Authors: Gillian Shields
We stared in silence as the door of the hidden study swung open to reveal its treasures. An antique writing desk. Purple and scarlet drapes. Parchments and manuscripts and cobwebbed jars of spices and herbs.
Carved boxes and leather trunks, stuffed with curious objects. Al relics of Lady Agnes and her deep studies.
Helen reached down cautiously and ran her fingers through the dust that had piled up on either side of the door. “Look,” she said. “It’s not dust. It’s earth, Sarah. It’s a sign. For you.”
MARIA MELVILLE’S WYLDCLIFFE JOURNAL
APRIL 5, 1919
Miss Scarsdale says that what I saw was a sign, from the past to the future. I don’t really understand what she means. I only know how I felt when the drums began.
I can’t write about that, not yet.
I am sitting up in bed in the infirmary, waiting for my ankle to heal. My other cuts and bruises are getting better, but it will be days, perhaps weeks, before I can walk or ride again. Miss Scarsdale has told Miss Feather-stone that she has given me books to study while I am an invalid, but really she wants me to carry on as I have begun, and write everything down that has happened to me since I arrived at Wyldcliffe.
I will try. I will do my best. I am sorry if I cannot tell my tale well, but this is my story.
Before I came to Wyldcliffe, Mother and Father protected me from every hurt, but they have always told me the truth, even when I was very young.
Mother’s favorite line from the Gospel is “The truth will set you free,” and I have tried to live by that too.
So when Daphne tried to shock me with her unkind gossip about my birth, what she said wasn’t actually a surprise. I have always known that Mother and Father, Katherine and William Melville, aren’t my blood parents. As far back as I can remember, I knew that my real mother had died when I was a baby. Her name was Adamina, like mine. It means
“daughter of the earth,” and Adamina was a Gypsy.
“One of the Roma, a proud and ancient people,”
Mother always said when she talked of her. “Don’t ever forget that, Maria darling. Be proud of who you are.”
And I am, I really am. Stupid, ignorant girls like Daphne and Winifred cannot destroy that pride.
When Mother and Father first got married they wanted to have a big family and dreamed of having lots of children to live with them at Grensham. But no baby came along, and when Mother was nearly thirty the doctor told her she couldn’t have a child.
She and Father tried not to be sad, and because they loved each other so much they were determined to make a happy, useful life together, even without children. So they looked after their land and the tenants on the estate. Mother ran a school, and Father built a village institute and started a health clinic, with a doctor for the local people. But still Mother said that they sometimes felt empty.
It must have been hard for them, having so much, but not the one thing they truly wanted.
Life at Grensham carried on as it always had, following the seasons of the earth and the church and the quiet country life. Father had always let the Gypsies camp on his land every year, which some of the neighboring landowners didn’t like. There was trouble sometimes, but Father said it was an ancient right and the old ways of the land had to be respected. The Gypsy people came at harvest time and helped to bring in the crops, and Father was grateful and paid them fairly. They loved Mother especially and one year did her the honor of giving her a beautiful embroidered Romany dress in return for the help she gave to the women and their children. But one year there was dreadful trouble.
Adamina was the most beautiful of all the young Gypsy wives, and she was expecting a baby. Her husband, Stefan, was accused of stealing from a local farmer and was sent to prison by the magistrate. The shock and upset made the baby come early, and Adamina died after the birth, with the baby in her arms. That baby was me.
I feel so sad when I think about her, my real mother, but my sadness seems far away in the past, like a beautiful piece of music that soothes as well as hurts.
After Adamina died, Mother helped to look after me, and soon she loved me as if I were her own baby. The Gypsies did not know what to do with me, as I belonged to the whole tribe, and yet to no one, as my father Stefan was still in prison. He had not yet claimed me by tying a red lace around my neck, according to the custom. Father knew that Stefan would never steal, and he went to great lengths to clear his name and get him freed. When Stefan came out of prison, he was heartbroken over Adamina’s death and said he was going to travel far away to forget his grief and never come back to Grensham. It was a place of death and ill omen for his people now. But out of gratitude for the kindness he had received there from Mother and Father, he gave them the red lace and told them to claim Adamina’s child as their own. It was what they both had dreamed of ever since they had first seen me.
And so that’s how this “dirty Gypsy” came to be adopted by a rich English couple. They have loved me so dearly and given me everything, even this fine education at Wyldcliffe. They did not imagine that the young ladies here would bully and despise me and drive me to seek more dangerous companions. . . .
I must rest now.
After the first couple of weeks I stopped trying to make friends with the stuck-up madams at Wyldcliffe, but in my heart I desperately wanted someone to love.
Instead of trying to persuade Daphne and Winifred to like me, I looked for friends in other places. One comfort was darling Cracker, a beautiful, sturdy hill pony that Father had given me to ride. I was so glad Cracker was here with me. Sometimes I crept to the stables and wrapped my arms around his neck and breathed in his strong, warm scent. That felt like a little bit of love in this bleak place. Though perhaps if I had not had Cracker with me, none of this would have happened.
I was allowed to get up early and ride him down to the village and along the banks of the little river, as long as the groom came with me. On Sunday afternoons, a small group of girls who had brought horses from home were given permission to ride over the lower slopes of the moors with the grooms.
These were precious hours of freedom. And on my fifteenth birthday, a few weeks after I had arrived, I had an even greater treat. Miss Scarsdale rode out with me on her beautiful white mare, and we took the path right over the moor that leads to the standing stones on the top of Blackdown Ridge.
She said the stones were brought there hundreds and hundreds of years ago by people who worshipped them as part of their gods. The great stones were eerie, standing on the horizon all black and cold against the sky. Miss Scarsdale knows so much about geology and archaeology and history, and so many other things. She makes me realize how much I have to learn. I loved being out on the open moor and hearing the bleat of the lambs and the cries of the birds. I saw a curlew and a lapwing.
We also rode past the entrance to some caves.
Miss S. told me that they spread under the hills like a honeycomb.
I dreamed about the caves again last night. I woke up sobbing and gasping and had to call the nurse. I am ashamed of being so weak and childish, but I can’t stop myself. I must be strong! I must be a soldier. . . .
But I was writing about trying to make friends.
Sometimes I kept a piece of cake from supper and offered to share it with the maids in the servants’
hall. I have always been great friends with the village girls at home who help Mother in the house, but these servants were different, sullen and suspicious. No doubt they are given a hard time by Miss Featherstone and are unhappy with their lot.
Whatever the reason, they looked at me differently because I was a young lady, and the young ladies at the school looked at me differently because I was a Gypsy. So I was alone. Alone. It is a dreadful word. It makes my heart ache just to write it.
But when the Brothers came to Wyldcliffe, I was no longer alone.
I felt terribly alone. The sign, the dust, the earth. The first letter of my name. Now it felt as though I had been pushed into the spotlight, and I wasn’t sure that I liked it. That night my dreams were troubled again, and I woke with my heart racing and my head throbbing. Perhaps, after al , I was better suited to being the one in the background.
Listen to the drums. What did the message mean? And who had sent it? I had heard drums in my dream—I had listened to their insistent rhythms. What more could I do to obey this strange instruction?
I got out of bed quickly, trying to shake off my unease.
The morning bel hadn’t rung yet, and my dorm mates were stil asleep. I dressed without disturbing them and hurried down to the stables. Al around me, life was renewing itself.
Flowers were in bloom, trees were in blossom, and lambs were growing long-legged and fat next to their mothers on the sloping hil s. But in my mind I was stil crouching in the dark, gazing at that splintered door and trying to understand.
During the first hour of the early morning, before anyone else was about, I hid in a corner of Starlight’s stable and searched the pages of the leather-bound Book that we had brought from Agnes’s secret room. It was a curious object, and ful of ancient lore and wisdom, though some of the pages were written in Eastern languages that I didn’t understand. The Book also had a wil of its own.
Sometimes pages would stick together, concealing their contents from the reader, or the writing would melt away and go blank, or change from English to Latin, or into unknown symbols.
I searched through it patiently, looking for guidance, but found nothing. The only entry that seemed at al related to the mark on Helen’s arm was a smal footnote that read: As to those who call themselves Witche Finders and do search a Woman’s body for Blemishes, if any such Markes are founde, that poor Soule is declared a servant of the Evil One and is set apart and destroyed. This may be Ignorance and Superstition and yet there remains a Questione. From where do such signs come? Many Scholars declare they are a Sign of great Destiny, with Death in their wake.
Set apart and destroyed. Was Helen marked out for some dreadful fate? And was there any connection between her vision and my dreams, and the bizarre message emblazoned on the door of Agnes’s secret study? We had been back at Wyldcliffe for less than twenty-four hours, and already I felt that a great snare had been laid around us, and that our enemies were waiting for us to fal into some kind of trap. We had to stick together to survive; that much I knew.
I began to search the pages of the Book again, desperately looking for anything that would make sense of the message about the drums, but by now the school was waking up. I heard a cat mewing, a gardener’s rake rattling across the terrace, and two girls chattering in the yard as they came to see their ponies before breakfast. Soon Josh would arrive, and I didn’t real y want to bump into him. I hastily closed the Book and scratched under the straw in the corner of the stable. Long ago I had found a loose brick that could be pul ed away to unearth a shal ow hiding place. When I had first arrived at Wyldcliffe I had hidden sweets and childish diaries there. Now I laid the Book in the narrow enclosure, and went to face the day.
On that first morning of the term, the general mood in the school was one of lighthearted optimism. When it was time for break, the students sat out on the wide terrace that overlooked the lake, enjoying the fresh scents of grass and blossom and talking excitedly about the changes that Miss Scratton had introduced.
“Did she real y say we were going to have new computers?”
“And a dance!”
“My friend’s brother goes to St. Martin’s—the guys there are so hot! I can’t believe it. . . .”
The exceptions to the general wave of approval were the die-hard snobs like Celeste van Pal andt and her uptight friend India Hoxton. They took a different approach.
“My mother says that the standards at Wyldcliffe have real y been slipping recently,” Celeste announced to anyone who would listen. “Al that tacky publicity about Mrs.
Hartle going off her head last term, and now these changes.”
“They’re hardly improvements, are they?” agreed India.
“I mean, who wants a whole pack of vil age kids using our tennis courts and swimming pool? I’m seriously thinking of transferring to Chalfont Manor next term.”
“Now that real y would be an improvement,” commented Evie, and a few other girls laughed. Celeste was in danger of losing her grip over the students in our form. It was Velvet who was the big excitement now. Everyone wanted to sit next to her and make friends with her and ask questions about her famous family. Velvet reveled in the flattery and told wilder and wilder stories about various musicians and actors she knew, and parties in L.A. that had been laced with drugs and alcohol and limitless amounts of money.
Superficial y, it seemed that the usual Wyldcliffe student merry-go-round would launch itself again—petty squabbles and power struggles over who was going to be queen bee, who had the most money, the best holidays, the coolest friends; and it looked as though Velvet would win easily.
Celeste might mutter like some outdated old dowager that
“the Romaine girl real y is most awful y common,” but nobody cared. For once Wyldcliffe was eager to move out of the past century and embrace the modern world.
For me, though, as I watched those giggling, gossiping girls, I couldn’t help feeling that they were like children playing on a beach, innocently unaware that a tidal wave was coming to sweep them al away. The new term that should have been ful of hope—a new start for Evie and al of us—had been secretly overshadowed by the brand on Helen’s arm, and the sound of distant drums.
When classes had ended for the day, we went to see Miss Scratton in the High Mistress’s book-lined study and told her what had happened the night before.
“Are you sure?” she asked, sitting at her desk and watching us intently. “Are you sure it was the letter S?”
“Quite sure,” Helen said. “S for Sarah.”