ORANGERY

The photograph covered the top half of the front page of the Highmark Dispatch, and it was a very good photograph.

Soren studied it at six the next morning, standing at his study window with the paper held at arm's length, as one holds a dead rat by the tail. The magnesium flash had caught them in the lane in perfect detail: the high wire fence, the leaning tenements, the crowd of gray-faced children, and in the foreground, the unmistakable profile of the Grand Duke of Vandermere with a knitted cap in his hand and a young woman in a patched coat at his shoulder. The ash-ribbon on her arm showed up quite clearly. So did the alley behind them, and the shape of a small figure in a woolen bonnet standing at its mouth.

The headline ran across five columns in black letters an inch high. DUKE CONSORTS WITH BLIGHT IN THE SLUMS. Below it, in smaller type: Heir to the Throne Seen in Company of Registered Blightborn in Quarantine District. Questions Raised Over Princess's Safety.

He read the article through. It was written in the sly and pious language of a newspaper that has been handed a story by someone with an interest in having it told, and it accused him of nothing directly. It merely observed that the Grand Duke had been seen entering a district whose residents were known carriers of contagion, in the company of his young sister and a person of Blighted descent in the employ of the household. It wondered, with a tremor of public-spirited concern, whether the Council had been informed. It noted that the Purity Bill, which would have addressed such irregularities, had lately been postponed.

It did not mention the boy in the alley. It did not mention the chained old man. It said nothing about the standpipe or the water.

He folded the paper in four and laid it on the desk. His cold tea sat beside it, and he regarded the pale scum on its surface for a time before he picked it up and drank the whole cup in one swallow, simply to have something to do with his hands.

…

The Chancellor received him at nine, in the long paneled office on the second floor of the Chancery, where the windows overlooked the river and the walls were hung with maps of the Dominion in faded colors.

Harlan Sterling did not rise. He sat behind a vast mahogany desk with his fingertips lightly touching, and a copy of the Dispatch lay open before him, folded to the front page. A pot of coffee stood on a tray at his elbow, and a single white rose in a crystal vase. He looked exactly as he always did, which was courteous, benign, and faintly tired, and Soren, who had spent ten years learning to read the man's face, saw absolutely nothing there that he could use.

"Your Grace," said the Chancellor. "Do sit down. I hope you won't mind my having sent for you at such an hour. I know you keep early habits."

"I am at your disposal, Chancellor."

"I wonder if that is true." Sterling poured a cup of coffee and slid it across the desk, with a small, regretful smile. "I should say at the outset that I place no credit in these rumors. A newspaper will print anything for a penny. But the Council has been asking questions, and Lord Ashcombe in particular is under the impression that the Crown has been taking an unusual interest in the Wards. I thought it better to hear the truth from your own lips."

"The truth is quite simple." Soren sat, crossed one leg over the other, and let his gloved hands rest on the arm of the chair. He had been rehearsing this on the walk across the courtyard, and he spoke in the clear, indifferent drawl he used for Council business. "The Princess's tutor proposed an educational excursion for her pupil. We visited the Botanical Conservatory in the morning. In the afternoon, at Miss Reed's suggestion, we made a short tour of the lower city, to give the Princess some notion of the Dominion's different conditions. I accompanied them in a personal capacity, as any guardian might, with Captain Pike in attendance."

"An educational excursion," said Sterling gently.

"Yes, that is precisely what it was."

"To Ash Row."

"The Princess will one day be a woman of influence in this realm, and she will be asked to lend her name to charities. It seemed prudent for her to learn what they were for." He lifted the coffee cup, which he did not intend to drink, and held it with great care. "I do not see that the Crown requires the Chancellor's permission to educate its own sister."

"Of course it does not." The Chancellor's smile did not alter. "But the Crown must consider how it is perceived. A young princess in a Quarantine District, with the Grand Duke himself in a woolen hat, in the company of a Blighted servant who is, I understand, not at all unattractive?" He sighed regretfully. "I fear it will be read as a lapse in judgment. The public is unforgiving, Your Grace. They like their royalty to be a little above the common run, and they like their Blighted to be a little below it."

The coffee in Soren's cup shivered, and he realized that his hand was shaking. He set it down on the saucer without a sound.

"I will bear that in mind," he said.

"I am sure you will." Sterling closed the newspaper and laid his folded hands upon it, and for a brief moment the pale eyes lifted, and Soren saw in them an expression that he had not met in ten years of service, a cold and curious patience, like that of a heron watching a pond. "The Gala must have been a trial for you. I was most distressed by what happened to Miss Reed. It was a sad accident, and I have spoken to my daughter about it. I trust you will not hold it against her."

It was not a question, and Soren did not answer it. He rose, bowed, and went out.

…

Delphine was waiting for him in the Orangery.

He should have expected it. It was her favorite room in the Hall, a long glass-walled gallery at the south end of the east wing, filled with orange trees and lemon trees and pomegranates in tubs of glazed blue tile. The winter light fell through the panes in pale, watery sheets, and the air was warm and heavy with the smell of citrus blossom. She sat on a wrought-iron bench beneath a dwarf lemon, in a morning gown of cream cashmere, with her hair loose over her shoulders, and she was not smiling.

That was the first thing he noticed. She had put away the public face. She looked tired and older than her years, with a hollow shadow beneath each cheekbone, and as he came toward her along the tiled path, she lifted a hand to shade her eyes against the light, as though it hurt.

"Close the door," she said. "I don't want the gardeners to hear."

He closed it. He stood a few feet away with his hands clasped behind his back, waiting.

"You've seen the paper." She laughed shortly, without humor. "It wasn't my idea, you know. I should like you to believe that. Papa has people everywhere. I had nothing to do with the photograph."

"I did not accuse you of it."

"No, you never accuse. You simply look at me as though I were an entry in a ledger that doesn't balance." She dropped her hand and raised her face to his, and in the clear cold light of the glass roof he saw her eyes properly for the first time in weeks. They were the color of weak tea, a pale clouded brown with a faint ring of gold at the edge, and the pupils were slightly enlarged. "Look at me, Soren. Look at me carefully, and tell me whether you can see what's happening?"

"Your eyes have changed," he said.

"I put drops in them four times a day. They cost me a hundred dollars a bottle." She spoke very quietly and quickly, as though afraid she would lose the courage to finish. "A year ago I didn't need them. Three years ago I was the brightest girl in the League. Now I stand in front of a mirror every morning and count the days until someone notices, and every time I think, not yet, not yet, not today. Do you think I enjoy being feared? Do you think I wouldn't give anything to walk through a room and be loved instead?"

"Delphine, you are frightened," he said.

"The Sunwell is dimming." The words came out in a rush, and she clapped her hand to her mouth, as though they had escaped her. Her eyes widened. For a moment she stared at him with naked fright. "You don't know what's coming, Soren. You think it's all politics, a few bills, a few Blighted in a few ditches. You have no idea. When the light goes..."

"What is the Sunwell?"

She stopped speaking at once.

He watched her face change. The wildness drained from it, the fear, the rawness, and a smooth pleasant mask slid down over the features like a blind drawn at a window. She lowered her hand. She tilted her head, and she smiled, a small and dazzling and perfectly composed smile that did not reach her eyes.

"Oh, it's nothing," said Delphine. "A figure of speech. Something Papa says when he's worried about the budget. I'm afraid I'm rather overtired."

"That was not a figure of speech."

"Everything I say is a figure of speech. It's how I was brought up." She rose, shook out her skirts, and came toward him with her chin lifted, so close that he could smell the jasmine on her skin. "Let's not discuss it. I came to ask you a different question. I want to know whether you intend to go through with it."

…

"With the wedding?" he said.

"With me, Soren, and not merely with the wedding." She stood very straight. "I'm not a stupid woman, Soren. I know when a man is looking at someone else across a room. I watched you at the Gala. I saw you take off your glove. I have known you since you were thirteen, and I have never once seen you take off your glove for anyone, and I stood on that dais like a fool and watched you kneel on the floor and take a Blighted servant's hand."

He drew a long breath. He had told himself that he would be kind, and he found now that he could not bring himself to be anything else.

"The engagement was arranged by our fathers for the sake of the succession," he said. "You know this as well as I. I have never pretended otherwise, and I will not begin now. I respect you, Delphine. I think there is a great deal in you that is better than you permit yourself to be. But I will not pretend that I love you, and I will not ask you to pretend that you love me."

"I never asked you to pretend," said Delphine.

Her voice had gone very soft. She was looking up at him with her ruined golden-brown eyes, and for an instant he saw behind them a girl of twelve at a dancing-class, watching the boy she had been told she would marry, with a hope so naked and so patient that he felt it like a physical blow.

"I asked you to choose me. That's all I've ever wanted. Not to be a convenient arrangement. Not to be a signature on a piece of paper. I wanted you to look at me once, just once, the way you looked at her." Her lip trembled, and she bit it. "Is that so very much?"

"I am sorry," he said, and meant it.

"There is no need to be." The mask came back. She stepped away and drew a delicate handkerchief from her sleeve, dabbed at the corner of each eye, and put it away again, and by the time she looked at him again, she was composed and gracious and perfectly lovely. "I shall expect you at dinner on Friday. Papa wishes to discuss the arrangements for the Midwinter ceremony."

She turned toward the door. At the threshold, with her hand on the latch, she paused and looked back over her shoulder, and her smile was gentle and her voice was light.

"Do be careful, darling. She's a disease with a nice vocabulary, and they are the kind that spread."

…

He found them in Lila's room that evening, a little after nine.

He had meant only to say good night. He had been walking the corridors of Vandermere for an hour, with Delphine's words circling in his mind like crows, and the Chancellor's cold patient eyes, and the old man's chain, and he had arrived at the nursery door without any very clear idea of how he had come there. The corridor was dim. Light spilled from the half-open door and lay along the carpet in a long yellow bar.

He heard her singing before he saw her.

It was the same song, low and unhurried, in that rough clear alto that seemed to belong to the inside of a house on a winter night. Down by the creek where the green things grow. He stopped in the doorway and put his shoulder against the frame, and did not go in.

Lila lay propped on her pillows in the great canopy bed, with her black hair loose and her eyes half closed. Tamsin sat on the edge of the mattress with her back to him, her shawl slipped from her shoulders, her hand moving slowly over the child's hair. The nursery lamp cast a soft circle of light about them. There was a faint scent of chamomile in the air. He had not noticed until that moment how long it had been since the room felt like a place where someone lived.

He stood there for the length of the song. When it ended, he did not move.

"You can come in, you know," said Tamsin, without turning her head. "I've known you were there since the second verse. You breathe very quietly for a man of your size, but the floor has a board that complains."

He came in. He crossed the carpet slowly, as one approaches a nest, and sat down on the opposite side of the bed, on the very edge, with his gloved hands on his knees. The mattress dipped under his weight. Lila opened one eye, observed him, and closed it again with an air of deep contentment.

Nobody said a word for a long while. The fire popped. The wind pushed at the window. Between them lay the small warm shape of the sleeping girl, rising and falling with the rhythm of her breath, and the quilt was pulled up under her chin. He looked across her at the woman opposite, whose face was lit from the side by the nursery lamp, tired and gentle and grave, with the shadow of her lashes on her cheek. He had a sudden, overwhelming sense that he was seeing something he had been told did not exist: a household, a family, a room in which no one was afraid.

It had been eight years, he thought, since he had sat on a bed in the evening with someone he loved.

A small hand crept out from under the quilt. It found his glove, and then it found Tamsin's fingers, and it drew them together over the coverlet, one on each side, and held on. Lila sighed in her sleep.

Neither of them pulled away. They sat for a long time with the child's hand curled around theirs, not looking at each other, listening to the clock. Then Tamsin shifted, very carefully, to draw back her hand without waking the girl, and as she did so, her fingers slid against his. It was the lightest touch, the barest brush of skin against the leather, and it should have meant nothing at all.

They both went perfectly still.

He did not look up. He did not need to. He could hear her breathing, quick and shallow, and he could feel the heat of her hand through the glove, and he knew with a quiet, absolute certainty that neither of them was going to be able to pretend, after tonight, that something had not begun that could never be taken back.