Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

She seemed to run out of air. Even in the voluminous robe, she looked smaller and more vulnerable than she ever had, though that might have been only a deception of the shadows.

“All right,” I said gently, and escorted her back to the door. “I’ll tell him.”

Tender creatures, these aristocrats. Who would have guessed?

...

I knew no other chambers at Tranquility but the ones I’d been in before. The parlor, the ballroom, the study. I figured Armand’s bedroom would be on the second floor, possibly the third. But it turned out it was on the fourth, a lone secluded chamber, the last before the wing ended in breezes and open space.

A rough wall of plywood had been put up to block the sudden conclusion of the house. A tarpaulin had been nailed over that; it looked streaked with moisture, probably from all the recent storms.

I smoked around the gaps between the plywood and Tranquility’s wall and found myself in one of those richly paneled hallways, with embossed strips of copper going green decorating the tops of both walls.

I hung in the air, obviously out of place. Had anyone emerged from the stairway at the other end of the corridor, they’d think there was a fire.

But no one came up. There was only one heartbeat on this level of the manor house, and it emanated from the one room with a closed door.

I thought about smoking through the keyhole or under the gap at the bottom, but it seemed, well, rude to show up like that. This was his home, not mine, and even though he’d had no qualms about barging into my bedroom uninvited, I was not him.

So I Turned back to girl in the hall, raised my fist, and knocked.

I heard him stirring. The knob began to turn. I grabbed it and held the door in place before he could open it more than a crack.

“Do you have a blanket or something?”

The knob released. He padded away, came back with a quilt that he thrust through the gap in the doorway. I wrapped myself up and went in.

Electric lights, not even gas. No soot, no flickering. I’d never get used to them.

Colored-glass chandeliers lit the room in pools of artificial glow. Newspaper pages scattered the floor beneath the windows, as if he’d been reading there for days and no one had bothered to come and pick them up. There was a rumpled bed with stiffly draped curtains, a few rugs, a desk holding empty wineglasses, and a fireplace—no fire—with a mantel of polished red stone. None of the furniture matched. It seemed as if they were pieces culled from other sections of the mansion, lumped together for convenience and nothing else.

Even so, it was a remarkably spare space, considering its size. The students’ suites at Iverson had more frippery than this.

Armand was staring at me, his hand still on the knob.

“I told you I’d come,” I said. Then, when he didn’t move: “You should close the door.”

He did. I wandered forward into the chamber, the quilt dragging behind me in an angled, weighted train.

I looked up, stepped out from beneath the buzz of a chandelier, and turned around to find him again. He hadn’t yet moved.

“I’ve a message for you from Lady Sophia.”

His face remained empty.

“She apologizes for not expressing her condolences properly to you today. She said to tell you that she’s sorry. That she liked your brother and she’ll miss him.”

“Sophia knew you were coming here? Tonight?”

“No. She thinks we’re lovers. She thought we’d steal away somehow to see each other soon.”

That seemed to wake him some. He took a step toward me, despair roughening his tone.

“Is that why you came?”

“No, my lord.” But since I didn’t have any answer beyond that, I went to his bed and sat upon its edge. I hooked my heels in place against the black-walnut frame and laced my fingers together in my lap. Then I waited.

It took him about two minutes to come over. He climbed up beside me, not touching, and sat with his shoulders slumped. He smelled of sandalwood aftershave and wine.

“I guess you’ll have to be a sodding duke now,” I tried—clumsy, tasteless, and he only winced.

“Sorry.” I covered his hand with mine. “That was dumb.”

“No, you’re right. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been stewing about it. Me and Reggie both. I think it’s safe to say that this isn’t remotely what either of us wanted.”

“I’m sure you’ll do swimmingly.”

“Bugger that,” he said, tired. “And bugger Aubrey, too. I wish I could say that to his face, even if he did go down a hero in a dogfight. Tell him what an ass he is for dying. For leaving me here like this.”

“I know.”

His hand twisted around until it covered mine.

“Isn’t it peculiar, Eleanore,” he said, not making it a question. “I know that you know.” He sighed. “They couldn’t even scrape together enough of his body to return it to us. They had to identify the plane by its numbers. What they could see of the numbers. All the rest of it—all of him —burned up.”

I’d never suffered another’s bereavement before. I’d gone through the steps of my own, of course, but only in private moments, tears in pillows or hidden in the falling rain. This was something very new and different to me: Armand’s unfiltered grief, so bare and so deep.

So naturally my instinct was to deflect it.

“How is your father?”

Armand squeezed his eyes closed. “You saw him. Looks splendid, doesn’t he? The butler can’t uncork the bottles of claret fast enough.”

I glanced over at the wineglasses on the desk but said only, “Maybe what he needs is you nearby. You know, just being around him more. That might help.”

“He can’t even look me in the face. Didn’t you catch that? It’s like if he looks at me, he sees only his dead son, not his live one. It fills him with hate.”

“I’m sure it’s not—”

“He’s getting in guns,” Armand said. “Crates and crates of guns. He’s always been a collector. He and some of his blokes, they even formed a hunting club. But this is something different. This is … more. Today it was machine guns.”

I tipped my head. “What’s that?”

“They’re quite modern.” He scratched at his shoulder through his shirt and straightened some. “They use bullets on a belt that’s fed into a drum. It’s thoroughly—” He noticed my face. “They fire a lot of bullets very, very quickly. Quicker than anything else.”

I looked up and around the bedroom, the mismatched furniture, the weirdly firm light. “Why? What could you hunt with those? What could they have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “That’s what’s so unnerving.”

I rubbed a hand to my forehead, feeling an ache beginning to build behind my skull. “Armand.”

His eyes went to mine.

I had to say this carefully; I had no wish to add to his despair, but I couldn’t let it go. “Do you think … do you suppose it’s possible that your father might … mean to do you any harm?”

But I’d actually made him smile. A real one, too, even if it came acerbic and thin. “With a pair of Vickers? Not unless he means to mount them in the hallway and spray me with bullets when I’m not paying attention. Seems like rather a spot of work for him. Surely even an unwelcome heir is better than none.”

I returned his smile as I pulled away my hand. “I think we need to teach you how to Turn to smoke, just in case. It’s a handy thing to be able to vanish in a hurry.”

His smile widened, but there was no humor left to it. “Handy.” He fell back against the blankets of the bed, his eyes gone shiny and hard. “If I could vanish into smoke, Eleanore, I’d leave this place and never return. That’s a promise.”