The Deepest Night

I hadn’t thought of where to go from there. No doubt there was a downstairs to Tranquility, but I had no notion of how to get there or even if there was going to be such a thing as a therapy room.

I was just walking, Armand rigid at my side, and my feet took us to the one other place I really recognized: the front parlor, where there was a piano.

Not an ordinary upright piano, either, but a shiny black grand piano, practically big as a pond, with a bench long enough for two. I led him to it, waited until he sat, and then took my place beside him.

I didn’t speak, and neither did he. Instead, my fingers touched the keys, and the music began to flow.

The duke had done up the parlor entirely in black and white. Floors, walls, furniture, drapes. It was probably the only reason the piano was there, fitting so neatly into his scheme, but as far as I was concerned, the piano was the only thing in the whole chamber that made any sense. Everything else was a black-and-white mess.

I closed my eyes to block it out and concentrated on the melody that drifted around us both, gentle and sweet, languid as a summer stream. I thought perhaps it belonged to the opal in Armand’s stickpin.

Minutes passed. No one else came in.

“How do you do that?” he asked at last, his voice barely rising above the notes.

“I listen.” And then, a while later: “Can’t you do it?”

He shifted, not quite a shrug. “I don’t think so.”

“Have you ever tried?”

“No.”

I stopped. “Here. Put your hands like this. That’s it, right there. Now, listen to the melody. Let it surround you. It’s lovely, isn’t it? Do you hear it?”

He gave a short nod.

“So. Play.”

He stared down at the keys, then tried a few tentative notes—the wrong ones.

“No, like this.”

I traced out half a bar, but he didn’t try to copy it. He didn’t move at all, in fact, just kept staring down at the keyboard.

“Okay, then. Hands up again, like I showed you.”

I rested my palms over the backs of his, our fingers aligned. I felt that slight, snapping shock that sometimes happened when we touched; he took a swifter breath, so I knew he felt it, too.

“Play,” I whispered, and pressed my fingers down, showing him the way.

Slowly, haltingly, we caught the easiest snippets of the song.

“Lieutenant Clayworth saw my dragon eyes,” I murmured, without looking away from our work. “I couldn’t help it.”

“Dragon eyes,” he echoed, emotionless.

“When they flash. Everything lit up.”

“I’ve seen it.”

We kept playing. We weren’t getting any better.

“And after that, he hared off. But I think it’ll be fine. After all, if he says anything about it, who’s going to believe him?”

“Only a lunatic,” answered Armand gravely.

I shot him a glance. He was smiling a little.

“Precisely.” I smiled back. “But—Armand. I think you should be prepared for him to … that is, he’s really not the sort of fellow who …” I shook my head, back to stumbling over my words, searching for the ones least likely to wound. Eventually I had to settle for the same thing I’d told him before. “He is unworthy of you.”

“Lora, if and when I see Laurence again, you may be confident that if his nose isn’t broken now, it’s going to be.”

“Excellent,” I said, and drew my hands away.

He tried it on his own for a few minutes longer, blundering along, before giving up.

“I’m no good at this.”

I let out a laugh. “You’re really not.”

And then we were laughing together, hushed and real, like we were thieves who’d gotten away with stealing something special. When it ended we were leaning against each other, our faces inches apart. All those sparks, the danger and darkness, had lifted from his eyes; everything was blue and bright once more.

The last tickle of laughter died away in my throat.

Armand said my name. He lifted a hand to my hair, cupping the nape of my neck.

“Eleanore,” he whispered again, tilting his head to mine, his lips skimming past my cheek, his breath in my ear. “I’d wait forever for you, you know. If it mattered. If you’d care.”

“I do care,” I whispered back, miserable.

His fingers tightened, warm and firm. “No, you don’t. Not the way I mean. Not yet.”

He pressed a kiss to my hair, then got up and left, taking all the heat of the room and the final floating notes of the opal song with him.

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