Page 27

MY NAME IS GRACE

SIXTEEN

She did not see the doctor that day, except as a tall, silent shadow that stalked the grounds with others in attendance as they pointed to patients scattered across the grounds. He kept his head down, his notebook in his hand, and Grace reminded herself not to let her gaze follow him too often.

Elizabeth and Nell had stuck by her the entire day, explaining that their duties—Nell’s in the laundry and Elizabeth’s in the kitchen—had been excused so that Grace could be shown around the asylum and grounds.

“Ye’ve got perfect freedom here, as long as ye be’ave,” Nell had explained. “There’s nae even locks on the bedroom doors.”

“As long as you behave,” Elizabeth had added archly, raising an eyebrow at Nell, who had smiled wickedly.

The warmth she’d accrued from the sun in their afternoon walk was escaping her skin now, but Grace could still feel the benefits from it, as if her body had remembered in that short afternoon what it was to be alive.

The presence of the other girls had its own effect, and Grace felt a smile tugging at her mouth as she remembered Nell unabashedly laying claim to Elizabeth’s dessert that evening as they ate together in the women’s ward. “On account of ye ’aving the wrong color eyes,” she’d mock whispered to Grace, clearly meaning for Elizabeth to overhear. “String didn’t know that, did ’e?”

Her comment had caused Elizabeth a diatribe of objection to String having any gender at all, to which Grace had listened with half an ear while devouring her dish of strawberries, which Nell had later informed her came fresh from the asylum’s gardens.

Her hands lay crossed on her belly now, no longer in protection of an unseen presence but in remembrance. Grace closed her eyes not against the world but in an effort to trap it in the moment, so that she could know fully how lucky she was to have come to this place where the kindness of strangers deemed unsuitable for society had filled her day more fully than any ever spent with the higher echelons.

There had been friends in Boston, girls her own age who were approved for her to spend leisure time with. Walks in gardens and timid conversations that only touched on respectable topics had been all that were allowed them. Grace knew that the horrid truths of her nighttime hours would only seem like garish nightmares to these half-formed shadows of their own mothers who parroted manners and giggled behind their hands when boys’ names were mentioned.

That she could tell Elizabeth and Nell the truth of her existence without hesitation if she were allowed to speak, Grace knew without a doubt. Their lives were like her own, flavored with the misery of the past, which made the safety of the present all the more sweet. The bonds grown out of shared suffering were strong indeed, and though forged only that afternoon, Grace felt a closeness to them that had never existed with the well-bred friends handpicked in her former life.

It was easy to shut the doors of her mind on the faces of the past. Grace had done so without hesitation and thrown away the key. But Alice’s voice slipped through the keyhole, echoing into her dreams and bringing with it the image of her little sister’s face, still full with the baby fat of youth and wide, innocent eyes.

“Grace.” Even her name sounded sweeter in those high, childish tones. “Grace, you haven’t eaten your strawberries,” Alice said, her small pink lips stained with the redness of her own dessert.

In her dream, Grace lifted her eyes from the pattern of the lace covering on the dining room table, her stomach turning in revulsion at the red fruit in front of her. “I can’t,” she said weakly, her fingertips barely strong enough to push the china away from her as the nausea swept her body.

“Mother,” Alice said, her thin blond brows creased with worry. “Why does Grace not eat her breakfast anymore?”

“Grace is not feeling well,” their mother said, a permanent line in between her brows darkening as she rose to stand beside her oldest daughter. “Perhaps you had best go to your tutor alone this morning, Alice. Grace and I need to talk.”

“We did talk.” Grace seethed, her words tasting like the vomit she tried so hard to keep down. “I told you and told you and YOU WILL NOT LISTEN.” The rage she’d held on to in reality burst forth in her dream, and Alice’s small face collapsed in tears as Grace grabbed her fork and drove it through her mother’s hand. Mother’s blood flowed and her hand turned to a man’s, the silver tines of the fork exposing bone and gristle while Heedson yowled in pain, and Alice’s cheeks hollowed out, the ends of her lovely hair splitting while she shoved handfuls of it into her mouth in an imitation of Cracked Pat.

“You wouldn’t listen,” Grace cried out, sitting up in her bed and trying to stop the words before they seeped through the walls and betrayed her to her neighbors.

Though she knew she could share parts of her story if she chose, her slate was small and no words were big enough to encompass her past. Grace wiped at her mouth, almost wanting to spit to rid the aftertaste of the nightmare and the memories that had rushed at her unbidden. It seemed safer to lock it away and leave everything behind along with her last name in the murky darkness of a Boston asylum.

And it would be so easy if not for Alice, whose sweet face had greeted her every morning and whose tiny fingers had once wound through Grace’s own. The very fingers that might that moment be pressed to red-rimmed eyes as she mourned for a sister dead at the hands of whatever lies her parents had fed her to cover the trail of the ones before.

Grace flung back her covers, all sleep stolen at the thought of Alice mourning for a death that hadn’t happened. Lies had covered her home for so long that Grace had accepted them as a matter of course, as ever-present as the smell of drink on Mother’s breath and strange perfume on Father’s coat. She’d been born and bred on them, and now she’d turned the tables, using all the tricks and trumperies she’d learned by watching to deliver herself from their web.

But her escape meant a shield was removed from her little sister. Alice had been born too late to foster anything other than resentment for a ruined figure from their mother and grumblings about another wedding to pay for from their father, but those words had never found her delicate ears. Grace hovered near her always, drawing the angry glares herself, and suggesting outdoor activities when the barely restrained arguments seeped through closed doors.

Grace reached through the decorative iron grille on her widow to trace her fingertips along the glass, now cool with the night air. She wondered if Alice sat at her own window, or if Falsteed thought of her behind his bars.

“Miss Madeleine Baxter,” Grace said softly to herself, remembering the false name Falsteed had told her to write to Reed under. A smile formed as a mockingbird sang on the lawn, echoing the gibberish of the inmates he’d encountered that day.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Miss Madeleine Baxter has a little sister,” she said.

Falsteed—

I hardly know what to call you. Mister? Doctor? Friend? Fiend?

Dr. Thornhollow has told me of your past, but how can I find fault with your deeds when without them our paths would never have crossed? If you are mad then I owe my life to a madman, and he is no less dear to me for his actions. Truly evil people do exist, this I know, but I do not count you among them. Instead, I choose to see you as a good person who has done bad things, and who among us cannot be dubbed so?

Somehow you smelled out the dark origins of my incarceration. Perhaps you also smelled mixed with my own scent a lighter one. So much time was spent holding this one close to me that I would not be surprised to learn that her smell clung to my skin, even in the darkness. As we are, after all, one flesh.