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.
The lamplight, still lit in the corridor at this hour, flickered on the square of floor I could see through the doorway. I had no time to run.
He came into view, slender and white, the naked line of his narrow shoulders clear against the rising light. I saw him through a curious double vision, blurred yet distinct. I did not see his face. He looked down at his feet, which I saw for the first time were bare. He took one step, and then slowly pulled the other foot forward, his heels slipping on the floor. Sssh. The movement was defeated, despairing. Stop, I wanted to shout. I wanted to get the sound out of my head, wanted the vision to go away and leave me alone. Please, please, don’t look up and see me . . .
My breath came in short, terrified gasps now, puffing before me in icy steam. My arms tingled and my hands burned hot with panic. He wasn’t this slow before, I thought wildly, but did I know for certain? I had seen him only as he had disappeared through the doorway, had followed him only after he had gone down the stairs. It had seemed so fast at the time.
His steps now took forever, but never wavered. He walked through the doorway and onto the landing below me, then down one riser, down another. I rose and stood, grasping the railing, just as I had that long-ago night. I moved away from it, from the cold and the despair that came off it in waves, from that inexorable descent down the stairs. My own breath coming high and whistling in my chest, I ran up the stairs again without looking back. He’s doing it over and over, I thought. That descent. The same thing, again and again. Why?
And something new came to me, now that I had seen him in full. I hadn’t seen his face, but his body had not been the body of a grown man. His had been the sleek lines of a teenage boy, not yet twenty years old.
? ? ?
I switched staircases and came downstairs another way. I bypassed the kitchen and slipped out the kitchen door, no longer hungry. I saw no one, but as I stepped out into the grounds, trying to put some distance between myself and the house, I saw a solitary figure. It was Jack, heading for the stand of trees that led to the clearing. He was half in a run.
I picked up my skirts and followed. He noticed me almost immediately, turning and waiting for me to catch up. “Did you see her?” he said as I approached.
I shook my head. “Who do you mean?”
“It was Maisey, I think. I saw her come this way, but I don’t see her now. She might have left letters for me.”
It was early to be getting replies to the letters he’d sent, but I followed him as he jogged ahead of me through the stand of trees around the clearing. I was glad to see him. My skirts slowed me down, and when I reached the clearing, he’d already checked the hiding spot under the bench. “Nothing,” he said.
He stood and turned to me, and I almost found myself smiling. He looked rested and alert, and his gaze took me in inquisitively. I was so used to seeing him in his hospital uniform that I briefly wondered what he looked like in any other clothes. “You’re up early,” he said.
“I’ve had the strangest morning,” I managed.
His blue gaze traveled over me, up and down again. “Are you all right?”
“I think so.”
“What—？” His gaze moved past my shoulder. “That’s not Maisey.”
I turned. Through the trees, I briefly saw the figure of a girl; then it disappeared.
I was frozen to the spot, but Jack touched my arm. “Was that the girl you saw the other day?”
“I don’t—I don’t know.”
“I’m going after her.” He started to move.
“Jack, what are you doing?”
“She might lead me somewhere,” he said. He turned and looked at me. “How much damage can she do if I’m awake?”