The Deepest Night tsd-2

by Shana Abe

  I faced ahead again. I stretched out my chin and climbed higher, higher, until all I could hear was my heart in my ears, and all I could fathom was the endless sapphire line between heaven and earth, ocean and night, and the slim golden thread of me tearing a path between them.

  Chapter 12

  “This is most irregular.”

  Aunt Lottie frowned at the note the butler had handed her, the black pudding and poached eggs she’d been served slowly congealing into a single, oozy glob on her plate. She adjusted her spectacles and held the note closer, perhaps hoping for less irregularity via a shorter distance from the paper to her nose.

  “Most irregular indeed,” she huffed.

  It was breakfast, a glorious full English breakfast, and for all of the massive sideboard jam-packed with platters of food, there were only three of us to dine. At the head of the table sat Armand, with Lottie to his right and me to his left. The rest of the chairs were empty, but like everything else about Tranquility, the table was huge. I’d wager forty more people could easily tuck in.

  Forty orphans from the Home. I looked down the table and imagined them there, in the high-backed, buffed wooden chairs that all had carved lions for the arms, fidgeting and blowing their noses in the napkins, destroying the careful code of flatware arranged around the china, smudging the wax on the table with grubby fingers and sweaty palms. All wide eyes and growling stomachs and out-and-out disbelief, because, like me, not a single one of them would have been able to fantasize themselves from Blisshaven into this room, before this feast of eggs and fresh fruit and pickled fish and toast and hash and meat, meat, meat.

  For only three people.

  I wondered if the servants would get to eat what we didn’t finish. Maybe they just tossed all the leftovers straight into the rubbish.

  And it wasn’t merely the meal that was excessive. The dining room was filled with floor-to-ceiling windows, sky and glass everywhere, with Armand’s seat placed so that the biggest one loomed right behind his back. It made it seem as if he somehow sat suspended in midair.

  But I guessed he was used to it. I hadn’t noticed him glance even once out the windows. Instead he’d paused, fork in hand, and was regarding Lottie with polite interest. He was obviously waiting to hear what Lieutenant Clayworth’s note said.

  I, however, didn’t stop gobbling down my latest helping of fried potatoes and sausage. I had no need to wait; I already knew what the note said, since I’d written it myself.

  TERRIBLY SORRY, AUNT LOTTIE AND ALL. MUST DASH OFF UNEXPECTEDLY. WAR BUSINESS. HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND AND WILL SEE YOU SOON, NO DOUBT.

  —L.C.

  Another good lesson for you: When forging missives or signatures, it’s always better to keep things short. The less there is to scrutinize, the less there will be to muck you up.

  The lieutenant hadn’t actually left a note. After I’d come back down to earth last night, I’d searched his empty room to be sure. I’d even done a quick perusal of both Armand’s and Lottie’s chambers to check that he hadn’t slipped one under their doors before leaving, because I couldn’t risk him writing something about me, truth or lie or anything at all. Not if I wanted this summer to keep going forward.

  But he hadn’t. He’d just fled.

  Who, exactly, was the coward?

  I had seen Armand Louis run into a hail of bullets for me. I’d seen him face mortal danger without recoiling, and I’d seen him weep for our dead. So to hell with sodding Lieutenant Laurence Clayworth.

  During my hunt for the note, I’d come to the decision that I’d keep most of the facts of my encounter with Laurence to myself. I didn’t know how close the two of them truly were, but hearing that a person you thought a friend considered you unbalanced at best, craven at worst, could only hurt. Whatever else I felt about Armand, I had no desire to cause him hurt.

  Lottie sighed and held out the folded paper to Armand, who scanned it and then passed it to me. I looked down at it, allowed myself a fresh measure of satisfaction at the handwriting (which definitely didn’t resemble mine), then looked back up.

  “I trust everything is all right,” I said, with what I hoped was exactly the right touch of genteel concern.

  Apparently I’d miscalculated. Armand’s focus went from his kippers to my face, instantly alert.

  “ ‘War business’,” Lottie muttered, slicing into her eggs. “And the boy couldn’t be bothered to wait for a respectable goodbye.”

  “You know how things are these days, my lady,” said Armand, still watching me. “It’s an unfortunate fact of the modern world. Matters change in the space of a breath.”

  Lottie squinted at him. “What’s that you said?”

  “Matters change.”

  “Did he receive a telegram in the night? We must ask Foster.”

  “I wouldn’t,” I warned Armand, low.

  “Foster?” Lottie was looking around, annoyed that neither the footman by the sideboard nor the butler had come forward. “Foster? Where the devil is he?”

  “Matthews,” said Armand, “I believe Lady Clayworth would enjoy some trifle, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Certainly, my lord.”

  Armand gazed at me, silent, while the butler offered a heap of cream and cake to her ladyship.

  “Well?” he said as Matthews moved away and Lottie happily dug in.

  I glanced at my own plate, now nearly empty, then back up at the sideboard.

  Armand’s tone went dangerously silky. “Lora.”

  “Yes, yes.” I poked at a piece of potato with my knife. Now that the time had come, I found myself struggling with what to say. “We might have a problem.”

  “What manner of problem?”

  “Your friend. I imagine his nose is broken.”

  “Oh? And why would that be?”

  I gave up on the potato. I lifted my eyes and gazed back at Armand and let the silence balloon between us.

  His face, already so pale, seemed to go even whiter.

  “Are you joking?”

  “No.”

  “Were you—hurt?”

  I smiled, mirthless. “No.”

  He sat there without moving, staring at me. A cloud of small brown birds poured into view behind him, shrinking and swelling in unison, blurred wings and shrill chirrups. Pouring away again.

  Armand had gone to stone. No, not stone, because I didn’t think stones could emanate the black sense of menace I felt from him now. He was as stiff and frightful as he’d been that moment in the duke’s asylum, when in the back of my mind I’d thought maybe, maybe I’d have to stop him from killing his own father.

  I said, “I should have locked the door and I didn’t. No harm done but to him. In fact, I likely did him a favor. He can tell all the girlies now that a Hun clocked him in a fight.”

  Armand stood; alarmed, so did I. He seemed fixed on a point beyond me, someplace where there were no birds or sky or anything civilized like breakfast. I looked into blue eyes and saw only sparks and darkness.

  He’ll come back to us stronger and stronger, Jesse had told me once. He’s going to crave you more and more, and not having you will eat him raw.

  How much worse, then, would it feel to know that someone else, his own mate, had not only craved me but had gone behind his back to act upon it?

  It wasn’t until then that I understood I’d accidentally revealed the worse betrayal, after all.

  “Mandy. He’s not worthy of you. Let it be.”

  “Lord Armand, have you taken ill?” demanded Lottie. “I cannot imagine why you’re standing otherwise.”

  “Mandy,” I said again, urgent, soft. Trying to pull him back to me. “There’s more.”

  His lashes lowered. He looked down at his hand, at his opening fingers. The fork he’d been holding had been bent nearly in two. It clattered down to the table.

  “Yes, indeed, I’m so eager to see the future therapy room,” I said very audibly. “It’s downstairs, you say? Do forgive us, your ladyship. I feel w
e must get started right away. For the soldiers, you know.”

  “What’s that?” Lottie asked, but I ignored her, reaching instead for Armand.

  I was counting on all those years of being raised as a gentleman, all that stiff-upper-lip training, Eton, London, any of it, and to my relief, it worked. Without a word he let me slip my hand through the crook of his elbow, and together we walked out of the dining room, leaving a confounded Lady Clayworth behind.

  “What did that young woman say? Why are they leaving? Foster, did you understand her?”

  I hadn’t thought of where to go from there. No doubt there was a downstairs to Tranquility, but I had no notion of how to get there or even if there was going to be such a thing as a therapy room.

  I was just walking, Armand rigid at my side, and my feet took us to the one other place I really recognized: the front parlor, where there was a piano.

  Not an ordinary upright piano, either, but a shiny black grand piano, practically big as a pond, with a bench long enough for two. I led him to it, waited until he sat, and then took my place beside him.

  I didn’t speak, and neither did he. Instead, my fingers touched the keys, and the music began to flow.

  The duke had done up the parlor entirely in black and white. Floors, walls, furniture, drapes. It was probably the only reason the piano was there, fitting so neatly into his scheme, but as far as I was concerned, the piano was the only thing in the whole chamber that made any sense. Everything else was a black-and-white mess.

  I closed my eyes to block it out and concentrated on the melody that drifted around us both, gentle and sweet, languid as a summer stream. I thought perhaps it belonged to the opal in Armand’s stickpin.

  Minutes passed. No one else came in.

  “How do you do that?” he asked at last, his voice barely rising above the notes.

  “I listen.” And then, a while later: “Can’t you do it?”

  He shifted, not quite a shrug. “I don’t think so.”

  “Have you ever tried?”

  “No.”

  I stopped. “Here. Put your hands like this. That’s it, right there. Now, listen to the melody. Let it surround you. It’s lovely, isn’t it? Do you hear it?”

  He gave a short nod.

  “So. Play.”

  He stared down at the keys, then tried a few tentative notes—the wrong ones.

  “No, like this.”

  I traced out half a bar, but he didn’t try to copy it. He didn’t move at all, in fact, just kept staring down at the keyboard.

  “Okay, then. Hands up again, like I showed you.”

  I rested my palms over the backs of his, our fingers aligned. I felt that slight, snapping shock that sometimes happened when we touched; he took a swifter breath, so I knew he felt it, too.

  “Play,” I whispered, and pressed my fingers down, showing him the way.

  Slowly, haltingly, we caught the easiest snippets of the song.

  “Lieutenant Clayworth saw my dragon eyes,” I murmured, without looking away from our work. “I couldn’t help it.”

  “Dragon eyes,” he echoed, emotionless.

  “When they flash. Everything lit up.”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  We kept playing. We weren’t getting any better.

  “And after that, he hared off. But I think it’ll be fine. After all, if he says anything about it, who’s going to believe him?”

  “Only a lunatic,” answered Armand gravely.

  I shot him a glance. He was smiling a little.

  “Precisely.” I smiled back. “But—Armand. I think you should be prepared for him to … that is, he’s really not the sort of fellow who …” I shook my head, back to stumbling over my words, searching for the ones least likely to wound. Eventually I had to settle for the same thing I’d told him before. “He is unworthy of you.”

  “Lora, if and when I see Laurence again, you may be confident that if his nose isn’t broken now, it’s going to be.”

  “Excellent,” I said, and drew my hands away.

  He tried it on his own for a few minutes longer, blundering along, before giving up.

  “I’m no good at this.”

  I let out a laugh. “You’re really not.”

  And then we were laughing together, hushed and real, like we were thieves who’d gotten away with stealing something special. When it ended we were leaning against each other, our faces inches apart. All those sparks, the danger and darkness, had lifted from his eyes; everything was blue and bright once more.

  The last tickle of laughter died away in my throat.

  Armand said my name. He lifted a hand to my hair, cupping the nape of my neck.

  “Eleanore,” he whispered again, tilting his head to mine, his lips skimming past my cheek, his breath in my ear. “I’d wait forever for you, you know. If it mattered. If you’d care.”

  “I do care,” I whispered back, miserable.

  His fingers tightened, warm and firm. “No, you don’t. Not the way I mean. Not yet.”

  He pressed a kiss to my hair, then got up and left, taking all the heat of the room and the final floating notes of the opal song with him.

  Chapter 13

  The military descended upon Tranquility like a plague of extraordinarily organized locusts. Men in uniforms and shiny black boots trod in and out of the rooms, every location swiftly evaluated, every servant assessed, every unfinished chamber and hallway and stairwell marked with tape across the entrances, so that doctors and patients and nurses wouldn’t topple through and break their crowns.

  That part alone took up all of their first three days.

  Then the wounded began to arrive.

  Truck after truck pulled up the drive, spilling out broken soldiers. Men on stretchers, men with crutches or canes, men wrapped in so many bandages they might have been living mummies, blots of scarlet bleeding through.

  The war had truly come to us at last.

  “Miss Jones,” barked a voice at my back, and I started, turning about.

  Mrs. Quinn, chief nurse of the newly christened Tranquility at Idylling Recovery Hospital, stood behind me in her wimple and somehow always spotless white frock, scowling. We’d met only two days ago, and it seemed she was always scowling—at me, at least.

  “Are you here to help, or are you rather more a tourist?”

  I forced a neutral tone. “To help, ma’am.”

  “Then do so. You may take this wheelchair to Nurse O’Donnell over there, and assist her with that young man.”

  Unlike me, Nurse O’Donnell (Call me Deirdre!) was a real nurse, probably in her late thirties. She had hazel eyes and a round face and a quick polished smile, which she directed at me as I walked up to join her at the back of the latest truck.

  “Emma!”

  “Eleanore,” I corrected her, but she wasn’t listening, focused instead on the wounded man trying to ease out of the truck on only one working leg. The other was encased from hip to toes in a plaster cast.

  “Lovely! Let’s have you escort this gentleman to the induction room, eh?”

  “Induction room” was the military’s term for the front parlor, which was by far the largest chamber on the main floor besides the dining room. It had been transformed from a hideous black-and-white room with a piano into a hideous black-and-white room with rows of beds and chairs and portable privacy curtains … and the piano, which had been pushed back against a wall, since it was too large to fit through any of the doorways. It seemed the duke had had the parlor constructed around it.

  “Here you go, then, sir, off with our Miss Ella. She’ll take fine care of you, get you settled in.”

  I offered a smile to the injured man, who offered a wan smile back.

  “Very kind of you, Emma-Eleanore-Ella,” he said, proving that at least someone had been paying attention.

  “My pleasure,” I replied. I rolled the wheelchair into position behind him, then leaned in close to help him sit.

  It was hard not
to retch. Like a lot of the wounded, he stank, really stank, of something elusive yet familiar. Something that reminded me of the grimy butcher’s alley a block from the orphanage, green bottle flies swarming over skinned animals, hot rotting meat.

  I wheeled him into the manor.

  The days went on like that. Since I had no true nursing experience, I was relegated to the least important tasks, most of which involved cleaning things or fetching things or relaying messages from one part of the mansion to another. By the end of each day I retreated into my bedroom with a sense of weary, guilty relief.

  And no matter how I scrubbed, I could not rid myself of the dreadful meat smell. I tried scented soaps, borrowed perfume from Deirdre: no use. It was always there.

  By the eleventh day, I was beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t have gone to Callander after all.

  Armand was busy with his new role as lord of the manor, but it seemed to me he was more of a specter haunting it than an actual person. We’d not spoken since the morning at the piano. Whenever I saw him now it was always from a distance, at the top of a flight of stairs or down long, gloomy hallways. He remained surrounded by others, the lone figure dressed in black or gray instead of khaki. They were all men with strict schedules and lives to save. I barely warranted a glance from any of them.

  I’d smoked to his bedchamber once since everyone else had arrived. Only once. I’d Turned to girl beside his bed and looked down at him sleeping, hoping he’d wake, hoping for some stupid reason that I wouldn’t have to put my hand on him for him to wake.

  I’d read somewhere that people always appeared peaceful in their sleep. All the cares and worries of the day slipped away, temporarily forgotten or buried beneath dreams.

  Armand did not look peaceful. He looked shadowed, stark. He looked much like the dragon-boy I’d glimpsed weeks ago in the forest, when he’d lit that lantern and offered me caviar and trouble.

  Out of curiosity, I leaned over him, inhaled; I smelled only soap and wine and him.

  Hungry? he’d asked me that night in the forest, watching me with that dark dragon look.