American Girls, English Land

Chapter One

Miss Edwards walked down the hall with excitement and giddy.

The older woman was usually stiff walking down the hallways of the school, as to not give off the appearance of warmth and weakness. But today, she had a cool grin on her face as this was the last day of school.

Miss Edwards was usually happy at the end of the school year. She'd like to enjoy her summers by spending time in her cottage that was a mile away from the school.

She'd spend the summer drinking lemonade and cultivating her garden. She would sometimes have small garden parties during the day and read a good book at night. She also loved to sew and write letters to her past favorite students.

Then when school started again in September, she was well-rested and able to work tirelessly until the winter.

However this year, she was not only excited for her long awaited break, but also because four pains in her side: Nora, Amelia, Francesca, and Helen, were leaving.

Nora, Amelia, Francesca, and Helen were not pains in the usual way.

They were fairly well-behaved young women who rarely ever got lashes or punishments of any kind. The young women were also extremely bright and diligent with their studies, sometimes more than any girl at this school.

These girls, except for Helen, were top of their class in more masculine studies, like chemistry, botany, and astronomy. However, they were also top tier in the more traditional studies, such as languages, spelling, reading, arithmetic, trigonometry, history, and geography.

No they were not those types of pains, they were social pains.

See, the only problem with these girls was the age of their money, all four girls came from new money families.

When their parents, who she assumed were friends or acquaintances of some sort, first tried to enroll their girls, Miss Edwards said no.

Miss Edwards was not as wealthy as the girls she taught, nor was she socially higher than they were, but Miss Edwards knew a little about class and hierarchy.

Her father was a lawyer, an educator at many boys schools, and professor at Columbia College. He was a member of old New York, and he married the daughter of a prominent judge from an old money family.

Mr and Mrs. Edwards decided to start the Edwards School for Girls in 1812. This school would be for only the aristocratic upper class girls.

Through their 40 years running the school and Miss. Edwards' 21 years of running the school, they stuck to their ideals that only the most respectable girls went to this school.

That was until the families came back with a whopping $230,000, and Miss Edwards had no choice but to take it.

Had Miss Edwards not gone into debt and lived off donations to the school, she would not have been swayed. Had the old money families' wealth not been dwindling, maybe she would not need the money. But this was not the way and she could not change it.

So she let the girls into the school, a choice that had mixed reviews.

Some of the family withdrew their aristocratic daughters from the school, saying that the school had gone down in quality. Other families, the new families, want to "donate" as well to get their daughters in. Then, the families who had connections to the school, allowed their daughters to stay at the school, though they were reluctant.

Miss Edwards walked down the dark hall into the dining hall.

The dining hall looked like an old church including the large stained glass windows. The eight windows in particular, portrayed the birth of Jesus. The walls were made of dark brown wood, with diamond shapes carved into them. The dark brown wooden floor was old and squeaky, that would be redone with money from the families. The room was candle lit, although most of the light came from stained windows. There were 20 round, wooden tables that could sit eight people at a time.