A Great and Terrible Beauty (Gemma Doyle #1)(81)

“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?”

“Felicity.” Pippa sounds anxious. “Let’s go back and have a nice cup of tea. It’s too cold out here.”

Felicity’s voice expands, fills the space around us, a bell tolling. “Their sin was that they believed. Believed they could be different. Special. They believed they could change what they were—damaged, unloved. Cast-off things. They would be alive, adored, needed. Necessary. But it wasn’t true. This is a ghost story, remember? A tragedy.”

The lightning’s back, a big one, two, three of light that lets me see Felicity’s face, slick with tears, nose running. “They were misled. Betrayed by their own stupid hopes. Things couldn’t be different for them, because they weren’t special after all. So life took them, led them, and they went along, you see? They faded before their own eyes, till they were nothing more than living ghosts, haunting each other with what could be. What can’t be.” Felicity’s voice goes feathery thin. “There, now. Isn’t that the scariest story you’ve ever heard?”

The rain beats down relentlessly, mixing with the strangled sounds of Felicity’s sobbing. Ann has stopped torturing her hands. Now she stares through the flame at cave walls that show her history, promise nothing. Pippa twirls her engagement ring round her finger till I fear she’ll break it off.

Maybe it’s the steady downpour driving me mad. Maybe it’s the thought of lovely Pippa, married off to a man she doesn’t love, who doesn’t love her, only wants to acquire her. Maybe it’s imagining Ann squelching her voice to work for pompous aristocrats and their hateful children. Or Felicity trying to hold back her tears. Maybe it’s that every word she’s said is true.

Whatever the reason, I’m thinking now of a way out, of bringing the magic back from the realms. I’m thinking of those mothers today in their ornate dresses and their vacant lives. And I’m thinking of my mother’s warning that I’m not ready to use my full powers yet.