A Watch of Nightingales

Chapter Two

TWO Her name was Mara Robinson then, and she was eighteen and standing on the platform at Gobowen Station, in the freezing January rain. She had not gone into the waiting room because her bags, seven months’ worth of clothes and books, were too heavy to budge. She had been moving most of them, two steps at a time it seemed, for the past thirty-six hours, from Pittsburgh to Washington , D.C., where the plane was delayed for ten hours because of snow, to Heathrow Airport, to Euston Station in London, to Wolverhampton , to this outpost, near Oswestry, Shropshire, on the border of Wales. It was ‹ve o’clock in the afternoon, but almost full dark this far north in the dead of winter. Another man had got off the train at Gobowen , but he was long gone. There was no porter or stationmaster. This is a dream I’m having, Mara thought, and when I wake up I’ll be in Pittsburgh and in my bed and I won’t have gone anywhere. She closed her eyes and opened them again. There was a certain pleasure in this, the surprise of it, in the emptiness and expanse of the railway platform and the view Mara had of the train tracks glistening away into the falling dark. It was the stillness she loved, being still, being here, ‹nally. The last few months had been like one long earthquake. The ground rattled continuously under her feet, starting early in October, when she decided she couldn’t stand another minute of high school. She wasn’t quite sure what happened, but she woke up one morning feeling suddenly older, dangerously bored. She talked back in class and wept in the principal’s of‹ce, and sneered at everyone who told her she was ruining her chances of getting into a good college. She asked her voice teacher for harder pieces. No more silly lieder. A bluebell from the earth . . . in a green summer meadow. Ridiculous, nothing to do with real life. So this teacher, who she knew was a little afraid of her, obliged and found pieces that were new or hardly ever performed. Beginner’s opera, 35 ÷ choral symphonies, the tortures of Holst and Berlioz, Stephen Sondheim ’s A Little Night Music. She applied early to the Berklee School of Music, then skipped classes and spent her days at Jimmy Carter’s campaign headquarters in Pittsburgh with a few younger teachers from school, drinking champagne, a lot of champagne, for the ‹rst time, when he was elected president. In mid-November, a particularly discerning counselor found out that the English Speaking Union offered half-year scholarships to attend boarding school in the UK. The selection process, he heard, was much less rigorous, and it was quick. Mara read that Stephen Sondheim had gone to live in London, and took it as a sign. Then two weeks before Christmas, the acceptance from Berklee arrived, and an hour later, the telephone rang, and Mara found herself listening to the head of the ESU scholarship committee in New York, who spoke as if he was doing the last of his shopping in the middle of Bloomingdale’s. She was in, accepted at a girls’ school in Salop , he said, the modern name for Shropshire, a ‹ne school, very international ›avor, an excellent arts and music program. Congratulations, Miss Robinson, the term begins in three weeks. They’ll be expecting you. Well, apparently not. Mara swallowed again, carefully, hoping that her throat wouldn’t hurt so much, that the cold she’d felt coming on since the night before would have become something else, something less. She coughed until her eyes watered, the smooth but sinister cough her mother called the croup, like the barking of a dog. At the sound, a man she had not seen before turned from the shadows, toward her, so that the light caught his face, illuminating it like the moon. He moved closer. Mara could see a kind of confusion in his eyes, as if he were looking for her, but looking past her at the same time. “Can I help you?” he said. “Are you from Vernal Hall? I’m Mara Robinson.” Mara extended her hand, but the man did not take it, or even look down. Instead he laughed, throwing back his head. His throat, Mara saw, was nicked and cut in several places, from shaving badly, or with a razor that was dull. “They don...