I lay awake half the night; when I did sleep I restlessed, tossing and turning, troubled by a succession of dreams in which the face of Caroline Adams loomed before me, the skin purple, the eyes popping out. Another time I awoke bathed in sweat after I felt my hands upon the clammy, pimpled neck of a plucked chicken which, when I looked at it, turned into the face of my Aunt Martha, who surely merited such a fate since she never intervened to prevent the violent excesses of my uncle and his vicious belt. But curiously, when morning finally came, with the sun shining bright, the thing that concerned me was neither the unfortunate Miss Adams, nor anything like that, but Jane Dove. The fact that she had read Hamlet to Morgan meant she had been fooling us – well, me, really – all along, simply pretending she could not read. I wondered what else she might be simulating and why she should want to do so. There was some mystery here and I meant to get to the bottom of it. I liked this girl immensely. I was attracted by her gangly good looks, her dark haunting eyes, her graceful neck; but none of that mattered. I would not be made a fool of; I would not be used.
As soon as I could escape my duties I went to her room. She was sitting at the window, staring out at the wintry landscape. Great Expectations was near to hand and I wondered if she had been reading it and had hurriedly put it down when she heard my knock. She smiled brightly at me. ‘Look at the snow!’ she said. ‘Is it not wonderful?’
I gave a cursory nod and she suddenly looked anxious. ‘Oh, sir, did I not pass the test?’
‘Oh yes, you passed all right. You passed a little too well.’
She was puzzled now. ‘I don’t understand. How could I do too well?’
‘You and I must have a serious conversation. I have tried my level best to help you. I have lifted you out of the tedious indignities of this place and you in return have taken advantage of me and deceived me.’
Her face fell. ‘What do you mean? What is it you accuse me of?’
‘Dr Morgan tells me you read Hamlet to him. How is that possible when you have not learned it?’
She began to laugh.
‘What …?’
‘I did learn it, from you, when you read it to me and acted it out. I could not help but remember some of it. “To be or not to be that is the question.” It just stuck in my mind.’
‘Dr Morgan said you read it to him. How did you know which piece was the soliloquy if you could not read the words?’
‘That is not the way it happened. When I had finished Great Expectationing, Dr Morgan asked me to read something else. I desperated, as you can well imagine, for I had no other pieces prepared and thought I was redhanded. The only other book in the room was the Shakespeare and he picked it up and handed it to me and told me to read something from it. My heart was beating as if it was going to burst, I can tell you, as I expected to be found out, but then I saw a chance, a small glimmer of hope. I opened it at random, because, as you say, I could not tell one page from another, but he had sat down opposite me. I lifted the book so all he could see was the cover. I gave him some speeches from Hamlet and a bit of Macbeth. I am sure I didn’t get them quite right, because I was only remembering what I’d heard and had not learned them as we did the Dickens. But he didn’t seem to notice. To tell you true, sir, I do not think Dr Morgan familiars much with Shakespeare.’
I shook my head in admiration at the resourcefulness of her improvisation and also at the sheer audacity of it. To think Morgan had considered this girl an imbecile. She had run rings around him, the silly old fool. I smiled. ‘That was very quick-thinking of you. I’m sorry I doubted you.’
She ignored that and looked out the window again, avoiding my eyes. ‘Sir, I have a request to make of you.’
‘A request? What is it?’
‘I should like to go skating.’
‘Skating!’
She turned to me, eyes gleaming. ‘It possibles, sir, really it does. Eva has skates she will lend me the use of and although it is true there is no lake, there is a pond at the back of the house and a couple of the garden boys have cleared the snow from it for Eva and she has been skating there. Please, sir, please let me.’
I was about to say no automatically, because I could imagine what Morgan would think of the idea, but then I thought, Why not? Where’s the harm in it? Besides, I didn’t need to ask Morgan’s permission. He’d given me a free hand with my experiment, more or less. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I will get up an hour early tomorrow morning and you can have your skate before breakfast.’
I was beginning to think ahead now, to ready myself for my departure, which would have to be before the snow melted and revealed Caroline Adams’s body. On counting the money I’d taken from her purse, I found it to amount to sixty dollars. With what I could pry out of Morgan by way of salary I would have a pretty good stake to finance my flight west. I looked more and more to the future and the new life I envisaged for myself because my existence in the hospital now was underscored by a vague feeling of dread. I worried that Miss Adams might be missed and that she might have told someone where she was going. Every time I was near a window with a view of the river, I could not help looking anxiously out across the black water expecting any moment to see a boat full of police heading toward the island. Of course I had lived for years with that kind of fear, but this time was somehow different. It was having had the noose practically around my neck that had done it. Before, I had convinced myself I was invincible; now I knew it wasn’t so. I was not fool enough to think the train wreck had been the work of providence protecting me, or even of the devil, looking after his own. I knew it was pure blind luck, a royal flush in the first deal, such an extraordinary piece of good fortune that I could not help feeling I must have used up all my reservoir of that substance and was now due no more.
The following morning it stopped snowing and the sun shone brightly in a clear frosty sky. Jane and I set off together for the pond, with her animated and chatting away in her strange language and giggling like a schoolgirl. Today we seemed more like child and favourite uncle than doctor and patient, or the lover and his lass we had sometimes felt close to being.
Eva’s boys must have been out early, since the pond had been cleared of snow. I shivered when I saw how close it was to where I had dumped the unfortunate Miss Adams, who lay only twenty or thirty yards away from the edge of the ice. But when I saw there was no sign of the body and how effectively it was concealed, I began to enjoy the idea of its proximity. While Jane sat by the edge of the frozen water putting on the skates Eva had lent her, I strolled casually round the pond until I came to the spot where I reckoned Miss Adams lay. I crunched through the snow and then stood watching my charge, and could not prevent a little smile at the idea I was standing on my victim and that I was the only one who knew.
Jane Dove had evidently skated a great deal before; she was certainly no novice. She glided effortlessly across the ice, graceful as a swan, head held high by that deliciously long neck. She criss-crossed the surface, going perilously close to the edges – which was unavoidable because the pond was so small, not at all like the lake she had told me about – but always seeming to know where she was. She swept around the little circle of the pond’s perimeter with a confidence that belied her normal shy self. And then, all at once, she stopped skating and let herself slow to a halt, coming to rest at more or less the dead centre of the ice. She stood there on her skates, staring ahead of her, hair blowing in the breeze, looking wild and completely crazy. I did not know what had happened but I had a hollow feeling in my chest. Something from deep inside her seemed to have tipped her over the edge.
I stumbled through the snow to the edge of the pond and called out, ‘Jane! Jane! What’s the matter?’
Her features were as immobile as her body; she showed no sign of having heard me. Then I had a sudden inspiration, ‘Florence!’ I shouted. ‘Florence!’
Immediately her head swung round and she looked straight at me and, as she did so, began to wobble. Her feet slid in opposite directions and she collapsed in a heap.
It was difficult for me to reach her quickly. My shoes slipped and slid on the ice and a couple of times I nearly fell flat on my back. She remained sitting on the ice, staring at me as if at a stranger. ‘It’s all right, Florence, I’m coming,’ I yelled. She didn’t seem to care.
Eventually I was with her. I got behind her, put my hands under her arms and hauled her to her feet. There was a moment when her skates began to slide away beneath her and I thought we were both going to go over, but I managed to stay steady and got her safely upright.
‘What’s the matter? What happened?’ I said.
She regarded me as though she had no idea who I was, then said a single word: ‘Theo.’
I waited a moment but nothing else came, so I said, ‘Who is Theo? Is he someone you used to skate with?’
Her eyes were staring at me but I felt they were seeing nothing. It was as though the mechanism inside them was focused inwards, looking at something long buried there. She nodded slowly. ‘Yes. He was tall.’
Again she offered nothing more and so I tried another prompt. ‘Is he perhaps the brother you mentioned before? Is Theo your brother?’
Her brow furrowed, as though she was thinking hard. At last she said, ‘My brother? Yes, I think he might have been. He was tall like me. Yes, he must have been my brother.’
It struck me as odd that while I had spoken of this Theo in the present tense, she had used the past. Was this because something had happened to him or was it that she was looking at her former life as something long gone? I could not tell.
With my arm around her shoulders I began to walk her slowly toward the edge of the ice. She made no attempt to skate but clip-clopped clumsily along on her blades. When we made the shore and she was sitting taking off the skates I said, ‘All right then, tell me more about Theo.’
Again she stared into some far distant past for what seemed like an age and then at last she looked at me and gave a second take, as though she had just realised I was there. ‘I – I can’t. I had a picture of a boy skating on a lake, but now it’s gone. He’s not there any more.’
‘Try,’ I urged her. ‘Come, Florence, you must try.’
She stood up and looked me in the eye, fully engaged now, and said, ‘You must not call me that, sir. I am not that person any more. Here I am Jane Dove.’ And with that she stalked off back toward the building. I staggered through the snow after her and caught her up, but despite all my fractured attempts at conversation she said nothing further all the way.
It was when we were approaching the building that a sudden movement in an upper window caught my eye. I saw what I thought was the figure of a woman dressed in black looking down at us, but at that moment I caught my foot against something, a branch buried beneath the snow perhaps, and stumbled, and when I had righted myself and looked up again, the woman, if she had ever existed, was gone.