A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

Godwin House belongs to us, to the literary effete of Dalloway, self-presumed natural heirs to Emily Dickinson—who had stayed here once while visiting a friend in Woodstock—and we like our house as is. Including its gnarled skeleton.

pretend not to remember the spot where I’d pried the baseboard loose from the wall last year and concealed my version of contraband: tarot cards, long taper candles, herbs hidden in empty mint tins. I used to arrange them atop my dresser in a neat row the way another girl might arrange her makeup.

By the middle of my first attempt at a senior year, I’d accrued such a collection of books in my Godwin room that they were spilling off my shelves, the overflow stacked up on my floor and the corner of my dresser, littering the foot of my bed to get shoved out of the way in my sleep.

Dr. Ortega had explained it to me before I left, her voice placid and reassuring: how grief would tie itself to the small things, that I’d be living my life as normal and then a bit of music or the cut of a girl’s smile would remind me of her and it would all flood back in.

Except that’s weakness, and I refuse to be weak.

All that has been swallowed up by the passage of time. My friends graduated last year. When classes start, Godwin will be home to a brand-new crop of students: third- and fourth-years with bright eyes and souls they sold to literature. Girls who might prefer Oates to Shelley, Alcott to Allende. Girls who know nothing of blood and smoke, the darker kinds of magic.

I am rooted at Dalloway. Dalloway is mine.

Once upon a time I found it so easy to forget the stories about Godwin House and the five Dalloway witches who lived here three hundred years ago, their blood in our dirt, their bones hanging from our trees. If this place is haunted, it’s haunted by the legacy of murder and magic—not

And if ghosts and magic aren’t real, curses aren’t real, either.

And my future: the Devil.

Meanings: oppression, addiction, obsession, dependency, excess, powerlessness, limitations

Tarot only means as much as your interpretation tells you about yourself.

“More likely the Dalloway Five were just girls who were too bold for their time, and they were killed for it.

Before last year, I had planned to write my thesis on the intersection of witchcraft and misogyny in literature.

Ex scientia ultio. From knowledge comes vengeance.

“I want to explore the gradations of human morality: how indifference can slide into evil, what drives a person toward murder. And I want to interrogate the concept of the psychopath: whether villainy exists in that truest form or if it’s simply a manifestation of some human drive that lurks in all of us.”

“Dalloway School: founded to teach the arcane arts to young witches under the guise of an expensive finishing school. Dalloway’s first headmistress: daughter of a witch. And of course the Dalloway Five, who murdered one of their own in a satanic ritual. Reality only aspires to such perversity.”

Just girls. Just clever, bright young women. Too clever and bright for their time. And they were killed for it.

And then there’s us: the literati, the bookish intelligentsia with an affinity for horn-rimmed glasses and pages that smell like dust.

I am tired of being a good girl. I’m tired of obeying.

“How can you understand a character’s mind without sharing their experiences?”

How could I explain the way my past feels as if it’s intertwined with theirs? The dark magic that bites at my heels no matter how fast I run?

The question isn’t whether magic is real. It’s whether I can touch it without being consumed by it.

Alex used to say I cared more about the aesthetic of autumn than about comfort.

And I imagined their magic stitched like a thread across time, passed from mother to daughter, a glittering link from the founder to Margery Lemont to me.

But bitch felt like a harsh word to apply to a girl who was fighting so hard to make space for herself in a world that didn’t want her. Alex was many things. She contained multitudes. And to say she was a bitch sometimes was to erase everything else she was: brave, stubborn, passionate, affectionate, a girl who would destroy empires to save someone she loved.

“Real magic is something different. Real magic has risks.”

I need to be able to touch the dark without being consumed by it.

Every spell is a pomegranate seed on your tongue, binding you to the underworld.

“Mostly how depictions of mental illness are used to build suspense by introducing uncertainty and a sense of mistrust, especially with regard to the narrator’s perception of events, and the conflation of magic and madness in female characters.”

Literally what this book is doing

I also know what it is to have a secret you’ve held close to your chest for so long it starts to poison you—to fear that if you show it to anyone else, it might poison them, too.

“They’re all bluster. They make it seem like the coven is the only path to success after Dalloway, but that’s just propaganda.” “It’s not entirely propaganda. Margery girls always succeed.” “Because they’re rich, not because they’re Margery. They’re rich and they’re white.” My teeth catch my lower lip. There’s a bladed quality to Leonie’s voice; I’ve never seen her like this. “Why did you join then?” I ask. Leonie shrugs. “Why does anyone join? And I liked it, at first. They liked me, too. Only then last year I mentioned that one of their little bits of historical legend was technically inaccurate, and all of a sudden they started treating me differently.

She had just been a too-clever girl living in a time when being clever made you dangerous. And she’d paid for that with her life.

That magic doesn’t have to be magic for it to mean something. That sometimes magic is a salve over a burn, and it’s the only way you can heal.