by Shana Abe
As if the war did not exist. As if rationing did not exist; as if hungry children stuck in foundling homes did not exist.
I might have remained as I was for hours, stunned and starving, but Miss Swanston took the tongs for the strawberries, which were nearest, and placed a few on my plate.
“How are things, Eleanore?”
I woke up fast. In my experience, when adults asked this question, it never led anywhere pleasant.
“Very fine, ma’am.”
“Good. I’m pleased to hear it.” She moved on to the roast beef, nodding to the footman behind the table for a slice. “I imagine it’s been something of a transition for you. Coming all the way out here from the city, I mean.”
“Yes,” I agreed, straight-faced.
“But, I must say, I think you’ve adapted nicely. You seem a resilient girl.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“You’re quiet but smart. Modest, I suspect. Watchful.” She sent me that sideways look again. “Watchful is good. Learning by observation is a most useful skill, especially for someone in your position.”
I had nothing to say to that, so only took up the cheese tongs.
“I lived in London for a few years after my own schooling. Islington. Do you know it?”
“No.”
“No, perhaps not.” She smiled, but it seemed wistful. “London is a colossal place, after all. A splendid, stinking jewel of humanity. I read that somewhere, and I don’t believe I’ve ever come across a description more apt.”
We had reached the end of the table, and my plate was full. I looked around for a space to sit, but the duke’s truly inspired décor apparently didn’t include tables and chairs. We strolled toward the only vacant spot left on the patio, leaning together against the marble railing. One of the Chinese lanterns hung directly above us; it colored us and all the food candy-red.
“Why did you leave, ma’am?”
“Ah.” Miss Swanston was rolling a cube of cheddar around on her plate with her fork. “Well, my parents died one winter, both of them. And the house had to be sold.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes. I am, as well.” She abandoned the cheddar. “As I said before, Eleanore, I know you’re smart. I also have a reasonably clear understanding of how very … difficult your life has been up until now. Please don’t look so distressed. Mrs. Westcliffe shared your records with me under circumstances of strictest confidentiality. Your past is your own, and, as far as I’m concerned, no one’s business but your own.”
The roll I’d just bitten into had gone dry as sand in my mouth.
“Yet I find I cannot help but offer you some unsolicited advice. Stay focused on your studies. Iverson will open doors for you that you might never have conceived. Your future could be as happy as your past was not. Don’t allow yourself to waste that chance. Don’t succumb to any … distractions.”
I could only imagine my expression. Miss Swanston lowered her candy-red lashes and glanced back at Armand.
“Oh,” I said, swallowing. “No. Definitely not.”
“Forgive me. He seems quite taken with you.”
The bite of roll lodged in my throat; I coughed. “He isn’t, I assure you.”
“Eleanore, it grieves me to correct you, but he is staring at you even now. He hasn’t been able to tear his eyes from you since we arrived.”
I couldn’t tell her the truth. I couldn’t say anything like, Armand doesn’t count. Armand’s not even in the game. I’m in love with a boy made of stars, and we’re going to live together ever after on gold and smoke and moonlight, and that’s my happy future, no matter what any of you think.
I scowled down at my plate. “He’s simply …”
“Yes?” she prompted, very mild.
I searched for the right word. “I don’t know what he is,” I admitted finally, frustrated. “Bored, I suppose.”
“Yes,” she said again, just as mild. “I’m glad you’ve realized it, too.”
“But I’m not dense. He’s nobility. I know—I know what I am. I know what to avoid.”
“Good,” Miss Swanston said once more, and gave me her wistful smile.
• • •
Eventually, I ate my fill. Eventually, Miss Swanston became convinced that I wasn’t about to go fling myself at Lord Armand and left me at the railing, saying that no doubt the headmistress would be missing her.
Twenty wily girls roaming free in the night and three unguarded tables of French champagne. I suspected Mrs. Westcliffe was rather outmatched.
The receiving line had dissolved, and the duke and his son were nowhere in view. Adults of all sizes and shapes stood elbow-to-elbow around me, admiring the gardens and one another. Chloe and her group were making their way through the food tables; Sophia and hers loitered at the foot of the stairs below me. So I left my plate with a maid and slipped back inside Tranquility.
I’d return for the champagne later.
It was easier to breathe away from the crowded courtyard. As I entered the ballroom, the music from the orchestra dimmed from strident to agreeable, and the peculiar aroma of banquet mixed with ladies’ perfume gradually faded in my wake. But the ballroom was as empty as the gardens were full; obviously the guests were supposed to remain out there. The only other people in the chamber besides me were a pair of footmen stationed by the main doors, perhaps to ensure no one got inside.
The best way to publicly succeed at anything forbidden is to seem as if you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Especially if you don’t. Don’t stop, don’t hesitate, and don’t look back. I glided past the footmen into the main hallway with my chin up and my expression bored, an air I’d seen nearly every girl at the school assume whenever someone of a lower station was near.
Of course you must let me pass; clearly I’m a lady; I belong in satin and mansions and I know where I’m going and I definitely, definitely, won’t be filching the silverware.
Like the ballroom, the hallway seemed deserted. It stretched long and mysterious in either direction, far darker than the rest of the house; all the electric lights had been set to low. When I passed directly beneath one of their dangling glass domes, a humming drone swarmed through my head so nastily that, after that, I sidled around them.
A runner of blue and mottled olive, rich and plush, absorbed my steps. Paintings, huge and framed in filigreed wood. Discarded scaffolding, bare frames of lumber and metal holding up nothing but air. Splintery pinewood crates, most unopened but a few showing their stuffings of straw and what might have been antique firearms.
And—voices behind me. Adult voices, male, subdued, discussing something about Americans and naval blockades.
I had my hand at once on the knob of the nearest door. By the time the duke and his companion passed by, I was well hidden in the shadows of what looked to be a study—a very masculine study, with panels of mahogany and massive leather furniture and a portrait above the fireplace of Himself with a family, so it was pure blind luck that they didn’t follow me in.
But they walked on down the hallway.
I released the breath I’d been holding, suddenly fatigued, the itch inside me beginning another crawl along my nerves. I wandered over to one of the chairs and tested it for softness. It was far more comfortable than it appeared, a reading chair, clearly, with a newspaper neatly ironed and folded atop the stand by its arm.
A London paper. Yesterday’s date.
HUN DIRIGIBLES FLYING FARTHER INLAND, warned the headline. I touched my fingers to it, spinning it about to scan the rest.
Germany’s cowardly use of naval airships upon the civilian population is expanding. Bloated and slow, the zeppelins cruise far above any altitude ground artillery may reach, and often even above the firing altitude of our valiant boys in the sky.
The Minister of War has recommended that all eastern and southern coastal towns implement immediately our own very effective nighttime blackout rules.…
Well. Perchance His Grace ha
dn’t read this particular article yet.
I sat back in the chair and crossed my feet at the ankles. Then I glanced up at the portrait.
Definitely the duke in his younger days, and a fair-haired, gray-eyed woman who must have been his duchess. They were both gazing straight at me—at the artist who had painted them—Reginald with a trace of a confident smile, but the woman with a delicate, pensive sort of gravity, as if she felt that smiling wouldn’t be appropriate. He was standing, but she was seated on what looked to be a garden bench, her hands resting on the shoulders of not one boy but two: the first a toddler with an unmistakable blue stare; the second an older child, probably around five, and fair like his mother.
She didn’t really resemble me the least bit. I couldn’t imagine what the duke had been going on about.
I studied it through half-lidded eyes, picking out the details, how roses bloomed pink and cream in the foreground. How the clouds above their heads looked stormy, and the wedge of sea in the far back was more of a suggestion of color and shape than anything literal.
Toddler Armand held something in his hand. A key, it looked like …
I’d stay for just a moment. I’d close my eyes for only one minute. Then I’d return to the party.
• • •
He found her in the study. He hadn’t even known he’d been searching for her until he opened the door and there she was, relaxed in one of the chairs, her head tipped back and her hands in her lap, very much asleep.
The bracket clock on Reginald’s desk ticked away the seconds, six, seven, eight, as Armand remained at the doorway, taking her in. Then he stole inside his father’s sanctum, closing the door carefully behind him. Making as little noise as possible, he settled into the chair closest to Eleanore’s.
What was it about her, he wondered, that made her so impossible to ignore? Little orphan girl, proud skinny waif, with secrets and music inside her that filled him with a crazed combination of exhilaration and fear. Like morphine pumping through him, but sharper than that. Not muddy. She’d made it as clear as could be that she didn’t even like him, but still Mandy found himself thinking of her and fantasizing about her so often it was stupid. He was stupid.
Yet here he was yet again. Because she was here and, for whatever the hell reason, he couldn’t stop wanting to be near her.
Her eyes opened. She registered his presence without an ounce of surprise.
“It’s not your birthday, is it?” she said, straightening. “It’s his.”
Neither of them glanced up at the portrait. Certainly Mandy didn’t need to look at it; he’d memorized it years ago.
“Aubrey Emerson Hugo, the Most Honourable Marquess of Sherborne. He’s a glorious twenty-one years old today, wherever he is.”
“No one told me you had a brother.”
“Didn’t they?” he said lightly. “I’m flabbergasted. It seems to me I can hardly go anywhere without people singing his praises.”
“Is he dead?” she asked, with that open candor no one else ever offered him.
“I hope not,” Mandy replied. “Because I don’t want to be a sodding duke.”
She nodded at that, unoffended. Another rare quality. Nothing he seemed to say or do ever amazed her.
“He’s a pilot,” he heard himself explaining. “Royal Flying Corps. Somehow even Reginald’s bluster couldn’t keep him from enlisting, although God knows Reggie tried. He bribed everyone he could think of to keep his golden boy here at home, but in the end, Aubrey just left. Just got up and went. And since he was of age, there was nothing Reggie could do about it.”
“You’re almost of age,” Eleanore said quietly, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees.
“Yes.” He smiled at her and wondered how it looked, if it was as bitter and twisted as he felt inside. “But Reginald learned his lesson, you see. He learned that when bluster and money don’t work, class does. Associations do. Family links. Insinuations. I went to the recruiting station at Eton with Laurence. I did everything he did, exactly the same. And now Laurence is part of the University and Public Schools Brigade, and I’m stuck here. I was told, officially, that as I’m still months short of the legal age, I should try again later. And then I was told, unofficially, not to bother.”
She held him in that frank, luminous gaze. “Why?”
“Oh, because I’m touched. Just like my mother.”
He stood up. He walked to his father’s desk, then to the window. The rage in him felt like a clenched fist in his chest.
“Such is the power of words, waif.” He fixed his focus beyond the panes, beyond the splash of light that was his father’s party to the very blackest part of the night. “Such is the power of having the ears of mighty men. Lost your heir to the cause? Don’t lose the spare. Whisper to all the right people about how your second son isn’t right. That his mother’s blood flows too freely in his veins. No one’s going to give a regiment to a madman.”
He heard her moving. He heard the rustle of her clothing as she stood, the footsteps that took her up to the fireplace and the portrait above it. He turned about to see her.
“She died of consumption. That’s what we say. I’ve repeated it so often now that I half-believe it myself. Consumption. As if anyone dies of that any longer.”
Eleanore kept her silence, but her eyes went back to his.
“She leapt from the roof of the castle,” Mandy said. “She killed herself, and Reggie moved us here. Not one mad parent but two. Bodes well for me, don’t you think?”
God, there, at last: He’d reached her. Her face drained of color, and she swayed and braced a hand against the mantelpiece for support. It wasn’t much, but he’d done it, he’d penetrated that stone-cold façade, he’d broken through to some deeper heart of her, he knew it. It was as gratifying as a fresh rush of morphine, and now the words spilled free and he couldn’t stop them if he tried.
“She heard voices, she said. Odd songs no one else could hear. Told my father there was something inside her, another person or something, and it kept telling her to jump. She’d tried it twice before, but Reggie had managed to stop her, so this time she waited until dark. Her body wasn’t found until the next afternoon, when finally they thought to search the grotto.” The bitter smile stretched across his face again. “So. At least I know I won’t lose my cunning in the end.”
“Armand,” Eleanore said, making his name a terrible sound, a sound so lovely and sweet and awful it pierced him to the core.
He sealed his lips together. He stood in place without moving, glaring at her, unwilling to surrender more of himself to any part of her.
“Armand,” she repeated, and lowered her arm. “Do you hear songs?”
“No,” he answered instantly, because he was cunning and he always knew the right thing to say, but this time it didn’t work. His glancing blow to her heart had opened her to him, or him to her, and he realized right then that not only had he broken her enough to see into her, but that she could see into him.
And she didn’t believe him.
Lies, rumors, masks; he was composed of little else. She saw it now.
He did the only thing he could. Mandy walked away, out of the study, back into the celebration of his blessed brother’s life.
He did not seek out Eleanore again.
Chapter 20
Third letter from Rue, dated November 17, 1809
Darling girl,
Time has stolen too much from me. Time has ensured we shall never again meet face-to-face. But there are a few things more I must share with you before I Travel On.
The first is a Word.
How strange it seems to me now, but there was an era when even penning this Word would summon grievous punishment from our tribal Council. We dared not write it, we dared not speak it. We lived it only in whispers. In public locations it seemed best not even to think it, lest some Sighted human steal it from our very minds.
But the Council is gone now, all those hoary old men finally Turned
to dust. I confess I find no small satisfaction in surviving them. Little difference their laws ever made to me. I was always too bold for their liking. And so I tell my friend who is my eyes and useful hands in these hard, blind years to inscribe the following letters on this page: Drákon.
That is who we are. That is what we are. And your blood, my child, ensures that no matter how many of us are gone now, done in by humans or our own foolish devices, we are not quite extinct.
Not damned quite.
I’ve hidden you well. I hid your entire line from the Council and the tribe, and of all my many notorious accomplishments—I am not so modest as to deny they are many—the secret of your life and that of your progenitors is my greatest.
They never guessed where Kit and I went, or why. They never thought beyond Europe, certainly not so far as a land of warlords and rice fields and misted mountains.
A land where dragons are worshipped instead of butchered. A place where our boy, your great-grandfather, could show his true face to the sun and fly free.
Those dead old Councilmen, those iron-fisted bastards who strangled us nigh to death with their Rules. How I wish I could gloat in their faces.
You are my final vengeance upon them, and my final grace. You hold all my hopes now, as well as my heart.
All my love,
—Rue
Chapter 21
How did the rest of the evening play out? I’ve no idea. I exited the study after Armand in a daze, in a heart-thumping confusion of shock and incredulity. Even though I’d followed him nearly right away, I didn’t see him anywhere, not in the hallway, not in the ballroom or the gardens after that.
I do remember some of it. I remember the duke on a graveled path with torchlight in his hair, watching me, surrounded by his fellows. I remember Miss Swanston speaking gaily to a man with silver spectacles, her head tipped to the side and him bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet. Sophia and Mittie beneath a tree, sharing glasses of stolen champagne. The colored lights gleaming, the orchestra always playing. An immense tiered cake had been placed on a central table, iced white and yellow and trimmed with garlands of marzipan. The cloying scent of it nearly turned my stomach.