After Alice Fell(53)

Stoakes pulls his watch from his pocket. “Last rounds. We’ll wait.”

Kitty shuffles, clasps her hands behind her back, and sighs. A pin springs loose from her ruffled cap and drops to the stone floor. Her hand darts out to grasp it tight, then she smiles at me and waves her prize in victory before returning it to its place.

The storeroom ceiling is low; I can touch it without much of a reach. Stoakes tips his head to keep from knocking it. Only Kitty seems at ease here. She’s taken the stool, crosses her legs like a sailor and stares at me. I clench my hands, though I wish to grab her shoulders and shake her.

“I loved her,” she finally says.

“I did too.”

It is hot here, the air thick with old meat and oily steam. I push up from the chair and brush past Stoakes to the main kitchen. Three women turn from the stoves to stare at me. Each in the same cotton cap Kitty wears, each holding aloft a wooden spoon, their mouths open in surprise. Like maidens spinning the hour atop a cuckoo clock. But my laugh strangles in my throat as the one on the end, middling aged and purse mouthed, flings her spoon across the room. Brown gravy spatters across the fabric of my skirt and slides in dollops to my feet.

Her doughy cheeks pale. She twists her apron up, squeezing it like a rag. “I didn’t mean it.” Then she lopes across to me, wiping at my skirts. She is the woman from the ward whom Dr. Mayhew stopped to assess. Are you all right? he had asked. But I remember how she shivered.

“It’s fine. There’s no harm.” I step away, but still she follows, grabbing and dragging her apron against the fabric. Her cheeks and neck flush in spots, and the skin is raked with scabs. She shakes her head, quick, as if someone’s cuffed her.

“Stop it.” I yank at my skirt.

Kitty shushes her, as you would a skittish foal. “Let her be, Della.”

Mr. Stoakes reaches his arms around the woman’s middle and carries her back to the stove. Then he picks up the spoon and tosses it to a bucket. “Get a clean one.”

The woman dips her head and picks and tears at the number—4587—stitched on her chest pocket. “I didn’t mean it.”

A bell clangs out in the basement hall, a flat, dull sound.

“That’s done,” Kitty says. She rubs her palms down her skirt.

There are footsteps on the stairs. One set. The door from the main hospital pushed open. A woman enters. Her walk is determined and sharp, and there is no grace to it. She holds her shoulders tight, her neck rigid as metal, her chin forward. She is dressed in plain gray with an apron so starched it rasps against her skirts. She flattens her palm to the fabric to tamp the noise.

She stops directly in front of me.

“I am Harriet Clough.” Her voice is like a rasp digging its way through wood. “You are unexpected.”

“But I am here.”

“So you are.” She tilts her head, parses me into pieces and puts me back together again, her expression never changing, save a tightening at the corners of her brown eyes. “What do you want?”

“I want to know who failed my sister.”

“I won’t be the scapegoat. I did nothing wrong.”

“Then show me what happened.”

Della starts crying; the other two women return to the pans. They are afraid of Miss Clough. I feel it in the shiver of air, the split second of hesitation before they pick up their rags.

The woman who’s accosted me—Della, number 4587—blinks and snaps her fingers against her thigh. Her cheeks blotch with red, and the freckles darken.

Miss Clough reaches out and grips the woman’s hand. “Don’t bring attention, Della. Never bring attention.” She squeezes tight until the snapping stops, and then lets go and smiles. She watches me, aims her voice to them.

“This is Alice’s sister. She wants to know about Alice. You’ll all stay quiet for me, won’t you?”

Her skirts make a sharp shirring noise as she turns to the doorway. “We have very little time. Follow.”

We hurry through a worker’s hallway of whitewashed brick and high-set windows. The sweet smell of baked bread and the acrid smell of the vinegar used on the floors mix and bite.

The hallway widens, trolley carts line the walls. Wide fabric straps and braces hang from hooks. We step into a room of white tile and black grout.

Like the room where Alice lay on her bed of ice.

But it’s not that room. It’s large and square with bathtubs and spigots and rolled hoses that clamp to the walls. Seeping lines of rust stain the tiles below the spigots. Four wheeled bins stand in a row, a flat shovel leaning to each.

It is so white. Tile. Tubs. Floor. Ceiling. The globes encasing the gaslight. Towels rolled and stacked to painted shelves. Cotton gowns along pegs, as if their owners had just shrugged them off, just stepped to a bath. All of it save the spigots piercing through the wall. Save the smooth-handled shovels leaning against a wheeled cart. Save that corroding rust. The common bath, I think, except it is knife-edge cold; most baths retain the steam, the cloy of warm water and soap and scrubbed bodies. There is none of that here.

I reach for a strap, roll it to my wrist, flinch at the bruise it would make if pulled tight.

“They bring the women in from there.” Miss Clough points to the thick metal door. The paint has been scraped where the long handle arcs, exposing the black iron beneath. “Then it’s a wash and an ice.”