What surprised me most about pulling my soul back from the brink of darkness was how much I came to miss teetering. Because on the edge of that darkness, my anger had no longer roiled around inside me, unspent. It was given free rein. It had been let loose, and bridling it again proved harder than ever.
As life returned to normal – as normal as it could, on a college campus plagued by arrests and murder convictions – my fuse shrank back to an inch long. I once again snapped at the people I loved, wished ill on bad drivers, physically prickled with irritation over minor inconveniences. Even with Lottie I lost my temper, stormed out on arguments, said things I didn’t mean in the heat of the moment. Afterwards I’d be filled with that familiar self-loathing that had plagued me since the day Chris threw me to the ground in his parents’ living room.
Eventually I realised that my anger would never leave me unless I gave it somewhere to go. It was a fundamental part of me, and I had to honour it – to exist alongside it.
Because contrary to everything Dacre had argued about female anger, there was nothing in the world as natural. As far back as my ancestral tree could branch, there were women who had been overpowered by men, underestimated by men, controlled by men, dominated by men, all the way back to the very roots of humanity. That anger had woven itself into the fabric of our beings. And instead of giving it room to breathe, we let it fester like black mould, destroying us from the inside out.
And the few women who fight back, who embrace that anger, that violence, that raw power . . . they’re burned as witches, exorcised in front of jeering mobs, labelled hysterical and committed to sanatoriums, bound and gagged and poked and prodded and electrocuted and studied as lab rats, shunned by friends and family and teachers and students and colleagues and peers, treated as something crude and ill-disciplined.
So the choice becomes this: let anger fester like black mould destroying you from the inside out, or let it free and let the world destroy you instead.
As Sister Maria had over a century ago, I began to wonder whether there was another way. Not an electrocution rod or a sinister soul purification ritual, but a means of embracing the anger without letting it overpower us. Of refusing toletourselves be overpowered; of luxuriating in the thrill of the fight the way men do.
I thought again of my brothers grappling on the living-room floor, wolfing down their dinners and falling into easy sleep, and I wondered how different my life would have been if I had done the same. How could we break these generational cycles? How could we stop what happened to Sister Maria – and to our grandmothers, and our mothers, and to the smart, brilliant women like Mordue and the original Society members – from happening to us? How could we reject the internalised shame that was passed down to angry women throughout history? How could we own it instead?
We had to break the cycle.
For all Dacre’s flaws, he had shared one powerful thing with me that stuck: ‘Anger left to run free is like wildfire, indiscriminate in its destruction. But if you learn to tame it, to position it, to take aim with it? Then it becomes a candle. And what is the candle but one of man’s greatest assets? It warms. It nourishes. It shines a light in the darkest of places, and it illuminates the path forward.’
Which was how Lottie and I found ourselves back in the clubhouse several weeks later, crash mats laid out on the smooth stone slabs, armed with padded head guards and mouth shields and taped-up knuckles. The long mahogany table had been taken to the Grandstand bar, where it had been thoroughly rehabilitated as a beer pong table.
Both the forest-green plaque and Sister Maria’s unsettling self-portrait still stared down at us; reminders of why we were here.
A female boxing trainer we’d recruited from Edinburgh was hanging a large punchbag from a newly installed hook on the vaulted ceiling beams. The moth cocoons were long gone. The air still smelled of rosemary and clove, but also of gym halls and fusty boxing gloves.
Attendance to the first Soulless Girls’ Fight Club was better than expected. There was Hafsah and her hallmate Alicia, a handful of girls from Lottie’s hockey team, a young barmaid from the Grandstand, as well as Mordue and Feathering. Everyone was taped up, guarded up, and ready to learn how to fight. Ready to learn how tolovethe fight.
The anticipation in the air was palpable.
Public speaking and rallying battle cries weren’t really my scene, so even though the Soulless Girls’ Fight Club had been my idea, it was Lottie who stood at the centre of the room addressing the girls she’d soon be learning to beat up.
Her voice was strong and clear; every inch the hockey captain. ‘Welcome to the new and improved Society for Soulless Girls.’ Mordue smiled reassuringly at her. ‘As some of you may know, I recently sold the story of the Carvell murders to a major newspaper for a significant amount of money.’ There were whoops and hollers and wolf whistles, mainly from the hockey girls, but I couldn’t resist a little air punch myself. ‘Thank you to everyone who worked with me on that piece, who gave interviews and insights, who helped claw back our power in some small but vital way. We have channelled our anger into something good, something that will help to build a better world, and I want that to continue. Which is why we are pouring the money we earned straight back into the Society.
‘As well as these training sessions, we’ve also hired Dr Al-Hadi, Hafsah’s mum, to provide counselling to all members of the Society.’ Hafsah beamed proudly; it had been her idea. ‘A healthy space for us to work through our anger and our pain, and to learn how not to let it destroy us.’
Lottie shot me a wide, beaming smile; sunshine-yellow fields and chin dimples so deep you could stick a penny in them.
Writing the piece with her had been hard. Not just because it meant reliving it all over and over again until we got it right, but also because it illuminated the holes in our story that we’d probably never be able to fill. I would never know whether or not I had killed Salem, only for her to resurrect herself days later. I would never know how the ritual was possible in the first place. I would never know why the clocks in Mordue’s office ticked backwards, or whether the stained-glass windows in the Refectory changed shape, or whether Lottie’s creepy professor really could conjure golden threads between the Gothic and reality. Call it the Carvell curse; call it madness. All I knew is that those dark spots would haunt me for the rest of my life.
Lottie turned back to the enraptured faces around her.
‘One of my favourite quotes inCrime and Punishmentis this: “Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up.”’ As she looked around, I could feel the coiled energy in her, the palpable fizzing. The anger in me felt different, somehow; a leaping excitement rather than a fearful snarl.
Lottie bashed the boxing gloves together with a final, rousing grin.
‘Let’s stoop, bitches.’