The group hushed, all faces turned to Elizabeth, who blanched under the attention.

“How did you know that?” Janey asked.

Elizabeth only shook her head, hands clenching tighter to the air near her hair.

“Oy there, String,” Nell called, peeling apart Elizabeth’s hands. “Perhaps ye tell me where to find some buried treasure? Or the cure for the pox? Somethin’ useful for once, ye invisible bastard.”

“You dare!” Elizabeth gasped, flashing her teeth at Nell, who backed off. “You keep a civil tongue in your head when addressing String, Nell O’Kelly, or I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”

“You’ll what?” Rebecca asked.

“I’ll spit in your tea,” Elizabeth said, stamping one tiny foot as she said it.

The other girls burst into laughter, and Grace bit down on her tongue to keep from joining them. Janey tried hard to control her face but her lips were twitching. Even Elizabeth’s angry pout changed into a hesitant smile.

“Aye, she’s a vicious one, our Lizzie,” Nell said. “Tell String I’m sorry and not to get ’imself in a tangle over it.”

“String is neither male nor female,” Elizabeth said.

“I don’t care one way or the other,” Rebecca said, looking sternly at Janey. “All I want to know is if String is right?”

Janey looked from each face to the next, all eyes now latched on her in the orange glow from the lamps. “Fine then,” she said, tossing her hands in the air. “Yes, the widow Jacobs’s daughter is an adult, but Mrs. Jacobs has found it easier to pretend she was still a little one, rather than an adult who chose to . . . to . . .”

“Are ye sayin’ she’s a whore?” Nell asked, drawing out the last word lasciviously.

“Was a whore,” Elizabeth corrected yet again. “She’s dead.”

Janey nodded. “Dead indeed. And the knowledge of that has sent the poor woman into a fit. Now you know, and I want all your legs moving back to your rooms. And don’t you be telling the other staff I said a word to you. They’d have my hide for sharing stories that aren’t my own.”

Grace wandered back to her bed, listening to Elizabeth and Nell’s good-natured bickering as she went. She’d not known Mrs. Jacobs well, but the few times they had met she’d been reminded of Mrs. Clay. They shared a respectful bearing, a way of holding themselves that communicated a power restrained. Now Mrs. Jacobs was broken, for whether her daughter was child or whore, she was lost forever. Grace’s thoughts strayed to Boston and Mrs. Clay, Reed and Falsteed, the deplorable Nurse Croomes and Dr. Heedson, whose straying hand she’d so gladly impaled.

Her consciousness trailed down into the darkness of sleep, where even that blackness could not compare with the hues of her past.

“Is she going to be all right?” Grace asked, in an attempt to distract Thornhollow from the blackboard.

“Who?” he asked, tearing his eyes away from his own handwriting reluctantly.

“Mrs. Jacobs,” she reminded him. “I was asking how she’s handling her grief?”

“Not well,” he said, slumping in the chair beside hers and tenting his hands over his eyes. “The ferocity of her emotions is tearing apart her mind. Sometimes I think we’d all be best suited by not caring for others at all.”

“A bleak picture,” Grace said. “I dislike most people as much as you, but the few that I care for I hold very dear. If not for those who care for us, we’d never make it through the worst. I’d not have survived Boston without Falsteed and Mrs. Clay. Likewise I’ll do my best to steer my sister through mourning my own death, false though it may be.”

A long silence greeted her words as Thornhollow slowly pulled his hands away from his face. “You have a sister?”

“Yes,” Grace said hesitantly, realizing her blunder.

“Older or younger?”

“Younger. She’s ten years old.”

“And she remains at home?”

“Yes,” Grace answered, nerves making her voice thready. “Why do you ask?”

“And how exactly are you offering comfort to her, if you are—as you say yourself—supposedly dead?”

Grace stiffened in her chair, braced for the argument. “I wrote to Falsteed and enclosed a letter to her written by an imaginary friend. Reed placed it for me and retrieved her response, sending it to me here.”

“You did what?” Each word was succinctly bitten off, each syllable a vibrant slash in the charged air between them. Thornhollow’s brow was dark, his eyes snapping in a way she’d never seen.

“I wrote to Falsteed,” she repeated, matching him tone for tone. “He gave me an alias to use. Reed handles all our correspondence. I’m sure the hospital staff in Boston believes he has a lover named Madeleine Baxter, nothing more.”

Thornhollow rose from the chair, pacing the room with an influx of energy and anger. “And this same Madeleine Baxter happens to enclose letters to the younger sister of a female inmate who supposedly died under my blade? What if a busybody decides to go through Reed’s letters, or his wife somehow gets wind that he receives missives from a female at his workplace? I didn’t deliver you from that pit only for you to allow sentiment to drive us both back into it!”

“Sentiment, Doctor!” Grace exploded, rising up from her chair to meet him in her fury. “My little sister lives in a more refined pit, but a viper’s nest nonetheless. You truly think I would leave her abandoned to that horror simply to save my own skin?”

“Your own skin?” he bellowed back, not cowed in the least by her display of temper. “What of mine? What of my career? How would it appear if it were discovered that I colluded in the disappearance of an attractive young woman and reappeared with her elsewhere as my dutiful assistant?”

“Am I to be a kept woman, then?” Grace yelled, not caring that his office walls may not hold her voice. “Not for what’s between my legs but my ears? Here to hop to your beck and call when you need a plaything for your night’s adventures, no less of a doll for your own purposes than our killer’s victims are to him?”

“Enough!” Thornhollow roared. “I’ll not be spoken to like this when I’ve risked everything on your behalf. Your father is a powerful man, Grace Mae. You don’t realize what could happen to me if he should uncover our ruse.”

“No, Doctor,” Grace allowed, her tone suddenly cold. “But I know exactly what would happen to me.” She turned her back to him and left the office with all the disdain her mother’s training had instilled in her, head held high.

TWENTY-TWO

Their argument did not sit well with Grace. She searched for solitude under a willow by the lake, aware that her emotions were running high and might find vent through her tongue if she kept company with her friends. It would be a double betrayal of her pact with Thornhollow, wrecking not only the work they’d put in to covering their tracks in Boston but the lives they’d built in Ohio as well.

It was a Sunday, and so the grounds were brimming with people. Though the mad themselves may be a nuisance, the beautiful ponds, rolling green hills, and fragrant orchards of the asylum grounds were open to the public, and they often came. Grace sat quietly in her shaded spot, aware that her plain homespun marked her as an inmate for those too far away to see her scars. The sane had the assurance of the staff that only the meek and mild were allowed free to roam among them, but they stayed to the paths nonetheless.

“Can my Sally have some tea?” a high-pitched voice questioned, and Grace turned her head toward the noise.

A young mother came around the bend, pushing a pram from which a low coo emanated. A small girl trotted beside her, gold curls bouncing, a doll in her hands. “Momma,” she said again, tugging on her mother’s skirts. “Sally is thirsty.”

Grace’s heart plummeted, and her lungs ceased working for a moment as the sun lit up the little girl’s golden hair. Her fingers clenched on Alice’s letter, crushing a corner.