“You don’t have the key. I do.”
I looked up at Roger. He was half smiling. He’d heard me use Jack’s first name. My heart was in my throat, my head pounding. I was nearly sick with panic. Half an hour. It was long enough. He’d tried to kill himself once before. For the last part of my life, I’ve wanted nothing more than to die.
“Give me your keys,” I said.
“He wouldn’t stay in his room. It teaches them a lesson.”
“Give me your keys.”
He sighed and handed them over as if put upon. I called Jack’s name again and pushed each key into the lock, my fingers sweating, until one of them turned.
The door swung open into darkness. I took a gasping swallow of panic. If anything had happened, if he was dead, it would be my fault alone. I’d seen the door shut half an hour ago. Stupid, stupid. If he’s dead, you’ve killed him.
“Jack?” I whispered into the dark.
A long moment of silence, and then something moved. I swallowed another breath.
“Jack,” I said again.
He got up from the window seat and walked toward me. He propped a forearm on the doorjamb and leaned on it, looking down at me. “Hullo,” he said.
I looked into his face, taking it in for a long moment. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. And you?”
Something was wrong. I reached up and tilted his face farther into the light from the corridor, studying him more closely. My hand was icy with the aftereffects of terror, but he didn’t complain. His skin was rough with stubble. I stared into his eyes and found the pupils dilated.
“What did you take?” I asked him.
“Nurse Weekes,” he drawled, and I realized how close our faces were. He smiled and tweaked the edge of my pinned cap.
I squeezed my fingers harder along his flawless jawline, pulling him back to attention. I could have shaken him. “You took this before. What was it?”
“The doctors gave it to me.”
“Liquid?” I said. “Shots? Pills?”
The large pupils focused on me again. “Pills.”
“How many?”
“Two.” He blinked slowly. “Three.”
Three pills had done this to him? And how many had the doctors given him? A bottle? If he swallowed the whole thing, no unlocked door, no rule about belts or braces, would save him. “Give me the bottle,” I said.
He leaned a little farther forward, his gaze soft on me. “You’re damned beautiful.”
Something jarred inside me like a shard of glass. No one had ever called me beautiful before. Oh, I knew I wasn’t ugly, but “pretty” was always the word applied to girls like me. As in, Come over here, pretty girl, or Do you like a drink, pretty girl, or Are you going home, pretty girl? I squeezed my legs as my knees went weak. He was drugged; that was all. Too drugged to notice the shock on my face as the word “beautiful” rolled from Jack Yates’s tongue. I kept my voice careful. “Give me the bottle,” I said, and let him go.
Obedient as a child, he went back to his room, fetched the bottle of pills, and gave it to me. I turned away from him and saw Roger still standing behind me, watching. His eyes followed my hand as I dropped the bottle into the pocket of my apron.
“Everything is under control here,” I said to him. “Go back to your duties. I’m going to count linens.”
He left, giving me what he must have thought was a knowing look. I stood in the hall for a moment, gathering my strength. I walked away without looking back to see whether Jack Yates was watching me, but when I’d sat down at the nurse’s desk, the list of linens in front of me, the gaping doorway to the darkened stairwell behind me, I pulled the bottle from my pocket and looked at it.
A full bottle of pills. A locked door. A man who had attempted suicide before.
It was as if, I thought, someone thought Jack Yates better off dead.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Hours later, when the soft light of dawn had finally appeared, I sat on the edge of the bathtub in the nurses’ lavatory, slowly unbraiding my hair. I was nearly shaking with fatigue, and the only thing I wanted more than my bed was a long, hot bath.
Nina and Martha had gone on duty, and I was alone. I opened the taps on the tub as full as they would go. I felt filthy, rank with dried sweat, and a decade older than my twenty years.
I let my hair fall and undid the braided knots one by one, tugging gently, working my fingers through the strands. The motion of it, the slow repetitiveness, started to soothe my wild brain. Too much had happened, even though for the quiet remainder of the night I’d counted linens as the wind moaned on the darkened marshes outside the window.
Now dawn had come again. I thought it would be a warm, pretty summer day. I turned the taps off and listened to the last drops of water. The nurses’ bathroom wasn’t half as luxurious as the men’s. The tiles were plain white and there was only a simple sink, toilet, and bathtub good enough for the use of children, overlooked by a narrow window now glowing pink with early light.
My nerves were still ragged, and they had not forgotten the terror of that other bathroom. But this room was quiet. There were no sounds in the walls. The air was not sharp with fear in here. This was just a bathroom, the house just a house. An English home at the start of an early-summer day.
I stood and dropped my nightdress, then stepped naked into the tub. I tried to remember the last time I’d had a long, hot soak in a bath all to myself and couldn’t. Well, then, there was one small advantage to living in the leftover riches of the Gersbachs.
I pulled my knees up, sank my shoulders under the water. I was too thin. My body was already narrow, boyish, but I could see the lines of my ribs. My hips were only a little rounded, my legs longish and thin with muscle, my breasts small. None of it mattered to me. I never looked at myself, not really.
I plunged my head under the water and scrubbed at my scalp. The memories came worse with my eyes squeezed shut; I saw that pale, shirtless figure walking to the stairs, and Archie’s face as his hands flew up, and even poor Somersham as he vomited into his water jug. I saw my breath cloud in that stairwell, heard my voice echo off the walls. I heard Archie say, I won’t go.
I pushed back up with a gasp. I dashed water from my eyes and stared at the ceiling. This was not just a house. It was quiet now because it chose to be, because it dozed. It left this bathroom alone because this room did not interest it. It let me sleep for now because it chose to.
Never turn your back on danger, Kitty.
Something was going on, something outside of normal rationality. Something mad. And I couldn’t leave, which made things simple. I’d have to stay and face whatever it was. I pressed my hands to my eyes. This thing had not bested me yet, but it had come close. I was tired, so tired of doing everything alone.
Jack Yates’s jaw had been rough and hot when I’d touched it. I could still feel the scrape of his stubble against the pads of my fingers. He’d listened so calmly as I’d cried, letting me stay in the dark. My skin prickled at just the thought of him, curious and aware, as if my body was imagining what his hands would feel like.
You didn’t tell him everything, I reminded myself, and pulled the plug, letting the water spiral down the drain.
• • •
I was six years old when my father first hit me. I was pulling myself up the arm of the sofa, pretending to be a mountaineer, when I’d looked up to see his hand swinging toward me, as large as the moon. As I’d lain on the floor, my face stinging and a jolt ringing up my tailbone, as I bit back a cry—for even then I’d known better than to make a noise—what registered first was not pain but surprise. It had been so fast, so random. Did that happen? I’d thought stupidly. Did it really?
Over the years, long past when it should have vanished, that surprise had been constant every time. My mother was most often the target of my fath
er’s anger; she had it worse than either me or Syd. We were nuisances, slapped casually out of the way with a muscled arm, but something about my mother infuriated my father, no matter what she did. She simply made him angry. And when she finally left, when I was thirteen—ran away with a man from the local soap factory, like a bad theater melodrama that no one would ever want to see—my father turned that anger on me.
He hit me while Syd was out. He called me names, disgusting and crude, when Syd couldn’t overhear. He twisted my arm behind my back, his fingers digging into my skin, silently when Syd was in the next room, and told me if I screamed, he’d kill my brother. If Syd noticed my black eyes, he never spoke of it. I didn’t blame him, and I didn’t ask for help. It was I who made my father angry: the way I looked like my mother, the way I was growing into her body, the way my lower lip curved like hers. I infuriated him. There was nothing anyone could have done.
The morning after Syd went to war, I stood in the kitchen frying two eggs on the stove. My father came in behind me on silent feet. He took the back of my neck in a viselike grip, bent me forward, cracked my forehead on the edge of the counter hard enough to bleed, and threw me to the floor. My arm hit the handle of the pan and the hot eggs and grease went flying, splattering the wall.
“That’s for leaving my socks on the dresser,” he said, and left the room.
I lay on the linoleum, thinking that the eggs were ruined, wondering whether he’d be angry because they’d been wasted. I absently wiped the blood from my forehead. And then I realized: The surprise was gone. I lay on the floor and felt nothing. And something heavy coiled in my stomach, something that was almost fear and almost anger. You are going to die this way, it said. Perhaps not today and perhaps not tomorrow, but this is how you will die.
The year that followed was the worst of my life. Syd had gone to France and vanished; we had no idea whether he was alive or dead. My father drank. He put a knife in my mouth and threatened to cut out my tongue; he held my hand under hot water until it scalded; he pulled me screaming from under the bed one night, not knowing or caring when my hand caught on a bent nail and the skin ripped from the base of my thumb almost to my wrist. He told me that if I ran, he’d find me, no matter where I went; he’d find me and kill me, dump my body. I believed him. I had no other family, no money, no friends, and nowhere to go.
I could have married, I supposed. I was fifteen, and the local boys liked to catcall as I walked down the street in my ill-fitting dress. But by then I knew men were as dangerous as snakes. If I married one of them and he was the same, then what? Then what?
One night he came drunk into my bedroom. He crawled on top of me, a big, painfully heavy man, pressed his knees onto my thighs beneath the covers, and pinned my hands over my head. He savored the way I froze, my breath in my throat. Then he laughed, his breath hot and painful on my cheek, his body shaking. He got up and stumbled from the room.
I lay awake for hours after that, trembling. Tears leaked down my temples and into my pillow. The heavy coil came back into my stomach. I am going to die this way. I am going to die.
Nothing had changed. I still had no money, no friends, no family, and nowhere to go. I had just turned sixteen. I was utterly alone and helpless.
It didn’t matter. Three days later, I ran.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I woke to Nina’s face as she shook me in bed. The sun was high in the windows, glaring through the thin curtains.
“Matron wants to see you,” Nina said.
I blinked at her. “What time is it?”
“Three o’clock.”
“What?” I sat up. “I’m not on duty yet.”
Nina frowned. “Matron’s off duty at night. She wants to see you now.”
I dressed and braided my hair, anger rising within me. Of course I would be expected to attend to Matron’s convenience; how else would it be? That I had been dragged out of bed after working a twenty-four-hour shift, given only a few hours’ rest, would be nothing to her.
The men were being served tea in the common room. A few of them passed me in the corridor and nodded. Somersham stopped me and apologized for the night before.
“It’s all right,” I said to him. “Are you feeling better?”
He moved his gaze from his feet to the window behind my shoulder. “Yes, ma’am. I’m well, thank you. I didn’t mean to bother you last night.”
In the afternoon light he looked haggard, as if he hadn’t slept the sleep of the drugged for some twelve hours. Somersham and I were about the same age, but like most of the men here, he looked much older. I didn’t have the heart to keep him there, asking him questions. Instead I said, “Are you certain? I can fetch you an aspirin.”
“It’s kind of you, ma’am, but if it’s all the same to you, my stomach won’t quite handle it.”
“Of course. Go have tea. I’m on night shift again tonight. I’ll see you later.”
Boney appeared at my shoulder as he left. “There you are,” she said. “Matron has been waiting.”
Boney’s face had its usual expression, but there was a distinct smugness about it. And so I wasn’t surprised when Matron turned thunderously on me when I entered her office.
“Nurse Weekes,” she said curtly. “Sit down.”
I sat in the hard chair opposite her desk, the same chair I’d used for our first interview.
Matron thrust a paper at me. “What is the meaning, exactly, of this?”
I took the paper and looked at it. “It’s my report from last night’s shift. I was told I was supposed to write one.”
“Read it, if you would.”
I cleared my throat. “‘Patient Twelve, Somersham, vomited twelve thirty a.m. Patient Six, Childress, nightmare two a.m. Both now resting quietly. Nothing else to report.’”
I raised my eyes. Matron was glaring at me.
“Well?” she said.
“Did I do it wrong?” I asked.
“Do it wrong?” There was high outrage in her tone, and I realized she was truly angry. “Nurse Weekes, I have been told on good authority that this is far from a complete report. I have been told that you spent a good deal of time alone with Patient Sixteen in his room, which is against regulations about fraternizing with the men. I’ve also been told that Mr. Mabry had another nosebleed, a fact you were apprised of, and yet you utterly failed to note it here.” She took the paper from my hand and raised it. “This is an incomplete report.”
I blinked. Perhaps exhaustion was coloring my perception, but it seemed a vigorous overreaction to me. “I didn’t think it was important,” I said.
“You may want to rethink that answer,” said Matron. “You may want to rethink it very carefully.”
I pushed my mind into gear. I’d been tattled on by Roger—that much was clear; he’d told her everything. He’d done it because he’d known I would catch hell for it, though why he wanted me to, I couldn’t yet figure. I honestly hadn’t meant to lie to Matron; I’d written the report in a haze and I barely remembered thinking anything at all as I wrote, except that I wanted Captain Mabry to see his children.
But I’d miscalculated. Matron was furious. The list of things that could put Matron into such a tizzy was easy enough to guess, and I figured I knew the item at the top.
“The doctors,” I said.
“The doctors,” Matron shot back at me, “are responsible for the medical care of these men. Completely responsible. They report directly to Mr. Deighton. If an incorrect diagnosis is made and a man is sent home when he shouldn’t because the night nurse didn’t think a man’s symptoms were important, what do you think the consequences would be?”
“I didn’t—”
“If a man goes home,” Matron continued, “and harms his family or himself, the inquiry will lead directly here. Directly to you and to me.”
At our first meeting she’d told me t
hat she was about to lose her position because she couldn’t keep a girl past three weeks. She was as worried about her own job, then, as I was about mine. The thought surprised me. I had never imagined Matron worried about anything.
I bit my lip, thinking. “All right. It’s just that I spoke to Captain Mabry and I don’t think he’s a danger to himself or others, not really. He has fits of nosebleeds, that’s all. I’m not even certain he’s mad.” Except that he sees things. But then, so do I.
Matron gave me a withering glare. “Mister Mabry, like every other patient in this institution, will say anything he can think of to win your sympathy, and therefore gain himself a better chance of escaping Portis House.”
That utterly stopped me. I stared at her, openmouthed. “Escape?”
“Of course, escape. This is an institution, Nurse Weekes.”
“But the doors aren’t locked. There are no fences. The men can leave whenever they wish.”
“And where would they go? Off over the marshes into the ocean? Or over the bridge to the mainland? We confiscate all of their personal belongings when they come here, including identification papers, money, and clothes. They wear clothing identifying them as patients.” Matron pulled a handkerchief from a pocket in her apron and began vigorously polishing the spectacles dangling on her chest. “There has never yet been an escape from Portis House, but if there were, no man could effect it alone. He would need help.”
I couldn’t calculate it. “You’re saying the patients would use me?”
She shook her head and continued to polish. “Just because a man has lost his sanity does not mean he is incapable of subterfuge. In fact, the insane are quite capable of it. And when they have brooded on something long enough, they have no moral qualms at all.” She dropped the glasses and let them dangle again. “So, yes, Nurse Weekes, I am saying that every man here will lie to you if he can. He will tell you what he thinks you want to hear in order to gain your sympathies. He will tell you he is a victim, that he is unjustly accused, that he is unfairly imprisoned. He will not tell you about the people close to him who are so badly frightened that they wanted him locked away for safety.” She looked me in the eye. “Trust me, Nurse Weekes, there are people right now who are terrified these men will come home.”
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