A Deadly Fortune

by Stacie Murphy

  “I suppose it can be a difficult environment.”

  “Indeed. And working here also means living here, present company excepted. Makes it difficult to have a normal life. One couldn’t very well have a wife and children living here, for example.”

  “How long have the others been here?”

  “Well, I’m coming up on seven years. Klafft… let me think. Twelve, perhaps? I’m not certain. Harcourt arrived only about three years ago.”

  They reached the ground floor, and Tyree directed him toward one of the doors to the wards Harcourt had shown Andrew earlier. “A bit of a surprise that he applied for the position, actually. He’d been on the verge of retiring, or so I heard. Klafft was furious when the board of governors chose Harcourt over him.” Tyree opened the ward’s first door, stepped inside the vestibule, and rapped on the metal door.

  “Lawrence kept misplacing his keys,” he explained. “So now none of us carry them.”

  Andrew nodded and returned to the earlier topic. “Dr. Klafft had applied as well, then?”

  “In a manner of speaking. He presumed he would get the job.”

  “Why didn’t he?” Andrew asked.

  Tyree glanced around, then lowered his voice. “I heard his interview with the board went terribly. His belief in his own superiority was on full display. You can imagine how they responded. He makes no secret of the fact that he regards their decision as a mistake.”

  “That must make things awkward for Dr. Harcourt.”

  “Indeed it does. But it was for the best. Roger is a terrible doctor,” he said. “Not bad enough to warrant dismissal, especially since it’s damned difficult to find people willing to work here at all. You know, when the asylum first opened, they used convicts to care for the patients. I’ve often thought Roger wouldn’t blink at reinstating the practice.”

  “His view of the patients did seem rather harsh.”

  Tyree muffled a chuckle as he knocked on the door again. “That was diplomatic of you. He’s more like a character from a Dickens story than a modern practitioner. Honestly, I don’t think he ever actually wanted to be a doctor, and certainly not an asylum physician. But can you imagine him in a private practice?” Tyree shook his head. “He’d be a disaster. Here, he’s an authority. And his patients are in no position to complain about his manner toward them.”

  Tyree quieted at the sound of the lock turning. “Malingerers first,” he said, with a wry glance at Andrew as the heavy door swung open. “We’d best ease you into it.”

  6

  The first night of her captivity passed more easily than Amelia expected. She woke to a noise at the cell door. A young man stood there, fumbling with a ring of keys and holding a tray. She sat up carefully, relieved to find her headache gone. She stretched and swung her feet to the floor. As the man entered, Amelia tried to speak but produced only a rusty whisper.

  “Good morning.”

  He looked up. “Good morning, miss. I have your breakfast.” He stepped forward, set the tray at the foot of her bed, and turned to leave.

  “Could you tell me what’s going to happen?” He looked at her, uncertain. “I mean,” Amelia continued, “can you tell me the normal order of things here? I’d like to know what to expect.”

  “I’m not supposed to talk much to the inmat—the patients. The nurse will be along in a minute,” he said in a low voice. “She won’t like it.”

  “Please,” Amelia said. “It’s very frightening not to know what’s happening.”

  With another quick look out the door, he relented. “Well, you’re new, so you’re in the isolation cells. You’ll be here for a bit while the doctors watch to see if you’re dangerous. Them that are—the ones who hurt themselves or attack the other patients—they stay here. If you aren’t, and if you don’t give nobody no trouble, they’ll move you to one of the open wards. Some of them ain’t so bad. The women there sew, and sometimes they go outside to walk or work in the gardens.”

  Amelia was a great deal more concerned about the wards where they didn’t sew or go for walks, but she knew she’d gotten as much as she could from the man.

  “Thank you.” She gave him a faint smile as he left.

  Her stomach growled as she examined the tray. It held a bowl of mashed oats, a hunk of dry brown bread, and a tin mug of what looked like either tea or weak coffee. Unappetizing under most circumstances, but it was anyone’s guess how long it had been since she had eaten. She apparently wasn’t permitted cutlery, so she used the crust of the bread to scoop the cold oats into her mouth.

  When they’d left her the day before, she’d been unable to do anything but lean against the wall, trying to master her panic. Amelia had nearly added her own voice to the chorus of wails and shouts coming from the hallway. Finally, she’d stumbled to the narrow bed and lay down, her knees pulled to her chest. She stayed there, as still as a hare in the shadow of a hawk. Eventually she must have fallen asleep, although she had been in such a state she was frankly surprised. But the long, dreamless—

  She went still. Dreamless. The god-awful nightmare of the Tower hadn’t come last night. Had it been a premonition? She tore off a chunk of bread with her teeth. If so, it hadn’t proven at all useful. Flowers and armless women and that slithering creature.

  And then the apparition in the park. She shuddered, recalling the feeling of invasion, the wrongness of that thing pushing into her head. She’d had unnerving experiences before—no few of them in the past several weeks. But nothing had ever come close to that. Jonas had been right, as usual. Her gift had changed. And this was where it had led her.

  She sipped at the mug—tea, weak and unsweetened—as she studied the cell. The walls and floor were rough gray stone, and the low ceiling appeared to be wooden beams mostly buried in thick plaster. The only light spilled in through the barred door from the window across the hall. The mattress beneath her was stained and the blanket was thin and rough, but both smelled of lye soap. They must be careful of lice and other vermin in a place like this. That was something to be thankful for, at least. She leaned forward to peer beneath the cot. A metal chamber pot sat under its foot. She shifted in sudden discomfort, hoping someone would take her to the washroom before she had to make use of it.

  I’ve gotten soft, she thought in chagrin. Not so long before, chamber pots had been a fact of life.

  Amelia pulled her attention back to the matter at hand. No one knew where she was. Jonas would be frantic. He would search for her, but with no way of knowing where she’d gone or what had happened to her, finding her would be difficult. She sighed, regretting anew her cruel parting words. If she couldn’t get out of here.… No. She would get out. She would convince whoever was in charge she was perfectly sane, and they would let her go.

  Amelia practiced her plea as though it were a catechism. Writing and rewriting her lines in her head, adjusting her tone and delivery until it was note-perfect. When the doctor came, she would explain. She’d been ill. She had believed herself recovered and had gone for a walk in the park, where she’d fainted. She had friends. She was no vagrant, no inebriate. She did not belong in an asylum. There had been a terrible misunderstanding. She would send word, and Jonas would come for her.

  She sat and watched the pale light move across the floor. The din from the other women rolled through the ward like waves on the ocean, never ceasing, retreating for only moments at a time before swelling again. A pair of nurses came to take her to the washroom. A second meal appeared, no more appetizing than the first. People passed in the hallway, but none of them looked at her.

  Amelia was careful to maintain a genial expression and correct posture, ready for the doctor whenever he should come. By the time a third meal arrived, she realized none would. She slumped on her cot and reached for the tray. She ate the bland food without interest, but the first swallow from the tin mug brought her upright again with a cough. Water, with a bitter, medicinal aftertaste. Laudanum, and a hefty dose of it. She set down the mug. She had
no interest in another episode of insensibility if she could avoid it.

  As night fell, the ward quieted. Clearly, she had not been singled out to receive the drug. She wondered at the other patients. The taste had been obvious. Those who drank it must have been too deranged to care. Or perhaps, she considered with a chill, sane enough to embrace any means of escape, however temporary.

  * * *

  Days passed, leaden and sluggish. The drug-laced water appeared twice more, following no appreciable pattern. Fearful someone would notice her refusals, whenever Amelia detected the telltale bitterness, she poured the tainted water into the chamber pot. The ward was as silent as a tomb those nights.

  There were no additional manifestations of her altered gift, and Amelia developed a faint hope it had left her. She tensed and readied herself each time footsteps sounded in the hall, but the only ones that stopped at her door were those of a rotating cast of orderlies and nurses.

  That morning’s nurse was one of the talkative ones, keeping up a steady stream of commentary as she went about her work. Amelia watched between the bars as she returned her neighbor to her cell. The woman’s face was slack and haggard, with limp hanks of graying hair hanging around it.

  “Your damned cat is right here.” The nurse scooped something from the floor and pressed it into the woman’s hands. The patient gave a low cry, and the nurse swung the door closed with a shake of her head. “She asks for her cat, we give it to her, and what does she do but fling it on the floor.”

  She unlocked Amelia’s cell as she spoke, and Amelia shifted in anticipation. Meals arrived at more or less the same times each day, but visits to the washroom were sporadic. She had several times been forced to resort to the chamber pot, much to her own disgust.

  Amelia stepped meekly out of the cell and started down the hallway. She glanced into her neighbor’s cell as they passed. The woman was curled on her bunk, keening. The stuffed cat, a pitiful, grayish lump, lay abandoned. They walked on.

  “And you,” the nurse said to the next cell’s occupant. “Told you you’d be back in the jacket, didn’t I? Gave you proper warning, but here you are anyway, and with none but yourself to blame.”

  That woman, shrouded like a corpse in white canvas and leather straps, was oblivious to the reproach.

  The nurse quieted as they passed the next cell, and both she and Amelia quickened their steps. The woman who’d threatened Amelia the first day was young, not much older than Amelia herself, from the looks of it. She might have been attractive, were it not for the unfocused fury twisting her features. She had an impressive store of profanity, and she was generous with it, hurling obscenities at anyone unwise enough to look in her direction. And words weren’t the only thing she hurled—she plainly did not have reservations when it came to the use of the chamber pot.

  In the washroom, Amelia found herself standing at the sinks next to the young woman who always cried for her baby, brought there with her own pitiless escort. As the two nurses gossiped by the door, Amelia washed her face and tried her best to ignore the girl, who stood mute as tears made shining tracks down her cheeks. Despite her resolve, she could not help herself in the face of such misery.

  Amelia reached out and squeezed the girl’s hand. Time halted at the touch.

  Though neither of them had ever learned to swim, she and Jonas had once taken a day-trip to Brighton Beach. With a packed lunch and a pair of borrowed bathing costumes, they’d boarded a train in the dark of the early morning. They dozed in a cramped compartment and arrived just after the sun came up.

  Enthralled by the view of the horizon, Amelia ignored the bathing boxes and walked out into the surf, enjoying the gentle tug of the waves and the sliding sand beneath her feet. Unwary, she went out too far. A rogue swell knocked her off her feet, and in an instant everything went mad. She clawed at nothing as she spun in the foamy water, buffeted against the ocean floor and terrified of being dragged out into the deep. There was nothing but rough sand and frothing water and naked desperation.

  Taking the girl’s hand felt like being swallowed by that wave. A torrent of images, vivid and wrenching, poured through Amelia’s mind and became as real to her as her own thoughts. She knew why the girl—Mara was her name—wept, what she’d lost. She felt what Mara did, the boundless sorrow, the scouring shame, and the utter certainty that all the world in every direction held only more of the same. Panic gripped her for a moment as she was nearly swept away. But like the wave that day at Brighton, almost before it had begun, it ended, and she found her feet again.

  Amelia blinked. No more than a second had passed. The nurses had not paused in their conversation. She let out a shuddering breath. So much for hoping her new abilities had gone. She looked at Mara, and the pain in the girl’s eyes made Amelia’s heart lurch.

  She gave the hand she still held another gentle squeeze and let go. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  The nurses looked over at the words. One of them snorted in contempt. “Says the likes of you.” She turned on the young woman. “And you. Always wanting us to bring you your baby. Can’t, can we? And well enough you know it, since you were the one what killed it. Oh, you fooled the judge, but you’ll not fool me.”

  Scowling, the nurse jerked Amelia away and hauled her back to her cell.

  That afternoon, Amelia lay on her cot, trying to make sense of it all. Before her injury, the most dramatic display of her ability had been the time she told Jonas to bet on Henny Pritchard’s little brindle bitch to win in the ring. He’d looked at her doubtfully but done it. The skinny dog had taken down an ugly, snarling cur twice her size, and they’d won what was, for them, a tidy sum—they’d slept indoors, with full bellies, for most of a month off the winnings.

  That had only happened the once, despite their many attempts to re-create the feat. Her whole life, Amelia had sometimes known things she shouldn’t have. But as often as not they were silly, useless things. Oh, she and Jonas used her flashes whenever they could, but it was never very often. Her ability simply wasn’t reliable. And it had certainly never shown her anything like the things she’d been seeing since her accident.

  The cards and the dream seemed to speak for themselves. They’d been a warning of her coming incarceration, for all the good it had done. Touching Mrs. Franklin and Mara had triggered something, but there was more to it than that. She tried to count all the people who’d touched her since she woke. Jonas, obviously. The doctor. Tommy. The nurses who’d stripped and bathed her when she’d arrived and a few of those who’d escorted her through the halls. She’d seen nothing with any of them. So it wasn’t as though every touch brought it on, and thank god for that, or she’d go mad in truth before long. The spirit in the park had affected her even before it touched her, but she hadn’t seen anything like it since—and fervently hoped she never would again.

  Amelia brooded for a while, then set it aside with a sigh. It wasn’t as though there was anything she could do about any of it at the moment. She and Jonas could talk it through once she was free. He would come for her. She knew, knew to her bones, he would never abandon her.

  With every day, however, her certainty grew the slightest bit fainter. At night, when the ward was ghostly silent and the shadows invited doubt, she could not master her traitorous mind. Jonas was coming, she reminded herself in the daylight. But at night she lay in her cell, remembering her goading words, imagining him boarding a ship for Europe, walking the streets of a foreign city. Each morning she shamed herself for harboring such thoughts. Then night fell again, and they wormed their way back into her mind, the images crisp and haunting.

  She edged ever closer to despair.

  By Amelia’s admittedly imprecise reckoning, it was the fourteenth day of her captivity before she finally caught sight of a doctor. He stopped outside her door, a nurse by his side. She straightened and readied herself to speak, her heart pounding. The doctor wore finely tailored wool, and his silver hair was smoothed back with pomade. She fought down a feeli
ng of instant dislike.

  “Carolina Casey,” the nurse read off a clipboard. “Vagrant, possible dipsomaniac.”

  The doctor made a noise. “Any incidents since her arrival?”

  “Nothing of note.”

  “Move her to the wards, then. Number three. See how she does there.” He began to move away without ever having looked at her.

  His dismissal was like a slap, and Amelia leapt to her feet. “Doctor! Please, I need to speak with you.”

  He stopped, turned. His gaze flickered over her, settling on a point somewhere behind her head. “Yes?”

  Her carefully prepared speech fled in the face of his disinterest. She groped for a moment before picking up the thread. “I… I shouldn’t be here. I’m quite well. I was ill, you see, but—”

  He cut her off. “Yes, yes, of course. You aren’t ill any longer, you have friends who would care for you, you certainly aren’t insane, you are here through mere happenstance, no fault of your own, and I should release you immediately. Is that what you were going to say?”

  Startled, she blinked at him. “Yes, I—”

  He interrupted again. “Miss…” He looked at the nurse.

  “Casey,” she supplied, after a swift glance at the paper.

  “Miss Casey, you cannot expect to be the judge of your own condition. And I assure you, if those things were true, you would not have been brought here in the first place. You should be grateful those who know better are able to look after you.”

  He turned on his heel and walked away, the nurse hurrying after him.

  7

  The suggestion was so lewdly graphic that Andrew felt his eyebrows climb toward his hairline. He regained control of his expression, if only just, but couldn’t stop a flush from spilling across his cheeks and down the back of his neck. The patient cackled at his discomfiture before settling back onto her cot with a satisfied grunt.

  He gave her a quelling look and finished his review of her file without further interruption: a long history of arrests for prostitution and drunkenness; no known family; committed to the city lunatic asylum after repeated public indecencies.