These Vicious Masks: A Swoon Novel(47)

I could not answer. My hesitation seemed to nearly destroy her. “Evelyn!”

“She’s . . .” I wanted to tell her, but I lost the words.

My governess closed her eyes with a sigh. She sank gracefully into the nearest settee and clutched her hat in painful meditation. “He still has her?” she asked, looking back up at me steadily.

Surprised, I peered deep into her grave eyes as I collapsed next to her. I nodded, and she pushed herself back up to her feet, pacing to and fro, weaving around the tables and chairs until I broke the silence. “Miss Grey?”

She stopped and looked at me, her eyes wet. “P-please, please forgive me—I am so sorry!”

I gaped up at her, unable to imagine what she could have possibly done.

“I—I tried to send warnings about Rose! I truly did!” The words poured out of her mouth so fast she started to cough on them. “But there was no way! They intercepted every letter, and no one would help me.”

“I saw you,” she continued, back to wildly pacing, hands in the air. “In your dreams. We spoke. You could discern me, Evelyn! Do you remember? Oh dear, I’m not describing this well at all. This must all sound absolutely mad!”

“I have been well acquainted with the mad lately, believe me,” I said. “I remember the dreams, although I only heard fragments. Are you saying you had the same dreams?”

Miss Grey sighed in apparent relief and gingerly sat back down. “It’s more than that. I’ll explain everything. All I ask is that you listen first, and then call me a lunatic and send me on my way.”

“I would never do such a thing.”

“I didn’t believe my parents would, either. That was the last time I told anyone about this, and it—well, it did not go as I wished.”

She cleared her throat and clenched her hands in her lap as her eyes met mine. Her breathing slowed. She began much as Mr. Braddock had. (Not that I was thinking of him.) Her tone had the same sad resignation: “Since I was fifteen years old, I’ve had an affliction. Whenever I fall asleep, I have very particular dreams about people I’ve never met. I used to believe they were parts of my imagination or characters from stories, because I would witness them perform extraordinary feats. Things no human can conceivably do.”

“I dismissed them for years until one evening, I had an encounter while I was awake. When you girls were about thirteen and fourteen, I traveled home to visit my parents for Christmas holiday, and while I was waiting at Victoria Station, a number of familiar faces caught my attention. They were all in a group, and I found it strange that I couldn’t recall how I knew any of them. Then I saw a dwarf of a man and had an even stranger realization: They were from my dreams. I had memories of them performing in a traveling exhibition. . . . They called themselves human curiosities.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I followed them, but I wish I hadn’t. I was curious to see if my dreams were true, and when my cab followed theirs to a small theater, my curiosity only grew. I watched them perform acts that seemed to take advantage of the powers I’d dreamed they had. A man who could create fire was a fire eater on stage. A woman with a powerful voice broke objects with just her song. And the longer I stayed, the more I hoped something would contradict my dreams, prove they weren’t all true. But nothing ever did, so I just kept watching.

“I watched from the street as they left the theater, I watched one of them get caught pickpocketing a man, I watched the man lunge at the pickpocket with a punch, I watched the man disappear through a door in the air before his punch hit, and I watched him reappear in the middle of the street, right in front of a moving carriage.”

Dear God. This sounded like the same man from last night. “Did he . . . kill him?” I asked, wincing.

She nodded steadily, her eyes distant and stuck in the past. “That was the most horrifying truth to realize. Not the fact that these powers existed, but the fact that there were people who did such awful things with them. When I returned to your home, I tried to pretend the nightmares weren’t real, but the harder I tried, the more vivid they became—it nearly drove me mad.”

I remembered mornings when she came downstairs pallid, exhausted, and reticent. She would assign Rose and me work that required plenty of writing and little talking, then spend hours looking out the window, endeavoring to keep awake. It finally made sense.

“Eventually, it became too much. Your mother was concerned for my health, and we decided it best that I leave.”

“Where did you go? We wrote you many times.”

I could see her withdraw into her memories as she rose again, walking stiffly to a streetside window.

“When I was sent back home, my parents demanded an explanation, so I poured out everything. They sympathized and told me all would be well.” There was a cold anger lacing her words that made me freeze, almost frightened to hear more.

“But they had decided I was mad,” she continued, shaking her head in disappointment. “My two sisters also work as governesses, and my father could not risk my condition becoming known. I don’t blame them, but I can never forgive them. They bundled me off to Belgium and shut me in a place worse than a prison—an asylum.”

“No! They couldn’t have!”

She clutched the windowsill to slow her trembling. “I cannot tell you the particular horror it is in such a place. Surrounded by strangers, treated like a dangerous, deranged criminal, I was made to drink vials of concoctions that kept me sick and sleeping most of the day. Of course, as I slept, I was forced to dream more. Sometimes it was pleasant. Mostly it was not. I did not know what I hated more, my waking moments or the dreams. I wanted to escape from both. But then, I dreamt of . . . I dreamt of you and Rose, Evelyn.”