What Moves the Dead (9)
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Breakfast was early. There were eggs and toast and black tea and little else on the sideboard. I took three eggs and felt immediately guilty for imposing so on Roderick’s hospitality. Was there some way to make it up to him without appearing to offer charity? Bring in a deer, say, or a brace of partridge?
I sat with my tea, dipping my toast in the egg yolk, contemplating how one might increase the contents of the larder without it being obvious, when Denton came in. I nodded to him. He grunted. Not a morning person. That was fine, I wasn’t either. I waited until he’d had his second cup of tea before asking the question I’d wanted to ask last night.
“Do you know what’s wrong with Madeline?” I asked. “Medically?”
Denton raised his eyes blearily from his tea. “You don’t pull punches in the morning, do you, Lieutenant?”
I began to apologize, but he waved it off.
“No, it’s fine. I won’t know any more when I’m awake than I do now. Hysterical epilepsy is probably the diagnosis she’d be given in Paris, for all the good it does.”
“Hysteria?”
“Yes. Which is a useless damn diagnosis.” He poured himself another cup of tea and offered me what was left of the teapot. I took it, even though the tea had steeped to bitterness. “Hysteria is like consumption used to be. Something wrong with you that we can’t seem to fix? It’s probably consumption. Now Koch has isolated the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis and we don’t have that to lean on any longer, so we have to admit that there are people dying of something that isn’t tuberculosis.” He slugged back his tea and grimaced. “But we still have hysteria, although Monsieur Charcot tells us it’s in men as much as women. Do we know the cause? No. Do we know how to treat it? No. Is it probably a dozen different disorders lumped under one name? Almost certainly. Don’t ask me. I’m good with a bonesaw and I’ll pour brandy down your throat and over your stump, but disorders of the nerves are beyond me.”
“How odd,” I said. “Madeline never struck me as the nervous sort. Neither of them did. Though Roderick…” I remembered his air last night, his talk of fear and the dreadful house.
Denton gave me a meaningful nod, and I guessed that Roderick had expressed the same sentiments to him. “I can’t say that you’re wrong there,” said Denton. “Particularly not of late. But I can tell you that Madeline has catalepsy.”
“Catalepsy!”
Denton nodded glumly. “Severely. She falls into immobile states for hours, and they are getting worse. The most recent was only a few days ago, and it lasted nearly a day and a half. Her reflexes were gone, she was ice-cold, and I could only barely see traces of her breath on a mirror.”
I slumped back in my chair. That must have been after Madeline had written to me. No wonder Roderick thought she was dying. “I had no idea.”
“No reason you should have.” Denton rubbed his hand over his mustache. “Of course, that’s a diagnosis of the symptom, not the cause. As for the cause … I don’t know. She’s anemic and doesn’t eat enough.”
I looked over the spread of food. “Perhaps I’ll go hunting, if Roderick does not object.”
“I would have myself, but I’m a dismal shot.”
I smiled. “Well, I am terrible at sewing people up after they’ve been shot, so I suppose it all works out.” I pushed away from the table and went to go see what equipment I had to work with.
Predictably, I got lost. The house was a maze, and I hadn’t seen it well the night before. I had only found the breakfast room by following the smell of toast. Eventually I saw a set of shuttered doors, half ajar, which seemed to indicate a balcony. Possibly if I got outside, I could figure out where in the building I was. Failing that, maybe I could climb down and walk to the front door.
When I reached the balcony, however, I found that it was already occupied.
In daylight, Madeline looked twice as shocking. Her hair was a dandelion’s colorless wisp and her skin looked almost transparent. When she stood against the sun, I half expected to see light stream through her like a stained-glass window, with a frame of bones instead of lead.
“The lake is lovely, is it not?” she said, looking down over the water.
“Mountain lakes so often are,” I said, which was true, even if this particular one was not. It looked dark and stagnant. Lovely is not the word I would have used to describe it. In need of fire and holy water, perhaps. Could you even burn a lake? I know there was a river in America that caught fire once, and had made the papers as an amusing footnote about how the Yanks could even make water burn, but I vaguely recalled there had been some kind of chemicals involved.
“Dear Easton,” said Madeline. “Do you remember when we went down to the river together and tried to catch fish?”
“I remember that I caught one,” I said, “and your execrable cousin … what was van name? Sebastian?… tried to steal it.”
“And you pushed van into the river.” She wrinkled up her nose and giggled. I tried not to show how much the sound of her giggle shocked me. It sounded thin and papery, like an insect rubbing its legs together, not at all like I remembered.
“It was so much easier back then,” said Madeline longingly. “We were all van together. So young and healthy and hopeful. Now look at me.” She gestured to her face and body. “It’s no wonder that Roderick thinks I’m dying, when I look like this.”