As Miss Nightingale trimmed her lamp, Sinclair held his breath in the dark corner.
“As I recall, the two of you enlisted in this mission together, did you not?”
“We did, mum.”
“And you shall return from it together, too,” she said. “Just be sure that the bonds of friendship, however strong, do not divert you from our more general purpose here. As you know, we are-all of us-forever under a magnifying glass.”
“Yes, mum. Indeed, mum.”
“Good night, Mrs. Mulcahy.”
And then, in a rustle of black silk, Miss Nightingale continued down the steps, and when the light from her lamp was gone, Sinclair stepped out of the shadows. Moira said nothing, but beckoned him on. At the next landing, he heard the voices of several nurses, wearily exchanging the news of the day-one was describing a pompous officer who had demanded that she stop dressing an infantryman's wound in order that she might fetch him a cup of tea- while others were washing up. Moira put a finger to her lips and led him up yet another flight, to the very top of the tower, where he found a tiny alcove with a tall window overlooking the dark blue waters of the Bosporus.
Moira, lifting her skirts from the floor, hurried to the side of the bed and whispered, “Look who I've brought you, Ellie.”
Before Eleanor could even turn her head on the pillow, Sinclair had knelt by the bedside and taken hold of her hand. It was limp and hot, damp to the touch.
Her gaze was unfocused, and she seemed strangely annoyed at the interruption; he doubted that she had actually registered his presence. The fever, as he well knew, could blur the line between fancy and reality.
“If the instrument is out of key,” she said, “then it ought not to be played.”
Moira met his eye, as if to confirm that Eleanor went in and out of sensibility.
“And put the music back in the bench. That's how it gets lost.”
She was back in England-perhaps at her family home, or more probably at the parsonage, where she had told him she once used to go to practice the piano. He pressed the back of her hand to his lips, but she pulled it away and whisked it above her blanket, as if trying to scatter a horde of flies. They were everywhere in the hospital wards, but here, he noticed, so high up in the tower and facing the sea, there were none.
How, he wondered, could he get rid of Moira? To do what he needed to do-what had to be done to save Eleanor's life-he would need to be alone and unobserved. Moira was wringing a cloth in a bucket of water, then dabbing at Eleanor's face with it.
“Moira, can you get some port wine, do you think?”
“More easily said than done,” she replied, “but I'll try.” Moira, no fool, handed him the cloth, then tactfully withdrew.
Sinclair studied Eleanor's face in the moonlight. Her skin had a hectic flush, and her green eyes glittered with a mad delight. She was not aware of her own suffering; for all intents and purposes, she wasn't even there. Her spirit had left her body and was traveling in the Yorkshire countryside. But her body, he feared, would soon go, too. He had seen a hundred soldiers rant and rave, mutter and laugh, just like this, before suddenly turning their heads to the wall and dying with a single breath.
“Can you play me something,” he said, “on the pianoforte?”
Eleanor sighed and smiled. “What would you like to hear?”
He gently drew the blanket away from her shoulders, the heat from her fevered body welling up from beneath the wool.
“You choose.”
“I am fond of the traditional songs. I can play you ‘Barbara Allen,’ if you like.”
“I would like that very much,” he said, slipping the chemise from her shoulder. She shivered in the breeze from the open window. He bent his head above her.
Eleanor's fingers twitched, as if they were caressing a keyboard, and under her ragged breath she hummed the opening bars of the song.
Although her skin was still hot to the touch, gooseflesh had already begun to form. He placed his hand above her breast to protect her from the night air. Even then, beneath the scent of camphor and wool, she smelled as sweet to him as a meadow on a summer morn. And when his lips grazed her skin, she tasted like milk fresh from the pail.
She was singing, very softly, “Oh mother, mother, make my bed…”
What he was about to do, he feared could never be undone.
“O make it saft and narrow…”
But what choice was there?
“My love has died for me today…”
By daybreak she would be gone. He put his arms around her, the breath choking in his own throat.
“I'll die for him to-morrow…”
And when he bestowed it-his mouth closing on her skin, her blood mingling with his own corrupted spittle-she flinched, as if from the sting of a bee, and her singing abruptly stopped. Her body became rigid.
Moments later, when he lifted his head again, his lips wet from the dreadful embrace, her limbs relaxed and she looked at him dreamily, saying, “But that is such a sad song.” She stroked his tear-stained cheek with her fingertips. “Shall I play you something gay now?”
PART IV
“I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gushed,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.
I closed my lids, and kept them close,
And the balls like pulses beat,
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.”
CHAPTER FORTY
December 18, 9 a.m.
Just as Michael showed up at the infirmary, stomping the snow off his boots, Charlotte came out the door with a finger to her lips. She put her arm through his and guided him back toward the outer door. “Not now.”
“She okay?”
She tilted one hand back and forth while pulling on her gloves. “She's still having a rough time and running a low fever. I've got her on some sedatives and a glucose drip. Best to let her rest.”
Michael found he was even more disappointed than he'd have imagined. Ever since rescuing Eleanor from the whaling station, he'd been haunted by her face, the sound of her voice, the chance to uncover the rest of her story.
