Dodger replaced his cap. “Right, then. And once I’m done showing off, do I get to go home? Go back to me own life?”
Lizzie and Victor exchanged uncomfortable glances.
“Look at it this way,” said Victor. “Whatever you were in your former life, you are now a very valuable part of Her Majesty’s defense. Now, isn’t that something to be glad about?”
“Yeah,” said Dodger, thinking that these two would make bloody awful card players. “Lucky me.”
22
It was almost the middle of May, more than seven weeks since Aggie’s operation, and there were fewer than five days left before the kaiser’s visit, yet Aggie was still not permitted to do anything remotely useful. It was maddening. Outside the Royal Victoria’s gates, spring had managed to infiltrate the grim brick buildings of the East End, and a lone mulberry tree was proudly displaying its pink blossoms. With almost no time left, preparations for the kaiser’s visit were going into overdrive.
Mouse droppings had been spotted in one of the dumbwaiters, and now traps had to be placed in various corners. The long, wheat-colored curtains in many of the wards were deemed filthy and had to be removed and washed, rooms had to be repainted, and exterior stairs and building facades had to be repaired and cleaned. All this meant constant reshuffling of patients and staff to accommodate the renovations.
One of the first rooms that had been refurbished was the Blue Room. One of a handful of private rooms, the Blue Room overlooked the small garden area outside the kitchen and was always reserved for special patients—former doctors, genteel but impoverished society ladies, retired generals and famous artists.
Shiercliffe would not name the room’s current occupant, but it was an open secret among the nursing students that the lady in question was none other than the elderly Queen Victoria. The Queen had been brought into the hospital for observation and care shortly after Aggie’s operation, under the cover of night. Word had it that the octogenarian monarch’s temper was as fiery as it was unpredictable. Victoria had attempted to punch one nurse while she was trying to help the queen out of bed, screamed that a second nurse was attempting to assassinate her during a sponge bath, and had overturned her chamber pot when a third nurse informed her that sausages were not on the queen’s permitted food list.
According to Lizzie, who was unofficially tasked with giving the queen treatments with the magnetometer, Shiercliffe was at her wit’s end trying to find a nursing sister whom the queen would tolerate.
Yet Aggie was not permitted to help.
Because of her accident and surgery, she had missed five lectures, an anatomy test, a practical exam on bandaging and a quiz on digestion, but she was only permitted to read or write for an hour each day, so as not to tire out her new eyes.
At first, Aggie had felt frustrated by these restrictions, but for the past few days, she had begun to slip into a sluggish melancholy. Sometimes she found herself missing Dodger with such unexpected intensity that she began holding conversations with him in her mind.
What if Shiercliffe never allows me back to a regular schedule? she would ask, and she could almost hear his derisive snort.
Never happen, she imagined him saying in response.
She confided in her imaginary Dodger things she was too embarrassed to confess to Lizzie or Justine, like her fear that by the time she was given the all-clear, her classmates would be so far ahead of her that she would be forced to begin again, repeating her first year with a batch of new students.
Then, to Aggie’s delight, Lizzie had slipped her a note saying she needed Aggie’s help in the Blue Room. Finally, a chance to do something, instead of being coddled like a hatchling chick.
Yet as she walked as quickly as she could down the corridor, Aggie felt a wave of disorientation as the walls seemed to tilt and shift. For a moment, when she opened her eyes, she was in a cramped little office, staring at an odd assortment of cast-off objects.
She closed her eyes and counted to three before opening them again. Everything was normal again, and the nurse walking past her didn’t appear to have noticed her lapse.
This had happened before, but only when she wasn’t wearing her spectacles. One time, she had watched a shovel raking coals into a huge boiler and it had felt as though she were the one doing the shoveling. Another time, she had seen a bowl of watery soup and a piece of stale bread. If she was very tired, the strange, out-of-body interludes lasted longer and seemed more vivid.
She didn’t dare tell anyone, in case they thought she was going mad. It was probably just her nerves, playing up. Or her guilty conscience.
Or else her donor’s eyes were giving her glimpses of things that Dodger had seen when he was alive.
No. That was a daft thought. Victor might have absorbed some of the personality of Jack, the donor who had supplied his left arm, but that was different. A cornea was a tiny sliver of membrane, not a whole limb.
She was probably just experiencing pangs of guilt, which was absurd. After all, it wasn’t her fault that Dodger had gotten himself killed by one of his thief accomplices. It was nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence that his bad choices had caught up with him just after he had sneaked in to visit her.
It was her bad luck that she couldn’t stop dwelling on the fact that she would never see him again.
Shoving thoughts of Dodger aside, she pushed her dark specs farther up her nose and gently rapped on the door of the Blue Room.
“Aggie! Thank God.” Lizzie stuck her head out of the door and looked around, checking to see no one else was around to witness this. “Hurry up and get in here.”
Aggie stepped into the room, which had been refurbished with Persian rugs, a Georgian armoire and a velvet-draped four-poster bed that seemed far too large for its diminutive occupant.
“Incendiary wench,” said Queen Victoria, her voice sounding far frailer than Aggie remembered. “Unblind shadow eyes.”
She must mean the tinted glasses. “Your Majesty, if you please, I would rather not remove these. They protect my eyes, you see.”
“Unsubstantiated!” In a sudden burst of rage, the queen hurled a teacup at Aggie, followed by a thermometer and a diamond brooch.
Frightened the queen would hurt herself, Aggie removed her dark spectacles. “I beg your pardon,” she said, dropping into a little curtsy.
“Beggars and thieves,” said the queen, subsiding back into the pillows and closing her eyes.
Aggie picked up the thermometer. Luckily, the glass hadn’t broken—mercury was impossible to clean up properly. “I don’t think she likes me much,” she said in an undertone.
“Are you serious?” asked Lizzie. “This is her version of a royal medal. Besides, she asked for you.”
Aggie replaced the diamond brooch on the queen’s bedside table. “I find that rather hard to believe.”
“Not by name,” admitted Lizzie. “She requested the puppy finder.”
“And Shiercliffe still didn’t ask me to help?”
“Ridiculous, right? And now I’m supposed to give a nasogastric feeding, only I’ve never done it by myself before.” Lizzie indicated a length of rubber tubing, a funnel and a mixing bowl. “You’re a lifesaver.”
This was typical Lizzie. Ask her to diagram the pathway of food down the alimentary canal and she would draw you a masterpiece, complete with detailed long-form essays on the processes of digestion. Ask her to locate a vein, stitch a wound or cauterize a nosebleed, however, and she would start stumbling around like a pastor in a bawdy house.
The only problem was, without the dark glasses on, Aggie could feel the slight tilt and shift of the walls. “Perhaps I can talk you through the procedure?”
“No, no, I’m terrified I’m going to pass the tube down her airway by mistake and kill her.”
Queen Victoria, hearing this, opened one pale and frightened blue eye
.
“Don’t you worry,” said Aggie, patting the monarch’s arm. “We’re just using nursing lingo. ‘Killing’ something means doing it perfectly the first time.” She gave Lizzie a look of rebuke as she fitted the funnel into the catheter. “Now, Lizzie, I’m assuming you’ve got the feed all ready? And it’s not too hot?”
Lizzie looked back at her, blank-faced.
“Oh, for crying out loud. What were you going to pass through the tube once you got it in? Thoughts and prayers?”
Lizzie looked sheepish. “I told you I needed your help.”
Aggie rubbed her eyes. “All right, check the patient’s chart and then start preparing the feed.”
“Two pints of milk, three eggs, one pint of beef broth.” Lizzie pulled a large jug out of the icebox. “This has the name Mrs. Windsor on it, so I guess we just insert the tube and bob’s your uncle.”
“Um, no. First of all, that’s cold. More important, you’re holding the amount for a twenty-four hour period.”
“Are you sure?”
“Think about it. How would you like three eggy pints of fluid shoved up your nose all at once?”
“When you put it like that, not at all.”
As Aggie talked Lizzie through the process of heating up the egg-and-milk mixture without scalding the milk and curdling the eggs, she decided it was probably for the best not to mention to Lizzie that she had never actually performed a nasogastric feeding on her own, either. She knew she could count on herself to keep a steady hand, and at the end of the day, if someone was going to kill the queen by accidentally funneling eggs into her lungs, it might as well be her.
She closed her eyes as she began to pass the tubing into the patient’s nostril, trying to feel her way, when a wave of dizziness hit her so strongly that it seemed as though the floor was shifting under her feet. Opening her eyes with a start, she found herself looking at the forlorn, leathery face of a dodo bird. Then the bird moved, and she realized it was a taxidermist’s model, held in a pair of lean, masculine hands.
The hands put the bird down, revealing a small room filled with broken desks and chairs, old books and chamber pots and a machine attached to two small wheels, like miniature windmills with copper paddles. She saw Victor’s face as he leaned over, adjusting something—an electrical lead—and then the paddled wheels began to turn, causing Victor’s image to flicker like the illustrations in a flipbook.
Then everything went black.
* * *
It was over in an instant and Aggie opened her eyes to find herself lying on the floor in a puddle of viscous, eggy milk, while Lizzie called her name.
“Are you all right? What happened?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You fainted. Again.”
Aggie did not correct her friend, but she knew the truth: She hadn’t lost consciousness. She had shifted perspectives. It felt real. “How long was I out?”
“Just a moment, no more.”
She shook her head, remembering the dodo and the hands and Victor’s face. Had it been a hallucination? Why would she hallucinate Victor, of all people? Lifting her hand, she found it wet from milk and egg. The feed. She must have lost consciousness while trying to pass the tube up the queen’s nostril. “Oh, God, the queen,” she said. “Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. She’s sleeping.”
Aggie looked up at the bed, where Queen Victoria was emitting little snuffling snores. No rattle of aspirated fluid in the lungs. “Oh, thank heaven.” She tried to stand up and nearly slipped.
“Careful. I still need to mop the floor.” Lizzie offered her a hand, which she reluctantly accepted. Luckily, this room was private, so no one else had witnessed her mishap.
Still, she was going to have to find a way to stop these strange fits before someone observed her at the wrong moment. “All right, then,” she said out loud. “Now, all we need to do is clean up this mess and get the sterilizer going while I mix up a fresh feed.” Lizzie’s hand closed over her wrist, preventing her from moving.
“Not so fast. You fainted a few weeks ago when I was with you. How often has this been going on?”
“Nothing’s going on. I just felt a little light-headed.”
“Is that lie for my benefit, or yours?”
Aggie hesitated, then said, “I’m not lying. I’m just really, really tired from trying to catch up.”
Lizzie changed her grip so that instead of holding onto Aggie’s wrist, she had laced her fingers through her friend’s. “I’m your friend, Aggie. Don’t you trust me at all?”
She hesitated, wondering if she dared reveal her secret when the sound of heeled shoes walking briskly in the hallway outside the queen’s room made both girls look at each other, and then swiftly separate. Aggie grabbed the mop, while Lizzie lifted the funnel and tubing off the floor.
Please, Aggie prayed, let it be a ward nurse and not Shiercliffe. The door opened with quiet efficiency.
“How are you coming along with the feeding, Miss Lavenza?” It was Shiercliffe. “And Miss DeLacey,” she said, cocking her head. “I was not expecting to find you here, considering that you are supposed to be a patient yourself.”
“It’s my fault, Matron,” said Lizzie. “I was having a bit of trouble administering the feeding.”
Shiercliffe pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “I can see that.”
“Aggie here was doing her best to talk me through it.”
Shiercliffe looked at Aggie. “I take it the patient coughed the tube out?”
“Afraid so.”
There was a snort from the bed. The Queen was observing them from the bed, her eyes bright in her wizened doll’s face. She’s going to rat me out, Aggie thought. And who could blame her?
“Don’t worry, Your Majesty, you’ll get your feeding,” said Shiercliffe. “DeLacey, I’ll handle this. You and Miss Lavenza may observe. Perhaps you’ll learn something.”
“That is unacceptable.”
Shiercliffe turned in surprise to face the queen. “Your Majesty?”
“I desire the ministrations of the Argus.” With the electrodes at her neck concealed by the high, frilly collar of her nightgown and her white hair covered by a silk mobcap, Queen Victoria looked like an innocent grandmother—but her pale, slightly protuberant eyes gleamed with wolfish schemes. Aggie wondered what the kaiser would think when he found his beloved Granny so altered.
“You mean Aggie?” Shiercliffe looked uncharacteristically indecisive. “But she has only just begun to recover from her own surgery.”
“My eyes feel fine, Matron. I haven’t had any problems with them, really.” Aggie had no idea why the queen was requesting her assistance, especially after she had botched the tube feeding. Perhaps she was still grateful for Aggie bringing her the puppies.
Shiercliffe pursed her lips, considering. “I’ll have to consult with Dr. Grimbald and Professor Moulsdale, but if you’re sure that you’re up to it...”
“I am.”
“All right, then. I suppose you can handle the rest of the feeding, DeLacey. Considering Her Majesty’s improvement, perhaps spoon-feeding will be sufficient.” With a last stern look at Aggie and Lizzie—do not mess this up was the wordless command—Shiercliffe left the room, shutting the door behind her.
“Well,” said Aggie. “That turned out much better than I expected.”
“There’s only one problem,” said Lizzie, folding her arms. “You’re lying. There’s something wonky going on with your vision, and we need to figure out what it is before something goes badly wrong.”
“Sausage,” said the queen, but whether this was a response to Lizzie or a dietary request remained unclear.
23
“So, let me be sure I understand this,” said Victor. “You’ve been getting visions which make you feel as though you are no longer in
your body?”
“Exactly,” said Aggie. “It happens mostly when I remove my dark spectacles. But Her Majesty won’t let me wear the tinted lenses in her presence.” Lord, it’s hot in here, she thought. The sign on the door said Department of Neuroscience, but the windowless room still looked and felt like a spare supply room.
Victor leaned forward in his chair. “And when you fainted earlier today, you had just removed your spectacles?”
“That’s right,” said Aggie. “Her Majesty demanded that I take them off, so I...” Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the wilted, grayish-white feathers of a taxidermy dodo. “Oh, Lord. I think—I think I was in this room.”
Victor’s eyebrows rose. “This room? Are you certain?”
She looked around her at the mismatched furniture, the jars of fetal animals and the two copper-paddled wheels. “I think so. I couldn’t see the entire space, though, so it’s difficult to be sure.” On the walls, a peeling portrait of the young Queen Victoria sulked while a devilish-looking man in a Puritan collar and Vandyke beard looked down at them with thinly veiled amusement. “I know I saw the dodo, though. And I’m pretty sure I saw the portrait of the young Queen.”
“Almost every room at the Royal Victoria has a portrait of the young Queen,” said Victor. “As for the dodo, well, it’s not exactly conclusive evidence.”
“Well, then, what is?” Lizzie looked up from a folder of notes. “Aggie’s not the sort to start imagining symptoms.”
“I’m afraid the mind can play tricks on all of us.”
“What if it’s not a trick?” Lizzie put down the folder. “What if these visions are actually images from the donor of the corneas she received?”
Victor rolled his eyes. “That’s a bit of a stretch.”
“But why?” Aggie wasn’t sure how she felt about receiving impressions from a dead boy’s eyes, but it certainly seemed a plausible explanation. “Isn’t that essentially what happened with you? When they attached someone else’s left arm onto your body, it brought part of his personality along with it.” She felt a bit awkward, bringing it up. These days, Victor seemed to be the one in control, and referring to Jack seemed rude somehow, as if she were bringing up an ex-beau of Lizzie’s.
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