“Of course you weren’t. No one ever is. Dr. Crane doesn’t believe in using their names, you see. Never mind, I will look it up. Rachel Quicke, was it?”
Alice nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And was she admitted recently?”
“Eighteen years ago.”
The nurse glanced up. “For what reason?”
Alice paused. “Religious mania. She burned eleven people in their beds. She was trying to re-create a miracle she thought she saw.”
The nurse was looking at her strangely. “Patient Seventeen,” she said quietly. “You’re her daughter. I didn’t know she had a daughter. Did no one get in touch with you?”
“In touch—？”
The nurse closed the book softly, her eyes searching Alice’s face. “Your mother was a fine lady, Miss Quicke. We all knew her. Troubled, of course. But a good person, under it all.”
She didn’t understand. “What’re you saying?” she whispered.
The nurse stood gravely, her hands clasped in front of her. “Your mother died seven years ago. In her sleep. I’m sorry.”
Seven years.
Alice said nothing. She should have felt ashamed, maybe. But there was nothing in her heart, she was empty—no sorrow, no anger, no bitterness—and this surprised her. Maybe this is what grief is, she thought. Maybe this is how loss feels. Like nothing. Like wind in a hollow.
The nurse put on a shawl and took her back outside and showed her the little graveyard on the hill and Alice walked up and stood for a time at her mother’s gravestone, already weathered, still feeling nothing, wondering if she should say something, a prayer maybe, but in the end she just stared out at the sky and thought of nothing at all and then walked back to the cart and the packhorse waiting with its ears pricked, its eyes rolling nervously, and climbed back up.
* * *
When Alice got back to Remington it was night. Shadows were pooling in the street under the lights from the taverns. She could hear the circus, the thrump of drums, the faint roar of the crowds.
Upstairs in her room at the hotel she could not sleep. She folded her hands behind her head and watched the colored lanterns from the circus track across the ceiling. Thinking about Jacob Marber and what she had glimpsed in Coulton’s face as he told her. Not fear exactly. Something darker and altogether more strange.
There was no sleeping after that. She dressed and sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on her boots and went out. The circus was strung with candle fire in jars of red-and-green-colored glass and there were townsmen in suits long out of fashion milling about in front of the big top and wives in hats with cloth flowers pinned into place calling their children close. A clown handed out flyers from a linen sack. Inside the big top a trombone and bass drum started up. She turned from that and in her mud-spattered coat and man’s trousers drifted past and away as if in a darkness of her own making and gradually the laughter faded. At last at a stenciled tent she stopped and lifted her eyes and read the name on the sign.
She almost walked on. But whatever was in her would not leave it be. A shill selling tickets from a roll at the door studied her from his stool, hands motionless, cigarette at his lips.
Inside stood a group of men in hats and frock coats watching two girls dance. There was no music. The girls wore negligees and had black leather ribbons wound about their wrists and arms. As they danced, their hands turned in slow circles and the ribbons on their forearms moved also. It was then Alice saw they were not ribbons but snakes. The men assembled watched the snake dancers with great seriousness as if what happened there before them contained some truth about a future not yet written. When the girls were done a man with long hair braided down his back came out and bent low and attached a chain to the piercings in his nipples and with his hands on his knees lifted an anvil and duckwalked it across the stage. Then one of the snake dancers walked down among them with a wooden box of liquor bottles and glasses clinking on a cord around her neck. Under its powder her face looked haggard and used.
Just then the woman Brynt strode through the crowd. The figures parted before her, sullen, wary, and she loomed hulking over Alice and stared down at her, massive arms bare, the tattoos crawling over her skin in the firelight like strange runes.
“I want you to know,” she said huskily, “he’ll be ready to go in the morning. I won’t keep him. It’s good and right for a boy to be with his own. I’ll not stand in the way of that.”
There was a shine in her eyes belying her words and Alice felt a sudden sickness, seeing it, seeing her, the pain she was clearly in. Alice knew that grief.