A Drop of Night (13 page)

Jules hands me some grapes. He's got his colorful shirtsleeves
rolled up to his elbows and is rubbing his arm furiously, except you can't really tell because he has an actual ink sleeve under the cloth one: a Cheshire cat and abstract flowers and the words
Plague of Monkey Lice
in Mandarin on his wrist. I bet the tattoo artist told him it meant
Good Luck
and
Fortune
.

I swallow the grapes. They taste like ash, dry and bitter. It looks like everyone's getting ready to sleep. I wonder how long we were out in the glass cube room. I wonder if it's nighttime up on the surface.

“There's another pillow here if you want it,” Lilly says, apparently taking pity on my Spartan sleeping arrangements. I take it and nod at her, which she can interpret as thanks if she wants to.

She nods back. She's curled up on a wing chair,
wrapped in a carpet like a Bedouin lady. Before I went to check the door, she'd been wearing a fluffy fur sewn from the pelts of a thousand small and adorable animals. I guess Jules explained that to her, though, because she dragged it all the way to the other side of the library and pushed it under a table as a form of protest.

I pick up the clock Will brought and look at it. “One hour gone, seven to go.” I flick my head in the direction of Perdu.
Watch him
, I mouth. “Every two hours we'll switch, okay? The first one will probably be the easiest, since you won't have to wake up. Who wants it?”

I expect Lilly or Jules to volunteer. They don't. No one does, which is admirable and also completely unhelpful. I hand the clock to Jules. “When the hands hit eight, shake one of us.”

Jules takes the clock. Will stretches himself out onto a rug, laying his sword down carefully next to him. “If something happens . . .” Will says. He trails off, gazing down the library.

“If something happens, wake up Will,” Lilly finishes. “He'll chop down our enemies. We'll send him supportive thoughts.”

Wow, Lilly, was that sarcasm? Will pushes himself up
onto his elbows and blinks at her. He's probably deciding whether she's making fun of him or not. She is, but for some reason she can't bear to let him think that, so she leans off her chair and ruffles his hair. “I'm joking, Will. Hey. I'm joking.”

She smiles at him, a huge bright smile, all pink tongue and teeth. Will smiles back. His cheeks dig into dimples, and his eyes take on a wry gleam, all before he can stop himself. It's kind of incredible to watch.

Will's facial transformation makes Jules laugh, which makes me laugh because Jules sounded exactly like Pete the Parrot, croaking farewell to me from his cage in the breakfast kitchen. The fact that I laughed makes Lilly laugh, and pretty soon all three of us are laughing, dry and brittle, like a really terrible trio of beatboxers. None of this is even remotely funny. That just makes me laugh harder.

Will gets his face under control. Raises his eyebrows at us and rolls over. I'm pretty sure he's still smiling, though. Our laughter trails off.

I feel full as I curl up against the table leg. Full and warm, which is ironic because those grapes were crap and the temperature in here is fairly chilly, lights or no. I
decide I'd live on laughing if I could. I'd probably starve, but maybe it would be worth it.

I start to doze. Get a crick in my neck and move my pillow to the floor. I'm nearly asleep, my whole body fuzzy and dull. I open my eyes, more of a slow, reverse blink. Will is asleep. Jules is standing by the fireplace, looking nervous, kicking his foot against the marble. Lilly is asleep in her chair. And behind her, just outside the bubble of light, Perdu is standing, watching me, his eyes burning scabs into my skin.

The servant's name is Jacques. He has come every day since I struck him with the vase and he no longer locks me out upon his arrival. He seems to enjoy the company as much as I do, though he is far more ready to say so. He is altogether too insolent, I think. He smiles when there is nothing to smile at and he does not walk like a gentleman, he
saunters
. Furthermore, he is slow in being useful.

“Why can you not simply unlock the panel and let me out?” I demanded the day we met.

“Mademoiselle, they are
watching
!” he said, cradling his bruised face and staring at me as if I were a wild troll. “What can you not understand? I will already have to spin a pretty tale to explain this face you gave me. ‘Oh, yes, I slipped while feather dusting the china and blackened my own eye.' You must understand, we have direct orders from Lord Havriel never to allow anyone into the serving
passages, least of all you. And if you
were
to leave, you would be caught. There are other servants running to and fro constantly. You would not get a hundred feet before they raised the alarm.”

I shook my head and turned away as if to say:
You do not know me, and you do not know how many feet I would get.

He carried on. “And once they've caught you, they'll put you somewhere worse and you'll get a warty old hag for a servant, and I assure you she won't speak a word to you, especially if you beat her with a vase. Listen. Please, mademoiselle, listen to me and I will help you.”

I turned toward him again, curious. His face was earnest, his eyes the colors of slate. “I know of your plight, mademoiselle,” he says. “I know they have locked you away, and revolution or none, it is not right to be caged so. But you must tread carefully. You will have one chance to get your sisters and get back to the surface. You will not get another.”

And so we began to talk.

This is what I have learned, six days later. The fact that I can put it all down so briefly vexes me: Jacques follows orders from the head butler, Monsieur Vallé. Jacques's job is to take care of my hyacinth rooms and to provide me with all that I need. He is strictly forbidden to speak to me. He
has seen no one else of my family. The last Bessancourt he saw was Mama. She was no longer breathing when he and the old guard carried her down. Jacques would not tell me her wounds, but he has a mother, too, in Péronne, and he said that if she were to die, he would weep for a year. His face was grave when he told me this, and when I cried he did not leave me, but sat at my side until I was exhausted, wrung out like a bit of washing.

Today I am sitting on the floor of the boudoir and he is cleaning, or pretending to.

“Why are you no longer a guard?” I ask him. “When we came down, you were in uniform.”

He shakes out a sheet with a snap. “They told me there was no need for guards here. Peace and everlasting safety and suchlike, you know? The palace is invincible. So now I am a chambermaid.” He laughs and begins tucking the sheet in at the corners, and I cannot help but notice that when he laughs, his face becomes quite wonderful to see.

“Did you come of your own choice?”

If he says yes I will like him less.

“No.” He starts on the pillows. “Well, yes, I suppose, but does a starving thief choose to steal? Does a soldier choose to
kill? We do things or else we die.” He tries to twinkle at me, but I will have none of it. I saw the shadow cross his face. I watch him sharply, and wait.

“You are a nosy sparrow. Mademoiselle,” he adds quickly, “I came here because my father is off at sea, and I have three sisters and four brothers, all living on what coins my mother can scrape together darning socks and patching trousers. My siblings needed bread, and stockings for the winter. So I hopped a cart to the château and begged for work. We don't have choices the way highborn lords and ladies do.”

I bristle at that. “Perhaps you have noticed,
Monsieur
, that highborn lords and ladies do not have quite as many choices as you thought. A golden cage is still a cage.”

“A cage with no shortage of bread and stockings,” he says evenly.

“A cage
alone
.” It comes out in a snarl. I see suddenly what he is: his sympathy for me is mixed with disdain. He pities me, is sorry that my mother is dead, but it is the pity of an older sibling patting the younger one crying over a lost toy. He thinks I do not know hardship.

“I have food and clothing, yes,” I say, my voice low. “And my mother is dead. There is no difference between pain of the heart and pain of the belly.”

“And you think peasants are spared heart's pain? We have both.”

“You have a mother!” I shout. “She is alive. She was not shot before your eyes, and your sisters were not torn from you and locked away in some godforsaken palace. But you will not spare a drop of pity because I am rich? We have death in our gilded courts, too. We have disease and cruelty, and not a breath of air or freedom. You cannot say our lives are easy, any more than I can say yours is. They are lives, and so they are
horrid
!”

The last word is a screech. I gasp, forcing the tears to keep from falling.

Neither of us says a word for several moments. Jacques begins to move again, wandering about and straightening the pillows. Finally he turns to me. “I'm sorry, mademoiselle. Let's not fight. Please? Everyone in the kitchens is on knife's edge, every day. There is nothing but bile spewing and bitterness. Let us not fight, at least.”

He finishes the bed and sits down across from me, cross-legged. I pretend great interest in a groove in the floorboards. I feel a stab of remorse for shrieking at him. He is poor and I am rich, and we each think ourselves the sadder and the more hurt. But there is no measure for pain. How wonderful
it would be if there were no limit to sympathy.

“I'm sorry, too,” I say. “And you may call me Aurélie. Please do.”

We stay on the floor, neither of us looking at the other, simply lingering, unwilling to part. We are the same in some things: we are both young and lonely. We wish to protect the ones we love. We are both unable to do so.

“Will you come with us when we escape?” I ask after a while.

He looks up, surprised. “Where to?”

“I don't know. Wherever we go. London, I suppose.”

I must sound terribly frivolous. I don't care. I can almost feel the sun up there, the wind and the green grasses brushing against my fingertips. I can hear the birds. I feel I could burst these walls, burst the ceiling with my shoulders.

“You would not want me along,” Jacques says, and he is looking at the same groove in the floorboard that I was so studiously inspecting. “I am no match for English chambermaids.”

“And you have a family here,” I say practically.

He stares at me. Nods. “That I have.”

A knocking sounds, somewhere in the walls, dull and faraway. He leaves me.

It is almost a week before I see him again. He unlocks the door to the boudoir and grins at me, tries to be light and jolly, but I know at once that he is neither. When he stretches himself long to reach the cornices, I see he has bruises on his hands and peeking, purple and green, from behind his collar. He will not tell me how he got them. I hope he is not being punished for the time he spends here.

“Have you found a way out?” I ask him as soon as I dare.

“No,” he says. “But I am closer. The butlers are run ragged with work. They . . . they become angry when the lower servants are slow, but there are fewer of them now and they cannot watch everything. I think some of them are being sent back up. Or perhaps they are escaping.” He studies his own hands, opening them across his knees. His fingers are brown and weathered like a farmer's. “They will not let me near the outer chambers of the palace, or in certain wings, but I think it is only a matter of time. It is vast down here, immense. But it feels small. It feels
airless
.” His voice becomes soft. “I've been having the oddest dreams.”

I wonder if they are like my dreams. I am about to ask him when a sound from beyond the door startles us to our feet. Jacques runs for the panel. I go with him, and as he
steps through, my hand brushes his and he squeezes it. Now he is gone.

I sometimes think I like him best when he is gone. I think of all the things I want to ask him, and I remember that if I were not here, if I were not a prisoner, I would not care to speak to him at all.

I'm dreaming. Nightmaring. Whatever it's called. My back is flat
against the floor. My shoulders stick disgustingly to my shirt.

I'm in a banquet hall—beautiful, hideous, ornate. Everything is black and red. Red light. Black shadows. And everything is upside down. Chandeliers sprout from the floor like trees. A long table hangs from the ceiling. The table is covered with heaps of food, grotesque and unrecognizable in the dark, and somehow it doesn't fall.

I'm sitting at the table, upside down, my shoulder blades digging into a high, carved chair. And now gravity shifts and I'm upright. A plate is in front of me. I can't tell what's on it, but it's piled high, steaming. . . .

I flinch. Someone else is sitting at the table, way at the other end. He's obscured by shadow, but I feel his eyes on me, and they're cold. Sharp. Ice blue.

A sound, like a knife against a crystal goblet, and the red lights flare along the table. I see the figure at the other end. It's a huge man, a silhouette against the ruddy glow. For some reason I can only see parts of him, a red velvet coat, lacy cuffs resting on the table in front of him. The lower part of his face. Warts pressing like boils through the powder. The man is chewing, smiling, chewing and smiling, faster and faster, smacking his lips. I get little glimpses of his teeth––red teeth, stained teeth chewing.

“Are you the butterfly man?” I want to ask, but something is clogging my throat, and I'm coughing, choking, vomiting bullets onto my plate—

I wake up gasping.

The sweat is freezing on my back. I shudder, pinch my eyes closed. Sit up.

What time is it?
Lilly is hanging off her chair. Jules and Will are sprawled every which way on the floor. The light seems to have changed. It's pale white now, not the golden glow we went to sleep in.

Something's not right.

The room feels crowded suddenly, stiflingly full. Lilly, Jules, and Will are next to me, but there are other people lying across the floor, propped against the fireplace,
draped over tables. Sleeping people, their faces turned away from me, unmoving.

I spin, searching for Perdu. He's in the shadows behind a massive globe, crying, clawing at the painted map. And now he turns to me, and his eyes are red fire.

Run,
he spits.
Run while you can. He's seen you.

I wake with a shout. Shove myself upright. The light is soft and warm. The sleepers are gone. It's just Jules, Will, Lilly, me. Four.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Perdu's gone.