Curses
"Do you believe in curses, Miss Moore?"
Miss Moore suffered an inward tremor of shock, a lurid string of her bloody midnight visions, the memories of wet indigo eyes and familiar faces vacant in death, and an implacable urge to strangle Felicity Worthington.
That girl was a thorn in her side. She always had the unsettling habit of asking the most dangerous question at the worst possible moment, always with a charming smile. In other words, she was too much like Miss Moore herself for comfort. Or at least she was like someone else, someone she was once. Regardless, it took one to know one, and Miss Moore could say with some assurance that Miss Worthington's smile was pure challenge beneath a thin, protective shroud of innocence. She was so saucy, so rebellious, and so undiscriminating in her choice of targets. She was a warship that had forgotten its purpose of peace and learned to thrive instead on the shots it fired, the war itself. She could strike a friend as easily as a foe that way. For, she never thought of why she acted. She merely acted. What she ever like that? Miss Moore wondered. She knew she probably was. But although one can only move forward, if there is one small, evasive way to move backwards, it is called hypocrisy.
Sometimes, she forgot what she had been as a girl, what she was. The teacher had begun to believe the lies she taught. The actress had started to believe her own performance. She found she liked to teach. The wide-eyed innocence of her students, the reverence of those girls in starched white dresses-- they would believe anything she told them. She could choose to teach them to do what she could not, but the choice was hers. That was power in itself. But it was a slim substitute for the power she had lost, and a simple reminder could bring the illusion crashing down. She would remember, and that was the true curse. She could not forget.
Miss Moore stared at her still lifes. The rich red of the apples outshone the mouth of shadow stretched around them, eternally tantalizing and never changing. The fruit of knowledge, that highest of sins.
She opened her mouth. "I believe…"
"What happens to the Lady of Shallot?"
Smiling, little Nell Hawkins tilted her head and widened her ingenuous eyes, a posture that rendered her features even more doll-like than ever. After she studied the sketch for some time, Nell's high, clear voice cut through the air like a single triangle through an orchestra. Her forehead was wrinkled with the strain of a young child who sees something she does not comprehend, but her voice was steady.
"Since she never left the safety of her tower, that was all she knew. She died because she was innocent. She couldn't be prepared for death. The Lady of Shallot knew nothing of curses."
The other girls shifted uncomfortably in their seats, the rustling of their skirts an echo of their whispers. Miss Moore understood. Hearing such heavy truths in Nell's breathy, girlish voice was unsettling.
"Very good, Miss Hawkins."
And then Nell was screaming, lying in a heap before the darkness on the horizon, which drew closer and closer. Her limbs were tangled like a rag doll tossed carelessly into a corner. A strand of hair stuck to her forehead, moist with terror. Some forgotten part of Miss Moore wanted to brush it from her face.
"Please. Not this one," she begged.
The terrible voice tore the air. "I demand a sacrifice."
"Run, Nell!" she shouted. Her throat was raw with the effort. It seemed to have shrunk with hopelessness. "Keep it out of your mind!"
Miss Moore did not stay to see what became of Nell Hawkins. She, too, was running. The creature would have its sacrifice, and after all these years, it would not be her. She ran against the will of the wind, and she did not look back. The sound of her own breathing, the thundering heart that reassured her she lived, drowned out the cries behind her.
The last time she saw Nell Hawkins, she was stumbling up the hill. Her tiny legs pumped frantically. Her sweet voice rasped hysterically, "Jack and Jill went up the hill." She fell and tore her skirt. "Jack and Jill went up the hill…" The creature set upon her. "Jack and Jill…" Even as the tracker drew its ugly face to hers in a lascivious smile of red teeth, she clutched her arms to her small, birdlike chest and held the words of the child's rhyme against her pounding heart. Nell Hawkins was never to let curses penetrate her mind. She was innocent to the end.
A sudden breeze overturned a cup of brushes, bringing Miss Moore back to her senses. She had taken the wind to be part of her vision. She closed the window and righted the brushes. Her thoughts proved harder to rearrange. They never let her forget for too long.
And if she could not forget, she could not change. She could only move forward, deeper into the pact that had trapped her. She was doomed to forever travel the same course in delirious pursuit of what she had wanted years ago. Pulled by the current after a dream. Now, she did not crave the power half as much as the vindication. If only she got the thing that had been taken from her, perhaps it would reverse everything, surrender everything she had lost on the road to getting it back. But most of all, she knew that getting what she had wanted was the only thing that could finally set her free.
Miss Moore straightened the already rigid brushes and addressed her class.
"I believe… that this week we shall take a walk through the woods and explore the old caves, where there are some truly astonishing primitive drawings. They can tell you far more about art than I can."
And you, I hope, can tell me what I need to know.Miss Moore glanced at Gemma Doyle. She played with the silver chain around her neck and stared out the window. Her expression was unreadable. Miss Moore had no way of knowing what Miss Doyle knew about her past. Nothing, she presumed. Mary was always a cheerful escape artist, never one to remember anything unpleasant. She had that beautiful flaw that Miss Moore had always lacked—the all-consuming need to be thought well of, and above all else, to be loved. Mary would never want her daughter to know what she had done. Nonetheless, perhaps Gemma was the one-- the key to the Realms. So far, however, Miss Doyle was as silent and unresponsive as Mary in her deepest state of brooding. The caves, however, were certainly a start. They were rich in Order lore. If nothing else, Miss Doyle's curiosity would give her away, if she had anything to hide. If not, well, she had faced disappointment before.
She turned back to the girls, and an unnamed anxiety set upon her. It was fear in its purest form, causeless and senseless. She needed to be alone. Miss Moore released the class to cheers and felt a vague stirring of happiness that there were, in fact, spirits within these stagnant young ladies in the making. However, her inexplicable restlessness persisted. She felt as if she should be doing something else right now. She had forgotten something immensely important, and it disturbed her. Something was missing.
"As for this," she said, scrutinizing her sketch, "it needs something." She was not sure exactly what she meant.
So Miss Moore drew a neat mustache on the Lady of Shallot, caricaturing the poor, cursed woman. Irreverence made her more manageable. With that simple addition, she changed from ingénue to villain—or fool. Miss Moore's face warmed with a smile. In that moment, she was more girl than woman, and the young ladies of Spence appreciated her cheek. She had done it again, against her better judgment. She had exposed that dangerous thing, her spirit.
And her weakness, too, she feared. As she laughed to chase away any demon, she could see that familiar mirror-pale face studying her from the corners of memory, dark eyebrows arched skeptically, just as they had any time Sarah had jested in order to hide. That familiar, smoky voice blew transient, illusory mist in her ear. What's wrong?
Miss Moore turned away from her creation, conscious of every muscle that held her smile. "God is in the details," she said, almost to herself, almost to the endless worlds of unknowing girls, whose reflections in the window passed her one by one.
A/N: Portions of the dialogue in this chapter are direct quotes from A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels. So now would probably be as good of a time as any to say that I don't own anything that belongs to Libba Bray or, in this chapter, Tennyson. But that only makes sense, because if it belonged to me, it wouldn't belong to Libba Bray, and this story would not belong on a fanfiction site. However, everything here that doesn't belong to anyone else belongs to me. And, in case you were wondering, the next chapter will be long.