Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) by Carol Goodman

Author:Carol Goodman [Goodman, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

After giving instructions for the costumes to be shipped to Blythewood, I walked west on Fourteenth Street toward the Jane Street Tea Room mulling over all that Miss Janeway had told me. I had not grown up with money. My mother had made a sparse living as a seamstress and hat trimmer. If a client didn’t pay on time we would subsist on meager fare—day-old bread soaked in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar was one of my mother’s favorite “hard times” meals, which she claimed tasted exactly like the baked Alaska at Delmonico’s—but we always managed somehow. Up until the last months of my mother’s life, when she was haunted by her fear of van Drood, we had been happy together in our various little apartments near the river. In fact, as I neared the Jane Street Tea Room, I recognized the streets we had lived on and smelled the salt breeze coming off the Hudson. I could come back here, I thought. If Blythewood lost its endowment I could get a job as a seamstress and a little apartment near the water and at night Raven and I could fly up the dark river to the Shawangunks—or perhaps we could live in one of the little farmhouses in the valley beneath the Gunks. We could raise cows and sell milk to people in the city . . .

I might be able to manage, but what about all the other girls at Blythewood? What about those like Etta, for whom Blythewood was a chance to better themselves? I couldn’t quite see girls like Alfreda Driscoll and Georgiana Montmorency living in tenement flats or rustic Catskill dairy farms. And while I wouldn’t grieve too hard for Georgiana, there were other girls at Blythewood I would hate to see reduced to poverty, not to mention the teachers. And if Blythewood ceased to train girls, who would protect the world against evil?

By the time I reached the Jane Street Tea Room I had worked myself up into a proper tizzy. Only the sight of Sam Greenfeder, dressed in his best Sunday suit with his unruly red hair brilliantined into submission, and Agnes Moorhen, trim and spruce in navy serge with a bright yellow feather nodding from her hat, brought me to my senses. They would stop it, I thought. Agnes and Sam would not let Blythewood founder.

“Oh, Mr. Greenfeder,” I cried as he got up to pull out a chair for me. “Do tell me you’ve found out who ruined Mr. van Beek. I think the same person must be trying to ruin Blythewood and we must stop him!”

Sam looked to Agnes, who gave him a curt nod that made the yellow feather bob. “Yes,” he said, pushing my chair in and taking his own seat across from me, “you may be right. I’ll tell you all that I’ve discovered about Mr. van Beek’s affairs, but first . . .” He looked nervously toward Agnes again and she sighed.

“Oh, for Bell’s sake, Sam, I’ll tell her.

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