Jack finished with the dresser, which apparently was empty, and I felt him come up behind me.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
“Watching you.” His voice came low, close to my ear. “I can’t seem to help it.”
“You shouldn’t,” I said, and I felt a lurch of fear—not of ghosts this time, but of the fact that I was so far beneath him, so unworthy. “You should find someone better.”
“Kitty,” he said. “You have no idea, do you, what my life was like before you came. If you did, you wouldn’t talk like that. In fact,” he said gently, “I never want to hear you talk like that again.”
I blushed. I felt him breathing. And yet, when he touched me, I jumped.
“Kitty,” he said, and sighed. He brushed the backs of his fingers along my bare neck, running them gently up the tender skin beneath my ear. Tension jittered through me and slowly began to seep away.
“You were brave today,” Jack said.
My breath caught in my throat and I closed my eyes, feeling the sensation of his skin on mine. “Was I?”
“Creeton owes you a debt.”
I couldn’t move. I would never move again, not as long as he touched me like that. “He doesn’t owe me anything.” Do you think you can help me? Creeton had shouted at me. Do you think you can help any of us?
“You don’t even like him,” Jack said. He ran the backs of his fingers down and up again, not touching me in any other way, like a man who has found that an animal is willing to sit still for him and he doesn’t want to frighten it. “I don’t think you’re as coldhearted as you pretend.”
I sighed again. This place was strange and sinister, but we were alone—truly alone—in a way we’d never been before. I savored it. “You do not get to choose the patients you treat. Matron told me that.”
“Exactly my point.” His fingers kept rubbing, and I tilted my head, giving him more access. He lowered his head and I felt his breath on my neck, in the spot where his fingers were. “You smell different than you did a few hours ago,” he said softly, the words echoing on my skin. “As if you had a bath.”
I breathed in, taking in the scent of summer air and rot, and wished I could smell him. He would be spicy and warm. He was right; I had bathed.
He knew it. His fingertip moved softly along the edge of my hairline behind my ear. “Your hair is just a little damp along here.” His mouth moved closer. “I think the picture of you in the bath, with your hair down, is the best thought I’ve ever had.”
“You’ve been locked up for six months.” My voice was unsteady.
But he ignored me, and as my breath rasped in my throat, he pressed his lips to the spot on my neck, soft and hot. Just a single kiss. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’d like to know what makes you laugh. And I’d like to know who has made you so afraid.”
My blood was singing and my skin felt raw. That kiss—my first—had erased everything but its own existence, the contact of skin to skin, for a perfect moment. I couldn’t speak. Jack put his hands gently on my shoulders and turned me around to face him. His face, half in shadows, was intent on me.
“Is it a husband?” he asked.
“My father.” The words slipped out, and I listened to them, stunned.
His gaze seemed to darken, became calculating. “I see. And is he still living?”
“Oh, yes.”
He searched my face for another long moment. My heartbeat began the slow process of returning to its normal rhythm. I found I was looking for disgust in his expression, but I found none. He only nodded. “All right.”
He turned away and picked up the lamp. I followed him, remembering—barely—to watch my step. “What about you?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think—？” Suddenly I could barely choke out the words. “Do you think you could ever leave here? Do you think you are still sick?”
“I don’t know.” He sighed. “It was bad, Kitty.”
“What happened?”
“I told you what happened. What room is this, do you suppose?”
“A powder room,” I said. “And that’s a bathroom over there, and if you think I’m going near it after what I’ve seen in the bathrooms in this house, you’ll have to think again. So answer my question. The real one. What happened, Jack?”
He turned in the doorway and looked at me again. It seemed to be his turn to be reluctant, but finally he shrugged, one-shouldered. “My men died.”
“Which men?”
“All of them.”
He turned away again, and I followed. “So you sat in the tent with the general,” I said, “or whoever he was. And they sent you home.”
“Yes. And the men I’d led, the ones I’d saved, were reassigned. And while I made speeches, all of them died. Not together, of course. Separately. The last one died in the spring of 1918, of influenza. He was one of forty-eight men who died in a single hospital that day. And then it was over.”
Dear God. “That isn’t your fault, Jack. You must know that.”
“I was home, Kitty,” he replied. “Staying in hotels and meeting politicians. Sending more men to the Front. They died.” His voice had grown as rough as a scrape of gravel. “I never asked to be sent home. But I agreed to it, didn’t I? I agreed to all of it. When the Armistice came—and I realized I’d actually lived through the damned thing—I suddenly saw that I’d have to go about the rest of my life. And the thought was completely beyond bearing.”
I haven’t had my chance to die, he’d told the general. “You went over there to die.” My voice was almost accusing. “You wanted it.”
“No. At least, not exactly. I thought I would die, and I was resigned to it. I expected it. That isn’t the same as a wish. But later . . . Later it became a wish. More than that, a desire. I just wanted everything to stop. I was so goddamned tired.” His voice was raw with grief. “After I woke up, I came here and I told them to lock me in a room, and in my room I stayed.”
I felt sick. “But the pills.”
“I wanted a way out. An exit if I needed it. Thornton is practical. I paid him quite a bit of money, after all. And I would take them, sometimes, just to feel nothing for a while. Until you arrived, and you took them from me.”
We’d been picking our way along corridors, poking into room after room. Water stains dripped down the walls; plaster had fallen in almost all of them, paint had peeled, and in one broken window a very comfortable bird’s nest had been built. It was the ruin of a house that has been abandoned for a decade, not for less than a year. The smell made my head hurt.
And then, ahead of me, Jack stopped. “We’ve found it,” he said.
I looked over his shoulder. He stood before a door that was closed and locked, the first locked door we’d seen. The lock looked much newer than the door did.
“Give me your keys,” he said.
I traded him the keys for the lantern and held the light as he tried each key in turn. I wondered whether I would feel a breath of cold at the back of my neck at any moment. “What if he comes?” I whispered.