Lilianne obeyed, collapsing dreamily into a desk at the backof the room. Uncertain what to make of her, Miss Augusta hesitantly returned tothe chalkboard she had been scrubbing and recommenced her work. “How far hadyou gone in school? Back—there?” she inquired after a moment, handlingthe final word as if it were something slippery and repellent.
Competing stories of the there had fascinatedBranaugh for the past weeks, building to a fever of anticipation in the finaldays before the new lighthouse-keeper’s arrival. No one knew the truth of hisorigins, for only a name had emerged from the silvery viscera of the fish thatthe Widow Clary read, and, later, the position of the moon indicating the dateon which the lighthouse-keeper would come. No one had foreseen a wife anddaughter coming with him, nor the dark and decidedly foreign cast of hisappearance.
The girl did not reply to the question, at first. MissAugusta began to wonder if she could speak. Then, presently, came the words,“Third form, miss.”
The notion of forms being an unfamiliar one, Miss Augustafetched a slate and a piece of chalk and asked the child to write her name,then dictated a series of exercises to her. “Seventh grade,” Miss Augustapronounced when the girl finished, smiling to indicate that she should bepleased, and then she sent Lilianne Eisner into the lingering dusk, feelingthat she had done as well as she possibly could in her handling of thelighthouse-keeper’s daughter.
Before the Eisners had arrived, Miss Augusta had pridedherself on abstaining from gossip, feeling virtuous and superior as she hushedvicious half-formed rumors in the schoolhouse or politely changed the subjectat the grocer’s counter. Now she went directly to the grocer with a shoppinglist she’d scrawled for the sake of appearances, feeling she must immediatelymake it known that the lighthouse-keeper’s daughter would be attending schoolalongside the children of Branaugh. Otherwise, she feared, the informationwould be somehow her secret, concealed deliberately and maliciously.
In the few minutes required to choose and purchase a filetof whitefish, Miss Augusta allowed Mr. Tillman the grocer to gather all thedetails of her encounter with the lighthouse-keeper’s daughter. As he poked andprodded at the few details she initially volunteered, Miss Augusta feignedreticence, glanced meaningfully over her shoulder at the women lingering withinearshot, then let herself be persuaded to divulge everything.
Mr. Tillman gratefully expressed the appropriate amount ofshock at the child’s ghostly twilight intrusion, at her strange quietness, atthe negligence of any mother who let a young girl go wandering so close todusk. Before Miss Augusta was out the door, the story had already reached Mrs.O’Neill, who was certain to tell Mr. O’Neill, who would be on the docks comemorning with half the men in Branaugh. Miss Augusta had withheld nothingbesides the child’s acuity in reading and arithmetic. She sensed thisinformation would only provoke resentment, and found, somewhat unexpectedly,that she did not want Lilianne Eisner to be resented.
◊
The other children were wary of the stranger among theirranks, as Lilianne was wary of them. She spoke only when directly addressed.She took no part in schoolyard games and would not perform the recitations offacts and numbers that consumed most of the school day. Only one subjectcommanded her full attention, and that was history. She listened to thelectures with her head tilted slightly to the side, her brow furrowed.
The history of Branaugh was but a well-worn catechism toMiss Augusta and to the other children, an almost ceremonial gesture beside themore urgent matters of multiplication and grammar. Yet the look of terrifiedwonder on the girl’s face as she listened made Miss Augusta hesitate sometimes,her tongue stumbling on words she’d spoken hundreds of times across her life.At the end of December, after the wild night when all Branaugh danced beneaththe brightly glowing eye of the lighthouse, the girl came to Miss Augusta’sdesk with her eyes swimming, holding her slate in a white-knuckled grasp.
“Is everything you say in the history lessons true, miss?”she said.
Miss Augusta had anticipated with dread the conversation shewould have to have with Lilianne since the moment she saw the child’s spectralface staring down from the lighthouse tower. Seeing Lilianne and her fatherwatch them, Miss Augusta had stepped for a moment outside herself and realizedhow they must all look to strangers. The savagery of their ritual joy.
The old lighthouse-keeper would have stayed indoors. Perhapsin midsummer Lilianne Eisner’s father would do the same, now that he knew. Butthat night, he had watched and so had the little girl. Stranger still, his wifehad come outside and danced as if she belonged to Branaugh, although she sovisibly did not, with her dark hair loose, her garments thin, her feet bare onthe frost. Miss Augusta suspected that the girl was not nearly so troubled bythe dance as she was by her own mother’s participation.
Miss Augusta could not comfort Lilianne, at least nottruthfully, so instead she dabbed at the girl’s wet eyes with a handkerchiefand asked what she meant, expecting an inquiry about the island’s winter deathand summer life, the imperative for bi-yearly dancing, the wildness thatconsumed them all on those ritual nights.
“The thin places,” Lilianne said, instead. “I think I foundone. I think I live inside one.”
◊
Miss Augusta had ceased to be entirely a person when shebecame a schoolteacher. She had surrendered any hopes of marriage, even ofclose friendship. She was to walk the well-trodden road laid out byschoolteachers past, from bright young novice to weathered schoolmarm, and thenfill a casket remarkably like her predecessor’s. To this fate she had alreadyresigned herself. The sound of a knock on her door was only a shock, not apleasure.
When Miss Augusta opened the door, Mrs. O’Neill was smilingapologetically from the threshold. She had a loaf of bread wrapped in cloth, aquiet and devastating gesture of her pessimism about Miss Augusta’s hostesslypreparedness. She was not wrong; Miss Augusta had nothing fresh, certainlynothing suitable for the occasion. Still, the assumption
