Silence for the Dead(49)

Two women behind me had been having a conversation. The niece of one of the women had been given a chance at a position at a glove factory in Clerkenwell, but had decided to brush it off and marry her sweetheart instead. “She isn’t even giving them notice,” the woman complained. “She just isn’t going to go. I think she’s mad. What if he doesn’t marry her after all? Good jobs are hard to come by. ‘You’re mad, Rachel Innes,’ I said to her. ‘It’ll come to no good.’ But she’s determined, of course.”

I’d listened a little longer, the back of my neck hot as lit coals. I waited so long it was almost my turn before I left the shop, possessed by a mad idea I had no control over, my hands and feet tingling, my legs moving on their own. I’d found our flat empty, my father not home, and where he was that day I would never know. I’d stuffed as many belongings as I could into a tiny valise and left, my nervous feet clattering loudly on the stairs.

I’d thought I’d get caught. I knew I would. He would come home seconds after I’d left and pursue me; he had been hiding in the closet while I’d been there, waiting in silence for me to make a move; the landlady, hearing my footsteps on the stairs, would somehow know I’d run and get a message to him. Everyone on the street was my father, or sent by him; every pair of eyes reported back to him. Even when I got to Clerkenwell and asked in a local shop where the glove factory was, I thought I’d be questioned. I thought the police would come. And when I knocked at the personnel office at the factory itself and presented myself as Rachel Innes, reporting for work, I thought they would know I was lying.

But they hadn’t. They’d just put me to work, indifferent. It seemed I’d gotten away with it. They never knew that I slept in a church vestibule all the nights until I received my first pay, that I bathed and washed my clothes in the women’s lav, that I worked the line faint with hunger and fear. They never knew I was a girl who didn’t belong there, who didn’t deserve it, who deserved nothing but death under her father’s thumb. And I began to see that if I could be smart, if I could keep moving and not get caught, they would never know.

I did not go out with men when they asked me. Not ever.

I ran my hands along the bruises on my neck, pressing them with unsteady fingers.

Archie had throttled me. My body had felt a sickening recognition of the feeling; I’d been throttled before. But this had been different. I hadn’t felt the bewildered surprise of my childhood, or the deadened stillness of the day with the frying pan. I’d only felt the numbness of shock, and now rage and empty, hopeless despair. I had promised myself, Never again. And yet here I was, treating bruises on my neck. It was as if, even to myself, I had never believed my promise.

“Kitty.”

I was still sitting on my knees in Archie’s room. I wondered whether I was going to be sick.

“Kitty.”

I opened my eyes. Jack Yates was in the room with me, squatting on his haunches, his wrists dangling casually over his knees, looking at me. He was barefoot, the strong sinews of his feet balancing him without effort.

“I’ll be all right,” I said.

“You don’t look it,” he replied.

“You’re not supposed to leave your room.”

“No,” he agreed. He reached out and put a hand on my forearm, the fingers curling over me with gentle force. “Come with me.”

I stared at his hand on me. This was the third time Jack had touched me. I’d counted, remembered each occasion with perfect clarity. I stared down at his bare fingers on my skin, their darkness against my pale arm. The sight of it, the feel of it, did something to me. It made my brain feverish; it made my skin feel too small, as if I could crack it open and fly away. I had never asked him to touch me, but he kept doing it anyway. And I never stopped him. I could not take my eyes from his hand.

He pulled me up, gently, and the next I knew, I was sitting in the only chair in his room, and he’d found my lamp from somewhere. He set it on the small side table and went to the washbasin. In the warm circle of light I could see his back, the muscles flexing under his shirt.

“I’m not supposed to bother you,” I said.

“You’re not bothering me.”

“No. I mean I’m not supposed to be here at all, talking to you. Roger is likely spying. He’ll tell Matron. I’ll lose my job.”

Jack said nothing, only turned from the basin, handed me the flannel, and sat on the edge of his bed. He wasn’t drugged this time, and his gaze was clear and intelligent as he watched me sponge my neck.

“You look rather shaken,” he said.

“I saw him,” I replied. “Last night, and again tonight.” It had been the shirtless man I’d seen in the window’s reflection tonight, his figure unmistakable. “And earlier today I saw someone else in the grass by the isolation room. A man. He called me a coward.”

“What?” Jack’s voice was icy with shock. “Kitty, what did you say?”

“I said I saw him.” The words were a relief, but I thought of the darker shadow I’d seen in the library window and I shuddered. “Two of them, though not at the same time.”

“You couldn’t have, Kitty. You couldn’t.”

“He hit me,” I said, tears stinging my eyes.

“What?” Jack said again. I seemed to have amazed him into repeating himself. “When I saw you from the window today?”