Amelia lay on her cot with her eyes closed, as uncomfortable as she’d ever been in her life. Her arms, pinioned by the heavy canvas sleeves of the straitjacket, had long since gone numb. The ache in her shoulders, however, went bone-deep. The straps squeezed her torso, pulled far too tight and fastened by heavy metal buckles at the middle of her back. The injection they’d given her before they put the straitjacket on her, much as she hated them for it, was the only reason she’d slept at all. Even now, it clung to her mind like mist, blurring the edges of her thoughts and lending an otherworldly air to everything around her.
One thought was clear: it had happened again. Not quite as it had in the park, but near enough. She remembered the doctor—Cavanaugh, she thought she’d heard—coming into the cell. She remembered Mrs. Brennan leaving. And then as he spoke to her, the silvery mist had gathered behind him and taken shape. He touched her, and it surged over her.
And the next thing she knew, she was lying on her cot and the cell was full of people. Cavanaugh was still there, pale and shaken and holding a blood-spotted handkerchief against his cheek. Mrs. Brennan was behind him, and two orderlies were in the doorway, one holding a syringe and the other a bundle of white canvas, straps trailing down.
“What happened?” she rasped.
Cavanaugh only looked at her with wide, stunned eyes.
“You had another of your fits,” Mrs. Brennan said, with a smug glance at the doctor’s back. “You see?” she told him. “She’s dangerous. You’ll want to tend to your face. Leave us to see to her.” Mrs. Brennan jerked her head toward the orderlies, who started forward. Amelia shrank back against the thin mattress.
“No,” Cavanaugh barked, waving them away. “No,” he said again in a more measured tone. “She’s done no real harm, and none at all intentionally. You’re to leave her be.”
He gave the cell a wild glance and backed toward the door. He turned, pushed past the others, and strode out.
Mrs. Brennan scowled after him, then turned back to Amelia. A moment later, the sound of the heavy ward door closing echoed down the hall.
The matron motioned to the orderlies. “Get on with it.”
They looked at her in confusion. “But the doctor said—” one of them began.
She rounded on him with a ferocious glare. “The doctor”—the word was a hiss—“isn’t here. I am, and I’m telling you to get her jabbed and wrapped, or you’ll be off the island and out of a job by dinner.”
Amelia had tried to fight, but her head throbbed with every movement. The two of them would have been more than a match for her in any case. One held her as the other stuck the needle into her arm. By the time they stepped back, her head was foggy and her vision was blurring. From far away she heard one of the orderlies ask if the restraints were necessary.
“She don’t look to be in any shape to cause trouble,” he said.
Mrs. Brennan let loose with a stream of invective. Both men flinched and moved to obey. Unable to hold them open any longer, Amelia let her eyes droop closed, thinking vaguely that at least now her face didn’t hurt. The last thing she felt before she lost consciousness was the orderlies threading her limp arms into the stiff white canvas.
Now her stomach roiled and her head throbbed. The endless noise of the ward seemed to have magnified and somehow concentrated into a solid mass that pressed against the insides of her ears. How much of this new sensitivity was an effect of the injection, and how much was a result of yesterday’s encounter? The scrape of a key in a lock sliced into the thought and sent a bolt stabbing through her head. She groaned, pressing her forehead against the thin mattress.
Amelia steeled herself and opened her eyes. One of the younger nurses stood in the doorway of her cell. Cavanaugh stood behind her.
He was through the door before it had opened much more than a crack, resolve on his face. Another step, and his eyes widened. Without taking them off her, he spoke to the nurse in a voice like the crack of a whip.
“I specifically said she was not to be restrained. Who ordered this?”
“I don’t know, Doctor, I only came onto the ward this morning.”
He pressed his lips together. “Leave us.”
As the nurse scurried out of the cell, Cavanaugh stepped forward.
“Are you able to sit?” His voice was tight.
She didn’t reply, too busy scanning the space behind him. There was nothing. She relaxed the tiniest fraction and finally focused on him. His eyes were shadowed, his face drawn and pale. She wormed and twisted until she was sitting upright on the cot. He watched and made no effort to help her.
The movement sent darts of pain through Amelia’s head. She did her best to ignore it and turned halfway so he could reach the buckles at her back. There was a momentary hesitation—he didn’t want to touch her, she realized. She looked back over her shoulder at him as he finally leaned in, his jaw hard.
He’d nicked himself shaving and missed a thin strip of beard over the pulse in his neck. He wore far too much cologne, no doubt in an attempt to mask the odor of stale whiskey seeping from his pores. It seemed she wasn’t the only one suffering from a heavy head this morning.
She might have enjoyed his discomfort if her own had not been growing with every minute. She tasted the sticky floral scent on the back of her tongue. Her stomach lurched. She swallowed hard and turned her head away as he worked.
After another moment, the buckles loosened, and he moved back, taking his eye-watering cloud with him. Amelia took a relieved breath and wriggled out of the restraints. She flexed her shoulders with a sigh—then grimaced as the blood rushed back into her arms. She must have made a sound, since Cavanaugh leaned forward. The slick of artificial scent engulfed her, and suddenly it was all too much. Her stomach failed her, and she bent forward, retching, producing only a thin stream of acid and bile.
Once she regained control of herself, Amelia wiped her mouth on a corner of the straitjacket and shoved the thing away. She leaned against the rough stone wall, the thin, sweat-dampened fabric of her dress offering no protection from its chill. She shivered.
“What do you want?” she asked, not really caring.
He hesitated, his expression caught somewhere between concern and resolve.
“I want to know who told you what to do,” he said finally. “Yesterday, you—I don’t know how you—those things you said…” His voice trailed away, but his eyes never moved from her face.
“What did I say?”
His expression darkened. “Do not play games with me.”
“Games.” Amelia tried to imagine what he would say, how he would react, if she told him the truth. She knew, of course; he would think she was mad. Elizabeth had seen and believed. But this man, this doctor, flush with learning and superiority, would not. Amelia laughed, and it was a bitter, humorless sound. “I’m not playing games, Doctor. I don’t know what I said.”
He began to pace the length of the cell. “Did someone promise you something? Threaten you? I can help you, but only if you tell me the truth.”
The taut strands of Amelia’s patience frayed. “No one told me anything.” Her tone was sharp around the edges. “I told you, I don’t know what I said. Whatever happened yesterday, whatever—or whomever—you saw, whatever she said—”
He froze in his tracks and whirled to face her. “She.” He pounced on the word. “You claim not to know what you said, but you know the words were a woman’s?”
He thought he’d caught her. He would never listen to her denials now. All the weeks of careful, calculated behavior. All the endurance and the restraint. All of it had bought her nothing. Tears of anger and frustration pricked at her eyelids. Amelia blinked them away in sudden conviction.
If he wanted the truth, she would give it to him, and damn the consequences. She squared her shoulders and looked up at him.
“She stood behind you yesterday.” Her voice was clipped. “A young woman. Pretty. I don’t know who she is—or was, since I suspect she’s dead.”
He flinched, and his face went white.
Amelia went on with a rush of savage joy. “I see you recognize the description. I do not know what I said. She was the one who spoke.”
Only years at the cards could have taught her to decipher the stream of expressions pouring across his face. Shock and sorrow. Guilt. And a flash of something soft. Hope? It touched his face and flitted away, fast as a hummingbird. Anger rushed in behind it.
He stepped toward her, flushed and shaking.
“You are lying,” he said in a low, passionate tone. “You are lying, and someone has put you up to it. I want to know who, and I want to know why. You will tell me.” His face was tight with anger, but there was a desperate edge to his voice.
A wave of fury rolled over Amelia and swept away her aching head and raw stomach. She leapt to her feet. All the fear and hopelessness of the past weeks, all the humiliations, the cruelties, the loneliness, and the desperation—they gathered inside her chest and swelled like water against a dam. And then they burst free.
She heard herself shouting as if from a great distance. About the infernal arrogance of men who demanded truth, then refused to hear it. About doctors who decided the course of women’s lives without looking at them. About nurses who took pleasure in cruelty. About stolen names. About Promenades and chamber pots. About straitjackets and icy baths and drugged water. About purgatory and hell and hard benches and stone walls and the stupidity of men who made such places and demanded women thank them for it.
A tiny, horrified corner of her mind begged her to stop. With every word, every accusation, she confirmed her own madness and destroyed any chance she might have had of getting him to believe her. But he would never believe her, another, colder voice reminded her. She’d told him the truth, and he’d called her a liar. It drove her on. Amelia poured her rage at his feet like burning pitch.
He drew back from her, shocked. Her anger began to wear itself down, until finally the remnants drained away, and she slumped, breathless and exhausted. She felt a twinge of regret and crushed it with a ruthless fist. It didn’t matter; he would never have listened. Never would have believed her. Never could have. She had lost nothing.
The rest of the ward had gone silent during her outburst. Now, in the hush that followed its conclusion, renewed sobs, wracking and piteous, began to filter through the hallway. Mara, continuing her ceaseless mourning.
“You’d do better to let the dead go,” Amelia said, and jerked her chin toward the girl’s cell. “She can’t, and look what it’s done to her. And if you actually want to help someone,” she added, and noted his tiny flinch, “you should start with her. If all you can do is call me a liar, then you can get out and leave me be.”
She turned her back to him. Moments later, the cell door crashed closed, and his footsteps echoed as he retreated down the hall.