DELPHINE IN THE DARK

There was a coal chute on the north side of Vandermere Hall that nobody had used since the installation of the steam boilers, and Soren had known about it since he was eleven years old.

He had discovered it in the summer of the year that Dorian came to live at the Hall, during an expedition that began as a search for pirate treasure and ended in the scullery, with the two of them covered in soot from head to foot and a cook in hot pursuit with a ladle. It was a long iron slide set into the wall of the old fuel store, closed at the street end with a hinged plate and at the cellar end with a wooden hatch, and it had the great advantage of being absolutely invisible from the windows. He had never thought of it in all the years since. He had gone past it every day on his way to the stables. And on the night that he returned to his own house like a burglar, with a bruised face and a stolen coat and a price on his head, he found it exactly as he had left it, rusted and cobwebbed and entirely forgotten, as if the whole of his childhood had been waiting there for him in the dark.

"This is the most undignified entrance I have ever made to a place that I own," he said, wedged on his back in the chute with his boots against the plate.

"You have always had a sense of occasion, Your Grace," said Dorian from somewhere above his head. "Now push as hard as you can."

The plate gave with a shriek of rust that echoed down the iron throat like a scream, and the three of them froze, listening. Nothing in the whole sleeping house stirred in answer. The wind moaned over the roofs. Somewhere far above, a shutter banged and was still, and then Soren heard the muffled tick of the great clock in the stable yard striking one. He slid out onto the cellar floor in a heap of cobwebs and loose coal, and held up a hand for the others, and in a few moments Tamsin dropped out beside him, brushing her skirts, and Dorian came last with a thump and a muttered oath.

…

It had taken them two days to prepare, and they had needed every hour.

They had come down from the Hollows by the night freight, in the guard's van of a coal train, under the protection of a signalman who was a cousin of Mrs. Ketteridge and who demanded nothing but a promise that somebody would someday bring him the Chancellor's head. They had left the train at a siding two miles from Highmark and walked the rest of the way across the snow-covered fields, in the black hush before dawn, past the dark mass of the Cathedral and the pale glimmer of the river and the long unlit wall of Vandermere's park. Tamsin had worn a servant's cloak with the hood drawn up. Soren had worn a groom's coat and a cap, and had discovered with some irritation that a man could pass through an entire city for half a night without any person looking at his face once, provided that his collar was turned up and his hands were in his pockets.

I have lived my whole life, he thought, as a man whom everyone looks at. I never knew that the alternative was so restful.

The cellar of the Hall was an enormous cold labyrinth of vaults and passages, filled with the smell of damp stone and apples and old wine. They went through it in silence, with Dorian leading the way with a shuttered lantern, past the wine racks and the coal bunkers and the long dim corridor of the servants' storerooms. He knew it as he knew the lines of his own hand. At the foot of the back stair he paused and listened for a full minute, with his head tilted, and then he beckoned them on, and they went up one flight, and then another, in their stockinged feet with their boots in their hands.

The nursery wing was dark.

There was no gas lit in the corridor. Only the faintest gray glimmer fell through the high window at the end, from the snow-lit courtyard, and in it Soren saw the two Palace Watchmen at the door of the Princess's room, a pair of black shapes with their chins on their chests and their sabers propped against the wall. One of them was snoring. The other was awake but dull, looking at nothing, with the glazed patience of a man on the sixth hour of a night watch.

Dorian leaned close to Soren's ear. "I'll deal with them," he breathed. "You keep your hands warm, and for the love of heaven don't freeze anything that we might want afterward."

He slipped forward along the wall. Soren saw him reach the nearest guard, saw a hand come up, and heard a soft sickening thud, like a sack of flour being laid on a table. The second man had time to turn his head. There was a second thud, and the corridor was quiet again, except for a faint creak as Dorian lowered the second sleeper to the floor with the delicacy of a nurse laying a child in its cot.

"They'll have headaches," he whispered, "but they will live. Go on, then."

…

He pushed open the door.

The room was lit by a single candle, burning low in a saucer on the table beside the great yellow bed, and the first thing that he saw was Lila, lying quite still under the quilt with her black hair spread over the pillow and the rag doll in the crook of her arm. She was alive. He could see the slow rise and fall of the blanket, and a dreadful tightness that had been in his chest for four days let go all at once, so that he almost sank to his knees.

The second thing that he saw was that she was not alone.

Delphine sat in the chair beside the bed.

She was not dressed for company. She wore a plain gray wrapper with her hair loose down her back, and her feet were bare on the carpet, and her hands lay open in her lap as if she had forgotten they were there. The candlelight fell across her face from the side. He had not seen her without paint or powder or the shimmer of kohl in a long time, and the face that he saw now was thin and fine-boned and very tired, the face of a woman of twenty-six who had not slept in a week. There were gray smudges beneath her eyes. A silver bottle lay on its side on the carpet, with its stopper out, and a small dark pool of liquid had soaked into the nap beside her foot, and more of it was spilled across the table and down the front of her wrapper in a long glittering trail.

She lifted her head slowly, and her eyes met his in the candlelight.

They were brown.

He had thought, in the orangery, that they were the color of weak tea. He had been wrong. They were the color of a plain brown wall, faintly flecked with amber, and only at the very rim of the iris, like a last thin line of daylight at the end of a winter afternoon, was there the faintest trace of gold. She held one hand out in front of her. It was trembling so hard that the fingers danced against each other.

"I knew that you would come," said Delphine. "I told them that you would, and none of them believed me, but I knew that you could not leave her here. You were always the sort of man who does the most foolish thing at the worst possible moment."

"Delphine," he said, and could think of nothing else to say.

"Please do not shout. I have a headache, and I have spilled my drops, and I am extremely tired." She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. "I did not send for the Watch. I want you to understand that, because in a few moments you will think I did. The nurse is asleep in the next room, and the two men outside were only there to keep me company. I sat up with her tonight because I wished to be with someone who could not look at me."

…

Tamsin had come in behind him, silently, and stood with her back to the door. He heard her draw a breath. Delphine's eyes moved past him and fixed on her, and for a moment the two women looked at each other across the room, the tall pale fallen daughter of the Chancellor and the small dark prisoner in a servant's cloak, and neither spoke.

"You look dreadful," said Delphine at last.

"So do you," said Tamsin gently.

A strange sound escaped Delphine, half a laugh and half a sob. "I told them you were clever. I told my father, a month before you came, that he should not hire a woman who read so much, and he laughed at me." She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. "Soren, I want to tell you something, and I would be grateful if you would not interrupt, because I am not at all sure that I can say it twice."

"I am listening."

"The Sunwell is dying."

She said it quite quietly, and the candle flame did not so much as flicker, but the words seemed to enter the room like a draft of cold air.

"It has been dying for twenty years," she went on. "It was not quite so bad in your father's time, and my father was able to hide it. But every year the light grows thinner, and every year the Gilded are born a little paler. Do you know how many babies were born with gold eyes in Highmark last year? I know, because my father keeps the register. There were four hundred in my grandmother's day for every hundred we have now. Within ten years, Soren, within ten years, there will not be a Gilded eye left in the Dominion." Her voice shook. "Do you know what that does to us? Have you any idea? We will be ordinary. We will be nothing. We will be a handful of gray-eyed men in fur coats, with no light, and no throne, and nothing at all to distinguish us from the people we have been burying in the Wards for three hundred years."

"Delphine, you have no need to say all of this tonight..."

"I am not asking you to forgive it. I do not forgive it myself." She was crying openly now, with her mouth twisted and the tears running down her cheeks. "But I was raised in it. I was a child in that house, and when I was nineteen my father took me down to the Cistern and showed me the Well and told me what it was, and I was sick for two days. And then I went to a ball. That is what we do, you see. We go to a ball. We tell ourselves that we are not the villains in this, that we are the survivors, and that anyone else in our place would have done exactly the same."

"Anyone else would not," said Tamsin.

"No, perhaps not. But I am not anyone else." Delphine looked at Soren with swimming eyes. "I never wished to hurt her. I wanted to have a little sister. I wanted a house with a child in it and a husband who did not hate me, and instead I have this." She lifted her trembling hand. "I put the drops in every four hours, and still it goes. It is going, and it will not come back."

…

He crossed the room and knelt in front of her chair.

He had not planned it. There was nothing in his mind but a great confused ache, a grief for a girl he had known since she was a child with plaits who had cheated at croquet on the lawns of the Hall, and had grown up into this. He took the trembling hand in both of his own, the bare one and the gloved, and it was cold, and very thin.

"You do not have to murder children to live," said Soren.

It was not an accusation. He heard his own voice, low and almost tender, and he thought of the green-eyed baby on the riverbank in the smoke. "You can live without it, Delphine. The Gilded can live without the light. There is nothing in the world that says a man must have gold in his eyes to deserve his bread, and there is no law of God or nature that obliges a people to feed on its neighbors in order to be great. We would be poorer. We would be ordinary, as you say. But we would be alive, and we would be clean, and I would rather be ordinary and clean than a god in a charnel house."

"You make it sound so simple."

"It is not simple at all. It is the hardest thing in the world. But it is true."

Her face crumpled. She bent over his hands, and her whole body shook, and he held her while she wept, with the candle guttering beside them and Lila breathing softly in the bed. Tamsin had come closer. She stood at his shoulder, and in the dimness he saw her lay a hand very lightly on the other woman's hair.

For one wild moment he thought that it might be enough.

Then the bell began to ring.

…

It was the alarm bell on the roof of the Hall, which had not sounded in his lifetime, and it clanged out into the night with a harsh, hammering, furious note that made the windows buzz in their frames. A moment later came the sound of boots in the courtyard, a great many boots, striking the flagstones in time, and a hoarse voice calling out orders in the dark.

Delphine's head came up. Her face was white as paper.

"I did not do it," she said hoarsely. "Soren, I swear to you, I did not ring it. It was my father. He had men put in the house on the night after the trial, in the servants' quarters and the stables. I thought they were for show, to keep the press away. He said that you would come." She grasped at his sleeves. "He said that you were a sentimental fool, and that you could be counted on to walk straight into a trap for the sake of a child."

"And so I have," said Soren, rising.

He did not feel afraid, which surprised him. He felt a kind of glittering clarity, as if all the confusion of the last days had burned away. He bent over the bed, and slipped one arm beneath Lila's shoulders and the other beneath her knees, and lifted her. She weighed almost nothing. Her head lolled against his chest and her eyes did not open, but she murmured something against his coat, and the doll slipped from her fingers.

Tamsin caught it before it touched the floor.

"The back stair," said Dorian from the doorway. He had a sword in his hand and an urgency in his face that Soren had not seen since the Wexmouth road. "They're in the hall below and the courtyard. I count at least twenty, and some of them have the Frost Guard badge. The coal cellar's still clear, but not for long. Go on now, while there is still a way out."

"You are coming with us."

"Of course I am coming. I only mean to see that nobody follows." Dorian's grin was a quick white flash. "Go, damn it, before I lose my temper."

…

They ran down the dark back stair, with Tamsin ahead holding the lantern and Lila clutched to Soren's chest, past the dim silent doors of the servants' rooms, where frightened faces peered out and were gone. The bell clanged on, overhead, and below them he heard the crash of a door being broken in and a roar of voices. They reached the passage at the foot of the stair. A lantern bobbed at the far end of it, and a man's voice bellowed There! There they are!, and a shot cracked out, deafening in the narrow stone throat, and a puff of plaster flew from the wall beside Soren's head.

"Keep going, all of you!" shouted Dorian. He had stopped at the turn of the stair, with his back against the doorframe and his blade drawn, and as the first of the soldiers came charging round the corner, Soren saw him step forward to meet them. "Go on, now! I will hold the door!"

Soren hesitated, one foot on the cellar steps.

"Soren, we cannot stay," said Tamsin. She had seized his sleeve. Her face in the lantern light was set and white. "If we stay, we shall lose everything, and Dorian has asked us to go. Please, carry her down the stairs."

He went, although it was the hardest thing that he had done in a year, and he plunged down the cellar stairs with Lila's weight in his arms and the clash of steel ringing at his back, and as he reached the bottom he heard Dorian give a sharp grunt of pain, and then a groan, and then a ringing shout of "That one was for the Duke!" followed by the sound of a man falling heavily down a flight of stairs.

The old fuel store was ahead. The chute gaped in the wall like a mouth. Behind them there was a scrabbling and a clatter, and Dorian came tumbling through the door into the cellar, with his left arm pressed against his side and a long dark stain spreading down his sleeve from the shoulder. His face was gray. He was grinning like a madman.

"A small cut," he said, as Tamsin ran to him. "Nothing worth mentioning. Go up the slide, if you please, I'll be right behind you."

…

It was Tamsin who looked back.

She had paused at the foot of the chute with one hand on Dorian's arm, and her eyes went to the head of the cellar stair, and Soren, following her glance, felt his heart contract.

Delphine stood at the top of the steps.

She had followed them down. She stood alone in the open doorway, in her gray wrapper, with her loose hair stirring about her face in the draft, and behind her in the passage he could hear the soldiers coming, the clatter of their boots and the shouting of their officer. She had only to raise her hand, or call out a word. She had only to say they are here, and the whole cellar would be filled with men.

She did not say it. She did not call out, or move, or raise a hand to help. She only stood, quite still, in the dark, and looked at him across the length of the cellar, and he saw in her ruined brown eyes a look that he would remember for the rest of his life. It was the way a person looks at someone who is walking away on a train, and who will not return, and who is already gone.

"Goodbye, Soren," said Delphine softly.

Then the soldiers were upon her, and the candlelight went out, and the dark swallowed her up.

He turned and put Lila into the mouth of the chute, and went up after her.

…

They came to the Hollows by the dawn freight, in the snow.

It was a bitter, glittering, silent morning, with the light coming up slowly in the east behind the black chimneys and the cold so great that the breath froze on the collars of their coats. They rode in the guard's van, wrapped in blankets, with the stove roaring and the cousin of Mrs. Ketteridge keeping a nervous watch at the window. Dorian lay on the bench with his head pillowed on his rolled coat, gray and sweating and cursing steadily in a low monotone, while Tamsin bound the wound in his shoulder with strips of her petticoat. Soren sat on the floor, with his back against the wall and Lila on his lap, and held her wrapped in his greatcoat against the shaking of the wheels.

He had not spoken for an hour. There was nothing in him to say. He sat watching the white fields go by and the wheeling crows and the dark shapes of the villages, and holding the child, and thinking of a girl with plaits cheating at croquet.

"Soren," said a small voice against his chest.

He looked down.

Lila had opened her eyes. They were not gold, he saw, not quite. In the cold gray daylight that came through the window of the van, they seemed to him a pale and wavering color, neither one thing nor the other, with the faintest touch of green at the rim, like a coin washed up on a beach. She was looking up at him with an expression of grave clear wonder, as if she had come a long way and was surprised to find anyone there.

"I am here, little one," he said, and his voice cracked. "You are safe. We are taking you somewhere warm, and you will have a proper breakfast, and nobody shall ever make you drink that horrible tonic again."

She considered this for a moment, with her head tilted.

"Is Mama in the water?" asked Lila.