My hands were cold as I pulled the bedclothes up from the floor and tried to tuck them around him. Was this what sedatives did? Was this normal? I knew nothing—nothing. Was there something I should be doing? What if he died on me? For the first time, alone on a dark floor with a semiconscious patient, I was struck by what I had done, what monstrous thing I was pretending. He could die in an instant and I could only look on, helpless.
What had been in that injection?
He seemed to settle, the drug sucking him back into sleep again. “He’s coming,” he said to me with the voice of exhaustion, unable even to open his eyes. “He’s coming. I can hear him.”
“Somersham?”
His eyelids fluttered, the eyes beneath them moving. One chilled hand brushed my arm like a leaf falling in autumn. “Help me,” he whispered, so low I almost thought I’d imagined it. “I’m so afraid.”
My mouth had gone dry. He’s mad, that’s all, I thought, and yet almost without willing it I leaned forward, closer to his face as it slowly went still. “What?” I whispered back to him. “What is it?”
Nothing.
I leaned back again. Silence descended around me, broken only by the rasp of Somersham’s breathing. The lamp I’d set down cast a yellow circle of light on the floor.
I took the fouled water jug and the lamp and stepped into the hall. The commotion hadn’t roused anyone, or if it had, they lay in their beds trying not to listen. Roger, for all his talk of being in earshot, was nowhere to be seen. The moonlight hadn’t moved in the windows. I turned and walked, alone, toward the lav, my footsteps sounding softly on the floor.
In the lav, I turned the tap on the sink. It was still clean in here, and smelled of disinfectant, yet I nearly fumbled as I rinsed the jug as fast as I could.
This house scare you?
“Shut up,” I said aloud to no one. “Shut up.” I scrubbed harder, the jug slippery in my hands.
He’s coming. I can hear him.
Clang. A single sound, low in the walls. Then the groan again, faint at first, and a second time closer. As if something had just realized I was here.
He’s coming. Help me. I’m so afraid.
“Shut up,” I said again, twisting the taps. In the dark the bathroom was an echoing chamber, the floor radiating cold, the moonlight colored blue in the high window. I stood in my bubble of lamplight, trying not to smell the stench of vomit, the hair on the back of my neck alight, trying not to think, trying not to remember—
“He isn’t coming,” I heard myself say. “I left. He isn’t.” I didn’t think who I was talking to, who I meant. That it wasn’t who Somersham might have meant. “He isn’t.”
The groan came again, and I hurriedly closed the taps, nearly dropping the clean and dripping jug in my haste. I picked up the lamp again. Run, Kitty. But no. He’d always hated it when I ran. It had always made it worse. I walked slowly instead, setting down each foot with silent care, holding my breath to bursting. He must not hear, I thought wildly.
I let out a harsh gasp of breath when I reached the corridor. I backed against the wall, put down the jug and the light by my feet, and raised my horrified hands to my face. I was nearly sobbing. Nothing made any sense; my thoughts were a jumble, disconnected, insane. You are falling apart, Kitty. This wasn’t me. I was the girl in control, the one who always had her eye two steps beyond everyone else, the one with schemes and plans. I was the girl who could get through anything, think on her feet, lie, endure whatever life tried to throw at her. I was not the girl who was reduced to a sobbing wreck, incoherent with terror over a vision from her past, from her imagination.
This house scare you?
My feet moved away and I left the jug and the lamp on the floor. In the lamplight of the corridor I counted the doors. I knew which door I was heading for.
It was shut. Special rules. But it was not locked. I turned the handle and opened it wide enough for me to slip through the opening and stand in the dark, my eyes trying to adjust, listening for breathing, for any sound.
All was silent for a long, black moment. Long enough for me to consider retreating from the room as quietly as I had come. He was probably asleep, oblivious to the sounds outside, oblivious to me.
“Nurse Weekes.”
That voice. So soft now, in the depths of night. Intimate. Coming from the direction of the window, where I’d found him before. Not sleeping, then.
“Patient Sixteen,” I replied.
I couldn’t see him against the darkened glass. Still, I fancied I heard a breath, heard his body shift just a little. “Have you come to check on me, then?”
“You’re not asleep.”
A low laugh that tapped down my spine like fingertips. “No. I’m not. How is Somersham?”
“Asleep.” I wondered how many men suffered insomnia, sitting or lying in their rooms night after night. I could do nothing for them. I could do nothing for any of them, not even for myself.
I tried to say something else. Something important that burned my throat and at the backs of my eyes. But nothing came, and I could only stand helpless with hot tears moving down my face, grateful that he couldn’t see me in the dark.
He moved again, came off the windowsill—I could tell as clearly as if I could see him, so attuned to him was I—and came closer. I heard his bare feet on the floor. “Nurse Weekes,” he said gently, as if sensing my tears. “Are you all right?”
I took a breath, and to my horror it hitched on a sob, half of which I desperately tried to swallow. “My name is Kitty,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’m not a nurse. I’m not anything. I don’t know what I’m doing. And I don’t—I don’t think I can do this.”
A long pause followed. I supposed it wasn’t often nurses came into his room at night, teary eyed and confessional. “Sit down,” he offered at last.
“I can’t.” Another stupid utterance that made no sense. I leaned back against the wall and sank to the floor in a slow glide. I took another sobbing, hitching breath and pulled my knees to my chest, thinking I’d die of humiliation.
“Wait,” he said, and he padded from the room, returning with my lamp. He set it on the bedside table and sat down on the floor himself, close enough to the lamp to be illuminated in its globe of light. He didn’t look bleary now, his pupils not dilated. Dark stubble had started on his chin, but he didn’t even look puffy with sleep or exhaustion; he fixed me with a gaze of intelligence and concern. It didn’t escape my notice that he’d placed the lamp in just such a way that I could see him but he could not see me. The consideration of it only made me cry harder.
“Tell me,” he said simply.
I did. I told him about overhearing my flatmate, about taking the pamphlet from the trash, forging the letter from Belling Wood, getting on the train sight unseen. I told him how Matron had seen through my ruse and hired me anyway, of how it had been only blind luck I’d known what to do with Captain Mabry’s nosebleed, how the doctors had chosen me for the afternoon session and I hadn’t known how to inject Somersham with a sedative, and how I’d been helpless when Somersham had woken up tonight. I told him how I’d found a book under my bed but had no time to read it properly in time and wouldn’t know how to save a life. The hot rush of words, once started, had to run its course before at long last I wound down into silence.