trick—and they’d watched their inherited wealth grow to numbers so high that even they could scarcely conceive of them. As such, they had a fastidious respect for the orderly following of the rules and systems from which they benefited. It all made them feel quite secure in the correctness of their position within the social order, and security was Clara’s mother’s favorite feeling, outranked only by virtuous womanhood. (She was cousin Charles’s favorite aunt, after all.)
That terrible afternoon, Charles, wanting to slow Clara, had perhaps called out to her, announcing his gaining presence. Surely his voice would have been as startling to her as the drift of a phantom, her path suddenly narrower—the low branches more like claws, her breath too shallow for her pace.
Even before what happened happened, Brookhants students had plenty of stories about those woods. They had stories about Samuel and Jonathan Rash, the brothers who had farmed the land more than a hundred years prior, stories about their spite-filled feud and its strange, resulting tower.
The students also had stories about the fog that gathered and hung in the woods, heavy as gray hopsacking dunked in a well. It blew in from the ocean only to drape itself over every leaf and briar, filling gaps and crevices, lingering for too long and hiding too much. And they of course had stories about the yellow jackets, everywhere, always, the humming of the yellow jackets, the flick of them about you. The woods were haunted, the students said. The woods were the source of sinister nighttime things that might scuttle their way across the lawns and up a vine-choked wall and in through your open window, until they were at the foot of your bed, now stomach, now pillow.
But you had to cross through the woods to get to the orchard, and usually, at least for Clara, every single time before this time, the orchard had been worth it.
The orchard, with Flo, and with Flo’s hands and mouth, too.
It’s worth mentioning that some of the Brookhants students also had stories about Flo and Clara. There were several girls who knew them well, their friends—girls who joined their club: the Plain Bad Heroine Society. And there were others, many others, who admired them. A few who probably envied them. But there was also a group, small but not insignificant, who felt quite bothered by them, who were wary of them; wary of their ideas and passions and the boldness with which they seemed to claim them.
Maybe this small but not insignificant group was even afraid of them.
The Black Oxford is an apple more associated with Maine than with Rhode Island. It was a somewhat old-fashioned and unusual variety, even in 1902, but you could still find them then in various places across New England. Brookhants was one of those places. Its orchard had nearly two dozen trees sprouting plum-black apples, like something planted by a witch in a fairy tale.* The orchard was a place that, before Flo, Clara had visited only once or twice in her previous years of Brookhants education. But then came black-apple-eating, soft-kissing/hard-kissing, well-traveled, sure-of-foot-and-voice, fluent-in-Italian-and-adequate-in-French, and just generally delirious-making Flo. And came Mary MacLane’s book. And everything changed.
(Though not in that order. The book came first.)
This was something else the onlookers later argued about: Was Clara carrying the book when she took off toward the woods that day?
That a copy, a much-loved and underlined and page-marked copy, was found near the bodies, is undisputed. The Story of Mary MacLane (the scandalous debut memoir of its namesake nineteen-year-old) had a deep crimson binding when the dust jacket was removed. A red book was not hard to spot when left almost indecently splayed against a cluster of ferns so enormous they looked like half-opened green parasols. Even in such a gruesome scene, the book stood out. Much was later made of the underlined section it was found opened to:
I have lived my nineteen years buried in an environment at utter variance with my natural instincts, where my inner life is never touched, and my sympathies rarely, if ever, appealed to. I never disclose my real desires or the texture of my soul. Never, that is to say, to any one except my one friend, the anemone lady.
—And so every day of my life I am playing a part; I am keeping an immense bundle of things hidden under my cloak.
It was no secret on campus how enthralled with that book both Flo and Clara were. (And, more