Authors: Shana Abe
Chapter 13
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.
Not to laugh at them.
The boy wasn’t really laughing, but the guards didn’t care. He was so young, probably only around eight. Maybe he hadn’t been at the Institute long enough to learn the rules, but anyway, one of the guards made a sudden movement and there was the sound of snapping twigs and the boy screamed, because the man had broken three of his ribs.
Three. I remembered that, because three weeks later I saw that boy again, but on a stretcher in the hall. They’d pulled a sheet over him but it wasn’t long enough to cover his face, and I’d crept close enough to confirm that he was slack and dead, and there were maggots crawling all along the sores around his mouth. Crawling out from the black-toothed, swollen-tongued
inside
of his mouth.
Little white wormy squirmy—
“Nooo,” Gavin wailed as I staggered back a few paces. Then, to my horror, he spotted me between the doctor and one of the soldiers. He held my eyes and cried out, “Miss! Miss! For God’s sake, help me, please, please, get them off!”
I shook my head, unable to look away, unable to say
Sorry, I’m so sorry
or to even part my lips at all, because if I did I was certain I was going to start screaming high and squeaky thin like that boy. The maggots writhed and the stench from the plaster shimmered up before me, bending the air into swirly shapes.
I was about to faint.
Someone new crossed in front of me. In the slow, syrupy suspension of the moment, she looked exactly like Chloe Pemington.
Whoever it was, she approached the bed and blocked my view. A crashing noise reached me from a distance; I had dropped the plaster, spattering maggots and putrefied skin and pus on us both.
A hand grasped my elbow. I was guided backward, one step, two, three, until I was across the room, near enough to the main doors that a blast of fresh air hit me, washing away the worst of the stench.
I sucked it in—
don’t faint do not faint do
not
faint
—battling the big black spots in my vision until they gradually receded into pinpricks.
“I will admit I thought you had asked Lord Armand to accept you here as a way to avoid the orphanage,” said the person holding my elbow. It was Mrs. Westcliffe, as fresh and smart as if she’d just stepped out from an audience with the king, maroon silk and matched pearls, not a hair out of place.
I licked my lips and swallowed hard, testing myself, but it seemed the danger of heaving had passed, too.
“Yes,” I rasped. “I know.”
“But now, Eleanore … now that I see this …”
All on their own, my lips glued shut again; I could not look at her. I glared up at the ceiling, down at my dress—my white nurse’s dress, as clean and new as anything I’d ever owned—and took in the spray of Gavin Raikes’ flesh across its front.
It seemed all the maggots had fallen off.
Mrs. Westcliffe’s voice gentled. “Child, it’s not too late. You need not stay.”
“No, I do. I promised I would.”
“A noble promise, indeed. But no one will think ill of you for deciding this is more than you bargained for.”
I sucked in another lungful of air. “I’m staying.”
“Very well. As you can see, at least you’ll have company. It seems Lady Chloe and Lady Sophia were inspired by your example. Both have volunteered to become nurses at Tranquility for the summer, too.”
I stared. Good heavens, it
was
Chloe, beautiful as ever, holding Gavin’s hand and murmuring something mollifying as the doctor did his work. Sophia looked on with her arms hugged across her chest, hanging back from the crowd as I had done.
“Since I was on my way here anyway, I offered to escort them. Yet this is my final day in Wessex until the autumn comes. Miss Jones, I want you to know that I sincerely wish you well. And I hope you know what you’re doing.”
I
definitely, definitely don’t.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Perhaps we’ll meet again,” Westcliffe said, and gave my elbow one last squeeze before moving off.
“This is very hard, I know,” I heard Chloe saying. “But you’re a good man, a strong man. You’re going to be fine. Look at me, now. You’re going to be fine.”
“Oh God, oh God, I wish I were dead. I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
“No, of course not,” lied Lady Chloe, and smiled.
Chapter 14
Sophia was here now.
Chloe
was here now.
So, naturally, dinner became an exercise in exquisitely mannered persecution.
For evening meals the dining chamber was aglow with candlelight, twelve silver, twisty-armed candelabras stationed in a row down the center of the table, twelve more reflected back at us from the shiny black windows, countless dancing bright flames. There were vases of flowers dotting the table as well, along with salt cellars and frilled glass dishes holding rainbows of perfectly arranged hard, round candies that I was dying to taste but knew better than to try. They seemed like someone’s idea of cheerful decoration.
At Iverson, Sophia had been at the far end of our table and her stepsister at another table entirely. But tonight Sophia sat directly across from me and Chloe was just two chairs to my left, a hapless young army fellow stuck between us. It was clear by the time the soup was served she’d already fixed stars in his eyes.
To my right was yet another officer, but silver-haired and mustachioed, who’d granted me a nod and a grunt before getting down to the business of eating.
Mrs. Westcliffe would not have approved of dining sans conversation, but I did. If only I could as easily avoid Sophia’s knowing gaze, and Chloe’s light, venomous chatter, which kept floating my way.
“ … so happy to be here, of course! To do my part. It’s the least one might expect of a girl in my position. After all, you boys are doing all the
real
work. Only a fool would imagine that a mere summer of volunteer nursing would compare to
your
sacrifice.”
“Er,” said the man.
“But I told Mamá I simply
had
to do
something
. I simply
couldn’t
spend the summer acting as if everything was normal. You know, attending dances and dinner parties and all those silly things. So I told her I was coming here to help, and no argument about it, if you please!”
“That’s awfully kind of you, my lady.”
“Oh, it’s nothing! Nothing at all! And naturally my little sister had to come along, too. She’s so
adorable
, simply has to follow wherever I go! Isn’t that
adorable
?”
“Quite,” replied the man, practically melting in his chair.
“But both of us followed Eleanore,” pointed out Sophia, smiling with exaggerated benevolence over her sauced turbot. “And that’s even more adorable, don’t you think?”
“Who?” said the fellow.
I concentrated on my own turbot, taking apart the fish flake by flake with my fork.
Chloe murmured something, and the army man said, “Oh!” and shifted and darted me a look.
“ … rather a wretched case, really.” She slanted closer to the man, ensuring that neither of us would miss a word. “I heard she had nowhere else to go. Poor dear, she’s just the most piteous creature. A charity girl, you know. It was either here or the streets for her.”
“A shame,” said the man.
Chloe shook her head sadly. “And she’s just so
hopeless
, you know? Of course, I don’t mean that in an unkind way!”
“Of course not!”
“It’s just … well, did you see what happened today? When I first arrived?”
“No.”
“She made a
huge
mess of things in the induction room. Couldn’t listen to anyone, couldn’t follow orders. Even at school, she was always the girl who couldn’t manage to get anything right.”
“There’s always someone like that around,” whispered the man conspiratorially.
“True,” Chloe agreed, pouty and ravishing, batting her comely brown lashes. “There’s always someone.”
I leaned out of my chair, pried loose one of the decorative hard candies from its place, and popped it in my mouth.
It tasted a lot less like sugar and a lot more like salt, but I kept eating it. It was either that or chuck it at Chloe.
Across the table, Sophia only smiled.
He watched her at dinner.
He watched her all the time, he supposed, but dinner was easiest, because they were both stationary at the table, trapped for five full courses at least, and even though he could no longer seat her at his side—the chief nurse now had that honor; Lottie Clayworth, who seemed thoroughly happy to remain at Tranquility for the duration of the war, as long as she got to complain about it, had his other elbow—anyway, even though he could no longer have her next to him, Lora was still at the table, which was good enough.
So he could watch her. Providing he was stealthy about it, he could do it for minutes at a time.
Armand had perfected his stealth years ago. He knew all the tricks: how to keep his lashes down but his gaze up; how to smile without smiling; how to listen without reacting. How to walk without sound, to embrace the shadows. He even knew the trickiest trick of them all: how to shine in public so brightly no one noticed what he was really about, because all they saw was dazzle.
He was especially good at that.
Every evening, Armand and the officers and doctors and nurses gathered at the table to enjoy Cook’s best efforts. The conversation tended to be vague and genial and unequivocally impersonal. Charts, medicines, village life. Most of the men balked at discussing anything more serious with the women around. Had Mandy nothing else to consider, he’d be bored out of his skull.
But he had
her
, just seven chairs down to his left. Eleanore Jones, who ate with such a tension about her he wondered that she didn’t crack apart into pieces, and even that was fascinating. Head down, unspeaking, quick small bites. Like someone was always about to snatch away her plate.
He’d noticed how she winced at the electrical lights, so he’d banished them from the meals, relying upon candles instead. He’d told the colonel in charge of the hospital that he thought it best if they reserved the generator oil for the soldiers’ needs, which got him another
Dashed
good
thinking, old chap
from the military machine.
But Armand was a charlatan, a dazzler. The soldiers could have all the oil; he didn’t care. He’d wanted the candles for
her
. Because she winced at the electrical lights. Because when they were on, she wouldn’t look at them or walk beneath them.
And because, for some reason, that hurt him. The lights themselves never hurt him—he had no notion why they bothered her—but watching her having to be so careful, watching her eat like a starved dog on a chain, watching her coiled so tight in her chair and avoiding the eyes of everyone around her, finishing first, waiting without words, never asking for more—
It hurt him. It infuriated him. He wanted her to have everything she ever wanted, and he wanted to be the one to give it to her. And how delightfully ironic, how ridiculously sidesplitting it was that the only thing she really wanted was something—someone—Armand could not give.
it
is
to
you
now,
Jesse had told him, that first night she’d come to stay at Tranquility.
i
give
to
you
her
earthly
cares, her beating heart and mortal life. she’s rich with magic, rich with possibilities. be careful, louis. protect her. she’s more fragile than she looks.
Right,
he’d thought.
Thanks
for
that, you bloody damned bastard. She looks about as sturdy as a dandelion tuft, so you’re bloody reassuring.
Then again, Armand heard talking stars now. So nothing was exactly reassuring.
From her place down the table, Chloe released a musical laugh. Sophia echoed it, sharper. They sat up straight and ate only what they should, smiling and chatting, practicing their English-rose charm. He knew from experience that Chloe would have half the men in love with her by dessert, and those she didn’t manage to ensnare, Sophia would scoop up in the following days. They were well matched in their mutual hatred: both attractive in their different ways, both witty, both relentless.
Yet when he found his gaze drifting to them now, all they inspired in him was a vague sense of weariness. He couldn’t help but think there wasn’t anything genuinely interesting about either of them. He’d known girls like them forever and ever.
The secret dragon at his table took her final bite of salad and glanced up and around, candlelight tangled pink in her hair, gold along her lashes. He watched her tighten into her silent coil, still and taut until the next course was served, then bend her head and begin again.
I smoked back to him that night, and this time I didn’t hesitate to shake him awake.
“We’ve got to work on a plan to get Aubrey,” I said as soon as his eyes snapped open. “I can’t stay here and be a nurse.”
Armand’s hand reached up and covered mine, pressing my palm to his shoulder.
“All right,” he said.
We met just after dawn at the swimming bath. I thought it’d be belowground (even the term “swimming bath” made me think of dank, moldy places), but it wasn’t. It was located at the back of the mansion, up against one of the unfinished wings. I’d glimpsed it from the air and thought it a hothouse, because it was long and rectangular and, like Prince Albert’s famed Crystal Palace, composed almost entirely of glass. Tall glass walls, peaked glass roof. A glistening sparkler set upon the emerald lawn.
Perhaps someone else had considered it a hothouse as well. Inside there were palm trees in elaborately enameled Chinese pots, and some sort of fleshy, flowering vine crawling up stakes secured in all four corners. The air was moist with the scent of plants and disinfectant and loam—a considerable improvement over the meat smell any day.
The light around us bloomed lustrous soft, colored with the new day. Condensation from the bath formed a thousand crystal tears that trickled slowly down the walls.
“Ready?” Armand asked. He was in his bathing costume, standing upon the first tiled step that led down into the blue-green pool.
No, I wasn’t. But I shrugged out of my robe anyway, approaching the steps.
I’d never swum in the ocean. I’d never had the luxury of a hot bath. Even at Iverson we washed ourselves with sponges, because that’s what ladies did.
Yet thanks to Moor Gate, I had nearly drowned too many times to count.
I thought of Jesse in my dream, telling me about fate. I thought of Aubrey, who was suffering, and how endless the Channel looked from Iverson, slippery chopped water that went on and on and on, a skin over bottomless depths.
“You remember how to swim?” I asked Armand, which was dumb, because of course he did.
“Yes,” he said, holding out a hand to me.
Armand’s bathing costume consisted of a skintight black tunic that stopped at his shoulders and midthigh. It was the least amount of clothing I’d ever seen on him. On anyone.
My costume was similar, but red with white stripes and a belt above bloomers and a short ruffled skirt. I looked like a stick of peppermint candy. It was all Armand had been able to find in storage, a forgotten leftover from someone’s long-ago summer visit.
Fashions changed, but even so. I could not imagine the woman who’d first spotted this rig in a shop and thought,
I’ll look stunning in that!
“Right,” I said, steeling myself. “Let’s get this over with.”
I walked forward, took his hand. His fingers closed over mine.
I touched one foot to the water and jerked it back again.
“You said it was heated!”
“It is,” he soothed. “It feels a bit brisk now, I admit, but you’ll get used to it. Trust me.”
I lowered my foot back into the water, fighting the goose bumps that raced up my skin. I held his hand hard and brought my other foot in. The water sloshed up to my shins, and I stifled a shriek.
Heated water should be warm, and this wasn’t anything close. Only Armand’s hand felt warm, and I fancied that was just because the rest of me had gone so cold.
“Come on,” he coaxed, and took me down another step, and then another one.
Ice water to my thighs, my hips, chilling me in places I refused to consider. My feet halted in place.
“Who’d have thought,” Mandy said, laughing, “that a girl bold enough to take on the Huns themselves would be so frightened of a little water?”
“I’m not frightened,” I bit out. “I am freezing.”
“Sorry, waif. Only describing what I see.”
“I am
not
frightened.”
To prove it I took another big step—too big. My foot skidded off the tiles and I lost my balance and plunged all the way into the pool. Water flooded up my nose, into my mouth, my eyes and ears.
Armand yanked me upright, still laughing as I sputtered.
“Oh, God,” I said, my teeth chattering, my body trembling, my hair fat dripping ropes down my face. “Oh, crikey. Crikey!”
Smooth as satin, he glided in front of me and took me in his arms. He pressed me to his chest and kept me there, both of us bobbing in place.
Water to my shoulders, neck. Shoulders. Soft lapping water, the steadily brightening light. His arms around me. My cheek above his heart.
Mandy wasn’t laughing any longer.
I became abruptly, acutely aware of my breathing. Of his. Of how my own arms had stolen around his waist.
Of how wherever we touched, I was no longer cold at all.
I felt his hand shift, his fingers weaving though the floating mass of my hair. His touch along my shoulder blade, satin again … but it brought back the shivers.
“Bad news,” he whispered, not letting go.
“What?” Was that my voice? It sounded so reedy.
“I’m afraid this is the warmer end of the pool.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out mostly choked. He pulled me closer.
“Lora—”
“My, my,” said someone behind us. “You
do
realize the walls are made of glass, don’t you?”
We broke apart at once. I ended up on the deeper side; Armand had to pull me back until I could stand without the water smacking me in the face.
“Good morning, Sophia,” he said evenly. “What a surprise to see you up and about so damned early.”