Grace took a puff, drawing the smoke into her lungs and back out in a rush that left her eyes watering. She handed it back to Lizzie, shaking her head.
“Amateurs,” Nell said, sucking in and releasing smoke through her nose.
The cigarette made the round again, Nell coaching the other two as the moon rose higher and their laughter grew louder. Grace allowed herself to be lulled, to follow their voices and stories to a place where she didn’t fear the arrival of her father. Lost in each other’s words, they didn’t even hear the party breaking up until the first carriages were brought around to the front, wheels crunching in the gravel.
“Already?” Elizabeth asked, rising from her chair to watch the guests depart.
“Ye’ve got no sense of time,” Nell said, pointing at the moon. “It’s two in the mornin’ at least. Or ’ave ye never seen the sky this late?”
“Does it matter?” Elizabeth said, at the railing. “Here they go.”
“Aye,” Nell said as she and Grace joined their friend. “And the rich stagger ’ome just the same as the poor.”
They emptied out slowly, women leaning on men and vice versa, drivers helping everyone into their carriages. Grace stood watching solemnly. Her father had been under her feet for hours and her friends had drawn her thoughts elsewhere. Now that he was leaving she felt a perverse need to see him, to revel in the knowledge that he had truly been so near and she’d been unaffected. The bricks had not crumbled; the air was not poisoned. She could continue to be Grace of the asylum on the hill and let Grace Mae truly be a ghost.
She went to the railing with triumph in her step, leaning into Elizabeth as they watched the revelers leave. Her father’s booming voice sailed through the night air to her, the laughter he used in public so different from the low chuckle she’d heard in the dark. He emerged from under the portico, his shadow stretching as if it would engulf everything below her, leaving Grace in her turret surrounded by his darkness. His heavy step seemed to reverberate, the rhythm of her nightmares carried through the bricks to shake the boards beneath her feet. Her knees quivered and she dropped slightly, clinging to the rail but forcing her eyes on him as he turned to speak to the superintendent, his hand emerging from his coat sleeve as they shook. His teeth flashed, bright white against the pink of his lips, and Grace’s stomach revolted at the sight, clenching down on her paltry supper as she bent over, gagging.
“Grace.” Elizabeth gripped her arm. “Grace, what’s wrong?”
Grace didn’t respond, eyes still focused on her father as he climbed into a carriage and was lost from sight.
“The smoke get to yer stomach?” Nell asked.
Grace shook her head, eyes glistening with unshed tears. Next to her, Elizabeth’s face went pale, her own knees buckling, and the two went down together.
“Yer a fine pair,” Nell said, slumping to the ground with them. “One cigarette ’tween the two of ye, and yer both the color o’ the sea.”
Grace wrapped an arm around Elizabeth, her own strength returning. She squeezed her friend, who smiled delicately, though her face was still ashen.
“I’m all right,” Elizabeth said weakly. “It’s the cold getting the best of me. I lost my breath there for a minute.”
“Yer fine to climb down?” Nell asked, holding the light in one hand, the trapdoor propped open on her knee.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, rising to her feet. “Can we leave the chairs, though? Maybe we’ll come up again another time?”
“Oh, aye. It’s gone so well. Grace is pukin’ an’ yer faintin’. Let’s do it again tomorrow.”
The three crept down to their hall with the light extinguished, hands on one another’s shoulders as Nell led the way in the dark. Moonlight streamed in through the high windows at the end of the hall, lighting their faces as they stopped at Grace’s door.
“Good night, Grace,” Elizabeth said, her hand on Grace’s shoulder still. “Feel better.”
“Aye, feel better.” Nell suddenly pulled her into a hug, crushing Grace to her. “I love ye, I’ll tell ye that. Like a sister. Even though me own ’aven’t much use fer me. Yer my real fam’ly, the both of you.” She pulled Lizzie in with her other arm. “Yer the best two women in the world, mad as hatters. And I’d take ye both over the lot of ’em that was ’ere tonight, money and all.”
“I love you too, Nell,” Lizzie said, tears flowing silvery streaks in the moonlight.
Grace could only move her head up and down as she leaned into both of them, tears streaming over her cheeks and down her closed throat.
The faces came back that night, the proximity of her father drawing them up from her subconscious. Even before his sins drew him to the ultimate depravity, he’d destroyed those around Grace, her young memory registering every occurrence though she’d not understand until later. Her nanny, the young sweet face that had become thin and wan almost overnight, the bruises around her throat not quite covered by a raised collar. The replacement, a girl with a simper, had lasted only three months before Mother sent her away with cash and a growing waistline.
The servants had always bustled away from him, exchanging glances with one another that Grace had been unable to interpret, but he hadn’t limited himself to easy prey. Some of the faces Grace was forced to look upon as she lay in her room had styled hair, ears that dripped jewelry as their mouths tried to form a smile though the lipstick was smeared. Her father’s lust recognized no boundaries as his power grew, and Grace’s memory rattled off names from her childhood along with the faces she’d forced herself to forget.
His face waited for last, filling her mind, though she dug her palms into her eye sockets to block the vision. He was impeccable, dark mustache trimmed daily, hat slightly cocked over one eye as he surveyed those around him, the smile never touching his eyes.
“Stop,” Grace said, her lips moving against her wrists as she railed at her own mind. “Please, stop.”
But the words brought another vision, one that she’d banished for fear of becoming truly mad. She heard his voice as it had been hours before, rolling confidently through the blackness of the night to fill her ears, but in her memory it was only her name he said, over and over again.
“No more!” Grace gasped, forcing her hands out of her eyes and to her scars, where the smooth skin brought solace, the only safeguard in place to keep him from ever seeing her again.
“I’m dead,” she reminded herself, breath coming more easily as she steered her brain elsewhere, to the hollows and planes of Thornhollow’s face as he cut her in Boston. “He believes me dead. Thank you, oh, thank you,” she said, her voice trailing off into sleep, though her mind lingered on Thornhollow’s face a little longer.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Ned’s screams were wordless as he stormed into the entrance hall with the morning light, his terror filling the atrium and roaring up the stairs. Thornhollow reached him first, taking the ax from his hands and trying to discern what had happened. Patients lined the staircases and staff poured from their rooms as Ned led the doctor out the front door.
Grace was pulling on her shift when she saw the figures streaming toward the pond, the sane outrunning the mad by only a few steps. She flew outside, her bare feet numbed in the first few moments as she tore down to the lakeside behind the others. Thornhollow tried to stop her as she broke through the crowd, grabbing her roughly around the waist.
“Grace, Grace, wait,” he said into her ear. “You don’t need to see this.”
She shrieked and wrested out of his grip, cold terror pushing up through her belly as she forced her way to the front to see a perfectly chopped hole in the lake’s ice, and Nell’s black braid lying beside it.
Grief made her truly mad. It took two male attendants to force her inside the padded cell, Thornhollow bellowing at them to be careful as she fell in a pile on the soft floor. She was screaming, hadn’t stopped since she saw Nell’s braid, carefully cut off and laid on her self-fashioned tombstone, as she’d threatened so
long ago. Grace’s voice ripped, wordless, through her mouth, and she clawed at the leather padding.
All her rage burned through her fingertips as she tore away. She thought of her father, taking a meal in the only place she had ever known safety. His name, used in ignorance on the innocent lips of her friends, pouring bile over her soul with every pronunciation. And Nell. Poor Nell with the pox eating her beautiful face, the damnation brought upon her by the lust of another. Anka Baran and Mellie Jacobs, lying deceptively peaceful as their killer pawed their bodies. And Grace, unable to stop any of it.
There were no words for the language she was speaking and so Grace only screamed, tearing into the walls, kicking and biting at the leather until it split, spilling horsehair and feathers into the air. Her flailing sent them ever higher, her sanity stretching thin as she gave vent to all that was within.
She ripped and tore and screamed until the thin tissue of her throat was as shredded as the walls of her cell, her eyes swollen and throbbing with no tears left to shed. Grace collapsed, the last feathers drifting down to land on her dry, cracked lips, her exhalations too small to disrupt them again. Strength gone, she could only lie quivering, her emotions spent and body exhausted.
The rectangular viewing screen slid open with a metallic screech.
“Grace.” Thornhollow’s voice was low and calm, the same tone she’d heard him use with the most difficult of patients. “Grace, I’m coming in to get you.”
She couldn’t object. Her exhaustion ran so deep she could not raise a finger. The door opened and he scooped her into his arms, her hands and feet trailing as if she were dead as he carried her down the hall to his office, where Janey waited. He set her in a chair by the fireplace, and Janey sponged her face clean, cool water erasing hot tear tracks.
“I know, Grace,” Janey said, her own face puffy. “It’s a hard thing to reconcile yourself to, but Nell went out her way. She wasn’t going to let that boy’s sickness have the last word.”
“Yes,” Thornhollow added, settling into the chair next to Grace’s. “Nell said the mercury made her feel worse than the disease. She’d stopped taking the treatment weeks ago, and I thought it was best to let her determine her own course of action.”
Grace looked at him coldly, no words necessary for the thought in her eyes.
“It was the right choice,” Janey said, pulling feathers and horsehair from Grace’s clothes. “The pox would spread anyway, Grace. All the mercury could do was slow the spread, and Nell hadn’t felt well in months.”
Grace shifted her stare to Janey, who met it without flinching.
“Yes, I knew she stopped taking the mercury baths,” Janey said. “What’s the use of treating you like people if we don’t let you make your own decisions?”
Grace closed her eyes, the truth of Janey’s words striking home. She nodded, forgiveness in her eyes when she opened them again. She put a finger next to her ear and raised an eyebrow.
“Elizabeth is taking things rather well, which, I have to say, I’m surprised,” Thornhollow said. “The girl is made of sterner stuff than I imagined.”
“It’s true,” Janey said, running her fingers through Grace’s hair to tame it. “When I went to her room to tell her the news she was sitting quiet by the window, watching the crowd. I think she knew without me saying what had happened, for she was crying all silent and proper, sitting there looking down on the lake.”
Janey’s voice hitched as fresh tears fell and she pulled Grace’s hair up out of her face, tying it back with a ribbon. “There,” she said, wiping her face quickly. “And now I’ve got to go and see to the other women. Nell’s gone out the way she’d want; has the whole place in an uproar.”
“Grace,” Thornhollow said after Janey shut the office door behind her. “I’m very sorry about Nell. I want you to know that I didn’t have any idea she would . . .”
Grace shook her head, absolving him. Nell had staged her own triumph and left the audience wishing she were still with them. Grace put her hand on her throat and looked at the doctor.
“No, I don’t doubt you’ll have it back, but it will be a few days at least,” Thornhollow said, glad to have the subject changed. “You’ve done some damage to yourself.”
She rose on unsteady legs, pushing away his assistance as she walked to the blackboard. She flipped their notes on the doll killer to the back, bringing the fresh side to face her. Chalk in hand, she wrote her question.
AM I MAD?
“No,” Thornhollow answered from his chair. “You’ve had an extremely taxing few days. Your tormentor was under your roof, your close friend took her own life, and you’ve been denied the use of your voice by a lie that must hang over you for as long as you remain here. Emotions were tearing you apart and they came out the only way they could. Grief is by nature the most violent of them all. The ancients tore their hair and rent their clothing to express it. Now we keep the dead body in our homes, shaking people’s hands as they pass by to view it and trying to stop ourselves from crying because it’s not socially acceptable. Tell me—which of these mourning practices is least sane?”
Grace’s mouth turned up slightly, grateful for his words. But there was no feeling alongside it; all of her convictions had flown out of her in the padded room. She could not avenge the dead, or protect her sister, or even stop her own mind from reliving her horrors. Her fingers trailed upon the chalk letters she’d made, leaving a white film on her fingertips.
“You are not mad, Grace,” Thornhollow said, watching her movements. “I assure you.”
She found the chalk and wrote again, the only thing she knew.
THEN I AM NOTHING.
“For God’s sake, man! Do you not think I know a suicide when I see one?” Thornhollow’s voice brought Grace from his office, where she’d been dozing by the fire. George and Davey stood in the atrium, holding their wet hats in their hands.
“It’s not my place to say what you know or don’t know,” George said. “I was told to come ask a few questions about a girl that’s gone missing up here at the madhouse. And from what I heard, there’s a screaming fella running around with an ax mixed into this story as well. That don’t sound much like a suicide to me, though I’m just a policeman, not a doctor.”
“I thought it was you,” Davey said, going to Grace as she stepped into the hall. “When I heard there was a girl gone, I . . .”
Grace stared at him as his sentence evaporated, his words hitting nothing. The concern she’d seen in his eyes before, the tiny attentions that he’d bestowed upon her meant nothing now. They could only be absorbed by her blankness.
“You’d best step away from her,” Thornhollow said, intervening between the two smoothly and taking Grace by the hand. “The girl in question was a good friend of hers, and Grace has had . . . a spell.”
Davey looked at her again, but she didn’t meet his eyes. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Gentlemen,” Thornhollow said. “I can assure you that Nell committed suicide.”
“How so?” George pushed. “And where’s the man with the ax being held?”
“He is held nowhere,” the doctor answered. “He is a docile resident of the asylum who merely found the instrument Nell used to chop through the ice in order to throw herself into the lake. Now if you would please go.”
“I don’t believe we will,” George said. “I’d like to see this Nell girl’s room and talk with the ax man myself. And if you want to keep having access to all our crime scenes, I suggest you let us into yours.”
Thornhollow heaved a sigh, his grip tight on Grace’s wrist. “I will be with you every step of the way.”
George mocked a bow. “But of course. I wouldn’t dream of trying to solve a crime without your assistance, Doctor.”
They climbed the steps together, Davey pausing to allow Grace to pass in front of him on the landing. She walked by without acknowledging him, leading the men to Nell’s room among the whispers of the girls who gathered in the ha
ll. Thornhollow let go of her arm when they entered the room.
“As you can see, Nell has laid out all of her personal belongings very carefully,” he said, indicating her desk. “She didn’t own much but what she had is here—hair ribbons placed with precision alongside one another, what clothes she had freshly laundered and folded.”
Grace slipped away mentally; the room where her good friend had quietly prepared for her death became simply another room. The ribbons that she’d seen adorning Nell’s black curls transformed into evidence easily, her emotional attachment to them vacuumed away by the cold, clinical evaluative stance she had used so often by Thornhollow’s side. Her breath came more easily, her pain sinking into the coldness that grew inside her.
Thornhollow walked the men through Nell’s room, but they insisted on seeing Ned, whose face still bore signs of tear tracks. The musty smell of the stable enveloped them as Ned talked, his hands telling the story as well as his mouth, but Grace heard little and felt less. Thornhollow was more than capable of convincing the police that Ned was innocent, and she let her mind drift to a place where facts held sway and emotion meant nothing. A place where she could never be hurt again.
She ignored the knock when it came, well aware of who it would be in the middle of the night. Janey cracked the door and slid inside Grace’s room. “Grace,” she hissed. “The doctor needs you.”
Grace rolled onto her side, presenting her back to Janey. “Grace.” The nurse’s hands shook her. “The doctor said to tell you that . . .” She paused, the oddness of the words catching on her tongue. “He said to tell you that he’s found another doll.”
A spark of interest ignited in her belly, but what good would come of looking at another dead girl, eyes wide with questions Grace could not answer? She shoved Janey’s hands aside and shook her head, burrowing deeper into the pillow.
“All right,” Janey said with a sigh. “I’ll tell him you’re not coming. I said before that I’d take your part if I felt it was too much. But I can’t help but think it might do you some good. You’re not one for talking, but I always see a purpose in you, Grace. I haven’t seen a trace of anything in you at all these past few days.”
A Madness So Discreet Page 18