Grace’s letters were waiting on her nightstand when she went to bed. The pages had been soaked through by Nell’s would-be alligator attack, and Grace had been terrified that they would fall apart in her hands if she didn’t let them dry thoroughly. The pages fluttered in the night breeze as she reached for them, her heart leaping at the sight of her younger sister’s handwriting.
Fair Lily—
The breeze brought me your letter. I don’t know that I would’ve gone looking for it otherwise, it has been so long since we played. I am glad you came back.
Do you remember my sister, Grace? She has died. Mother and Father say that a sickness killed her on a boat when she went on a trip. I miss her. She would always play with me and tell me everything would be all right, though it looks like she was wrong.
Father tries to comfort me. He even let me sit on his lap the other day, although Mother said I’m much too big to be doing that sort of thing now. Mother put my hair up in curls to try to cheer me up, but when Father said I looked very pretty she got angry and pulled it all out again. It hurt and I had to cry, and Mother didn’t let me come down to dinner and I don’t know why.
I miss Grace and I miss you.
Write back—
Alice
Grace’s fingers shook as she refolded Alice’s letter, placed it under her pillow, and turned to Falsteed’s.
Dearest Grace—
From one asylum to another, greetings. Enclosed you will find a letter that Reed retrieved for you. I gave it a good sniff before entrusting it to him. Your sister has the smell of innocence about her still, and the whiff of purity that came from your presence may indeed have been due to your close proximity to her. But I choose to believe otherwise.
You say I am a good person who has done bad things. You are a good person who has had bad things done to her, which is a different situation altogether. Do not sell yourself so short in assuming that the darkness inside you cannot be overcome, or that your only path to redemption lies with the footsteps of Thornhollow. There is more to you than beauty. There is more to you than strength. There is more to you than intelligence. You are a whole person, and I would have you treat yourself as such.
Falsteed
Grace’s sob took her by surprise as her tears fell on Falsteed’s declaration that Alice remained innocent. “Thank God,” she said quietly to herself as a night rain began to fall outside. “Thank God.”
Grace slammed her hands over her mouth before she realized that the screams that had awoken her were not her own. Pulse racing, she listened with the rest of the wing’s inhabitants to see if it would happen again. And it did. A piercing wail that floated up through the floorboards, its maker unrecognizable in her grief. Footsteps shuffled in rooms all around her and doors creaked open, hushed voices seeking answers as lamps were lit.
“What’s happened?”
“Who is it?”
“Where’s it coming from?”
Grace lay still in her bed, willing her heart to a steady rhythm before joining them.
“It’s comin’ from down under me own room. Luck o’ the Irish, my arse,” Nell’s voice joined the throng and Grace slipped through her door to see a cluster of familiar faces gathered together.
“Under your room?” a tall woman named Rebecca said. “That’d be the widow Jacobs.”
Another shriek reached the group, trailing off into a series of racking sobs that made Grace’s throat ache.
“That old loon?” Nell said. “Christ, she’s a case, sure enough. Best get used to it, lassies. We’ll be up the rest o’ the night.”
“Nell,” Elizabeth chided. “That’s no way to speak.”
“I can’t help me accent.”
“You know what I mean,” Elizabeth bit back, more harshly than usual, her hand clamped firmly in the thin air beside her hair. “Something’s gone horribly wrong.”
“Oh, really?” Nell asked. “And what does String know about it?”
Elizabeth twisted her hand furtively, uncomfortable under the hungry stares of the others. “It’s not my place to say.”
“You do know, then?” Rebecca asked, raising her oil lamp higher and peering at Elizabeth.
Elizabeth’s eyes bounced from one face to another, and Grace felt a stab of pity. She tugged on Nell’s elbow just as the door at the end of the hallway opened. Janey’s hair was down and loose, her eyes still heavy with sleep.
“All right, ladies, back to bed, back to bed,” she said, her voice still carrying authority even though she was wearing a nightgown. “Nothing to get upset about.”
“Somebody who sleeps in the room under me own doesn’t think so,” Nell disagreed, arms crossed in front of her. “She was verra upset indeed.”
“Is it Mrs. Jacobs?” Rebecca asked.
Elizabeth only fretted at the air beside her ear, fingers entwined in something invisible.
Janey looked at the circle of faces and sighed. “All right then, if it’ll get you back in your beds. Her daughter’s died, and the police have just been to tell her.”
“And her just a wee lass,” Nell said, real sadness in her voice. “Tha’s a terrible thing to hear.”
“She’s not,” Rebecca said. “Her daughter’s a full-grown woman, same as me. I’ve seen her when she comes to visit. Unless there’s more than the one?”
“Mad or not, yer dense as can be,” Nell said. “’Ave ye not ’eard the woman speaking of ’er lass like she’s just a bairn? Goes on about ’ow she cries all the night till ’er mum brings ’er a drink.”
“Ladies,” Janey said, her voice bringing a halt to the argument. “Mrs. Jacobs has just the one daughter, if I must say so to end this ridiculousness.”
“She walks on ’er own two legs and still cries for ’er mum in the night?” Nell said incredulously. “Sounds like she’d be better off in ’ere with the likes of us.”
“Except she’s dead,” Elizabeth reminded her. “And Mrs. Jacobs chooses to think of her as a child because it’s easier than recognizing the adult she’s become.”
The group hushed, all faces turned to Elizabeth, who blanched under the attention.
“How did you know that?” Janey asked.
Elizabeth only shook her head, hands clenching tighter to the air near her hair.
“Oy there, String,” Nell called, peeling apart Elizabeth’s hands. “Perhaps ye tell me where to find some buried treasure? Or the cure for the pox? Somethin’ useful for once, ye invisible bastard.”
“You dare!” Elizabeth gasped, flashing her teeth at Nell, who backed off. “You keep a civil tongue in your head when addressing String, Nell O’Kelly, or I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
“You’ll what?” Rebecca asked.
“I’ll spit in your tea,” Elizabeth said, stamping one tiny foot as she said it.
The other girls burst into laughter, and Grace bit down on her tongue to keep from joining them. Janey tried hard to control her face but her lips were twitching. Even Elizabeth’s angry pout changed into a hesitant smile.
“Aye, she’s a vicious one, our Lizzie,” Nell said. “Tell String I’m sorry and not to get ’imself in a tangle over it.”
“String is neither male nor female,” Elizabeth said.
“I don’t care one way or the other,” Rebecca said, looking sternly at Janey. “All I want to know is if String is right?”
Janey looked from each face to the next, all eyes now latched on her in the orange glow from the lamps. “Fine then,” she said, tossing her hands in the air. “Yes, the widow Jacobs’s daughter is an adult, but Mrs. Jacobs has found it easier to pretend she was still a little one, rather than an adult who chose to . . . to . . .”
“Are ye sayin’ she’s a whore?” Nell asked, drawing out the last word lasciviously.
“Was a whore,” Elizabeth corrected yet again. “She’s dead.”
Janey nodded. “Dead indeed. And the knowledge of that has sent the poor woman into a fit. Now you know, and I want all your legs moving back to your rooms. And don’t you be telling the other staff I said a word to you. They’d have my hide for sharing stories that aren’t my own.”
Grace wandered back to her bed, listening to Elizabeth and Nell’s good-natured bickering as she went. She’d not known Mrs. Jacobs well, but the few times they had met she’d been reminded of Mrs. Clay. They shared a respectful bearing, a way of holding themselves that communicated a power restrained. Now Mrs. Jacobs was broken, for whether her daughter was child or whore, she was lost forever. Grace’s thoughts strayed to Boston and Mrs. Clay, Reed and Falsteed, the deplorable Nurse Croomes and Dr. Heedson, whose straying hand she’d so gladly impaled.
Her consciousness trailed down into the darkness of sleep, where even that blackness could not compare with the hues of her past.
“Is she going to be all right?” Grace asked, in an attempt to distract Thornhollow from the blackboard.
“Who?” he asked, tearing his eyes away from his own handwriting reluctantly.
“Mrs. Jacobs,” she reminded him. “I was asking how she’s handling her grief?”
“Not well,” he said, slumping in the chair beside hers and tenting his hands over his eyes. “The ferocity of her emotions is tearing apart her mind. Sometimes I think we’d all be best suited by not caring for others at all.”
“A bleak picture,” Grace said. “I dislike most people as much as you, but the few that I care for I hold very dear. If not for those who care for us, we’d never make it through the worst. I’d not have survived Boston without Falsteed and Mrs. Clay. Likewise I’ll do my best to steer my sister through mourning my own death, false though it may be.”
A long silence greeted her words as Thornhollow slowly pulled his hands away from his face. “You have a sister?”
“Yes,” Grace said hesitantly, realizing her blunder.
“Older or younger?”
“Younger. She’s ten years old.”
“And she remains at home?”
“Yes,” Grace answered, nerves making her voice thready. “Why do you ask?”
“And how exactly are you offering comfort to her, if you are—as you say yourself—supposedly dead?”
Grace stiffened in her chair, braced for the argument. “I wrote to Falsteed and enclosed a letter to her written by an imaginary friend. Reed placed it for me and retrieved her response, sending it to me here.”
“You did what?” Each word was succinctly bitten off, each syllable a vibrant slash in the charged air between them. Thornhollow’s brow was dark, his eyes snapping in a way she’d never seen.
“I wrote to Falsteed,” she repeated, matching him tone for tone. “He gave me an alias to use. Reed handles all our correspondence. I’m sure the hospital staff in Boston believes he has a lover named Madeleine Baxter, nothing more.”
Thornhollow rose from the chair, pacing the room with an influx of energy and anger. “And this same Madeleine Baxter happens to enclose letters to the younger sister of a female inmate who supposedly died under my blade? What if a busybody decides to go through Reed’s letters, or his wife somehow gets wind that he receives missives from a female at his workplace? I didn’t deliver you from that pit only for you to allow sentiment to drive us both back into it!”
“Sentiment, Doctor!” Grace exploded, rising up from her chair to meet him in her fury. “My little sister lives in a more refined pit, but a viper’s nest nonetheless. You truly think I would leave her abandoned to that horror simply to save my own skin?”
“Your own skin?” he bellowed back, not cowed in the least by her display of temper. “What of mine? What of my career? How would it appear if it were discovered that I colluded in the disappearance of an attractive young woman and reappeared with her elsewhere as my dutiful assistant?”
“Am I to be a kept woman, then?” Grace yelled, not caring that his office walls may not hold her voice. “Not for what’s between my legs but my ears? Here to hop to your beck and call when you need a plaything for your night’s adventures, no less of a doll for your own purposes than our killer’s victims are to him?”
“Enough!” Thornhollow roared. “I’ll not be spoken to like this when I’ve risked everything on your behalf. Your father is a powerful man, Grace Mae. You don’t realize what could happen to me if he should uncover our ruse.”
“No, Doctor,” Grace allowed, her tone suddenly cold. “But I know exactly what would happen to me.” She turned her back to him and left the office with all the disdain her mother’s training had instilled in her, head held high.