The Lake of Dead Languages (24 page)

He was four steps below me, his head bent down, watching his footing on the slippery rock. I saw that beneath the white skull he wore the brown felt mask, but at the nape of his neck I could see his hair: sandy brown hair that just then turned fiery red in a ray of light that skidded across the lake from the eastern shore. I noticed, too, his shirt, a hockey jersey with the name “Corinth Lions” emblazoned on the back. Matt’s team. Behind him I saw Deirdre run left into the woods, pursued by one of the masked boys. Lucy stood facing her masked partner and then she turned and walked into the water and started swimming. I didn’t stay to watch if Ward would swim after her. It was hard to imagine him braving that cold water, but maybe that was what she was counting on. By taking to the water, she’d issued him a challenge.

I turned and ran across the path and into the woods. I skirted behind the lower school and the dorm and then headed west. I knew that once I got past the road there was a large tract of pathless woods, an old grove of giant hemlocks that Matt had once told me was one of the few patches of virgin forest in the area. I felt sure he would know I was heading there and that he’d know why. It was one of the few places where we were sure to be alone and, I knew, one of his favorite places. I wanted him to know that I knew it was him under the deer skull.

The sun was up now, streaming through the morning mist from behind me. I saw the first young hemlocks appear. As I
ran, the hemlocks grew taller and the undergrowth thinned. The trees were spread out and evenly spaced like a colonnade. I was running through a wide avenue between the towering trees and their shadows, stretched out in front of me like a black pattern laid out on the gold forest floor. Echoing my own footsteps and the sound of my heart were the footsteps and ragged breath of the boy following me.

I came to a clearing and slipped on the hemlock needles. I lay on my stomach panting until I felt a hand on my shoulder turning me over.

We were both breathing so hard neither of us could talk. The deer skull mask was gone, but he still wore the brown felt mask Deirdre had made. My hood had fallen back.

He stroked my arm and took my hand as if to pull me up, but I pulled him down. He half fell on me, but he moved one leg in between mine to keep his full weight off me. I moved underneath him and felt the heat of his skin beneath his clothes. I touched, with the back of my fingers, a strip of bare skin above the waistband of his jeans, stroking the red-gold hairs, and he moaned. He lowered himself on me and I moved down so that my shift bunched up underneath the small of my back. I could feel the small, flat needles against my bare skin and see the slanting sun streaming over his back as he came inside me.

When we were done the sun was just above his shoulder and shining in my eyes, blinding me. I burrowed my face into his collarbone and felt the damp felt of the mask brush against my cheek. I could see the green thread Deirdre had used to stitch the seam and the small green heart she’d embroidered at the edge of the fabric. She’d used a different color for each mask. “So you’ll know your heart’s true love,” she had said. I was just about to ask him to take off his mask when I heard voices. I felt him stiffen. He got to his knees and snapped his jeans closed. I pulled my shift down and raised myself on my elbows to listen.

“As you can see the undergrowth has become progressively thinner. This is because the fallen needles of the hemlock
make a thick, acid mulch in which the seeds of most plants cannot germinate.”

“Miss Buehl,”
I whispered. “You have to get out of here.” He got to his feet and held his hand out for me, but I waved him away. “Go!” I hissed. “I’ll distract them.”

He seemed confused, for a second, about which way to go. The voices were approaching us from the north. I pointed south and said, “You can get back to the icehouse that way. Just make sure you make it off campus before they catch you.”

Again he seemed to hesitate. It occurred to me he didn’t like leaving me so abruptly after what we had just done.

“It’s all right, Matt,” I said, “we’ll talk later.”

He must have been reassured, because he turned and left instantly. I watched him running through the woods and then lost sight of him behind one of the hemlock trunks just as a troop of lower school girls burst into the clearing. As soon as they saw me the girls began screaming. Miss Buehl rushed to my side and knelt down beside me.

“My God, who did this to you? You’ve been butchered.”

For a minute she really frightened me. What I had done with Matt had been painful and I knew there might be blood, but when I looked down at my shift I was shocked to see that it was bright red. My hands and arms, too, were stained and lurid in the morning sun. I felt faint and for a moment I think I did lose consciousness, but then I heard a familiar voice.

“Die,” she said. I looked up and standing over me was Albie. She was holding a long strand of red crepe paper that she rubbed between her thumb and forefinger. “Look,” she said holding a crimson hand up in the sunlight, “Dye. It’s just dye.”

M
ATT WAS CAUGHT JUST OUTSIDE THE ICEHOUSE BY
the extension agent who had come to use her boat. So, Lucy explained to me, it wasn’t really my fault because even if Miss Buehl hadn’t come upon us in the hemlock grove he still might have run into the extension agent on his way home.

It was kind of her to try to make me feel better, but we both knew she was lying. That first sight of me, in my torn and “bloody” shift, had sparked a hysteria not easily quelled even when the “blood” turned out to be crepe paper dye. Three of the lower school girls on Miss Buehl’s nature walk were so traumatized at the sight of me they had to be sent home. Not Albie though, because she had no home to go to. She sturdily related the whole story to anyone who would listen. To give her credit, she always ended by explaining I hadn’t been covered by blood after all, but somehow, the way she told it, the fact that I was covered with red dye came to sound even more
lurid.

It didn’t help, either, that Miss Pike found Deirdre’s wine flask on the swimming beach and correctly assessed the contents as a mixture of cooking sherry and opium.

Still the scandal might have remained localized if it hadn’t been for the Founder’s Day picnic. I imagine that the dean
and her staff debated long and hard that morning over whether to cancel the picnic or not. The problem was that this year India Crevecoeur had been invited to the Maypole dance. How to explain to our ninety-year-old founder that because a boy had been caught wandering the campus in a deer mask and bloodied shirt (the crepe paper dye again), and several girls were found half-naked and reeking of alcohol and opium, Heart Lake’s traditional Maypole dance might suddenly look like a pagan rite? By noon that day there was already talk in town that there was a campus cult that lured innocent boys into drugged sex orgies.

Deirdre laughed when she heard the rumor. “Oh, like they need to be lured into that.” We were sitting outside the Music Room, waiting to be called in to see the dean. Hurriedly we had agreed to say there’d only been Lucy’s brother (since Ward and Roy had gotten away unseen) and we’d asked him to play a part in a May Day pageant that we planned to perform later at the Founder’s Day picnic.

“What about the wine flask?” Deirdre hissed as Miss North came out of the Music Room and signaled for Deirdre to come in alone.

“Just say you bought it used and it must have had the opium in it already,” Lucy told her. “I mean, how much trouble can you get in for stealing some cooking sherry?”

Lucy shook her head as Deirdre followed Miss Buehl into the Music Room. “God knows what she’ll say.”

A few minutes after Deirdre went in, the door to the Music Room opened and Albie came out. She must have been called in to relate her story about finding me covered with dye again. She came over to us and I actually thought she might be about to apologize for causing such a stir. Instead she spoke to Lucy.

“You won’t get kicked out, will you?”

“Nah, I don’t think so. Besides, I live just down the road. Even if they kicked me out of the school I could come back to visit.”

Albie shook her head. “You wouldn’t though. Girls always say they’ll stay in touch when they switch schools, but they don’t.”

“Yeah, but this school’s different. It’s in our motto.”

Albie looked confused. I didn’t blame her; I didn’t know what Lucy was talking about either and I wondered if she was still high from the opium. But Lucy got to her feet quite steadily and led Albie to the front door. She pointed to the fanlight above the door where the morning sun was shining through the colored glass. The words of the motto glowed like molten gold, but you couldn’t read them of course—they were backward from this side of the door.

“You know what that says?” Lucy asked.

Albie shook her head.

“Cor te reducit,”
Lucy said. “It means ‘The heart leads you back.’ It means no matter where you go after you leave this place your heart will always bring you back here. It means there’s always a place for you here. And it means I’ll always be here for you, too—me and Deirdre and
Domina
Chambers and Jane …”

I saw Albie frown and look over her shoulder at the mention of my name. I tried to smile encouragingly. Truthfully, Lucy’s speech had touched me, too.

“Go on now,” Lucy said, pulling open the heavy door and holding it for Albie. “Go back to your room and don’t worry. And don’t ever forget what I told you.”

The girl nodded and left. Lucy came back to the bench and slumped down beside me. I could tell her little speech had worn her out. I noticed that her hair was still damp from her morning swim in the lake. We’d been allowed to change our clothes, but there hadn’t been time to shower. Lucy had told me to wear my nicest outfit and when she wasn’t happy with what I’d picked gave me something of hers to wear. The plaid skirt she’d given me was a little too short and I kept pulling on its hem to cover more of my bare legs, which still had streaks of red dye from the crepe paper streamers. Lucy,
in a dark blue jumper and turtleneck, looked proper as always, except for a piece of grass caught in her damp hair. I picked it out of her hair and noticed that there was a light film of sawdust on the back of her neck.

When the front door opened I sniffed at the spring air like a prisoner who may only have a few hours of sunlight left to her. What I smelled, though, was something like talcum powder and moth balls—a distinctly old-ladyish smell. Outlined against the bright gleam of lake, a small, bent figure stood in the doorway making little clucking sounds with her tongue. As she moved into the foyer her pale blue eyes wandered over the pictures on the wall above our heads and then settled on me and Lucy. As old as the woman was there was something unnervingly steady in her gaze. I had been scared about being questioned by the dean, but suddenly I wished it were my turn to go into the Music Room.

The front door opened again and Miss Macintosh and Miss Beade rushed in—I’d never seen either teacher move so fast. Miss Macintosh’s hair was coming undone from its chignon and Miss Beade’s face was bright pink.

“Mrs. Crevecoeur,” they both exclaimed. “We thought you were waiting for us to escort you to tea.”

“This was my home for forty years. What makes you think I’d need escorting,” the old woman answered without turning to look at the two flustered teachers. “Who are these girls and why aren’t they in the Maypole dance?” She waved her cane at us and came closer. “In trouble, are you?”

Lucy and I looked at each other and then at our teachers who hovered behind India Crevecoeur.

“Actually,” Miss Macintosh said, moving to Lucy’s side, “these girls are our two Iris Scholarship recipients. They expressed a desire to meet you and um …” I could see Miss Macintosh, who had begun so well and so boldly, was running out of innovations. Luckily Lucy, always cool in awkward social circumstances, came to her rescue.

“To thank you for the great privilege of attending Heart Lake,” she said, rising to her feet. For a second I thought she might even curtsy, but she merely held out her small hand, which Mrs. Crevecoeur, switching her cane to her left hand, took briefly and then let drop.

“This is Lucy Toller,” Miss Beade said, coming to Lucy’s other side and standing almost directly in front of me. “One of our finest students. Miss Chambers says she’s the best Latin student she’s ever had.”

“Toller, eh? Your mother’s Hannah Corey, isn’t she?”

Lucy nodded.

“The Coreys are cousins of the Crevecoeurs, if you go back far enough. You’ve got the same blue eyes my girls Rose and Lily had.”

I couldn’t see Lucy’s expression, but I imagined she was smiling modestly. I was hoping no one would notice the bits of sawdust that clung to the backs of her bare legs. I was too busy staring at Lucy’s legs to notice that Mrs. Crevecoeur’s attention had swerved in my direction.

“And who’s this girl lurking in the shadows here? Didn’t anyone ever teach you to stand in the presence of your elders, girl?”

Blushing, I got up and squeezed myself in between Miss Macintosh and Miss Beade to hold out my hand to the old woman. As I stood I saw the old woman’s pale blue eyes widen, the pupils enlarge and darken. For a second I was afraid I’d missed a button on my blouse or she’d noticed the red streaks on my leg. She looked at me in a way that made me feel naked.

“Who are you?”

“Another Iris recipient, Mrs. Crevecoeur,” Miss Macintosh patiently explained, clearly thinking the old woman had forgotten what she’d been told five minutes earlier. “Remember, there were two of them last year …”

“I’m not senile,” she snapped. “What’s your name, girl?”

“Jane Hudson,” I answered.

The washed-out blue eyes narrowed. “Who was your mother?”

“Margaret Hudson.”

“Her maiden name, child,” she said impatiently.

“Oh,” I said, “Poole.”

For a moment a film seemed to lift from the eyes. I could see how blue her eyes must have been.

“Your grandmother worked for me,” she said, “as my maid. I never thought I’d see her granddaughter here at Heart Lake.”