The Sweetest Dark by Shana Abe

say?”
    I decided to plunge on. “He’s not mute.” It occurred to me belatedly that mute might be their private code for something else— dirty or forbidden or so savory for a stable boy —but Lady Sophia only raised the other brow.
    â€œAnd you know this because, what, in your sole night here, he’s already spoken to you?”
    â€œYes,” I said.
    Sophia released a melodic laugh, one that everyone but Malinda immediately copied.
    â€œImpoverished and a liar,” Sophia said to them, and shook her head. “Dear me. Not a propitious start for you, Eleanore.”
    â€œI’m not—”
    â€œJesse Holms doesn’t speak ,” interrupted Lillian. “Not to you or to anyone else. It’s why he can’t sign up for the war. Even the Tommies won’t have him. He’s simple. Don’t you understand?”
    â€œPerhaps she’s simple, too,” suggested Mittie.
    Sophia turned around, linking arms with Malinda. “A perfect couple, then! Cheers to them!”
    I stood there and let them leave. I moved again only when the teachers behind me caught up and shooed me onward.
    Before I entered the chapel, I threw a look over my shoulder at Jesse. He was seated alone on the grass where Hastings had been, watching me with a hand held to his eyes to block out the sun.
    ...
    Sunday services were cold. Later on, that was mostly what I remembered. The pews were hard; the chapel was cold. The vicar was roughly two hundred years of age and he spoke slowly— slowly, with biting clear elocution—about warfare and chastity and virtue, somehow eventually entangling the three. By the time we were dismissed, the tips of my fingers felt numb.
    I wanted outside again. I wanted to feel the sun again.
    I wanted to see if Jesse was still there by the bed of flowers, free of Sunday lectures, illumed with light.
    He wasn’t. Only students dotted the green now, girls spreading out in spokes from the chapel door. Most seemed headed back to the main entrance of the castle. A few wandered in groups the other way, toward the gardens.
    I thought of the orange in my room and trailed after the castle girls. Perhaps I could sneak it out in my blouse. There had to be a private place somewhere out here where I could sit in the sun and eat in peace. Maybe an arbor or a meadow in the woods.
    The graveled driveway curving near the double doors was clogged with students, everyone surrounding a very familiar automobile loaded with trunks. A pair of menservants was struggling to unbind the luggage cords.
    My feet stopped moving before my mind had fully processed what lay ahead. All those schoolgirls, and Chloe in cherry stripes and a huge, scarf-fluttering picture hat. Lord Armand standing beside her with a fist on his hip, driving goggles dangling from the other hand, his long-paneled coat flaring with the breeze.
    I was held in place, unable to go forward, unwilling to go back. Chloe tilted her head and said something up to him, and he smiled at her, but it was a cold smile, cold as the chapel air. I wondered that she couldn’t sense it … or maybe she did and it didn’t matter. She was the shining star of the moment and she reveled in it, more beautiful and more important than any of the other girls, even Lady Sophia, now a rosy-pink sylph shunted off beside the auto’s spare tyre.
    Because Chloe evidently had what no other girl at Iverson did. She had him.
    There was no question Lord Armand was handsome. I’d seen that last night, right up close. Yet I thought now that handsome wasn’t truly the best word to describe him. Behind the wind-disheveled hair and burning blue gaze lurked a complexity not easily captured by words. Even from a distance, he struck me as deeper, darker, than those obvious good looks suggested. Like the hidden red glint inside a clouded ruby, visible only by holding the stone just right; if you didn’t know the trick,