Wishes and Wellingtons by Julie Berry

Author:Julie Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2020-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

We assembled in the paved courtyard where we had greeted our families on visiting day. We would assemble there again the next morning when they came to bring us home for the holidays. I couldn’t wait.

The clouds were thick and heavy, moist with the hopeful promise of snow. Outside the enveloping arms of the school building, London’s noises never paused, but in the courtyard, quiet hung in the expectant air.

After inspecting our appearances in the frosty dark, the schoolmistresses gave us each a candle. Miss Salisbury, the music mistress, waggled her hands to lead us in singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” As soon as our voices began, Miss Salamanca took her lantern and lit the first girl’s candle with it. The second girl tipped her taper into the first girl’s until it lit. Thus, slowly, carefully, little lights spread down the line, casting a halo over each girl’s face.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth

The everlasting light!

The hopes and fears of all the years

Are met in thee tonight.

Mine is not a heart of stone, despite what some people think. For that moment, with those candles, and that song, Christmas wrapped itself around me like a muffler—one knitted by someone other than me. Each girl became more, to me, than she’d been before. I couldn’t stay vexed with anyone. I even felt a glimmer of acceptance of Theresa Treazleton. Miss Salamanca looked, for a moment, in lantern light, like her kindly, better, warmer self—like the girl she must’ve been once, if she’d ever had a mother to love her.

She led us slowly, still singing, across the street to the charitable home. Each of us walked with a lit candle in one hand and a parcel in the other: a muffler and a pair of mittens wrapped in red paper. We had each tied a little sack of sugarplums into the parcel’s ribbon.

“Think of the poor, motherless boys who never get to enjoy a sweet,” Miss Rosewater had said when we wrapped them. I remembered Tommy stealing my licorice, but said nothing.

London’s bells broke out in their joyful, clamorous song. Seven o’clock. Time for a Christmas party. From the shouts and the steam-fogged windows of the washrooms across the way an hour before, the boys at the charitable home had faced a trying ordeal getting scrubbed and combed for the occasion. It tickled me to wonder what Tom would look like, all dandied up for a party. If there was lace anywhere, I’d never let him live it down.

We filed into the home and down a dark hallway to the refectory, where the boys ate their meals. It was colder here than at the girls’ school. The corridor smelled faintly of coal smoke and burnt eggs and, well, of boy. Sweaty, unwashed, cricket-playing, wrestling-in-the-dirt boy. I contrasted it with Miss Salamanca’s school, which smelled like starched pinafores and too many rules. I almost wished I were an orphan.

Until I saw the boys.

I’d seen them roughhousing at play, of course, but never lined up on exhibition as they were now.

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