Indoors. And not only does no one tell her to put it out, MacDonald fails to preternaturally manifest the way she would had it been me and Alex smoking in the common room: Books are flammable, girls!
Well. I’m hardly going to leave just because they so clearly want me to. In fact…I belong here as much as they do. More than they do. I was a resident of Godwin House when they were still first-years begging for directions to the dining hall.
I sit down in an empty armchair and pull out my phone, scrolling through my email while Clara and Kajal exchange incredulous looks—like they’ve never seen someone text before. And maybe they haven’t. They’re all dressed as if they’ve just emerged from the 1960s: tweed skirts and Peter Pan collars and scarlet lipstick.
Ellis finishes the chess game in eight moves—a quick and brutal destruction of Clara’s army—and conversation resumes, albeit stiltedly, as if they’re all trying to forget I’m here. I learn that Leonie spent the summer at her family’s cottage in Nantucket, and Kajal has a pet cat named Birdie.
I don’t learn anything I want to know—and frankly, nothing I didn’t know already. Leonie’s family, the Schuylers, are old money; and I’d seen Leonie around school before, I realize, although she had straight hair then, and she certainly hadn’t been wearing that massive antique signet ring. The surnames Mehta and Kennedy are equally storied, their wielders frequent guests at my mother’s holiday home in Venice.
I want to know why they chose Godwin…or Dalloway altogether. I want to know if they were drawn here, as I was, by the allure of its literary past. Or if perhaps their interest goes back further, paging through the years to the eighteenth century, to dead girls and dark magic.
“What do you think of Dalloway so far?” Leonie asks. Asks Ellis, that is.
Ellis taps the ash from her cigarette into an empty teacup. “It’s fine. Much smaller than I expected.”
“You get used to it,” Clara says with a silly little giggle. More and more I dislike her; perhaps because she reminds me too much of Alex, and yet not enough of her, either. Clara and Alex look alike, but that’s where the similarities end. “You’re lucky to be in Godwin. It’s the best house.”
“Yes, I know about Dickinson,” says Ellis.
“Not just that,” Leonie says. “Godwin might be the smallest house on campus, but it’s also the oldest. It was here before the rest of the school was even built. Deliverance Lemont—the founder—lived here with her daughter.”
“Margery Lemont,” Ellis says, and I am frozen in the armchair, ice water in my veins. “I read about what happened,” she adds.
I should have gone upstairs when I had the chance.
“Creepy, right?” Clara says. She’s smiling. I can’t help but stare at her. Creepy: the word fails to encapsulate what Margery Lemont had been. I can think of better terms: Wealthy. Daring. Killer. Witch.
“Oh, please,” Kajal says, waving a dismissive hand. “No one really believes in that nonsense.”
“The deaths were real. That much is a historical fact.” Leonie’s tone is almost pedagogic; I wonder if her thesis involves archival work.
“Yes, but witchcraft? Ritual murder?” Kajal shakes her head. “More likely the Dalloway Five were just girls who were too bold for their time, and they were killed for it. Like what happened in Salem.”
The Dalloway Five.
Flora Grayfriar, who was murdered first, by the girls she’d thought were friends.
Tamsyn Penhaligon, hanged from a tree.
Beatrix Walker, her body broken on a stone floor.
Cordelia Darling, drowned.
And…Margery Lemont, buried alive.
Before last year, I had planned to write my thesis on the intersection of witchcraft and misogyny in literature. Dalloway seemed like the perfect place for it, the very walls steeped in dark history. I had studied the Dalloway witches like an academic, paging through the stories of their lives and deaths with scholarly detachment—until the past reached out from parchment and ink to close its fingers around my throat.
“You’re lucky you got accepted to Godwin your first year at Dalloway,” Leonie says to Ellis, deftly guiding the conversation out of choppy waters. “It’s so competitive; most people don’t get accepted until they’re seniors.”
“I’m a junior,” Clara points out, to general disregard.
I resist the urge to retort: I was, too.
“Didn’t they say all the witches died here at Godwin House?” Ellis says, lighting a fresh cigarette. The smell of her smoke curls through the air, acrid as burning flesh.