Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) Read online

  “I’m dressed as a phoenix,” I told the reporter in a loud clear voice that carried to the crowd. “It’s a bird that rises from the ashes of a fire to be reborn. I’m wearing it in honor of the girls who died in the Triangle fire last year . . . and all the working girls in this city who risk their lives to earn a living.”

  A great cheer greeted my words, and a dozen magnesium flash lamps exploded around me. Smoke from the flashes filled the air. Silhouetted against the light, the crowd became a cluster of shadows, as if the tenebrae had risen up to challenge my proclamation. I turned and walked up the steps of the Montmorency mansion, feeling less like a proud phoenix and more like a newly hatched chick cowering in the shadow of a hawk’s wings. The spectacle that greeted me beyond the front door did nothing to soothe my jangling nerves.

  The Montmorency mansion, imposing at all times, had been done up to resemble Versailles at the time of Louis XVI. The foyer had been transformed into a formal garden with dusky bowers and fountains lit by floating lamps and scented by a thousand roses and orchids. Footmen in gilded livery and powdered wigs glided across the polished floors with gold trays of sparkling champagne and delicate pastries. My eyes still dazzled from the magnesium flashes, I wandered through the faux greenery in a blur, to the threshold of the ballroom.

  The girls in their wide frothy skirts pirouetted around the dance floor like flocks of tropical birds wheeling across a marble sky; the men in their dark velvet costumes and black tails could have been their dark shadows. I recognized Georgiana at the center of the interlocking circles in a brilliant blue dress, peacock feathers quivering in her headdress as she preened over her flock. There were Alfreda Driscoll and Wallis Rutherford—and even the shy Jager twins, Beatrice and Dolores, dutifully following the steps of the waltz. I suspected some of the girls I didn’t recognize were the rising class—the new nestlings. They seemed to know the steps as well as anyone. How could I have ever thought I would be able to fit back in at Blythewood after all that had happened to me? I wanted to turn and flee, but a familiar voice stayed me.

  “Ava! What a brilliant dress! Is it a Poiret?”

  I turned to find Helen, my Blythewood roommate, standing in a robin’s egg gown that turned her blue eyes azure and her blonde hair gold. Unlike the overdone confections worn by Alfreda and Wallis, this dress was simple and elegant.

  “I should have known Louis XVI would suit you,” I said, slipping my arm around Helen’s slim waist and hugging her. Beneath the layers of lace and silk she felt thinner than she’d been in the spring—and more fragile—but she embraced me back with the same strength and fierceness I recalled. “But how did yours turn into something so pretty?”

  “Oh,” Helen replied, twirling her skirts, “I had a word with Caroline Janeway and we made a few alterations. You should have seen the puce monstrosity Georgiana had picked out for me. Puce! With my coloring! It was a deliberate attempt to sabotage my chances of attracting a suitable husband.”

  “Is your mother still after you to marry?” I asked.

  “It’s her idée fixe, especially since Daddy . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to. I knew that when Helen’s father had perished on the Titanic, he had left his financial affairs in a shambles. Agnes and her lawyer friend Samuel Greenfeder had outlined a plan by which Helen and her mother might survive frugally, but from the quality of lace on Helen’s dress and the jewels in her hair, I didn’t think they were following it.

  “Mama sees a rich husband as a way out of our financial difficulties, but you should see the ancient specimens she’s put forward.” Helen flicked open a silk fan and rolled her eyes. “They lurk around the house like undertakers waiting for someone to die. I’d rather die than marry one of them. Or marry a bank teller like Daisy’s Mr. Appleby.”

  “Has Daisy written to you?” I asked. I hadn’t heard from our third roommate all summer.

  Helen shrugged. “Just some drivel about campaigning for women’s votes in Kansas. You see, Daisy would be fine without money, but not me. Poverty just doesn’t suit me.”

  I laughed. “I don’t really think it suits anyone, Helen. You should see the tenements I go into and the choices that life drives girls to.” I thought of Ruth meeting her mysterious stranger under the Steeplechase entrance. Had she thought he was going to deliver her to a better life? “Which reminds me, there’s a project I’d like you to help me with.”

  I began to tell her about how Ruth Blum had gone missing, but I soon saw she wasn’t listening to me. Her eyes were focused on the glass doors to the garden, where a tall man in a top hat was leaning jauntily against a fake rose arbor. “Yes, yes,” Helen said distractedly, “I’m sure it’s a good cause. Put me down for a few dollars.”

  “Really, Helen!” I stamped my foot. “Are you pursuing everything with pants on now?” But when I saw who the young man was I quit my scolding.

  “Nathan!” Helen cried, then covered her mouth with her fan, embarrassed to have been caught shouting at a boy as if we were on the hockey field at Blythewood instead of a ballroom. But it was too late. Nathan Beckwith had turned and was scanning the crowd to see who had called his name. I’d have recognized those searching gray eyes anywhere, but the rest of him was quite altered.

  He’d grown half a foot at least, and his pale silvery hair that always fell in front of his eyes was slicked back. The lines of his face had been set into an immovable coldness I had never seen before—the result, I guessed, of spending the last few months at asylums and hospitals searching for a cure for his sister Louisa’s madness after we’d rescued her from Faerie. From the look of his face, I was betting he hadn’t found one. Pools of darkness filled the hollows beneath his eyes and under his too-sharp cheekbones, as if he carried a reserve of shadows with him.

  But then he spotted us and his smile chased the shadows from his face.

  “Look how happy he is to see you!” I told Helen, because I knew how she felt about Nathan. As he crossed the room, though, I saw that his eyes were locked on me with a look that set my heart knocking against my ribcage and made me want to either fly from the room or fly to him. My shoulder blades were itching under my corset, my fledgling wings straining against the metal stays. The movement under my shoulder blades made my wire wings tremble.

  Their movement in the light must have drawn Nathan’s attention. His gaze moved from my face to just above my head, and his pale gray eyes flashed silver. Had the wings reminded him of catching me and Raven kissing? When he looked back down at my face the shadows had reclaimed him. He stopped a few feet from us, doffed his top hat, and bowed low before us.

  “You’ve learned fine habits on the continent,” Helen quipped.

  “I’ve learned more than that,” Nathan said as he lifted his head. Up close I saw that his fine blond hair really was silver now, as if he had aged a decade in the months since I’d last seen him.

  “How is Louisa?” I asked.

  “As well as the combined medical knowledge of all the finest doctors in Europe could make her. I left her in an asylum in Vienna where there was a doctor who made some progress with her—at least enough so she’s stopped trying to run into the woods and can sit down to tea without playing chimes on the teacups. In her doctor’s last letter he informed me that she’s learned to repeat a few phrases of polite conversation and doesn’t tear her dresses to bits anymore, so I suppose she’s as fit as half the automatons here.”

  He looked scornfully at the dance floor. “Really, where are they sending you girls to dancing school these days? I’ve seen less complicated maneuvers at the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.”

  “Oh, there’s the most brilliant new dancing school up in Riverdale. All the new girls are going there,” Helen said with a touch of envy in her voice. The dancing school was too expensive for the van Beeks. In solidarity I had gone to lessons with old Madame Musette in her fusty Stuyvesant Square s
tudio. But Nathan didn’t hear the strain of jealousy—or anything else Helen was saying. He was staring at me.

  “That’s an interesting dress,” he said, looking me up and down in a way that made the blood rush to my face. “What are you supposed to be?”

  “She’s a phoenix,” Helen said, “in honor of the girls who died in the Triangle fire.”

  I stared at Helen, amazed that my interview had traveled so fast and that Helen had paid attention to it. But that was Helen—loyal when you least expected it.

  “Oh, so you’ve become a socialist,” Nathan said, not softening at all. Why had he come over here if he was going to be so disagreeable?

  “Ava’s been working at the Henry Street Settlement House,” Helen went on, surprising me by knowing the settlement house’s name. “She was just telling me about a girl who’s gone missing.”

  “A missing girl?” The interest made his face human again. “Do you think she’s been taken?”

  I knew he meant taken by the Darklings, whom he believed had taken Louisa. Even though Raven had helped get Louisa back, Nathan still thought the Darklings were evil. Would I ever convince him—or the Council of the Order—that they weren’t? Not unless I found A Darkness of Angels—which proved the Darklings’ innocence and revealed how to end the centuries-old curse that kept them out of Faerie. That is, if it wasn’t lying on the bottom of the ocean among the ruins of the Titanic.

  “The changeling didn’t say Ruth was taken by a Darkling,” I said. I told them what she had said about Ruth meeting a shadowy man in Coney Island. I didn’t say it was van Drood, because I was still hoping she had assumed his features from my memories and not Ruth’s. I was still hoping van Drood had died on the Titanic.

  “Ruth’s memory of the man she was meeting might have been obscured by shadows because a Darkling had mesmerized her.”

  “Nathan’s right,” Helen said. “Just like that Darkling mesmerized you last year.”

  “He didn’t mesmerize me!”

  “How would you know?” Nathan asked coolly. “He could be using this changeling to lure you back to him. You’re planning to go look for the missing girl, aren’t you?”

  As soon as he said it, I knew I was. Nathan knew me better than I knew myself. “I thought I’d go to Coney Island to see if anyone saw Ruth and the man she left with.”

  “Alone?” Helen asked, appalled. “With all the rabble that frequent Coney Island? Why, I’ve heard that women show their bare legs on the beach and drink spirits in public and men take improprieties on the carousel rides . . .”

  “Why Helen,” Nathan said with a grin, “you’ve done quite a bit of research on the place. It sounds as if you’re dying to go there.”

  Helen turned pink. “I never!” she cried.

  “Then you don’t want to go with Ava and me when we go investigate?”

  “You’re going with me?”

  “I can’t very well let you go alone and get snatched by a Darkling or pawed by a lowlife on the Steeplechase, can I?”

  I stared at Nathan, trying to figure out what he was up to. He stared back. Helen looked from one to the other.

  “Yes, Nathan’s right,” she said. “We can’t let you go alone. We’ll all go. I suppose I’ll have to acquire a new bathing costume; my one from last year is horribly out of date. I should have one by Thursday next.”

  “We’ll go tomorrow,” Nathan said. “While the trail’s still hot.”

  I began to object that the trail was hardly hot and to think of some other pretext for not going tomorrow. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t be glad of Helen and Nate’s company, but if a Darkling was behind Ruth’s disappearance . . .

  “It’s settled then!” Nathan declared. He grabbed Helen’s hand. “Now have we come here to dance or what?”

  Helen was barely able to suppress the jubilant smile that rose to her face, but she did spare a backward glance at me. “But we mustn’t leave poor Ava alone,” I heard her whisper in Nathan’s ear.

  “Oh, I don’t think poor Ava will be alone for long. I’ve noted half a dozen gentlemen eyeing her, just waiting for their chance to ask her to dance. You’ll be fine, won’t you, Ava?”

  I wasn’t at all sure I’d be fine dancing with a stranger, but I didn’t want to deny Helen the pleasure of dancing with Nate. “Of course,” I assured them both.

  They were instantly sucked into the whirl of the ballroom as if into a cyclone. I stood on the edge of the dance floor watching the swirling couples, moving faster now in steps I didn’t recognize—no doubt one of the newfangled dances the girls were learning at that new dancing school. I could no longer make out individual faces in the blur of pastel satin and lace and the dark, upright men whose heads all inclined to their dancing partners, moving to the rhythm of the music as if they were gaily painted automatons in a huge clockwork mechanism—a mechanism I stood outside of. I wasn’t sure what I was most frightened of: remaining here on the margin or being taken up into it.

  “Of course no one would want to dance with her . . . after all, no one even knows who her father is.”

  The whisper came from behind me. I turned to see who had spoken, but the edges of the ballroom had been built into dusky green arbors from which onlookers could sit and watch the ball unobserved. I made out dim shapes in the shadows, matrons in subdued dark dresses and older men in black tails, their stiff clothing rustling like wings.

  The room seemed suddenly full of whispers and rustlings, my ears tingling with the undercurrent of sound. I had an image of crows roosting in the shadows. The elders of the Order were plotting who would marry whom, which matches would be most advantageous for wealth and property, but also to strengthen the Order’s powers. I had discovered last year that the Order kept records of bloodlines going back for centuries that recorded magical traits . . . and flaws. They bred their children as if they were livestock, selecting for desirable gifts and winnowing out the weak and abnormal. If the Order determined there was something wrong with you, you would be condemned to a life of spinsterhood. Which would be preferable, I thought, to being mated to a stranger. I’d far rather stand here alone all night.

  “May I have this dance?”

  The voice was so low I thought I might have imagined it; it was the voice I heard in my dreams. I turned slowly, afraid a quick motion might dispel the dream, and found myself facing a winged creature.

  “Raven!” I cried, my whole body tingling at the sight of him. Black wings stretched out behind him, in full view of the Order. How had he dared . . . ?

  But then I saw that the wings were made of wire and feather, costume wings. Like me, he was hiding in plain sight. Only I didn’t see how anyone could look at him and think he was an ordinary mortal. His black eyes flashed behind a feathered mask. His skin was the color of fine marble veined with gold. His teeth, when he smiled, were slightly pointed and fully menacing. I could sense the power of muscles flexing beneath the velvet doublet and lace collar and cuffs of his costume.

  “They’ll kill you if they see what you are,” I hissed. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

  “You mean without an engraved invitation?” he asked with a crooked smile. “I flew into the garden along with a flock of pigeons who weren’t on the guest list either. Your Order seems to forget that footmen and high gates can’t keep our kind out. As for what I came for—well, to dance, of course. But if you say no, I will have risked the wrath of the Order for nothing.”

  “Oh!” I should tell him to flee before they recognized what he was—and recognized what I was when they saw me with him. The music swelled—a new waltz was beginning. I felt my body swaying with it, swaying toward Raven as if a magnetic force were pulling us together. I put my hand in his and felt a spark of electricity race through my body, my fledgling wings tingling beneath my shoulder blades.

  “Yes,” I said, afraid I would explode i
f we didn’t move. “I would be most honored to share this dance with you.”

  5

  IT SHOULDN’T HAVE surprised me that Raven was such a good dancer. After all, he could fly. Being in his arms felt like flying. My dancing slippers barely touched the marble floor as he swept me into the waltz. A jasmine-scented breeze from the garden ruffled my hair. My wings itched to spread out . . .

  “They won’t,” Raven said.

  “How did you know . . . ?”

  “I felt your shoulders tense. Just relax. Quit trying to lead.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Is this your first dance?”

  “It is,” I admitted.

  “Mine too,” he said, grinning. “I got the Sharp sisters to give me dancing lessons.”

  I giggled at the picture of Vionetta Sharp’s plump aunt Emmaline and tiny aunt Harriet practicing dance steps with Raven. “And they still don’t know wha—who you really are?”

  The smile disappeared from his face and his arm tensed around my waist. “No, poor dears, they have no idea they’re harboring a monster in their midst.”

  “Raven, I never meant . . . when you told me about my father I was shocked to learn what I was. I’ve never thought of you as a monster.”

  “But you’ve spent these last few months seeing yourself as one, haven’t you? You’ve been working at the settlement house to appease your conscience. You’re dreading the moment your wings will break out . . .”

  His voice faltered as I flinched under his accusations.

  “Have they?”

  “Almost,” I whispered, looking around to see if anyone was close enough to overhear us. But each of the couples revolved around the floor in its own separate bubble. All I could hear was the music and the beating of my heart as I told Raven about chasing the changeling over the rooftops and my wings breaking through my skin.