The headmaster, p.15
The Headmaster,
p.15
“I prayed God would bring the school back, and the boys, and Headmaster Yorke. And they would be together. These boys…this school was their Heaven. And I prayed they would have a teacher come take my place who would not make the mistakes I made, not be the fool I was. And she would love and cherish the boys and Headmaster Yorke. That is what I have prayed for.”
“I’m sure they’re all in Heaven,” Ryan said and touched his grandmother’s arm.
“But I won’t be,” the old woman said. “I’ll go to Hell for what I’ve done. I will burn as they burned. Except my burning will never end.”
Gwen inhaled deeply and smelled the smoke again. It came not from the burned rubble of the buildings or the scorched grass, or even from the past. It came from the old woman, from Miss Muir.
“Forgive me, Edwin,” the old woman said. “Forgive me.”
“I forgive you,” Edwin said. But the old woman didn’t hear him. “We all forgive you.”
“Take me home,” the old woman said to her grandson. “I was wrong to come here. I don’t belong here. I never did.”
Ryan took his grandmother by the arm and tried to lead her away. Gwen took a step, intending to follow her.
“Gwendolyn, you can leave,” Edwin called out. She turned and faced him. “You can leave, but if you do leave, there’s no coming back.”
“And if I stay?” she asked.
“Then you will stay here always. Just as we have, just as we are.”
Last night she had lain next to him in his bed and asked him to promise her that nothing would ever change, that it would always be this wonderful, this passionate, this good. A foolish romantic question, the sort of question everyone asks when they first fall in love. The answer should have been no. Of course it wouldn’t always be like this. They would grow older, grow wiser, grow more comfortable with each other. The passion would wax and wane. And then someday it would end. It would all end, because no one lives forever.
But Edwin was already dead. He’d been dead for decades.
“It’s so strange,” the old woman whispered. Gwen turned back to her. “I had such a vivid dream last night. I dreamed that I came back here and the school was still here and it looked like it did fifty years ago. The boys were all here—Christopher and Laird, Jefferson, Samuel, Eliot…all my sweet young gentlemen. And Headmaster Yorke was here. And a lady. They’d decorated the whole school in white for a wedding. I thought it was my wedding. But it wasn’t. I wasn’t even a guest at the wedding. They didn’t want me here…”
“We’ll go now, Grandma. You have to eat, take your medicine.” Ryan tried to coax her toward the exit.
“They rebuilt the school, Ryan. But it wasn’t my Marshal. Five miles from here is the new school. The Marshal School they call it. It’s not the same, though. It’s not the same at all….”
The old woman and her grandson walked back through the arch. Gwen touched her face and found it wet with tears. She looked back and saw the crosses were gone now, all those graves. But the boys were still in a line, Edwin in their midst.
“There was no way to tell you,” Edwin said. “Forgive me.”
She raised her hand to stop his words.
It all made sense now. The waitress at the diner…it was The Marshal School, the new school, that was hiring teachers, not the Marshal Academy. And then the waitress had given the old man extra napkins…she knew he would cry like Christopher’s grandfather had when he visited. No. The elderly man walking with Christopher—it hadn’t been his grandfather. It had been his father come to mourn the fiftieth anniversary of the school burning to the ground, the anniversary of the day he’d killed his son by trying to save him from his sins. No computers. No cell phones. The shock over Edwin’s divorce. Christopher and Laird being terrified of discovery. Christopher said banks weren’t open on Saturdays. They were now, but not in 1964. And of course…
The scent of smoke.
Now that the old woman had gone, the scent of smoke disappeared from Gwen's nostrils, and all she could smell was the dewy grass beneath her feet, the warm and living forest. Life. She smelled life. Even though all her boys…
“My sweet boys,” she said and looked at their faces, eternally frozen in youth. Somehow Miss Muir’s prayer had been answered. The school lived. The boys lived. The headmaster lived. “My angels…”
All of them dead fifty years, and yet here they were and here they would stay. Miss Muir’s wish had been granted—the school had risen from the ashes, the boys from their graves. Here was the school, the boys, the headmaster…and Miss Muir couldn’t even see it and never would. Her prayer was answered and she would never know it. Their Heaven was her Hell.
But what about Gwen?
She looked past the old woman who’d once been Miss Muir and saw her car again. The wreckage of her car. The battered, fiery wreckage…
“Gwendolyn?” She heard the voice calling her name. Not Edwin’s voice. Not the boys’. She’d never heard the voice before. Her eyelids fluttered. She blinked and blinked again. A white light flashed. She closed her eyes tight and opened them again. She lay in a hospital bed, and above her stood a man in a doctor’s scrubs and coat. “Gwendolyn Ashby. Can you hear me? You’re in the hospital. You were in a car accident, and you’ve been unconscious. Nod if you understand.”
Gwen closed her eyes again and when she opened them she was back at Marshal, back with Edwin.
“Edwin?” she said, her voice trembling with fear and confusion.
“You can go back if you wish,” Edwin said to Gwen. “Or you can stay and…”
He didn’t have to finish his sentence. If she stayed it would be like he promised—always like this. The days would blur into each other in a haze of books and laughter and learning. The nights would be always like last night. Heated, ardent, hungry. Every night like the first night. New love forever.
The old world was there, waiting for her. She could wake up and rejoin it. But if she left she could not return. If she stayed she would never leave. The door that had let her in would close, and she would never leave again. Somehow she knew she would forget this morning and Miss Muir’s visit like one forgot a dream upon waking. The boys would forget. Edwin would forget. This would be her life forever and her life would be…
“Perfect,” she whispered.
She walked up to Edwin. Thirty pairs of eyes watched her.
“Boys,” she said. “Don’t look.”
The boys covered their eyes with both hands.
She put her hand on the back of Edwin’s neck and pulled his mouth down to hers for a long hard kiss.
Thirty boys ohhh-ed and wolf-whistled before bursting into embarrassed teenage laughter. Behind them the bell broke through the morning fog and sounded the first period five-minute warning.
“Boys,” Edwin said sternly as he stood back up from the kiss. “Class. Now.”
The boys, all of them wearing watchful smiles, didn’t move a muscle.
Silly boys. Didn’t they know she was teaching them A Midsummer Night’s Dream in class today? Surely they were eager for that discussion.
She gave Edwin one more kiss, and headed toward Hawkwood Hall.
“You heard the headmaster,” Gwen said, and clapped her hands once to get their attention. “Get to class.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind she heard the sound of a heart rate monitor beeping a flat line.
Gwen ignored it and went back to work.
* * * * *
ISBN-13: 9780369736079
The Headmaster
First published in 2014. This edition published in 2022.
Copyright © 2014 by Tiffany Reisz
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises ULC. 22 Adelaide St. West, 40th Floor Toronto, ON M5H 4E3 Canada.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
www.Harlequin.com
Tiffany Reisz, The Headmaster
