Mad Miss Mimic

by Sarah Henstra

  I dreamed my bedclothes were on fire and half-woke with painful coughing. A white-whiskered man pinned my wrist to the bed and pierced my skin with a syringe. I thrashed to escape, and my aunt Emmaline leaned over me, stroking my forehead. Then I slipped back into sleep.

  The next time I woke, I was just clear-headed enough to recognize my surroundings. I was in my old bedchamber at Aunt Emma’s house in Kew. My hearing had recovered too, except for a strong ringing, and my aunt was arguing with the whiskered man: “I know ’tis uncomfortable for her, but she is strong.”

  “But the pneumonia—”

  “Her coughing has lessened; you said yourself that her lungs have cleared. Doctor, if she is to get well, she must wake up. I won’t have my niece recover only to condemn her to a life of morphia enslavement!”

  The doctor sighed. “Laudanum, then. At least for another week or two. The coughing has slowed the healing of her clavicle considerably. ’Twill be another month before it stops paining her altogether.”

  But the laudanum sickened me so that I could not keep any food in my body. Aunt Emma spooned broth and laid compresses on my aching head. Finally she took the bottle of medicine away and replaced it with an endless rotation of garden powders and teas of spearmint, boneset, ginger, and eyebright. My fractured collarbone did hurt, especially when I coughed, but after a week or so I felt less nauseated and began to sit up in bed for short periods. Bess bathed me with a damp sponge and leaned me over a basin to wash my hair. She threw open the windows on breezy days so I might smell the nearby hayfields.

  Still I would sleep whole days, shutting out the light with the coverlet pulled up over my head. It made my nights more restless, but I preferred the darkness to the oppressive sunshine. Time crawled on, day blending endlessly and monotonously into night.

  Aunt Emma took to visiting my bedroom just to sit and speak to me. She spoke to me of the robins who had made a nest outside her parlour window, and the fledglings who fought for space in the nest and hopped to the rim and flew away. I would wait until she left the room, then turn over and go back to sleep. She would come back and wake me and tell me of the lavender plants that scented the garden path and the old, blind hound that wandered in from the gamekeeper’s cottage.

  Over and over I would sleep, and my aunt would wake me, and we would talk. On her many, brief visits to my chamber I felt too weak and ill for conversation, so Mimic stepped in for me with a surprisingly close approximation of my own voice. She even stammered on occasion, for authenticity.

  Often I caught Aunt Emma peering into my face with concern. She always looked away immediately. Once, though, she said, “You are not yourself, my dear.”

  I assumed she meant Mimic, and heat came into my face. But Aunt Emma said, “Your spirits are even lower than this illness warrants.”

  Neither my aunt nor my maid spoke of the events at the Thames, and I knew they meant to wait until I would ask them. I put off asking. I felt the memories pressing at the edges of my mind, and I knew that my constant headaches stemmed in part from the shock and sorrow I was refusing to face.

  One morning I turned my head to find, perched on my bedside table, Tom’s music box. One of the crystal birds was missing and, when I turned the little knob, the clockworks did not move. I shoved it under the blanket, willing myself back to sleep. But sleep would not come. My pillow dampened with the tears that leaked from my eyes.

  Later, when Bess came in with my breakfast tray, Aunt Emma drew up a chair. She waited until we were alone, cleared her throat, and nodded at the music box where I’d replaced it on the table. “They found it inside a gentleman’s coat beside the river,” she told me. She smiled. “It was eventually deduced that you’d taken the coat from Whitehall. You will recall the leaf of stationery in its pocket? Well, my dear, that scrap of paper has induced great excitement amongst the police detectives. Your cousin Archibald is making quite a nuisance of himself about it, too. He’s convinced it somehow connects the Lord Rosbury to all the explosive attacks.”

  I stared past Aunt Emmaline to the leaves on the tree outside trembling against the cloudy sky. I knew from many hours of practice that if I concentrated I could transform the pattern of greens, blues, and whites into the dappled surface of a pond.

  “I’ve read and reread the letter you wrote to me before … all of this. The one in which you lay out the case, as it were. You suspected Thornfax, and it seems now you had good reason. No one has been able to locate him.”

  I knew that I could pretend my body was floating just under the pond’s surface, borne along by the water, looking up at the light but hearing nothing. And I knew that eventually this fantasy could lull me back to sleep.

  She tried again: “The Dewhursts have taken their children to France. Daniel’s medical licence has been suspended, and Christabel couldn’t bear the scandal.” Aunt Emma paused and slipped a hand into the pocket of her housedress. “There’s also this.” And she laid Mr. Thornfax’s diamond-and-amethyst necklace on the bedcover.

  I recoiled as though she’d dropped a snake into my lap.

  “It was found among the rubble and taken into evidence,” she explained. “But half of London saw you wearing it, so I didn’t need to press very hard for the police to hand it over.”

  “I don’t want it,” I said. I looked back to the leaves outside, but the fantasy of the pond surface was ruined.

  “I know you don’t want the man,” she said, “but think what these jewels could buy—”

  “Sell them, then,” I told her, “but I do not want the money, either.”

  She slipped the necklace back into her pocket, sighed, and took my hand. “Speaking of money, Leonora, I want you to know that I’ve made a decision. I have transferred the deed of Hastings House to your name. I’ve also established an allowance for you that should quite suffice to let you live as independently as you like.” Her hand, trellised with blue veins, squeezed mine, and she traced a fingertip over the healed rope wounds on my wrist. “You are young, my dear, but you have more than demonstrated that you know how to take care of yourself!”

  My tears began to flow again. I took the music box from the table and cradled it in my lap.

  “My dear girl. Oh, my dear.” She had not witnessed me cry since the rescue, and the sight was obviously upsetting to her. “I shall have it repaired for you!” Aunt Emma leaned to take the box from me, but I gripped it harder.

  “It cannot be repaired,” Mimic said for me, through my sobs. “He is the only one who could have fixed it, and he is gone.”

  “Who is, my dear?”

  “T-Tom Rampling!” The name was a ragged moan of pain.

  My aunt sank onto the bed beside me, wide-eyed with surprise.

  “I loved him, Aunt.” Suddenly, I no longer knew whether it was Mimic or I talking. “I loved him. He was g-good and brave, and clever, and he made such beautiful things. I lost him in the river that night. I let go of him, and he drowned.”

  It was neither Mimic nor I talking—not in the old sense, anyhow, not separate or taking turns. Something inside me had thrown open a door. Something had thrown open a door and hurtled through it and was tearing down the passageways, battering the walls with its wings and shrieking for the open sky. Something shattered the glass, burst through the window, and filled the whole house with unbearable light.

  “You were trying to save this boy, this Tom Rampling. Is that why they found you in the water?”

  “I loved him, and he is dead. I can’t bear it!” I squeezed my eyes shut and slid down until the bedclothes covered my face.

  My aunt stroked my hair, clucking and murmuring comforting words, but now that I had confessed them my feelings would not be appeased. The bed shook with my sobbing. My injury throbbed savagely, and I wheezed and grew light-headed, and still I could not stop.

  “Laudanum,” I begged at last. “Please, let me go back to sleep!”

  She refused at first, but eventually she brought me a glass. Between hiccups I
gulped down the medicine, and Aunt Emma stayed at my bedside until sleep finally came.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Afew days later it was decided I was well enough to have visitors, and I was dressed and bundled with blankets into a chair in the parlour. In fact there was only one visitor: my cousin Archibald, who coughed into his fist as he entered the room. He schooled his features as he took my hand, but I’d seen his shock at my sickly appearance.

  Aunt Emma had gone out for the morning, so my cousin and I were left to make our own conversation. He tried to inquire about my recovery and my stay at Kew, but Archie had always been dreadful at small talk. Not even waiting for my answers he fell to his knees in front of my chair. “Oh God, Leo! I am so, so sorry for it all,” he exclaimed, and I was surprised to see real tears in his eyes.

  “Whatever is the matter?” I said. Had he allowed my name to be smeared in the papers after all?

  “You—you nearly died because of me!” he choked. “I had the facts, I was suspicious as all hell of Thornfax, and yet I did nothing.”

  “No one knew what would happen—”

  He cut me off. “I waited for something to happen. It wasn’t until the countess brought me that letter you’d written to her, and then Dr. Dewhurst enlisted my help in search of you after you disappeared from your party, that I even really considered you might be in danger.”

  “But you saved my life.” I remembered, suddenly, what I thought I’d only dreamt: my cousin shouting from the pier at the Thames. “I saw you that night. You brought the police.” I held my smile steady until the shame and worry creasing my cousin’s brow began to soften. “You didn’t send me to the Docks that night, Archie,” I continued. “You were caught up in the plot like everyone else. I was worse than anyone. Do you know at some point I suspected you of making it all up about the Black Glove? I even wondered if you were writing those notes yourself after each explosion. No, the truth is that all the damage, all the d-death”—my voice caught, and I veered away from the thought of Tom—“was my own doing. My own fault.” I tucked my right arm under the linen sling supporting my left. Despite the blankets on my lap I felt cold.

  Archie snorted, shook his head, and got to his feet. “That’s ridiculous, Leo. This falls squarely at Rosbury’s feet, and you know it.” All signs of his own remorse had evaporated.

  “Where is he?” I asked. “Why haven’t they found him?”

  “I wish you didn’t care.” He settled himself on the chester-field and picked up my aunt’s Harlequin statuette.

  “Is he still in London, do you think?”

  “I shouldn’t think he’d linger so close. He has accounts and trusts all over the world. He could live like a king anywhere he wanted and not be bothered by suspicion.”

  “But the police must be attempting to bring him to justice.”

  “I doubt they’d try him for murder in any case. Mischief, maybe. He may be a rogue but he’s still a lord.”

  I sighed, and Archie must have mistaken it for relief, because he gave me a sharp look. “You are finished with him, aren’t you? You haven’t fooled yourself into thinking he can be redeemed, or anything stupid like that?”

  I scowled at him. “I may have been stupid for a time. But I’ve read your reports. Your newspaper should thank me for snatching the Lord Rosbury’s stationery. It’s made you quite the detective hero.”

  “Yes, that was a brilliant stroke, Leo! Can you believe the man was arrogant enough not to bother even trying to disguise his penmanship? Well, of course you believe it. You knew him better than anyone.” Harlequin turned somersaults in my cousin’s restless hands. “D’you know I’ve been promoted thanks to all that? I might be sent to America for a feature on the Indian wars. Only last month a troop of Cheyenne braves sabotaged a Union Pacific rail line.”

  “Give me that, will you? You’re likely to drop it any moment.”

  Archie passed me the figurine, and I laid Harlequin in my lap.

  “The countess wants …” Archie hesitated and then donned his most determined journalist’s face. “I need to ask you, Leo: What happened with all this business of Dewhurst’s hired boy? This Tom Rampling character?”

  The mention of Tom’s name brought hot blood to my cheeks and a painful tightness to my chest.

  Archie saw it and rushed on: “I don’t want to upset you. It’s only that Rosbury’s man Watts died in the explosion, you know, and his driver—what’s his name, Curtis—keeps insisting that all the Black Glove business was carried out by Watts and Rampling alone.”

  A series of racking coughs overwhelmed me. When I could finally breathe again I said, “It hardly matters now, does it?” I was exhausted by the conversation. I wished nothing more than for my cousin to say goodbye so that I could crawl back upstairs, sink into my bed, and go to sleep.

  Archie took a letter from his pocket—my letter, the one I’d written to Aunt Emmaline before the train attack. “You wrote about sabotage,” he said. “You seemed to think Rampling was working against the Black Glove. But the police have found no proof to support that notion.”

  “There was proof,” I corrected him. “They found …” But Mr. Thornfax’s pocket watch had been returned to him, I remembered. The police had discovered it in the train wreck but, assuming the Lord Rosbury could have had nothing to do with the derailment, had delivered it back to him directly. I’d watched him display it to Daniel at Whitehall, listened to him declare to Daniel that Tom was his to revenge himself upon—

  “Ask Dr. Dewhurst,” I said to Archie. “He knows. If you want to keep playing the detective, write to Daniel and ask him about Lord Rosbury’s pocket watch. Perhaps his guilty conscience will prompt him to tell you the truth about”—I could not bring myself to say “Tom” or even “Mr. Rampling”—“his poor assistant.”

  “I knew Dewhurst knew more than he let on!” Archie exclaimed. “Of all the craven, self-interested—I’d like to go straight to France myself and beat the truth out of him, or drag him by the ears back here to testify!”

  The idea made me smile. “You don’t seem exactly suited for a sheriff ’s role,” I said.

  “Oh, I’ll adapt. Detective, sheriff—the lines are all blurred for a journalist. I’ll play any role to get at the truth.”

  “To get a good story, you mean. ’Tis not the truth that sells your newspapers.”

  Archie’s grin was quizzical. “I didn’t think it was possible to trump my cynicism, Leonora, but I believe you’ve just done it. Journalism calls for sensationalism, I’ll grant you. But it also demands a real social commitment. I’ve dug out the truth about Rosbury’s dealings, haven’t I?”

  I shrugged. “Truth is a storytelling technique like any other.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You sound like the countess. But that’s not her voice; it’s your own, or very nearly. In fact I haven’t heard you stammer once since I arrived. What’s happened to you, Leo?”

  “The lines are all blurred,” I said, in a perfect imitation of Archie. Then I switched back to Leonora’s voice. “’Tis the same for me, I suppose: a series of overlapping roles.”

  “But which one is you? Which is the true Miss Somerville?”

  I laughed and saw my cousin wince a little: there was no humour in the brittle, weary sound. I looked down at Harlequin in my lap, stroked his checkered belly, and scraped my fingernail over the enamelled teardrop on his cheek. As near as I could tell, the true Miss Somerville no longer existed.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  There are things I cannot say in any voice. I was born Leonora Emmaline Somerville, but I am not at all sure that is still who I am. They called me by that name at Hastings House, but I shall not live at Hastings again, with its cold floors and colder memories, even if I am to become its owner. The revisions to my aunt’s will have freed me from the need to get married, so I will not seek refuge in a husband’s name, either. After my adventure with Mr. Thornfax marriage seems a dubious sort of refuge in any case.

  Aunt Emmaline
says your story determines who you are. Well, I suppose I am now come to the end of mine. It is remarkable how the human body will knit itself back together, no matter how tattered the human heart. My collarbone healed, and the congestion in my lungs ebbed until I could once again breathe deeply without risk of a coughing spasm. My appetite returned enough that I could take regular meals downstairs with Lady Hastings. I walked the gardens—first on her arm or Bess’s, then alone—and over the days and weeks I developed a favoured circuit of the grounds. I would start at the orchards, where the apples and pears were ripening and the beehives thrummed with midsummer fervour. I would make my way down through the hayfield to the pond, where lines of frogs, like tipped dominoes, plunged into the sludge at my approach. Then back along the rush-choked creek—if I was lucky I would startle the heron and witness how he beat his great wings into the sky—and up to the barn, to dandle the kittens and stroke the ponies’ silken noses.

  Aunt Emmaline had decided that the real test of my recovery would be a visit into town. This I delayed as long as I could, preferring the secluded universe of Kew, but one evening she declared she had business in London the next day and would not go without me.

  Next morning Bess packed my cases, did my hair and, with Aunt Emma’s assistance, helped me to dress properly. Then she fluttered about with needle and thread, taking in my gown where it sagged and gaped.

  I asked for a mirror, and Bess brought one—reluctantly, I thought. She propped it against the wall. “You will be yourself again, Miss Somerville,” she assured me.

  I laughed, thinking of Mimic. “Leave me a moment,” I said.

  My amusement died as I stood in front of the glass. My left arm, newly freed from its sling, hung weakly at my side. I had to force my shoulders straight, as they seemed to want to hunch around my damaged collarbone. I was so wasted from the pneumonia that despite Bess’s efforts my clothes still hung on me.

  And my face! I did not recognize my own face. I was pale as death despite my walks in the sun, with concave cheeks and grey shadows under my eyes. The rouge powder Bess had applied only accentuated how starkly the bones stood out. I scrubbed at the powder. I tried bending over at the waist to bring the blood to my face but suffered a wave of dizziness upon righting myself. I tried a smile and shuddered at the ghoulish effect. It reminded me of something, and I stood a moment, hands on hips, trying to think what it might be.