Shana Abe - The Deepest Night

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.

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.

Hungry?

I realized, unsettled, that I was. A flicker, a small stirring of my blood. Nothing like what I’d felt with Jesse, but … I was.

I stood there a while longer with my insides roiling and that flicker growing, growing, my hand hovering above his shoulder.

In the end, I didn’t touch him. I left him to whatever dreams may have lulled him.

As I said, we hadn’t spoken in some time. Even so, I don’t know why I was surprised at what happened next. Looking back, I can see that it was absolutely inevitable.

The man with the cast was named Gavin Raikes. He was nineteen years old and in the process of dying inch by excruciating inch. Everyone now, not just me, could smell it.

“No,” he kept saying, staring up wildly from his bed at his doctor, at Deirdre. At me. “No, no, no, I won’t let you! I won’t let you, I say. Keep away from me!”

“This is just the cast now,” Deirdre was trying to tell him. “The cast, that’s all. It must come off. Be a good lad and let Dr. Newcastle take it off.”

“I won’t let—”

“Raikes,” warned the doctor, very stern, “if you don’t calm down, you won’t like what comes next. We must have a look—”

“No!”

Gavin began thrashing about and within seconds a couple of soldiers were on him, grabbing him by the shoulders and ankles, pinning him down.

“Quickly,” said the doctor to Deirdre, and like they’d done it a hundred times before—perhaps they had—they moved over the man, wielding saws, hammers, something that looked like a long metal claw.

I stood ready with clean linens across my arms because that’s what I’d been told to do. Although as soon as the plaster cracked apart, all five of us, even the doctor, gagged and tipped back.

There wasn’t much left of his leg. What there was was shredded, melted, sickly gross green. I looked away before I did something awful, like heave down Deirdre’s skirts.

Before I knew it, everyone else had recovered, was busy moving again, and Deirdre swiveled about and deposited something in my arms: a section of the plaster with a saw still attached, all of it slimy with decomposed flesh.

And something else. Small somethings, wiggling through the slime. Squirming.

I had seen maggots before. At Moor Gate there had been a boy—I hadn’t known his name—who’d been kept alone in his cell for so long that when they finally brought him out he’d been a papery skeleton, with big red sores on his lips and his hair mostly missing because he’d been tearing it out and eating it. Eating even his eyelashes and eyebrows.

I’d been pressed up against a hallway wall when they’d passed (that’s what you were supposed to do: press yourself thin against a wall when the guards came, hope hope hope they weren’t coming for you), a pair of men half dragging the boy down the corridor because his paper skeleton legs either couldn’t or wouldn’t work right any longer. They kept buckling, and it made the guards angry. They’d yelled at him and he’d giggled back at them. I’d reckoned then that he must have been actually barmy, because every patient at Moor Gate knew not to anger the guards. Not to make eye contact. Not to speak to them, not to plead.