The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(90)

“Where is it!?” she shouted.

She punched him again and felt her knuckles ache.

“I don’t have it.” He smiled, gasping for breath.

“Where’s the letter I wrote!?” Zoe’s hand was on his collar. She ripped a button as he tried to pull away. “What did you do with my letter?”

“Do?” Guto asked with a giggle as though the answer were obvious, inevitable, like how the sun rises in the east, how storm clouds bring rain. He touched his swollen upper lip. “I mailed it, you daft twat. You stupid chink.”

Zoe froze, her arm in midair, her hand a swollen fist.

“Oh, no?” he said with a mocking pout. “Did you not want me to?”

She felt a tightness in her jaw as he kept laughing, even as blood ran from his nose. He smiled, dirt on his face, blood on his teeth and gums.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You should thank me.”

What have I done?

She looked around at the others, who went from cheering to bewilderment.

“I did you a favor,” Guto said. “You and your special friend.”

Zoe stood up, trying to catch her breath, seething, horrified, embarrassed, scared, knowing that Mr. Bidwell—Stanley—was home and had likely received the mail. This was why Alyce stayed away all week. This was why her goodbye felt final.

Guto was playing a sick, twisted game, and Zoe thought she was always one move ahead of him, that she could run out the clock. But while she’d been playing by the rules, he had literally gone and sacrificed her queen.



* * *



Zoe ran to Mrs. Bidwell’s office, swimming in apologies, rehearsing the words she would say. Hoping that her teacher would be there and would somehow understand.

I’m so sorry. I love the book you gave me. I got carried away. I didn’t mean to…

When she opened the door, the headmaster was there, pipe in hand, looking scholarly in a tweed jacket, a rolled-up newspaper beneath his arm. He was with two other students, who looked at Zoe and shrugged apologetically.

Zoe felt heartsick when she saw them taking down Mrs. Bidwell’s poster calendar for the Royal Scot, the train between London and Glasgow. Zoe wished she could board that steam locomotive and escape to the Highlands. Instead she stood and watched helplessly as her peers removed framed pictures and certificates from the walls. Photos of Mrs. Bidwell’s parents, her family, who smiled earnestly for the camera, and her husband, who did not. The headmaster sat down in Mrs. Bidwell’s wooden chair, which creaked beneath his weight.

Zoe felt his eyes upon her. When she met his gaze, she saw that his expression was filled with pity, compassion, but not surprise. He nodded soberly, his countenance beleaguered with grudging acceptance, if not surrender.

“Thank you, that will be all,” the headmaster said to the other students. “Please take what you’ve packed and leave the boxes by the gatehouse at the school entrance. Mr. Bidwell will be coming to collect them this afternoon.”

Zoe felt as though she were sinking in a sea of regret, drowning in anger, caught in an undertow of jealousy at the thought of Mrs. Bidwell’s husband finally coming home to be with his neglected wife. She pictured him reading the letter. The argument that must have ensued. The rage. She pictured Alyce in an infirmary, beaten, her face bruised and swollen.

“Where is she, Mrs. Bidwell? Is she all right?”

It’s all my fault.

The headmaster sighed and chewed on the end of his pipe. He looked sad and weary. He gazed out the window, but Zoe could see that he was really just staring at his own reflection. “I don’t like this any more than you do, my dear.”

“What happened?” Zoe asked, but part of her already knew.

“Mrs. Bidwell was a fine teacher. One of the best we’ve ever had. She had a certain… vitality. She also had a well of strength, fortitude beyond her years.”

“What do you mean, had?”

The headmaster took the rolled-up newspaper from beneath his arm and set it on the desk as though it were a telegram informing him of the death of a loved one, a biopsy report, an obituary. The day’s headline on the Leiston Observer read: SCHOOLMISTRESS EMBROILED IN TAWDRY AFFAIR WITH FEMALE STUDENT, AGE SIXTEEN, CLAIMS HUSBAND.

Zoe grew pale skimming the article. Much of it featured Mr. Bidwell’s accolades in the Royal Cartographic Society, his travels to Burma and Siam to help map new lines for the British Colonial Railroad, his lofty, worldly status in their humble community. The résumé of his wife, however, was absent. Instead the newspaper listed her supposed improprieties as a teacher, speculated on her corrupting influence, her perversions and wantonness. Concluding with her ultimate failure as a woman and wife, her unwillingness to quit teaching and bear children.

The headmaster looked at Zoe. “You know I would do nearly anything for my students, my teachers, for the workers and staff.”

“But we didn’t do anything! We discussed poetry.”

The headmaster’s hair seemed grayer. The lines on his face deeper. “Zoe, I was prepared to go down with the ship. To let them try. Let them come for us. This place is everything to me, and yet I was ready to risk it all to do what’s right.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

The headmaster drummed his fingers on Mrs. Bidwell’s desk.