Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

“No,” she said, flat again. “I want you to wear it to the tea.”

“Why?” I wasn’t going to play her game, not without proper answers.

“Because Chloe will be there. And I want to make her as miserable as I possibly can.”

My arms dropped. The silver dress felt light as paper in my grip.

“She’s my sister,” Sophia said. “Didn’t you know? Stepsister, actually. Her mother wed my father four years ago.”

“You hate her,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“You’ve no idea.”

“How will me in this make Chloe miserable?”

“Anything that drags attention away from Chloe makes Chloe miserable.”

The lamplight flickering on Sophia’s desk behind her burned a halo around her pale hair. She gazed at me bright and hard, an unlikely angel in a schoolgirl’s shape.

I lifted a shoulder. “Fair enough. I’ll wear the dress.”

Her distant smile returned. “Good.”

The route back to my tower lay thick with night. I knew the way well enough now not to need illumination. My feet took me where I needed to go.

Sophia’s dress was a silken veil across my arms. It tugged at the shadows behind me, murmuring to the dark as I climbed.

My door was closed, as I’d left it. But there was something at the base of it. Something new.

It was a box. A small one, cardboard, unadorned. I picked it up and felt a weight sliding around inside, singing as it moved.

By the light of my window I pried open the box to find a circlet of tiny roses made of solid gold, perfect as true life, attached to a pin.

It was a brooch.

A message had been written on the inside lid. It read: For your tea. And I didn’t come in.

Tranquility at Idylling was surely the largest, oddest house ever graced with the word tranquil in its name. It was much newer than the usual aristocratic manor homes that dotted the English countryside, a sprawling, five-story wonder of limestone and stained glass and spires commissioned by the present Duke of Idylling after he’d decided to remove his family from Iverson Castle fifteen years before.

In fifteen years, it had not been finished.

Walking through its halls, it was easy to imagine that it never would be.

Even on that day, the day of my first visit to the house, I was struck by its strange and awful beauty. It seemed a construction of elaborate nonsense, of inspiration and madness combined. Rounding each new corner was a lesson in surprise; it was always wise to glance both up and down before committing to the next step.

Up to see if you were about to be concussed by a stray bit of pipe or scaffolding.

Down to make certain the floor didn’t suddenly end.

In time, however, I grew to learn the folly of Tranquility very well.

Warrens of elaborately paneled hallways led to nowhere. Luxurious rooms of pressed copper and imported woods were left dusty and half complete. Sometimes there was roof overhead, sometimes only sky. A gorgeous grand staircase in the atrium curved sinuously up the wall before ending in open space. The very last step would drop you like a stone two floors down.

As we motored up the drive, I noticed that the entire south wing tapered off in what looked like the middle of a window, tarps covering the roof and walls, a rubble of bricks and planks exposed to the elements, already dissolving in the salty wind. A solitary old man was stooped low over a retaining wall, slowing troweling mortar along a section at the top.

“Astonishing, isn’t it?” Mrs. Westcliffe was my companion in the chauffeured automobile the duke had sent for us, both of us hanging on for dear life to the straps fixed to the doors.

“Very,” I replied.

Perhaps it was the silken dress on my body or the golden roses at my shoulder, but I had determined that I was going to be the most perfect, delightful charity student the duke had ever encountered. I was going to stand correctly, speak correctly, smile correctly, listen attentively. I was going to make him positively reel with my perfection, so I added another “Very,” with a trace more awe. Mrs. Westcliffe granted me a glance of approval.

“The duke designed it himself, every corner. When completed, Tranquility will feature some of the most modern and superb workmanship in the kingdom. Of course, with this dreadful war dragging on, finding enough laborers to finish it all has become something of a chore.”

I wanted to ask about the fourteen years before that, but today I was the perfect charity student. So I merely nodded in sympathy.

How do you do, Your Grace? So sorry to hear about your lack of peasant workers. What a rather large bother this war with the kaiser has turned out to be!

A butler stood at the front doors to welcome us. Our little party from Iverson had taken up two of the duke’s automobiles; Chloe and two of her friends had crowded into the second.

Apparently, when Armand had invited her to tea to make up for her fictitious game of lawn tennis, she’d taken it to mean she could bring along the other fictitious players. And neither of them, I noticed, was nearly as pretty as she. Not by half. One had a weak chin, and the other badly frizzed hair and a red runny nose.

Clever Chloe.

We all five stepped out of the autos and into a brisk spring wind. The girl with the bad hair gave a squeal as her dress flipped up, revealing her knees. She slapped it down again as if she were smashing a bug with both hands, still squealing.

“Come, ladies.” Mrs. Westcliffe brooked no such nonsense from her own garments. Her skirts were firmly in hand as she led the way up the stairs into the house.

I was the last one in. I paused for a moment to look back at the untilled field before the mansion, the crushed-shell drive and azure sky. Past the slope of the field and a notched break of trees, the channel glinted, pebbles of light broken only by the shadow island that was the duke’s former home, and now my own.

“Miss?” The butler was waiting, watching me with a patience that might have disguised something deeper. Like pity.

I scurried inside.

Tea was to be held in one of the few chambers that had been fully completed. It wasn’t quite a parlor, at least not in the traditional sense. It resembled more an auditorium. There was no stage, but I was sure entire theatrical productions could take place within its walls. It was that huge.

And everything—everything—was black and white.

The marble checkered floor. The silk-papered walls. Clusters of tables and chairs of every size and shape, all black woods and spotless white velvets.

Black and white rugs. Black and white drapery.

A black grand piano stood ponderously in the middle of it all, a circle of chairs surrounding it like a noose.

Uh-oh.

And there were other people here, as well, about two dozen men and women standing in pockets and speaking in small, civilized voices. I saw no sunburned arms or faces, so they might have been the local gentry. Formal suits and starched-lace dresses and ostrich plumes in the ladies’ hair; everyone serious, no one smiling.

Tea with His Grace looked to be a torturously grim affair.

Mrs. Westcliffe was addressing a man who was leaning against the piano with one hand. I was unsurprised to see that he was dressed to match the chamber. Only the ring on his finger shone with color.

He wore a ruby, a big one. I knew at once it would be clouded.

“… and—ah, here she is.” With her back to the man, Mrs. Westcliffe threw me her pinched do-hurry-up look. “Come, Miss Jones. Come at once, if you please.”

I did. I glided past the others and stood with my lovely, absolute obedience before the man and his ruby.

“Your Grace, may I present Miss Eleanore Jones, the latest happy beneficiary of your great goodwill. Miss Jones, I have the honor of introducing His Grace, the Duke of Idylling.”

I sank into a curtsy so low it made my knees ache, my gaze fixed to the floor.

“A true pleasure to meet you, sir,” I murmured, rising as slowly as I could.

“And you,” the duke said back to me in a plummy, bored tone.

I took it as permission to look up at him.

I saw Armand before me and not. The duke was both taller and thinner than his son, with sallow skin and startlingly concave cheeks. I recognized that combination too well; it was the look of unhurried starvation. It seemed impossible to conceive, though, that a man with this house and a gemstone nearly the size of a robin’s egg on his hand would live starved.

He did share the same waving chestnut hair as Armand, but the Duke of Idylling’s face was, at best, intriguing instead of handsome, and his eyes were brown instead of blue.

He was freshly shaved and pomaded, smelling of a lemony soap. When he removed his hand from the piano it quivered noticeably, and he tucked it into his jacket pocket to disguise it.

I moved on to my next scripted phrase. “Thank you so very much for inviting me into your home.”

But the duke had no interest in my script. He was staring at me, staring at me hard, just as his son had done when we’d first met.

“Good God” was what he said.

I froze, my gaze flying to Mrs. Westcliffe. She looked from him to me, her eyes narrowed.

“You …” the duke began, and pressed a fist to his chest, still staring.

“Sir?” I whispered.

“Your Grace.” Mrs. Westcliffe was abruptly professional. “Do forgive Miss Jones. She’s unused to such exalted company, you may be sure, but we—”