“I can smell you,” came a whisper—from the figure? Yes, but in such a low, hollow voice that it almost seemed to come from the air itself. “Salt. You smell like the ocean. I saw the ocean once, at Bergen aan Zee. It was large, so large. I would like to drown in it.”
Was this really Lucinda? Diana was looking for a prisoner—this was a madwoman. She spoke perfectly good English, with an accent of some sort. Wasn’t Lucinda Danish, or Norwegian, or something? Maybe that’s what she had been speaking, when she first answered.
“Seriously, are you Lucinda?” she whispered through the grille.
“No,” said the figure. “I am her ghost, forced to wander the Earth. Or sit here, as the case may be.”
Damn it all. Was this Lucinda, or should she keep looking?
“Did Wilhelmina Murray send you?” asked the women who might be Lucinda. “She said she would send you. . . .”
It was Lucinda all right. A prisoner and a madwoman! This was going to be even harder than Diana had thought.
Click! went the door when she turned the lockpick. But that was going to be the easy part of it. She shut the door behind her and said to the figure on the bed, who was definitely young, and probably blond, although it was hard to tell, “My name is Diana Hyde. I’m from the Athena Club. Miss Murray sent us your letter.”
With two hands that shone white in the moonlight, the girl on the bed pushed back her hair, but all Diana could see were dark, shadowed eyes and sharp cheekbones.
“Too late, too late,” she said in her sepulchral voice. “You should have come before I died and went to hell.”
What was that supposed to mean? Whatever. It didn’t matter, not now. Diana had a job to do, which did not depend on Lucinda Van Helsing’s degree of sanity. “I’m supposed to tell you that we’re going to rescue you. We just haven’t figured out how yet.” Despite Mary’s warning, she’d been assuming that she would be able to rescue Lucinda by herself. But this basket case? She didn’t think so.
Lucinda’s hand shot out and clutched Diana’s arm in a cold grip, stronger than she had expected. Ow, that hurt! “I will be gone. Even now I am going to that farther shore. I can see it, the black shore, the realm of oblivion.”
“And that means what, exactly? Let go, you’re hurting me.”
Lucinda loosened her grip. “Death. I do not have much longer now.”
She turned her face toward the moonlit window, and Diana could see it fully for the first time. She had seen faces like this before, in Whitechapel. Lucinda Van Helsing was starving. Yes, in a couple of days, maybe sooner, she would be dead.
So either Diana rescued her now, or they would lose her altogether. She sighed.
“Come on. I’ll get you out somehow. We’ll figure it out as we go along.”
“Not without my mother,” said Lucinda, in a low but perfectly ordinary voice. “She is across the hall, three doors down.”
Her mother? But Irene had told them Mrs. Van Helsing was dead. Which meant either Irene had gotten bad information, or Lucinda was completely off her rocker.
Bloody hell. This situation was going from bad to worse.
CHAPTER XII
Escape from the Asylum
My mother needs blood,” said Lucinda Van Helsing.
“And what might that mean, exactly?” Diana could barely see the woman lying on the bed—she was a lump of shadow under the thin coverlet provided to third-floor patients. But what she saw—a skeletal arm stretched on the cover, a bony wrist—did not give her much confidence. This woman was dying. She could smell death in the room—it smelled like decaying lilies.
“She needs your blood, from your veins,” said Lucinda, which clarified exactly nothing. “To drink,” she added. “It will bring back her strength.”
Seriously? “From my veins. You want me to cut open a vein, so she can drink my blood?”
“Yes,” said Lucinda.
Well, why not? She had done worse before. Diana drew the small but very sharp knife out of her lockpick kit, cut into her forearm (the other one, not the one she had cut into at the Magdalen Society—now she would have matching scars), and held it just above Mrs. Van Helsing’s mouth, or where she thought it was, by feel. A dry, thin mouth that moved just a little at the touch of her fingertips.
There—the cut was directly on it. And suddenly, she felt something soft, wet—like a cat. Mrs. Van Helsing was licking her forearm.
MARY: I can not believe you did that.
DIANA: What else was I supposed to do? What would you have done under the circumstances? Something sensible, no doubt. And Lucinda Van Helsing would probably still be in the Krankenhaus, or dead.
MARY: I would have thought of something other than cutting myself so a woman I’d just met could drink my blood!
DIANA: Technically, I hadn’t even met her. I mean, we hadn’t been introduced or anything.
“That’s enough!” cried Diana. Now, Mrs. Van Helsing was not just licking, but sucking, gripping her arm with one strong, bony hand. How could such a sick, frail creature be so strong?
“Stop, Moeder!” said Lucinda. She pulled her mother’s hand off Diana’s arm, prying open the skeletal fingers. “Step back!” she said to Diana. “She does not mean to harm you, but she cannot help herself.”
Diana stepped back. She felt dizzy. How much blood had she lost?
Lucinda was speaking to her mother, rapidly, insistently, in a language Diana did not understand. And then she was helping her mother to sit up, to stand. When Mrs. Van Helsing stepped into the moonlight, Diana gasped. She looked like someone already dead, like the corpse of a woman, with dark, haunted eyes—wells of darkness, she might have thought, if she was in the least poetic. And so thin! As though she were in the last stages of consumption. Like her daughter, she had long hair that hung down on either side of her face, and she was dressed in a white nightgown. On the breast were a scattering of dark spots where Diana’s blood had spattered.
Mrs. Van Helsing turned and threw her arms around her daughter with a cry that sounded almost inhuman. “Mijn dochter, mijn liefste!” she said. Lucinda had her arms around her mother as well, and she was sobbing—harsh, dry sobs.
For a moment, Diana put her hands over her eyes. She could not stand watching this reunion. It reminded her too much of the day they had taken her mother to St. Bartholomew’s hospital, coughing blood into her handkerchief. And then the day Mrs. Barstowe had taken her to the graveyard by the hospital, where her mother had been lowered into a pauper’s grave.
DIANA: Do you have to bring that up?
CATHERINE: You thought it, didn’t you? That’s what you told me. I could see that you were about to cry, even talking about it.
DIANA: Go to hell, you (the rest of this conversation has been omitted, as such language would be inappropriate for our younger readers, or indeed some of our older ones).
All the while, Lucinda was speaking to her mother, presumably explaining their predicament. Mrs. Van Helsing drew back from her daughter and pointed to the window. Then, she stepped to the iron bars and pulled the two central ones apart, bending them as though they were India rubber.
Diana stared, dumbfounded. Who, or what, was Mrs. Van Helsing? How was she still alive, when Irene Norton had told them she was dead? And how could she bend iron bars?
Lucinda turned and said, “My mother says we may escape through the window. We must climb down the wall, like the itsy-bitsy spider.”
Trying to stay as far away from Mrs. Van Helsing as possible—the woman might still want her blood—Diana walked to the window and looked down.
“You have got to be joking,” she said. It was sheer stone, with only the smallest cracks to hold on to, three stories down. And at the bottom? “Even if we make it down without falling, we’ll be seen. Look, there are guards patrolling—there, and there.” It was a clear, cloudless night. Her dull gray uniform might blend into the gray of the wall, but the moon, almost full, would shine on the white nightgowns. By the time they r
eached the bottom, guards would be waiting for them. “No, what we need”—it had worked once, it might work again—“is a distraction.”
“Distraction—that is afleiding,” said Mrs. Van Helsing. The woman knew English! Well, a little English, anyway. Her accent was even stronger than Lucinda’s.
“Is there a closet on this floor?” asked Diana. “I have an idea—well, the start of one, anyway.” Would it work? It would have to.
“I do not know,” said Lucinda. “But there must be one, no? For supplies.”
“Right,” said Diana. “Can you help me look?”
Lucinda said something to her mother in rapid gibberish.
MARY: It was Dutch. The Van Helsings are from Amsterdam.
DIANA: Well, how was I supposed to know that?
MARY: Maybe because we mentioned it over and over again?
DIANA: You’re assuming that I listen.
She turned to Diana. “It will be a door without one of the little windows.”
“I know that!” Did Lucinda think she didn’t know that? She wasn’t stupid. “Come on.” Diana stepped into the hallway, which was much darker than the room had been. If Lucinda thought she was going to be the one in charge . . . well, she just wasn’t, that’s all.
On the second floor, the closet had been located to the left of the entrance. Sure enough, there was one here too, right where Diana had expected it to be. She picked the lock and opened the door. In the closet, it was pitch black. Ah, she knew that box of matches would come in handy! Good thing she had pinched it off the prayer book, where the night guard had left it, before picking the lock to the women’s wing.
DIANA: Shouldn’t you have said that back when I took it?
CATHERINE: Our readers will naturally have assumed you took it. After all, it’s you. If you saw a box of matches lying around, of course you would put it in your pocket.
DIANA: I don’t always steal.
JUSTINE: Forgive me, Diana, but you do. I continually have to go into your room to retrieve my books.
CATHERINE: And my clothes. Why are you always taking my clothes? Why don’t you take Mary’s?
MARY: And that brooch of my mother’s that I said you could not have.
DIANA: Whatever.
Diana took the box of matches out of her pocket and struck one. The match flared and the interior of the closet was illuminated by a flickering light. Shelves, filled mostly with what looked like bedding and cleaning supplies. A mop in a bucket. But would it contain . . . yes, there they were! Lamps. She had seen lamps in the closet on the second floor, and had assumed there would be some up here as well. And yes, there on a shelf were three lamps, their reservoirs half-filled with kerosene. On the shelf below was another gray uniform.
Diana lit one of the lamps. There, now she could see properly! “Put this on,” she said, taking down the uniform and handing it to Lucinda. “I wish there were two, but this is the only one I can find. I think everything else is sheets and pillowcases and bottles of disinfectant.”
Lucinda nodded. “You will turn around, yes?”
Diana stared at her incredulously. “We’re in the middle of a rescue operation, and you’re worried about modesty?”
But she turned around, partly because she had been asked, partly because she found the sight of Lucinda Van Helsing’s face disturbing. It was so very pale, the eyes so very sunken. Why was she even bothering to rescue someone who was clearly in the last stages of consumption? Once again she thought of her own mother, coughing up blood. . . .
“I am ready,” said Lucinda.
Well, at least she had been quick. Dressed in the gray hospital uniform, with her hair up under a cap, she did not look quite so conspicuous.
“Carry these lamps,” said Diana, handing two of them to the newest member of the Krankenhaus staff. Lucinda nodded and took the lamps. She was obeying orders—good. She would need to, if Diana’s plan was going to work.
Diana carried the lamp she had lit, and as many of the sheets as she could drape over the other arm. Once they were back in Mrs. Van Helsing’s room, she tied the sheets to the bars on the window: some draped out of the window, down the stone walls of the building, some draped into the room. That would create the greatest spectacle.
“Open up the bowls on those two lamps—just lift the burners, like this—and sprinkle the kerosene on the sheets,” she said. “We don’t have enough to cover everything, but at least it will get the fire started. Now, I’m going to pick the locks on all the rooms. Here are the matches. Once I tell you to, set fire to the sheets. Do you understand? But not until the locks are picked, because we’ll need to get everyone out as quickly as possible.”
Lucinda nodded.
It took her only a few minutes to run up and down the hall, unlocking and opening the doors. All the patients were asleep but one, a woman who was pacing up and down, muttering to herself in the darkness. Finally, Diana unlocked the door to the central hall. She hoped the guard would not notice, but he was unlikely to check the door unless he heard something to alarm him. After all, he could scarcely expect anyone to break out from the inside! Only a few minutes now, and her plan would be set in motion.
There, that did it—everything was ready. She ran back to Mrs. Van Helsing’s room. “You, get behind me,” she said to Mrs. Van Helsing. The woman moved quickly—good. Diana just hoped she was strong enough to make a run for it. Would this work? It would have to, because if it failed—well, she did not think they would get another chance.
“Now!” she said. She saw the match flare in Lucinda’s hand. It moved here and there like a firefly, setting fire to the sheets. “All right, come on! We need to get everyone off this floor. You stand by the entrance—make sure the guard understands there’s a fire in here, and that everyone needs to get out. Hey, what’s the German for fire?” Damn, she should have asked Lucinda earlier.
“Feuer!” said Lucinda as they both hurried out of the room, where smoke was already rising from the burning sheets.
“Right, thanks. I’ll go that way, you go the other—make sure everyone gets out!”
Diana ran to the end of the hall, shouting “Feuer! Feuer!” Starting at the end, she made sure every patient was awake and out of her room. “Feuer!” she told them. “Run as fast as you can!” They probably did not understand her English, but they understood the word “Feuer” well enough, as well as her uniform and the pointing hand. She was one of the nurses, telling them there was a fire, telling them to get out. They ran down the hall, women of all ages in their nightgowns. She checked every room, making sure all of them were evacuating.
When she reached the entrance, there was Lucinda standing at the top of the stairs.
“Rufen Sie die Feuerwehr! Da ist es ein Feuer auf dieser Etage,” she was saying to the guard, while herding patients down the stairs. He was looking confused, turning around and around as though looking for the fire—but then smoke started trickling out above Diana’s head. Now she could smell it—thick, acrid. Where had Mrs. Van Helsing gone? Diana hoped she was already on the second floor.
“Ja, Schwester!” he said, nodding at Lucinda. Then he started shouting down the stairs. Diana watched him run to the men’s wing and unlock the door. Good, he was going to get the patients in the other wing. That meant she wouldn’t have to get them out herself. She ran down the stairs, behind the stream of patients and Lucinda Van Helsing.
Patients in nightgowns, nurses rushing about—that was the scene on the second floor. Now she could smell the smoke down here as well. Her diversion was doing its work. Once she had gotten Lucinda and her mother safely out, Mary and the others would have to admit how very clever she had been.
MARY: You put every single man and woman in that hospital in danger! You do realize that, don’t you?
DIANA: How? I set some sheets on fire. The hospital was built of stone. The fire would have burned itself out, eventually. It didn’t even spread out of Mrs. Van Helsing’s room. Anyway, no one got hurt.
> MARY: You didn’t know that would be that case when you set the fire, did you? Someone could have been injured in the general confusion. And we only know that no one was hurt because Irene checked afterward. Why don’t you ever stop to think before you do something rash and impulsive?
DIANA: Because I don’t. I swear, if you keep on at me about this, I’m going to start tearing my hair out. Or maybe yours!
JUSTINE: Diana, why don’t you come up to the studio with me? It’s so peaceful there, and you can tell me about how you cleverly rescued Lucinda and her mother.
DIANA: No, I’m going out. At least Charlie and the Baker Street gang aren’t as insufferably self-righteous as the lot of you!
For two days, Mary had been bored and worried. What was Diana doing? Was she all right? She had watched and watched from the window, sometimes through the binoculars, sometimes through the telescope, but all she had seen were those men leaning against the walls and the ordinary traffic of the street.
On the second night, she was sitting on the floor, playing solitaire by the light of the single lamp they kept burning, when Justine, who was keeping watch, said, “Diana was supposed to signal if she needed help. Could that be it?”
European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club Book 2) Page 27