A Deadly Fortune

by Stacie Murphy

  Warm sunlight filtered through the large windows on the opposite wall, and Amelia stifled a yawn. Cavanaugh wasn’t the only one who was tired. Jonas, in particular, was ragged and moody with fatigue. Somehow he was managing to work shifts at both the asylum and the club, all while continuing his search of the courthouse records. Twice, she knew, Cavanaugh had waylaid him in the hallways on the pretense of some task or other and sent him to sleep through part of his shift on the cot in the storage room.

  Jonas had yet to come up with a workable replacement plan for Amelia’s escape that didn’t involve Cavanaugh’s aid. If he had, she knew he would have told Cavanaugh he could go to hell with his bargain and taken her away already.

  “Faking a death works because it doesn’t leave any loose ends,” Jonas said. “I might be able to sneak you off the island on one of the supply boats. Or maybe I could hire someone to pick you up along the shore. But they’d know a patient was missing. Harcourt couldn’t cover it up—Klafft would bray it from the rooftops if he tried. So there would be a search.”

  “Someone would talk eventually,” Amelia said.

  Jonas nodded. “They don’t have your real name, but Lina’s name would lead them to the club. Legally, whoever you are, they have custody of you. They could bring you back. Maybe we could fight it, but it’s not certain. To be absolutely sure, we’d have to change our names and leave the city.

  “If you stay, and if Cavanaugh follows through on his end, we’ll have a better chance. Forging a discharge or even faking a different sort of death may be a better bet. This fever might give us an opening. If he won’t help—”

  “He will,” Amelia said.

  “If he won’t,” Jonas repeated, “we’ll have to take our chances without him.”

  “For the time being, we give him the time we promised,” Amelia said. “We keep looking for Julia Weaver.”

  They were making progress on that front, but it was grindingly slow. Their combined efforts had resulted in some two hundred names struck from the master list of asylum patients. Amelia recalled her sarcastic comment about shouting Julia’s name in the wards and fought the urge to do just that. But they had to be careful. Revealing that they knew she was here would alert whoever was responsible. They’d lose any chance of finding her.

  The plan to search the doctors’ quarters was going no more quickly. Twice, Amelia had a chance to search Tyree’s rooms, but something about the lock on his door—some twist or bend—thwarted her hairpin. Jonas reported the same problem. Harcourt did much of his work from his quarters, and thus spent far more time there than any of the other doctors.

  And the day after their reckless, failed attempt at Klafft’s apartment, the doctor himself fell ill, coughing and shivering in the wards until Harcourt ordered him to his bed. Connolly attended him, hurrying in and out of the apartment fetching whatever Klafft required. They’d get no further opportunity until he was well.

  And by then, it was possible they would have—

  Amelia snapped to attention as something tickled at the back of her chest. She went still, trying to isolate the source of the sensation. Movement at the corner of her eye. Near the window. Carefully, she turned her head.

  There.

  Formless and unmistakably other, a grayish wisp drifted among the women. It looked like smoke, if smoke could gather itself and choose its direction. It wound around their legs, sinuous as a cat.

  The babble of the ward faded as Amelia focused on the thing. It froze as if it felt her attention. Something thrummed inside her when it found her. It roiled toward her, and Amelia’s pulse beat faster. The thing tugged at her breastbone, the sensation a milder version of what had happened when she encountered the spirit in the park. Alarm surged through her. If it tried to possess her—

  But it was already too late. The thing was on her before she could move, and all her effort turned toward resisting its attempt on her mind.

  She must have made a noise, because Cavanaugh turned toward her, the beginnings of concern creasing his face. She ignored him, wholly absorbed by the spirit’s touch. It pushed, and she ground her teeth, resisting. It pushed again, harder, and the borders of Amelia’s mind trembled.

  But they held.

  This being—whoever it had been—was far weaker than the shade in the park, with its irresistible need. This was the dying echo of a scream, not the scream itself. A shallow, formless thing. It wanted, it sought, but it had no will, no force.

  It could not take her over, not unless she let it. Amelia’s fear began to bleed away. She could withstand this. Perhaps she could even control it. She gathered herself, formed the word in her mind, and thought it at the thing: No.

  It flinched.

  Amelia pushed.

  It resisted.

  Amelia shoved, an expulsive little noise escaping her as she did so.

  There was a tearing sensation in her mind, and the spirit flew away from her as though hurled by a catapult. It went straight through the window, and to her shock, the pane shattered with its passage, spraying bits of glass onto the lawn below. Several of the women nearby yelped in surprise.

  Cavanaugh spun to stare at the window, looking baffled. He turned to her, a question on his face. His eyes went wide as she gave him a shaky nod in response.

  Lawrence never looked up from his notes.

  35

  Twelve days remained in the promised month. Amelia brooded over the encounter with the spirit as she sat beside a window. Yes, she had pushed it away. But she didn’t know precisely how she’d done it and wasn’t certain she could do it again. It had been weak. What would happen if she encountered something stronger? Something more like Cavanaugh’s sister, or the girl in the park? The thought chilled her. Her new abilities weren’t fading.

  She had to figure out how to control them.

  Below, a group of women appeared, carrying tools and baskets. Ward seven, heading out for work in the gardens. Beyond them lay the open ground where other groups went on Promenade.

  Amelia straightened, remembering the spirit she’d sensed there weeks before. She hadn’t seen it, but it was there. She focused on the memory, trying to gauge its strength from the way it had felt. Stronger than the one in the ward, she decided, but not much stronger. It was perfect.

  “I need you to move me to ward seven,” Amelia murmured to Andrew that evening as he made his way down the row of patients. “There’s something I need to do.”

  He looked as if he were about to ask for an explanation, but the next patient pushed her way forward, complaining about the nurses stealing her jewelry while she slept. While Cavanaugh calmed the woman, Amelia allowed herself to fade back into the throng. He would object to her plan if he knew what she intended to do, and she preferred to ask for forgiveness rather than for permission.

  By late the following afternoon, Amelia was digging in the kitchen garden with a group of about twenty other women, under the supervision of a pair of younger nurses. It was warm for May, and the sun was strong enough overhead to dampen her brow as she worked.

  Amelia looked up as several orderlies strolled past the group, headed toward the tree where they smoked during their breaks. Jonas was with them. Perfect. He pretended to scan the group, but his attention was on Amelia. She cut her eyes at the nurses. He broke off and turned toward them with a magnetic smile. Both women bloomed like flowers. Amelia smothered a smirk. It never failed.

  She waited until one of the nurses glanced back at her charges, then wobbled where she stood and put a hand to her forehead, as if trying to ward off a spell of dizziness. She glanced through her lashes. The nurse was watching, a slight frown on her face. Good. Amelia calculated. A full faint would likely get her taken back inside. That would do her no good. Amelia took a tottering step, bumping into the woman beside her and going to one knee.

  “You there.” The nurse moved toward her. Jonas broke off his conversation with the other nurse and followed, a quizzical look on his face.

  Amelia
made as if to stand. Instead, with a well-timed lurch, she toppled toward Jonas, who caught her.

  The nurse sighed, annoyed. “I suppose you’d better take her back inside,” she said to Jonas.

  “Oh. No, please.” Amelia let real anxiety bleed into her tone. “It’s so much nicer outside. I’m sure it’s just the sun. I’m not used to it. If I could sit in the shade for a bit. Perhaps under those trees.” Amelia gestured toward the clump of trees some thirty feet away beside the little rise. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  “I can walk her over,” Jonas offered. “I’d rather not go back inside, if I can help it. It’s my break, and if I go in, I won’t get a chance to smoke. I’ll be right back,” he promised in a voice like a caress, already heading away with Amelia.

  The nurse conceded with a flustered smile. “Stay where we can see you, mind,” she said to Amelia, not looking at her.

  “Of course,” Amelia said meekly.

  She leaned against Jonas as they made their way toward the trees.

  “What are you doing?” he asked in a low voice.

  “I need to try something. I can’t explain right now. Just keep their attention off me for a bit. If you think you can handle them both.” She added the last bit with a wry grin.

  “Of course I can,” he said in faux affront. “Just be careful, whatever it is you’re up to.”

  Amelia waited until Jonas was back with the group, positioning himself so both nurses—and most of the patients, Amelia noted—were facing him, their backs turned to where Amelia sat.

  She waited another moment, then eased herself up and backed into the trees. When they were between her and the others, she turned and scrambled over the crest of the hill, watching behind her all the way, waiting for someone to shout at her to stop. No one did.

  On the other side, and certain she was out of sight, Amelia turned, then stopped with a gasp.

  Perhaps forty yards away, a stone tower stood on a narrow promontory jutting into the river, some fifty feet tall and stark against the water and sky behind it. Amelia took several hesitant steps forward, chilled by how much the rough gray structure resembled the drawing of the Tower on her Tarot card—and even more, if she were being honest, the one from the nightmare she’d had after her injury. There was a wooden door at the bottom and an enclosed glass cupola at the top. A lighthouse, she realized as she drew nearer, meant to keep boats on the river at night from running aground on the island.

  Amelia tore her eyes away from it and surveyed the surrounding area. The grassy swathe was only about thirty feet wide. It gave way to a flat, hewn-stone seawall running level with the ground along the perimeter of the narrow finger of land, dropping on the river side straight down into the water. Feeling gloriously free for the first time in weeks, she walked along the edge and studied the drop, willing a boat to appear below. She would have leapt into it and been away, never mind her pledge to stay.

  No boat appeared, and Amelia reluctantly turned her attention to her task, following the wall as it curved around the lighthouse, waiting for the spirit she’d felt during the Promenade to make itself known. Nothing happened, and after a second circuit of the wall, Amelia stood still, frowning.

  She didn’t have much time; Jonas was good, but all it would take was for one of the nurses to glance at the trees where Amelia was supposed to be resting and see her gone. They’d find her in minutes, and she doubted she’d get outside again.

  She strode toward the lighthouse door. A metal plaque was affixed to a stone block beside it.

  This is the work

  Was done by

  John McCarthy

  Who built the Light

  House from the bottom to the

  Top All ye who do pass by may

  Pray for his soul when he dies.

  “Quaint,” she muttered, looking at the name. “John McCarthy. Was it you I felt that day?” It seemed possible some part of a man so eager for prayers might well stay behind to hear them.

  Amelia stepped into the center of the path. She couldn’t afford to wait. She’d have to try something a bit more direct. “Spirit,” she called, feeling foolish. “Come to me.” Still, nothing.

  Amelia stood listening to the sound of the river lapping against the stone of the seawall and fought the urge to stamp her foot. There had to be a way.

  She tried to relax and closed her eyes, attempting to summon the same feeling of will she’d felt when she repelled the spirit in the ward. This time, however, she pulled instead of pushing.

  “John,” she said, a note of command in her voice. “Come to me.”

  The itchy, tickling sensation began in her chest before the words were out. Her heartbeat thudding in her ears, Amelia opened her eyes.

  It was, as she’d suspected, nothing like the shade in the park. It wavered in the air before her, a dim outline of a human figure only slightly more defined than the wisp she’d shoved away in the ward. There was a suggestion of a man’s face, but no single feature she could have described. Amelia held her breath, but the spirit did not move, did not solidify. It waited.

  Steeling herself, she inched toward it, half afraid it would collapse as she approached, half afraid it wouldn’t. She hesitated with it hovering inches from her skin. Then, her heart pounding, Amelia stepped into the cloud. As the mist touched her, an insistent pressure grew against her mind. She didn’t fight it.

  A confused jumble of images. A bright flash and a shocking pain in the back of her head.

  And then it was gone. Amelia was on her hands and knees, staring at the grass. There was a puddle of vomit in front of her. Everything was sharp and bright, with a silvery air of unreality. Carefully, she eased back onto her heels. The world whirled around her. She lurched forward, afraid she would be sick again. She waited a few seconds, then made another attempt to sit, still shaking and queasy. After a moment, her stomach quieted.

  Amelia’s throat was as parched as if she’d swallowed sand. She had no sense of how much time had passed. She rubbed at the back of her aching head and squinted at the sky. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. The sun didn’t appear to have moved, and there was no outcry coming from the direction of the asylum; hopefully she hadn’t been missed. Filmed with drying sweat, she pushed herself up on trembling legs and regarded the gentle slope up toward the asylum with weary resignation.

  Amelia was woozy in truth by the time she staggered back into the shade of the trees. She sank to her knees and leaned against the rough bark of the largest tree. Jonas, who had apparently been keeping watch over the shoulders of the nurses, was beside her a bare moment later.

  “Faint,” he told her. “I’ll take you back inside.”

  She let herself fall against his shoulder an instant before her feigned swoon became real.

  36

  Andrew found the pulse in Amelia’s wrist with one hand as he clicked open his pocket watch with the other. Still a bit fast, but steadier than it had been an hour before, when a furious, panicked Jonas dragged him from his office to the infirmary, telling him Amelia had intentionally allowed a spirit to overtake her.

  She sat in the bed beside them, propped up by pillows and looking pale but unrepentant.

  Andrew tucked the watch away. “You shouldn’t have done it without letting us know what you were going to do.” He held onto her wrist for another moment before letting go.

  Jonas scowled. “You shouldn’t have done it at all.”

  A woman several beds away began to cough, a rough hacking sound that brought a nurse over with a cup of water. Murmured voices filtered toward them.

  Jonas lowered his own voice. “Anything could have happened.”

  “I needed to know if I could control it,” Amelia said. Her tone was apologetic, but the words themselves, Andrew noticed, were not an apology.

  Jonas was not mollified. “You didn’t even know if—”

  Andrew interrupted. “Perhaps we should move this conversation to my office.” He indicated their surro
undings. “If you’re feeling no further ill effects,” he said to Amelia.

  “I’m fine, although I am hungry.”

  Andrew smiled. “I’ll see if I can remedy that.”

  He left them there, still arguing, as he went to arrange the move with the nurse. He made his way to his office, flagging an orderly on the way and sending him to the staff kitchen for a tray of food and a pot of coffee. “Bring an extra portion,” he told the man.

  Andrew waited, keenly aware of the depth of his own relief that Amelia had not been hurt. Despite agreeing with Jonas that she had been reckless, part of him couldn’t help but admire her for it. She kept startling him. He’d never met anyone like her before, and he was coming to doubt he ever would again. Andrew straightened, mindful that his thoughts were treading a dangerous path. This was hardly the time or place for such adolescent infatuation. The circumstances were beyond bizarre. Even if they had not been, there was still Jonas, with his prior claim.

  They arrived a moment later. Jonas looked, if anything, more peeved than before. As it turned out, however, his anger had a new target.

  “Klafft saw me in the hallway,” he said with a scowl. “He wants me to come help him with something.” He deposited Amelia inside the door and left.

  Amelia took a seat, seeming more amused than anything. “Don’t mind him,” she said to Andrew. “He doesn’t like feeling thwarted. And he doesn’t like Dr. Klafft.”

  “I think,” Andrew said carefully, “that he doesn’t like you being in danger. I can’t blame him for that.”

  “He’s protective. He always has been.”

  “How long have you been with him?”

  “My whole life,” Amelia said. “We grew up together—at the Foundling.”

  “What is that?”

  “The Foundling Asylum of the Sisters of Charity. One night a man—my father, perhaps, although there’s no way of knowing—walked into the building with a bundle under his arm. He handed it to the sister on watch and walked out without a word. I’m told I was only a few hours old.” Amelia might have been speaking of the weather, so little interest did she evince in the circumstances of her birth. “They gave me to Jonas’s mother. She was one of the ones who came to give birth at the Foundling and stayed on afterward. They let some of the women do that sometimes, when they had need of more hands,” she explained. “She took charge of me. She died about a year later. Jonas remembers her, a bit. He would have been about four by then.