The Deepest Night

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.