Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt Read Free Book Online Page A

time.”
    â€œOh.” It wasn’t clear to me how I could help them. Olivia and Marion, in particular, weren’t even in my classes.
    â€œAnyway.” 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.”
    â€œDo something, like what?”
    â€œHmm,” said Adeline. “Have you ever heard of the Gray Governess?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWell, 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 School: 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, shebelieved 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
    11.
    â€œHere’s the basic idea,” Cindy told me,