stages: fishermen, farmers, merchants. Today was our day, and a line of ebony-clad girls marched up the grand curving driveway—pinkish grit from the crushed shells speckling our shoes—without anyone speaking a word.
Mrs. Westcliffe led the way, carrying an offering of white lilies. Lady Chloe was just behind her, carrying nothing but her fine looks, which seemed even more heightened in black. I had tried to hang behind at the end of the line, but all the youngest girls were there, and the three teachers at the very back gestured for me to get ahead and move to the front with my own class.
That’s how we entered the mansion. That’s how we greeted Armand, because the duke wasn’t even there. I heard people whispering from the corners of the black-and-white parlor that he was upstairs, locked in his quarters.
By the time I reached Armand, the strain was clear on his face. Most of the girls had just curtsied and gabbled a few words. Chloe, on the other hand, had thrown her arms around him and held her lips to his cheek, a few seconds too long for anyone to mistake it as a mere token between friends.
My turn. I gave no kisses. No embrace. I held out my right hand and he accepted it, his gaze drifting down, unanchored, to stare blankly at where we connected. His fingers were cold, barely curved around mine.
“Remember the shark,” I said, the first thing that came into my mind.
Armand looked up again. A little of the focus returned to his eyes.
Be strong, I was telling him. You are more than this moment, I was trying to say.
He understood me, I think. His fingers regained their life, clasping mine hard.
Tonight, I mouthed to him, another something that just popped into my head.
He nodded, I moved away, and the girl behind me took my place.
Eventually, the duke did come down to make his greetings, and if it had been quiet in the room before, now you could hear a mouse squeak.
The best word to describe Armand’s father was ghoulish. His suit hung off him—he’d lost even more weight since the day on the yacht—and his face reminded me of the jack-o’-lanterns we used to carve on All Hallows’ Eve, all sunken red eyes and bony outline and uneven teeth. The Iverson girls shrank back from him en masse; his starving, jittery desolation looked actually contagious. Only Mrs. Westcliffe approached in her assured clip across the marble tiles. She’d already passed the lilies to a footman, so she was able to take up both of his hands and keep them in hers as she murmured something to him none of the rest of us could make out.
None of the rest of the people, I mean. Maybe I had dragon hearing since my transformation, because I heard her as if she had spoken just to me.
“Reginald,” Mrs. Westcliffe had said. That was all.
And there was so much anguish behind that one word that I knew not to mistake it as a mere token between friends.
• • •
That night, I waited in the tower for the dark to reach its full bloom. My plan at first was to go to Jesse and then Armand, but Jesse himself had quashed that.
I hadn’t seen much of him since our night together. Only a few occasions around the grounds, working with Hastings, driving the carriage or cart. Once a fleet, illicit caress of my cheek in the bamboo grove of the conservatory before class. His music to me since then—including tonight—had all been the same reassuring tune.
All’s well, beloved. Catching up on sleep. We’ll see each other soon.
I had decided to let him have his way, since he’d been gracious enough to let me have mine.
The sounds of the castle settling in for the night seemed both repetitive and heartening. How quickly I’d become accustomed to this place, I realized. I was even rather fond of it. My tower, the old-fashioned teachers and lessons, even the other girls, snooty and insolent and so untouched by grimy reality.
The bountiful food.
On an evening such as this, with the moon smiling and the stars sparking to life in milky, silvery bands, I almost wished I could stay here forever. Which seemed a very upside-down thought, because as much as I appreciated my life in the castle, it was a place that had been constructed with only one purpose in mind: to hide from death.
But there was no true hiding from death. It would hover and