Warrens of elaborately paneled hallways led to nowhere. Luxurious rooms of pressed copper and imported wood were left dusty and half complete. Sometimes there was a roof overhead, sometimes only the sky. A gorgeous grand staircase in the atrium curved sinuously up the wall before ending in open space. The very last step would drop you like a stone two floors down.
As we motored up the drive, I noticed that the entire south wing tapered off in what looked like the middle of a window, tarps covering the roof and walls, a rubble of bricks and planks exposed to the elements, already dissolving in the salty wind. A solitary old man was stooped low over a retaining wall, slowly troweling mortar along a section at the top.
“Astonishing, isn’t it?” Mrs. Westcliffe was my companion in the chauffeured automobile the duke had sent for us, both of us hanging on for dear life to the straps fixed to the doors.
“Very,” I replied.
Perhaps it was the silken dress on my body or the golden roses at my shoulder, but I had determined that I was going to be the most perfect, delightful charity student the duke had ever encountered. I was going to stand correctly, speak correctly, smile correctly, listen attentively. I was going to make him positively reel with my perfection, so I added another “Very,” with a trace more of awe. Mrs. Westcliffe granted me a glance of approval.
“The duke designed it himself, every corner. When completed, Tranquility will feature some of the most modern and superb workmanship in the kingdom. Of course, with this dreadful war dragging on, finding enough laborers to finish it all has become something of a chore.”
I wanted to ask about the fourteen years before that, but today I was the perfect charity student. So I merely nodded in sympathy.
How do you do, Your Grace? So sorry to hear about your lack of peasant workers. What a rather large bother this war with the kaiser has turned out to be!
A butler stood at the front doors to welcome us. Our little party from Iverson had taken up two of the duke’s automobiles; Chloe and two of her friends had crowded into the second.
Apparently, when Armand had invited her to tea to make up for her fictitious game of lawn tennis, she’d taken it to mean she could bring along the other fictitious players. And neither of them, I noticed, was nearly as pretty as she. Not by half. One had a weak chin, and the other badly frizzed hair and a red runny nose.
Clever Chloe.
We all five stepped out of the autos and into a brisk spring wind. The girl with the bad hair gave a squeal as her dress flipped up, revealing her knees. She slapped it down again as if she were smashing a bug with both hands, still squealing.
“Come, ladies.” Mrs. Westcliffe brooked no such nonsense from her own garments. Her skirts were firmly in hand as she led the way up the stairs into the house.
I was the last one in. I paused for a moment to look back at the untilled field before the mansion, the crushed-shell drive and the azure sky. Past the slope of the field and a notched break of trees, the channel glinted, pebbles of light broken only by the shadow island that was the duke’s former home, and now my own.
“Miss?” The butler was waiting, watching me with a patience that might have disguised something deeper. Like pity.
I scurried inside.
Tea was to be held in one of the few chambers that had been fully completed. It wasn’t quite a parlor, at least not in the traditional sense. It resembled more an auditorium. There was no stage, but I was sure entire theatrical productions could take place within its walls. It was that huge.
And everything—everything—was black and white.
The marble checkered floor. The silk-papered walls. Clusters of tables and chairs of every size and shape, all black woods and spotless white velvets.
Black-and-white rugs. Black-and-white drapery.
A black grand piano stood ponderously in the middle of it all, a circle of chairs surrounding it like a noose.
Uh-oh.
And there were other people here, as well, about two dozen men and women standing in pockets and speaking in small, civilized voices. I saw no sunburned arms or faces, so they might have been the local gentry. Formal suits and starched-lace dresses and ostrich plumes in the ladies’ hair; everyone serious, no one smiling.