Mallow knew the search would begin in the valley bars and taverns. Everyone knew about Darcy’s secret medicine. Eventually they’d think to check the cliffside trails, but she doubted they’d check the funeral rocks at the very top. None of the young ladies had died that week. No one needed a funeral. The birds would be hungry. Sooner or later, a girl would die, and they’d take her in procession up the cliffside to the funeral rocks for her body to be consumed—and her sickness consumed with it, where it could no longer reach her family, her neighbors, the whole village. By then there shouldn’t be any trace of Darcy. Even the ropes would be plucked away for nesting fibers.

Mallow jabbed the broom against the wall and dragged it through the corners of the room. Swept clean. Every inch. Don’t miss a spot.

She gathered the table linens to her chest—heaps of fine napkins spotted with a delicate spray of blood, where the fine young ladies’ lungs had crumbled out of them. Out of their soft, round little chests and into my hands, poor dears suffering in overwhelming comfort.

***

The housemaids gathered in the attic hall outside Darcy’s door like birds huddled over stained rocks.

“Think she’ll be back? Will they hire a new matron, or promote one of us?” They flustered around the door. It hung ajar, lock sprung where it had been picked by the groundskeeper’s son. Scandalous, to have a boy in their hall. A boy who could pick locks, no less, and the silly girls nearly forgot poor Darcy, for all their wild imaginings. They all wanted their locks picked.

But when they swung open the door, Darcy wasn’t there—not ill, not dead in her bed. But her things were there—or some of them. Not her bright red slippers, and not her diary. That was in Mallow’s pocket.

***

In March, the rains come, even in the mountains where the clouds are so often pooled at the foot of the cliffs. The damp throws the school into tragic disarray as scores of fine young ladies are finally overcome by their malady. They drop like hunting birds, and their rooms are stripped and scrubbed and filled again with the next young ladies from the deacon’s list.

There’s always a thing or two to be found, when the rooms switch over. Something to slip into a pocket. A silver button, or a vial of morphine.

The maids spend March fighting over dead girls’ rooms. A new term begins in April.