Lost Among the Living(32)

“That’s why you fainted,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s me who’s sorry, for frightening you,” he replied. “The fact is, I’m usually in pain. Eating pains me. Exertion pains me. Sometimes even sleeping pains me. Mother’s doctors are useless, so I had to find my own. She has tried to help, but you know—just once I’d like to have a doctor who doesn’t report to my mother.”

“And morphine?” I asked. “Is that why you send for him? To supply you?”

Martin leaned his head back against the door, his gaze rising to the ceiling for a long moment before lowering back to me. “I have not had morphine in nearly six weeks,” he said slowly, as if the words fought him. “Forty-one days, if you wish to be exact. This is the third time I’ve purged myself of it in two years. Needless to say, the other two tries were failures.”

I put my hand to my mouth. I could not imagine it.

“Do you want to know something?” Martin said. “Dr. Weller doesn’t even help, not all that much. He gives me vitamin shots—he claims a stronger constitution will help me kick the addiction—and a mild analgesic. But other than that, he listens to me. He sits in silence, in that chair just there, as I go on and on with the candle lit. It’s so strangely cathartic.” He raised his gaze to the ceiling again. “Perhaps talking helps me forget that I would gladly strangle him if he had a few drops of morphine in his doctor’s bag.”

“What do you talk about?” I asked softly.

“The war,” Martin replied. “My parents. My childhood. My condition, and how ashamed I am. Franny jumping off that goddamned roof.” He winced, whether in pain physical or mental, and I stepped forward, took his arm, and pulled him gently toward the bed.

“You should sit,” I said.

“Thank you. Awfully sorry about the language.”

I shook my head. “I’ve heard it before.” I helped him sit against the pillows, swinging his legs up onto the mattress, then took a seat in the wooden chair.

“So you see,” Martin said as he eased back in the bed, “how horrified Mother would be if she knew I was telling the family secrets to a doctor. It’s why I haven’t told her.”

I took his hint. “I won’t tell.” I remembered why I had come to visit him, the information I needed. It seemed harsh to question a man so sick, but he was relaxed now, and I could tell he did not wish me to leave. We may as well talk, I thought.

“There are a lot of rumors,” I said, “about the family’s secrets. In town.”

Martin nodded. “They’ve never liked us in the village. Mother has never tried to ingratiate herself, I’m afraid, and Father only bothers with his wealthy friends. When Mother hired David Wilde as her man of business, it put the final nail in the coffin.”

“David Wilde is disliked so much?” I asked. “Just because he has one hand?”

An expression of discomfort flitted across Martin’s face. “Let’s just say no one in town approves of Mr. Wilde. What else do our happy neighbors say of us?”

I stared down at my hands in my lap. “That your sister haunts the woods,” I replied. “That the children won’t play there.”

That brought a frown from him. “False,” he declared. “Franny wandered the woods, yes, but she was terrified of the town children when she encountered them. They bullied her mercilessly. I can’t imagine she’d come back from the grave to seek them out now.”

“They say they’ve seen her,” I persisted, embellishing a little so I wouldn’t have to admit that the one who had seen her was me. “And they say she has a dog.”

Martin turned his head sharply on his pillow and looked at me. “Now, that’s interesting,” he said. “That they’re still talking about Princer.”

I blinked at him in surprise. “Princer? There truly was a dog?”

“No,” he replied. “There wasn’t a dog.” He saw the confusion on my face and added, “There was only a dog in Franny’s mind, do you see?”

“So it was one of her hallucinations,” I said. It made sense, then, why Dottie would deny the dog’s existence at the inquest.

“Princer was different,” Martin said. “She imagined him, yes. But he was different. He appeared later. He came through the door, like the others, but Franny trusted him. He was her ally. I think she conjured him in an effort to soothe herself, to bring herself comfort.” He shook his head. “I’m not explaining it right. It’s so hard to make someone understand who didn’t live with Franny. Her delusions became so real after a while.”

“You’d be surprised,” I said, thinking of Mother and her viscount, the illusion she summoned every time she felt helpless or distressed. “So if the dog was a hallucination, it couldn’t have killed the man who died in the woods that day.”

“I don’t know.” Martin turned his head back and stared at the ceiling, his expression beginning to close down the same way it had the last time we’d talked of Franny. “I wasn’t here.”

“David Wilde says he doesn’t believe Franny was suicidal,” I persisted, thinking of Martin saying the same thing himself just before he fainted.