It was easier to breathe away from the crowded courtyard. As I entered the ballroom, the music from the orchestra dimmed from strident to agreeable, and the peculiar aroma of banquet mixed with ladies’ perfume gradually faded in my wake. But the ballroom was as empty as the gardens were full; obviously the guests were supposed to remain out there. The only other people in the chamber besides me were a pair of footmen stationed by the main doors, perhaps to ensure no one got inside.
The best way to publicly succeed at anything forbidden is to seem as if you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Especially if you don’t. Don’t stop, don’t hesitate, and don’t look back. I glided past the footmen into the main hallway with my chin up and my expression bored, an air I’d seen nearly every girl at the school assume whenever someone of a lower station was near.
Of course you must let me pass; clearly I’m a lady; I belong in satin and mansions and I know where I’m going and I definitely, definitely, won’t be filching the silverware.
Like the ballroom, the hallway seemed deserted. It stretched long and mysterious in either direction, far darker than the rest of the house; all the electric lights had been set to low. When I passed directly beneath one of their dangling glass domes, a humming drone swarmed through my head so nastily that, after that, I sidled around them.
A runner of blue and mottled olive, rich and plush, absorbed my steps. Paintings, huge and framed in filigreed wood. Discarded scaffolding, bare frames of lumber and metal holding up nothing but air. Splintery pinewood crates, most unopened but a few showing their stuffings of straw and what might have been antique firearms.
And—voices behind me. Adult voices, male, subdued, discussing something about Americans and naval blockades.
I had my hand at once on the knob of the nearest door. By the time the duke and his companion passed by, I was well hidden in the shadows of what looked to be a study—a very masculine study, with panels of mahogany and massive leather furniture and a portrait above the fireplace of Himself with a family, so it was pure blind luck that they didn’t follow me in.
But they walked on down the hallway.
I released the breath I’d been holding, suddenly fatigued, the itch inside me beginning another crawl along my nerves. I wandered over to one of the chairs and tested it for softness. It was far more comfortable than it appeared, a reading chair, clearly, with a newspaper neatly ironed and folded atop the stand by its arm.
A London paper. Yesterday’s date.
HUN DIRIGIBLES FLYING FARTHER INLAND, warned the headline. I touched my fingers to it, spinning it about to scan the rest.
Germany’s cowardly use of naval airships upon the civilian population is expanding. Bloated and slow, the zeppelins cruise far above any altitude ground artillery may reach, and often even above the firing altitude of our valiant boys in the sky.
The Minister of War has recommended that all eastern and southern coastal towns implement immediately our own very effective nighttime blackout rules.…
Well. Perchance His Grace hadn’t read this particular article yet.
I sat back in the chair and crossed my feet at the ankles. Then I glanced up at the portrait.
Definitely the duke in his younger days, and a fair-haired, gray-eyed woman who must have been his duchess. They were both gazing straight at me—at the artist who had painted them—Reginald with a trace of a confident smile, but the woman with a delicate, pensive sort of gravity, as if she felt that smiling wouldn’t be appropriate. He was standing, but she was seated on what looked to be a garden bench, her hands resting on the shoulders of not one boy but two: the first a toddler with an unmistakable blue stare; the second an older child, probably around five, and fair like his mother.
She didn’t really resemble me the least bit. I couldn’t imagine what the duke had been going on about.
I studied it through half-lidded eyes, picking out the details, how roses bloomed pink and cream in the foreground. How the clouds above their heads looked stormy, and the wedge of sea in the far back was more of a suggestion of color and shape than anything literal.
Toddler Armand held something in his hand. A key, it looked like …