“It’s really for the best, you know,” said Martha, drying her hands. “Not everyone can handle it here. It’s best to know right away.”
“We’ve seen enough of them come and go, God knows,” said Nina. “You won’t be here long yourself, Martha, if you keep repeating the orderlies’ scary stories to Matron.”
“He wasn’t lying,” Martha protested. “He was scared.”
“It’s this place,” said Nina. “Anyone who stays here long enough goes just as mad as the patients, with the exception of you and me. And sometimes I wonder about the two of us, working here as long as we have.”
“That’s not fair. This is a good job.”
I listened to them and remembered Matron’s words. I think that someone desperate might do. I wondered what made Martha and Nina—and Boney—so desperate that they were the only girls to stay.
Money, perhaps. Or perhaps, like me, they were girls with nowhere else to go.
“This was the nursery,” Martha said to me, gesturing around the room, her eyes shining just a little. “This room here. Isn’t that nice? It’s so pretty.” She looked up and down the long room, taking in the grandness of it despite the shabbiness of the current furniture. “I like to imagine what it was like to grow up here. The children, tucked in their beds. There were only two, you know, and they had this room all to themselves. Wouldn’t it be lovely, to grow up in a room like this?”
She was smiling, and her eyes were sweet and kind, but her skin was sallow, her bones sticking through the shoulders of her dress like broomsticks. She’d grown up, like me, where children didn’t live in grand houses, and now she worked a job with madmen—a job in which I’d seen her carry linen baskets twice her weight up two flights of stairs—and she called it “good.” She dried her thin, chapped hands, and I knew that deep down she was hard, but she wasn’t hard enough. No one ever was.
“The children sound like spoiled brats to me,” I said.
“Now there’s a bit of sense,” said Nina from her bed. She was untying her apron, her head bent down, her stringy hair coming loose from its bun and dangling. “Besides, who wants to grow up in a damp old house in the middle of nowhere, no matter how rich you are?”
“You’re just not picturing it,” Martha persisted, her eyes half closed and looking somewhere far away. “I like to imagine Christmas. The whole room decorated and lit with candles. Gifts of oranges and wooden toys. The children on Christmas morning. It must have been wonderful.”
“Christmas!” Nina snorted. “You’re out of your mind. It’s only June. And why aren’t you undressing, anyway?”
Martha shrugged. “I’m working night shift.”
“What?”
“Matron’s orders. She told me after supper. She said that since we’ve had no one on night shift since Maisey left, I will have to do it.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I interjected. “You’ve been working since six o’clock this morning!”
Martha bit the edge of her thumbnail. “I’ll be tired, for certain, but I can make it through.”
“What do they need one of us on night shift for, anyway?” Perhaps I was exhausted, but for some reason, this injustice—Martha having to work twenty-four hours straight—made me angry. “Don’t they just lock the men in their rooms and be done with it?”
Nina gave me the you’re stupid, aren’t you? look that I was beginning to recognize. “Of course we don’t lock them in. We’re not allowed.”
“They’re madmen. This is a madhouse. Why in the world not?”
“Obviously you haven’t seen what a man can do to himself in a locked room, have you?”
I thought of the rule against belts, against straight razors, and said nothing.
“The bathrooms, too,” Nina said. “The inside bolts are taken off, and we aren’t given keys. So that means someone has to work the night shift and check in on them. We get nightmares, sleepwalking, insomniacs. Some of them want to harm each other over some petty argument, or get deluded into thinking they can walk out the front door and go home.”
“It isn’t so bad,” Martha said gently. “There’s an orderly on duty all night, though he sleeps in his chair most of the time. Matron has us count linens. It’s usually quiet, except when someone starts screaming.”
“Oh, God.” I rubbed a hand over my forehead. “I need a cigarette.”
“Look what you’ve done,” Martha accused Nina. “You don’t have to be so harsh. Now she’ll run off and leave us, just like the last girl.”
Nina turned to me darkly. “If you do, and I have to do double work again, I’ll find you and skin you myself. Do you hear me? Besides,” she added, “you shouldn’t smoke. I hear it isn’t healthful.”
? ? ?
It was hours before I slept that night. I lay endlessly on the lumpy, narrow bed, shivering in my thin nightgown under the single regulation blanket, staring at the far-off beams of the ceiling. The coal fire we’d laid in the nursery fireplace burned low and hissed in the damp, and feverish wisps of clammy air passed over me in drafts. The house made distant noises as it settled and groaned in the gloom. Nina snored, oblivious.
I listened for screams, but heard none. I wondered where Martha was, whether she was counting linens. I wondered whether Ally would ever find out about the deception I’d used to get here, and what she would think of me if she did.
Perhaps she’d be angry, or perhaps just disappointed in me. Most people were, sooner or later.
I tried rolling onto my side, but it was no warmer that way. It was the beginning of summer, but the nights were still chilled, especially this far north out on the marshes by the sea.
Who were the Gersbachs and why had they built a house here? I wondered where they’d gone. I saw my brother Syd’s bedroom, the bed so neatly made up, the coverlet folded down precisely, the way it had looked on the morning he left for war without saying good-bye. Shut up, Kitty, and go to sleep.
I pressed my eyes shut. My nerves were waiting for the screaming, waiting, waiting. He gets afraid, Martha had said of Captain Mabry. He thinks he sees something.
Cold sweat trickled down my body. Creeton’s hand on me, the blunt intrusion of his fingers through the fabric of my skirts. Captain Mabry’s blood, his stillness on my lap. Someone moving behind me, though I never saw who. I dozed, part of me still waiting for something to come—the hard grip of fingers, or the screams. Or the shuffle of feet behind my back. Dawn was years away.
And Syd’s cold bedroom, dark and abandoned. Someone moving behind me that day, too, as I stood in the doorway.
No matter how bad it gets, I said to myself just as I did every day, I’m never going home.
CHAPTER SIX
Over the next two days of grueling work, I came to know more about Portis House. I learned to coax water from the reluctant taps in the laundry, where we filled our buckets for daily washing. I learned how to rub polishing wax onto a floor so it wouldn’t look opaque. How to buff the convoluted knobs of a brass bedstead without missing a spot. How to carry a bowl of hot soup up a flight of winding stairs without spilling any on the tray. How to fold a bedsheet properly at the corner of a bed, though I was slower and clumsier than Nina, and had to watch her more than once from the corner of my eye, admiring the fast, sure way she hefted the mattress with her beefy hands.