She remembered cold, the icy water closing over her head, lungs screaming for air as hands held her pinned beneath the surface—a fragment of the vision sparked by the Wine of Jurema.
“What is that for?” she demanded.
“Best hope you don’t find out,” Gibbs replied before shoving her on.
The way branched at the end of the hall. One side was blocked by a tacked-up fall of painter’s canvas. The space beyond it was dark, and a cold draft crept in around the gaps. A box of tools sat beside it—a carpenter’s saw, hammer and crowbar peeking out. Whatever renovation this place was undergoing was very much a work in progress.
Gibbs turned her away from the curtain, leading her to the other end of the short hallway, where she stopped at the threshold of Hartwell’s office.
It had once been some gentleman’s study, but the room was now in a mixed state of decay. Strips of paper had been torn from the walls, which were roughly sanded in some spots. The floorboards were bare, showing the small holes where rows of carpet nails once pierced them. An electric lamp, run on a cord that extended out into the hall, illuminated a heavy oak desk.
There were a pair of windows, both tall and lacking the grille that covered the one in her room.
Hartwell stood behind the desk. He finished inscribing a note on a medical file. He turned and dropped it into the open drawer of a filing cabinet behind him. The steel cabinet was clearly new and obviously fireproof. Hartwell closed and locked the door, putting the key back in his jacket pocket.
“Miss Albright, Doctor,” Gibbs announced.
“Thank you, Mr. Gibbs.” Hartwell dismissed him. Gibbs closed the office door and Lily faced her enemy alone.
“I have been considering my options regarding you,” he said, his tone expressing a mild irritation. “Turning you over to the legal authorities is, of course, one possibility, but I am forced to admit I do not find it as appealing now as I did earlier this evening. You have cost me a very great deal since then.”
A gust of wind rattled the smeared, filthy glass of the windowpanes. Beyond them, the sun was sinking lower, light fading behind a dark stretch of forest.
“The goods in the warehouse can be replaced, of course. I would not be so foolish as to leave myself exposed to such a loss. It will, however, delay matters, a delay that should not have been necessary. Yet all of that pales in comparison to the matter of Lt. Waddington.”
“It was him, wasn’t it? Dora Heller. Agnes McKenney. Sylvia Durst. Annalise Boyden. He was the one who did it.”
“The lieutenant was a very resourceful man.”
“How?” she demanded. “How did he get in without anyone knowing?”
“Through the front door, I imagine,” Hartwell replied, as though the matter should have been obvious. “Except perhaps at Mrs. Boyden’s. She would certainly have had a service entrance.”
“He posed as a servant?”
“A technician from the gasworks,” Hartwell replied shortly. “That was his idea and a very clever one. It explained the need for a case full of equipment.”
The pieces fell into place. She remembered Sam’s stories of the best way for a thief to break into a house—by being invited in and simply failing to leave. There were enough tales of horrible accidents that resulted from faults in gas lines that no one would turn away a technician who claimed he was investigating a problem. All Waddington had to do was get inside and then disappear. In a busy household, everyone would assume that someone else had seen him out.
He simply found himself a place to wait, then emerged when the time was right to go about his work.
She remembered the vision that had started all of this. In it, a shadow wielding a silver needle had swept out of the closet in Estelle’s bedroom.
That was where he must have hidden.
She might have run off with the gasworks man.
Mrs. Bramble’s comment to Miss Bard, overheard as Lily stood in the hallway, the horror of realizing that what she’d foreseen had come to pass washing over her.
There had been other signs as well. In her vision of Annalise Boyden’s death, the gas lamps in the room rose and fell, flickering like beacons.
She had even been told it all but directly, she realized with a sick lurch in her gut.
Every time I ask her about it—who was it that did you in, Agnes?—she just shows me a lamp . . . a built-in gas fixture.
The ghost of Agnes McKenney, communicating with Estelle. Sending her a precise and perfect warning that identified exactly who it was that killed her.
The man who’d come about the lamps.
Hartwell glared at her.
“Lt. Waddington was a unique resource. His hematological characteristics were extremely rare and to find that combined with a very competent and discreet medical assistant . . . well. The rub of it is that you are proving yourself an unusual menace. Which is why I have decided the most responsible course of action is to simply admit you.”
“Admit me where?”
“Here.”
“An empty house?”
“This is—or will be—the Greater Hampstead Ladies’ Hospital. A private lunatics’ asylum.” He flipped through the remaining papers on his desk, making a quick notation. “It’s a far more appropriate solution to the problem you pose. After all, I would not find it at all surprising that your outrageous behavior is, in fact, motivated by some mental disease. Sane women do not routinely go about London dressed as tanner’s boys, breaking into private property.”
It was also the quieter solution. The involvement of law enforcement meant a trial and trials gathered reporters like flies. Though Lily had little faith that the justice system would be willing to listen to her accusations against Hartwell, the tabloid reporters would certainly lick them up, causing him the inconvenience of a scandal. By shutting her up in his asylum, he ensured that any truth she tried to speak would be dismissed as the raving of a lunatic.
“Someone will find you out.”
“Find me out for what? Practicing as a physician?”
“Physicians don’t murder people.”
His eyes narrowed.
“It is research, Miss Albright. Research with the potential to shape the course of the future of the human race. There can be no more meritorious purpose.”
Connections continued to fall into place, triggered by his nearness, by the urgency of her situation.
She thought of a portrait on a gallery wall, a pointed warning from an artist thirty years dead. Mordecai Roth’s story of a suitor spurned by a woman he had no logical reason to court.
She recalled words spoken in the dim silence of Robert Ash’s reflection room.
My wife was a charismatic.
“Evangeline Ash,” she said abruptly.
At the sound of that name, Hartwell’s attention sharpened.
“Careful, Miss Albright.”
“Did you know?” She pushed on, refusing to let him intimidate her into silence. “Did you know what she was?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“I think perhaps you do,” Lily countered. “This was never about research. It was about her. You couldn’t have her then, so you set about taking some echo of what she was from anyone who fell under your power. There is nothing noble about that, Dr. Hartwell. It is simply greed.”
There was a pause, as though the room itself were holding its breath.
He set his pen down on the table, hard enough to send a splatter of ink across the blotter.
“Do not pretend to see into my soul. You think you stand on such firm moral ground? I am a doctor. I spent the first twenty years of my career in a charity hospital. I have seen the misery and degradation a human life can sink to, every imaginable form of it. You pass judgment on me without a thought for the countless thousands whose future suffering will be alleviated because of what I empower our race to become.” He caught himself, reigning control back in. “I forget myself. One doesn’t reason with lunatics.”
Lily thought of the horror of the great metal tub, of icy water and the battle for air.
He frowned, considering. “I should really have you on laudanum. We can start with a full dose and reduce it based on your response. You may quite like it. It has a very calming effect.”
“What about Estelle?”
“The sapphist? She won’t be here long. I just need to find another research partner with a compatible blood type.”
Fear crept in. It moved quickly, wrapping cold tentacles around her heart.
He could do it. He could do all of it. He could lock her back in that room under another woman’s name. Even were she lucky enough to gain access to someone from outside, would they believe the ravings of a certified lunatic over the word of a respected physician?
No one would hear her. No one would question her presence. Hartwell would gain complete control over her for as long as she lived, secreted away in hell. And Estelle?
He would tear her apart as soon as he had the means.
How could she stop him? She had nothing. There was no threat she could levy, nothing she could put on the table to try to bargain with him . . .
Except there was. She had one asset that would almost certainly capture Hartwell’s interest. But could she turn it into an appropriately powerful bargaining chip?
“What if I could provide you with a more desirable research subject?” she asked.
“How would you possibly do that?”
Lily ignored his dismissive tone, pressing on. “Assuming that I could, would you let Miss Deneuve go? You must have kept her drugged, as you did me. If she remembers anything of the warehouse or of Waddington, it will only be confused fragments. When she wakes here, you can tell her she was brought for medical attention and that you have no idea what happened to her. She’ll believe you. She’d have no reason not to. I never told her anything about any of this.”
“It’s a plausible scenario but I fail to see—”
She cut in before he could finish.
“If I can give you something better, will you swear to me—on your honor as a physician and a gentleman—” The words nearly choked her, but Lily forced them out. “Will you swear that you will release her unharmed?”
“You’ve stood there judging my actions and now you’re offering to sacrifice some other life to protect one you value higher. I do hope you are aware of the hypocrisy of that.”
“Just tell me whether you agree to my terms.”
“I reserve the right to judge whether the substitute you offer is truly a better subject. And I am not going to release the medium until this person, whomever she is, is securely under my care. Even then, the matter would have to be handled delicately . . .”
“Do we have a bargain or not?”
“If you can truly provide what you have promised, then yes. I can spare the woman. Though I fail to see how you can possibly do so, seeing as you have just been admitted to an asylum.” He shook his head. “Gibbs!”
There was no mirror here, no convenient basin full of water for her to gaze in, but she had to find something. Hartwell would never take her at her word on this. Like the guests at Estelle’s séance, he needed a show—a demonstration.
Her eyes moved to the shining black steel of the file cabinet, to the place where the light of the electric lamp was reflected on the surface of the dark metal.
She took a breath, forcing back her awareness of Hartwell’s thug returning to the door. She made herself ignore the words they spoke, honing her attention desperately on the glow in that false glass.
This had to work. It had to.
The fear nipped at her, trying to pull her attention away. She refused to give in to it.
The light flickered, dancing like the flame of a candle across the black steel. The room narrowed, the far corners shifting into darkness . . . and then only the light was left.
Ask for what you want.
Something now, she thought fiercely. Something quick and now.
The vision presented itself to her, as clear as it was absurd.
Then it was gone and she was back in the moldering study once again.
She opened her mouth, the words falling quickly from her lips.
“A lorry is about to pass down the road. White. Headlamps on. It . . .” She paused at the absurdity of it, then plowed forward. She couldn’t question it, not now. She had to trust this. “It’s being driven by a dog,” she finished.
Hartwell stared at her in dumb surprise, as though he were shocked to discover that she was, in fact, a lunatic after all.
“What’s she going on about?” Gibbs demanded crossly.
Then the rumble of an engine crept through the thin glass of the window-panes.
It grew louder, drawing closer. Hartwell continued to stare at Lily, but his expression shifted, narrowing with intense interest.
He stepped over to the window, opening the sash to see better than the dirt smearing the panes would allow. Cold air spilled into the room.
A white lorry bounced down the lane. The rumble of the engine disturbed a murder of ravens scattered across the field. They startled up into the air, painted shadows flapping against the darkening sky. A few settled in the branches of the massive oak that dominated the yard.
The driver’s window of the truck was open. The head of a beagle protruded from it. The dog panted delightedly into the breeze, perched on the lap of his master, who let up the throttle as he slowed the vehicle and turned it into the drive.
There was a crunch of gravel. Then the engine shuddered to a halt.
Hartwell turned to Lily.
“How? How did you know?”
She didn’t answer, holding fiercely to an ongoing thread of knowing deep inside of her.
This was more than another bit of scrying. It was something else, something stranger and yet utterly familiar, like an old friend come back to her doorstep.
“You have a caller,” she told him. She reached, feeling for more, sensing it was there. “Something about the temperature.”
There was a sharp knock on the door below, a quick exchange of voices. A few moments later, footsteps sounded in the hall.
Lily recognized the man who arrived as the one who had been driving Hartwell’s carriage the night before. He was tall and thin, good-looking in a dull sort of way. His chauffeur’s cap was tucked into his trouser pocket.
“What is it, Mr. Northcote?” Hartwell demanded.
“Sorry to bother you, sir, but there’s a gentleman below. Says he’s come about the boiler.”
Hartwell didn’t answer. He just turned his gaze slowly back to Lily.
“Should I let him in, sir?” Northcote pressed.
“This isn’t a convenient time,” Hartwell finally answered.
“See, I told him that. He said it’d be a fortnight before he was back out this way again, and I’m knowing the paint won’t dry in this weather without any heat. That’s a fortnight with no work being done about the place, and you’ve said you were on a schedule—”
Hartwell’s irritation was written clearly on his face. Northcote seemed immune to it.
The doctor snapped at Gibbs.
“Watch her. See she doesn’t try anything foolish.”
He stalked out, Northcote following behind him.
Lily let go. The tension of maintaining her deliberate connection with her power had been rising to a shrieking pitch. It broke, falling softly back, and she let out a long, shuddering breath.
How had she done it?
It had to be the drug. Though the vision had ended, some other effect still lingered. It had charged her
like the battery in Estelle’s magic lantern.
There was no time now to consider what that meant or worry about how long it might last. She needed to assess her options, quickly.
She made a quick study of the room. Her eye lit on a narrow line in the wall. It was a door, no bigger than that of a cupboard. It had been papered over in the same pattern as the wall. Had the paper not been half stripped it would have been nearly invisible. She judged her chances of exploring it while Gibbs watched from the doorway.
She moved to the window.
It was uncaged. Lily pushed up the sash. At least thirty feet extended between her and the hard, frozen ground. There was no way she could scale the smooth facade of the building. The great oak tree in the yard would be climbable, but the nearest branch was beyond her reach, even if she took the chance of leaping for it.
An enormous raven perched on the bare limb, staring blandly out over the heath.
“Try that and you’ll break your neck,” Gibbs barked from within.
The bird turned. Eyes like black pebbles locked onto Lily’s, measuring her with dark intelligence.
What’s the cleverest animal?
Ravens.
What do you have to pay them?
More than you’d want to give.
Sam’s words came back to her, spoken in the drawing room of The Refuge while the portrait of Saint Francis preaching to finches looked blandly on.
Desperation choked her.
She couldn’t get out of this on her own.
Strangford was gone. The grief of that hovered at the periphery, waiting for its time to consume her.
But there were others.
The bird outside the window ruffled its feathers, black eyes shining in the last of the evening light.
The action that suggested itself to her was utterly ludicrous, the act of a woman who probably deserved to be locked up in an asylum.
She did it anyway.
“There is a boy in Bloomsbury who talks to birds,” Lily said.
The Fire in the Glass Page 45