Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

Most of the girls had families that lived too far away for regular visits. For all its bucolic charm, this part of Wessex wasn’t in any danger of becoming a serious social destination. It seemed no one of any real consequence–barring the Duke of Idylling and his irritating son, of course–lived nearby.

But a few girls did have guests on my first Sunday at Iverson: mothers and fathers, a scattering of boys in jackets and tight collars who might have been brothers. Or beaux. The rest of the students sat in softly chattering circles, ankles crossed, drinking tea and eating tiny morsels of food without spilling a drop or a crumb. Without even, I noticed, seeming to part their lips.

I sat alone, naturally. I hadn’t wanted to come, but the scent of cold smoked salmon and dill wafting from the doorway had been too much to resist. After everything that happened that afternoon, I’d missed lunch entirely.

I’d claimed a solitary chair wedged into a corner. It was horsehair, old, wretchedly uncomfortable. I sat with my plate of finger sandwiches balanced on my knees and tried to chew as the other girls did, teensy bites followed by short, dainty sips of liquid, a process that could easily consume ten minutes for a single sandwich. Perhaps that was why no one had sprigs of dill in their teeth.

At the orphanage we’d had one meal a day, plus tea. Tea at Blisshaven was old chipped teapots filled with twice-used leaves and a platter of stale sliced bread. If yours wasn’t one of the first hands groping for the bread, all you got was tea.

The pots here were of silver. The china had cherubs and gilded trim. The tea was flawlessly steeped, possibly my first ever from virgin leaves. And there were enough salvers of miniature sandwiches and iced cakes to satisfy even me—although after I had served myself thirds, Mrs. Westcliffe sent me a fixed, frigid smile from across the room that had me slinking back to my chair.

Lady Sophia held court in the corner opposite mine, reclining on a chaise longue, letting her jackals do all the talking. I pretended not to hear, but the parlor sported mirrors on all the walls. Everything reflected.

“… so ridiculous. I mean, of course she has no money, but does that mean she has to dress like some woeful matchstick girl? You know the ones I mean, Stella, those deplorable little rags one sees at Drury Lane, bleating for coins after the shows.”

“Quite.”

“And her hair. Gracious.”

“Perhaps someone might lend her a proper comb. You’ve got an old one, Caro, don’t you? That ugly one your auntie gave you, carved from a camel bone or something?”

“I’d rather throw it away, really. I doubt she’d even know what to do with it. Look at her. Did no one tell her this was Sunday tea?”

Chew, chew, chew, chew. Swallow. Sip.

“Is that a hole in her skirt? Look, look—oh, Mittie, don’t be such a fishwife! With your eyes, not your entire torso! But just there, at her knee.”

“It is!”

“Yes!”

“Now, that is truly pathetic. Truly.”

“Pathetic!”

Chew, chew, chew, chew. The salmon turned to mush in my mouth.

“What on earth do you suppose Lord Armand had to say to her?”

That was from Lillian, sounding genuinely baffled. I took my sip of tea in the midst of their silence, washing down the mush.

“Well, she’s the new charity girl, isn’t she?” said Mittie. “So most likely he was merely saying hello. All the charity girls have to meet the duke. To make certain they’re appropriate and everything. He was probably only saying hello. For his father.”

“He never did before,” said Lillian, still baffled.

“Of course he did. You just never knew.”

“It didn’t seem Chloe thought it a mere hello.”

“No,” agreed Sophia thoughtfully, speaking at last. “It didn’t.”

My cup and plate were empty. I rose, placed them on the sideboard with the other lovely dirty things, and walked off. The mirrors all around showed me images of a phantom girl, shadowy and gray.

I left her behind me. I was careful not to look too closely at her face.

...

And that was the sum of my first day at Iverson.

The worst part of it all was that Jesse was right. I was hungry. I was definitely too hungry not to eat his orange.

If it was Dark, it didn’t matter. I was already doomed, because every Dark cell of my being already hungered to see him again.

I stood by my window that night and dropped the peeling through bit by bit, flickers of white and orange that tumbled down to the grass, became swallowed by the moonlit green.

Proper young ladies of the British Empire were, apparently, expected to know how to dance, to organize a supper of up to twenty courses, to embroider, to speak a foreign language—not German—to play the piano, and to paint.

We were not expected to wrestle with mathematics, beyond what might be required for common household management. We need not bother with horticulture but were encouraged to learn to arrange cut flowers artfully in vases. We studied history because, I supposed, it was dry and full of the dead and therefore mostly harmless. But science was a subject fixed absolutely within the realm of men. So was literature of the darker sort; no Dante or John Ford for us. We read books about moral forbearance. Or else poems, the fluffy sort that rhapsodized over windmills and kings and kittens and good girls who liked to sit by the fire and knit.

I could not dance. I could not reliably position forks on a dinner table for a prince. When I embroidered, the needle buzzed so loudly in my hand that I pricked myself with it, and my first attempt at a sampler ended up stippled with blood.

I understood no other language but my own and that of the metals and stones.

I’d never held a paintbrush.

But something happened on my first day of piano class.

Something magical.

“Middle C, if you please, Miss Jones.”

Monsieur Vachon lurked behind me, unseen, but I knew exactly how he would appear, anyway: tall and lanky, with a spine bent at the neck like a shepherd’s crook, his eyes sharp behind his spectacles, his hands clasped together at the small of his back. He wore a black jacket and waistcoat and pristine spats over his shoes. He looked like an undertaker but for his hair. It was tawny and unruly, a lion’s mane framing his face.

And he fully expected that I, seated for the very first time in my life before a piano, would know what middle C might be. Perhaps all the girls in France were born with sonatas bubbling through their veins.

The sheet music in front of me swam with dots and lines. It might as well have been penned in ancient Etruscan.

“Miss Jones,” Monsieur Vachon prompted, only with his accent it became Meez Jonzzz.

“I …” My hands hovered above the keys. Was middle C one of the ones in the middle? Wouldn’t that make sense? Was it ivory or ebony?

I’d tried to explain to him before the class began that I couldn’t do this, that I had no notion of how to play, but he’d brushed me off. “Everyone must play,” he’d pronounced. “This is Iverson.”

I supposed now he understood I wasn’t really everyone.

I heard Mittie heave a sigh from her chair against the ballroom wall. She’d already had her turn, pecking out a tune that had reminded me of one of the kitten poems. Perky, insipid pap.

Monsieur’s patience began to fray.

“Here.” A finger reached past me, pointing to one of the ivory keys. From my seat of mortification I noticed that he had hair all over his knuckles, too.

“C,” he enunciated in my ear, and I quickly mashed my own finger down against the key.

The note hit the air slightly muffled. I hadn’t done anything with the pedals, as I’d seen the other girls do, and it died its solitary death without a fuss.

But then the magic came. Another note, another C, lifted around me, soft at first and then louder, exquisitely pure. I raised my head, searching for its source, but no one else was holding an instrument. In fact, the only other instrument in the entire chamber was a harp, and it was still shrouded in its sheet.

The ballroom had wooden floors and long, decorative tapestries, a frescoed ceiling painted into a cloudy heaven. The chandeliers suspended above us were also covered in sheets; only the bottom curving loops of crystal beading showed, swaying gently with a draft.

All the rest of my class gazed back at me from their line against the wall. Their expressions ranged from boredom to impatience to happy spite.

Sophia turned her head to whisper something to Lillian, who giggled. Mittie crossed her legs to swing her foot from side to side.

C, sang the silent music. My finger pressed the key again, and then C changed to another note, and my finger found that one, too. And another. And another.

I needed both hands. I was using both hands to play the song that saturated the chamber. My head felt clear and my heart felt at peace for the first time in so long. I heard the song as it happened, and it was as if it sank into me, became part of me. The piano was now part of me, too, the voice I did not have otherwise. Melody, harmony, my hands moving faster and faster along the keyboard, creating sounds I’d never imagined.

I wasn’t thinking about any of it. I just let it be, and the music came.

Then it ended. The song finished and the ballroom fell into silence. I echoed the final passage and let my fingertips rest atop the keys, relishing their sleek warmth.

“Mon Dieu,” said the monsieur. At some point he had come to stand right beside me; I hadn’t noticed at all. He gazed down at me with wondering eyes. “You told me you could not play.”

“No, I—” I pulled my hands back to my lap. “I never have before.”

“Never before?” he repeated, with an incredulous arch of his bushy lion’s brows. “What is the name of that piece? Who is the composer?”

“I don’t know,” I said, nervous. “I … made it up.”

I hadn’t, though. I hadn’t made it up. It had been the song of the ballroom. The song sung by the stone walls and rock-crystal drops of this room.

I swallowed. Monsieur Vachon had brought a hand to his chin. He was rubbing it, scowling, trying to decide if I was attempting to make a fool of him.

One of my fellow students coughed the word cheat.

“At the—where I came from,” I said, “we had no piano. We had nothing. Not even books of music. I’ve never touched a piano before today.”

“You cannot read this?” He indicated the sheet music.

I shook my head.

“And you just now created what we heard? All at once, sans répétition?”

I nodded.

“Can you play for us something else, Miss Jones?”

I swallowed again and looked helplessly at the far wall. I heard music still, but it was so dim. My pounding heart was so much louder.

“I feel a little ill,” I whispered.

“Try,” he ordered, dropping his hand.

Please, I thought, a plea to the ballroom, to anyone, anything. Please, please help me.

I pressed a key, but it was the wrong one. I closed my eyes and listened harder, waiting, breathing through my mouth. Someone—Mittie, said the fiend, bloody fishwife Mittie—let out a stifled snort.

My index finger found a new note, one of the ebonies. That one was right.

Soon it was happening again. I had to strain for some of it, and this song seemed sadder than the first, more ethereal. But when it finished I opened my eyes and there was my piano instructor staring down at the floor instead of at me, and I would have sworn there was a gloss of tears behind his spectacles.

“Brava,” he said to the floor, then lifted his head and made it louder, so that everyone heard. “Brava.”

I sat back on the bench and folded my hands over my stomach. The piano gleamed huge and black and white in front of me, a grinning, separate thing once more, an opportunity I’d barely begun to comprehend.

...

A jungle existed within the castle. It was an upper-crust sort of jungle, concocted entirely by upper-crust imaginations–and funds. There were no wild, messy monkeys or screaming macaws, no piranha in sight but for my classmates. Even the vines clinging to their lattices seemed too polite to stretch their tendrils beyond their allotted space.