“You’re a professor? Your office just says ‘Dr. Joseph Bell’.”
“That’s my medical office. But the John Radcliffe is also Oxford’s teaching hospital. So you see, for many years, I’ve been teaching as well as practising medicine. Over the years, I’ve been promoted up through the ranks. Good things come to those who wait, I suppose.”
See, for. C-4? Moira left all her C-4 in Oxford. The police think it was a gas leak. Pieces of a puzzle start to fit themselves together in her mind, but the morphine muddies the waters of her unconscious. Her finger is pressing the morphine pump repeatedly. How did it get back in her hand? The ripples become swells, swells become waves, waves become breakers.
And darkness washes over her once more.
She wakes again. The control for the morphine pump is in her hand. There is no name card on the nightstand. It feels like she has slept for a long time. Did she dream of a visitor after Henry? She reaches for the memory but it slips through her fingers like water.
Visiting hours are long over and the hospital lights are dimmed. A skeleton crew of nurses will be checking in on the patients, but apart from the accident and emergency department it should be quiet. The flowers are gone from her room, removed by orderlies as respiration takes over from photosynthesis. The pseudo-scientific reason for this shuffling of bouquets is that at night they move from being net producers of oxygen to net consumers. The amounts are so negligible, however, that it makes no appreciable difference. Some studies have suggested that the positive impact of seeing flowers outweighs any miniscule reduction in O2.
Her mind is clearer now. She pushes the morphine control off the edge of the bed. That way addiction lies. The control dangles from a cord attached to the same stand that holds her intravenous drip. She leans over and sees wheels on its base. It is mobile.
She raises her arms and then lifts her legs. Pain, but no indication of further injury. A quick survey identifies that it is only a heart monitor that must be removed. An alarm sounds when she detaches the wire from her chest, but she silences the machine.
She pushes and then kicks the sheets so that she can swing her legs off the bed. Her feet were protected from burns by school shoes, but the soles touching the linoleum floor feel cold. Her muscles have not weakened appreciably after a day in bed, but she clasps the IV stand nonetheless for stability. The pain increases, but is plateauing. She can bear it.
The first journey is a short one: to the cupboard. Her bag is inside, and she removes her phone and the burner given to her by Miss Alderman/Phaedra. She turns on both, but the simple burner is the fastest to wake. A call to the one number in its memory reaches a disconnected signal. She drops it in the bin on top of Magnus’s empty box of chocolates, puts her own phone in the pocket of her hospital gown, and heads for the door.
This second journey will be trickier. She must walk without bending her knees; in the dim light she would have the visage of a lumbering zombie—albeit a short zombie. Probably best to avoid the paediatric wing.
She reaches an elevator and takes it to the long-term care ward. The only locks inside the hospital are those closing off operating theatres and drug storage. As she moves down the corridor, the only sound apart from her footsteps is the soft beeping of monitors behind closed doors. Mother’s door is ajar.
“Hello, Mother,” she says, entering the room. “It’s me, Arcadia.” It is the first time she has visited Mother at night, when sleeping seems natural. She turns on a bedside lamp and sits down.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t bring my violin today. It’s probably a little late to play now, anyway.” She takes Mother’s limp hand in hers and looks around the room. “I’ve been reading some of your diaries. I hope that’s OK. They were stolen from our house and then one was returned to me. It helped me find Dr. Joseph Bell. He’s trying to help me—” She pauses. Did she dream about Dr. Bell just now? The thought hovers on the edge of her consciousness before dissipating.
“We looked into the records of my birth. I’m not sure if you were also lied to, but the Hebrons never had any children. I also discovered I have a twin—kind of. Her name is Moira.”
Mother’s breathing remains regular. It is easy to project one’s thoughts onto a sleeping patient, to see silence as approval, to read a sleep murmur as disagreement. Mother is a blank slate.
“Reading the diary—and meeting Moira—reminded me of the influence you and Father had on me for my entire life. That I’m more than just the double-helices that make up my DNA. And that somewhere between the genes given to me and the life you built around me, I have to work out who I am.
“And that’s the one, most important, question I can’t answer yet. Because I thought I was your daughter. And then I wasn’t. Then I thought I was at the centre of some great conspiracy. And now I’m not, and I don’t know where I am.” The tightness in her throat is back; an irritation is causing her eyes to water.
“It’s like following a trail of breadcrumbs in a forest, but the animals are eating the breadcrumbs before I can see where they lead. All my life, I relied on my mind; I knew my place in the world and how to act in it. And then I found out that none of it was true.” A salty taste reaches the back of her mouth. “Part of me wants to go back to that happy ignorance—even though I know that I can’t. The other part of me wants to push on and unravel what’s left of this mystery. To find out where I stand in the world. But I don’t know if I can do that without you, Mother.”
An electrocardiograph similar to the one she disconnected from her own chest tracks Mother’s heartbeat. The rhythm of life measured by contraction and expansion, systole and diastole, remains steady. It is the daughter’s heart that races.
“Mr. Ormiston keeps telling me that I need to express my feelings about the attack on you and Father. I’m not sure that’s right. There’s plenty of literature that shows that reliving traumatic events can make things worse, not better.” She wipes away some of the fluid being secreted by her eyes. “He also says that I tend to cite authorities for things I don’t want to confront. That’s probably true.
“Yet my life is not just made up of where I came from and what happened to me. Genes and environment, nature and nurture—they’re necessary, but they’re not sufficient. At some point I have to take responsibility for my own life. For the choices that I make. And for the harm that I cause.
“For now I know what’s been eating away at my insides. And it isn’t the trauma of seeing you bathed in scarlet. It isn’t even Father’s death. It’s that I was responsible. If I hadn’t pulled at the threads of the experiment, none of this would have happened.”
She is weeping openly now, warm tears making tracks down her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Mother. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t protect Father, and I don’t know how to save you now.”
Her bandaged arms are unable to embrace Mother, so instead she simply lays her head down on Mother’s chest, its slow rise and fall a counterpoint to her own intermittent sobs as she lets her floodgates open at last.
Daylight is breaking by the time she retraces the path to her room. She continues to renounce the morphine, each step causing storms of neural signals advising her body to cease moving the damaged skin tissue so that it can be repaired. She presses on.
Despite the pain of movement, she does feel better. Mr. Ormiston said she needed a way to express her feelings. The very act of crying can serve to expel stress hormones from the body; such tears have a different chemical makeup from those shed when cutting an onion. But she also knows the relief of having spoken out loud a secret she has been keeping even from herself. She does not, of course, blame herself for the attack. Milton did that and got no more than he deserved. But her own sense of responsibility gives a focus to her desire to uncover the truth behind the attack, a truth that might yet give her an idea of her place in the world.
She passes the dying petunias outside her room. Inside, new flowers stand beside her empty bed. It is too early for the orderlies to have done their ro
unds. Someone else has been in her room? With her zombie shuffle it is impractical to be stealthy, but she nudges the door open and peers around to establish that the visitor is now gone.
In a crystal vase on the bedside table, she recognises the flowers as Myosotis scorpioides—forget-me-nots. On her pillow is a package. Once again, it is a padded envelope from the Royal Mail. The shipping label has only a large letter “A” printed on it. Slightly thicker than the one she received earlier in the week, she opens it quickly. Two leather-bound volumes, bound to one another by a purple ribbon. Mother’s journals, along with a note from Moira:
Dear Arcadia,
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Good luck finding out who you are, Arcadia. You’re going to need it.
Moira
The hospital lights are still dimmed but her eyes are recovering. Throwing open the curtains, winter sunlight streams in to illuminate the room. She squints as her pupils adjust to the glare, then settles back into bed, diaries on her lap, and begins to read.
Arcadia Greentree will return in
the final book of the trilogy:
BEING ARCADIA
Arcadia Greentree confronts her past—and her future.
The pieces of Arcadia’s life are slowly falling into place when Moira returns to scatter them once more. Arcadia must now choose whether to trust her nemesis as they uncover the dark secret of their birth.
Previously, in
the first book of the trilogy:
RAISING ARCADIA
Arcadia Greentree knows she isn’t exactly normal. But then she discovers she isn’t Arcadia Greentree either.
Arcadia sees the world like no one else. Exceptionally observant, the sixteen-year-old is aware of her surroundings in a way that sometimes gets her into trouble—and then out of it again. But then she discovers something odd going on at school, and a tragedy at home forces her to use her skills to catch a killer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SIMON CHESTERMAN is a Professor and Dean of the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law. Educated in Melbourne, Beijing, and Oxford, he has lived and worked for the past decade in Singapore. Simon is the author or editor of eighteen books, including One Nation Under Surveillance, Just War or Just Peace? and You, The People. Rasing Arcadia was his first novel. This is his second.
Finding Arcadia Page 18