“Oh good,” said a girl named Adeline, who lived on the floor below me. “You got her.”
“Why am I here?” I asked. My elbow hurt where Cindy had been holding it, and I tried to rub away the pain while still looking cool, collected.
“Right, right, we’ll get to that.” Adeline raised her eyebrows at Cindy and surveyed the room. She asked me: “You know everyone?” Besides us and Cindy, there were three other girls from our year—Bernice, Leslie, and Louise—plus a first-year named Marion who would later transfer out. A senior named Olivia.
“I guess so,” I said.
“Perfect. Well, listen, we’ve all heard about you”—again, I was flattered and confused to hear it—“and we think you can help us with something we need to do. How is, uh, how are your grades going?”
“What?”
“You know,” Adeline said. “Are you doing ok in your classes?” She seemed uneasy, clocking my reactions, as if she was as scared as I was that I would say the wrong thing.
“Sort of. It’s fine.” I didn’t want to get into it. Cindy smirked, and I threw her a look from the corner of my eye—math was one of my better subjects, actually. Dispassionate, and a universal language. “Why, is this a study group? I like working…” I paused, considered my phrasing, not wanting to lie. “I prefer working on my own,” I said, which I did, because it cut down on the stress of conversation.
“Well, that’s really great for you and all, but not everyone feels that way.” Olivia, the senior girl, had her back pushed up against a bookcase, and she kept rocking into it, making it shudder. “Some of us aren’t doing so great, and some of us need to graduate on time.”
“Oh.” It wasn’t clear to me how I could help them. Olivia and Marion, in particular, weren’t even in my classes.
“Anyway.” Adeline stared at Olivia until she sat still; until everyone was perfectly still. “Anyway. Studying is fine, but sometimes it’s not enough. We want to do everything we possibly can to make sure finals go well this year. It’s important. For all of us.”
“Do something, like what?”
“Hmm,” said Adeline. “Have you ever heard of the Gray Governess?”
“No.”
“Well, she’s the ghost of the library, and she’s going to help us pass. And you’re going to help us talk to her.”
Excerpt from The Donne Schooclass="underline" History and Legacy, by R. B. Stinson
Though many consider the metaphysical poet and cleric John Donne (b. 1572, d. 1631) the institution’s primary spiritual forebear, the Donne School has long maintained a second connection to the mysterious and much-debated Lady Donne, also called the Gray Governess. A recluse and a scholar from the eighteenth century, the Governess lived in Devonshire, England, as heir to and proprietor of her ancestral castle The Goss, where she acted as ward to a group of orphaned young women from all over the county who called themselves the Gray Goslings. This group was viewed with some apprehension by the community; reported Gosling activity ranged from advanced hermetic scholarship to unsubstantiated, likely slanderous accounts of witchcraft and necromancy, though it is widely believed by serious historians that the girls spent most of their time cultivating the grounds around the castle in order to provide food to the local poor. After The Goss burned down in 1826, all firsthand records of the period were lost.
Although her mark on history is fainter than that of her literary namesake, it can be seen in her limited remaining writing that Lady Donne shared many of the poet’s philosophical concerns, including the mercurial essence of nature, flux and momentariness in all existence, and the transmigration of the human spirit into the physical world. Lady Donne, however, also believed in the transmigration of God’s spirit into man, and was notable for her insistence that the exercise of human will is a vital method of communication with the divine. In simpler terms, she believed that what we do is what God is, and that this fact endows humanity with a number of grave obligations, particularly when guiding young people toward productive lives.
At the Donne School, our primary responsibility is to the welfare and education of our students, and we believe Lady Donne provides them with a unique example of modern (if not quite contemporary) femininity. Robust in her challenge to the idea that young ladies must be seen and not heard, Lady Donne was heard, but not seen; she offered shelter and education to the unfortunate without seeking any personal visibility or reward, and was bold enough to insist on a causal link between base corporeal actions and the transcendence of the soul. Her work was, in a word, visionary, despite the limitations placed on her sex during her lifetime. Stonework rescued from the ruins of The Goss can be found throughout the Donne School campus, serving as a reminder of the Gray Governess’s commitment to education and as an extratemporal link between today’s Goslings and those of yesteryear. A chalice of earth from Devonshire, likewise, evokes the Governess’s spirit in the library.
Editor’s note: This page, torn out of a Donne School reference book, was found tucked into the Andropov diary. A thorough comb-through of the Donne School library, including the sub-basements, located the exact tome from which the page originated, including the shredded remnants where the page was removed, and a smudged fingerprint in the nearby margins.
Zoya
“Here’s the basic idea,” Cindy told me, stepping in for Adeline. She seemed nervous again, allowing herself one small nibble at her pretty thumbnail. “There’s supposed to be this library ghost? And if you ask her things, she can help you with your schoolwork? Because she believed in education?”
“Ok,” I said. “And?”
“And we want her to help us? According to the legend, you’re supposed to find this dirt, see. That’s the first thing. And then you get a sensitive person to be the ghost’s, um, mouth. Voice. And, um, we thought, you seemed pretty sensitive.”
I looked around the room, waiting for one of the girls to burst into laughter. But they were nodding, attentive. Leslie and Bernice held hands, and despite my fear of being made a fool of, I was intrigued. Back in Moscow I’d been raised by the state to believe in sensible ideas, focusing on practical knowledge and hard work instead of fairytales about life after death. God was forbidden in my childhood, and spook stories, too, those hair-raising articles of the capitalist imagination, designed to lull the overrun masses into a submissive stupor, while the revolution was designed, instead, to wake us up. But the pragmatism required by my Soviet education never quite took, with me. Maybe because my mother had been full of superstitions—sit on a cold stone and lose your childbearing abilities; go to sleep with wet hair and you’ll wake up with the walking flu; whistle below the full moon and you’re inviting something malign to tea—or maybe just because I didn’t feel that my physical senses were perfect enough to grasp everything the universe had to offer. And then, too, my parents died, which felt like something that might happen to somebody else, suggesting that I wasn’t living my own proper life. Anyway, beyond any ghostly concerns, I hadn’t been completely honest with Adeline when I said my grades were fine. They could’ve been better. They could always have been better.