Dacre would be my mentor.
The shame of my first day at Carvell came flooding back. It had started with cursing at the welcome-desk woman and ended in a free-flying fist – and a shattered bottle pressed into a guy’s stomach. That ugly wrath had been Dacre’s very first impression of me. Would he ever take me seriously as an academic? Would I spend the next few months or years clawing back the respect I’d lost? Or was I forever tarnished?
How thoroughly unreasonable for my actions to have consequences.
And yet as much as I was ashamed of what I’d done, it was still undercut with that terrifying sense of satisfaction, of rightness, of ancient scales rebalanced. I was afraid to look at that feeling any more closely.
After Le Conte’s seminar, I went to the dining hall for a late breakfast. The room was much like the others in the Jerningham building, with high white walls and tall Gothic windows and scuffed wooden floors, only about ten times the size. It rang with the sound of clinking teaspoons and hungover laughter, and smelled of burnt sausages and tomato ketchup and bad filter coffee. The scent made my stomach roil and clench, but I knew I’d feel better with some food inside me. I realised too late that I hadn’t had dinner last night, which is probably why the five whiskies had left me feeling so jaded. A headache had already begun to pound at my temples.
I grabbed some boiled eggs, a few slices of buttered toast and a black coffee the size of my head, then slid on to the end of one of the long bench tables that slatted up and down the dining hall. Looking nervously around, I scanned the room for the guy I’d assaulted in the Refectory, but I couldn’t see him anywhere.
I hope he choked on his own vomit.
The thought arrived in my head fully formed, yet I found that I truly meant it in the very depths of my chest. In that split second of vindictive malice, I genuinely wanted him to be dead.
Shrugging the feeling off me like a coat, I forced a spoonful of yolk into my mouth, tried not to gag, and pulled out my phone. Still nothing from Noémie. I started typing a text to my older brother Max, who was a third year studying fashion at Central St Martin’s.
Hey, so when you started uni, did you ever feel like
But I didn’t know how to finish the message. How could I possibly articulate the things I was feeling? He always told me I was a ‘sulky mare’ (his words), but if he knew I’d almost stabbed someone . . . there was just no way he’d relate. Max had always been the life and soul of the party, the raucous karaoke and feather boas, the snazzy cocktails with tiny pink umbrellas. I was the one who felt like an alien half the time.
The idea of going back to the dorm after breakfast filled me with dread, but as it turned out, I was destined to run into Lottie that morning regardless.
When I entered the Sisters of Mercy library, I saw her sitting in one of the green velvet chairs by the theology section, reading a massive purple book. Her hair was pulled up in a messy blonde ponytail, and she wore a frankly horrifying fleece with a green and purple zigzag pattern.
As I walked past her to the spiral staircase, she glanced up at me, offered a tight smile, then looked pointedly back down at the page. For a moment I considered apologising, but her stiff body language told me it would be wasted breath. I gripped the handle of my briefcase even tighter, the ache in my hand still fresh and deep, and kept walking.
I headed up to the philosophy section, to check out one of the only books on Le Conte’s list that I hadn’t already read, only to find myself so utterly sapped of energy that I slumped down into the nearest armchair instead.
It was there, from that velvety perch, that I spotted the book that would change everything.
Bound in a woven emerald-green hardcover, the volume had an embossed gold title on its spine which read:Soul Purification Rituals in Nineteenth-Century Conventsby T.A. Renner.
Something about the words ‘soul purification’ gave me that academic flutter I’d spent the last few years of my life pursuing. Mysticism was very much in my research interests, and this sounded right up my alley. Plus, we wereina former convent that had been operational in the nineteenth century.
A quick scan of the introductory chapters outlined a purification ritual devised by a wrathful Sister Straughan in the mid-1800s to rid herself of violent thoughts and impulses. It soon became popular in nunneries across northern England and the Scottish Borders, but fell out of favour for unknown reasons around the turn of the century.
At first, I found it strange that the book was shelved in the philosophy section in the first place. Surely it was more at home under theology? Or perhaps history? But then again, the very notion of having a soul was fundamentally a philosophical one.
The next chapter, ‘How the Ritual Was Performed’, was any aspiring occultist’s dream come true. It was essentially a how-to guide complete with diagrams, equipment lists and detailed instructions.
For the most part, it was pretty standard fare. Grinding wild ingredients like pimpernel and heather and rosemary in a pestle and mortar. Pulverising a recently abandoned moth chrysalis, and then gently murdering a living moth in order to extract haemolymph from its arthropod. So far, so creepy.
And then it devolved into blood magic.
The final part of the ritual required the blood of a person they had wronged. This blood would be mixed with the pulped ingredients and then stirred into fresh elderflower cordial. One of these tinctures per moon cycle was said to eradicate wrath from the soul.
My heart beat a little faster.
I was no stranger to rituals. First there was my religion-questioning phase when I was twelve, during which I performed a series of elaborate chants intended to summon the Holy Spirit. Then there was my witchcraft phase, when I got heavily into moon manifestation rituals. I’d cleanse my space with sage smudge sticks, cleanse my body with a lavender salt bath, light candles and incense and pray to the moon herself.
In short, I’d always believed there was something more to the universe, something more than what we could see and hear and taste. There were mysterious energies and forces at play, invisible currents and complex webs, strings of light and dark that only a select few knew how to pluck and weave and snap. Maybe that’s why I didn’t immediately dismiss the moth-blood tincture as irrational folklore.
Maybe that’s why it lurked in the back of my mind for weeks before I finally acted on it.