, fading into nothing.

I’M
BEING
WATCHED
.
THE
FEELING
STAYS
WITH
ME during a tedious dinner of lamb and potatoes followed by pudding. Who would be watching me and why? That is, who else besides the girls of Spence, who eye me and whisper to each other, stopping only when Mrs. Nightwing reprimands one girl for letting her fork droop.

When dinner is finished, we are allowed a free period in the great hall. This is the time we’re given to be at ease—to read, laugh, socialize, or just sit about. The great hall is just that—enormous. A massive fireplace commands the center of one wall. Six beautifully engraved marble columns form a circle in the middle of the room. Mythical creatures have been carved into each one—winged fairies, nymphs, and satyrs. Strange décor, to say the least.

At one end of the room, the younger girls sit playing with dolls. Some have gathered to read, some to embroider, and some to gossip. In the best possible corner, Pippa and Felicity are holding court with a few other girls. Felicity has cordoned off a sitting area and turned it into her own fiefdom complete with exotic scarves that make it seem like a sheik’s tent. Whatever she’s telling the others seems to have them hanging on her every word. I have no idea how thrilling it might be, since I’ve not been invited. Not that I want to be invited. Not much, anyway.

Ann is nowhere to be found. I can’t very well stand in the center of the room like an imbecile, so I find a quiet seat near the roaring fire and open my mother’s diary. Though I haven’t looked through it in a month or so, I’m in the mood to torture myself tonight. In the firelight, Mother’s elegant handwriting dances on the page. It’s surprising how just the sight of her words on paper makes tears sting at my eyes. So much about her has begun to fade away. I want to keep holding on. And so I read, flipping through page after page of notes about teas and visits to temples and housekeeping lists, until I come to this, her very last entry:

June 2
^nd
—Gemma is cross with me again. She wants desperately to go to London. That will of iron is formidable, and I am quite exhausted by it all. What will her birthday bring? It is agonizing to wait, and torture to have her loathe me so.

Sentences go blurry, words run together as the tears pool. I wish I could go back and change everything.

“What are you doing?” Ann asks, hovering over me.

I wipe at my wet cheeks with the back of my hand, keep my head down. “Nothing.”

Ann takes a seat and pulls out some knitting from a basket. “I like to read, too. Have you ever read
The Perils of Lucy, A Girl’s Own Story
?”

“No. I can’t say that I have.” I know the type of book she means—cheap, sentimental claptrap about put-upon girls triumphing over adversity without ever losing that sweet, kindhearted, feminine softness everyone seems to prize so highly. The kind of girls who would never cause their families to worry and suffer. Girls nothing like me. The bitterness is too much to contain.

“Oh, wait,” I reply. “That’s the one where the heroine is some poor, timid girl at boarding school who gets bullied by everyone for being such a sap. She reads to the blind or raises a lame brother or perhaps even a blind and lame brother. And in the end everyone discovers she’s really a duchess or some such who goes off to live like a queen in Kent. All because she took her punishment with a smile and a sense of Christian charity. What poppycock!”

My breath keeps catching in my chest. I’ve been overheard by the embroider-and-gossip set, who giggle in shocked delight at my bad manners.

“It might happen,” Ann says, softly.

“Honestly,” I say, with a brittle laugh, as if it will excuse the harshness of my words. “Do you know any orphan girls who’ve been plucked from obscurity and made into duchesses?”
Get yourself under control, Gemma. You mustn’t cry.

Ann’s voice takes on a new determination. “But it could happen. Couldn’t it? An orphan girl, a girl no one expected much from, someone who’d been dumped in a school because her relatives thought of her as a burden, a girl the other girls laugh at for her lack of grace, charm, and beauty . . . that girl might show them all one day.”

She stares into the fire, knitting ferociously, the needles clicking together, two sharp teeth in the wool. Too late I realized what I’ve done. I’ve struck at the very heart of Ann’s hope, a hope that she could become someone else, someone with a life that doesn’t involve spending the rest of her days as governess to some rich man’s children, grooming them for a wonderful life and opportunities she’ll never see.

“Yes,” I say, my voice hoarse and quiet. “Yes, I suppose it could happen.”

“Those girls, the ones who misjudged . . . Lucy. They’d all be very sorry one day, wouldn’t they?”

“Yes, they would,” I agree. I don’t know what else to say and so we sit and watch the fire crackle and spit.

Peals of high laughter draw our attention to the far corner. Pippa emerges from the sheik’s tent where the other girls still sit. She saunters over to the two of us and slips her arm through Ann’s.

“Ann, darling, Felicity and I feel simply awful about the way we treated you earlier. It was terribly unchristian of us.”

Ann’s face is still slack, but she blushes and I know she’s pleased, sure that this is the beginning of her new, wonderful life among the beautiful. The end of
The Perils of Ann.

“Felicity’s mother sent a box of chocolates. Would you like to join us?”

There is no invitation issued to me. It’s a huge slight. Across the room the other girls are waiting to see how I’ll take it. Ann glances at me guiltily and I know what her answer will be. She’s going to sit and eat chocolates with the very girls who torment her. And now I know that Ann is as shallow as the rest of them. More than ever I wish I could go home, but there is no more home.

“Well . . . ,” Ann says, looking down at her feet.

I should just let her wallow in her discomfort, force her to snub me, but I’m not about to let them get the best of me.

“You should go,” I say, flashing a smile that would put the sun to shame. “I really must catch up on my reading.”

Yes, after all, if I were to join you, I might enjoy myself, and wouldn’t that be a shame? Please, don’t spare me another thought.

Pippa is all smiles. “There’s a sport. Come on, Ann.” She waltzes Ann off to the far end of the room. With a forced yawn for the benefit of the girls watching me from the tent, I sit down and open my mother’s social diary again, as if I couldn’t care less about being ignored. I turn the pages as if I’m captivated, though I’ve already read each one. Who do they think they are to treat me like this? Turn another page and another. More giggles waft out from the tent. The chocolate’s probably from Manchester. And those scarves are ridiculous. Felicity is about as bohemian as the Bank of England. My fingers land on something crackly and stiff inside the book, something I hadn’t noticed before. An account from a sensational London newspaper, the sort the upper classes pretend not to notice. It’s been folded over so many times that the ink has worn away in the creases and elsewhere, making it hard to read. I can just make out the gist of it, something about the “scandalous secrets of girls’ boarding schools!”

It’s tawdry, of course. And that’s what makes it so fascinating. In lurid prose, the article details a school in Wales where a few girls went out walking “and were never heard from again!” “A virtuous rose of England snipped by the tragic dagger of suicide” at a finishing school in Scotland. A mention of a girl who went “mad as a hatter” after some mysterious involvement in a “diabolical occult ring.” What’s diabolical is that someone received money for this rubbish.

I’m about to put it away when I see something near the bottom about the fire at Spence twenty years ago. But it’s too worn for me to read. It’s just like my mother to save such a sordid article to add to her list of worries. No wonder she wouldn’t send me to London. She was afraid I’d end up on the front page. Funny how the things I couldn’t bear about her bring a pang to my chest now.

A shriek comes from Felicity’s sanctuary.

“My ring! What have you done with my ring?” The scarves fly open. Ann backs out with the other girls bearing down on her, Felicity pointing a finger accusingly. “Where is it? Tell me this instant!”

“I d-d-don’t have it. I d-d-didn’t d-do anything.” Ann stumbles over her words and suddenly I realize that part of her flatness, her control, must be an effort to keep from stuttering like this.

“You d-d-didn’t? Why d-d-don’t I believe you?” Felicity’s face is mocking and hateful. “I invite you to sit with us and this is how you repay my kindness? By stealing the ring my father gave to me? I should have expected something like this from a girl like you.”

We all know what “like you” means.
Low-class
. Common. Plain, poor, and hopeless. You are what you’re born, always and forever. That’s the understanding.

An imposing woman with a handsome face sweeps over to the girls. “What’s going on?” she asks, stepping between Ann, who is cowering, and Felicity, who looks ready to roast Ann on a spit.