before Sunday tea and after church, when Iverson’s genteel young ladies tended to wander off in their individual clusters to genteelly shred the characters of anyone beyond their circle.
Each year had claimed its own location, I’d learned. The older girls usually headed outdoors to brave the tame wilderness—and relative privacy—of the gardens, while the younger ones liked to remain ensconced safely inside, closer to the promise of biscuits and cake. On days such as today, however, all the girls in all the years recognized that they were made of spun sugar: Rain would surely melt them into puddles. Everyone was forced indoors.
The front parlor was out-of-bounds until four, so they’d draped themselves throughout the other common rooms instead. As I passed the library, I glimpsed Chloe and Sophia standing and chatting by the fire with every evidence of civility. But Sophia still had her cat’s smile, and Chloe’s cheeks were still red.
Perhaps it wasn’t so unpleasant to be without a family, after all.
I moved past the doorway without either of them noticing.
Jesse wasn’t with any of the other girls, anyway. He wasn’t in any part of the castle that I’d yet explored. The more I walked, the more I understood that even though I had gone all the way down to the ground floor, he was still below me somewhere, in the bowels of the keep.
I didn’t think students were allowed below the main floor. I knew the kitchens were there, as were most of the servants’ quarters; the professors and Mrs. Westcliffe had their own aboveground wing on the other side of the castle. No one had ever specifically told me not to go below stairs, however—probably because a true Iverson girl would never, ever dream of mingling with the help.
I could always say I’d gotten lost. The pillars of the world would hardly collapse. The sky would not shatter. I was barely a hairbreadth away from being the help myself.
The only entrance to the lower level I knew of was down at the far end of the main hallway. I lurked by the sole painting there, gazing up in apparent fascination at the portrait of a man in a tatty fur coat with what seemed to be a dead weasel wrapped around his head. He stared back at me with a cold smile I recognized very well.
Olin, read the little plate screwed into the frame, 5th dk Idylling.
Like brown hair and lunacy, it seemed hauteur was passed down the family line. At least the current duke was a finer dresser.
A pair of maids holding spent tapers swished past. The servants’ door opened; the maids went through; light and voices and the blue-smoke sting of lit cigarettes boiled up into the hall until the door shut behind them, and it was just me and the dead-weasel duke once more.
Jesse’s song sparkled louder, so beautiful and wanting, it felt like an ache in my bones.
Come, love.
I glanced up and down the passageway: I was alone. I inched toward the door and put my hand on the latch.
“No, not that way,” murmured Jesse, close enough that I felt his breath on my temple.
Chapter 16
“A francba!”
I jumped back, smacking the wall, and knocked into the portrait, which clattered heavily and began to tilt. Jesse, very near and very swift, reached out and steadied us both, one hand on the frame and the other on my shoulder.
He was a genie, a wizard, a boy who’d materialized from nothing but cigarette smoke and shadows, because he had not been there a second ago.
“All right, Lora?” He waited for my nod, then used both hands to straighten the painting. “What did you just say?”
“What?” My heart was still pounding. I’d flattened a palm over it, pressing back the fright.
“Just now. You said something in a foreign language.”
“No, I didn’t. Did I?” I dropped my hand. “Where did you come from?”
Jesse stepped back from the duke and his disturbing attire—properly aligned once more, still smiling down at us bloody cold—and faced me, too tall and real and solid to have simply appeared from thin air.
“You’ll find this castle keeps many secrets, some ancient, some not.” His fingers clasped mine, instant warmth. “This is one of the oldest ones. I’ll show you.”
He stepped back again, and again, pulling me with him all the way to the wall, only the wall wasn’t there any longer. A gaping black space was where there should have been stone, where there surely had been stone when I’d first crept down this