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My blood ran cold. Father Étienne had told me another patient had died with my mother, and yet Mrs. Wauters indicated only one person died that night. Suddenly the young priest’s peculiar behavior in the chapel took on an entirely different tone. I swallowed hard. My voice came out hoarse, thin. “Wh … what do they say in the village happened to that woman?”

Mrs. Wauters frowned, unaware of my discomfort. “Delfine took her. But I have never put much stock in the old stories—though if you saw a spirit today…” She made a low sound in her chest I could not quite parse.

I blinked uncertainly, mouthing the name silently—Delfine. Who the devil was Delfine?

“You’re half-frozen, child…” Mrs. Waters tucked an arm around me, rubbing me hard as we walked along in the frigid wood. “All the children know the story, but you aren’t from here. The spirit’s name is Delfine. She grew up in the village some centuries ago—father gone and mother dead. The girl was raised at the priory working in the laundry. She’d come here to fetch the water every day, you see…”

My throat would not work. Couldn’t swallow. My mother was not murdered by a naiad. At least of that I was certain. She wasn’t a madwoman either …

Mrs. Wauters continued her story as we slowly walked back toward the village. Step by step. “One day a wounded soldier came to the village. Handsome as the devil with a forked tongue as well. Each day, she would bring him down to the miraculous waters of the lake. In time they became lovers. He promised her riches. A home. Safety and a life far from her toils at the priory. And the girl, fool that she was, believed him.”

Even I had to admit it was a curious tale, and a familiar one. Many cultures and lands have stories of water spirits and the tales of how they came to be. Seldom did they end well for the girl. “What happened to them?” I ducked my head below a low branch, shoving my hands into the pockets of my coat for warmth.

“Poor Delfine believed her lover when he promised to marry her. She met him here in this very wood with plans to elope. But the night they were to leave Saint Oda, he drowned Delfine in the lake whose powers she used to heal him. He took the coin she had brought with her for their journey and fled into the night. Ever since that day, Delfine has been claiming souls of those who wander too close.”

I shuddered. It was a variation of a tale I’d heard time and again in folk songs and stories across the world. But I had seen a child by these waters, not a woman scorned. What’s more, the girl had been real. “What do you think happened to the woman from the hospital? The one they found here this week?”

Mrs. Wauters glanced back at the lake before tucking me once again closer to her. Her voice came out just over a whisper. “You should ask the young priest. He knows all too well what happens up at Saint Oda’s. What I don’t understand is why he was the one to find her. Why they let him out at all.”

I furrowed my brow. “Father Étienne?”

She nodded with a frown. “He is not well. No matter what they say. Has not been for quite some time.”

Drawing to a stop, I turned to look at her, struggling to recall the few moments I’d spent in his presence. I’d been so consumed with thoughts of my mother, I’d scarcely paid attention to the young priest, but I did note the curious way he behaved when I asked about my mother. The wind whipped at Mrs. Wauters’s hair, pulling it loose from the braided crown she wore. “What do you mean, he’s not well?”

She closed her eyes shaking her head. “I love him like a son. But Étienne is a patient at the hospital as well. He grew up here in Saint Oda alongside my Djhan and Félix. This was before his formation. Étienne became a chaplain in the Belgian army once the war began. Djhan and Félix joined alongside him. Then … well … Étienne came home to Saint Oda’s after the armistice. The doctors said it was shell shock, but does shell shock cause one to hear voices, to know the souls of man?”

I shivered at the thought.

“There are some who say he’s been touched by God. That it is the Lord who whispers to him at night, but I do not know what to believe. Regardless, Father Crawford is fond of him and allows Étienne to say mass now and then, and it does the boy a world of good. He and my son Djhan were close. The pair would oft leave the priory to come to my house for supper. At least before von Keller forbade the patients from leaving the priory grounds.”

So, Mrs. Wauters’s son was a patient at Saint Oda’s as well. That must be the reason for her strange words when speaking of him this morning. I tucked a windswept curl back behind my ear as we continued through the wood. “Dr. von Keller allowed the patients into the village?”

Her fingers tapped upon the handle of the basket as she stepped over a large root. “Yes. For the longest time if patients were well enough, they could come into the village. The hospital gives each of the patients a silver magpie pin to identify them. Their name is engraved upon the back. It was how we would know them as one of ours and not strangers to the village. Those who were well enough could do day work for wages to send home to their families or save for once they were discharged from the hospital. But no longer. That’s why I found it so strange Étienne was the one to find that poor drowned woman. He should not be off hospital grounds, not when we cannot even see our own families anymore.”

My pulse sped up as I recalled the pin he wore on his cassock. The little silver bird glinting in the sunlight had caught my attention. That must be what Mrs. Wauters was describing. Suddenly I understood why she did not know how her son was. Her son was at the hospital with Father Étienne. “Your son … Djhan … is he still there?”

The woman came to a stop. The shadows from the trees made a lattice upon her face and hair. “I do not know. I have not seen nor heard from him since December. When I go to the hospital to ask, they will not tell me anything. Father Crawford says he is alive and I should pray for them.” Her eyes grew glassy as she took my hand, giving it a squeeze. “But the last I saw my Djhan, he and Étienne came to supper with a strange young woman. A slight creature. At first, I thought she was a boy. She bore a pin like theirs so I assumed she must be a patient, but I never saw her before—nor after. The very next day, von Keller forbade patients to leave the hospital grounds. They are not allowed visitors either. Everything that once was allowed is now forbidden.”

December. I shivered, scarcely able to force my lungs to draw in air as my mind tripped on ahead. It was late December when a woman came to Oxford seeking me out, a woman who had information about my mother. The very same time she was seeking me, was when something had changed here at Saint Oda’s, turning what was once a place of convalescence into little more than a prison. It was too much to be a coincidence. My breath grew short. Hari had described the imposter to me. The one who sought me in Oxford. He said she was a young woman who could easily be confused for a boy. “Do you think that you would have recognized the girl if she was a patient?”

Mrs. Wauter’s expression was grim. “I live in this village, Mrs. Vaughn. My only son is a patient there. I know many of them by face, if not by name. It is possible, but not likely that she was. At the time I thought it odd. I still do.”

There was a thread here, a ghost of a clue. Hazy and shrouded, yet I could almost see it. It had to signify that Dr. von Keller locked down the hospital after that woman supped at Mrs. Wauters’s home in December. If that woman was the same imposter who appeared in Oxford in December claiming to be my mother, then it underscored my suppositions of foul play. Now the question became, what was von Keller trying to hide by locking down the priory, and why? I was grateful I’d not rushed off to confront him at my first suspicion of wrongdoing. For if Dr. von Keller was involved in my mother’s death, I might have inadvertently tipped my hand. Perhaps I was getting better at this lady-sleuthing business after all.

CHAPTER EIGHTThe Walls of Saint Oda’s

MRS. Wauters left me in the center of town while she returned to the boardinghouse with her basket of mushrooms. Something had most certainly happened here in December, the only question was what, and how it connected to my mother. If it connects to your mother.

I checked my watch again, weary of the nagging voice in my head. I’d have to speak with this Dr. von Keller fellow first, before going to the children’s home. After what Mrs. Wauters told me, I had a great deal more to ask the man than I’d first believed. My mind flitted back to the imposter who’d sought me out in Oxford this past December. I’d not met the woman as she vanished before our appointment, but it was clear she intended to give me a message. One she was unable to deliver. I racked my memory for clues, signs, anything that might point back to this place. I’d thought it odd at the time the imposter would go so far as to blackmail me for just a few moments of my time. She hadn’t wanted money. She simply wanted to talk, and then disappeared the very morning of our appointment with only a few words scrawled upon a piece of paper.

I AM SORRY, MR. ANAND. I CANNOT.

And now, suddenly, it had become imperative I discover why she could not. Was it a matter of cold feet that had nothing to do with this place? Or had something more sinister occurred at Saint Oda’s that forced her silence? The priests had mentioned my mother left the priory before this most recent disappearance … sometime in the fall.

I chewed the inside of my cheek thoughtfully as I neared the priory gates. Edging closer to the broken wall overlooking the strangers’ cemetery and my mother’s washed-out grave. The river had now returned to its banks.

Sometime in the last dozen or so hours, someone had also reburied the grave—the fresh mud mixed with dead grass and chaff turned up by the floodwaters. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought I’d imagined the whole thing yesterday. The girl, the exposed grave, the hare. Yet the little doll told me otherwise. It had been real. All of it.