A Lesson in Vengeance(11)
At last, I bite the inside of my cheek and admit: “I thought I wanted to study the witches, as well. But I’m not sure that’s such a good idea anymore.”
Ellis’s brow arches at a perfect angle. “Curiouser and curiouser,” she says.
Her amusement hangs on the words like antique lace.
Does she know? Can she tell that, for me, the study was never academic?
Maybe she’s been warned, Wyatt or MacDonald drawing Ellis into her office: Be careful with such stories, Miss Haley. Take care you don’t start to believe they’re true.
“How so?” It comes out a little more aggressively than I expect. “It’s a good story. Clearly you agree, or you wouldn’t be writing about it.”
“A perfect story,” Ellis corrects. “Dalloway School: founded to teach the arcane arts to young witches under the guise of an expensive finishing school. Dalloway’s first headmistress: daughter of a witch. And of course the Dalloway Five, who murdered one of their own in a satanic ritual. Reality only aspires to such perversity.”
“It’s not all untrue. We know the founder came from Salem, after all. And don’t forget the occult collection in the main library.” A collection donated by an alumna of Dalloway, a now-famous historian of seventeenth-century religious practices. A collection I had hoped to get my hands on, as soon as I was a third-year and had a faculty member willing to sign the permission slip. I wanted to breathe the dust off those scrolls, trace my gloved fingers along ancient spines. The administration—and Wyatt—had tried to talk me out of my thesis a hundred times. Maybe they’d known what would become of me if I flirted too well with old magic. “How many finishing schools do you know with rare book rooms crammed full of pentacles and pages made out of human skin?”
Ellis waves a hand as if to say Fair enough.
“But of course, you’re right,” I add. “They weren’t really witches. They were just girls.”
Just girls. Just clever, bright young women. Too clever and bright for their time.
And they were killed for it.
“One other fact was real,” Ellis says after a long moment. Her gaze is as cool as silver lake water, and as steady. “The death of Flora Grayfriar.”
She’s right. I’d almost not come to Dalloway for that precise reason; I’d found the idea of attending a school where a girl was ritually murdered, even if three hundred years ago, to be horribly gauche. All I’d really cared about was Godwin House. Yes, all five of the Dalloway witches had been found dead on Godwin’s grounds—killed by each other, or by small-minded townsfolk, depending who you believe—but Emily Dickinson. How could I resist?
It wasn’t until I came here and learned more about the history of the school, about the witches, that I fell in love with the dark.
The front door bangs open, and the murmur of voices in the foyer heralds the return of the other Godwin girls. Ellis sets her empty coffee cup aside and stands, offering me her hand. After a moment, I take it, and she pulls me to my feet.
“Ellis,” Kajal says once she appears in the common room entryway. “You should have told us you were coming back here.”
Ellis glances toward me, the corner of her mouth curling up; and for once, I smile back.
The spell is broken now. The other girls eat up all the oxygen in the room, circling around Ellis like asteroids around a black hole. I escape upstairs to wash off my makeup and scrub the scent of cigarette smoke out of my hair. I’m exhausted, but even once I’ve curled up under my duvet with my pillow slowly going damp against my cheek from the shower water, it takes me a long time to fall asleep.
Flora Grayfriar haunts the late-night silence of Godwin House. My skin holds the sense memory of the Margery Skull, cool bone and warm wax dripping over my fingers. And I can’t forget what Ellis wondered: whether the drive to murder sleeps quiet in all of us, if we’re all two steps away from the ledge, waiting for an excuse to throw out both hands and push.
I think about the moment the rope snapped and the world went quiet and still, my body weightless without Alex dragging it down, the snow in my eyes and the emptiness on the mountain. The hollow feeling that carved its way into my chest.
And the relief.
Dalloway semesters never begin slowly.
Unlike other prep schools, Dalloway allows its students remarkable leeway in terms of what we study. We have a general education requirement, taught with the Harkness method—all discussion-based. And after our second year, students are encouraged to adopt a concentration: a passion project to pursue that will eventually become our senior thesis. There are Dalloway students who spend most of their year enmeshed in internships at the nearby aerospace laboratory, students who sleep in the classics building and only speak in ancient Greek. And then there’s us: the literati, the bookish intelligentsia with an affinity for horn-rimmed glasses and pages that smell like dust.
I had thought I might get away with an unannounced thesis for a few weeks at least, that the administration’s sympathy over Alex, or at least their repulsion over my former subject, would translate into a long leash and emails saying things like Take your time. I should have known better. But as it turns out, I’m a slow learner.
Wyatt calls me into her office the first day of classes and passes me a can of store-brand soda; she keeps it in a minifridge under her mahogany desk, and the aesthetic of the chilly aluminum can juxtaposed with that desk and Wyatt’s antique rug makes me oddly uneasy.