After Willoughby had gone, the image of the women lingered, too real to be imagined. They’d spoken over him. Touched him. Yes, they’d felt for his pulse before taking something. Everything. And when they’d gone, a void of nothingness had spun in their wake.
“Sounds like our Blackwood sisters,” the nurse said as she folded a set of bedsheets near enough to his cot to have overheard the conversation. Seeing him steady his eyes on her for more information, she retracted her comment. “Not saying it was them. It’s just they do wear long black shawls and silver combs in their hair, the two of them. Lots of women do, of course. Only they volunteer at the hospital on occasion. Could be they were here this morning when you came in. That’s why you know them. Easy to understand how that might have got in your head, love.”
And yet he knew the memory—his only memory—was of the muddy bank of the stinking river, not the hospital. The smell climbed in his nostrils to remind him of how he’d lain on the ground when they’d taken something from him.
Whoever or whatever he was in this life, he gripped the knife with conviction. “Could you tell me how to get in touch with these sisters so I might pay my respects when I’m well?”
The nurse nodded and smiled, and he inwardly did the same when she described their shop on Old Bridge Road.
Chapter Six
Curse the stars. Why couldn’t that man have done the proper thing and died in the mud where they’d found him? Edwina took that back. Wasn’t wise to speak ill of the dead. Or the living. Besides, she rarely meant the terrible things that came first to her mind. It was just the flint and spark of discharging flighty emotions. It was either that or let them get bottled up inside her, waiting to explode at an inopportune moment. A trait of her father’s that had taken seed in her demeanor. Something that had never served him, or her, well in the past. And yet intuition told her there was a great deal to be regretful about should the man still walk this side of the veil hanging between life and death.
Edwina stepped out from behind the counter to straighten the skeleton keys on display near the window. She liked to see them all lying straight as spines from their curled handles to their crooked teeth in a neat row, but it was merely busywork to pass the time until either a customer or her sister walked through the door. It was long past the time Mary should have returned, come to think of it. She’d been gone far longer than it took to buy a pint of milk at the nearest cowshed and walk to Saint Basil’s afterward. Then again, the sun had broken through the gloom, shining blearily through the smoke and haze. Though they lived within the square mile of the city proper, the sunbeams were never anything more than a facsimile of true sunshine. Not like the country sky they’d known growing up. Still, even if Mary had taken the long way home to cut through the cathedral gardens, she should have been back by now.
With no customers and the shop to herself, Edwina returned her attention to the jewelry case where the new ring sat prominently among the other trinkets. She’d found all manner of gold and silver in her life—rings, bracelets, charms hooked on long chains. Some had been lost a week before and others three hundred or a thousand years before. How old an object was didn’t matter, though she often appreciated the long journey the item had taken to find her. All she sought was the glint in the starlight and to snatch the thing and bring it home. In the same vein, she didn’t mind parting with them later, selling them to strangers who would only lose them again in a few years or a decade to complete the journey back to the river. The moment of discovery was the joy that sparked the magic inside her. The same for Mary when she spotted one of her corpse lights. To snatch it out of the air at first sight, that was the thrill.
Edwina’s back was to the door when the shop bell finally chimed. She spun around eager to greet a new customer, but instead of encountering a woman out shopping for a knitting needle to match the one she’d bent or a young man hoping to find a ring for his intended, she saw him.
The man who should be dead.
He looked for all the world as if he still stood on Death’s threshold, unsure of which direction to go. His squared jaw was rough with three days’ worth of beard, and his eyes, bloodshot and full of anger, stared as he held firm to the doorframe to steady himself. A white cloth had been bandaged around his head. A faint brown stain bled through near the neck.
Edwina managed an innocent enough “May I help you?” before the deception fell away and the man closed the door behind him with a slam. The panic she’d kept tethered in place at the first sight of him broke free on the path between her heart and her mind. Not knowing what to do, she backed up until she bumped into the shelving behind her.