“I just . . . I wanted to say hello,” Molly said, feeling the inadequacy of the words.
“Well, you won’t catch her now.” His manner was stiff. “She’s gone to some party.”
“A party?”
Finally, Hans showed some emotion, scoffing and rolling his eyes.
“Some damned thing with an orchestra and waltzes.” He said the last with a grimace. “Said there was a client who needed her, though I think she’d have gone for free.”
“I guess I’ll find her another time.”
“I’m sure she’ll be glad to see you.” There was no sarcasm in his voice.
Molly started to leave, then hesitated. “What’s the party?”
“Don’t know. Only that it’s somewhere on High Street.”
High Street. A small chill worked its way up her spine.
“Sorry, love. But I’ve got to go. Big night tonight.” He reached around her and opened the door to Ginny’s room, slipping past.
Of course. Molly blushed. The two of them probably shared the space.
Hans lifted his mug in a salute goodbye.
But as he shut the door, it was not coffee but a new, sharper smell that laced its way out of the room—the familiar scent of peppermint.
38
The rain came without warning, releasing itself like a long-held breath.
The carriage driver cursed as he made his way through the rapidly flooding streets. Through the storm, a magnificent sunset broke—orange and purple, with furious clouds swirling between them—light and dark warring for dominance.
Molly stuck a hand out the window and let the fat drops hit her. They stung against her skin, half ice and half water. Pulling her fingers back inside, she stared at the pink skin.
She had nearly killed a woman with this hand.
She looked at the scar on her palm from Kitty’s grave.
You only ever cared about yourself.
A voice, as real as her own, sounded suddenly in her ear. Whipping around, Molly scanned the empty carriage. And though she’d never heard it in life, Molly knew it immediately.
You said you were my sister . . .
Closing her eyes, she tried to will it away, but she could feel the pretty, crushed mouth against her ear. The girl whose sister she’d pretended to be.
Watched him pluck the teeth from my mouth, and never said a word.
Then there was a new voice, and this one was worse.
Never even asked how I died.
Soft and sweet and oh so young. She knew if she looked, she’d see a green ribbon tied over the ghost’s eyes.
Faster now, the voices rose, jumbling together. All the bodies she’d ever stolen rode with her now, crowding the carriage with their accusations.
Gave my mother a few coins for me and let her go right back to the filth she lived in.
She opened her eyes.
The young giant stared at her, his eyes a burning flame.
“No.” Molly whispered. “I had to do it. It was so new doctors could learn. So that I could learn. I was helping people.”
Who helped me? Never even thought of what I wanted.
Like a woman drowning, Molly sank beneath the accusations’ weight.
Pretended to be my niece, and when my real family came, there was no one there.
I had a child once. Did you know that? A pretty girl, and now she eats alone.
My brother was going to be a sailor for the navy.
The words beat against her in endless waves until it was too much to resist. A sob rose and broke inside her.
It was true.
They’d all been just bodies to her. Each and every one.
Molly leaned back into the carriage seat and gave in, letting the ghosts pull her under.
But the voices began to change.
Not accusations now, but stories—stories that no one had ever cared to hear. All the things they might have spoken if given the chance. She’d told the giant’s mother that she listened to the dead’s stories, but that had been a lie. She’d only ever made them a piece of her own, used them to serve her needs.
Now they spoke to her in a rush, unwilling to be silenced.
Here, the pretty girl with the crushed mouth saying that her favorite color was red, the same shade as the shiny toy box her father had brought all the way from Prague.
And Sophie whispering the smell of happiness—honeysuckle and the first salty spray of morning ocean. How it sometimes stuck to the skin of the new babies in the orphanage.
The giant’s boyish face stretched into a grin as he regaled Molly with a daring rescue of a drowning bird from a stream.
Then Kitty. Kitty speaking to her of the hurt in her heart. Kitty telling her of what she wanted.
And this time Molly did not turn her away. This time, she listened, letting through the memory she’d tried so hard to forget.
“Come with me, Molly. Please.”
She could hear Kitty’s voice. Knew it as well as her own heart.
“No.”
The big brown eyes full of water, her bottom lip trembling and raw from where she would not stop gnawing.
“Please,” Kitty whispered. “I have to make him see.”
Molly rolled over in bed, pulling the orphanage’s thin sheet over her head. Kitty was supposed to meet Molly that evening, to spend time with her in the barn after chores, sharing a sweet cake she had pilfered from the new priest. When Kitty did not come, she’d eaten it alone, making herself sick on the icing.
“You don’t need me for what the two of you are going to do.” Instead of admitting her hurt, she made her voice hard.
“Please, Molly. If he doesn’t come, I don’t know what I’ll do. If he doesn’t come, I’ll—”
“You’ll find another one.”
Pulling the covers tighter around her, Molly waited, breath held, until she heard Kitty’s footsteps crossing the wood floor.
And the final words, a whisper, floating back to her on the moth wings of a dream.
“Molly, I’m sorry. I love you . . .”
As the carriage bumped its last mile down the pockmarked streets of the city, mud sloshing at its wheels, Molly felt the pain swelling, washing over the numbness in her heart.
She’d used Kitty’s friendship as selfishly as any body she’d ever stolen.
It wasn’t the Knifeman who’d killed Kitty. It was her. The rest of the Knifeman’s victims had been mutilated beyond recognition, but not Kitty. The only damage done to her by a blade was a single, perfect slice. Someone had stolen her tail, but they had not taken her life. The rest of the defilement to her body had been done by the river. Molly hadn’t known how to see that at the time—wouldn’t have seen it even if she could have—but her medical training would not let her unsee it now. The battered bruising of the skin from the river rocks. The jagged tears of its branches. Nature had had its way with her as it had done with so many other lost souls.
A girl’s life was cheap in this world, especially a girl like Kitty. Maybe if Molly had been there to listen, to stand beside her that night, she could have stopped whatever had happened.
But she hadn’t been there.
Kitty had died, and whether it was an accident or her own doing, Molly could never know.
Tears fell down her cheeks, and she did not know if they were her own, or the ghosts’, or only rain from the leaking carriage roof.
She’d only wanted to know the best parts of her friend. The ones that served her.
She’d tried to keep Kitty’s love like a specimen in the doctor’s collection.
But love was not a corpse; it was a flame. It could not be chopped up and displayed on a shelf. It could not be preserved and kept forever safe. Trying to shove fire into a jar would simply put it out.
Real love w
as free to choose.
Ma had not left because she hadn’t loved Molly; she had simply loved Da too.
And Kitty had not taken her love from Molly by telling her about Edgar; she’d only been trying to share it. Trusting her friend to support whatever choice she made, because that was what real friends did.
Instead, Molly had acted as if she had a right not just to Kitty’s heart but to her body, her choices.
She’d done the same to Ginny, shaming her for sleeping with Edgar.
On and on, she had tried to keep the hearts of those she loved like dead things in a jar.
But the dead do not love. Only the living have that right.
Opening her eyes, Molly saw a shimmering shape beside her. A body as real as her own. She could actually feel Kitty’s hand as it slipped into hers.
Hush, you splendid sphinge. It’s not too late. A worried smile spread across her face. I have to tell you something important. There’s a reason you’re here. You’re forgetting . . .
Her voice was so soft that Molly had to strain to hear it.
“What, Kitty? What am I forgetting? Tell me.”
But Kitty began to fade.
Her words came now in a staccato beat of missed consonants and vowels.
There’s . . . see . . .
Kitty was going. But Molly still needed her. Needed to hear what she was trying to say.
“No!” She said the word aloud, sobbing, reaching for her as she had her mother as a child, begging her to come back.
. . . remember . . .
And then a flicker as the fading ghost of Kitty held something toward her—a small blue candy dish. It was the same one Mother Superior kept on her desk. Molly had not thought of it since she’d left the orphanage.
But she could see it now, its pretty blue glass, and she could feel the smooth crystal as she reached to take it.
Except there was no candy this time.
From inside crawled the bloated figure of a rat.
Molly screamed, batting it away. The dish shattered, breaking into a thousand jagged pieces on the floor.
Then she was falling, tumbling hard into the side of the carriage as the world turned upside down beneath her.
* * *
She tried to sit up, but her feet couldn’t find the floor.
“Jesus, girl, are you all right?” The driver’s face peeked at her from an odd angle, his nose pointed skyward.
“All right?”
A great square of sky opened above her where the floor should have been. The driver took hold of her and pulled.
Only when she was outside did Molly understand what had happened—the entire carriage had tipped. Its wheels spun lazily as muddy rainwater sluiced around the roof.
“I’m fine.” Molly patted her body shakily and was stunned to find it was true. Nothing broken, nothing bruised even.
Kitty.
The memory of the final few seconds came to her, and she ran to the carriage, searching inside.
“Girl, you can’t go back in there!” The driver wrapped an arm around her waist, pulling her back out, but it didn’t matter.
The carriage was empty.
She stopped her struggling. “Let me go.”
The driver did, embarrassed. “You’ll have to walk the rest of the way.” He looked apologetic. “It’s no more than a few blocks, but it’ll take me an hour at least to get this thing righted.”
“I’ll manage.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a few coins. “Thank you for your trouble.”
He nodded and then, cursing, returned his attention to the carriage.
The water had dislodged several bricks from the road, and great pools rose in them. Pungent mud and fresh rain, damp coal and rotting food, all laced together in a heady blanket of scent.
Molly hitched her dress high and began her way home. Maybe there wouldn’t even be a party. If LaValle didn’t have a body, surely Ava would have to cancel the event.
A small group of beggar children splashed in one of the nearby puddles, despite the water’s chill. Around her, the city, freshly washed, glowed with an unnatural beauty, buildings slick and shining.
But she could not stop thinking of the rat’s ugly face as it crawled from the dish.
In the distance, Ava’s house appeared, each of its windows lit in a fiery brilliance.
Molly hurried toward it, finally clear about what she must do.
There would be no more bodies for her tonight. The doctor would have to get his hospital without her. She would be no part of a scheme that used the poor as kindling to warm the rich.
Overhead, the rain began again, a wet sputtering that started and stopped.
She quickened her pace, nearly running now.
Ahead, she saw carriages pulling in and out of the muddied driveway as doormen hastened to lay down fresh carpet for the ladies to step on.
So the party was still on.
Molly passed the last house before her own, hurrying toward the light, eager to be out of the rain.
She heard the attacker before she saw him.
From the dark of an alley sprang the familiar shape of a knife.
The glint of metal caught the reflection of the party’s distant lanterns as it sliced across the air toward Molly.
* * *
She stumbled, falling backward into a puddle, which soaked her in an icy embrace. Her dress ripped as a long piece of her skirt caught beneath her heel. But when she looked up, her alarm gave way to anger.
“Did you just pull a knife on me?”
Tom Donaghue ducked his head, embarrassed. “It was meant to be a gift.”
“A gift?” She stared at him in shock and disbelief. “Have you lost your bloody mind?”
She couldn’t believe he was actually standing there. She’d thought him gone forever.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“I needed to see you before I left.” He moved closer. “I wanted to say goodbye. To give you this.”
“You and your gifts.” She thought of that morning so long ago when he’d given her the box of cheese.
“It’s a surgeon’s knife,” Tom said, holding it out to her again, gently now, like meat to tempt a stray. Carefully, she took it in her hands.
Silver and shining, the blade curved into a precise point. Inlaid in the handle were small luminescent pearls in the shape of a moth. A single red ribbon was tied around its base.
“I was wrong. If you want to be a surgeon, you’ll be the best damned one there ever was.”
Molly stared at the knife. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I kept thinking about what you said about caterpillars,” Tom said quietly. “The way they have to disintegrate before they can become something else. Only it wasn’t my sister that needed to change. Or you.” He held her with his gaze. “It’s the rest of the world that needs fixing. You’re perfect just as you are.”
“No.”
The word fell from her in a choked sob, and she pressed the knife back into his hand. She made herself keep talking, afraid she would never speak the truth if she did not do it now.
“My best friend, Kitty. It was me who killed her. Maybe I didn’t throw her body into the river, but I might as well have. She came to me before she disappeared. Asked me to go with her, and I said no. I was too angry. I thought she was weak, giving herself away like that to a boy. She said she was afraid, and I just let her go.”
She was crying.
The shell that had been holding her together cracked, revealing a wound as red and bloody as the ribbon in Tom’s hand. She was falling apart. Transforming. And the ugly spore that had been growing inside her was released.
Tom scooped her into his arms, pressing her to him. The familiar scent of soap and leather filled her, s
oothing the fluttering of her heart. And once again, he was there beside her, just as he’d been night after night since she came to the city. “It’s all right,” he whispered.
“She’d still be alive if I’d gone with her.”
“No.” His voice was fierce in her ear. “You loved her, Molly. Love makes mistakes. That’s how you know it’s love.”
For the first time, a small glimmer of light shone around the black hole of her pain.
“Do you really think that?”
“Yes.” He cupped her face gently in his calloused hands, meeting her gaze with his single, brilliant eye.
“I’m sorry, Molly. About everything.” His voice broke. “I should have been there for you.”
When they kissed now, it was as though they had never been apart. His lips were rough and eager, and she met them with her own need, a fire burning between them.
Molly closed her eyes.
But suddenly there again was the rat, its pointed face peeking over a candy dish as blue as the feathers of a preening peacock.
Startled, she pulled away.
“Molly, what is it?”
Whether her best friend had made her own choice or been the victim of an accident, the Knifeman had not killed her. But the other girls . . .
Molly gasped, feeling again the cool clamminess of a bare palm against her palm.
Commit your sins in plain sight.
Finally, she understood what Kitty had been trying to tell her. The reason Ava had been so afraid.
“I need to do something,” she whispered. “Will you help me? One last thing before you go.”
“Yes,” Tom answered without hesitation. His hand slipped into her own, its steady pulse a beating heart.
“Good.” Overhead, the sky caught the last of the setting sun. “Take me to the party.”
39
Trays of the finest champagne floated about the room on the wings of perfectly attired servants. Pheasant, ham, tongue, trifle, jellies—the delicacies continued for what looked like miles, on perfectly laid-out tables stretched with white tablecloths, the meat resting in jeweled buckets of ice. Onstage, a full orchestra played while the partygoers danced below.
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