A Great and Terrible Beauty

Felicity is more pleased than I've ever seen her. "Whiskey. You accidentally took Reverend Waite's private collection."

Tears sting at my eyes from the pungency, but at least I'm breathing again. A surprising warmth floods my entire body, weighing me down in a delicious way. I like the feeling, but Felicity has already snatched the bottle away and sent it to Ann who takes her medicine like a good girl with just the slightest grimace at the taste. Once Felicity has her drink, we've all been initiated. Into what, I'm still not certain. The bottle goes around a few more times till we're all as loose-limbed as new calves. I'm floating inside my skin. I could go on floating like this for days. Right now, the real world with its heartbreak and disappointments is just a pulse against the protective membrane we've drunk ourselves into. It's somewhere outside us, waiting, but we are too giddy to bother with it. Watching the rocks glimmer, my new friends talking in soft murmurs, I wonder if this is what the days look and feel like for my father, wrapped tight inside his laudanum cocoon. No pain, only the distant beating of memory. The sadness of that is overwhelming, and I'm drowning in it. "Gemma? Are you all right?" It's Felicity, sitting up and looking at me, confused, and I realize I'm crying.

"It's nothing," I say, wiping at my eyes with the back of a hand.

"Don't tell me you're going to be one of those maudlin drunks," she says, trying to joke, but it only makes the tears come faster.

"No more for you, then. Here, have something to eat." She puts the bottle behind a rock and hands me the still uneaten apple. "This party is getting very dull. Who's got a clever idea for us?"

"If this is a club, shouldn't we have a proper name?" Pippa's head lolls against a rock. Her eyes glisten from the drink.

"How about the Young Ladies of Spence?" Ann offers.

Felicity makes a face. "Makes us sound like spinsters with bad teeth."

I laugh a little too loudly, but I'm grateful that the tears have stopped, even if I'm still having trouble catching my breath.

"It was just my first thought," Ann snaps. The whiskey has given her fangs.

"Don't get prickly on us," Felicity shoots back. "Here, have another go."

Ann shakes her head, but the bottle is still there at the end of Felicity's hand, so she takes another tight-lipped swig.

Pippa claps her hands. "I knowlet's call ourselves the Ladies of Shalott!"

"Does that mean we're all going to die?" I ask, starting to giggle uncontrollably. My head is a feather on the breeze.

Felicity joins my snickering. "Gemma's right. Too moping by far."

We throw out names, laughing at the completely outrageousAthena's Priestesses! Daughters of Persephone!--and groaning at the truly terribleLove's Four Winds! Finally, we fall silent, leaning against the rocks, our heads touching softly. On the walls, the goddesses hunt and cavort, free from all restraints, these makers of their own rules, punishers of trespassers.

"Why not call ourselves the Order?" I say.

Felicity sits up so quickly I can still feel the warmth of her next to me, trailing behind her by seconds. "How absolutely perfect! Gemma, you are our genius." I'm a little embarrassed, so I twist the stem of the apple in my hand till it breaks with a snap. Felicity pulls my hand to her mouth and bites into the fruit cupped there. Her mouth is still sticky sweet from it as she kisses me full on the lips. I have to put my hand to them to stop the tingling, and a blush has flooded my entire body. Felicity raises the apple and my arm into the air, both held tight in her pale fist. "Ladies, I give you the Order, reborn!"

"The Order, reborn!" we all echo, our voices bouncing around the cave in ripples of sound. Pippa actually embraces me. We're alive with our new secret, with the way we belong to each other and to something other than the dull passing of hours with nothing to look forward to besides our routines. It makes me feel even more powerful than the whiskey, and I want it to go on forever.

"Do you suppose there was really such an order of women?"

Felicity snorts. "Don't be daft, Pip. It's a fairy tale."

Pippa is hurt. "I only wondered, that's all."

I don't want the spell of our evening to be broken so fast. "What if it were true?" The slim leather-bound diary is in my hands and out in the open before I can really think about it.

"What's that?" Ann asks.

"The secret diary of Mary Dowd."

Ann is afraid she has missed something. "Who's Mary Dowd?"