By now I had firmed up my plan of escape. In December I would receive my first quarter’s salary, which, with the money bequeathed me by Caroline Adams, would be more than enough to carry me to the far west. In January, when I was ready, I would tell Morgan that I wanted to quit. In my mind I often rehearsed this conversation, in which I told him in no uncertain terms what I thought of the harshness and ineffectiveness of his regime and how I could stand to be part of it no longer. I would tell him I was leaving immediately. As this would be without the notice period of a month my employment agreement demanded, I didn’t expect him to pay me any more salary anyway, so I had nothing to lose by my frankness. I would do this on a Sunday and take the visitors’ boat to shore that afternoon and then head for the nearest railroad depot and a train to freedom.
As far as this plan went, the one fly in the ointment was O’Reilly, if she had the draft letter. After I was gone and the thaw came and the body of Caroline Adams was discovered, O’Reilly would produce the letter and it would soon be obvious to the police that ‘Dr Shepherd’ had been a fake. I didn’t imagine it would take them long to find out that Shepherd had been in the train crash with Jack Wells. Given the manner of Miss Adams’s death, it was a small step to figuring out the identity swap and then the hunt would be on for me, with my old police picture on every front page.
Once again, I cursed my carelessness in not destroying that draft note; it was the only mistake I had made, yet that one little error could cost me all. Without it there would be a single murder possibly – but not definitely – committed by a doctor of previous good character, a crime of passion. Even that was a worse case. There was a possibility that when they found Miss Adams no one would connect the corpse with the woman who had called upon me and who, so far as anyone knew, had returned on the boat that had brought her. And if Shepherd were hunted, any photographs of him the police traced and published would be of the wrong man.
As part of my preparations for my flight, I began to grow a beard, which I figured would make me even harder to recognise as Jack Wells. It afforded Morgan no little amusement. ‘Ah, you think you will look older and wiser if you hide half your face behind hair,’ he said.
‘You have divined my motive,’ I confessed with a smile.
‘Well, perhaps it will add some gravitas. Although, speaking personally, I never saw any need for a beard. In my opinion a perfectly good and manageable moustache is as far in that direction as anyone should go.’ He stroked his own, that hacked-off caterpillar on his upper lip, as he said this.
‘You may well be right, sir. I’m not set on it. I shall wear it a month and then if I decide it doesn’t suit, off it will come.’
Jane Dove was also intrigued by my burgeoning whiskers. ‘Why, sir,’ she mocked one day, for she was growing ever bolder in the familiarity with which she spoke to me, and was almost flirtatious it seemed to me, ‘I swear I did not recognise you. If that forest upon your face grows much thicker, even your friends will not know you.’
‘Do you think not?’ I asked. ‘Am I to gather from the amusement it affords you that you do not approve of beards, even though so many men choose to wear them?’
She was thoughtful a moment, then said, ‘I seem to recall someone I knew once – do not ask me who or when or where, for I do not know – but someone said to me that a man who covers his face with hair is trying to hide.’ She said this with a smile, meaning it as a throwaway remark, but I found I could not reply in kind; what she had said was a little too near the mark for that.
I picked up the book I’d brought with me from the library to read to her. It had no illustrations but I thought she might like it.
‘What is it called, sir?’ she asked as I opened it.
‘Jane Eyre.’
‘Jane, sir, just like me.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘just like you.’