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“How do you mean?”
“You wouldn’t have to go far outside of Boston and mention my name to find someone who knows it, none of them remembering it for the lives I saved. It’s the other they remember. But Thornhollow, he’s safely anonymous for the moment. Passes through halls like this one with his dark gift and leaves those that he touches silent and still, fragile as the day they were born. Quiet like doves they are, placated with warm milk and sleeping the night through.
“You can always count on a visit from Thornhollow when the Board is about to visit. Heedson feeds the worst of the lot down here, slick as a laundry chute, and Thornhollow, he . . . well, I guess he does the laundry, in a sense. Sends it back upstairs nice and clean, a blank slate for the Board to look upon with approval when they make their rounds.”
“A blank slate . . . ,” Grace repeated, her words lost in a renewed shriek from the spider girl. She rested her head against the cold stones behind her. “Do they forget?”
“I can’t say for sure,” Falsteed said. “There’s a little room down the hall. You’d never see it in this pitch, but Reed comes down with his light when Thornhollow makes his rounds. The violent ones and the screamers, they go in there loud with the doctor, and they come out smelling like blood and metal and, yes, I suppose a type of forgetfulness. Although I’d say it’s more of a removal, a permanent state of that which you’re only now emerging from.”
Grace kept silent, not trusting her throat to handle the voice now running rampant inside of her. All the things she had kept silent boiled inside. The burning rage that Falsteed had diagnosed plummeted into the cold river of her voice and produced a harsh smoke, one that filled her lungs and pushed to overflow from her mouth.
It enveloped her brain, burning off the fog that she’d allowed to settle as easily as the sun ripped the mist away from the morning. She knew it all again, footsteps in the dark and her father’s face looming in the bedroom doorway. It was all seared into her memory, and she knew it as perfectly as she knew the cracks in the ceiling of her cell. All the details of her life, caught forever in her mind. Inescapable.
The blood had slowly ceased to flow down her legs, the fear that came with each drop lost losing its bite as Falsteed had talked to her in the darkness, his voice her anchor. The dress Reed had brought already fit less snugly, the extra flap of skin that had once held her baby evaporating. She’d woken from sleep once to see that Heedson had come to check on her, the bandage on his hand bright in the darkness.
The baby was lost, the purpose of her body gone as it returned to its normal shape. There was nothing to keep her here now, no stain on the family name in the form of a widening waistband. As soon as the scratches from Croomes’s fingernails on her wrists were healed, the bruises on her cheeks from Heedson faded, she’d be returned. She clutched onto Falsteed in the anonymous dark, both her arms slipping between the bars that separated them and clasping on to his broad shoulders and finding bare flesh.
“Is Thornhollow coming for me?”
Falsteed was silent for a moment, and she felt his body rise and fall as he breathed in deeply. “Dearest,” he chided. “You smell of hope. You smell as if you want him to.”
Her small hands clenched, her fingernails digging into Falsteed’s skin. “Maybe I do.”
TEN
Fingers of orange light threaded through the darkness from Reed’s lantern as he approached, bringing muted noises from the spider girl. Falsteed moved to a corner of his cell where the flickering could not reach him, but his voice covered the distance between him and Grace, its low whisper meant only for her.
“Hang back a moment, dear one. I’d have you draw the measure of the man while he’s still in ignorance of you.”
An irrational fear sliced through Grace as she saw two shadows cast in the dim lamplight. Her world had shrunk into a place populated only by herself and Falsteed, the pitiful complaints of the spider girl underscoring their existence, punctuated by visits from Reed. The arrival of a new person, and one who Falsteed had spoken of in awe, sent Grace fleeing to her stool in the corner.
“I apologize for the dank, sir,” Reed said. “Once the weather gets a mind to start raining, the cellars don’t stand much of a chance of drying themselves.”
“Interesting choice of words, Reed,” a new voice said. Grace’s ears perked up, even though her hands began to tremble.
“How’s that, sir?”
“You’ve given the weather and the cellar—entities that don’t make choices or take action on their own—precisely the qualities that the humans in your care lack.”
“I suppose I did, sir, though I had no intention of doing it.”
“All the more telling, that your mind would subconsciously choose words to allocate control to things that lack exactly that.”
Grace pressed her bare toes against the stones, bracing her body against the cold wall. The stranger’s voice was low and melodious, wandering through sentences as if assured it would find the end victoriously, though the path was unsure. His shadow stretched beside Reed’s as they came nearer, the serpentine voice easily supplying answers to Reed’s nervous chatter.
“Nonetheless, I’m sorry for the state of things down here, and you with a surgery tonight, sir.”
The pair stopped outside of Grace’s cell, and she examined the newcomer in the sickly light of the lantern, his deep-set eyes lost in the shadows, his doctor’s bag slung over his shoulder almost haphazardly.
“Why do you call me ‘sir’?”
“Well, I suppose because you’re a surgeon, Dr. Thornhollow,” Reed said, his hand trembling on the lantern as he held it aloft.
“Yes, but I’m no greater than you. In fact, I’d venture to say you’re probably the better person, if it came to a matter of weighing souls.”
“I don’t see how one would weigh a soul, sir, or what bearing it would have on the argument.”
“For example,” Thornhollow continued as if Reed hadn’t spoken, “I can see my mother’s house from my office, yet I only visit her once a month or so, and then only under duress. The last visit occurred because I had a bit of glass buried at the base of my spine—never mind how—and had to find someone to pull it out. Even considering that, I think I went there because it was the only house that had a light at the time. I could’ve very well asked a stranger in the street to oblige me—would have, in fact, saved time if I’d done exactly that.”
