attention.
“My pleasure,” I replied. I rolled the wheelchair into position behind him, then leaned in close to help him sit.
It was hard not to retch. Like a lot of the wounded, he stank,
I wheeled him into the manor.
The days went on like that. Since I had no true nursing experience, I was relegated to the least important tasks, most of which involved cleaning things or fetching things or relaying messages from one part of the mansion to another. By the end of each day I retreated into my bedroom with a sense of weary, guilty relief.
And no matter how I scrubbed, I could not rid myself of the dreadful meat smell. I tried scented soaps, borrowed perfume from Deirdre: no use. It was always there.
By the eleventh day, I was beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t have gone to Callander after all.
Armand was busy with his new role as lord of the manor, but it seemed to me he was more of a specter haunting it than an actual person. We’d not spoken since the morning at the piano. Whenever I saw him now it was always from a distance, at the top of a flight of stairs or down long, gloomy hallways. He remained surrounded by others, the lone figure dressed in black or gray instead of khaki. They were all men with strict schedules and lives to save. I barely warranted a glance from any of them.
I’d smoked to his bedchamber once since everyone else had arrived. Only once. I’d Turned to girl beside his bed and looked down at him sleeping, hoping he’d wake, hoping for some stupid reason that I wouldn’t have to put my hand on him for him to wake.
I’d read somewhere that people always appeared peaceful in their sleep. All the cares and worries of the day slipped away, temporarily forgotten or buried beneath dreams.
Armand did not look peaceful. He looked shadowed, stark. He looked much like the dragon-boy I’d glimpsed weeks ago in the forest, when he’d lit that lantern and offered me caviar and trouble.
Out of curiosity, I leaned over him, inhaled; I smelled only soap and wine and him.
I realized, unsettled, that I was. A flicker, a small stirring of my blood. Nothing like what I’d felt with Jesse, but … I was.
I stood there a while longer with my insides roiling and that flicker growing, growing, my hand hovering above his shoulder.
In the end, I didn’t touch him. I left him to whatever dreams may have lulled him.
As I said, we hadn’t spoken in some time. Even so, I don’t know why I was surprised at what happened next. Looking back, I can see that it was absolutely inevitable.
The man with the cast was named Gavin Raikes. He was nineteen years old and in the process of dying inch by excruciating inch. Everyone now, not just me, could smell it.
“No,” he kept saying, staring up wildly from his bed at his doctor, at Deirdre. At me. “No, no, no, I won’t let you! I won’t let you, I say. Keep away from me!”
“This is just the cast now,” Deirdre was trying to tell him. “The cast, that’s all. It must come off. Be a good lad and let Dr. Newcastle take it off.”
“I won’t let—”
“Raikes,” warned the doctor, very stern, “if you don’t calm down, you won’t like what comes next. We must have a look—”
“No!”
Gavin began thrashing about and within seconds a couple of soldiers were on him, grabbing him by the shoulders and ankles, pinning him down.
“Quickly,” said the doctor to Deirdre, and like they’d done it a hundred times before—perhaps they had— they moved over the man, wielding saws, hammers, something that looked like a long metal claw.
I stood ready with clean linens across my arms because that’s what I’d been told to do. Although as soon as the plaster cracked apart, all five of us, even the doctor, gagged and tipped back.
There wasn’t much left of his leg. What there was was shredded, melted, sickly gross green. I looked away before I did something awful, like heave down Deirdre’s skirts.
Before I knew it, everyone else had recovered, was busy moving again, and Deirdre swiveled about and deposited something in my arms: a section of the plaster with a saw still attached, all of it slimy with decomposed flesh.
And something else. Small somethings, wiggling through the slime. Squirming.
I had seen maggots before. At Moor Gate there had been a boy—I hadn’t known his name—who’d been kept alone in his cell for so long that when they finally brought him out he’d been a papery skeleton, with big red sores on his lips and his hair mostly missing because he’d been tearing it out and eating it. Eating even his eyelashes and eyebrows.
I’d been pressed up against a hallway wall when they’d passed (that’s what you were supposed to do: press yourself thin against a wall when the guards came, hope hope hope they weren’t coming for you), a pair of men half dragging the boy down the corridor because his paper skeleton legs either couldn’t or wouldn’t work right any longer. They kept buckling, and it made the guards angry. They’d yelled at him and he’d giggled back at them. I’d reckoned then that he must have been actually barmy, because every patient at Moor Gate knew not to anger the guards. Not to make eye contact. Not to speak to them, not to plead.
Not to laugh at them.
The boy wasn’t really laughing, but the guards didn’t care. He was so young, probably only around eight. Maybe he hadn’t been at the Institute long enough to learn the rules, but anyway, one of the guards made a sudden movement and there was the sound of snapping twigs and the boy screamed, because the man had broken three of his ribs.
Three. I remembered that, because three weeks later I saw that boy again, but on a stretcher in the hall. They’d pulled a sheet over him but it wasn’t long enough to cover his face, and I’d crept close enough to confirm that he was slack and dead, and there were maggots crawling all along the sores around his mouth. Crawling out from the black-toothed, swollen-tongued
Little white wormy squirmy—
“Nooo,” Gavin wailed as I staggered back a few paces. Then, to my horror, he spotted me between the doctor and one of the soldiers. He held my eyes and cried out, “Miss! Miss! For God’s sake, help me, please, please, get them off!”
I shook my head, unable to look away, unable to say
I was about to faint.
Someone new crossed in front of me. In the slow, syrupy suspension of the moment, she looked exactly like Chloe Pemington.
Whoever it was, she approached the bed and blocked my view. A crashing noise reached me from a distance; I had dropped the plaster, spattering maggots and putrefied skin and pus on us both.
A hand grasped my elbow. I was guided backward, one step, two, three, until I was across the room, near enough to the main doors that a blast of fresh air hit me, washing away the worst of the stench.
I sucked it in—
“I will admit I thought you had asked Lord Armand to accept you here as a way to avoid the orphanage,” said the person holding my elbow. It was Mrs. Westcliffe, as fresh and smart as if she’d just stepped out from an
