After Alice Fell
Kim Taylor Blakemore
Chapter One
Brawders House
Harrowboro, New Hampshire
August 1865
“Is it her?” The ward attendant holds up the oiled tarp. He chews on his dark mustache. Blinks and clears his throat. “I am sorry, Mrs. Abbott. I must ask.”
I clasp and unclasp my reticule, the metal warm between my thumb and forefinger, the click comforting, steadying in this room with white tile walls and black grout. There’s a single circular grate in the corner; yellowed paint chips from the ceiling clog its pipe. The cold pushes through the floor, needles of ice that poke my thin-soled boots. Ill chosen, meant for summer, not this chill room. But I hadn’t thought; I put on the first pair I found and last night’s stockings, too, hung from the bedpost because I was too weary to put them away.
A note delivered, too blunt:
Alice Snow deceased. Please collect.
The driver who delivered the note had waited, slumped against his hansom and fanning his face with a folded-up newspaper. His horse, roan and swaybacked, drooled and ground his teeth. The air shimmered and blurred the edges of the fence and abandoned barn across the road. It was too early and already too hot.
I had missed an eyelet when buttoning my boots earlier, and now the leather cuts into my ankle. I rub the heel of my other shoe against it until the chafed skin burns. Paint chips drift into a crevice of the tarp’s fabric, stick like snow to the crown of this dead woman’s head. Neat, straight part and white-gray skin. Strands of ginger hair blood stippled, a tangle loose and dangling. A mottled stretch of bruising across her forehead. I lower my gaze to the floor. There are divots there, hollows and gouges. Her body is cooled by a leather-strapped block of ice. The body who is Alice. Alice so still, Alice under the tarp.
Alice, my sister.
She is not meant to be here, her mouth agape as if she were about to share a thought, like she used to when she was very young, her finger to her lip, a shake of that ginger-red hair, then “Marion, I wonder . . .” Or “Marion, it’s an odd thing . . .” Her voice trailing away as she swallowed the words or clamped her jaw because I interrupted, finishing out whatever it was she wondered about or found odd. “Everything in and of itself, Alice, is so very odd that one must just consider it normal. Otherwise, you’ll drive yourself mad.”
The attendant stares at me.
“It’s her.”
He lowers the tarp, pulling it up to her forehead. It is too short. Her left foot pops free: a dark welt across the bridge, crisscrosses of cuts, thin long toes. Maybe she’ll wriggle them now, as she used to. “Look, Marion. I’m royalty. Look at my middle toe, look at its length.”
“You’ll need to sign the certificate.”
There, on the small desk by the square window that looks out on nothing, on a wall of brick and pipe, is the document. Smaller than I would expect. Simple and harsh.
Record No.: 4573
Name: Alice Snow
Sex: F
Date of Birth: February 3, eighteen hundred and forty-one
Age: 24
Date of Death: August 3, eighteen hundred and sixty-five
Cause of Death: Accident. Acute mania.
Signed: Lemuel Mayhew MD
I’ve seen too many of these, pinned too many to uniform lapels. I’ve seen so many dead: Antietam, Poplar Springs, Spotsylvania. Men stacked on carts, tarps too short to hide the high arches and missing limbs and nails roughly cut. I’ve signed so many letters, whispers from the soon dead to their loves. Forgive me. Help me. I am almost at heaven, Mother.
One signature and Alice will be released. One signature to absolve this place of any responsibility for her slipping from the roof, absolve the staff from finding her body splayed on the pebbled drive, half tangled in the sharp thorns of pink hedging roses. I dip the pen and hold it above the signature line. Ink beads at the nib and splatters.
“What time was she found?” I keep my eyes on the ink, watch it soak and spread along the short edge.
His foot scrapes the stone floor. “You’d need to ask Dr. Mayhew.”
“But Dr. Mayhew isn’t here. He’s upstairs with my brother. You are here. Mr. . . . ?”
“Stoakes. Russell Stoakes.”
“Mr. Stoakes.”
The ink is a river now, rippling around the paper, a black frame around my sister’s name, her death, the date. When I hand it over, he’ll place it in the brown folder with her name printed neatly on the edge.
He waits for me to sign. He is as cold as I am, has his arms crossed over his barrel chest and fists curled round his elbows. His eyes are a muddy hazel and flick with resentment. It’s not his fault he’s been assigned this duty. He taps his finger on the corner of the iced table. “She didn’t suffer.”
“Yes, she did.”
I turn from the desk, holding out the official certificate officially identifying the now official death of my sister, Alice Louise Snow, and watch as the attendant shoots a glance at it before setting it atop the folder.
“She’s afraid of the dark.” I take my gloves from my pocket and fumble them on. “I must find my brother.”
The door sticks as I open it and step into the hall. Low voices slip and mumble from both directions, from under other doors and away down the tunneled walk. Away from the white-tile room with black grout and my Alice too silent under the tarp.