I had no choice but to follow him as he took off at a trot. When we emerged, we saw only a flash of fabric through a stand of brush fifty feet away. “Hello?” Jack shouted, but she was gone again before we got there. We fought through the brush until we could see clearly, and then we were only in time to see her figure descend the other side of the rise. She had her back to us and she did not turn. She was slender and she wore the same simple blouse and skirt I’d seen before, her blond hair wound behind her head, her gait stately and unhurried. Her shoulders dipped behind the rise, and then her head, and she was gone.
“Bloody hell,” said Jack, and he took a run up the rise, his strides taking him up the slope with no effort at all. I was still halfway up when he reached the top. “Where the hell did she go?” he cried in frustration.
I pointed. “Over there.”
She’d made it to Portis House. She was back by the west wing, where I’d seen her before. There were footprints flattening the grass. As we watched, she picked up her skirts and turned the corner out of sight.
“She’s not a damned ghost,” said Jack.
“No.” The realization drained me of fear as I stared at the trail she’d left. “And she’s not Maisey, either. Let’s catch her.”
We ran. He was faster than me, but I’d been working hard and climbing the stairs dozens of times a day; I nearly kept up with him. We followed her trail around the house, giving a wide berth to the patch of weeds in front of the isolation room. We saw nothing, not even when we fanned out and looked from all angles.
“She can’t have gone far,” Jack said. “We’d see her. She must be hiding somewhere.”
The sun had come up now. Martha would be getting up, would find the bed next to her empty, and breakfast would be started in the kitchen. “We can’t,” I said to him. “We’ll get in trouble.”
He looked at me. “To hell with trouble, Kitty. We have to find out who she is.”
But I shook my head. I’d promised Martha only the day before, and here I was, alone with Jack Yates, outside at the wrong time of day, chasing shadows instead of working. We might have been seen already. “I can’t be caught, Jack. Not again. I can’t.”
He spun around, his gaze looking for the mysterious girl. I backed away.
He swore, colorfully. He was very good at it.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” I said, and I turned back toward the house.
? ? ?
No one had noticed that I had broken the rules yet again. I served breakfast in obedient silence. I told a bewildered Martha I’d had a nightmare and had gone for a walk. My explanation seemed to satisfy her.
I fed Archie in the infirmary. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. I made a note to ask Nina to check on him more frequently, and to see whether a mild sleeping draft would be possible. There must be a way to help a tortured man get a little rest, I thought, without punching him with a drug that would fell cattle. But any draft would likely come from the odious Dr. Thornton, and God only knew what would be in it.
I’d given Archie an aspirin as a weak consolation and was heading back through the downstairs hall when Boney stopped me. “Nurse Weekes,” she said.
The words sent an icy bullet of foreboding into my chest, but I kept my chin up. “Yes?”
Two spots of high anger rose on her cheeks. “I thought you knew the rules,” she said accusingly.
I stared at her, fighting dismay.
“You’ve been here for several weeks now,” Boney said. “I thought it would be obvious.”
“I—”
“But perhaps,” she talked over me, “this particular rule was not explained.”
Now I was confused. “What rule?”
She sighed as if she’d lost count of how many times she’d repeated herself. “About visitors. They are not allowed. Especially men.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Nurse Weekes, I’m telling you there’s a man in the front parlor who claims to be your brother. Whoever he is, get rid of him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
My blood rushed in my ears. My skin burned and froze at the same time. This, I thought, was what happened when a girl was about to faint; for a second I was light-headed, and Boney’s lips moved in disapproving silence, the way people talked in the films at the cinema. I followed her down the corridor, kept my feet moving when she pointed to the door of the front parlor, her lips still moving. I approached the parlor door alone, its outline jangling in my vision, the sound of my own footsteps echoing up through my body as if my ears were plugged. This could not be happening.
And yet, of course, it was. My brother, Syd, sat in the front parlor, the same room Creeton had seen his family in. Syd sat looking about him in one of the hideous chairs, a high-backed armchair with decrepit maroon upholstering over its sagging seat. The chair was angled slightly away from the window, so the fresh sunlight fell across it in a clean diagonal, and he was tapping his palms nervously on the arms.
My brother. Alive. Hope bloomed in me, sudden and fierce. Syd was home. He could help me.
He’d changed. His face looked older, his hair longer. He carried the set of his shoulders differently, as if something in the last five years had made him stand taller, and he was heavier now than the too thin boy I’d last seen.
Still, when he saw me in the doorway and smiled, rising from the chair, I knew him. This man—his brown hair, his dark eyes, his lean build, the length of his nose and the set of his chin—was unmistakably my brother.
“Kitty,” he said, and put his arms around me. He smelled of sweat and the wool of his suit. He didn’t smell like Syd anymore.
He pulled back and looked at me. “Thank God I’ve found you,” he said. “Thank God.”
“You’re dead,” I said numbly, thinking of his neatly made bed on the day he’d left for the army. “I mean—you were—”
“Did you think it? Ah, God, Kitty, I’m sorry. I should have written a letter. It was a near thing more than once. But it was madness at the Front, you know, and they censored all the letters. There didn’t seem much point.”
“Not much point?”
“I thought you might rip up like this. Kitty, for God’s sake just sit down, will you?”
I lowered myself mechanically into one of the other ugly chairs and stared at him. The one question I most dreaded came out of my throat. “Have you been home?”
He sat down himself. “Yes, for months.”
“Months?”
“Of course,” he said. “Father’s been asking for you, you know. I’ve been looking for you all this time. It hasn’t been easy. You’ve led me a devil of a time. All over London, and now here. What possessed you, Kitty?”
“You can’t be serious,” I said.
He sighed. “We have a lot to talk about. So much has changed. It isn’t like it was before. Everything is different.”
“How did you find me?”
“It wasn’t easy. I thought you’d have to get work, you know, so I asked in the shops. And eventually I found a shopgirl who’d worked with you at the glove factory, only she knew you under a different name. When I asked at the factory, they didn’t know where you’d gone, but one of the girls told me. She’d been friends with one of your flatmates, I think—I don’t remember. And I followed you to your last job, at the wool factory, but someone said they’d heard you left town. That left the train stations.” He smiled. “Lucky for me, the man who sold you your ticket remembered you.”