A Lesson in Vengeance(42)

Ellis laughs. I realize now it’s the first time I’ve heard her laugh, the sound bright and clear as winter bells. “You’re delightful,” she says. “Of course we will. We will each have the singular opportunity to inhabit the histories of Flora Grayfriar, Tamsyn Penhaligon, Beatrix Walker, and Cordelia Darling. It will be like a game.”

“A game,” I echo.

Ellis nods. “A game. Don’t be a spoilsport, Felicity—this will be fun.”

Fun.

I grip the seat of my chair with my free hand, palms gone damp. The prickle at the nape of my neck must be the breeze drifting in through the cracked window, chilled as it rolls off the lake.

Ellis and I have very different ideas of fun. But she needs this. And so, it seems, do I.

“Fine. I presume the magic isn’t real in your book, considering your position on the subject. The witches aren’t really communing with the devil, they’re just laboring under the oppressive weight of societal expectation.”

“Oh, yes,” Ellis says, and kicks out one foot to knock the sharp toe of her oxford against my shin. “Witchcraft is just a metaphor for female grief and anger. I told you that.”

“Right. Of course. How could I forget.”

“That’s why this will be good for you, Felicity,” Ellis says. “So that you don’t forget.”

It feels the slightest bit juvenile, the two of us sitting around in my room like this, talking about hypothetical murder—a scene better suited to children at sleepover parties, huddled under the covers clutching flashlights. But Ellis has likely never worn pajamas in her life, never mind attended sleepovers. Perhaps our plans become sophisticated by the mere virtue of her presence.

“Let’s talk about method,” Ellis muses, propping her chin against one hand and gazing out my window as if she can glean ideas from the pattern of the shadows in the woods. “Each of the Dalloway Five died a different way: Flora was stabbed, Tamsyn strangled, Cordelia drowned—”

“I’m not stabbing anyone,” I say.

The look Ellis gives me is a shade shy of derision. “Felicity, this isn’t—”

“I’m not fake-stabbing anyone, either.”

She sighs. “All right, we can each take on a different murder. If I have to consider stabbing someone, then it’s only fair that you strangle Tamsyn.”

“Good, the easy one. All I have to do is string her up on a noose. Forty feet above the ground.”

That’s why people thought these deaths were magic—they all happened in incredible, impossible ways. There’s no explanation for how Tamsyn Penhaligon’s corpse was found swinging so high up that tree, too high for anyone to have climbed without the branches breaking under their weight.

“Yes,” Ellis says, “but the murders don’t need to be exact replications. We both know historical representation of fact is more or less political propaganda. We need to find ways for the Five to have died that approximate their recorded causes of death. A story told again and again is never the same story as the original. So Leonie should be strangled, as in the Dalloway myth, but not by a noose. What about—oh.”

“What?”

Ellis sits a little straighter in her chair now, eyes glimmering with an unseen light. “A garrote.”

“You mean like…” I gesture as if tightening an invisible wire around my neck.

“Precisely. Minimal blood, silent; it’s ideal. They used to use it during war, to kill sentries without alerting other enemy soldiers.”

I really don’t know where she acquires such information. I’ve read Ellis’s first book. It has nothing to do with war, which means this wasn’t part of her research.

But I have to admit, I like the idea. It seems…Romantic, with the capital R, conjuring visions of dashing heroines and vicious assassins, of hazy London streets and the click of horse hooves on stone, gas lamps burning, the flick of a cloak in the dark.

It seems like precisely the kind of fate that could have met a person in 1712.

“A garrote,” I echo, and find myself tracing a circle on my notebook, over and over: a circle of piano wire perhaps.

“Do you like it?”

Pleased is not an expression I’m accustomed to seeing on Ellis Haley’s face, but it’s infectious; I find myself smiling back at her as I write down the method: garrote.

“All right,” I say when I look up again. “You know, one of the interesting things about the Dalloway case was that there were no suspects—everyone just claimed the girls’ deaths were the inevitable price of witchcraft.”

Margery’s directly so, if you consider being buried alive by vengeful townspeople to be a fitting end for her magical crimes.

“Yes, that’s my point,” Ellis says, perhaps a bit impatiently. “It’s terribly convenient, isn’t it? The witches all die in witchy ways, no murder about it. Do you really believe that?”

I don’t want to dignify that with an answer. Especially when we both know what the answer really is.

“Fine,” I say. “But is that what you want to do in the book as well? I thought you were going to have Margery be the killer?”

“Are you two planning to come down for supper?”

I snap around toward the door at the sound of the voice. I was too quick to avoid looking suspicious; for her part, Ellis is perfectly unfazed by the appearance of Leonie Schuyler in my room. Today, Leonie wears a tartan skirt and a neat blazer furnished with an elaborately knotted silk scarf: the very picture of an old-fashioned schoolgirl. She no longer has the loose coils of before; now her hair is a cascade of braids entwined with delicate gold thread. She didn’t even mention she was going into the city, but she must have: everything about her looks professionally styled. For some reason I’m struck by the reality that the other Godwin girls have lives that don’t involve us—don’t involve Ellis.