Edvane Stories

I was trained not to spill.

Miss Villein taught me first with water, then with weak tea, then with the Academy’s red wine, which was kept for civic dinners and corrective anniversaries. A tray was to be an extension of the wrist, as that in turn was an extension of obedience. A girl below stairs had no need of grace, she said, but she had every need of control.

That is why I return to the moment so often. Not because I regret it, though I have tried regret on and found it useful in company. I return to it because everything afterwards was judged from the angle of that cup, that hand, and that fault. When the cup tipped and the wine spread across Angel-June Nair’s uniform, nobody believed it was an accident. They were right, but not in the way they thought.

It soaked in and spread at once, dark on the grey and white, and brightening where it touched the clean fold of her sleeve. I remember the hall seeming to look before any face did. Laura looked down. Elvira’s mouth opened and closed without permission. Lucy set her knife straight beside her plate. Mina stared at me with such fear that I almost hated her for understanding.

Angel-June did not move. She sat with her hands placed correctly, but her eyes fixed on me. Behind her, the high windows held the last light of the rear grounds, where the field lay, whispering.

Senior Correction Mistress Castiga said my name sternly. Regan. I told them I had slipped, that the silver lip of the jug had caught the cup, that I was sorry with all the precision I had left. Our Principal Matron, Daisy Wilde, watched on gravely from the upper table, her flower-name doing its usual damage to flowers.

Yet Angel-June still gazed at me, while the wine kept spreading.

◆

The Academy stood above the lower service yard like a tall, polished headstone, designed to blend in with the many other official buildings of the city. Its front face completely belonged to Streindarke. Dark stone, high glass, polished ironwork, and the broad steps, scrubbed each morning by those who were not allowed to use them. Girls arrived there in closed carriages with their papers sealed and their trunks inspected. They came chosen, corrected already by family ambition, then corrected further until even their stillness could be trusted.

We, below stairs, saw the other Academy. We knew the iron grates behind the kitchens, the laundry shafts, the coal doors, and the old tubes through which instructions fell. We lived around the damp walls, the uneven floor near the scullery and the knocking pipes. The girls above were taught presentation, civic poise, ledger discipline, administrative silence, and the moral danger of untidy feelings. I had to learn which stair to scrub first so Miss Villein would not have reason to strike my knuckles with the measuring rod.

I had once been meant for the upper halls myself, though nobody said that after my parents were taken. Realigner Soucin and Adjudicator Soucin, my mother and father, had entered state service before I was old enough to understand the difference between honour and disappearance. Their names remained in Academy records longer than their bodies remained in my life. There had been an inquiry, and then an absence, and finally a debt.

Miss Villein explained it with apparent pleasure.

Your fees were advanced, Regan. Your guardianship reverted. Your account remains unsettled.

Or something along those lines. She spoke as if I had mislaid my parents in some corridor and was being charged for the inconvenience. No one called me Soucin after that. A family name was wasted on a girl in arrears. I became Regan below stairs, Regan in the laundry, Regan at table, Regan when a tray was late, or a blouse returned insufficiently white. The Academy had no need to hate me. Hate would have required a warmth it did not possess. It simply made use of the balance outstanding.

From below, I watched girls above being remade, as they had tried to remake me. They entered with little gestures still clinging to them. A laugh cut short too late, a head turned before permission, or fingers fiddling with a cuff. Those gestures were gone, eradicated, soon enough. Eventually, they could sit through a civic address without blinking at the wrong word, and look through servants with no cruelty. Cruelty, after all, notices what it injures.

Angel-June Nair did not learn that part quickly enough. She was not the prettiest girl at the Academy, which saved her from the worst kind of attention, but there was a purity to her that made people look twice. Not softness, though. Streindarke corrected softness early. She had a composed face. She had learned that fear could be folded small and stored behind the eyes, and I admired that. Her uniform was always exact. Grey and white, of course, cuffs pressed flat, collar bright, and skirt falling with no argument from the cloth. I handled it twice a week in the laundry room and knew the places where her body had resisted instruction. A faint pull at the left sleeve. A crease near the waist from sitting too straight for too long. One thread loosened inside the cuff where her thumb must have worked at it during lectures.

The first time Angel-June saw me properly, I was dusting the shelves in the west study. The girls had been taken there to copy civic judgements in a hand suitable for future confidence. Laura wrote quickly. Elvira wrote with beautiful obedience. Lucy blotted twice and went pale. Mina kept her eyes on the page until they watered. My former group were predictable. I knew which of them would fail.

Angel-June looked at the mirror above the mantel instead. I was reflected there, cloth in hand, dust on my sleeve, and my hair pinned badly after the kitchen steam had loosened it. She should have looked through me. That was what the better girls were taught. Servants were permitted to be useful, but were not considered present. Yet her glance held mine in the glass and did not leave. No one spoke, and that was how it began. Angel-June began to make small failures. Nothing Castiga could mark, nor Daisy Wilde summon into doctrine, though. A pause before taking a tray. A hand moved aside so I could set down a cup without brushing her glove. Once, beneath Angel-June’s grammar book, I found a torn page left too carefully to be lost. The margin was blank, but waiting. I kept it three days before I dared answer. By then, I had pressed a white flower into the fold, taken from the rear ditch where the meadow leaned through the railings.

I wrote nothing foolish. No declaration or plea. Only what a girl below stairs could risk offering to a girl in grey and white.

You see me.

Then, underneath, when the ink had almost dried.

I know.

The meadow lay behind the Academy, beyond the rear terrace and the black railings, where no gravel path was permitted to continue. They called it the Field of Natural Consequence. Daisy Wilde used it in her morning addresses whenever rain kept the girls from ordered exercise. We were not invited to hear those addresses, but doors carried sound, and servants learned more through doors than pupils ever learned through permission. The Principal Matron would stand before the rear windows with the meadow behind her and explain that living things, left to themselves, did not become free. They became tangled. They competed for light. They took root where they should not. They made a waste of good ground and shelter for vermin.

Castiga preferred fewer words. She would have the girls stand at the glass and look. No entry was allowed. That was part of the lesson. The meadow could only be studied from behind Academy glass. In summer, the growth rose higher than the lower windows, thick with stems, burrs and pale weeds. In autumn, it leaned against the railings in wet black strands, and by winter, the whole field seemed pressed flat beneath the endless rain. But even then, I knew something lived beneath the facade. You could detect sound and movement when the wind had stopped, and the night was quiet

Murrell kept the rear gate. He kept it badly in small ways and perfectly in the only way that mattered. No pupil passed him. No servant crossed the threshold without a written purpose. No child in arrears was allowed near enough to learn whether a lock could be persuaded. I went there when the kitchen ashes had to be emptied, or when Miss Villein had given me more work than one girl could complete and had therefore stopped watching how I completed it. The meadow smelled unpleasant. That comforted me. Pleasant things in Streindarke were usually maintained by some unseen cruelty.

Once, at dusk, I saw a shape move between the stems. Too upright to be an animal, though not upright for long. It slipped away with the grass closing after it, and it made me think of my parents, taken into a darkness the state had signed off. The Academy had its darkness, too, but Angel-June had begun to look at the meadow. That was when I knew she might come.

The Civic Meal came on the last Thursday of each month, though only those of us below stairs were vulgar enough to think of it as food. Above, it was the Demonstration of Tempered Conduct. Girls sat beneath portraits of women who had become useful enough to be painted. They were given water first, then bread, then soup, then meat cut small enough that no appetite could embarrass the room. Nobody reached too quickly. Nobody swallowed too loudly. Nobody thanked the servants unless thanks had been placed in the order of proceedings.

Wine was different. Wine meant the city had sent eyes, and that evening those eyes belonged to Eno Bricht, a civic examiner with a white pin at his throat and the confidence held only by men who had never had to wonder whether they would be gladly received.

Daisy Wilde received him beneath the clock and said, “The Academy is honoured by civic attention,” in a voice polished smooth by years of bowing to better-placed men. Bricht replied that attention was duty properly placed, and Daisy Wilde gave him the thin smile she saved for men whose approval mattered more than their intelligence. Castiga stood half a pace behind her, watching the girls before the girls had done anything.

Miss Villein put the jug into my hands before the wine course. “Do not tremble, Regan,” she said.

“I will not,” I told her, which made her look at my wrists before she looked at my face.

“Say that again after the first cup,” she said. She had no fondness for jokes, so she was anticipating failure and a chance for some lukewarm joy.

Angel-June sat in her grey and white. Crisp and clean, and almost finished. That was how the Academy liked them best. Not complete enough to leave. Not unfinished enough to pity. Laura had arranged her hands in the manner Castiga preferred. Elvira wore the emptiness of successful instruction. Lucy watched her cup. Mina watched nothing at all. They were each arriving.

I poured neatly at first. Streindarke forgave very little, but less so an error that had not first proved it knew the rules. The jug was heavy, and the silver lip caught the lamplight. There was only Angel-June’s sleeve, the white edge of her cuff, and the clean grey cloth waiting beside it.

And my wrist.

I thought of the meadow behind the Academy, unpleasant and dark and full of things that had not asked permission. Then I poured. The wine ran where it should not, over the rim, across her fingers, down into the white of her cuff and along the grey fold of her sleeve. It took at once, like evidence.

Castiga said, “Regan,” so softly that the room hardly needed to hear her. I told her the jug had caught, and she came nearer with her hands folded and asked, “Did it?” I said my hand had slipped. “Did it?” she asked again, and I said the fault was mine because that was the phrase below stairs girls were given for moments when truth had become expensive.

Daisy Wilde did not rise. She only looked at Angel-June and said, “Miss Nair will confirm the servant’s account,” as if she would be setting a plate straight on a table. Angel-June looked down at her ruined cuff while the room waited for her to be sensible. She could have said, The girl was clumsy. She could have said, Nothing happened. She could have let me be punished as a spill, a slip, a small below-stairs failure.

But after a pause that felt like the rest of my life, she looked at me and said, “Regan was trying to tell me something.”

Eno Bricht leaned forward, no longer bored by proceedings, while Daisy Wilde asked, “And exactly what did she tell you?”

Angel-June’s face changed by almost nothing, but I saw the girl behind her eyes step closer to the door I had been holding open. “That the meadow is dark,” she said. “And that I already knew.”

And then I spilled the rest.

Daisy Wilde let the silence stand long enough to discipline everyone inside it. Then she told Angel-June to withdraw and restore herself. She rose at once and did not look at me as she left, which was sensible and therefore hurt. I was dismissed below stairs. Miss Villein would deal with me, Castiga said, once the Civic Meal had concluded. Until then, I was to remove myself from sight and remember that useful girls did not become interesting. I bowed and then carried the jug away with both hands steady.

The corridor outside the hall was empty. It should have stayed empty.

Angel-June had waited in the turn by the laundry stair, still in grey and white, still stained, her face pale under the service light. For one moment, neither of us moved. Then she said, “You wrote the page.”

I touched the place where it lay hidden against me and said, “You left the space.”

She looked past me, towards the dark passage that led beneath the kitchens and out towards the rear yard. “Then finish telling me,” she said and smiled.

◆

We did not run to begin with.

Running was for alarms. Angel-June walked beside me through the service passage with the stain dark on her sleeve. The folded page was still against my skin, damp now from fear or heat or whatever name the Academy would have preferred for my wanting. Behind us, voices gathered themselves into authority. Castiga would be calm by now, and Daisy Wilde would be deciding which words made the smallest scandal. Eno Bricht would be watching the Academy learn how much of itself it could still hide.

Murrell was not at the rear gate.

I would have felt less frightened if he had been there with his keys and his dull suspicion. An open way always looked like permission in Streindarke, and permission was where the trap usually waited. Angel-June knew it too. She stopped with one hand on the rail and asked whether I had arranged the open gate. I told her no, and she looked past me to the field.

The meadow waited without making any promise. It had seemed almost still from the Academy windows that night, but at the gate I could hear it moving. There was no wind, yet stems and blades shifted against one another. Beyond it, the dark was no longer only part of the scenery. It had depth, and the small movements inside it were the same ones I had spent months pretending not to see.

Angel-June clasped my hand and said my name. Not loudly, or in alarm, but I still asked if she wanted to go back. She looked towards the Academy, where the windows had begun to brighten one by one, each light set in its proper place. Then she looked at the stain on her sleeve and said there was nothing to go back for.

So we went in.

The meadow took our ankles first. Grass looped around our stockings. Burrs caught at Angel-June’s skirt. Something moved beside us, then behind us, then everywhere. I heard her breath break and reached for her hand, but other hands had already found us. They came from the dark, quick and certain, closing on our wrists, shoulders, clothing, and hair. I tried to kick and was pulled down. Angel-June cried out. A sharp sound cut loose from all its academy training, yet unheard now beyond the railings

No one struck us. The hands dragged rather than tore. They pulled us deeper, away from the railings, away from the windows and the ordered lights. Faces appeared. Girls. Some of them young women. A cheek smeared with soil. A mouth. An old white cuff greened at the edge. Eyes watching us from under hair cut badly with knives.

At the farthest edge of the field, where the grass lay flattened into a hollow, another stood waiting. Older than us. Her grey uniform had been altered and added to. Around her, other girls crouched and watched.

“I’m Martha,” she said. “Welcome to the meadow.” She looked at Angel-June’s sleeve, then at me. “You spilled it, then.”

I had perhaps expected judgement. I had firmly expected hunger. I had expected the dark to have teeth.

It did. But not for us.

This story was inspired by the song ‘In The Meadow’ by All About Eve

I welcome polite comments. If you enjoyed this Streindarke Story, you may also like His Pretentious Love, Under A Yellow Moon, and Arrange The Symmetry