Free The Sweetest Dark by Shana Abe Page A

corner opposite mine, reclining on a chaise longue, letting her jackals do all the talking. I pretended not to hear, but the parlor sported mirrors on all the walls. Everything reflected.
    â€œâ€¦Â so ridiculous. I mean, of course she has no money, but does that mean she has to dress like some woeful matchstick girl? You know the ones I mean, Stella, those deplorable little rags one sees at Drury Lane, bleating for coins after the shows.”
    â€œQuite.”
    â€œAnd her hair. Gracious.”
    â€œPerhaps someone might lend her a proper comb. You’ve got an old one, Caro, don’t you? That ugly one your auntie gave you, carved from a camel bone or something?”
    â€œI’d rather throw it away, really. I doubt she’d even know what to do with it. Look at her. Did no one tell her this was Sunday tea?”
    Chew, chew, chew, chew. Swallow. Sip.
    â€œIs that a hole in her skirt? Look, look—oh, Mittie, don’t be such a fishwife! With your eyes, not your entire torso! But just there, at her knee.”
    â€œIt is!”
    â€œYes!”
    â€œNow, that is truly pathetic. Truly.”
    â€œPathetic!”
    Chew, chew, chew, chew. The salmon turned to mush in my mouth.
    â€œWhat on earth do you suppose Lord Armand had to say to her?”
    That was from Lillian, sounding genuinely baffled. I took my sip of tea in the midst of their silence, washing down the mush.
    â€œWell, she’s the new charity girl, isn’t she?” said Mittie. “So most likely he was merely saying hello. All the charity girls have to meet the duke. To make certain they’re appropriate and everything. He was probably only saying hello. For his father.”
    â€œHe never did before,” said Lillian, still baffled.
    â€œOf course he did. You just never knew.”
    â€œIt didn’t seem Chloe thought it a mere hello.”
    â€œNo,” agreed Sophia thoughtfully, speaking at last. “It didn’t.”
    My cup and plate were empty. I rose, placed them on the sideboard with the other lovely dirty things, and walked off. The mirrors all around showed me images of a phantom girl, shadowy and gray.
    I left her behind me. I was careful not to look too closely at her face.
    ...
    And that was the sum of my first day at Iverson.
    The worst part of it all was that Jesse was right. I was hungry. I was definitely too hungry not to eat his orange.
    If it was Dark, it didn’t matter. I was already doomed, because every Dark cell of my being already hungered to see him again.
    I stood by my window that night and dropped the peeling through bit by bit, flickers of white and orange that tumbled down to the grass, became swallowed by the moonlit green.

Chapter Ten
    Proper young ladies of the British Empire were, apparently, expected to know how to dance, to organize a supper of up to twenty courses, to embroider, to speak a foreign language—not German—to play the piano, and to paint.
    We were not expected to wrestle with mathematics, beyond what might be required for common household management. We need not bother with horticulture but were encouraged to learn to arrange cut flowers artfully in vases. We studied history because, I supposed, it was dry and full of the dead and therefore mostly harmless. But science was a subject fixed absolutely within the realm of men. So was literature of the darker sort; no Dante or John Ford for us. We read books about moral forbearance. Or else poems, the fluffy sort that rhapsodized over windmills and kings and kittens and good girls who liked to sit by the fire and knit.
    I could not dance. I could not reliably position forks on a dinner table for a prince. When I embroidered, the needle buzzed so loudly in my hand that I pricked myself with it, and my first attempt at a sampler ended up stippled with blood.
    I understood no other language but my own and that of the metals and stones.
    I’d never held a paintbrush.
    But something