Read Online The Deepest Night by Shana Abe - Free Book Online Page B

meant the sun, and the sun meant parasols, a bobbing sea of them above the audience in their wicker chairs, a handful more held by those of us stranded in our row upon the makeshift stage.
    A patchy breeze tugged at the trim of our formal uniforms like a fussy toddler wanting attention.
    The trim was black lace. Every inch of our formal uniforms, in fact, was black, because they’d been dyed that way about a month past to honor the death of our school patron’s eldest son.
    Which meant that I was clad in the most stifling outfit imaginable from neck to toe, perspiring and miserable in the heat of the day, for no good reason. The breeze wasn’t strong enough to cool, and the parasol I’d been handed before being ushered up to the stage was also made of lace. I sat dappled in fiery sunlight.
    “What a silly to-do,” Malinda was grumbling. As ever, she’d been seated at my side. “When we’ll be seeing all these same people at parties as soon as next week.”
    “ Some of us will,” Lillian corrected her, with a smug glance at me.
    “Yes, I guess this is something for Eleanore to remember. You will remember it, won’t you, darling Eleanore? When you’re back with all the other sad, tatty orphans in your sad, tatty orphanage, mucking about in the Scottish slums?”
    I gazed at the parasol sea before me, dark shade hiding porcelain faces, fans undulating, diamonds flashing. Silks and linens and hats and feathers. Servants weaving through with lemonade and champagne.
    Not a single snatch of conversation I’d overheard had been about the war. It was all who had seen whom where, and when, and whom they’d been with, and what they’d been wearing.
    “Oh, yes,” I said softly. “It would be quite impossible to forget such a magnificent display of affectation.”
    It took Malinda a moment to untangle my sentence. Then she straightened, her cheeks going pink.
    “Well! I like that! Here you are amid your betters, and you have the nerve to say something like that!”
    “I have the nerve for rather a lot of things, actually.” I turned my head to hold her eyes. “You’ve no idea.”
    “I don’t doubt it!”
    “You seem indisposed,” I said, darkening my voice. “Indeed, darling Malinda, I fear you’re horribly ill.”
    It wasn’t nice of me. I know that. But sometimes the best way to fight nastiness is with a good, sharp dose of something even nastier.
    I turned away again as she began panting, pulling at the collar of her shirtwaist.
    The very first row of the audience held the most important people, I assumed, because Mrs. Westcliffe was there, and some old men in fine coats, and one young man in particular at the end of the row, dressed in black like me, but with a starched white shirt and a dove-gray waistcoat and tie, and a ruby ring that wasn’t his on his right hand.
    Like everyone else, Armand’s face was obscured by the shade of his hat. Unlike everyone else, however, I felt him staring at me. I could always feel it when he stared.
    Malinda began to make small mewling noises under her breath. She sounded distressingly like a sick kitten.
    I leaned in close. “You’re fine,” I said, and went back to gazing out past the parasols.
    I hadn’t been able to tell Armand about Scotland. I’d smoked to his room twice since that night, but he’d never been there; I thought it likely he hadn’t been at Tranquility at all. I’d hoped it meant he’d gone to London, as he’d said, and sold my pinecone.
    I had no intention of mucking about in slums any longer, not in Scotland or anywhere else. If Westcliffe wasn’t having me back next year anyway, there was no point in doing what the government or any of the adults ordered me to do.
    I would take my money from Armand, purchase some decent traveling gear and a ticket to Someplace Else. I would empty my chest of gold into my suitcase, board a train, and not look back. Never mind Westcliffe and Armand and Jesse and the Splintered Sisters of the Holy