I swallowed again and looked helplessly at the far wall. I heard music still, but it was so dim. My pounding heart was so much louder.
“I feel a little ill,” I whispered.
“Try,” he ordered, dropping his hand.
Please, I thought, a plea to the ballroom, to anyone, anything. Please, please help me.
I pressed a key, but it was the wrong one. I closed my eyes and listened harder, waiting, breathing through my mouth. Someone—Mittie, said the fiend, bloody fishwife Mittie—let out a stifled snort.
My index finger found a new note, one of the ebonies. That one was right.
Soon it was happening again. I had to strain for some of it, and this song seemed sadder than the first, more ethereal. But when it finished I opened my eyes and there was my piano instructor staring down at the floor instead of at me, and I would have sworn there was a gloss of tears behind his spectacles.
“Brava,” he said to the floor, then lifted his head and made it louder, so that everyone heard. “Brava.”
I sat back on the bench and folded my hands over my stomach. The piano gleamed huge and black and white in front of me, a grinning, separate thing once more, an opportunity I’d barely begun to comprehend.
• • •
A jungle existed within the castle. It was an upper-crust sort of jungle, concocted entirely by upper-crust imaginations—and funds. There were no wild, messy monkeys or screaming macaws, no piranha in sight but for my classmates. Even the vines clinging to their lattices seemed too polite to stretch their tendrils beyond their allotted space.
But there were trees in oversize bronze pots: palms spreading fronds in wide, emerald fans; pomegranates and mangoes and figs, all jeweled with luscious fruit. Orchids opened fleshy petals of magenta and saffron from hanging baskets and urns. Statues stared from unexpected corners. Bamboo grew in a tended thicket, leaves sighing each time someone walked past.
A pond filled with koi and lotus plants marked the center of the jungle world, an octagon of liquid hemmed with stone. Orange and red fish, purple flowers, dark waters. A domed glass ceiling shone like a pearl overhead.
This was the castle conservatory. It was a more recent addition to Iverson, only about eighty years old, according to our teacher, Miss Swanston.
“And the light,” she said, lifting her cupped hands upward in benediction to the dome. “The light, children. We could not ask for more.”
I thought privately that we could. We could ask for a window to be opened, for instance, to release some of the heavy air that moistened every bit of my skin and stank faintly like rotting compost.
Lovely hushed music played from within the bamboo, music I knew no one else heard. Jesse was part of the jungle, as well, moving leisurely through the stalks, trimming errant stems. And if I’d had the power to ask for more of anything, really, it wouldn’t have been for an open window. It would have been for more of him. For him to come out from the thicket, so that I could see his face.
But he didn’t.
Art instruction was a combined class, meaning that two separate years of girls took it at once. There were twenty of us standing before our easels today, circling the pond. Since my class had been combined with the year ahead, one of the other nineteen students was Chloe Pemington.
She managed to ignore me magnificently. I thought Sophia might take a lesson from her. I was a gnat, a speck, an absolute nothing that required no greeting, no eye contact. Not even a sidelong sniff.
I simply did not exist, and I was standing right beside her.
I squared my shoulders and tried to do as good a job shutting out the rustling of the bamboo. Another older girl stood at my other side; I knew I existed to her, because she kept sneaking looks at my painting.
Hers, I noticed, literally dripped with color. Our assignment was to depict the lotus blossoms. Our medium was watercolor. There would be no undoing any mistakes.
“Good, good.” Miss Swanston was walking from girl to girl. “Excellent use of perspective, Sophia. Most ingenious. Fine shadow work, Florence. Perhaps a touch more … there. Yes. Beatrice. What is that? A fish? I see.”
Jesse moved nearer. Beautiful music, alluring music, sifting through green leaves.
I was listening to it despite myself, drawing languid brushstrokes along the section of my painting that was the surface of the water.