Free The Last Nightingale by Anthony Flacco Page A

pen-and-ink sketches, and sometimes even daguerreotype photographs of successful men and women. The shots accompanied articles about High Society's weddings, their births, their graduations, and their charity balls—all of it was news to him. The images stuck to his brain like flypaper. It wasn't the idea of money and power that was so captivating; it was the impression of contentedness. How could it be otherwise for such people, living such lives?
    He tried to envision what it must be like for them to live each day, feeling assured that they were a desired presence anywhere they went, always knowing just how to behave and what to do. These people had the world's stamp of approval. Unlike Shane, their conduct brought credit to their families. No doubt, any one of them would have known what to do in the Nightingale house. They would have been able to take action where he could do nothing more than lie paralyzed.
    The Nightingale family had given Shane their last name and ended his life as a foundling in order to show him a house where there was decency and discipline for everyone, even if he were little more than a glorified servant. It wasn't an unhappy household; happiness simply wasn't part of the daily roster. Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale were both vocal supporters of hot baths, cool tempers, and cold routines. It felt sterile to him, even though he couldn't imagine what he would actually do differently, given the chance.
    He only knew that despite his respect and fondness for people he lived to serve, he never felt any desire to emulate their way of life once he was grown. That was even truer now, when being reminded of the Nightingale house made his mouth taste of ashes.
    Shane became consumed by the urge to study the happy people of the world and discover the secret to living their lives. Most of all, he wondered what they might know that could have given him power to take action, back in the Nightingale house, if only he had known it too. Could learning it guarantee that such a thing would never happen again? That question, especially, began to haunt him.
    Now while he read the society pages and practiced his speaking, he was also searching for a
particular example
—somebody who might teach him, by personal demonstration, the secret of how to live. But since Shane also knew that privileged people have authority—his experience in life so far had shown him that too much authority tends to turn nice people into mean ones and to make nasty people turn just plain evil—his plan was to select his subjects, then hang back and observe them from a distance. Let them teach him without realizing it. That seemed safer than confessing his weakness and asking for help, exposing himself to scorn. Perhaps earning himself a ticket back to St. Adrian's, where children were sometimes heard making those same yelps of surprise and fear that he now knew far too well.
    Surely these society people were the antithesis of nearly everything he had absorbed with the hardscrabble survival skills learned in the orphanage, or the grim and gray discipline of the Nightingale house. He would practice. He would do more than practice; he would study them, copy them any way he could. There was no choice. Until he did, he felt certain that he was missing too many pieces inside to be able to hold his own, out there among the fast-talkers. With lives such as these society people seemed to have, surely they knew how to avoid going through their days feeling like garbage. Surely there was something he could learn from being around them.
    "What a thing," Shane said under his breath, "that anyone can actually live like that." His mind sank into the fantasy images while his body exhaled so deeply that the muscles rattled in his shoulders and his legs. "What a thing," he said again, just because it seemed to need saying. He was too preoccupied to notice that he was speaking without any sort of stammer at all.

CHAPTER SIX
FRIDAY, MAY 18
ONE MONTH AFTER
THE