Hastings. If I looked at Hastings, stooped over his cane, I began drowning in a shame so deep and profound it made me tremble, and Tilbury would eye me uneasily and pat me on the arm.
It was my injured arm, too. It was bandaged up, but you couldn’t see the bandages beneath the peacoat, so he didn’t know.
Mrs. Westcliffe wouldn’t glance at me at all. I think she no longer knew quite what to make of me. Was I an accidental heroine, as Armand had publically insisted, or was I something much different: a conniving slum girl who had taken advantage of her beloved Reginald’s weakness and largesse?
There had been no disguising what the duke had done that night, or what he’d meant to do. Despite our initial intent to spirit him away and cover the whole thing over with darkness and lies, two burning dirigibles—visible for miles along the coast, I’d heard—were impossible to disguise. They’d woken everyone in the castle, everyone in the village, likely every single person all the way to Bournemouth. Woken them right up to the war.
And then we had been found, Armand and Jesse and me, there on that beach of broken stones.
And the duke had been found, because two minor children suffering bullet wounds, one of them dead, could not be explained away with any of the dubious, unsteady excuses that had come to me at the time.
Eventually, even the German I’d saved had been found. I’d left him in a cove of brutal surf and steep cliffs on every side. I suppose he could have tried to swim for it—I would have—but he didn’t. By the next afternoon, a shepherd boy had heard his shouts and he’d been hauled up the cliffs and confined to an empty pigeon house, the sole survivor of his doomed mission.
Gone cracked, though, from the ordeal. Ranting in perfect English about dragons and a young woman who could fly.
No one believed him. A few people swore the airships had suffered lightning strikes, although the night had seemed so clear. A few more vowed they’d spotted them off the bluffs and fired at them, and that had brought them down.
Whatever it had been, everyone seemed certain of two things. It had not been a dragon, and it had not been the poor, tormented Duke of Idylling.
We’d had to give him up. To his credit, Armand had led the authorities straight to him, and apparently in the nick of time, too, as he’d been coming ’round. So no one else got shot.
I was in the hands of the local physician by then, who turned out to be the bespectacled man from the birthday party, the one chatting up Miss Swanston. He didn’t seem to mind that I’d fallen mute, just like I’d been as a child. Other people talked and talked at me, but I had nothing to say.
Let silver-tongued Mandy come up with his crafty mesh of facts and fabrications. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t react, not even when the bullet was fished from my arm.
I was still back on that beach, you see. I couldn’t leave it. I couldn’t leave Jesse.
Over the next few days, Sophia had visited enough times that I knew all the school gossip, which included a variety of tales: That Jesse and I had been lovers, and the duke had discovered us on the roof. That Armand and Jesse had been lovers, and I had been jealous enough to inform the duke. That Jesse and Armand and I had been lovers, and the duke had tried to murder us all.…
Armand’s official story was this:
He had discovered what his father intended that night and had raced to the castle to stop him. By pure chance he’d come across Jesse walking the grounds and had enlisted his help. He’d thought, Armand had explained bleakly to Mrs. Westcliffe when they were alone, that he could trust Holms. That perhaps there’d be a chance to hush it all up still, allow the family to deal with the situation privately. And that—although he was deeply mortified to admit it now—even if Holms had wanted to tell, he would be unable. Mute, you know. Simple.
But Holms had proven stalwart and valiant. When Miss Jones had shown up to discover them in the castle hallway, because she’d heard a suspicious noise and had feared for her schoolchums’ safety, they’d had to bring her along. She’d wanted to run straight to the headmistress, of course, but Armand had persuaded her not