Lost Among the Living(31)

As I watched the days grow colder and shorter through the windows, that was beginning to sound familiar.

You are acquainted with madness, are you not?

Frances terrified me—but she drew me, too. Just like Mother did. Whatever was happening, Frances was the key. Dottie couldn’t help me, and Robert was gone. As day after day dragged on, I realized that if I wanted to understand Frances, I needed Martin.

Two weeks after Martin’s collapse, I left my room one evening and stepped onto the landing, ready to ascend to the upper floor. I had just screwed up my courage to broach my cousin in his bedroom when I realized I was not alone on the stairs.

On the landing below me stood a man I had never seen before—short, middle-aged, his graying hair combed back neatly from his forehead and temples. He was carrying a case, and he had paused in his descent, looking up at me. I froze in surprise, and for a moment I wondered if he would disappear, as Frances had. Then he moved, and I realized that he held in his hand a doctor’s case.

“Good evening,” he said to me.

I nodded. He gave me a polite smile, a little apologetic. Then he turned and descended the stairs below me, unaccompanied, as if he had free run of the house. I stared after him, bemused.

“Curious?”

I turned. Martin stood on the landing above me, looking down. In the dim light of the stairwell, his face was smudged and soft. He was slowly rolling one shirtsleeve back down the length of his arm. I realized I was standing nearly where he’d fainted that day after we’d walked in the woods, the last time I’d seen him.

“Martin,” I said.

“Hello, Cousin Jo.”

His voice was harder than it had been before, some of the kindness in it vanished. “Who was that?” I asked him.

He shrugged, the motion tight and uneasy. “My doctor.” He dropped his gaze to the sleeve he was unrolling.

“I thought the doctors had already come,” I said.

“Those were Mother’s doctors,” Martin replied. “Dr. Weller is mine.”

I felt my jaw drop open. “Dottie doesn’t know,” I said. “She doesn’t know you’re seeing him, that he was here.”

Martin raised his gaze to me. “You can tell her, if you like.”

I thought it over. I would get in trouble if she found out I knew and didn’t tell her, but I realized I didn’t care. “Is it helping you?” I asked. “Whatever he does?”

That made Martin smile. The lines on his face were deeper than they’d been two weeks ago, the shadows darkening the sockets of his eyes and the brackets around his mouth. “Would you like to see something?” he said in reply. “Follow me.”

I ascended the steps, my hand on the rail. He watched me come toward him, and some indescribable emotion crossed his eyes, fear and pain and a queer sort of excitement. The charming young man who had led me on a tour was not in evidence tonight. When I reached the top of the stairs, he grasped my wrist—his hand was icy and strangely soft, as if made of wax—and led me down the corridor to a room with its door ajar, light spilling from within. His bedroom.

It was messy, the night table and the desk covered in books and papers, empty dishes, empty cups, pens and bottles and jars. He had just blown out a candle, and the tang of smoke was in the air, scenting the room with that curious edge of fire that candles leave. I saw the thin line of smoke on the table next to the bed, twisting toward the ceiling, and wondered why he’d needed a candle when Wych Elm House was fitted with the latest electric light. I was still looking at it when I heard the door click shut behind him.

I turned to him. I was not afraid, even though we were now alone in his bedroom; I’d never felt any prurient interest from him. He leaned his back against the door, and without waiting for any further cue from me, he gripped his shirt just below the breastbone and yanked it upward. The shirt disengaged from the waist of his trousers, and I was suddenly exposed to an expanse of Martin Forsyth’s stomach, white and intimate, displayed before me.

“My God,” I said softly.

Across his abdomen was a jagged line, pinkish and healed. It rode upward, knotting the skin before tapering off in a jaunty curve that looked like the blade of a scimitar or half of a wicked smile. The wound had not healed cleanly or kindly; the puckers of skin that marked its length stood stark and angry against the smooth flesh below his rib cage, which I noticed was curved inward in pitiful thinness.

“Shrapnel,” he said. “Infected before the medics could get to me. After three surgeries, the doctors claim they got it all out, but I’ve never believed them.”

He dropped the shirt, and I raised my gaze to his face. He was watching me avidly, as if looking for something in my reaction. I lowered myself into the hard wooden chair by the desk. “This is why you spent three years in hospital,” I said.

“Four,” he corrected me. “I acquired this lovely wound in 1917. The first two years were for the surgeries. The next two were to cure me of the morphine habit I’d so conveniently acquired in the meantime.”

“Morphine,” I said, thinking of the doctor I’d just seen. “Does your mother know?”

“Of course.” He began to tuck his shirt back into his trousers. “She paid the hospital bills.”

“And your father?” I asked.

“You could say Father knows,” Martin replied. “Though he doesn’t quite believe it. ‘Use your backbone, son,’ is his advice. ‘It’s just a little pain.’”