Page 55

“Stop,” Grace said, her lips moving against her wrists as she railed at her own mind. “Please, stop.”

But the words brought another vision, one that she’d banished for fear of becoming truly mad. She heard his voice as it had been hours before, rolling confidently through the blackness of the night to fill her ears, but in her memory it was only her name he said, over and over again.

“No more!” Grace gasped, forcing her hands out of her eyes and to her scars, where the smooth skin brought solace, the only safeguard in place to keep him from ever seeing her again.

“I’m dead,” she reminded herself, breath coming more easily as she steered her brain elsewhere, to the hollows and planes of Thornhollow’s face as he cut her in Boston. “He believes me dead. Thank you, oh, thank you,” she said, her voice trailing off into sleep, though her mind lingered on Thornhollow’s face a little longer.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Ned’s screams were wordless as he stormed into the entrance hall with the morning light, his terror filling the atrium and roaring up the stairs. Thornhollow reached him first, taking the ax from his hands and trying to discern what had happened. Patients lined the staircases and staff poured from their rooms as Ned led the doctor out the front door.

Grace was pulling on her shift when she saw the figures streaming toward the pond, the sane outrunning the mad by only a few steps. She flew outside, her bare feet numbed in the first few moments as she tore down to the lakeside behind the others. Thornhollow tried to stop her as she broke through the crowd, grabbing her roughly around the waist.

“Grace, Grace, wait,” he said into her ear. “You don’t need to see this.”

She shrieked and wrested out of his grip, cold terror pushing up through her belly as she forced her way to the front to see a perfectly chopped hole in the lake’s ice, and Nell’s black braid lying beside it.

Grief made her truly mad. It took two male attendants to force her inside the padded cell, Thornhollow bellowing at them to be careful as she fell in a pile on the soft floor. She was screaming, hadn’t stopped since she saw Nell’s braid, carefully cut off and laid on her self-fashioned tombstone, as she’d threatened so long ago. Grace’s voice ripped, wordless, through her mouth, and she clawed at the leather padding.

All her rage burned through her fingertips as she tore away. She thought of her father, taking a meal in the only place she had ever known safety. His name, used in ignorance on the innocent lips of her friends, pouring bile over her soul with every pronunciation. And Nell. Poor Nell with the pox eating her beautiful face, the damnation brought upon her by the lust of another. Anka Baran and Mellie Jacobs, lying deceptively peaceful as their killer pawed their bodies. And Grace, unable to stop any of it.

There were no words for the language she was speaking and so Grace only screamed, tearing into the walls, kicking and biting at the leather until it split, spilling horsehair and feathers into the air. Her flailing sent them ever higher, her sanity stretching thin as she gave vent to all that was within.

She ripped and tore and screamed until the thin tissue of her throat was as shredded as the walls of her cell, her eyes swollen and throbbing with no tears left to shed. Grace collapsed, the last feathers drifting down to land on her dry, cracked lips, her exhalations too small to disrupt them again. Strength gone, she could only lie quivering, her emotions spent and body exhausted.

The rectangular viewing screen slid open with a metallic screech.

“Grace.” Thornhollow’s voice was low and calm, the same tone she’d heard him use with the most difficult of patients. “Grace, I’m coming in to get you.”

She couldn’t object. Her exhaustion ran so deep she could not raise a finger. The door opened and he scooped her into his arms, her hands and feet trailing as if she were dead as he carried her down the hall to his office, where Janey waited. He set her in a chair by the fireplace, and Janey sponged her face clean, cool water erasing hot tear tracks.

“I know, Grace,” Janey said, her own face puffy. “It’s a hard thing to reconcile yourself to, but Nell went out her way. She wasn’t going to let that boy’s sickness have the last word.”

“Yes,” Thornhollow added, settling into the chair next to Grace’s. “Nell said the mercury made her feel worse than the disease. She’d stopped taking the treatment weeks ago, and I thought it was best to let her determine her own course of action.”

Grace looked at him coldly, no words necessary for the thought in her eyes.

“It was the right choice,” Janey said, pulling feathers and horsehair from Grace’s clothes. “The pox would spread anyway, Grace. All the mercury could do was slow the spread, and Nell hadn’t felt well in months.”

Grace shifted her stare to Janey, who met it without flinching.

“Yes, I knew she stopped taking the mercury baths,” Janey said. “What’s the use of treating you like people if we don’t let you make your own decisions?”

Grace closed her eyes, the truth of Janey’s words striking home. She nodded, forgiveness in her eyes when she opened them again. She put a finger next to her ear and raised an eyebrow.

“Elizabeth is taking things rather well, which, I have to say, I’m surprised,” Thornhollow said. “The girl is made of sterner stuff than I imagined.”

“It’s true,” Janey said, running her fingers through Grace’s hair to tame it. “When I went to her room to tell her the news she was sitting quiet by the window, watching the crowd. I think she knew without me saying what had happened, for she was crying all silent and proper, sitting there looking down on the lake.”

Janey’s voice hitched as fresh tears fell and she pulled Grace’s hair up out of her face, tying it back with a ribbon. “There,” she said, wiping her face quickly. “And now I’ve got to go and see to the other women. Nell’s gone out the way she’d want; has the whole place in an uproar.”

“Grace,” Thornhollow said after Janey shut the office door behind her. “I’m very sorry about Nell. I want you to know that I didn’t have any idea she would . . .”

Grace shook her head, absolving him. Nell had staged her own triumph and left the audience wishing she were still with them. Grace put her hand on her throat and looked at the doctor.

“No, I don’t doubt you’ll have it back, but it will be a few days at least,” Thornhollow said, glad to have the subject changed. “You’ve done some damage to yourself.”

She rose on unsteady legs, pushing away his assistance as she walked to the blackboard. She flipped their notes on the doll killer to the back, bringing the fresh side to face her. Chalk in hand, she wrote her question.