The Paper Shield

Eleanor was on her knees in the hallway when Clara's heel came down on her wrist.

"Not in the corridor, Miss Hartwell," Clara said, her voice carrying that particular pitch of aristocratic boredom. "We have rules about throwing yourself at people's feet. It's rather uncouth."

"I was not throwing myself at anyone," Eleanor said, pulling her hand free. Her wrist was red and throbbing, but she would not admit pain. Not to Clara Ashford, not to anyone. "I was helping Agnes. She was standing in your way."

Clara looked down at Agnes, who had gone pale enough to match the lace at her collar. The two of them had been walking back from the chapel, clutching their prayer books like shields, and Clara—being exactly what her name suggested—had decided they needed to be stopped.

"You're always helping someone," Clara said. "It's a hobby, isn't it? Like stamp collecting. Except your stamps are all from the wrong side of the tracks."

Eleanor rose. She was a head shorter than Clara and perhaps ten pounds lighter, but something in her posture straightened, and for a moment she looked less like a scholarship girl and more like someone who had read too many adventure novels and believed them.

"If you have something to say, say it to my face, Clara. Not through Agnes."

The hallway had emptied by now. Only the faint echo of the chapel bell remained, still vibrating in the stone walls.

Clara smiled, and it did not reach her eyes. "See that you mean it, Miss Hartwell. The Latin competition is next week. I'd hate for you to be so busy playing guardian angel that you forget to study."

When Clara had gone, Agnes exhaled as though she had been underwater. "Thank you, Ellie. But she'll find another way. She always does."

"Let her try," Eleanor said, and though her hand was still shaking, she meant it.

She did not sleep that night. She lay in her narrow bed in the top dormitory, listening to the wind move through the London streets below—the coughing of carriages on wet cobblestones, the distant call of a night watchman—and thought about her father's last letter. The one that had arrived three weeks ago and had said, in careful, shameful handwriting, that the business was not yet recovered and that he would send the next term's fees as soon as he could. She had folded it and put it beneath her mattress and told no one, not even Agnes.

The next morning, she found the notice posted on the Academy's main board. The top twelve names for the Latin competition would be announced, and below them, in smaller print, a warning about examination integrity. Something about sealed papers and independent work. Eleanor read it once and put it down. She knew her Latin. She had taught herself as much as the Academy's tired instructors could give her, stealing hours in the library after curfew, reading Cicero by candlelight because the dormitory heater was unreliable in November.

"Ellie."

She turned. Caleb Ashworth stood at the end of the corridor, looking as though he had been waiting for a while and was trying very hard not to look like he had been waiting. He was from the boys' academy next door—the one with the higher walls and the newer library—and everyone knew him. He was seventeen and captain of the fencing team and apparently had the sort of face that made people write poetry about it.

"You saw the notice?" he asked.

"I saw it."

"Good. Because you should know—there have been reports."

"Reports of what?"

He hesitated. It was a strange thing for Caleb to do. He did not hesitate. Eleanor had noticed that about him during the two times they had accidentally crossed paths in the past month. The first time, he had held a door. The second time, he had asked her what she was reading and, when she told him it was Julius Caesar's Commentaries, had said something that might have been the most intelligent thing anyone had ever said to her in this building.

"Reports about the competition," he said carefully. "About irregularities."

Eleanor felt something cold move through her stomach. "I didn't do anything."

"I didn't say you did."

"But someone said something."

Caleb looked at her for a long moment. His eyes were a colour she could not quite name—not brown, not grey, but something that shifted depending on the light. "Someone always says something, Ellie. The question is who listens."

He moved to pass her, then stopped without turning around. "The library closes at nine. If you're going to stay after, take a candle. The one in your corner goes out too fast."

And then he was gone.

Eleanor stood in the corridor and felt, for the first time since she had arrived at St. Mary's, that someone on the other side of the wall knew what she was carrying.

The morning of the competition, the hall was full. Long tables arranged in a semicircle, each with a stack of sealed papers and a single oil lamp. The examiners sat at the front—three of them, including Headmistress Pembroke, who wore black and looked as though she had never smiled in her life.

Eleanor took her seat. She could see Clara two tables over, reviewing her notes with an expression of smug certainty. She could see Agnes in the front row, wringing her hands. She could see, through the tall windows behind the examiners, the grey light of a London morning that seemed determined to be as ungenerous as possible.

The papers were distributed. Eleanor unfolded hers. The first passage was Virgil. She could do Virgil. The second was Horace. She could do Horace. By the third question—a translation from Thucydides—she was breathing faster, and not from nervousness. This was the part she loved. The part where words from two thousand years ago arranged themselves into meaning in her hands, and for a moment, nothing in the world was as it seemed on the surface.

She was on the fifth question when the footsteps started.

Two examiners stood. Headmistress Pembroke approached the table where a girl from the third form was sitting—someone Eleanor barely knew, someone whose name she would learn only in the moment it mattered most. The girl's name was Beatrice Linley. And on her desk, carefully placed beneath the edge of her examination paper, was a folded slip of parchment with a single line written in Latin:

Amor vincit omnia.

Love conquers all.

It was not Eleanor's slip. It was not anyone's slip, really—it was a trap, and everyone in the room knew it except Beatrice herself, who had gone white as wax and was now looking at Headmistress Pembroke with an expression of pure animal terror.

But Pembroke's eyes were not on Beatrice. They were on Eleanor.

"Miss Hartwell," she said. "Please come with us."

Eleanor stood. She did not look at Clara. She did not look at Agnes. She looked at the paper in front of her—half-finished, three questions from Thucydides still untranslated—and then she looked at the door.

"Was I accused of cheating?" she asked. Her voice did not shake. She was surprised by this.

Headmistress Pembroke regarded her as though she were a specimen in a jar. "The slip was found at your desk during the examination. It bears your handwriting."

"It doesn't bear my handwriting," Eleanor said. "And it wasn't at my desk."

"The matter will be investigated," Pembroke said. "In the meantime, you will leave the hall."

Eleanor gathered her things. Her hands were steady. When she passed Caleb's table on the way out, he was watching her, and for the first time, she saw something in his face that might have been anger.

"Did you do it?" he asked, quietly.

"No," Eleanor said.

He nodded once. "I believe you."

The investigation took four days. In those four days, Eleanor did not eat properly. She did not sleep. She sat in her dormitory room and wrote letters to her father that she never sent, letters that explained everything and nothing and all of it at once.

On the fifth day, Caleb came to her door.

"I found it," he said.

"Found what?"

"The slip. The real one." He held up a small piece of parchment. "It was in Miss Linley's desk drawer. Not at anyone's desk. Not at yours. I had to wait until after the examiners had cleared the room to get close enough to check."

Eleanor stared at him. "Why would you do that?"

"Because someone planted it," Caleb said. "And because I wanted to know if I was wrong about someone."

"Who planted it?"

Caleb's expression darkened. "I think you already know."

Eleanor knew. She had known the moment she saw Headmistress Pembroke's eyes settle on her. It was always her. The scholarship girl. The one from the wrong side of the tracks. The one whose family name was already whispered in corridors when she wasn't there to hear it.

Clara. It had to be Clara. But proving it would mean saying the words aloud, and saying the words aloud meant admitting that the daughter of one of the Academy's most generous benefactors was a liar.

"I need to talk to Headmistress Pembroke," Eleanor said.

"I'll come with you," Caleb said.

"No," Eleanor said. "You can't. If you come with me, it looks like I can't handle it myself. And if I can't handle it myself, then everything Clara says about me is true."

She opened the door. She walked down the corridor. She knocked on the Headmistress's door.

When she emerged an hour later, the London sky was still grey, but it felt different—less like a ceiling and more like a space that might, eventually, open up.

"Mr. Ashworth's evidence was deemed credible," she told Agnes, who was waiting outside Pembroke's door with a basket of dry biscuits she had clearly baked the night before. "The matter is dropped. I can return to the competition."

Agnes threw her arms around her. Eleanor endured it, patting her friend's shoulder with one hand while with the other she touched the pocket of her dress, where a small folded slip of parchment lay.

Amor vincit omnia.

Caleb had slipped it into her pocket before she left Pembroke's office. He had said nothing. He had simply reached across the gap between their worlds—a gap wider than any wall—and placed something in her hand.

That evening, Eleanor walked to the edge of the Academy grounds and looked across at the boys' building. A light was on in one of the upper windows. She could not see who was in the room. She could not see anything except the square of warm yellow against the dark stone.

She stood there for a long time, thinking about what Caleb had said when he handed her the slip. He had leaned close—close enough that she could smell the leather of his fencing gloves—and whispered:

"They're sending me to India next term. If they'll have me. I told them I wanted to do something useful with my life instead of just managing my father's money. They agreed."

India. A continent away. A different world.

Eleanor went back to her room, sat at her desk, and opened her copy of Caesar's Commentaries. She read until the candle burned down to its last inch and the wax dripped onto the pages like tears she would not shed.

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Author Note & Copyright: