A Great and Terrible Beauty (Gemma Doyle #1)(25)

When she stands up to sing, a clear, sweet voice comes pouring out of her. It’s lovely, if somewhat timid. With practice, and a little more feeling, she could be quite good, actually. It’s a shame that she won’t ever get the chance. She’s here to be trained to be of service, nothing more. When the music is over, she keeps her head down till she finds her seat again, and I wonder how many times each day she dies a little.

“You have quite a nice voice,” I whisper to her when she takes her seat.

“You’re just saying that to be kind,” she says, biting a fingernail. But a blush works its way into her full, ruddy cheeks, and I know that it means everything to her to sing her song, if just for a little while.



The week passes in a numbing routine. Prayers. Deportment. Posture. Morning and night, I enjoy the same social outcast’s status as Ann. In the evenings, the two of us sit by the fire in the great hall, the stillness broken only by the laughter coming from Felicity and her acolytes as they pointedly ignore us. By week’s end, I’m sure I’ve become invisible. But not to everyone.

There is one message from Kartik. The night after I discover the diary, I find an old letter from Father pinned to my bed with a small blade. The letter, rambling and sloppy, had hurt to read, and so I had stuffed it into my desk drawer, hidden away. Or so I thought. Seeing it on my bed, slashed, with the words you have been warned scrawled across Father’s signature chills me to the bone. The threat is clear. The only way to keep myself and my family safe is for me to shutter my mind to the visions. But I find I can’t close off my mind without closing off the rest of me. Fear has me retreating inside myself, detached from everything, as useless as the scorched East Wing upstairs.



The only time I feel alive at all is during Miss Moore’s drawing class. I had expected it to be tedious—little nature sketches of bunnies nuzzling happily in the English countryside—but Miss Moore surprises me again. She has chosen Lord Tennyson’s famous poem, “The Lady of Shalott,” as an inspiration for our work. It’s about a woman who will die if she leaves the safety of her ivory tower. Even more surprising is that Miss Moore wants to know what we think about art. She means to have us talk and risk giving our opinions instead of making painstaking copies of cheery fruit. This throws the sheep into complete confusion.

“What can you tell me about this sketch of the Lady of Shalott?” Miss Moore asks, placing her canvas on an easel. In her picture, a woman stands at a tall window looking down on a knight in the woods. A mirror reflects the inside of the room.

It’s quiet for a moment.

“Anyone?”

“It’s charcoal,” Ann answers.

“Yes, that would be hard to dispute, Miss Bradshaw. Anyone else?” Miss Moore casts about for a victim among the eight of us present. “Miss Temple? Miss Poole?” No one says a word. “Ah, Miss Worthington, you’re rarely at a loss for words.”

Felicity tilts her head, pretends to consider the sketch, but I can tell she already knows what she wants to say. “It’s a lovely sketch, Miss Moore. Wonderful composition, with the balance of the mirror and the woman, who is rendered in the style of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, I believe.” Felicity turns on her smile, ready to be congratulated. Her apple-polishing skills are the true art here.

Miss Moore nods. “An accurate if somewhat soulless assessment.” Felicity’s smile drops fast. Miss Moore continues. “But what do you think is going on in the picture? What does the artist want us to know about this woman? What does it make you feel when you look at it?”

What do you feel ? I’ve never been asked that question once. None of us has. We aren’t supposed to feel. We’re British. The room is utterly silent.

“It’s very nice,” Elizabeth offers, in what I’ve come to realize is her no-opinion opinion. “Pretty.”

“It makes you feel pretty?” Miss Moore asks.

“No. Yes. Should I feel pretty?”

“Miss Poole, I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to respond to a piece of art.”

“But paintings are either nice and pretty or they’re rubbish. Isn’t that so? Aren’t we supposed to be learning to make pretty drawings?” Pippa pipes up.

“Not necessarily. Let’s try another way. What is taking place in this sketch right now, Miss Cross?”

“She’s looking out the window at Sir Lancelot?” Pippa phrases it as a question, as if she’s not even sure of what she’s seeing.

“Yes. Now, you’re all familiar with Tennyson’s poem. What happens to the Lady of Shalott?”

Martha speaks out, happy to get at least one thing right. “She leaves the castle and floats downstream in her boat.”

“And?”

Martha’s certainty leaves her. “And . . . she dies.”

“Why?”

There’s a bit of nervous laughter, but no one has an answer.

Finally, Ann’s bland, cool voice cuts the silence. “Because she’s cursed.”

“No, she dies for love,” Pippa says, sounding sure of herself for the first time. “She can’t live without him. It’s terribly romantic.”

Miss Moore gives a wry smile. “Or romantically terrible.”

Pippa is confused. “I think it’s romantic.”