Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

I followed Jesse. I wanted to avoid the hand he held out to me for those last few vertical feet, but he said, impatient, “Grab on,” so I did. The scrubby grass growing at the top of the cliff felt like a godsend, wonderfully firm.

Again, I pulled free as soon as I could. Again, every part of me tingled, and that made me defensive.

“What were you doing here? Were you following me?”

“Yes,” he said.

No denial, no excuses. I blinked up at him, and his smile widened.

“Why?”

He didn’t answer, not at first. The green of his eyes seemed to shift, growing darker, a summer storm rolling in. It was pulling me with it, too, spellbinding. I stared up at him and felt a fresh heat wash over me, dry lightning charging the atmosphere. Everything around us glowed brighter and brighter, as if we ourselves were caught in an electric strand. I smelled cinnamon and vanilla and rain, a combination so delicious I nearly licked my lips.

I took a sustained breath instead. I looked away to the unclouded sky, and the spell unraveled.

“I wanted to make sure you’d be safe,” Jesse was saying, but something in his tone was tinged with a lie.

“Was it you who left the orange in my room last night?”

“You were hungry. And I thought you’d be up before Gladys arrived.”

Hungry, echoed the fiend, almost a moan.

“I wasn’t!” I barked, wanting to stifle them both—and then the shock of his admission hit. I’d thought about it but hadn’t truly thought about it: the moonlight spread along the blankets on the bed, the thin flannel of my nightgown pulled tight against my breasts. The small rounded room, the sensation of a caress. He’d been there, with me—

Jesse lifted his open palms, a gesture of surrender.

“I meant no harm. You’re a deep sleeper, Lora, heavy dreams that carry you deep. Beyond memory, I’d guess. I’ll wake you next time.”

My cheeks began to burn. “Are you insane?” I hissed. “You’re not to go into my room, not at night or any other time! Do you think I don’t know how to defend myself? I’m from bloody St. Giles! Do you think I’ve never been in a fight before?”

“No,” he said, unsmiling. “I don’t think any of that.”

“Look,” I said, and now my anger was a fine weapon zinging through me, putting power behind the finger I jabbed into his chest. “I don’t know what you’re about, and I don’t care. I’ve dealt with boys like you for as long as I can remember, and I’m not interested. Just because I’m poor doesn’t mean I’m weak. The next time you try something like that, I swear to God I’ll make you sorry.” I had no idea what I could do to make him sorry that wouldn’t also land me in the soup, so I gave him another jab for good measure. “Got it?”

“I apologize,” Jesse said. He’d made no move to defend himself, although he was taller than I. And older. And a boy. His hands remained lax at his sides. “I just … didn’t want you to be hungry.”

And there was something in his tone again, something unsaid, only this time I swore I nearly heard it. The beast in me heard it, gathered it near.

It became: beloved.

I closed my mouth with a snap. I backed away from him, letting the wind push me sideways until I met the cool, scoured wall of Iverson. Then I turned around and ran.

I never heard him follow.

...

Sunday was Visitors’ Day at the school. It was the one day of the week outsiders were permitted inside the halls … but only some of the halls. And only some outsiders. I doubted that anyone I knew from the Home, for example, would have made it as far as the prickly hedges, much less found themselves escorted into the shining sophistication of the castle’s front parlor.

Most of the girls had families that lived too far away for regular visits. For all its bucolic charm, this part of Wessex wasn’t in any danger of becoming a serious social destination. It seemed no one of any real consequence–barring the Duke of Idylling and his irritating son, of course–lived nearby.

But a few girls did have guests on my first Sunday at Iverson: mothers and fathers, a scattering of boys in jackets and tight collars who might have been brothers. Or beaux. The rest of the students sat in softly chattering circles, ankles crossed, drinking tea and eating tiny morsels of food without spilling a drop or a crumb. Without even, I noticed, seeming to part their lips.

I sat alone, naturally. I hadn’t wanted to come, but the scent of cold smoked salmon and dill wafting from the doorway had been too much to resist. After everything that happened that afternoon, I’d missed lunch entirely.

I’d claimed a solitary chair wedged into a corner. It was horsehair, old, wretchedly uncomfortable. I sat with my plate of finger sandwiches balanced on my knees and tried to chew as the other girls did, teensy bites followed by short, dainty sips of liquid, a process that could easily consume ten minutes for a single sandwich. Perhaps that was why no one had sprigs of dill in their teeth.

At the orphanage we’d had one meal a day, plus tea. Tea at Blisshaven was old chipped teapots filled with twice-used leaves and a platter of stale sliced bread. If yours wasn’t one of the first hands groping for the bread, all you got was tea.

The pots here were of silver. The china had cherubs and gilded trim. The tea was flawlessly steeped, possibly my first ever from virgin leaves. And there were enough salvers of miniature sandwiches and iced cakes to satisfy even me—although after I had served myself thirds, Mrs. Westcliffe sent me a fixed, frigid smile from across the room that had me slinking back to my chair.

Lady Sophia held court in the corner opposite mine, reclining on a chaise longue, letting her jackals do all the talking. I pretended not to hear, but the parlor sported mirrors on all the walls. Everything reflected.

“… so ridiculous. I mean, of course she has no money, but does that mean she has to dress like some woeful matchstick girl? You know the ones I mean, Stella, those deplorable little rags one sees at Drury Lane, bleating for coins after the shows.”

“Quite.”

“And her hair. Gracious.”

“Perhaps someone might lend her a proper comb. You’ve got an old one, Caro, don’t you? That ugly one your auntie gave you, carved from a camel bone or something?”

“I’d rather throw it away, really. I doubt she’d even know what to do with it. Look at her. Did no one tell her this was Sunday tea?”

Chew, chew, chew, chew. Swallow. Sip.

“Is that a hole in her skirt? Look, look—oh, Mittie, don’t be such a fishwife! With your eyes, not your entire torso! But just there, at her knee.”

“It is!”

“Yes!”

“Now, that is truly pathetic. Truly.”

“Pathetic!”

Chew, chew, chew, chew. The salmon turned to mush in my mouth.

“What on earth do you suppose Lord Armand had to say to her?”

That was from Lillian, sounding genuinely baffled. I took my sip of tea in the midst of their silence, washing down the mush.

“Well, she’s the new charity girl, isn’t she?” said Mittie. “So most likely he was merely saying hello. All the charity girls have to meet the duke. To make certain they’re appropriate and everything. He was probably only saying hello. For his father.”

“He never did before,” said Lillian, still baffled.

“Of course he did. You just never knew.”

“It didn’t seem Chloe thought it a mere hello.”

“No,” agreed Sophia thoughtfully, speaking at last. “It didn’t.”

My cup and plate were empty. I rose, placed them on the sideboard with the other lovely dirty things, and walked off. The mirrors all around showed me images of a phantom girl, shadowy and gray.

I left her behind me. I was careful not to look too closely at her face.

...

And that was the sum of my first day at Iverson.

The worst part of it all was that Jesse was right. I was hungry. I was definitely too hungry not to eat his orange.

If it was Dark, it didn’t matter. I was already doomed, because every Dark cell of my being already hungered to see him again.

I stood by my window that night and dropped the peeling through bit by bit, flickers of white and orange that tumbled down to the grass, became swallowed by the moonlit green.

Proper young ladies of the British Empire were, apparently, expected to know how to dance, to organize a supper of up to twenty courses, to embroider, to speak a foreign language—not German—to play the piano, and to paint.

We were not expected to wrestle with mathematics, beyond what might be required for common household management. We need not bother with horticulture but were encouraged to learn to arrange cut flowers artfully in vases. We studied history because, I supposed, it was dry and full of the dead and therefore mostly harmless. But science was a subject fixed absolutely within the realm of men. So was literature of the darker sort; no Dante or John Ford for us. We read books about moral forbearance. Or else poems, the fluffy sort that rhapsodized over windmills and kings and kittens and good girls who liked to sit by the fire and knit.

I could not dance. I could not reliably position forks on a dinner table for a prince. When I embroidered, the needle buzzed so loudly in my hand that I pricked myself with it, and my first attempt at a sampler ended up stippled with blood.

I understood no other language but my own and that of the metals and stones.