Lord of Ice (4 page)

“Amy, you have to own up—”

“But Mr. Reed will flog me! Please, Miranda, I didn’t mean to do it! I was only dusting it while you went to get another pail of water. It fell off the mantel.”

“And you simply put it back?” she exclaimed.

“It didn’t shatter—there were only four or five big pieces. I rested them back together and leaned it against the mirror.”

“You were too busy primping at your own reflection, I warrant!” she said angrily.

“No, I wasn’t, I swear! I didn’t think anyone would notice it was broken! Or I thought maybe Brocklehurst would think she had broken it herself the next time she went to pick it up! Please, Miranda, you have to help me! She’s going to kill me!” the child shrieked. “Please!”

“Damn and blast!” Miranda cursed under her breath, whirling around as the door slammed back on its hinges. Her body tensed, well used to this fight.

Miss Brocklehurst towered in the doorway. The candle in her hand illuminated the severe angles of her mannish face, further harshened by wrath. “
Fitz
Hubert.”

The woman always emphasized the
Fitz
in her last name as though to remind Miranda deliberately of her illegitimate status, but she refused to be ashamed of the lovely, flamboyant creature who had been her ill-fated mama.

In her other hand, Brocklehurst suddenly held up the decapitated head of her Wedgwood china doggy. “You bad, cruel, horrid girl! I know full well you hate me, but this—this is beyond the pale!”

Miranda summoned forth her acting skills and forced her chin downward. She clasped her hands behind her back, the picture of contrition. “I apologize, ma'am. It was an accident.”

“ 'I apologize, ma'am. It was an accident,'” she mimicked spitefully. “Do you think I shall let you off so easily?” Bristling, Miss Brocklehurst prowled into the room. She set her candle on the nearby table. “Bad, proud, intractable girl! I have tried—oh, how I’ve tried—to make something of you, but you will never amount to anything.”

Miranda’s chin came up a notch. Her green eyes narrowed with blazing defiance.
Oh, yes I will.
Bad, proud, intractable—maybe that much was true. But she
would
amount to something. They’d see. She knew exactly what she wanted to be; she had dreams they could never crush. Dreams that would take her far, far away from here.

“Don’t you dare glare at me, girl,” Brocklehurst warned, but Miranda was too angry to obey, staring at her in simmering rebellion.

Crack!

The blow took her off guard. Miranda’s head snapped to the side with the force of the headmistress’s slap. Amy stifled a scream, clapping both of her hands over her mouth.

Recovering from the blow, Miranda insolently turned the other cheek, like a true Christian.

The headmistress glowered at her for it, but did not strike her again. “You insufferable baggage. You shall have no supper tonight, nor tomorrow night, nor the night after that. I’ll starve you into submission, if need be! And you will be on slops duty—for a fortnight!”

Ugh, not the chamber pots.
Miranda grimaced and looked away in revulsion.

“Miss Brocklehurst, if I may, do allow me to intervene,” a nasally male voice intoned from the doorway.

Miranda instantly stiffened. Paling, she looked over as the Reverend Mr. Reed sauntered into the dormitory in all his pompous indecency, no doubt happy for an excuse to glimpse the girls wearing nothing but their shifts.

Jane grabbed her frock with a gasp, and Sally dove beneath the bedsheets in horrified modesty as his gaze flicked over them. Then, lingeringly, he eyed little Amy.

Miranda felt her blood run cold. “I said it was an accident,” she forced out, drawing the pervert’s attention to herself.

His gaze darted to her in warning. “What is this impertinence, FitzHubert? Do not speak unless you are spoken to.”

She held his gaze in loathing. For all of Miss Brocklehurst’s spite and bullying, far worse was Mr. Reed’s inability to keep his hands to himself. And when it came to discipline, wielding the birch was his favorite pastime. It had been weeks since he’d had the opportunity to flog anyone. Miranda gulped silently, fearful that he was eager to keep his hand in play.

“This act of subterfuge indicates a serious lack of moral development,” he remarked, stalking slowly toward her, his pale, long-fingered hands dangling at his sides. He had thinning hair, a bony beak of a nose, and shifty eyes. Tall and spare, he stood with a slight stoop that added to his air of furtiveness. “Are you proud of this act of destruction, FitzHubert?”

“Pride is her natural manner,” Brocklehurst said in contempt.

“Mm, yes, vanity. Are you vain because men think you beautiful, Miss?” His stare raked her body and her face. “Do you forget that pride is first among the mortal sins, the very sin that toppled the angels?”

“I have tried for years to remove that stain from her character,” Brocklehurst chimed in, nodding.

“As have I, ma'am, as have I. Alas, I see we both have failed,” he said, staring at Miranda for a moment in lecherous malice. “In addition to what Miss Brocklehurst has indicated, you will come to my office tomorrow following the eleven o’clock service and take your punishment from my hand . . . privately.”

Miranda flinched down into the core of her soul and closed her eyes, dropping her chin slightly, but she knew better than to argue with him. That would only make it worse.
It doesn’t matter,
she told herself fiercely. She had lived through the humiliation and pain of a flogging before. Amy had been saved again. That was all that mattered—that, and tonight’s performance. She could get through it tomorrow if only she could have her dream tonight.

When she heard Amy sobbing a few feet away, she feared the guilty child would confess. She shot the girl a sharp look askance.
Hold your tongue.

In that moment, more than she despised Brocklehurst, even more than she detested Mr. Reed, she cursed Uncle Jason for abandoning her here and going off to war, forgetting about her. She despised him for it.

Patriotism, bah!
she thought bitterly. He had gone for the adventure and had long since forgotten she existed. He had left her, his bastard niece, dangling here between two worlds—neither aristocratic, like her father, nor fallen, like Mama. He barely even remembered to pay her tuition anymore, as Brocklehurst frequently reminded her. She was little better than a charity girl, and that was even more humiliating than having to submit to the birch. Closing her eyes, she fought the feeling of it all crushing her. Only by remembering the last time she was onstage could she even breathe.

She struggled to remember the faces of the people who had watched her in delight and admiration and had listened to her singing with charmed looks. She knew of course that the rollicking entertainments and gaudy spectacles at the Pavilion hardly ranked as legitimate theater; Mama would have lifted her nose at the place with a diva’s disdain. The amphitheater served another audience entirely—not lords and ladies, but the working people of Birmingham’s factories, potteries, breweries, and mills, those who dug its canals, and the nearby garrison of soldiers. Miranda didn’t care. Even if it was only a third-rate circuit theater, when the limelights gleamed and the applause rushed over her, she was someone else up there, someone beautiful and carefree, who made everybody happy, like her mother had. She made people laugh and forget their woes, and when they applauded and cheered and even threw flowers, for a fleeting instant, she was someone who was loved.

It was the closest she would ever come to recapturing those halcyon days in her father’s glittering world of wealth and privilege, when she had been a little girl and would sing and dance to entertain her doting, wonderful parents. Life had been safe and warm then, full of Father’s manly elegance and Mother’s butterfly joie de vivre. How they had loved each other! If only they had been married, she thought in misery. If only tonight she could run away with the circuit company and never, ever come back to Yardley to be abused and beaten and called all manner of hurtful things.

But she knew what would happen to Amy if she left. She had seen the way Mr. Reed watched the pretty child when he thought no one was looking. Miranda had made it her mission to see that he kept his distance, because she was the only person at Yardley School who dared defy him. Even if Reed and Brocklehurst ground out her spirit one particle at a time, she refused to abandon that vexing little girl the way she had been abandoned.

Having handed down her sentence, Mr. Reed and Miss Brocklehurst marched out in haughty procession. When the door had shut and the girls were alone once more, there was a terrible, hollow silence.

The only sound was Amy’s soft, mournful crying, until Miranda’s stomach grumbled indignantly, at which noise, Amy cried harder. “You can have my supper, Miranda. It’s all my fault—”

“Oh, shut up, Amy. It doesn’t matter. The food is wretched anyway.” Miranda put her head down and quickly turned away to hide the tears smarting in her eyes. She lowered herself to her knees beside her cot and reached under the straw pallet, carefully pulling out her costume. She held it up and gazed at it in reverent silence. It made her heart ache, it was so beautiful, spun from ethereal gossamer muslin in the most delicate shade of pale lavender, embroidered with silver spangles.

The other girls gathered around, staring at the costume in wordless awe, as though it were a mysterious artifact from another world. It was a gown for a fairy princess, a changeling child caught between the mortal world and the fey one, belonging fully in neither. Miranda shrugged off the haunting thought. Having washed up prior to her sentencing, she sat on her cot and quickly donned the flesh-colored tights that all the dancers and actresses wore beneath their costumes, then lifted off her workaday purple dress, rinsed the rest of her body with a washcloth, shivering in the cold, and slipped into the sleeveless muslin dress. At once, she felt herself transformed.

Hurrying to the mirror, she tied her thick, wavy hair back with the matching lavender bandeau. The other girls looked on in growing wonder all the while. She dabbed a drop of rouge on her cheeks and rubbed it into her lips, then looked around for her slippers. She slid the sequined, satin dancing slippers out from under her cot, but pulled her worn, clunky half boots back on, for she still had a long trek through the snow to reach the Pavilion.

Amy looked at her morosely as Miranda donned her mantle over the skimpy lavender gown. Miranda gave her fellow orphan a brilliant smile that she hoped looked fearless. Amy smiled wanly and opened the window for her. Jane stood on a chair and looped the rope that Miranda had stolen to serve as her escape ladder around one of the exposed rafters.

Peering out the window, she assessed her escape briefly before climbing up onto the sill and grasping the rope. In short order, she shimmied down the side of the building, holding on to the line like one of Admiral Lord Nelson’s ablest seamen. The light snow crunched under her boots as she plunked down onto the ground.

She signaled for the girls to draw the rope back in; then Amy tossed down her dancing slippers one at a time. The child waved woefully, her golden curls drooping.

“Don’t forget to go down and unlock the kitchen door after everyone’s asleep!” Miranda called to her in a whisper.

Amy nodded and waved. “Break a leg!”

Miranda blew her a kiss; picked up her slippers, one in each hand; and ran. The winter moon shone on the snow-frosted roof of Yardley School, which sat on Coventry Road about three miles outside of Birmingham, in sight of the River Cole and the Warwick Canal. It was a large, old, rectangular farmhouse of gray stone, with white-painted shutters and a slate roof. The school and all its miseries receded into the darkness behind her as Miranda raced away through the fields north of the village.

The clear December evening was so still it seemed to be holding its breath. The cold was sharp, but the silver gleam of moon and stars glittered magically on the snow in every direction as far as the eye could see. The only sound was her panting and her footfalls as she ran. Her misting breath streamed out behind her like a bridal veil.

She saw a band of deer pawing through the snow for forage. A startled hare darted across her path. At last, she came to a silent country road and turned left. A few minutes later, she skittered nervously across the bridge over the River Cole. She hated going over bridges. Having watched her parents drown, she wanted nothing to do with any body of water anywhere on earth. On the other side of the bridge, at Bordesley Green, her adventure took on its usual element of danger. The vagrants’ bonfires were burning, out there on the distant green. She summoned forth a burst of speed and sprinted as fast as she could, skirting the large, dark, open expanse. They called it Mud City.