A Deadly Fortune Page 11

  “What happened?” she rasped.

  Cavanaugh only looked at her with wide, stunned eyes.

  “You had another of your fits,” Mrs. Brennan said, with a smug glance at the doctor’s back. “You see?” she told him. “She’s dangerous. You’ll want to tend to your face. Leave us to see to her.” Mrs. Brennan jerked her head toward the orderlies, who started forward. Amelia shrank back against the thin mattress.

  “No,” Cavanaugh barked, waving them away. “No,” he said again in a more measured tone. “She’s done no real harm, and none at all intentionally. You’re to leave her be.”

  He gave the cell a wild glance and backed toward the door. He turned, pushed past the others, and strode out.

  Mrs. Brennan scowled after him, then turned back to Amelia. A moment later, the sound of the heavy ward door closing echoed down the hall.

  The matron motioned to the orderlies. “Get on with it.”

  They looked at her in confusion. “But the doctor said—” one of them began.

  She rounded on him with a ferocious glare. “The doctor”—the word was a hiss—“isn’t here. I am, and I’m telling you to get her jabbed and wrapped, or you’ll be off the island and out of a job by dinner.”

  Amelia had tried to fight, but her head throbbed with every movement. The two of them would have been more than a match for her in any case. One held her as the other stuck the needle into her arm. By the time they stepped back, her head was foggy and her vision was blurring. From far away she heard one of the orderlies ask if the restraints were necessary.

  “She don’t look to be in any shape to cause trouble,” he said.

  Mrs. Brennan let loose with a stream of invective. Both men flinched and moved to obey. Unable to hold them open any longer, Amelia let her eyes droop closed, thinking vaguely that at least now her face didn’t hurt. The last thing she felt before she lost consciousness was the orderlies threading her limp arms into the stiff white canvas.

  Now her stomach roiled and her head throbbed. The endless noise of the ward seemed to have magnified and somehow concentrated into a solid mass that pressed against the insides of her ears. How much of this new sensitivity was an effect of the injection, and how much was a result of yesterday’s encounter? The scrape of a key in a lock sliced into the thought and sent a bolt stabbing through her head. She groaned, pressing her forehead against the thin mattress.

  Amelia steeled herself and opened her eyes. One of the younger nurses stood in the doorway of her cell. Cavanaugh stood behind her.

  He was through the door before it had opened much more than a crack, resolve on his face. Another step, and his eyes widened. Without taking them off her, he spoke to the nurse in a voice like the crack of a whip.

  “I specifically said she was not to be restrained. Who ordered this?”

  “I don’t know, Doctor, I only came onto the ward this morning.”

  He pressed his lips together. “Leave us.”

  As the nurse scurried out of the cell, Cavanaugh stepped forward.

  “Are you able to sit?” His voice was tight.

  She didn’t reply, too busy scanning the space behind him. There was nothing. She relaxed the tiniest fraction and finally focused on him. His eyes were shadowed, his face drawn and pale. She wormed and twisted until she was sitting upright on the cot. He watched and made no effort to help her.

  The movement sent darts of pain through Amelia’s head. She did her best to ignore it and turned halfway so he could reach the buckles at her back. There was a momentary hesitation—he didn’t want to touch her, she realized. She looked back over her shoulder at him as he finally leaned in, his jaw hard.

  He’d nicked himself shaving and missed a thin strip of beard over the pulse in his neck. He wore far too much cologne, no doubt in an attempt to mask the odor of stale whiskey seeping from his pores. It seemed she wasn’t the only one suffering from a heavy head this morning.

  She might have enjoyed his discomfort if her own had not been growing with every minute. She tasted the sticky floral scent on the back of her tongue. Her stomach lurched. She swallowed hard and turned her head away as he worked.

  After another moment, the buckles loosened, and he moved back, taking his eye-watering cloud with him. Amelia took a relieved breath and wriggled out of the restraints. She flexed her shoulders with a sigh—then grimaced as the blood rushed back into her arms. She must have made a sound, since Cavanaugh leaned forward. The slick of artificial scent engulfed her, and suddenly it was all too much. Her stomach failed her, and she bent forward, retching, producing only a thin stream of acid and bile.

  Once she regained control of herself, Amelia wiped her mouth on a corner of the straitjacket and shoved the thing away. She leaned against the rough stone wall, the thin, sweat-dampened fabric of her dress offering no protection from its chill. She shivered.

  “What do you want?” she asked, not really caring.

  He hesitated, his expression caught somewhere between concern and resolve.

  “I want to know who told you what to do,” he said finally. “Yesterday, you—I don’t know how you—those things you said…” His voice trailed away, but his eyes never moved from her face.

  “What did I say?”

  His expression darkened. “Do not play games with me.”

  “Games.” Amelia tried to imagine what he would say, how he would react, if she told him the truth. She knew, of course; he would think she was mad. Elizabeth had seen and believed. But this man, this doctor, flush with learning and superiority, would not. Amelia laughed, and it was a bitter, humorless sound. “I’m not playing games, Doctor. I don’t know what I said.”

  He began to pace the length of the cell. “Did someone promise you something? Threaten you? I can help you, but only if you tell me the truth.”

  The taut strands of Amelia’s patience frayed. “No one told me anything.” Her tone was sharp around the edges. “I told you, I don’t know what I said. Whatever happened yesterday, whatever—or whomever—you saw, whatever she said—”

  He froze in his tracks and whirled to face her. “She.” He pounced on the word. “You claim not to know what you said, but you know the words were a woman’s?”

  He thought he’d caught her. He would never listen to her denials now. All the weeks of careful, calculated behavior. All the endurance and the restraint. All of it had bought her nothing. Tears of anger and frustration pricked at her eyelids. Amelia blinked them away in sudden conviction.

  If he wanted the truth, she would give it to him, and damn the consequences. She squared her shoulders and looked up at him.

  “She stood behind you yesterday.” Her voice was clipped. “A young woman. Pretty. I don’t know who she is—or was, since I suspect she’s dead.”

  He flinched, and his face went white.

  Amelia went on with a rush of savage joy. “I see you recognize the description. I do not know what I said. She was the one who spoke.”

  Only years at the cards could have taught her to decipher the stream of expressions pouring across his face. Shock and sorrow. Guilt. And a flash of something soft. Hope? It touched his face and flitted away, fast as a hummingbird. Anger rushed in behind it.

  He stepped toward her, flushed and shaking.

  “You are lying,” he said in a low, passionate tone. “You are lying, and someone has put you up to it. I want to know who, and I want to know why. You will tell me.” His face was tight with anger, but there was a desperate edge to his voice.

  A wave of fury rolled over Amelia and swept away her aching head and raw stomach. She leapt to her feet. All the fear and hopelessness of the past weeks, all the humiliations, the cruelties, the loneliness, and the desperation—they gathered inside her chest and swelled like water against a dam. And then they burst free.

  She heard herself shouting as if from a great distance. About the infernal arrogance of men who demanded truth, then refused to hear it. About doctors who decided the course of women’s
lives without looking at them. About nurses who took pleasure in cruelty. About stolen names. About Promenades and chamber pots. About straitjackets and icy baths and drugged water. About purgatory and hell and hard benches and stone walls and the stupidity of men who made such places and demanded women thank them for it.

  A tiny, horrified corner of her mind begged her to stop. With every word, every accusation, she confirmed her own madness and destroyed any chance she might have had of getting him to believe her. But he would never believe her, another, colder voice reminded her. She’d told him the truth, and he’d called her a liar. It drove her on. Amelia poured her rage at his feet like burning pitch.

  He drew back from her, shocked. Her anger began to wear itself down, until finally the remnants drained away, and she slumped, breathless and exhausted. She felt a twinge of regret and crushed it with a ruthless fist. It didn’t matter; he would never have listened. Never would have believed her. Never could have. She had lost nothing.

  The rest of the ward had gone silent during her outburst. Now, in the hush that followed its conclusion, renewed sobs, wracking and piteous, began to filter through the hallway. Mara, continuing her ceaseless mourning.

  “You’d do better to let the dead go,” Amelia said, and jerked her chin toward the girl’s cell. “She can’t, and look what it’s done to her. And if you actually want to help someone,” she added, and noted his tiny flinch, “you should start with her. If all you can do is call me a liar, then you can get out and leave me be.”

  She turned her back to him. Moments later, the cell door crashed closed, and his footsteps echoed as he retreated down the hall.

  16

  Two days later, Amelia looked up from her breakfast as the sound of a masculine voice filtered down the hallway. The words themselves were lost in the general din of the ward, but the pauses indicated a conversation, and the tone was unmistakable. It was instructional, pleasant enough without any degree of deference. A doctor, for certain. The orderlies, when they spoke, murmured. Short. Obedient. Amelia held still, listening, but the voice grew no louder. Whoever he was, he’d stopped before reaching her cell.

  After driving Cavanaugh away, Amelia had thrown herself back onto her cot and stewed until a nurse finally came to take her to the washroom. On the way, she peered into every cell they passed and confirmed that both Janey and Elizabeth were in the isolation ward as well. Amelia spent the rest of the morning trying to think of a way to communicate with Elizabeth, but her still-pounding head and sour stomach eventually forced her to set the problem aside.

  Now, as she scraped up the last dregs of sticky porridge with her bread and popped it into her mouth, a momentary lull brought her a snippet of the conversation taking place down the hall.

  “—quite certain. I will take full responsibility.”

  Amelia straightened. It was Cavanaugh.

  She stood and crossed to the door. She wavered between stubborn defiance and self-reproach every time she thought of their last encounter. She had no interest in repeating it. Why was he in the ward?

  Amelia tilted her head to peer through the bars. Cavanaugh stood down the hall. A nurse stepped in front of him to open a cell, and Cavanaugh disappeared inside. Perhaps five minutes passed before he reappeared, shepherding the cell’s occupant before him.

  Mara.

  Amelia pressed closer. What was he doing? Mara hunched in on herself and shied away from his touch, blinking in the relatively brighter light of the hallway. He guided her down the corridor as if she were made of glass, and Amelia watched until the pair disappeared from view. A minute later, the ward door crashed closed. Amelia paced her cell until they returned, some two hours later. Cavanaugh led Mara back into her cell, conferred with the nurse, then left the ward again, alone.

  He never looked in Amelia’s direction.

  He returned again the next day. And the next. And each day after that.

  He spoke with other patients on the ward. He frequently drew something from a pocket and offered it between the bars of the cells. A few women—the ones prone to violence or threats—Cavanaugh spoke to from the hallway, quiet words Amelia could never make out. Most, like Mara, he removed from their cells for an hour or two at a time. Sometimes he carried a cloak over one arm, and the women returned pink-cheeked and smelling of the outdoors. Janey went more than once and always came back smiling. There was no pattern to the visits, save that he never skipped them for more than a day.

  He made no attempt to interact with Amelia.

  She wondered at his silence. Once or twice there was a tiny hitch in his stride as he passed her door, as if he might turn toward her, but he never did.

  Mrs. Brennan happened to be in the ward when he returned with Mara one afternoon. She reached for the girl, who flinched away. With a scowl, Mrs. Brennan took a rough hold of her arm and gave her a shove in the direction of her cell. Cavanaugh spoke.

  “I’ll see her settled. You may wait for me over there.” His voice held that note of command again, and on this occasion, Amelia found she did not object to it.

  When he finished with Mara, he strode directly to Mrs. Brennan, standing halfway between Mara’s and Amelia’s doors and wearing an expression as sour as curdled milk.

  “I do not wish to see you handle a patient so harshly again,” he said in a firm voice, “especially one who is in need of neither restraint nor correction.”

  He looked past the matron, and his eyes caught Amelia’s. Her chest tightened, and something flickered on Cavanaugh’s face for a moment before he looked away.

  Mrs. Brennan followed his gaze, her frown deepening. Despite an overwhelming urge to shrink back, Amelia stood her ground.

  “Additionally,” Cavanaugh went on, “I’m aware that you’ve disobeyed my explicit orders at least once. I don’t wish to find that it’s happened again.” The warning was clear in his tone. He waited until the matron looked at him. “Is that understood?”

  Amelia winced. Someone would pay for that, and there was every chance it would be Amelia herself.

  The older woman’s face flushed an unpleasant shade of red. Her jaw clenched, but she muttered something that must have been agreement before striding away.

  Cavanaugh watched her retreating back for a moment. Amelia found herself hoping he would look at her again, but he only turned, nodded once to Mara, and left.

  That evening, Amelia lay on her cot as the ward sang its chorus. Mumbles and shouts echoed. A burst of laughter pierced the air and trailed away. Threats and curses threaded through the hall. But something was missing. It came to her as she drifted into sleep. Mara’s crying. The anguished sobs that had been such a constant part of the ward’s discordant harmony.

  They’d stopped.

  17

  Andrew started at the knock on his office door. “Come in,” he called.

  An orderly entered with a stack of mail, handing it over with a nod. Andrew thanked the man and glanced at the clock as he left.

  He’d done it again.

  He turned his attention back to the stack of files on his desk. All of them needed updating before he left for the night. The one on top was Mrs. Dennis, who insisted the archangel Michael whispered messages from the dead into her left ear.

  Messages from the dead. It seemed he couldn’t get away from them.

  Mrs. Dennis was quite insane, of course. Andrew very much doubted the archangel Michael instructed her to burn down her neighbor’s chicken coop in broad daylight, or to threaten a pair of police officers with a knife when they responded to the neighbor’s complaint. But the notion of the dead speaking through the living had proved impossible to dismiss since his initial encounter with Miss Casey. Their second meeting only made things worse. Her tirade had been shocking. It should have been enough to convince him of her madness. But it was her earlier words that shook him. Not only had she refused to admit the lie, she’d taken it further, describing… well, describing Susannah.

  Andrew had fled from the ward and spent
a pair of restless nights struggling to come to some sort of resolution. What he believed to be possible and what he knew he’d seen fought in his mind like a pair of dogs with their teeth locked on each other’s throats.

  He rose on the third morning, his mind exhausted by the struggle and something else she’d said ringing in his head.

  If he wanted to help someone.

  He did. And this fruitless obsession with an impossibility accomplished nothing. He would let it go and focus on what he’d come to the asylum to do. And, Andrew thought with a flash of something like defiance, he would start with the very woman Miss Casey had pointed out.

  Mara Roark’s case—along with some dozen others he adopted as his own—quickly consumed him. The interviews took time and attention, and there was all the reading and research necessary to teach himself about their conditions. He was making good progress with some of them. It was rewarding, and the work left him with no time to worry over the paradox of Miss Casey and her impossible claims.

  Except, much as he told himself so, he knew the last bit for a lie.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d looked up to find he’d wasted an hour imagining what he would say to Susannah if he had the chance. If it were truly possible to speak with the dead.

  He gave an irritated sigh and turned to the stack of mail: a circular for a medical supply company, the newest volume of the American Journal of Psychology, and a thin letter with a Philadelphia postmark.

  Andrew glanced at the return address, then ripped open the envelope with suddenly shaking fingers. The letter within was brief:

  Dear Dr. Cavanaugh—

  I received your letter of April 19 with great pleasure. You have been much missed since your departure, and we are all pleased to hear you have found satisfaction in your new home.