Arm in arm, Felicity and Gemma talk about friends sharing secrets and Gemma asks if they would be friends if Gemma didn't have something to hold over her head.Pippa is hurt when Felicity chooses to walk with Gemma instead of her.The headmistress buys her story and off the girls go, but not without Pippa trying to get the details of the event-much to her surprise though, Felicity isn't dishing the dirt.Nightwing when she arrives, saying that she and Felicity took out the boat and that the girl fell out if it. Gemma helps Felicity out of the water, although she is furious and confused, and lies to Mrs.Suddenly, Kartik appears and convinces Ithal to leave.Ithal does not want to leave like a coward, but Gemma convinces him to go because Mrs.Smugly, Gemma tells her she'll help if Felicity owes her one, then she pushes the blonde in the lake.The Gypsy, Ithal, tells her he doesn't want to hide anymore-but Felicity calls him crazy and begs Gemma for help. Jumping out from behind the boathouse, she scares the wits out of Felicity, who is frightened to be found with a Gypsy boy alone.Her temper flares and she intends to get even with them, but then hears a male voice with Felicity's.Gemma wakes up and tries to figure out her dream when she hears the mean girls nearby-she creeps out of the boat and hides behind the boathouse.She follows her mother into the East Wing, which is beautiful again, and a little girl is there who says, 'They promised me my dolly' (10.16) and quickly she flashes to a wintery world where Kartik's brother, Amar, is running away and something tells her, 'So close…'.She dreams about chasing a deer that turns into her mother, who says, 'Find me if you can' (10.14), and then runs away, tearing a bit of her blue dress.Wandering through the woods and to a lake, Gemma cries as she thinks about wanting to see her mother, then falls asleep in a boat floating by the shore.In the same diary entry, Gemma learns about something called a door of light and a garden, which she wonders about since she hasn't seen them then she wonders about Kartik and if she can trust him.She is not amused by the diary entries so far… yawn… but then, as she reads on, she discovers that Mary and her friend Sarah both had visions.Outside, the Spence girls are catching some rays and Gemma goes for a walk to open the diary again.To make things worse, she's been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one. It's 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. It is told from the perspective of Gemma Doyle, a girl in the late 1800s.

A Great and Terrible Beauty is the first novel in the Gemma Doyle Trilogy by Libba Bray.

A great terrible beauty