Lost Among the Living(25)

The water was hot, and something of a shock, and I drew in a deep intake of breath. As the heat worked through my limbs, I took another and another. Alex pulled up the bathroom’s small stool behind me without a word and sat. He found a sponge and washed my back, gently, winding my hair out of the way. His hands were adept, his touch sure. I hugged my knees, staring down at the water. He lifted my hair from the back of my neck and ran the sponge there, too, the sensation filling me with warmth. The silence stretched out, settled like an even blanket, free of awkwardness. We seemed to need no words.

He did not try to touch me beyond that. I felt my mind stop spinning, stop scheming. I made a sound, and I realized I was crying, my tears falling into the water.

Alex put the sponge down and slid his arm around me, across the top of my chest, drawing me gently backward. I could feel him behind me, the silk of his waistcoat against my bare shoulder blades. He had not rolled back his sleeves, and his arm, still clad in its white shirtsleeve, dragged in the water, soaked through.

He pressed his lips to the side of my neck in a single passionate kiss, and I felt his breath against me. “Jo,” he said.

And suddenly I stopped fighting. I looked down at his arm, soaked so heedlessly in the water yet still holding me, and something about it cracked me open. The old Jo was gone, and someone new and unknown took her place. Someone who wanted to love Alex Manders more than anything. I lowered my defenses, put down my weapons, and let everything go.

Two weeks later, I married him.

There was no baby; not then and not later. It never mattered. We had each other.

And then he went to war, and he died. And he left me alone to start fighting again.





CHAPTER ELEVEN



That night at Wych Elm House, I dreamed.

I was in the front hall, standing next to the familiar umbrella stand, listening to the clock tick in the sitting room past the glass doors. The air was close, hot; I could not breathe, and I could not turn around. Instead, with the inexorable motion of dreams, I walked forward on silent footsteps.

There was something wrong with the light. It was glaring and harsh, burning like late-summer sunlight, and I blinked hard, trying to see. The corridor had somehow become the corridor at Mother’s hospital, the two places overlapping, and I felt my bare feet walking over cool tile instead of warm wood.

I turned a corner to find Mother sitting on a sofa, just as I’d seen her in the hospital visiting room. Her large brown eyes implored me silently from her porcelain face. She wore a shawl that drooped past her bare shoulders, and on the skin of her neck and her collarbones I could trace long lines of scratches, like claw marks, some of them welling with blood. Standing over her, wearing the white coat of a doctor, was David Wilde.

Something flickered past, lost in the glare of light. I raised my hand, trying to shade my eyes, trying to stare into the pitiless white. Stop, I wanted to shout at Wilde. Leave her alone. Behind me, I heard the snick of a door opening.

Forget, Mother said to me as blood trickled down her neck.

Then I was once again in the corridor of Wych Elm House. At the end of the hall I saw the front door hanging open to the steps and the cobblestoned drive beyond. Someone had come in.

Wet footprints were pressed into the floor, coming through the door. In the bright light, they gleamed like fresh paint—feet crowned with toes, leading into the corridor beyond. With rising horror, I realized the prints were made in blood, as if someone had waded barefoot through a bloody puddle.

It’s Frances, I thought, unable to stop myself. The prints led around a corner and through a doorway where I could not see. She got up from the cobblestones outside. She hadn’t stayed where she’d fallen; she’d gotten up and come inside, broken and bloody, and if I followed the trail through the doorway I would see—

I gasped awake, jerking in my sweaty bed, a half-formed sound in my throat. In the darkness I put my hands to my neck, pressing my palms to it as I took one breath, then another.

It was the middle of the night, with nothing but darkness coming through my window, yet my bedroom was suffused with faint, eerie light, grayish white and creeping. I inhaled a breath of cold dampness before I realized it was mist.

The dream fell away. There could not be mist in my room; my window was closed. But I could feel it against my face, and it carried a strange smell, sweet and almost cloying. I threw back my covers and sat up, kneeling on the bed and gripping the sash of my bedroom window. It was stuck; I pushed harder, jamming the heels of my hands against it, as drops of water collected on the ends of my hair. I made a low sobbing sound as my fingers slipped over the damp wood of the sash, and then the smell disappeared and the mist vanished.

I turned and stared into the blackness of the room, my breath rasping loudly in the still air. It was full dark again now, the mist gone as if it had never been. The blood pounded in my temples. I am not mad, I thought wildly, thinking about footprints in blood. I touched a finger to a lock of hair that lay plastered to my cheek and curled it around my knuckle, watching the drop of water forming at the end. I did not imagine it. I am not mad.

In the morning, when dawn finally came, I found leaves scattered on the floor of my bedroom, brown and curled like the palms of hands in supplication, dry and crumbling beneath the soles of my bare feet.

? ? ?

Dottie was waiting in the morning room, her lips beginning to pinch at my tardiness. “You’re wearing one of your new frocks, at least,” she said.