A Lesson in Vengeance(22)

Wyatt had fixed me with a lancet gaze and said: “So long as you focus on the literature, Miss Morrow—not on flights of fancy.” And she’d signed the papers.

But when I’d told my mother about my plans, she’d been appalled.

“That school is a bad influence on you,” my mother had told me while I was home for Thanksgiving break a few weeks later. “I thought you knew better than to believe all that nonsense about witches.”

Perhaps she was right to be afraid. Of course, at the time I’d scoffed. I don’t believe in witches, I’d insisted, and it was true. Before Dalloway, I had fancied myself a rationalist—too rational, in fact, to entertain the possibility that reality might contain more mysteries than my feeble mortal mind could understand. But there was something about the Dalloway Five that drew me in, embraced me in their cold dead arms. They were real: there was historical evidence for their lives, for their deaths. And I imagined their magic stitched like a thread across time, passed from mother to daughter, a glittering link from the founder to Margery Lemont to me.

That had felt like a comfort once. After Halloween, it felt more like a curse.

By that night, I’d had plenty of opportunities to embroil myself in lore and legend. My room at Godwin House was littered with scanned grimoire pages and notes on the uncanny. Alex watched all this with a sort of academic fascination; she’d never been able to understand why I was so drawn to darkness. She had always belonged in the light of the sun.

“Don’t you think you’re taking this a little too seriously?” Alex asked the night everything went wrong, waving a match through the air to extinguish the flame. “You’ve been kind of over the top about this thesis business. Like, do you think you’re starting to get a little confused about reality here? Magic doesn’t exist, Felicity.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I mean…yes?”

She held my gaze for a long moment; I looked away first, back to the Ouija board set up between us. “This is important to me,” I confessed to the planchette. I dipped a cloth into salt water and wiped it over the board itself, cleansing it for the summoning. “Not because I believe in it, necessarily, but because they did.”

“And you’re obsessed with them. The Dalloway Five.”

“I’m not obsessed. This is our history—Godwin’s history. They killed a girl. That really happened, whether we believe in witchcraft or not. And we know they held a séance—that was documented in the trial. Whether they thought it was real or just make-believe, they performed a ritual to raise a ghost. And Flora died a few days later.”

The primary sources I’d read in Dalloway’s library were inconsistent as to the nature of Flora Grayfriar’s death. The account I’d read in the library described an almost ritualistic killing, Flora’s throat slit and her stomach cut open, stuffed full of animal bones and herbs. But other contemporaneous writings said she was found with a musket ball in her gut, dead in the forest, shot like a beast. It should have been a simple thing, to determine how a girl died: Was she shot, or was her throat slit? Do I trust the trial documents, or the letters written by Flora’s mother? Who had more motive to lie?

Either the Dalloway girls were witches, and they’d murdered Flora in some arcane deal with the devil, or Flora’s death had a far more mundane explanation. A hunting accident, maybe. A lovers’ quarrel. Or even a bigoted townsperson who heard about the séance and wanted to see the girls punished for meddling with powers they couldn’t contain.

After all, Flora was the first death, but she wasn’t the last. Following her, every one of the Dalloway witches died in ways that were impossible to explain. All of their bodies were found on the Godwin House grounds, like the house itself was determined to keep them. It was almost as if they were cursed, as if they’d raised a spirit that was determined to see them all dead.

The more likely explanation—that they’d been killed by religious mountain folk who feared women, feared the magic they’d assigned to women—didn’t hold the same appeal.

Regardless, Alex was right. I hadn’t been able to get the Dalloway Five out of my head for weeks. I’d even dreamed about them the previous night, Beatrix Walker’s hair like spun corn silk and Tamsyn Penhaligon’s bony fingers trailing along my cheek. They had found their way inside me, like fungal spores inhaled and taken root. Sometimes I felt like they’d always been there. I’d read about reincarnation, about girls born again and again, and imagined Margery Lemont whispering soft words in the back of my mind. Every time I touched her skull at Boleyn House, I felt her in my blood.

Maybe I was losing my mind. Or maybe this was what it was to appreciate history, to truly understand it. When I read books, the boundary between my world and others shifted. I could imagine other realities. I envisioned the tales so clearly that it was as if I lived them.

The story of the Dalloway Five was a story born in Godwin House. Why shouldn’t their legend be real?

And if this ritual worked—if we spoke to them—we could put the mythos to rest once and for all.

The scent of sandalwood rose in the air. We’d already turned off the lamp; I could only see Alex by the flickering candles, her skin glowing warm silver in their light.

“All right, then,” Alex said. “Let’s summon old dead witches.”