Hawthorn (4 page)

I hurried after Helen, looking side to side for any sign of the shadow crows, but I didn't see or feel anything stalking us. In fact, the woods felt empty, barren even. As if all the life had been drained out of them. The bare tree branches rubbed against each other with plaintive creaks that sound like scared mice. The wind moaned as though in mourning. Even the moon hid its face behind a shroud of tattered clouds.
I'm just feeling sad about leaving Mr. Ward all alone,
I told myself,
and because I haven't seen Raven all week.
I'd go looking for him tomorrow. For now, I'd feel better when we got back to Blythewood.

After a half hour had passed I wondered if we'd struck off in the right direction. “Do you know where we're going, Helen?” I asked, tugging at her shirtsleeve.

She looked up at me, startled, as if I'd asked her a difficult
question. “I-I don't know . . . oh, wait, do you hear that?”

She held her finger to my mouth, telling me to be quiet. With my Darkling ears I should have heard it first. A bell chiming in the distance.

“It's the Blythewood bells. They're ringing us home! Come on!” She grabbed my hand and pulled me through a narrow path between fallen trees—I didn't recall so many fallen trees at the edge of the woods. It looked like a tornado had come through here. Also, there was something funny about the bell. Yes, it sounded like one of the Blythewood bells—the big bass one—but if they were ringing us home why weren't they ringing all the bells?

My worries were allayed when we came out on the lawn and saw the river glinting to our right and the dim bulk of Blythewood looming under a cloud-cloaked moon. The lawn was so swathed in fog that it was hard to see our feet, much less the castle. Helen stumbled twice, her ankle—and no doubt her older injury—clearly bothering her.

“Those confounded nestlings!” Helen swore. “They've left their hockey equipment on the lawn. I'm going to have a word with Dame Beckwith about them.”

“I'm sure Dame Beckwith and our teachers will want to hear about the shadow crows trying to get into the vessel first.” I pictured Miss Sharp, Miss Corey, and Mr. Bellows all gathered around the fire in the library. Funny they weren't out here looking for us, though. And why was the school so dark? Even if it was very late I'd have thought they would leave lights burning to guide us back.

“Helen,” I said as we reached the edge of the hockey field
where a torn goal net was flapping in the wind. “Don't you think it's strange . . .”

I never finished my sentence. Helen was standing mute and white-faced in the light of the moon, which had come out from behind the clouds. Her face reminded me for a moment of Mr. Ward's, her eyes as wide as his, her skin as pale as his underground pallor. I followed her shocked gaze up to the tower of Blythewood—only there wasn't any tower, just the skeletal fragment of one rising up out of the blasted ruin that had been our school.

“GONE!” HELEN'S VOICE
was so hoarse that for a moment I thought the shadow crows had come back to caw over the gutted remains of Blythewood. Then, rushing forward, she cried, “Nathan!”

I grabbed her before she could throw herself on the rubble. She turned on me, flailing her arms in my face. “We have to get inside! People might be trapped and hurt . . . Nathan . . . and Daisy and Cam! Dolores and Bea! That's why they aren't looking for us, because the school was bombed just like Herr Hofmeister tried to bomb the Woolworth Building. Van Drood has bombed Blythewood! Don't you see . . . Ava, why are you looking at me like that? Why don't you let me go help them?”

“Helen,” I said, grabbing both her arms and looking into her wide frightened eyes. “Our friends aren't in there. Look at it.”

“What do you mean? There's plenty of building left!” She raked her eyes over the rubble, fully revealed now by the merciless moon. “There could be survivors.”

“Then they've survived for a long time. Look at the vines and moss growing over the rubble.” I dragged Helen over to a toppled wall and plucked at a vine climbing over the stones.
It came loose with a dry snap. Something moved within the rocks. Mice. Or snakes. “This didn't just happen, Helen. It happened
years
ago.”

Helen turned to me, the whites of her eyes glowing in the moonlight. “But we just left. We've only been gone a few hours.”

“We must have passed into Faerie at some point in the tunnels and come out in a different time. Remember how your watch stopped and my repeater started acting funny?” I took out my repeater now and opened it. It played the mournful tune the bells tolled when a Blythewood alumna had died. I looked up at Helen. Her eyes were full of tears.

“How long?”

“I don't know.” I followed the broken wall to a smashed marble heap that had been the front steps. The once majestic oak doors with their carved shield of Bell and Feather were still there but they were gouged and scarred as though animals had scratched at them. A rough plank was nailed slantwise across them with a rune burned into it.

“It looks like they tried to barricade and ward the doors,” I said, touching the rune. I felt a faint tingle of magic, its power drained. My fingers came away blackened. “Someone might still be inside,” I said doubtfully. The truth was I was afraid to go inside, afraid of what we might find amidst the rubble and the mice. But Helen was braver.

“Someone must be inside,” she said, squeezing my arm. “Else who rang the bell?”

I looked up at the bell tower. The belfry was a crater, but she was right—there must still be one bell hanging and we had heard it ringing. “We'll explore,” I said, “but we have to be
careful. The whole place could come toppling down on us.”

“So what?” Helen asked, her face stone white. “If all our friends and teachers are gone, what's left for us to live for?”

I followed Helen through a gap in the stones. Blythewood's walls were over three feet thick, built in the Middle Ages to withstand a siege, before they were carried to America.
What could have been strong enough to bring those walls down?
We had to scramble over a lot of stones, disturbing whole nests of mice. I felt like we were digging ourselves into a pit, but then we came out into a large vaulted space. Skeletal stone arches stood bone white against a midnight-blue ceiling spangled with gilt stars.

In Mr. Bellows's history class he had shown us a picture once of a chapel in France with a vaulted ceiling painted with gold stars against a blue background. It wasn't half as beautiful as this, because this ceiling really was the night sky. We were in the Great Hall, where we'd eaten our meals and listened to Dame Beckwith give her inspirational speeches. It was where I'd taken my oath to protect Blythewood—
to stand by my sisters in peril and adversity.
I could almost hear the ghosts of girls' voices and the chiming of the handbells. I listened for a moment for my own bell signaling danger, but heard nothing. I had a bell that rang for danger and one for love, but none for the empty ache of sadness I felt now. All I heard was the wind clattering the loose glass hanging from twisted lead in the windows. The seven arched windows that had held stained-glass portraits of our founders—the seven bell maker's daughters—had been reduced to a framework of glass shards. Our feet crunched on
broken glass as I moved closer and looked up at one remaining pane that featured Merope, the youngest daughter. The top of her face had been blown away, leaving only a ghostly smile that smoldered in the moonlight like a dying ember. I felt a hand steal into mine.

“Come this way, Ava. The North Wing seems to be mostly intact.”

She pulled me into the hall that led to our old classrooms. Without the open sky it was darker here, but Helen found an old spirit lamp in the chemistry lab and lit it with a spell. It cast our shadows on the blasted walls. For a moment I thought I saw the shadow of Professor Jager, with his majestic mane of hair and his unruly eyebrows, lecturing an abashed Daisy on how air magic worked by creating a simulacrum out of a pair of scissors, but then the shape wavered and vanished as I followed Helen back out into the hallway where glass crunched under our feet, fallout from the display cases that held trophies and plaques from older classes. I peered into them now at framed pictures of girls in long dresses playing field hockey, bronze trophies for archery and bell ringing, engraved plaques for first place in Latin contests—
Abigail Montmorency 1869, Lucinda Hall 1879, Honoria Thistle 1883 . . .
I found myself saying the names aloud as I followed Helen down the hall until I came to one that brought me up short.

“Helen! Here's Daisy! She placed first in Latin in 1914. So the school wasn't destroyed before the end of our senior year.”

“Daisy was always good at Latin,” Helen said with a wan smile. The spirit lamp gave her face a ghoulish appearance, as if
she were one of these dead girls in the pictures. “Bully for her. Oh look, Dolores won for best essay—”

A loud bang from one of the classrooms interrupted Helen. We looked at each other, then both hurried into the room. I think for a second we were both thinking so much about Daisy we thought it was her, that we'd find her sitting in the first row, saving us two seats, chiding us for being late.

But the room—Mr. Bellows's history classroom—was empty. The sound was one of the big heavy maps slapping against the wall in a draught coming in through a broken window. Helen marched to the map, put her spirit lamp down on Mr. Bellows's desk, and ripped it from the wall as if she blamed it for raising our hopes. She stood clutching it in her hands, her back convulsing. I went to put my arms around her but she shrugged me off.

“If I hadn't been so awful about listening to her wedding plans she'd be here with us now.”

“And would that be better for her?” I asked. “We haven't found any . . .” I was going to say
bodies
but thought better of it. “. . . sign that anyone was hurt when the school was attacked. Perhaps they evacuated first. It would have happened after Daisy graduated.”

I was scanning the walls, looking for something that would tell us Daisy was okay—perhaps a note pinned to the corkboard where Mr. Bellows had put up interesting newspaper stories (“History in the making, girls!”), that said, “Went to Kansas to marry Mr. Appleby!” The board was covered with yellowed newspaper stories cut from the New York papers. Mr. Bellows
would give extra credit to any girl who clipped out a story that he deemed “history making,” but he'd been discriminating.

“A sale on hats at Best & Company is
not
history making,” he'd lectured Georgiana Montmorency our first year. “But a bill passed to make killing birds for ladies' hats illegal
is
.”

As a result, the board was usually only about half-f. Now it was not only full but the articles overlapped one another, leaving only the headlines showing. I scanned the top of the board.

Heir to Austrian Throne Is Slain by a Bosnian Youth . . . Widespread Political Plot Thought to Have Inspired Killing of Archduke . . . Austria and Servia Ready for War . . . Russia Gives Warning to Germany . . . London Still Sees Hope for Peace . . . Austrian Troops Invade Servia . . . Peace of Europe Now in Kaiser's Hands . . . Germany Declares War on Russia . . . First Shots Are Fired . . . Russia Invades Germany . . . Germany Invades France . . . German Marksmen Shoot Down a French Aeroplane . . . England Declares War on Germany . . . Germans March on Belgium . . . Liege Fallen . . . Charleroi Fallen . . . French and British Troops Routed at the Marne . . . Paris Fallen . . . London Fallen . . .

“Helen,” I said without turning around, “it looks like a war broke out the summer after our senior year. Something that started with the assassination of the archduke in a place called Sarajevo . . .”

“It's marked here on this map,” Helen said, coming over to stand next to me, clutching the heavy wall map in her hands. “There's a big X drawn on it—Mr. Bellows never let us draw on the maps!”

I looked at the map. In addition to the X, someone had outlined a river in Belgium—a very
bendy
river—and drawn a question mark in one of the bends.

“The X marks a place called Ypres . . .” Helen was saying.

“I saw that name somewhere,” I said, looking back at the corkboard. “Here, there's a story about Ypres. It says over thirty thousand British soldiers are dead. Can that be right? What kind of war is that?”

“A most horrible one,” Helen replied. “Here's a story about soldiers dying on some river called the Marne. ‘Germans Defeat Allies at the Marne and March on Paris' . . . oh, look! Here's something about two schoolteachers volunteering to aid the war effort in France. It's Miss Sharp and Miss Corey!” Helen leaned closer to read the article in the flickering light from the spirit lamp. I leaned forward to adjust it while Helen read. “It says they're driving an ambulance and tending to the wounded on the Western Front,” she said, then read, “‘Miss Vionetta Sharp gained her nursing training at the Henry Street Settlement House.'”

I shivered, recalling Miss Sharp saying to me that the world would soon have more need of nurses than English teachers.

“And here's a story about Cam flying aeroplanes on the Mexican border! Oh, and here's one about the boys of Hawthorn Hall who have enlisted in the army—and it's written by Dolores Jager, ‘special wartime correspondent' to the
Times
.”

As Helen read out all the wartime accomplishments of our classmates and teachers I bent down to adjust the flame on the lamp and noticed a pile of telegrams held down by a
paperweight. I picked up the first one. “It is with regret that we inform you . . .”

My heart thudded in my chest.

“What is it?” Helen asked.

I tried to slip the telegram into my pocket but Helen grabbed it from me. I saw her squinting at it and knew she couldn't read it in the dim light and that I should adjust the wick on the lamp to give her more light. But I couldn't. My fingers were frozen. My whole body was frozen. Helen moved to the window and stood in the moonlight to read the telegram. She looked like a girl in a Dutch painting reading a letter from her lover.

“This can't be right,” she said, shaking her head, annoyed as if it were a bill from her dressmaker that didn't add up. “It's dated August 1916, and it says that Nathan Beckwith was killed in a place called Verdun. But what would Nathan be doing in France?” she demanded, looking up at me. “What could all of this”—she waved her arms at the bulletin board and the maps—“a war all the way across the ocean, have to do with Blythewood?”

“We're pledged to fight evil,” I said, holding up another letter I'd found on the desk. It was dated the same day as the telegram. “That's what Mr. Bellows says here in his letter to Dame Beckwith resigning from Blythewood to enlist in the British army. He says, ‘I can no longer remain here at my post pinning flags on maps and recording the names of the dead on my honor roll when the flower of our youth goes forth to fight. Although our country remains neutral, we at Blythewood cannot. This is not a natural war—if any war can be said to be
natural
—but a war fueled by the evil of the shadow creatures. I am convinced
that since the beginning our old enemy van Drood has had a hand in this war, seeding dissent on all sides. Hence it is our war and as a knight of the Order it is my duty to go forth and avenge our dead.'”