Choice.
The word hangs in the air. She is trying me, testing me, and I will not fail her.
"Do you have anything to say on the matter, Miss Doyle?"
"Nothing whatsoever, Miss Moore."
There is nervous chatter, excited laughter. I have them in pieces with just a few well-placed words. I feel faint at the power I could hold over them if they knew what I had deep inside me. Inside me.
"Really, Miss Doyle? How very interesting."
"That's my choice."
"What, privacy?"
"It's as good a choice as any."
"Yes, indeed." She stares at me for an unnervingly long time over the rims of her spectacles. I stand my ground. I am not fighting her, but I am holding fast. I am rebelling. Small rebellious acts.
"Miss Worthington, you're never short of things to say. Do you have any ideas?"
"Yes. Plenty."
"Care to enlighten us?"
"Not particularly."
There are widespread giggles now. Cecily glances at us, her eyes gleaming with delight. I gaze levelly back at her, until her grin falters and she looks away.
"Well then. Miss Bradshaw, I assume you're with your friends on this matter."
"Not at all. I have plenty of ideas."
This is what shocks the class into silence. Not Felicity, certainly not I. But Ann could be ruined by anything, everything. They will ruin her, and we all know that. Somewhere, they will ruin her. That is our sport.
"Miss Bradshaw?"
She clears her throat, pauses a second. Somehow, she has changed. She is changed. She gazes around the class, impassively, testing each girl with those calm, flat eyes. And she controls them. They are silent for her.
"Choice surrounds us. But it is closed choice. Jam or marmalade, drawing or painting, reading or knitting. There is no 'you could have this, or something else entirely'. There is no 'something else entirely' for us. But there might be. One day."
"Ladies shouldn't have too much choice. It confuses us."
"Yes, I can imagine that." Ann stares, smirking slightly at Cecily, who gazes back, her eyes wide and her top lip drawn back slightly in amazement. It makes her look unbelievably attractive, and I dig Felicity in the ribs to alert her. She stifles a giggle.
"But, you see, the thing is, Cecily, that you've all been telling me for the past ten years that I'm simply not a lady. Not like you. So, I guess that amount of choice would never confuse me. And I guess I might just get it."
We are quietly triumphant, and I am, once more, acutely glad that I am alive.
The rest of the day is uneventful. We are subtly rejected and revered by the other girls. They cannot understand quite how we could behave like that. They can understand very little of anything that matters.
I value the teaching of Miss Moore. Truly, I do. But there is something about the structured way in which our lessons are unstructured that made me what to stop and dig my heels in. I was not content to be a wilder flow, if I were still flowing. I wanted to stop, and make others stop in the process. Because when you stop, even for just a second, you begin to think, and thought is what will make the tides change. Until then, I will be quiet and small and reverse my fate.
Felicity meets Ann and I in our room after midnight. The candle spreads a condensed, wavering little pool of light on the floorboards at our feet. We sit, hold hands, and close our eyes. But for that moment, that tiny little particle of time before I will open my mind and become truly emancipated, if only for a night, I dream of him.
And then we are falling.
We are never sure when the transition took place, as always, and it sounds foolish to say that I was relieved by that little piece of continuity, that tiny fragment of Same that I took as a sign of what we were to find. And, indeed, on the surface, everything is the same. Everything is correct. But there is something deeper down, something black and bleak and startlingly intense. Instinctively, I glance towards the statue, marking the opening where the curtain of vines used to hang, dangerous and indolent, and I gasp, because I can finally see through my ignorance.
The statue is of Pippa.
We have seen her naked, of course, we have seen every little inch of each other. I danced with her in the moonlight, swam with her in the half-light of dusk, I ran as fast as deer on the fleet feet of cats at sunset across the river. But this statue is mesmerising.
She really was perfect. I am unabashed as I explore her figure with my eyes. No tiny flaws, no little bumps or bruises. Her hair seems wilder, her eyes wider and her lips fuller. She is achingly lovely, and, yes, it aches.
"Fee. Ann. Look."
The simplicity of my words is enough to attract their attention. They stand next to me, stare in the same direction, and Felicity sees it first. Her hand flies to her mouth just as Ann mutters, "Oh my."
"Our Pip is here."
Indeed she is.
We sit around the statue, and I vaguely feel foolish, descending into the throes of insanity – I am sure Tom would love the opportunity to test my sense and diagnose me with some hideous, terminal disease – but Felicity is gazing longingly at the statue and so I do not resist. Ann smoothes the skirt of her dress unconsciously under her fingers, and then moves on to plucking and twisting the glass surrounding her.
Yes, we talk to her, and laugh with her, and even begin, tentatively, to tell her jokes about the effects of her death. As usual, Felicity leads conversation, twisting it deeper and deeper into discomfort. But Ann is the one to say what we are really, truly thinking.
"We miss you, Pip."
The silence is amicable. We are each with our own thoughts, and I think that is when we will all be happiest. We can all keep secrets, I have decided. We should all hide away a little of our soul that only belongs to us, because, once you expose it, then it can be taken and distorted by anyone who cares enough. Secrets make the world black and bitter, but they also make the world. And that is very important.
We return from the realms, dusky eyed and dapple footed, and bid each other slumber of the sweetest kind. Ann's snores do not start immediately, and so I keep my thoughts very quiet and small.
"When Felicity comes at dawn, do you think I'm asleep?"
There is no right answer to this question – and no wrong one, either. There is, and only ever has been, the truth.
"Yes. We do."
"Well, I'm not."
The only sound is the wind batting branches gently against the glass. It taps, sending shivers down my spine, like skeletal fingers. The shadows thrown through the thin drapes twitch and grin eerily. The world comes alive when we are asleep.
"I like watching you both. It's like a part of me did die, and I can watch down on you from ... Elsewhere. Keep you safe."
The sweet simplicity of Ann's words breaks something fragile inside me, and that night as we slept, in separate beds, because Ann is Ann, I thought only of her.