A Lesson in Vengeance(45)

“Are we really doing all of these?” I ask her eventually, after she’s finally reached over to steal the cranberry juice from me.

“All of them,” Ellis says, with a faint lilt of surprise to her tone. She looks at me. “What else, Felicity? There’s no better way for me to write about their deaths.”

I sigh. “Lovely. When will we be finished? I do have my own thesis to work on, you know.”

“It won’t take too long,” Ellis promises. “I have to be done by the end of winter if I want to get the book written and revised by deadline. I’ll need all of spring to work on revisions.”

“Fine. But you still haven’t explained to me how Cordelia Darling’s body ended up drowned on dry land.”

Ellis’s gaze cuts back toward the lake, her eyes narrowed against the bright sunlight. “Isn’t it obvious?” she says. “Whoever drowned her brought her out here to make it look like magic. They wanted the Dalloway girls to be blamed for it. And they got what they wanted.”

I track a path along the ground, from the lake across the field, back up the hill toward Godwin House perched like a bird of prey upon the rocks, silently observing. If they’d been looking, someone in the house would have been able to see what happened. But they hadn’t looked, and so the mystery persists.

“You said you’re writing Margery as the villain,” I mention eventually.

“I am.”

“Then why would she want to frame her own friends for the deaths? Why not frame the townspeople?”

Ellis shrugs. “Who knows? The mind of a psychopath is an uninterpretable thing. Perhaps she thought it was more entertaining that way, to sow fear and hysteria among the coven—who can you trust, who can’t you, and so on.”

I find myself unpersuaded, but I nod anyway.

“There’s just one thing,” Ellis says. She dusts the cracker crumbs from her hands and pushes to her feet, offering to help me up after her.

“And what is that?”

“Pick me up.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Ellis’s brow arches. “If it was Margery who killed all the others, she would have needed to drag Cordelia Darling’s body out here, wouldn’t she? But we’ve seen the painting of her. She wasn’t a large girl.”

Ellis is the furthest thing from a corpse. She’s bright-eyed and impatient, watching me with arms crossed over her chest and the wind blowing stray black hairs across her face. And yet when I crouch down to lift her she feels like dead weight in my arms. I take two steps and stumble, my breath lurching in my throat.

“Steady now,” Ellis murmurs, her breath hot against my neck.

I grit my teeth and take another step. “What did you eat for breakfast, rocks?”

“Well, I am prodigiously tall for my age. I weigh quite a bit more than you do.”

I make it another three feet then give up, unceremoniously dumping Ellis onto the grass and collapsing next to her, sweaty and breathless. She falls onto her back, arms splayed across the dirt, and for a moment I worry I’ve hurt her somehow, broken something when I let her go—but then she says:

“Margery could have dragged her.”

“What?”

Ellis stays right where she is, loose-limbed and still. “Margery dragged her. She wouldn’t have needed to carry Cordelia across the field. There are other ways to transport a body. This isn’t proof she wasn’t involved.”

My hands twist up in my dress. “I’m not going to drag you anywhere.”

At last Ellis pushes herself up onto her elbows, fixing me in her gaze. “No,” she says after a moment. “You don’t have to. You could, though. If you tried.”

She crawls back over to the picnic blanket, leaving me standing there, aching and damp-faced, behind her until she’s poured fresh glasses of juice and called for me, and I, obediently, follow.



* * *



—

“Go without me,” Ellis says the night of the Lemont House Halloween party the following week; she’s sitting in the common room on one of the high stools by the windows, gazing out down the hill, with her dark hair tumbling about her shoulders and ink stains on her sleeve. “I need to write.”

We might have grown closer, but the four of us still make an awkward crew without Ellis’s grounding presence. Even so, we go without her. Leonie’s brought a flask; she passes it around as we traipse down the drive and across the quad, sharing Ellis’s bourbon (of course; no escaping Ellis’s influence, even in Ellis’s absence) and each other’s spit. I’m the only one who bothered dressing up—the others are all costumed in their usual plaid skirts and cable-knit sweaters, Leonie with a beret perched atop her head, and Kajal’s skinny legs all wrapped up in wool stockings. My Persephone costume seems absurd in juxtaposition.

“I wish it was only Godwin House,” Clara sighs as we pass a knot of giggling first-years with their flimsy disguises: sexy nurse, sexy vampire, sexy priestess. “I wish we were here and no one else.”

A murmur of agreement rolls from one of us to the next, and it’s only after I’ve said my part that I wonder if it’s even true. Do I wish we were alone? Do I think we’re so different from all the rest of them? Better, even?