Waltz of the Crows

by L Rollins

  Leila slipped through the dark corners of the room and back out the door.

  The cooler air of the hallway pricked against her skin as she hurried up the staircase. Sneaking about was every bit as thrilling as she’d remembered it being. Gads, but this was undeniably the calling for her. Slipping about, overhearing conversations, pretending to be someone you weren’t. It was all so incredibly enticing.

  Leila glanced over her shoulder as she hurried down the hallway toward her bedchamber.

  The castle was silent. Leila clutched the metal wire in her pocket. Now, she just needed to decode the message and relay it to London and—

  Leila pulled up short, barely stopping herself before she smacked directly into the shoulder of a man standing just outside her bedchamber. She let out a small shriek of surprise, then quickly covered her mouth. If she was going to continue sneaking about, she would have to be sure never to cry out in surprise.

  The man spun around, as surprised as she was. Leila recognized his roman nose and the gray around his ears immediately.

  “Pardon me, sir.” Leila dropped a quick curtsy as she’d seen her own servants do so many times growing up. Any nurse would most certainly curtsy when coming across the master of the castle in the middle of the night.

  Did her curtsy look authentic? She’d not thought to practice it before coming. Blast those little things. They would be the death of her if she wasn’t more thoughtful.

  “Is everything all right?” the man asked her in a deep, French voice, glancing down the hall from whence she’d come.

  He probably assumed her rush down the hall was due to an emergency with one of the patients.

  “All is well with the patients, sir.” She didn’t look him directly in the eye as she’d always been taught to do as a girl, but tried to keep her gaze just lower than his. She was only a nurse, after all. “I was a bit late retiring”—she motioned toward her bedchamber door—“and must arise early tomorrow, is all.”

  Huh, that didn’t sound as believable once it left her mouth has it had in her head.

  “Very well,” he said, turning back to the portrait on the wall he’d been looking at before she’d nearly run him over.

  It was a clear dismissal, which felt quite strange having never been dismissed thusly before. It very nearly felt like a slight. It would have been a slight had he not been master of the house and she a lowly nurse.

  Leila’s gaze followed his to the portrait. It was of a lovely young woman, probably no more than fifteen at the time the likeness was rendered. The young woman had lighter hair than Monsieur Martin and a button nose.

  There was a hardly any similarity between them, but Leila could think of no other reason the young woman’s portrait would be hanging in the castle. “Is she a relation of yours, sir?” Leila only just remembered to add the ‘sir’ at the end of her question.

  He nodded slowly. “My younger sister.”

  A real nurse would not have pried, but instead gone silently to her room. Truth was, Leila was dying to enter her bedchamber and study the wire she’d secured.

  But Leila had also been curious about Monsieur Martin since arriving in Conques. As the man who had aided the sick more than any other since the outbreak begun nearly a year prior, he would know all the details regarding the French government’s response and secret plans to eradicate the disease, if there were any. He had a fine-looking face. Though, not so fine as the man with the motorcar who’d helped her with Edgerton.

  She was here to aid Victor in passing on information regarding the waltzing flu and, more specifically, what caused it, how it was spreading, and the chances it would ever make its way to England. She pressed on. Her instructors always said one never knew where the next piece of the puzzle would be found.

  “She appears quite a striking lady. Does she visit often?”

  Leila knew enough to know Monsieur Martin’s sister did not live there in the castle, but she didn’t know anything more than that.

  His jaw tightened and one of his hands curled tighter into a fist, crinkling the two letters he held.

  “Not anymore.” He turned to her and smiled. But if Leila wasn’t mistaken, his smile was more for show than one of actual pleasure. “She was swept off her feet by love a few years back. She adores her husband and can’t be parted from him, it seems.”

  He turned back to the portrait, tapping the two letters against the corner of the long, thin table which rested below the picture. Atop it was an orange-red vase with strange, Oriental images carved into it and, beside that, three large glass balls, with decorative metal swirls wrapped around them.

  She wanted him to keep talking—a bit of an easy relationship between them would most certainly turn out useful sometime in the future—but she wasn’t sure what else to say. Finally, she settled on pointing toward the letters.

  “Are those from her?”

  He turned toward her and once more seemed surprised to see her standing there.

  Truly? Had he forgotten her presence already? She may only be a nurse, in his mind, but she was still a human.

  He opened his mouth as his gaze moved from her to the letters in his hand. “Ah, no. Afraid not. These have far less pleasant origins.” He held up one of the two. “This is from Monsieur Jus, the owner of Conques’s new factory.” His voice turned bitter. “He’s demanding I find a cure so that his workers can return, post haste.”

  He held up the second letter, one of much finer paper and script. “This is from the undeterrable Madame Uppertick.” His tone rose from bitter to simply exhausted. “It seems she will be gracing us”—he drew out the words with obvious sarcasm—“with her presence once more before the month’s end.”

  So, Monsieur Martin was not particularly fond of either. It was good information to have. It seemed the man who owned the factory, Monsieur Jus, was not overly concerned for the suffering of those who worked for him. And Madame Uppertick was not as welcomed as she assumed.

  The information was not directly linked enough to the suffering in Conques for Leila to write London about it, but she was determined to keep her eyes and ears open. She would prove her value to her superiors.

  Of course, that required she decode whatever wire message Victor had left her.

  She excused herself, leaving Monsieur Martin to continue staring after the picture of his sister and slipped into her own bedchamber. Natalie, the nurse Leila shared her small room with, didn’t so much as roll over at her entrance. Thankfully, Leila had been given a room with a heavy sleeper.

  Leila crossed to her own bed and turned up the lamp sitting atop the small table beside it. She held the wire up to the light. It had several notches, all at various angles, gouged into it. Leila felt it with her fingers, carefully studying the way it reflected the lamplight. She even sniffed and tasted the metal.

  Nothing.

  Blast it all. What was Victor trying to tell her? The notches had to be the message. But how to decode it? She closed her eyes, sitting back against her pillows and the bare wall, all she had for a headboard. The nurses used the same utilitarian beds the patients did on the floors below.

  Leila tipped her head back until it rested against the wall behind her. What kind of code had they discussed already in her training? There hadn’t been many; she’d left training before they dove more fully into codes and cyphers.

  London had sent her with a cypher wheel, but it required letters to decode. Not notches in a wire. She pulled the blanket out from under her and tossed it over her legs. With so many resources going to patient care, no wood was left for warming the nurses’ rooms at night.

  Victor had known it was her who had come to make contact. He and his wife had recruited her, and mentored her. He would have recognized her immediately. But he also would have known that she wasn’t fluent in codes. She held up the wire and studied it once more. What, then, did he want her to do with it?

  The wire had many curves and bends in it, more than it should have had from being wrappe
d around the bed beam and then into the loose circle she’d shoved in her pocket. Had Victor wrapped it around something else? Or had it already been bent before he picked it up and decided to use it thusly?

  Leila’s gaze floated up, past the wire, toward her feet and the bed post there.

  He’d tapped the bed post, not the bed beam. Perhaps he wasn’t just leaving a sloppy message, one that only almost indicated where she should look. Maybe the bed post was the answer to reading the code.

  Slipping off her bed silently—Natalie still had yet to stir—Leila moved to the base of her bed. She placed the top of the wire against the post and then wound the wire around and around and around, tight to the post.

  The notches began to line up. She twisted the wire a bit one way, cinched them up closer another other way, and clear letters formed from the previously disjointed notches.

  Not natural causes. Disease purposely perpetrated.

  Beware the smile.

  Leila’s whole framed tingled with excitement. She’d figured it out! Her first true code. One she hadn’t been trained on either, and she had figure it out.

  But what did Victor mean by “Beware the smile”? Moreover, someone was purposely making people sick? Who would do such a thing? How perverted could one person be?

  Leila reviewed the message a couple more times, being sure she committed it to heart, word perfect. Then she unwound the wire.

  Was the perpetrator someone from far off wishing to seek revenge on all of Conques? Why would a person want to hurt an entire town?

  She slipped out of her uniform and crawled between the blankets in her light shift. She wished she’d packed something warmer. It was nearing summer, but the sun couldn’t seem to warm the heart of the centuries old castle. Though it was constantly hot outside, her bedchamber was always chilly.

  First thing tomorrow, she would draft a message to London. They had decided on a code before she left. It would look as though she were writing her family back in England.

  Well, her superiors were wanting to know if she truly could succeed in this line of work. She would prove to them she could.

  Not only would she follow through on her assignment and draft a letter to them, she would begin at first light to compile a list of possible perpetrators.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LEILA’S LIST OF possible perpetrators was already longer than her arm.

  She couldn’t even begin to sort through all the faces she encountered, even just in one day’s time, much less decide who should and shouldn’t logically be placed on the list.

  Leila poured boiling water over a metal ball full of tea leaves and set it to steep in an extra-large tea pot. Should she consider every single individual who currently lived or who ever had lived in Conques?

  What about all the nurses who now filled the castle to overflowing? She doubted anyone who’d give so much to help those ailing could actually be the perpetrator—but her superiors always said to avoid assumptions.

  She didn’t have reason to excuse any individual nurse or servant, so they all went onto her mental list as a collective ‘nurse or servant’ suspect.

  Leila let out a small breath of frustration, sending the tendrils of steam rising from the teapot scattering. She had to narrow down the list somehow. She ought to focus on those who had motive.

  Motive, and the ability and resources to cause the disease.

  Her stomach rolled with the thought that a human being—one who had a mother, who’d been hurt themselves, who’d possibly loved another—would inflict so much pain, even death, on so many others.

  Who could ever do something so awful? She couldn’t even fathom.

  “Leila.”

  Only one person ever said her name with so much sharp disapproval.

  Leila stood up straight and turned to face Martha.

  As head of the household, Martha Hamon had also assumed responsibilities for all the nurses and patients. She ran the castle with a firm, and Leila felt occasionally unfair, hand.

  “That tea was due ten minutes ago. Stop dawdling and get there.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Leila curtsied—she was doing that a lot these days—and picked up the large tray. Good gracious, but it was heavy.

  “Leila,” Martha called yet again.

  Leila stopped, halfway out the kitchen door.

  “Don’t steep the leaves for too long. We’ll use them again later today.” Her harsh cheek bones and angular jaw were all the more emphasized by her sour expression. “The patients are, after all, living off Monsieur’s gracious hospitality and can’t expect tea at full strength.”

  Leila struggled to keep her face in check. As a lowly nurse, it was not her place to argue this or any point with Madame Hamon. However, willow bark tea was one of the few things that helped ease the pain most of the patients were experiencing. And they weren’t to receive it at full strength?

  “Yes, ma’am,” Leila replied once more, disagreement pressing against the back of her teeth.

  She stepped out of the kitchen and the door shut behind her—shutting out Madame Hamon’s coldness and her horrid suggestion.

  Leila marched down the hall, head high. She would steep these tea leaves as long as she liked; the patients under her care, at least, would receive the much-needed reprieve they deserved.

  It would, of course, necessitate her throwing out the tea leaves and somehow replacing them before she made tea a second time. That might prove a bit tricky. Madame Hamon watched the castle’s resources like Leila’s oldest sister watched the styles other young women wore to balls. She might claim she was only looking out for others, but Leila had a hunch her motivations weren’t quite so pure. She likely just wanted more tea for herself.

  Well, Leila wouldn’t go along with it. She marched into the patient room she’d been assigned to attend. It was once a book room. The books still lined the many shelves, but the desk had been removed. Beds now lined either side—like nearly every other room in the castle—and it was filled with the sickly smell of ointments and bathwater.

  “Natalie,” Leila said. “Would you help me hand out the tea?”

  Natalie, who had been helping a young woman sit up in her chair, stood and moved closer to Leila.

  “The one on the right has steeped long enough, but the one on the left needs more time.” Leila was not about to let Madame Hamon, or anyone, tell her there was a better way to treat the patients than by giving each individual all the help available.

  Natalie began pouring tea into cups, only filling each half full, explaining that once the rest of the tea had steeped, they’d pour out that kettle too.

  “Margret is worse today,” Natalie said, speaking softly. “She’s lost all control over her left side, and there was blood on her pillow this morning.”

  Leila shook her head. Margret had three young children at home. “Is she still lucid?” Once a patient lost track of reality, they were moved to the Crow’s Hall where nurses with more experience were charged to watch over their final few days of life.

  “Mostly.” Natalie had become particularly attached to Margret—they were of the same age and shared a love of the old songs sung in the rural, rolling hills of France.

  “Dreams or hallucinations?”

  “Dreams.” Natalie spoke the one word with an audible amount of relief. “They’re vivid, and she woke screaming this morning. But no hallucinations . . .”

  Yet. It was a small word Natalie had refused to add to the end of her sentence. Even unspoken, it hung between them, foreshadowing what would inevitably come.

  Natalie picked up two of the half-full teacups she’d just poured and handed them out. Then she returned for two more. They never spoke their daily assessments, or hourly worries, loud enough for the patients to hear. But Leila doubted the patients were blind to much.

  Leila placed the tray, which was growing blessedly lighter by the minute, on a side table and brought two cups over to a couple of the patients.

  Grauth, the old b
utcher from town and Tommie, his grandson.

  “Did you put sugar in this time?” Tommie asked as Leila drew near.

  Sugar in tea was yet another thing Madame Hamon regulated quite strictly.

  Leila shook her head. “You know that isn’t allowed.”

  Tommie raised thin hands and mock-begged her. “Just a little sugar, mademoiselle?”

  Grauth chuckled, though it ended with a raspy cough. He was covered from head to toe in sweat and one eye refused to follow the direction the other took.

  Leila smiled as well, slipping a hand into her deep dress pocket. “Well, I suppose I may have snatched some while Madame Hamon was looking the other way.”

  She pulled out her closed fist, the corners of two tiny sugar cubes pressing up tight against her palm. She made a show of looking over first one shoulder and then the other. Which was quite silly, because everyone in the room was obviously listening in. But it was only Natalie and the other patients, and they all agreed with her. Young boys should not be made to drink bitter tea without sugar.

  She plopped first one and then the second cube into his cup and gave him a wink. “It’s a good thing you have a sneaky nurse.”

  “It’s a good thing he hasn’t outgrown his baby charm,” Grauth said with another chuckle.

  “How is it, Leila, that you are so quick to bend the rules for little boys and so strict with your fellow nurses?” Natalie sauntered over, skirt swaying. She was far more shapely than Leila herself could ever hope to be. Somehow their nursing uniform, which looked quite stuffy on Leila, looked right near scandalous on Natalie as it emphasized her curves and drew one’s eye to her full bosom.

  “Margret agrees with me,” Natalie continued, her tone bordering on a pout. “Madame Hamon doesn’t care what we nurses do when our shift is over, and there are still many a fine man down at the tavern in town just waiting for us to visit and say hello.”

  Leila took the now empty teacup from Grauth and returned it to the tea tray. When Natalie said she wanted to say hello to a handsome young man, what she actually meant was she wanted to see how hard it was to convince him to kiss her.