Jane Steele(23)

“Would you like to watch the sun rise?” Clarke would ask when the weather was fine, and madly I would accompany her to the roof, yawning and cracking sluggish joints, and we would sit there quite contented, always gazing at the murky haze of London not so very far away from us, and seeming—as was perfectly true—nearer to its outskirts every year. She would hum soft songs whilst gazing at the firmament, and her head would find its way to my shoulder.

Meanwhile, we all grew longer limbs and harder hearts every year.

Granville passed away during the fever which swept through our school when I was eleven years old. Taylor wept dreadfully, saying that Ettie Granville had been the only person ever to understand her; I raided the charity salvage pile and delivered her monogrammed kerchief to my bedmate, who clutched me about the shoulders for all the world to see.

Influenza claimed Fox when I was thirteen; I orchestrated the theft of a bushel of apples to store in her memory and was caught out during a vengeful Reckoning. Clarke smuggled me broth in a hot-water bottle and watched me guzzle it as we both hid behind the bed frame.

We became adept at grieving, suffering agonies for a day or two, and then returning to our altered orbits. I grew accustomed to the facts of my mother’s death more slowly, the horrible truth that she had finally managed the trick she must have attempted long before, which was to die. The others treated me predictably poorly for a spell—who can escape the stigma of a lunatic for a mother—but we all hated Mr. Munt so ferociously, with every red pulse of life, that we had not time to hate one another.

All fell to pieces, however, when I had been at Lowan Bridge for seven years, and Clarke’s preoccupation with honour swerved from pleasant foolishness into fatal lunacy.

There we stood before Miss Lilyvale’s desk, awaiting instructions.

“Would you girls please study . . . oh, goodness, I’m that scattered . . . the piano part, Steele, and this soprano vocal part, Clarke, for the end-of-year gala? I can think of no one better able to demonstrate our talents. Won’t you say yes?”

We glanced at each other; excelling at any course was a coveted position, but evidence suggested that our favourite teacher’s praise was not so complimentary as her censure. Meanwhile, Clarke was an outstanding vocalist—her tones were dizzyingly high, hovering midair as if a magical harp had been strummed. Students came to a bewildered halt in hallways whenever she practised her scales with that mathematical precision which was so innate in her.

“Of course.” Clarke took the small bundle of songs.

Then a strange thing occurred: head folding, Miss Lilyvale leant forward against her desk briefly. Her rosy cheeks had lost their blush during the course of the past two years, as if she had been bid to shoulder a stone up an endless mountainside; every month Miss Lilyvale became more of an automaton with something terribly pleading beneath the waxworks. She drew her fingers along the knob of her drawer, eyes briefly falling shut.

“Do you want something else of us?” Clarke asked.

She answered softly, “I can never have the things I truly want.”

“Are you all right, Miss Lilyvale?” I inquired, concerned.

“Oh! Heavens yes, I was only . . . distracted. Thank you for being so obliging,” our teacher said, smiling, and the strange moment was shattered.

“It’s in the desk,” Clarke announced as Miss Lilyvale bustled off to see that some younger girls were given appropriate parts. I was sixteen, Clarke thirteen, and thus as model pupils we were often left to our own devices—save for the inevitable Reckonings.

“What’s in the desk?”

“Whatever is haunting Miss Lilyvale.” Clarke studied her music. The charm of her distraction lay in the fact it was genuine; Becky Clarke could not lie if her life hung in the balance, and I shall soon cite statistical evidence to this effect. “This is rather high even for me, though I do like G major.”

“Never mind music,” I whispered as we quit the classroom. “Miss Lilyvale is stretched as tight as the catgut on her violin strings. You really mean to say you know what ails her?”

Clarke lifted the choral part as we walked. The birds outside the gloom-shrouded staircases were dumb that April afternoon, the carpets mute beneath our footsteps. “I went into the music room at half four yesterday because I thought I left my sketchbook, and Miss Lilyvale was reading a letter. When I appeared, she shoved it in the drawer she just touched so sadly.”

“And you think her correspondent is making her ill?”

“No one can say,” Clarke owned, tossing her flaxen curls though they were restrained under her chaste cap. “But if ever it looked as if a letter were strangling someone . . .”

The ensuing silence fairly crawled with questions.

Does Clarke wish me to intervene? I wondered, heart thrumming eagerly.

I had countless times thwarted hunger at Lowan Bridge, taking as much joy in naughtiness as in success; I had forged grades, pilfered supplies, told positively operatic lies. Queerly, Clarke had never minded these untruths, though I supposed that was thanks to her natural compassion, or else her practicality. In any event, I had learnt the principle swiftly: if I lied to Mr. Munt (or anyone else to do with the ultimate act of lying to Mr. Munt), I would be praised; if I lied to Clarke—all of these accidental falsehoods, bred of forgetfulness—I would be shunned until her ire burnt itself to cinders and she nuzzled into my shoulder like a cat seeking company.