The Sweetest Dark

CHAPTER 10




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.

I’d never held a paintbrush.

But something happened on my first day of piano class.

Something magical.

“Middle C, if you please, Miss Jones.”

Monsieur Vachon lurked behind me, unseen, but I knew exactly how he would appear, anyway: tall and lanky, with a spine bent at the neck like a shepherd’s crook, his eyes sharp behind his spectacles, his hands clasped together at the small of his back. He wore a black jacket and waistcoat and pristine spats over his shoes. He looked like an undertaker but for his hair. It was tawny and unruly, a lion’s mane framing his face.

And he fully expected that I, seated for the very first time in my life before a piano, would know what middle C might be. Perhaps all the girls in France were born with sonatas bubbling through their veins.

The sheet music in front of me swam with dots and lines. It might as well have been penned in ancient Etruscan.

“Miss Jones,” Monsieur Vachon prompted, only with his accent it became Meez Jonzzz.

“I …” My hands hovered above the keys. Was middle C one of the ones in the middle? Wouldn’t that make sense? Was it ivory or ebony?

I’d tried to explain to him before the class began that I couldn’t do this, that I had no notion of how to play, but he’d brushed me off. “Everyone must play,” he’d pronounced. “This is Iverson.”

I supposed now he understood I wasn’t really everyone.

I heard Mittie heave a sigh from her chair against the ballroom wall. She’d already had her turn, pecking out a tune that had reminded me of one of the kitten poems. Perky, insipid pap.

Monsieur’s patience began to fray.

“Here.” A finger reached past me, pointing to one of the ivory keys. From my seat of mortification I noticed that he had hair all over his knuckles, too.

“C,” he enunciated in my ear, and I quickly mashed my own finger down against the key.

The note hit the air slightly muffled. I hadn’t done anything with the pedals, as I’d seen the other girls do, and it died its solitary death without a fuss.

But then the magic came. Another note, another C, lifted around me, soft at first and then louder, exquisitely pure. I raised my head, searching for its source, but no one else was holding an instrument. In fact, the only other instrument in the entire chamber was a harp, and it was still shrouded in its sheet.

The ballroom had wooden floors and long, decorative tapestries, a frescoed ceiling painted into a cloudy heaven. The chandeliers suspended above us were also covered in sheets; only the bottom curving loops of crystal beading showed, swaying gently with a draft.

All the rest of my class gazed back at me from their line against the wall. Their expressions ranged from boredom to impatience to happy spite.

Sophia turned her head to whisper something to Lillian, who giggled. Mittie crossed her legs to swing her foot from side to side.

C, sang the silent music. My finger pressed the key again, and then C changed to another note, and my finger found that one, too. And another. And another.

I needed both hands. I was using both hands to play the song that saturated the chamber. My head felt clear and my heart felt at peace for the first time in so long. I heard the song as it happened, and it was as if it sank into me, became part of me. The piano was now part of me, too, the voice I did not have otherwise. Melody, harmony, my hands moving faster and faster along the keyboard, creating sounds I’d never imagined.

I wasn’t thinking about any of it. I just let it be, and the music came.

Then it ended. The song finished and the ballroom fell into silence. I echoed the final passage and let my fingertips rest atop the keys, relishing their sleek warmth.

“Mon Dieu,” said the monsieur. At some point he had come to stand right beside me; I hadn’t noticed at all. He gazed down at me with wondering eyes. “You told me you could not play.”

“No, I—” I pulled my hands back to my lap. “I never have before.”

“Never before?” he repeated, with an incredulous arch of his bushy lion’s brows. “What is the name of that piece? Who is the composer?”

“I don’t know,” I said, nervous. “I … made it up.”

I hadn’t, though. I hadn’t made it up. It had been the song of the ballroom. The song sung by the stone walls and rock-crystal drops of this room.

I swallowed. Monsieur Vachon had brought a hand to his chin. He was rubbing it, scowling, trying to decide if I was attempting to make a fool of him.

One of my fellow students coughed the word cheat.

“At the—where I came from,” I said, “we had no piano. We had nothing. Not even books of music. I’ve never touched a piano before today.”

“You cannot read this?” He indicated the sheet music.

I shook my head.

“And you just now created what we heard? All at once, sans répétition?”

I nodded.

“Can you play for us something else, Miss Jones?”

I swallowed again and looked helplessly at the far wall. I heard music still, but it was so dim. My pounding heart was so much louder.

“I feel a little ill,” I whispered.

“Try,” he ordered, dropping his hand.

Please, I thought, a plea to the ballroom, to anyone, anything. Please, please help me.

I pressed a key, but it was the wrong one. I closed my eyes and listened harder, waiting, breathing through my mouth. Someone—Mittie, said the fiend, bloody fishwife Mittie—let out a stifled snort.

My index finger found a new note, one of the ebonies. That one was right.

Soon it was happening again. I had to strain for some of it, and this song seemed sadder than the first, more ethereal. But when it finished I opened my eyes and there was my piano instructor staring down at the floor instead of at me, and I would have sworn there was a gloss of tears behind his spectacles.

“Brava,” he said to the floor, then lifted his head and made it louder, so that everyone heard. “Brava.”

I sat back on the bench and folded my hands over my stomach. The piano gleamed huge and black and white in front of me, a grinning, separate thing once more, an opportunity I’d barely begun to comprehend.

• • •


A jungle existed within the castle. It was an upper-crust sort of jungle, concocted entirely by upper-crust imaginations—and funds. There were no wild, messy monkeys or screaming macaws, no piranha in sight but for my classmates. Even the vines clinging to their lattices seemed too polite to stretch their tendrils beyond their allotted space.

But there were trees in oversize bronze pots: palms spreading fronds in wide, emerald fans; pomegranates and mangoes and figs, all jeweled with luscious fruit. Orchids opened fleshy petals of magenta and saffron from hanging baskets and urns. Statues stared from unexpected corners. Bamboo grew in a tended thicket, leaves sighing each time someone walked past.

A pond filled with koi and lotus plants marked the center of the jungle world, an octagon of liquid hemmed with stone. Orange and red fish, purple flowers, dark waters. A domed glass ceiling shone like a pearl overhead.

This was the castle conservatory. It was a more recent addition to Iverson, only about eighty years old, according to our teacher, Miss Swanston.

“And the light,” she said, lifting her cupped hands upward in benediction to the dome. “The light, children. We could not ask for more.”

I thought privately that we could. We could ask for a window to be opened, for instance, to release some of the heavy air that moistened every bit of my skin and stank faintly like rotting compost.

Lovely hushed music played from within the bamboo, music I knew no one else heard. Jesse was part of the jungle, as well, moving leisurely through the stalks, trimming errant stems. And if I’d had the power to ask for more of anything, really, it wouldn’t have been for an open window. It would have been for more of him. For him to come out from the thicket, so that I could see his face.

But he didn’t.

Art instruction was a combined class, meaning that two separate years of girls took it at once. There were twenty of us standing before our easels today, circling the pond. Since my class had been combined with the year ahead, one of the other nineteen students was Chloe Pemington.

She managed to ignore me magnificently. I thought Sophia might take a lesson from her. I was a gnat, a speck, an absolute nothing that required no greeting, no eye contact. Not even a sidelong sniff.

I simply did not exist, and I was standing right beside her.

I squared my shoulders and tried to do as good a job shutting out the rustling of the bamboo. Another older girl stood at my other side; I knew I existed to her, because she kept sneaking looks at my painting.

Hers, I noticed, literally dripped with color. Our assignment was to depict the lotus blossoms. Our medium was watercolor. There would be no undoing any mistakes.

“Good, good.” Miss Swanston was walking from girl to girl. “Excellent use of perspective, Sophia. Most ingenious. Fine shadow work, Florence. Perhaps a touch more … there. Yes. Beatrice. What is that? A fish? I see.”

Jesse moved nearer. Beautiful music, alluring music, sifting through green leaves.

I was listening to it despite myself, drawing languid brushstrokes along the section of my painting that was the surface of the water.

“Eleanore.”

I stepped back, glancing up at my teacher. Miss Swanston wasn’t what anyone would call fetching, but she was handsome, and far younger than most of the rest of the staff. I wanted to like her for that alone. She had hazel-gray eyes and a long nose and wide lips. In close quarters she always smelled of charcoal; I finally realized it was from the sketching pencils she carried in the pockets of her skirts.

Her head tilted; she was studying the line I’d just added. “Very nice. Very nice, indeed. You’ve captured the illusion of depth in the water quite well. Chloe,” she said, turning in place. “Do come here and have a look. Do you see what I mean?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” said Chloe, indifferent.

“I’m referring to our previous conversation. You asked about the use of transparency for depth. Eleanore has provided us with an example of a wash of separate colors to achieve her desired effect. Notice the dark beneath the light?”

Chloe pretended to care. “I suppose.”

Jesse moved nearer still. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the beige of his shirt through the shoots.

“Blue under ocher, violet under green. Opposing colors that, when joined, create a perfect illusion of a shimmering whole.”

“But isn’t that only a trick, Miss Swanston?” asked Beatrice, from across the circle. “I mean, there isn’t really any special skill involved in putting two colors together, is there?”

Miss Swanston smiled. “One might argue that all of art is trickery. A landscape is not merely a representation of what one sees but also how one sees it. Using pigment and paper, Eleanore has suggested quite nicely the idea of water and of what exists beneath the water. But her vision is unique.”

“Rather,” muttered Chloe.

“As is yours,” said Miss Swanston, turning back to Chloe. “And yours, and yours, and all of yours. That is what makes art both perfect and imperfect.”

“But a fish should look like a fish,” insisted Beatrice.

“In your world, then, yes. But to someone else, a splash of red might be a fish, and that is fine, too.”

“I hardly think splashing color about is art,” Beatrice griped, just loud enough to be heard.

“Art,” replied Miss Swanston, “may take its form however we wish. That is its joy.”

A throat was cleared behind us. We all looked; Mrs. Westcliffe stood at the doorway, a taller figure in the gloom behind her.

“And that will be all for today,” concluded Miss Swanston smoothly. “Leave your brushes and trays where they are for Mr. Holms to clean; thank you, ladies. We shall save the fish for our next lesson. Kindly place your smocks in the hamper there by the fig tree.”

Jesse had ventured to the edge of the bamboo, clippers in hand. He was looking at the doorway, at Mrs. Westcliffe walking toward me, Armand Louis in a dapper tweed suit at her side.

I quickly checked the rest of the circle; none of the other girls seemed in a great hurry to leave. Most of them were watching either Armand or me, folding their smocks into squares, lingering around the hamper. Whispering.

The smocks were of rough cotton and tied in the back. I yanked at the bow of mine and felt it contract into a knot.

I yanked harder, swiveling back to my easel, closing my eyes as my fingers fumbled with the cloth.

I am invisible. Invisible. If I can’t see them, they can’t see me.

Surely they weren’t here for me. Surely Armand was here to visit Chloe. She was still standing right there beside me, practically licking her lips with anticipation. She’d removed her smock already and had it arranged elegantly over one arm.

I pulled at the knot again and heard threads begin to pop.

“Allow me, Miss Jones,” said Armand, right at my back.

There was no gracious way to refuse him. Not with Mrs. Westcliffe there, too.

I exhaled and dropped my arms. I stared at the lotus petals in my painting as the new small twists and tugs of Armand’s hands rocked me back and forth.

Jesse’s music began to reverberate somewhat more sharply than before.

“There,” Armand said, soft near my ear. “Nearly got it.”

“Most kind of you, my lord.” Mrs. Westcliffe’s voice was far more carrying. “Do you not agree, Miss Jones?”

Her tone said I’d better.

“Most kind,” I repeated. For some reason I felt him as a solid warmth behind me, behind all of me, even though only his knuckles made a gentle bumping against my spine.

How blasted long could it take to unravel a knot?

“Yes,” said Chloe unexpectedly. “Lord Armand is always a perfect gentleman, no matter who or what demands his attention.”

“There,” the gentleman said, and at last his hands fell away. The front of the smock sagged loose. I shrugged out of it as fast as I could, wadding it up into a ball.

“Excuse me.” I ducked a curtsy and began my escape to the hamper, but Mrs. Westcliffe cut me short.

“A moment, Miss Jones. We require your presence.”

I turned to face them. Armand was smiling his faint, cool smile. Mrs. Westcliffe looked as if she wished to fix me in some way. I raised a hand instinctively to my hair, trying to press it properly into place.

“You have the honor of being invited to tea at the manor house,” the headmistress said. “To formally meet His Grace.”

“Oh,” I said. “How marvelous.”

I’d rather have a tooth pulled out.

“Indeed. Lord Armand came himself to deliver the invitation.”

“Least I could I do,” said Armand. “It wasn’t far. This Saturday, if that’s all right.”

“Um …”

“I am certain Miss Jones will be pleased to cancel any other plans,” said Mrs. Westcliffe.

“This Saturday?” Unlike me, Chloe had not conceded an inch of ground. “Why, Mandy! That’s the day you promised we’d play lawn tennis.”

He cocked a brow at her, and I knew right then that she was lying and that she knew that he knew. She sent him a melting smile.

“Isn’t it, my lord?”

“I must have forgotten,” he said. “Well, but we cannot disappoint the duke, can we?”

“No, indeed,” interjected Mrs. Westcliffe.

“So I suppose you’ll have to come along to the tea instead, Chloe.”

“Very well. If you insist.”

He didn’t insist. He did, however, sweep her a very deep bow and then another to the headmistress. “And you, too, Mrs. Westcliffe. Naturally. The duke always remarks upon your excellent company.”

“Most kind,” she said again, and actually blushed.

Armand looked dead at me. There was that challenge behind his gaze, that one I’d first glimpsed at the train station.

“We find ourselves in harmony, then. I shall see you in a few days, Miss Jones.”

I tightened my fingers into the wad of the smock and forced my lips into an upward curve. He smiled back at me, that cold smile that said plainly he wasn’t duped for a moment.

I did not get a bow.

• • •


Jesse was at the hamper when I went to toss in the smock. Before I could, he took it from me, eyes cast downward, no words. Our fingers brushed beneath the cloth.

That fleeting glide of his skin against mine. The sensation of hardened calluses stroking me, tender and rough at once. The sweet, strong pleasure that spiked through me, brief as it was.

That had been on purpose. I was sure of it.