fellows. I remember Miss Swanston speaking gaily to a man with silver spectacles, her head tipped to the side and him bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet. Sophia and Mittie beneath a tree, sharing glasses of stolen champagne. The colored lights gleaming, the orchestra always playing. An immense tiered cake had been placed on a central table, iced white and yellow and trimmed with garlands of marzipan. The cloying scent of it nearly turned my stomach.
At some point the cake was cut. Toasts were made. I was there for that, standing by myself beyond the bulk of the crowd.
Armand never returned to the party. And all the rest of the night, all the way back to Iverson, one thought kept rattling through my head, obsessive, persistent, offering no solutions and absolutely no peace:
Could it be possible …?
I fell asleep that night in my tower without an answer.
Tomorrow I would find Jesse. Jesse would tell me the truth.
• • •
He looked down at the key in his hand and thought of all the reasons why he shouldn’t be where he was, about to do what he was about to do. It was Sunday; he was technically just a visitor to Iverson, no longer a resident; he didn’t want to run into Eleanore or Chloe or Westcliffe or any of them; he didn’t know how believable his lies would be right now should anyone discover him.
He used to be so good at lying. At guile. At deflection. It occurred to Armand in that unlit, desolate hallway, holding that key, that he hadn’t felt like himself in a long while. If he truly considered it, he seemed more a circus-mirror likeness of who he used to be, all wavy and wrong, stretched in impossible directions. Even thinking about it too much made him dizzy, perhaps because so much of who he was now was zigzag reflection, not truth.
So he didn’t leave. His hand moved, fit the dull iron key into the dull iron lock. He was honestly astonished when, after an initial moment of stiff resistance, the tumblers turned. Unless the students had learned how to pick locks, it had to be more than a decade since anyone had tried this.
The door to his parents’ bedchamber cracked open—not much, because the door was heavy, ancient planked wood scrolled with wrought iron, most of it rusted, but enough so that a stale puff of air hit him in the face.
Mandy fought a sneeze. He swiped at his nose, pushed harder at the door, and managed to open it enough to squeeze through.
It was dismal enough, all right. Easy to believe this place had been kept in shadows for nearly all his life. The floral curtains pulled across all the windows looked riddled with rot and moths. Pinpricks of daylight shone through the sagging flowers, tiny spears of sun illuminating motes.
The curtains, the bed coverings, the upholstery on the chairs and settees: all of it decayed, forsaken. He stood in a medieval suite disguised in old chintz and kingwood, and it was just as depressing as he’d expected it to be.
He’d been born in this chamber, right there in that bed. He’d had a crib in the corner, where a grimy dressing table now stood, and then a cot. Only months after he was old enough to join Aubrey in the nursery, Rose had taken her final step from the battlement, and Reginald had abandoned the castle.
They’d lived in London after that, all three of them broken and so … dreadfully quiet about it. All three of them just waiting for Tranquility to be completed, because somehow, somehow, that was going to help.
“Soon,” Reginald would tell his sons, when they begged to return to the sea. Mandy remembered Aubrey crying silently at night, and how the Thames smelled like sewage instead of salt, and how Reginald always promised them the same thing in the same hearty tone: “We shall live there again soon.”
Soon had proven to be a word to last nearly twelve years. Soon meant a succession of nannies, then tutors, in their Grosvenor Square mansion. Soon meant a thumping city rhythm hammering a new tempo into his life that proved so loud and busy that, in time, young Armand barely recalled the blue salty sea. Or the castle. Or his mum.
And when the day at last came that they moved back to Wessex, all three of them again, that glorious, hope-filled day …