ASH RIBBON

The train from the Hollows did not so much arrive in Highmark as surrender to it. For the last twenty miles it crawled along a ledge cut into the Silverwater cliffs, trailing coal smoke across a sky the color of pewter, and when it finally rolled beneath the great iron arches of Union Station, the carriage windows went dark for a long moment and Tamsin Reed felt her ears pop with the sheer enclosed size of the place.

She stepped down onto the platform with her carpetbag in one hand and her satchel of books in the other, and for a few seconds she simply stood there and let the city pour around her. The station was larger than the whole village of Marrow Creek. Its ceiling was a lattice of glass and black iron three stories overhead, hung with gas globes that glowed like a field of captive moons, and beneath them thousands of people moved in every direction at once. Porters pushed brass-cornered trunks on rattling carts. Newsboys shouted the evening editions. A brass band somewhere beyond the ticket hall was playing a march with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and the whole cavernous space smelled of hot oil, roasted chestnuts, and the cold mineral tang of the river.

It also smelled of money, she realized, in a way she could not have described to anyone who had not grown up without it. The women sweeping past her wore long cloaks of dove-gray and plum wool that moved like water, trimmed at the collar with fur, and the men wore overcoats cut so precisely to their shoulders that they seemed to have been poured into them. Everyone had the same bright, faintly polished look, and when they turned their faces toward the lamps, their eyes caught the light and flashed gold.

Tamsin looked down at her own coat. It was a brown wool she had bought secondhand at a church sale in Calder Junction, and the left elbow had been patched twice, once in a darker brown and once in a sort of apologetic green. She considered the patches for a moment and then lifted her chin, because if she was going to be looked at, she preferred to give the onlookers something to see.

The onlookers obliged her. She felt it almost at once, the way you feel a draft in a closed room, as heads turned and conversations dipped and a little clear space opened around her on the platform. A woman drew her child to the other side of her skirts. A young man in a fur-collared coat glanced at the pale mark on Tamsin's neck, and then at her patched sleeve, and then away with a small, fastidious tightening of the mouth, as though he had caught sight of a stain on the tablecloth.

She walked on through it, one deliberate step after another, as if she were crossing a creek on slippery stones.

…

The checkpoint stood at the head of the main concourse, beneath an arch of black iron lettered with the words QUARANTINE ACT — INNER CITY ACCESS. A line of travelers shuffled forward under the eyes of four Imperial Guards in gray-blue greatcoats, and Tamsin knew without being told which line was hers. The Gilded passed through the left-hand gate with a nod and a flash of a signet ring. The right-hand gate, a narrow iron turnstile beside a wooden desk, was where the people with the scars and the shabby coats were collected like parcels at a post office.

The clerk at the desk was a heavyset man with a waxed mustache and ink-stained cuffs. He did not look up when she approached.

"Name and place of origin."

"Tamsin Reed," she said. "Marrow Creek, in the Hollows. I have a letter of appointment from Vandermere Hall."

That made him look up, though not for long. He read the letter slowly, with the faint frown of a man who suspects a forgery, and then he turned it over to examine the wax seal as though he expected it to leave a smear on his fingers. Finally he dipped a pen in the inkwell, opened a great black ledger on the desk, and wrote her name in a column headed in capital letters: REGISTER OF BLIGHT.

"Your arm," he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Roll up the left sleeve." He pulled a strip of coarse gray cloth from a drawer and held it out between two fingers, like something he did not want to touch. "By order of the Quarantine Acts, every person of Blighted descent entering the inner city must wear the ash-ribbon visibly at all times until she has left it. Failure to display it carries a fine of five dollars or thirty days."

Tamsin took the ribbon. It was rough and smelled faintly of lye, and it was about as wide as her palm. She knew the law perfectly well, since she had read the full text of the Quarantine Acts in the library at Ashby when she was nineteen, and she had marked the places where the language contradicted itself in the margins of her notes. Reading about a rule in a library and having it tied around one's arm in a public concourse, however, turned out to be two entirely different experiences.

She pushed up the sleeve of her patched coat and tied the ribbon above her elbow herself, pulling the knot tight with her teeth.

"Blightborn," someone muttered behind her, quite clearly, in the low pleasant voice of a man commenting on the weather. "They really do let them in anywhere these days."

She turned around. The speaker was a silver-haired gentleman in a charcoal overcoat, with a gold-topped cane and eyes the color of new brass, and he did not look the least bit ashamed to have been overheard. Tamsin held his gaze for the space of three breaths, steadily and without any particular expression, until he found something to examine on the far side of the concourse.

"I'm sure I'll adjust to the hospitality," she said to the clerk, and she took her letter back and went through the turnstile.

…

The carriage waiting beyond the gate was a plain black brougham with the Vandermere sunburst painted on its door. The driver did not climb down to help her with her bags, and he did not speak to her, but he did flick his whip with a certain eagerness as soon as she had scrambled inside, as though he were anxious to be rid of the cargo as quickly as possible.

Highmark rolled past the windows in a long, glittering panorama. The city climbed the cliffs above the Silverwater in terraces of red brick and cream stone, every street lit by gas lamps that had been kindled early against the November dusk, so that the whole hillside looked like an enormous altar crowded with candles. Trolley cars clanged along the avenues. Clock towers rose above the rooftops, each one showing a slightly different time. Above all of it, on the highest crag of the cliff, the white towers of Vandermere Hall climbed out of the evening haze like something grown rather than built.

She had seen engravings of the Hall in her schoolbooks, but they had not prepared her for the scale of it. It spread across the cliff-top in wing after wing of pale stone, with long glass-fronted galleries catching the last of the sun, and a great domed conservatory shining at one end like a soap bubble stretched over a frame. Beside it, a little apart, rose the dark spires of the Cathedral of the Founders. The gates were twenty feet high and wrought into patterns of sunbursts and wheat sheaves, and they swung open to admit the carriage before it had quite reached them.

Inside, the gravel drive curved up through gardens that had been trimmed within an inch of their lives. Tamsin pressed her forehead to the cold glass and watched topiary spheres and clipped boxwood hedges slide by, and she noticed with an odd pang that there was not a single wild thing in any of them. Every leaf had been told exactly where to stop.

…

Mrs. Prudence Halloway received her in a side hall of the servants' wing, because she had apparently not been judged fit for the front steps. The housekeeper was a tall, narrow woman of fifty in black bombazine, with a ring of keys at her waist and a face so thoroughly composed that it might have been painted on porcelain. She looked at Tamsin from the crown of her head to the muddy hem of her skirt and she took a long, unhurried moment to arrive at her verdict.

"You are the new tutor," she said at last. "I had been given to understand that you would be older."

"I was given to understand that the position was for someone qualified," Tamsin replied pleasantly. "It seems we've both been disappointed."

The housekeeper's thin eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch, and then she turned and led the way down a long corridor without comment. Tamsin followed, taking in every detail as she went, the way she had trained herself to read a page before the lecturer could turn it. The floors here were bare boards instead of carpet. The wallpaper was a faded brown stripe, and the gas jets were turned so low that the passage seemed to be underwater. Somewhere nearby a dozen kettles were whistling, and a woman's voice called out something about the potatoes.

"These are the rules of the household for persons in your situation," said Mrs. Halloway, handing her a single printed sheet without turning around. "I expect you to read them tonight and to follow them to the letter."

Tamsin read it as she walked. The heading was RULES FOR BLIGHTED STAFF, and below it ran a numbered list of eleven items in a dense, officious type. She was not to enter the main wings of the Hall except by summons. She was not to touch any object in the household except those necessary to her duties. She was to take her meals in the lower kitchen, after the other servants had finished, and she was to drink from the vessel assigned to her use and no other. At the bottom, in the same blunt type, someone had added a rule that was clearly not part of the standard form: The Blighted tutor shall at no time be alone with the Princess outside the schoolroom.

"The vessel assigned to my use," Tamsin said.

"The gray cup." Mrs. Halloway stopped in front of a plain deal door and produced a key from her ring. "It is kept on the lowest shelf of the scullery. I should not like to have to remind you where it is."

"I'm sure I'll find it." Tamsin folded the sheet and slid it into her pocket. "Is there a rule about reading in my room after hours, or should I assume that falls under the general prohibition against enjoying myself?"

Mrs. Halloway did not smile. Something in the line of her mouth, however, flickered very slightly, in the manner of a candle that has been breathed on, and then she pushed open the door.

…

The room was hardly larger than a pantry. It held an iron bedstead with a lumpy gray blanket, a washstand, a deal table with one short leg, and a narrow window that looked out over the laundry yard. The wall behind the bed was warm and slightly damp, and Tamsin could hear the thump of a mangle and the hiss of steam from the other side of the plaster.

When the housekeeper had gone, she set down her bags and stood for a moment with her hands pressed flat against the table, breathing in the smell of soap and hot linen. Then she began to unpack. Her books went first, seven volumes of botany and pharmacology with cracked spines and her own handwriting crowding the margins, which she arranged on the table with their corners squared. Next came the little rack of stoppered glass vials, each labeled in her neat hand, and a pressed sprig of mugwort that Granny had slipped into her pocket at the station, and finally the photograph of Jonah on the porch step, squinting into the sun with his front teeth missing.

She propped the photograph against the lamp and looked at it for a long time.

"Sixty dollars a week," she told the small face, in the practical tone she used for her most difficult resolutions. "It's a perfectly good salary, and I've survived worse than a gray cup. Footnotes matter, Jonah, and the footnote on this job is that I don't have to like it, I only have to learn what it's for."

She went to the window to draw the thin curtain, and that was when she saw him.

He stood alone on a long stone balcony on the third floor of the main wing, so high above the laundry yard that she had to tilt her head back to find him. He was tall, with black hair that the wind had pushed slightly off his forehead, and he wore a dark coat buttoned to the throat and black leather gloves. Even from that distance, with the gas lamps in the yard casting their yellow glow upward, she could see that his eyes were gold. They were not the bright, flashing gold of the travelers at the station, but a colder, paler shade, like winter sunlight on a frozen pond.

He was looking down into the yard with a stillness so complete that it seemed to belong to the stone. His gaze traveled across the laundry maids hauling baskets and the boy carrying coal, and then it passed over her window and over her, with no more interest than if she had been a smudge on the glass, and moved on.

Tamsin let the curtain fall and stood very still in the dim little room.

She knew exactly who he was. Every newspaper in the Dominion had carried his portrait at one time or another, and the Hollows children had a skipping rhyme about him that she had not thought of in years, something about a frost on the water and a duke with no heart. She had expected him to be taller than the paper made him look, and he was. She had not expected the look to land on her like a hand pressed flat against a bruise, even for the instant it lasted, and she disliked very much that it had.

…

At seven o'clock the clock of the Cathedral began to strike, deep and slow, and the sound rolled across the cliff-top and shook the glass in the window frame. Mrs. Halloway appeared at the door precisely on the last stroke, as if the housekeeper and the bell were two parts of the same mechanism, and she did not bother to knock.

"The Princess will see you now."

She led Tamsin through a green baize door into another world. The wallpaper was damask here, the floorboards were hidden beneath a runner of thick crimson carpet, and the air smelled of beeswax and lilies and warm lamp oil instead of laundry. Portraits of stern men in gold-braided coats looked down from the walls, and each of them had the same pale, remote gaze. Tamsin was aware of her own boots, still gritty with the dust of the Hollows, leaving small faint prints on the carpet, and she felt Mrs. Halloway notice them too.

The Princess's rooms were at the end of a long gallery on the second floor. The housekeeper tapped once at the door and opened it without waiting for an answer.

It was a pretty room, and a very quiet one. A canopy bed hung with pale yellow silk stood against one wall, and a dollhouse the size of a small cottage occupied a corner, though Tamsin noticed that its tiny windows were all dark and its inhabitants all arranged in a stiff row along the stairs. There was a fire in the grate, a shelf of books that looked untouched, and beside the tall window overlooking the gardens, a straight-backed chair, in which a very small girl sat as rigid as a figure on a clock.

She was eleven, but she looked younger. Her hair was black and cut in a neat bob that ended at her chin, and her skin was so pale that the blue veins showed at her temples. Her hands were folded in her lap, but they were twisting a fistful of her gray velvet skirt so tightly that the knuckles had gone white. She did not look up when the door opened, and she did not look up when Mrs. Halloway announced, in her flattest voice, "Your Highness, this is Miss Reed, who will be your tutor."

Tamsin took a step into the room and stopped, aware that something in this silence was different from the rest. It was not the silence of a shy child, or a sulky one. It was the silence of someone who has learned that to speak is to invite trouble.

"Good evening, Your Highness," she said gently. "I'm very glad to meet you."

For a long moment the little girl said nothing at all. The fire popped. The Cathedral clock finished the last of its strokes and let the quiet close up behind it. Lila's pale golden eyes stayed fixed on the dark glass of the window, where the reflection of the room floated like a ghost, and when at last she spoke, her voice was so soft that Tamsin had to lean forward to catch it.

"You're the one they said would make me sick."