A Great and Terrible Beauty

"I'll never leave you, Gemma."



She turns and walks up the hill, the child's hand in hers. They walk toward the sunset till they merge with it and there's nothing left but the deer and me and the lingering scent of roses on the wind.



When I find my friends again, they're frolicking like happy lunatics. "Watch this!" Felicity says. She blows gently on a tree and its bark changes from brown to blue to red and back again.



"Look!" Ann scoops water from the river and it turns to golden dust in her hands. "Did you see that?"



Pippa is stretched out in a hammock. "Wake me when it's time to leave. On second thought, don't wake me. This is too divine a dream." She extends her arms overhead and dangles a leg over the side of the hammock, resting in her cocoon.



I am changed and spent. I want to go back to my room and sleep for a hundred years. And I want to run back down into that valley and stay here with my mother forever.



Felicity puts her arm around me. "We simply must come again tomorrow. Can you imagine if that prig Cecily could see us now? She'd be sorry she didn't want to join up."



Pippa drops an arm down to pick a handful of berries.



"Don't!" I shout, slapping them out of her hands.



"Why not?"



"If you eat them, you have to stay here forever."



"No wonder they look so tempting," she says.



I hold out my hand. Reluctantly, she drops them in my palm, and I toss them into the river.



CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE



We're sleepwalking through the day, ridiculous smiles on our faces. The other girls rush past us in the halls like nettles blown across a lawn. We drift through them from class to class, going through the motions, absorbing nothing. We keep last night's promise alive through furtive glances and little asides spoken in code that perplex our teachers and make us all smile.



We understand each other. We share a secret.



Not a terrible secret like the one that binds me to my family and to Kartik, but a deliciously forbidden secret that bands us together. Anticipation races through our veins, stretching our skins tight to the point of bursting. It's all we can do to get through the day and wait for night to come so that we can open that door of light into the realms again. We are as one. There will be no outsiders. No intruders on our experience.



During our music lesson, Mr. Grunewald drones on for the whole of the hour about the merits of a particular opera.



Elizabeth, Cecily, and Martha listen like the good girls they are, taking perfect little notes, their heads bobbing up and down in unison. Listen, write, listen, write.



We don't jot down a word of it. We're elsewhere in a land where we can be anything we choose. Mr. Grunewald calls Cecily to the piano to play her Assembly Day piece for us. Her fingers plod out a careful, correct minuet.



"Ah, good, Miss Temple. Very precise." Mr. Grunewald is pleased, but we know the feel of real music now, and it's difficult to feign interest in the merely pretty.



After class, Cecily pretends her playing was awful. "Oh, I simply butchered it, didn't I? Tell the truth."



Martha and Elizabeth protest, tell her she was brilliant.



"What did you think, Fee?" It's easy to see that she wants Felicity's praise.



"Very nice" is all Felicity says.



"Just nice?" Cecily forces a laugh that's meant to sound devil-may-care. "My, it must have been truly awful, then."



"It was a lovely waltz," Felicity says, getting it wrong. She can barely keep the smile from her face. I look away, trying not to break into the same ridiculous grin.



"It wasn't a waltz. It was a minuet," Cecily corrects. She's pouting openly.



Elizabeth peers at us as if she doesn't know who we are.



"Why are you looking at us that way, as if we're specimens?" Pippa asks. "I don't quite know. There's something different about you."



We exchange quick glances.



"There is something different, isn't there? Come now, if you've a secret you'd best share it."



"That would be telling, wouldn't it?" Felicity smirks. The light is shining through the hall window. It makes the dust dance in the air.



"Pippa, darling, you'll tell me, won't you?" Elizabeth puts her arm around Pippa, who twirls away from her embrace.



Cecily is quite put out. "The old Pip and Fee wouldn't have kept secrets from us."



"But those old girls are gone." Felicity gives a radiant smile. "They are dead and buried. We are new girls for a new world."