Silence for the Dead(72)

“No.” Her voice was tight. “I don’t know. And you—you shouldn’t know. Respectable girls don’t. It just—it isn’t done between patients and nurses. It isn’t!”

“Hush. Lower your voice. I told you there is nothing going on between us.” Except he had touched me, and kissed my neck, and I still dreamed about it. “If we don’t go to the kitchen for supper, they’ll be looking for us. And for God’s sake don’t say anything.”

She followed me only part of the way down the corridor, and then she stopped. “It’s easy for the rest of you,” she said.

I turned and looked at her. “What?”

“It’s easy for Boney, because she’s Matron’s favorite and Matron would protect her against anything. It’s easy for Nina, because she has her fiancé. And it’s easy for you—you’ve worked at Belling Wood and you could get a job anywhere even if you do have incident reports. But this job is all I have.” She looked pleadingly at me. “I can’t go back to Glenley Crewe. I can’t. We’ve no money, and it’s a small place. I’m completely humiliated there. If you mess this up, Kitty—and I don’t know what you’re up to, but I know it isn’t good—you mess it up for all of us. If you’re fooling around with patients, we’ll all be tarnished with it, no matter what we’ve done. And it matters to me. It does.”

We looked at each other for a long moment after she’d finished. She stood in the dim light of the corridor, her big eyes tired, her pretty cheeks flush with misery. I hadn’t thought how what I was doing would affect the other nurses. It was what I did: Look ahead, don’t look down, and for God’s sake don’t start thinking about the people around you.

I blew out a breath. “All right. I won’t get you dismissed.”

“You’ll stop what you’re doing?”

“I’ll behave,” I tempered. “I’ll be the soul of a good nurse.”

She wanted to believe, but she looked wary. “He isn’t just any patient, Kitty.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” I said to her. “Don’t you think I know?”

The words came out heartfelt, and I watched as her face slowly relaxed, the exact moment when she decided to trust me again. I felt no better when she did it, no better at all. No, Martha was not a fool. As she walked with me to supper, I suspected the fool here was me.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE


I awoke from a horrible dream I couldn’t remember, something so bad I opened my eyes with my arm already thrown over the side of the bed, feeling under the mattress for my knife. Only when I had my fingers on the handle did sleep start to fall away. I pulled the knife out anyway and rolled over onto my back, exhausted and sweating, the knife resting on my stomach under my hand. I stared into darkness only faintly tinged with dawn, my breath rasping, a primitive part of my mind still living in the dream.

I wouldn’t sleep again. Martha slept in the bed next to me, huddled on her side, oblivious. With barely an hour before we were to wake, there was no point in tossing and turning here. I got up and dressed. Perhaps someone was about—Nathan, perhaps, or one of the orderlies. Even a conversation with Roger or Bammy would be better than the silence in my head that left me alone with my own thoughts, my own bad dreams.

I had just picked up my boots, ready to tiptoe out the door in my stockings, when I noticed the knife still on the bed. I’d picked a filleting knife, long and razor sharp, and the kitchen had no doubt missed it. I could bring it down there, say I’d found it, innocently replace it. Instead I put it back under my mattress before I padded off down the corridor.

I descended the servants’ stairs to the first landing, halfway between our floor and the men’s floor. I sat on the step and took a moment to pull on my boots and lace them. The only illumination came from a high window, through which the dark was beginning to give way to an indigo purple light that made my fingers look blue and frozen as they tied the laces. In the height of the long days of summer, the sun would be up in less than an hour. It was a quiet moment, and as my dreams receded into an ache in my skull, I let myself breathe and begin to wonder whether there would be anything I could snatch from the kitchen for an early breakfast. I had finished lacing my boots when I heard the sound.

Sssh.

I went still, my breath suspended.

Sssh.

I was still bent over my knees, my hands curled motionless in the air above my feet. It was a whisper, yet it was as shrill as nails down a blackboard, and my back teeth clamped together and ground.

Sssh.

My feet were cold now, and the ends of my fingers. The sound was coming from the men’s hallway, through the door several feet in front of me. I clasped my hands to my knees and looked back up the stairs I had just come down, thinking about escape. Then the sound came again and I turned back, its pull inexorable. There was no voice in my head, no fist in my stomach. I recognized it now as the dragging shuffle of feet in the corridor, one foot and then the other. Approaching.

Sssh.

It could be a patient, a sleepwalker. I could help. As the thought hit me, I remembered the last time I had had such an idea: the night I had seen the shirtless man go into the stairwell. This stairwell. The one I was currently sitting in.

I never see anything walk but the sleepwalkers, Roger had said.