After Alice Fell(57)

I lick my lips. Wince as my tongue catches on a stitch, pulls the skin.

“Where—” My voice is like crushed stone. I swallow and swallow. “Where am I?” But I think I’ve asked this before, because his eyebrows lift before he answers.

“The inn.”

“Your room.”

He shifts in his seat near the end of the cot and pulls a thin blanket up my legs. “My bed.”

I wheeze a laugh and run my tongue against the back of my lip. “The horse?”

“Cut on the pastern. It’s been seen to. The buggy’s axle snapped.”

I nod, but it feels like an arrow to the head. He hands me the handkerchief. Allows me to cry and doesn’t look away. He crosses his arms over his barrel chest as he leans back. He is larger than I remember from the asylum; perhaps it is due to the narrowness of the room, the small table. Somehow it is comforting.

I wipe my nose, wad the handkerchief, and push it under my hip. “You found me.”

“I heard you, more like.” The voices outside rise and then settle again. A man and woman.

“The doctor?” Yes, the doctor and his wife. She kept hold of the light when he took my arm to set it.

Stoakes looks toward the door. The chair squeaks as he presses back into it. “I wouldn’t call him that.”

“Something spooked the horse.”

“Did you see something?”

“I last remember you. You lit the lamps . . .” My vision waffles. “No. Nothing else.”

“You’ll need a tale. The bone man won’t say anything. I told him I found you on Jaffrey Road, and that’s the only thing he needs to know.”

“Jaffrey Road is the other side of . . . It’s not my horse. I borrowed him and the buggy. Mrs. Hargreaves. Thomas Hargreaves.”

“Do they know where you were?”

“She does. Oh, my God.” I try to sit up. My head swims, then feels like it’s being tightened in a vise.

He puts a hand to my shoulder and settles me back. “Give me the address. I’ll send a boy.”

“Did someone kill my sister?”

He doesn’t answer. Just rests his elbows on his thighs and smokes. Apple smoke.

“I went to the war to get away from her,” I say. “That’s the truth.”

“Is it?”

“My husband and I . . . There was always Alice in the way. Always. I’ve always taken care of her. He knew that . . .” But the vision that comes to me is not the cottage or Benjamin but Kitty. Kitty bent to a crumpled Alice. Holding her hand. Listening to the horrible noise of someone not ready to die. “You told me she didn’t suffer. But she did.”

“Perhaps she did.”

“Why do you work there?”

Stoakes knocks the ash from his pipe to a plate, then lays it crosswise. He takes a draught of his drink—a darker liquor than mine. “My brother Antrim got shot at Bull Run. I was right next to him, just pulling at his sleeve to get him to move. If he’d taken one step. But it got him. Here.” He points to his forehead, above the left eye. “Didn’t kill him. Wish it had. He couldn’t stop the deliriums. Mother couldn’t watch out, not that, not a grown boy. So I received a deferment. I make sure to look after him now. That’s why I’m there. Him and others.”

“I’m sorry.”

He nods and lifts his chin. “You’re shivering.”

“Yes.” I pick up the brandy, swallow the last bit.

He shrugs out of his coat and drapes it over my shoulders. It smells of sweet tobacco, and its warmth wraps around me. He sits back and lifts up the pipe again. “Just think. You could have been the one was kind to my brother. Wrapped up his wounds and held on to his hope.”

“Your brother matters a great deal to you.”

“That he does. As your Alice matters to you.”

The stark morning light washes the room. Ada’s eyes are liquid blue, pulling me in like a mesmerist. She sits on the edge of the bed, her arm next to my hip. She picks at the fabric, her fingers pushing it to the mattress, then winding it up. She is still in her walking cloak, the pin holding the neck tight and leaving a thin red line where it rubs the skin.

Mr. Stoakes was good as his word, had called for her and then slipped us down the back stairs to a cab he’d hired. She said nothing—just stared at me and then gave the driver a tip when we made it across town to the cottage.

I want Mr. Stoakes in the room; I want him to smoke his pipe and let me cry. Instead it’s Ada peering at me as if expecting some answer. And the blue robins circling the ceiling of Alice’s old room.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

She jerks straight and lets out a long sigh. “My God, Marion.”

My hand throbs; I need to loosen the splint ties, but when I move to sit, it jostles my arm. I hold my breath for five seconds, then let it out and point at the knots. “This needs to be loosened. The swelling—”

She unties the sling, a piece of gingham crudely cut, splaying it on my chest and thighs. Then she pulls at the cotton strips, one at a time, unraveling the knots, then, “Put your finger here.” And when I do, she ties the cotton again without shifting the splint, slowing just for me to pull my finger away and give mercy to the ache.