The Sweetest Dark

Chapter Thirty-One

The funeral for a hired hand is not the same as one for a marquess.

Mrs. Westcliffe was there for both. I guess that was the same.

Armand was there for both.

I attended only Jesse’s. It probably would have been politic of me to also go to the marquess’s; I had been summoned, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to go anywhere, really. I wanted only to stay in my tower, in my bed, and spend the rest of my life doing nothing more than staring up at the ceiling, watching the spiders wending around on spindly legs, weaving their opal webs.

I roused myself for Jesse. That was all.

I stood between Mrs. Westcliffe and someone else. I think it was Professor Tilbury. Most of the teachers had shown up, which vaguely surprised me. Quite a few of the villagers, as well, along with all the other Iverson employees.

I was the only student. Even Malinda hadn’t come.

Lord Armand—now the new Marquess of Sherborne—was the highest-ranking person in attendance, so he’d been given a place of honor right by the pit dug for the grave. He stood a solemn figure in stylish black, almost directly across from me. Whenever I glanced his way, he was staring at me. Lots of people were staring at me, frankly, but his was the only gaze that stung. So I tried not to look at him.

I also could not look at Hastings. If I looked at Hastings, stooped over his cane, I began drowning in a shame so deep and profound it made me tremble, and Tilbury would eye me uneasily and pat me on the arm.

It was my injured arm, too. It was bandaged up, but you couldn’t see the bandages beneath the peacoat, so he didn’t know.

Mrs. Westcliffe wouldn’t glance at me at all. I think she no longer knew quite what to make of me. Was I an accidental heroine, as Armand had publically insisted, or was I something much different: a conniving slum girl who had taken advantage of her beloved Reginald’s weakness and largesse?

There had been no disguising what the duke had done that night, or what he’d meant to do. Despite our initial intent to spirit him away and cover the whole thing over with darkness and lies, two burning dirigibles—visible for miles along the coast, I’d heard—were impossible to disguise. They’d woken everyone in the castle, everyone in the village, likely every single person all the way to Bournemouth. Woken them right up to the war.

And then we had been found, Armand and Jesse and me, there on that beach of broken stones.

And the duke had been found, because two minor children suffering bullet wounds, one of them dead, could not be explained away with any of the dubious, unsteady excuses that had come to me at the time.

Eventually, even the German I’d saved had been found. I’d left him in a cove of brutal surf and steep cliffs on every side. I suppose he could have tried to swim for it–I would have–but he didn’t. By the next afternoon, a shepherd boy had heard his shouts and he’d been hauled up the cliffs and confined to an empty pigeon house, the sole survivor of his doomed mission.

Gone cracked, though, from the ordeal. Ranting in perfect English about dragons and a young woman who could fly.

No one believed him. A few people swore the airships had suffered lightning strikes, although the night had seemed so clear. A few more vowed they’d spotted them off the bluffs and fired at them, and that had brought them down.

Whatever it had been, everyone seemed certain of two things. It had not been a dragon, and it had not been the poor, tormented Duke of Idylling.

We’d had to give him up. To his credit, Armand had led the authorities straight to him, and apparently in the nick of time, too, as he’d been coming ’round. So no one else got shot.

I was in the hands of the local physician by then, who turned out to be the bespectacled man from the birthday party, the one chatting up Miss Swanston. He didn’t seem to mind that I’d fallen mute, just like I’d been as a child. Other people talked and talked at me, but I had nothing to say.

Let silver-tongued Mandy come up with his crafty mesh of facts and fabrications. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t react, not even when the bullet was fished from my arm.

I was still back on that beach, you see. I couldn’t leave it. I couldn’t leave Jesse.

Over the next few days, Sophia had visited enough times that I knew all the school gossip, which included a variety of tales: That Jesse and I had been lovers, and the duke had discovered us on the roof. That Armand and Jesse had been lovers, and I had been jealous enough to inform the duke. That Jesse and Armand and I had been lovers, and the duke had tried to murder us all… .

Armand’s official story was this:

He had discovered what his father intended that night and had raced to the castle to stop him. By pure chance he’d come across Jesse walking the grounds and had enlisted his help. He’d thought, Armand had explained bleakly to Mrs. Westcliffe when they were alone, that he could trust Holms. That perhaps there’d be a chance to hush it all up still, allow the family to deal with the situation privately. And that—although he was deeply mortified to admit it now—even if Holms had wanted to tell, he would be unable. Mute, you know. Simple.

But Holms had proven stalwart and valiant. When Miss Jones had shown up to discover them in the castle hallway, because she’d heard a suspicious noise and had feared for her schoolchums’ safety, they’d had to bring her along. She’d wanted to run straight to the headmistress, of course, but Armand had persuaded her not to. How he regretted that decision now!

The duke had fired his guns at them all. They’d retreated, thought to go to the automobile to fetch a doctor and the sheriff, but they’d stumbled the wrong way and fallen down the slope to the beach instead. All three of them. And there, noble Jesse had died.

Fact. Fiction. Likely because so much of it had happened, and because Armand’s red-eyed, stoic distress seemed so genuine, the adults around us had accepted it as truth.

Mostly.

I think if I hadn’t been discovered wearing only Armand’s coat as I knelt next to Jesse’s body, Mrs. Westcliffe might have found the whole thing easier to swallow.

Yet the official version ruled the day. And here we all were basking in it, breathing fresh sea air, warmed by the generous spring sun. Burying a hero. A far, far greater hero than anyone standing around me at his funeral would ever suspect.

Somewhere in deep-blue briny waters, a U-boat rested, filled with live torpedoes and solid-gold men.

I thought I better understood Rue’s letters now. I understood her warnings about the pain that would come with my Gifts.

I understood my sacrifice.

I listened to the vicar speak. I listened to the breeze. The birds. The sea. I watched the first handful of dirt land on Jesse’s coffin and thought with absolute sincerity, Wish it were me.

...

I waited until Aubrey’s funeral to steal away. It wasn’t long to wait, only a week, so I made myself tolerate it.

I paid attention to my spiders. Their remarkable webs.

Due to a loss of blood, I’d been excused from attending classes, although the professors had made an effort to extend their best wishes for my recovery, mostly by assigning me homework. It’d been piling up on the bureau. I knew I should at least inspect it, but it bored me. Everything bored me.

Let them kick me out of Iverson if they wanted. Perhaps I’d fly to the moon to live.

Lora-of-the-moon. That would be me.

I itched where I was healing. The wound to my wing was a phantom itch somewhere in the vicinity of my shoulder blade; unlike with my arm, no bullet hole showed there in my human form. But that particular itch was especially maddening, because I could not scratch at it. It was always present.

The following Saturday morning, the castle emptied. I got up to watch them all go, all the ebony girls, all the teachers, most of the help. Sophia had told me the formal ceremony was to be held at Tranquility, which had a completed chapel and nice, virgin grounds for its first grave. They would be burying an empty casket.

The duke, regretfully, would be unable to attend.

I wondered briefly if his madhouse was anything like mine had been, and found that I couldn’t wish Moor Gate even on the man who had killed my true love.

I dressed–Blisshaven’s clothes, not Iverson’s. I walked like I knew what I was doing and where I was going, which was true, and I left the fortress.

It was an easy journey through the forest. The day was sublime, the kind of day reverently described in those sweeping, romantic histories of England that populated the castle library. Shafts of sunlight broke through the green canopy of trees, daubing yellow along wildflowers and butterflies and once even a rabbit, half a primrose in his mouth, staring at me with his ears high and straight.

I could smell the coming summer still, just as I had my first evening here, as I’d stepped from the train. It was warmer and lusher now, less a tinge in the air than a sultry blossoming. It traveled across the sea and laced through these woods. It slipped up my arms and neck and face and kissed me with the faintest hint of bitter salt.

Summer in the woods. Summer on the isle. I imagined it all so … full of life.

Jesse’s cottage stood deserted. I’d wondered if Hastings had come by yet—surely he had—or had thought to maybe move into it now himself from his loft above the stables. Seemed like it be would nicer than living over horses.

I knocked on the door, in case. No one answered.

The latch gave at my touch. The cat’s-eye knot watched me go in.

A shadowed place. A place of shadows. I had the feeling all the lamps in the world wouldn’t illuminate the cottage again. Jesse had been its light, the heart of these woods.

Pine, soap, coffee. Cinnamon, vanilla, rain. Scents that wrapped around me as I walked, a last trace of him. It was awful comfort.

I drew my fingers along the tabletop, remembering the buttercup turned to gold set there on that wood, how it had sung and gleamed. But then, Jesse’s home had always sounded like song to me. Even at night, in our sweetest dark as I’d lain in his arms, golden songs had drifted over me.

Like now. Right now.

I glanced around and saw nothing but the expected. The table and chairs and stove and plates. The rug and fireplace. His closed bedroom door.

Ah. The bedroom. It was coming from in there.

I rested my hand on the knob and knew that I had to go in, that he had wanted me to go in. That’s why there were songs resonating from inside. It was a message just for me. A message from dead Jesse.

But … the bedroom. The bed. Quilts we’d slept under. Sheets. His drowsy smile, half tucked against a pillow. The glass vase on his windowsill, pinkish-green with the first flush of dawn.

I hadn’t come out here for his bedroom. I hadn’t planned on being strong enough for that.

My hand pushed open the door.

I stood fixed in place, not breathing. I had no breath left in me. All the gold in the room had stolen it, and I might not ever breathe again.

I’d dreamed once of a forest of gold, and Jesse had done what he could to give it to me. His bedroom had been transformed into a wonderland of leaves and flowers, pinecones and branches of birch and oak, all of it glimmering, all of it singing. The bed was covered, his chest of drawers, the sill.

Much of it was jumbled together, beautiful for what it was if not its presentation. Jesse had last left this room on the night of his death, right after he’d called to me, right before he’d gone to the castle. So he would have been scattering his final gift in haste, knowing he worked against the clock.

Knowing, somehow, what was to come.

Which meant he’d been making gold for weeks. When I’d seen him so tired, when he’d told me all those nights that we should rest apart … he had been doing this.

For me.

A folded note had been set upon the bed. My name had been scrawled upon it.

I love you was all it said inside.

I sank to the floor. I looked up and all around as the sun danced through the window and turned Jesse’s room into an ambered heaven of song and shimmer and sparks.

That was how Armand found me, hours later. That was what he saw, as well, what he heard, as he walked slowly into the chamber and eased down beside me to rest his back against the bed.

We sat there together, listening, marveling.

In time, his hand reached out and took firm hold of mine.