A Madness So Discreet

by Mindy McGinnis

  The linen sailed back through the dark, landing neatly into the waiting hands of Reed. “What do you think, Dr. Falsteed? Any hope for her?”

  “That one is lost. She not only claims her veins are full of spiders but truly believes it. And once we are convinced of something, no matter how ludicrous, it becomes a fact. If you cut her she’d see eight-legged creatures pour forth rather than a crimson tide, and who is to say that we are only all agreeing on the same perception when we say it is blood, and not arachnids, moving through us?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow, sir.”

  “Do you believe in God, Reed?”

  “Yes, I do. And our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

  “As I said, you are convinced and so it is fact. When in reality, I am your savior, the one who cut the abomination from your side and gave your life back, to live and to love and to make your children, is that not true?”

  In the meager light from his lantern, Grace could see Reed’s cheek muscles jumping as his teeth gritted. “You did, sir, saved my life and rightly so. Yet you are not the son of God.”

  “Unless I believed myself to be so, and then it would be so. To me, at any rate.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re wanting me to say, sir.”

  “Say that you’ll bring Grace a stool, and be on your way. I’ve taxed you enough for the day. And when you send for Dr. Thornhollow, ask that he may stop and pass the time with me as he goes about his bloody business.”

  “Dr. Thornhollow, sir? The surgeon over at Mayfaire?”

  “Yes, Reed. We’ve come to that time again. Grace’s arrival says the Board is coming. We’ve a new patient whose screams smell of delirium and by the scent of Heedson’s blood he’s nigh in a panic. He’ll call for Thornhollow. He’ll call for the one that wields the knife.”

  NINE

  The girl with spiders for blood came into the cellar like a typhoon, her screams breaking the companionable silence that Falsteed and Grace had established. In her own panic, Grace moved the low milking stool Reed had brought her from the stables next to Falsteed’s cell, her hand groping for his in the darkness. The iron bars pressed cold against her shoulder, and she was about to call for him when she felt his dry, warm hands close over hers.

  “Needing some support from the sane, love?” His voice was almost next to her ear, but she didn’t shy away from it.

  “Do you call yourself sane?”

  He chuckled, a sound of true mirth that flowed low under the high-pitched screams of the spider girl.

  “I do. I’d put the same label on yourself, though I sense you’d deny it.”

  Her hand pulsed in his, and he squeezed her back. “Do I have a right to claim sanity?” she asked, her voice still hoarse from disuse. “I’m cursed with a perfect recollection of all things and have seen things no one should—even once. To have it shown to me again and again, eyes open or shut, would truly make one mad.”

  “Maybe,” Falsteed said. “But I’ve smelled you, smelled the wrongness of all that’s been done to you by hands familiar and those of strangers. You chose to stop acknowledging a world that has treated you foully. What’s saner than that?”

  Grace sat still in the darkness, allowing the screams of the spider girl to roll over her from the cell opposite hers. The truth of Falsteed’s words rang deep inside of her. Her voice flowed again, more easily with practice.

  “And yourself? You are a good man, yet you are in the darkness here with me.”

  “Sane and good are not the same thing. Yes, I’m sane. What of it, if I can smell the sickness of others? The flavors of their feelings rich in my nostrils? It was a boon to my medical practice, for certain, but I’ve got other proclivities you need not know of. No, in the end . . . I am not a good man.

  “But that’s neither here nor there in the darkness. This particular darkness, anyway, the one you and I find ourselves denizens of. We are here because we’re the sanest people in this establishment, so they put us down here as the bedrock on which to gain a foothold for the wanderings of their own minds. They call us insane, then feed their own insanities on our flesh, for we are now less than human. Heedson and Croomes are but examples of the greater world, love. They work their discreet types of madness on us, power and pain, and we hold to our truths in the darkness.”

  Grace considered his words, her hand small and cold still resting inside Falsteed’s warm one. She could feel his breath on her ear but didn’t mind his closeness or the hint of warmth that emanated from him as their bodies pooled their resources in the cold.

  “Who is this Dr. Thornhollow you spoke of?” she asked.

  “Him? He’s the sanest of us all.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because he knows he’s insane.”

  Grace moved to pull her fingers from his grasp, but Falsteed stopped her with his words. “I’m sorry, love. I’m not teasing the words from one who kept them buried so long. I mean what I say. Thornhollow . . . he’s a special bit of a man, and that’s the closest I can come to explaining it.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You wouldn’t have to go far outside of Boston and mention my name to find someone who knows it, none of them remembering it for the lives I saved. It’s the other they remember. But Thornhollow, he’s safely anonymous for the moment. Passes through halls like this one with his dark gift and leaves those that he touches silent and still, fragile as the day they were born. Quiet like doves they are, placated with warm milk and sleeping the night through.

  “You can always count on a visit from Thornhollow when the Board is about to visit. Heedson feeds the worst of the lot down here, slick as a laundry chute, and Thornhollow, he . . . well, I guess he does the laundry, in a sense. Sends it back upstairs nice and clean, a blank slate for the Board to look upon with approval when they make their rounds.”

  “A blank slate . . . ,” Grace repeated, her words lost in a renewed shriek from the spider girl. She rested her head against the cold stones behind her. “Do they forget?”

  “I can’t say for sure,” Falsteed said. “There’s a little room down the hall. You’d never see it in this pitch, but Reed comes down with his light when Thornhollow makes his rounds. The violent ones and the screamers, they go in there loud with the doctor, and they come out smelling like blood and metal and, yes, I suppose a type of forgetfulness. Although I’d say it’s more of a removal, a permanent state of that which you’re only now emerging from.”

  Grace kept silent, not trusting her throat to handle the voice now running rampant inside of her. All the things she had kept silent boiled inside. The burning rage that Falsteed had diagnosed plummeted into the cold river of her voice and produced a harsh smoke, one that filled her lungs and pushed to overflow from her mouth.

  It enveloped her brain, burning off the fog that she’d allowed to settle as easily as the sun ripped the mist away from the morning. She knew it all again, footsteps in the dark and her father’s face looming in the bedroom doorway. It was all seared into her memory, and she knew it as perfectly as she knew the cracks in the ceiling of her cell. All the details of her life, caught forever in her mind. Inescapable.

  The blood had slowly ceased to flow down her legs, the fear that came with each drop lost losing its bite as Falsteed had talked to her in the darkness, his voice her anchor. The dress Reed had brought already fit less snugly, the extra flap of skin that had once held her baby evaporating. She’d woken from sleep once to see that Heedson had come to check on her, the bandage on his hand bright in the darkness.

  The baby was lost, the purpose of her body gone as it returned to its normal shape. There was nothing to keep her here now, no stain on the family name in the form of a widening waistband. As soon as the scratches from Croomes’s fingernails on her wrists were healed, the bruises on her cheeks from Heedson faded, she’d be returned. She clutched onto Falsteed in the anonymous dark, both her arms slipping between the bars that separated them and clasping on to his broad shoulde
rs and finding bare flesh.

  “Is Thornhollow coming for me?”

  Falsteed was silent for a moment, and she felt his body rise and fall as he breathed in deeply. “Dearest,” he chided. “You smell of hope. You smell as if you want him to.”

  Her small hands clenched, her fingernails digging into Falsteed’s skin. “Maybe I do.”

  TEN

  Fingers of orange light threaded through the darkness from Reed’s lantern as he approached, bringing muted noises from the spider girl. Falsteed moved to a corner of his cell where the flickering could not reach him, but his voice covered the distance between him and Grace, its low whisper meant only for her.

  “Hang back a moment, dear one. I’d have you draw the measure of the man while he’s still in ignorance of you.”

  An irrational fear sliced through Grace as she saw two shadows cast in the dim lamplight. Her world had shrunk into a place populated only by herself and Falsteed, the pitiful complaints of the spider girl underscoring their existence, punctuated by visits from Reed. The arrival of a new person, and one who Falsteed had spoken of in awe, sent Grace fleeing to her stool in the corner.

  “I apologize for the dank, sir,” Reed said. “Once the weather gets a mind to start raining, the cellars don’t stand much of a chance of drying themselves.”

  “Interesting choice of words, Reed,” a new voice said. Grace’s ears perked up, even though her hands began to tremble.

  “How’s that, sir?”

  “You’ve given the weather and the cellar—entities that don’t make choices or take action on their own—precisely the qualities that the humans in your care lack.”

  “I suppose I did, sir, though I had no intention of doing it.”

  “All the more telling, that your mind would subconsciously choose words to allocate control to things that lack exactly that.”

  Grace pressed her bare toes against the stones, bracing her body against the cold wall. The stranger’s voice was low and melodious, wandering through sentences as if assured it would find the end victoriously, though the path was unsure. His shadow stretched beside Reed’s as they came nearer, the serpentine voice easily supplying answers to Reed’s nervous chatter.

  “Nonetheless, I’m sorry for the state of things down here, and you with a surgery tonight, sir.”

  The pair stopped outside of Grace’s cell, and she examined the newcomer in the sickly light of the lantern, his deep-set eyes lost in the shadows, his doctor’s bag slung over his shoulder almost haphazardly.

  “Why do you call me ‘sir’?”

  “Well, I suppose because you’re a surgeon, Dr. Thornhollow,” Reed said, his hand trembling on the lantern as he held it aloft.

  “Yes, but I’m no greater than you. In fact, I’d venture to say you’re probably the better person, if it came to a matter of weighing souls.”

  “I don’t see how one would weigh a soul, sir, or what bearing it would have on the argument.”

  “For example,” Thornhollow continued as if Reed hadn’t spoken, “I can see my mother’s house from my office, yet I only visit her once a month or so, and then only under duress. The last visit occurred because I had a bit of glass buried at the base of my spine—never mind how—and had to find someone to pull it out. Even considering that, I think I went there because it was the only house that had a light at the time. I could’ve very well asked a stranger in the street to oblige me—would have, in fact, saved time if I’d done exactly that.”

  “Saved time, sir?”

  “Yes, of course. Because once I was back in the house of my birth, much the worse for wear for having been out of the womb for some twenty-plus years, my mother had to fuss and pick. Nonetheless, she’s a well-intentioned person and I did get a good dinner out of the whole escapade. I suppose I just don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

  “What? Dinners?”

  “No, well-intentioned people. Speaking of, where’s the poor soul I’m meant to see to?”

  “To the left, sir. Just follow what little noise she’s able to keep making.”

  The men moved from Grace’s sight, and she shifted silently, tiptoeing along the edge of the wall. The pale glow cast around them by Reed’s lantern sank to the floor with them while the men knelt beside the spider girl’s cell, one pleading white hand stretched between the bars.

  Dr. Thornhollow’s fingers closed around her wrist, and the faded mewlings that she’d been making intensified, like a starving cat in an alley that spotted hope in a stranger. “You can open the cell, Reed. She’s no danger to anyone in this condition.”

  “True enough at the moment, but she’s down here because she nearly took the upper lip off of Croomes.”

  “Only fair. I assume Croomes has been giving lip to people long before someone accepted her invitation to take it.”

  Reed’s keys clanked and the cell door swung open. Thornhollow beckoned for him to follow as he propped the girl against the wall. Her eyes were dark circles, her hair a tangled cloud that moved in a perpetual storm above her head, but she offered no resistance when the doctor touched her, placing his palm against her forehead gently.

  “What’s your opinion in this matter, Dr. Falsteed?” Thornhollow asked, raising his voice so it would carry.

  “It’s a sad case, Dr. Thornhollow,” Falsteed said, his voice assuming a professional tone Grace had never heard from him before. “She came in recently, claiming that there’s spiders in her veins for blood. Reed said the constables found her in an alleyway, slicing at her wrists with a bit of glass so as to let them out. Nobody’s had a word from her about anything other than the spiders, not even her name.”

  Thornhollow nodded, pushing the girl’s hair out of her face. “What’s been done to you, then?” he asked, as if expecting an answer. “Or what have you seen that you’ve gone to the abyss so young?”

  Grace’s throat constricted, her words piling on one another in her gut as she yearned to answer the questions that weren’t asked of her.

  “It’ll be a mercy, Thornhollow,” Falsteed said. “We both know she’ll get no true care here, and there’s no one to speak for her on the outside. She’s another lamb to the slaughter, and it’s better you wield the blade and bring her the blackness than allow her to know the injustice of this life.”

  Thornhollow remained crouched in front of the girl, his hand in her hair and his gaze searching her blank face. Her fingers drummed a rhythm on the stones beside his foot, and her eyes rolled.

  “Seems a bit calmer, almost,” Reed observed, leaning toward her.

  “Yes, they do that sometimes when you treat them like people,” Thornhollow said, rising to his feet. “All right, Reed. Take her by the hand, please. I believe she’ll follow easily enough. We’ll use the same room as before. If you’ll fetch another light, I believe we’ll need it.”

  Grace watched as the doctor stepped out of the cell, all semblance of emotion now stripped as he pulled his doctor’s bag from his shoulder. “Falsteed, what are your feelings on additional patients? I’m surprised at Heedson only requesting one procedure with the Board’s arrival imminent.”

  “I imagine one or two more will be along,” Falsteed said. “He always overestimates his capacity for generosity before the panic sets in.”

  “Panic indeed,” Thornhollow said, pulling a wooden box from his satchel. He sank to his knees on the stone hall, oblivious to the wet as he flipped the lid. It came open like a jewelry box, compartments unfolding in the faint light of Reed’s fading lantern as he led the spider girl away. Grace’s hands went to her ears, remembering the jewels that had hung there once upon a time and a similar box on her nightstand at home.

  But what emerged from Dr. Thornhollow’s box was nothing to ornament a woman or anything to be spoken of at parties. Glass bottles clanked against one another and metal scraped as he rummaged in a lower drawer. “I don’t suppose the kitchens would begrudge me an egg or two, Falsteed? I seem to have broken mine.” Thornhollow distastefull
y flicked something off his fingers.

  “Trying something new?” Falsteed asked.

  Footsteps signaled Reed’s return, along with the gradual lightening of the hall. Grace could see one of the doctor’s eyebrows raise. “I hardly think you’re one to condemn a little experimentation, Falsteed,” Thornhollow said.

  “Just a professional curiosity,” Falsteed said. “I find it hard to remain at the top of my field when I’m always . . . kept in the dark.”

  Thornhollow’s mouth barely twitched at the joke. “I highly doubt that. Reed keeps a steady stream of information directly to your ear. As far as the darkness goes, I’d welcome an excuse for isolation.”

  Falsteed grunted in response, and Grace squinted as Reed leaned over the still-kneeling Thornhollow. “I think you’ll find her quite ready for you, sir. I dosed her with ether and the poor bird flew off into the oblivion like she’d been pining for it.”

  “Like I said, Dr. Thornhollow,” Falsteed said. “It’s a mercy.”

  “No doubt. And yet only hours after I carve into the brain of a lost girl whose name we’ll never know, I’ll be seated next to the recognizable names of society with my hands itching to give them that same mercy so as to stop their ceaseless words.”

  “You’ve evaded their clutches quite a while. A young man of your position can only escape his social duties for so long. I imagine they’re hoping to affiance you to a daughter before you leave for Ohio?”

  Thornhollow snapped the box closed. “Reed really does keep you up to speed on current affairs,” he said stiffly. “As to the daughters, society will have to learn to live without air if they’re holding their breaths for my marriage.” He rose holding only a glass vial and a slim blade. “Reed, if you’ll humor me by going to the kitchen for two eggs and an apple corer?”

  Grace could see Reed’s face pale. “Y-yes, sir,” he stammered, leaving the lantern on the floor. The light pooled around the doctor’s feet, his features lost into a smeared blur once again.