Silence for the Dead(111)

Nina and I exchanged a glance and evaded the question.

When I wasn’t at the hospital, I was in the temporary flat I’d rented with Jack, two doors down from the room that housed Archie, West, and Mabry. He put Anna Gersbach in a third flat of her own. He’d taken our flat as “Mr. and Mrs. Yates,” looking the landlady in the eye and daring her to disagree. She didn’t. “We’ll fix that part later,” he told me when she was gone and we were alone, making my heart flip in my chest. “When we have time.” In the meantime, we were busy.

Jack wired his banker, told him he was sane again, and withdrew some funds. Then he wired his man of business, who’d been taking care of the farm Jack had inherited from his parents, and told him he’d be home within the month. “Make sure your books add up,” he’d put in the telegram. “I’m quite good at math.”

He kissed me, hired a car, and drove to Bascombe. He returned with Maisey Ravell and a stack of files she’d stolen from her father’s study.

And then we dealt with Anna Gersbach and what had happened at Portis House.

There was no question about it: Anna had killed her father, which made her a murderer. But she was also a pawn who’d been given no chance to defend herself, whose home had been stolen and sold, who had never been allowed to mourn her brother or tell of how he had been so brutally murdered by the man she’d killed. She was also a girl who had been through too much, and was in mental distress, not quite in her right mind. As we spent more time with her, we could see that she couldn’t make many decisions, that she relied on us for even the smallest things, that when we spoke of her case, she stopped listening, as if not hearing our words would make them go away.

Maisey moved into the flat with Anna, made certain she ate and washed, found her more clothes to wear. What they spoke of when they were alone together, whether Anna told Maisey of the pain she’d been hiding all those years, I did not know. But I thought, perhaps, they understood each other.

But there was no way to keep Anna free from what had happened. We had no choice. We went to the magistrate at Newcastle on Tyne and gave him everything—every file, every witness account. Everything but the ghosts.

The resulting scandal was so large even Matron heard of it. The story had already broken that England’s Brave Jack had spent six months in a madhouse. England’s Former Hero Shell-Shocked, read one headline, and most of the others followed suit. Then the second wave of stories washed over the country’s newspapers:

SHOCKING SCANDAL AT MENTAL HOME.

DOUBLE MURDER LED TO SCANDALOUS COVER-UP.

FATHER-DAUGHTER MURDER WAS SELF-DEFENSE.

“I WAS A VICTIM,” ANNA GERSBACH CLAIMS.

Anna was taken into custody by the magistrate to wait for the inquest. Reporters came to our flat in a steady stream, asking for interviews and shooting me very, very interested looks. Jack introduced me to all of them as Mrs. Yates and stared at them as he had the landlady. They were persistent, but he gave them nothing, not a single interview or quote, and they were all disappointed.

It was overwhelming, and our days were full. But at night we never spoke of any of it. At night we got in bed together and the world went away. We talked of nothing, or of everything. Or we did other things. I’d finally found something I was truly good at, if Jack’s enthusiasm was anything to judge by. I’d grown achingly used to the feel of him, the smell of his sweat on my skin. And when we slept, it was the dreamless sleep of the exhausted.

In the dark, I told him everything and he told me everything. Those long nights, in the dark, we each understood the other. And then we slept.

Eventually, one by one, the men were removed from the hospital. Mr. Deighton was arrested while trying to flee to France. Maisey’s father was arrested for fraud, as were the coroner he had bribed and the sexton who had cremated the Gersbachs for a fee, no questions asked. Dr. Thornton was investigated, though he could not be directly connected to the scandal; he hid, predictably, behind a bank of expensive lawyers. I never discovered what happened to Dr. Oliver.

And at last, the jury at Anna’s inquest refused to indict her for reasons of self-defense, and Anna was freed. Portis House itself descended into a legal quagmire; supposedly it was Anna’s to inherit, but the wheels of English law turned notoriously slowly. She could not sell it, even if she could find a buyer; she could do nothing with it, it seemed, but live in it, moving back in with her memories and ghosts.

She didn’t return to the house. Instead, Anna and Maisey went off on a tour of the Continent together until the scandals died down. They never said where they got the money for the trip, but I knew. Captain Mabry was pleased. “I shot at her,” he told me. “It’s the least I can do.”

Before they left, I had one last interview with Anna, alone. “I don’t mean to distress you,” I said to her, “but there’s something I want to ask.”

She looked at me with her curiously disconnected expression, as if she was watching a play.

“At Portis House,” I said. “Your father—his ghost—wanted a sacrifice. You said that sacrifice was you. You told Jack to shoot you.”

She looked away. “I don’t think he would have. I know that now.”

She was right; Jack had told me that already. He had always planned to shoot Mabry, not Anna, and he had not shot to kill. “But your father’s ghost wanted you dead,” I said. “He wanted you dead so that he could go.”