SIX

When they pulled the sheets from her, the shock of the cool air was almost painful. Grace heard Mrs. Clay saying her name, but she could only moan. Her hands fell away from her sides and her fingers went instinctively to her belly, digging into the loose skin that hung there.

“Grace,” Mrs. Clay said. “Can you hear me?”

She nodded, fingertips still buried deeply in her malleable belly. “B-b—” She tried to speak, but the word she needed most wouldn’t come.

Mrs. Clay pulled her hands into her own. “The baby’s lost, dear, I’m so sorry. Listen to me—listen!” she said, clamping Grace’s fingers together as the girl’s mouth contorted into a soundless cry. “Heedson has to make sure you’re going to be all right after losing the baby. I’ve seen a few women on the farms get sick after, and I can tell you it’s not the way you want to go.”

Grace barely nodded, her dilated pupils fixed firmly on Mrs. Clay’s. “I . . .”

“You’re doing brilliantly, dear,” Mrs. Clay encouraged her, wiping cold sweat from her brow. “To hear your voice is a lovely thing. Keep trying. You what?”

Heedson came through the door, rolling his shirtsleeves up to his elbows. Grace cried out, whatever hard-earned word she’d been trying to form lost entirely as she scraped the sheets into a pile to cover her nakedness.

“Spare me, girl,” he said. “My only interest in you now is seeing that you don’t die on my watch. Your father would have my head.”

“A fine thought,” Mrs. Clay said through clenched teeth. “After what she’s been through on your orders.”

Croomes and Marie filed into the room behind him. Marie’s eyes were swollen from crying, and she wiped them with her apron as she set instruments on the table next to the bed, their metal edges banging against each other.

“What—” Grace’s panicked eyes shot toward the noise.

“Ah, talking now, are you?” Croomes asked. She pulled Grace’s wrists above her head and pinned her arms back in a meaty grip. “You’d best sit quiet while the doctor looks after your welfare. I’m happy to put you back in the sheets.”

Mrs. Clay cradled Grace’s face in her hands. “Listen to me, Grace. This needs to happen. You can die if you’re not looked after properly.”

“Enough,” Heedson said. “Grace, the less you squirm, the quicker I can be,” he said as he worked a hand between her knees. She lashed out instinctively, the sheet sailing with her movements as she kicked. Marie yelped and slipped sideways, sending the instrument tray to the ground amid a clattering of metal. Croomes’s grip bit down on her wrists, and Grace’s hands tingled as the nerves sang, but she didn’t stop fighting. Her blood-smeared feet scissored in the air, striking the doctor’s hands and knocking Mrs. Clay aside.

“God damn it,” Heedson yelled. “Have it your way, then, idiot girl. Let her go, Croomes. Let her rot from the inside out if that’s what she wants.”

The second the pressure released her wrists Grace lunged for the doctor, humiliation fueling her past the bounds of energy. She dove for a metal instrument and lashed it across his face in a vicious arc, sending his spectacles flying.

Then Croomes was on her, throwing her to the ground and grinding her face against the cold rock as if she would make flour out of her cheeks. Mrs. Clay struggled to her knees, picking her way over strewn instruments to Grace’s side.

“Grace,” she whispered. “What have you done?”

“What’s she done?” Heedson said, his voice towering over the women huddled on the ground. “She’s earned herself a place in the cellar.”

“Oooh.” Croomes leaned over to crow in Grace’s ear. “That’ll be a treat. Not quite the European tour, but a sight you’ve not seen yet, nonetheless.”

“Dr. Heedson, please.” Mrs. Clay struggled to her feet. “In her state . . . it’ll kill her.”

Heedson wiped the blood from his cheek, fingering his swelling lower lip. “The Board is coming for inspection tomorrow, Mrs. Clay. I’ve been attacked by a demented patient who’s been given every chance to show that she can behave better. One look at this exhausted, bleeding slip of a girl and they’ll have my certificate. She’s going with the worst, down to the cellar, where the Board won’t think to look for patients.”

Grace lay flat on the floor, all of her fire spent on the attack. Croomes didn’t bother to help her to her feet, simply dragged her into the hall. Grace watched dispassionately as her toes trailed through her own blood and the sound of Mrs. Clay’s crying dissipated in the dark.

“Nobody’s gonna look after the welfare of people in a place where ain’t no person able to live,” Croomes said, when they came to the cellar door. “You done sealed your fate. He don’t care who your daddy is now.”

The door yawned open with a creak, its black shadow creeping over Grace. She was a chasm, her baby gone, her revenge spent. Croomes would take her to the darkness and it would match her insides. She would blend with it, absorbed into nothing.

“Good-bye then, highfalutin lady,” Croomes said. She took Grace’s wrists again, and they passed into the blackness.

SEVEN

There was a voice in the darkness. It slipped through the shadows to find her ears.

“Get up, love. Get up or the rains will kill you.”

Grace opened her mouth and cold water flowed in. It slipped over her parched tongue, leaving behind a gritty aftertaste. She gagged, the convulsion pulling her into a sitting position as she struggled for air, water pooling around her.

“That’s something, anyway,” the voice continued. “I’ve listened to more than a few unconscious drown slow, not even knowing they’re dying. The rains slip through the walls down here and the reaper comes quiet with them.”

Grace’s hands sank into the floor, mud squeezing between her fingers as she pushed herself against the wet stone walls, panicked breaths wheezing into the pitch-black.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” the voice said again, low and smooth. “I’m not going to hurt you. Even if I should want to, there’s bars between us, love, and more than that. My conscience is stronger than they, and you’ve got the smell of young flesh about you.”

In the darkness all she could tell was that his voice came from the right. She pushed herself away from it, her feet digging into the muck for traction.

“Shhhh, shhhh,” her fellow prisoner went on. “Don’t get yourself out of sorts. Lose your breath and you’re likely to go over into the wet again. Calm yourself. Sit still and let me learn from the air you’ve brought with you.”

Shivering and streaked with mud, Grace found the corner of her cell. Pressing herself against it until her shoulder blades dug into the rock, she heard a deep breath from his direction, then silence. Seconds later, an exhalation, followed by another audible intake.

“Now then.” His voice reached for her again across the black, drawing her head up from her chest, where it had begun to sag in weariness. “Yours is a story whose events happen more often than are told. Tales like these belong to the black, do they not? Where they can’t be seen or heard. But I can smell it out quick like the devil.

“You’ve got the smell of man on you, faded but there, a scent still strong enough to tell that it matches your own, like to like. Fresh blood—I imagine even you can smell that, all coppery in the back of your throat—but I can say where it’s come from and know the harm done to you. And the babe . . .”

Another sniff, this one soft and delicate.

“Gone to the permanent darkness now. Sorry, love.”

A fought-for breath stuck in her chest, and Grace forced it outward, then another in, to keep herself going. Her arms crossed in front of her empty belly, their duty failed, nothing left to protect. A sob stuck in her throat, lodging itself halfway on its path to the dank air.