A Splendid Ruin: A Novel

by Megan Chance

  Costa stared at me, but she was disconcerted, and I heard it even through her threat, which did not have its usual force. “You’d best watch yourself, Miss Kimble.”

  I smiled.

  “No one will believe a word you say,” she said quietly. “You’re a lunatic.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe not.”

  It was a gamble. I was surprised when it worked, when she considered me briefly and then retreated to the table. She hung the strap on the hook and sat down, turning back to her magazine.

  I took a deep breath of air and left the window open when I went to bed.

  Be clever, I told myself. Think like Goldie. Think like Uncle Jonny. What had happened with Costa gave me confidence.

  The next time I saw her, she raised her eyes warily, and I said, “I’d like my button back, please.”

  She said nothing, but the button was on my pillow within the hour. I squirreled it away; I kept it with me from that moment on, and my fortunes changed. I watched the way the head laundress, Mrs. Thompson, favored quiet, delicate, and somewhat stupid Cynthia Letterer, who toiled over the wringers until the laundress put her to the less onerous work of folding. I watched when Thompson pressed too close to Cynthia, when she ran her hand over Cynthia’s hip, and then later took her into the supply closet.

  Two days later, when Thompson asked me to take a turn on the wringers, I said casually, “I don’t think so,” and then, at her infuriated expression, “I wonder if Mrs. Letterer’s husband would like to know how she’s being handled by the laundress.”

  Again, I was surprised when it worked, and Thompson stepped away.

  I spent hours at the window, watching the yard, and noted the special relationship one of the groundskeepers had with a young assistant. I watched them go surreptitiously behind a shrub near the wall, and then emerge later, both smiling. Some of the nurses liked the boy too, and some of the inmates—the women from the special First Ward—preferred another groundskeeper with blond hair and a winning smile. O’Rourke constantly and surreptitiously tucked things into her pockets. Findley bribed patients into behaving with sugar, which was strictly forbidden.

  Now, suddenly, I understood that my revenge against the Sullivans would have nothing to do with burning down the house on Nob Hill or sending porcelain angels to hell. I understood that the power I held was far more destructive than that.

  Secrets.

  I knew then how I would destroy them if I ever got out of Blessington. I would give Dante LaRosa the information he wanted. I would tell him everything I knew. Then there was Shin, who could not only help me clear my name of murder and madness, but who also must be privy to other Sullivan confidences. I set it all out in an elegant list in my head: What I Will Do, by May Kimble:

  1) Prove that I did not kill my aunt

  2) Take back my inheritance

  3) Use the Sullivans’ secrets to destroy them

  4) Find out who my father is

  And the most important piece of all, the key to everything:

  5) Enlist Shin and Dante LaRosa to help me

  In the asylum I honed my skills. I prepared. I worked toward planning my revenge with a zeal and a talent that surprised me. But then, I’d been trained in treachery by the best.

  And so I listened when Sarah Grimm’s comments about Dr. Scopes became more and more descriptive. Not only did she let him undress her, but he had suckled her. He had put his fingers into her. She hoped for more. True? Not true? Oh, but the truth didn’t matter, did it? When Dr. Scopes asked me to lift my skirts for an examination, I said, “I didn’t know doctors were allowed to make love to their patients. Or to their nurses. When do the commissioners visit again? I think they’d like to know.”

  I noted how he grappled with my words. “You must not allow yourself to believe such delusions, Miss Kimble.”

  “Sarah has a love bite on her breast. Here.” I pointed to a spot on my own. “I am not imagining that, I think. I might point it out to Nurse Costa. Do you think she would be angry?”

  It was that gem that won me the private room. It was small and bare, but it was mine. The bed was bolted to the floor. The window was too high up to see through, the panes small and round and thick, but it let in the light, and when the sun drew reflections and patterns upon the floor, I would start at the reminder that there was still something beautiful in the world. Most importantly, the smells here were my own.

  For weeks, I changed my circumstance in this fashion. Clothing was regularly donated to the asylum, I discovered. Most of it went to the nurses. I managed to win some things for myself, including a nearly new nightgown in soft pink. I began to be allowed into the room where the best-behaved women whiled away their hours reading or talking or playing games. From there, the grounds were not so hard to gain, and I was allowed an hour every day to walk the circular path through the grass, to glimpse the garden that visitors were told was for the use of the inmates, but which was kept for Mrs. Donaghan only. Sometimes I saw her out there, clipping or digging in the cool sun. I watched her exchanges with the favored groundskeeper, the bags and small packages tucked into her apron pockets. It took me weeks of watching to connect those packages to certain patients. Mrs. Donaghan was taking bribes to get patients forbidden items from outside the asylum.

  And so I asked for a few hours alone in her garden. She was agreeable enough, rather easily persuaded, in fact. She even, bless her, got me the sketchbook and the pencils I requested, and so, for the first time since I’d set foot in this hell, I found myself at peace among a bounty of flowers, alone and surrounded by scents and the quiet buzzing of insects that drowned out the asylum noises beyond.

  The day she brought me the sketchbook, I stared at the curling, pink-edged petals of a yellow rose and the urge to create surged as it always had, undiminished, blazing to life as if it had been waiting. I clutched the pencil and turned to the first page in the sketchbook and began to draw. The sheer relief of it made me want to cry. As long as I had this, I knew, I could bear anything. I could bear this place forever.

  Yes, I could bear this.

  The echo of my thought startled me. The weight of the future it contained frightened me more than anything else that had happened at Blessington. I looked up from the page, past the heavy rose bobbling now in the breeze. I had found a way to be here. I had found a way to survive, and that was the first step to acceptance.

  But I did not want to accept this. I could not. My fear was too great that I might become complacent, one of the many women treading this endless circular path and finding it pleasant, commenting upon the good stew on the days the commissioners were here, reading and chatting and pretending this was all some society social hour with a hostess who made a truly terrible tea.

  Belonging, just as I’d always wanted.

  Not here. Please don’t let it be here.

  I stared at my hand clutching that pencil, awareness and regret chasing one another. I did not want to give up drawing, yet I knew what would happen if I did not. It would save me, just as it always had. It would make everything all right, but in the end, that would numb any necessity or desire I had to get out of this place. It would give the Sullivans exactly what they wanted. It would destroy me.

  I scratched out the lines of the room I had begun to draw. I banished it from my memory. Then I tossed the pencil to the ground. I shoved the sketchbook beneath the bench, and even as my heart ached at releasing it, I wished for rain to soak it, to cover it in mildew and remove its temptation.

  I would make my life bearable here, because I had to, but I would never accept it, and I vowed not to draw another thing until I was out of this place. One day, I would be free, and when that day came, I would do what I could to take back what was mine. I would make them pay for what they’d done to me.

  In the meantime, I was the seed, biding its time, waiting for the soil to warm and soften, stretching my roots, reaching for the sun.

  I did not expect the earth to move itself for me.
But when it did, I was ready.

  PART THREE:

  RETRIBUTION

  SAN FRANCISCO, APRIL 18, 1906

  EARLY MORNING

  I was already awake when the roar thundered from a sky blued with encroaching dawn, a howling from nowhere, from everywhere. I struggled to my elbows as the walls began to shake. The bed rocked as if it were desperately trying to escape the bolts anchoring it to the floor. A train—no, something—had hit the building, or no—what was this?

  The floor rose and fell in disorienting, nauseating waves. The room bucked and jerked; I grabbed the sides of the bed to keep from being thrown. The ceiling split with a thunderous crack. I looked up, too stunned to be afraid, and someone’s bare leg thrust through amid a rain of plaster dust. The building lurched, my stomach lurching with it, and the ceiling snapped shut again with a rumbling groan, severing the foot, which fell onto me with a hard thump, spurting a spray of wet into my face. Blood.

  I screamed and lunged from the bed just as the floor upended and tossed me down. I dug my fingers into the floor, trying to claw into the wood, to anchor myself. The building twisted and moaned and shook me loose again. Nothing steady, nothing fixed. The disembodied foot danced across the floor as if it were alive. The thick round panes of my little window smashed, one after another, shards jumping and skittering. The ceiling rattled, plaster fell in chunks, raising choking clouds of dust. I was going to die. We were all going to die, and it was going to hurt. Terrified, I dragged myself beneath the bed.

  Then the shaking stopped. Barely long enough to catch my breath, to think, It’s over, to hear the screams and the wails coming from beyond the door, before it started again, more violently than before.

  A terrible grinding filled my ears, vibrating into my skull, and then there was no more floor, nothing beneath at all, only a pitch into absence and darkness. I grabbed for something, anything, but I was falling and all I could think was No. Please. Not now, after all this. Not yet.

  I don’t know how long it was before I opened my eyes to dust and grit and gloom. I wasn’t dead after all, but trapped. The foot, thankfully, had fallen into its own hell. The bottom of my bed was only a breath from my face; the heavy metal frame pinned me in place. I flexed my fingers, dislodging rubble, trying to pull loose, failing. I could not tell where I was in the world, or even if the world still existed. I could not even tell if I was hurt.

  Sounds came to me in fractured bursts: muffled groaning, faraway sobbing, brick and stone crashing, someone shouting, “Watch out!” A horse screaming.

  “Over here!” someone called from a distance.

  I raised my hips. The bed did not budge. Trapped, yes. Buried alive. With growing panic I punched at the frame with my one free hand, and then again. Nothing.

  “Help! I’m here! Help!” Desperate effort made me cough, and then I couldn’t stop hacking—eyes watering, throat stinging, so much dust. When the spasms finally subsided, I twisted, or tried to. As if in response, the world trembled once more, the ruins shaking, a quiet roar now, but no less terrifying. I closed my eyes, once again expecting both pain and death. More stones cracked and broke and fell, brick and plaster and wood, a distant explosion, a panicked cry, but the earth was merciful this time, and it was just enough to unsettle the rubble, enough to free my other arm and shift the bedframe. I could ease from beneath it, but I couldn’t get past the beam that had crushed it. No amount of prying or digging, no matter how frenzied, moved me an inch. The quiet was deadly. I could hardly breathe, my lungs full of dust, my nostrils and my mouth caked with it.

  “Help!” I rasped again, breaking on a sob of frustration and fear. “Please! I’m here! Help!”

  I heard someone vomiting, very close, and then a man called, “Did you hear something?”

  I scrabbled more urgently. “Here! I’m right here!”

  Now the crunch of footsteps settling debris, the scraping slide of things dragged aside. The crack of light widened, and then widened again, just as had the ceiling in my room. This time there was no foot punching through, but instead a man peering down, the sky behind him. The brightness blinded briefly before I made out his rough and craggy features.

  “You all right, miss?” He looked over his shoulder, gesturing, calling, “Come here now! Hurry! I got a woman!”

  Slowly, they managed to pull me free, and I was out of my tomb and into the morning. My head throbbed, my back and my hips ached. I coughed so violently and painfully I thought I might split my lungs.

  I had no time even to thank them as another man called and they went hurrying off to help, one of them pausing only long enough to glance at my forehead and say, “You’d best find a doctor.”

  Gingerly, I touched my forehead. My fingers came away covered with blood. The severed foot, I thought, but no, this was my own blood trickling down my cheek. I choked on filthy mucus that I spat into the wreckage as I stumbled forward, my bare feet tender, gray with dust. The entire side of Blessington where my room had been had collapsed upon itself, four stories now only crushed brick, broken glass, twisted metal, splintered wood. The wall that had surrounded the asylum lay in pieces, the iron railing mangled. I stared at what was left. A half-formed building, exposed rooms, jagged bits of flooring and plaster hanging. Impossible to imagine that it had ever been anything to fear.

  Everyone looked as I felt; we were like ghosts haunting the aftermath of a tragedy. A woman huddled in a blanket. A man in underwear and a tattered coat blinked as if he’d just awakened—one of the groundskeepers. The silence was eerie, a city gone mute when before it had sung joyfully with activity. The only human sounds were the grunts of the rescuers, the cries for help, others hacking and sneezing in the dust.

  I expected someone to call out, There you are, miss. Come now, but no one spoke any such thing. It occurred to me then that no one was watching; there was no one to call me back. No one yet had grasped who I was. But at some point they would.

  I pressed for the reassuring lump in the waistband of my drawers beneath my nightgown. Yes, there it was, secured in the pocket I’d forced into the seam. My uncle’s vest button. What was left of my confusion vanished with the sharp reminder of my purpose. This was not how I’d imagined things to happen, but I was no longer the fool I’d been. I would not miss an opportunity when it presented itself. I had to get as far from Blessington as I could, as quickly as I could, as unobtrusively as I could.

  A burst pipe spilled water into a gurgling course over loosened cobblestone, creating a sudden stream in the center of a city street. The water stung the cuts on my feet, but I did not rush my step, not yet, though I wished to run.

  Once again, the earth beneath my feet shrugged. I steadied myself against sudden vertigo—no wall, nothing to grab on to. It was soon over, and other patients emerged from the rubble, injured and bleeding, one of them crying, “She’s dead! I saw her die! Oh God, save us!” I did not slow to discover who was dead, because now attendants were coming to themselves, chasing after bewildered patients and tying them with sheets and straitjackets and leather belts to whatever secure thing they could find.

  I ignored the pain of my injured feet and the gash in my forehead and kept walking, losing myself in the people massing in the streets, moving with them away from Blessington. Thankfully I was no longer wearing inmate gray, but my pink nightgown. Only a nurse or another patient would recognize me as belonging to the asylum, but that was enough. I didn’t want to call attention to myself. Do not look at me. Do not see me. I am no one.

  A ghost. Smoke and dust and shadow. Nothing substantial until I chose to be, and when I did, no one would ever underestimate me again.

  It was no longer a city I recognized. The street before me had cracked into great fissures running helter-skelter, the sidewalks bordering it broken into slabs like candy brittle. Rail tracks twisted. Horses lay dead in the streets, downed by falling walls or bricks. A woman stood crying before a house that had shifted off its foundation and tilted into the one next door.
The exterior wall of another had crumbled away, leaving it exposed like a dollhouse, and the man inside rushed about picking up shattered dishes. The fronds of the palm in the yard below wore a chair and a crocheted throw.

  Keep walking. Don’t stop. I bowed my head against any curious glances, but everyone was too dazed to care who I was. No one would be looking for me yet. They would think me dead until they didn’t find my body in the ruins.

  Now, I was only one of hundreds of others coming into the morning, another woman wearing a pale nightgown, having awakened to a nightmare. All of us dazed, most half-clothed, or bizarrely dressed in bits and pieces grabbed in haste. One man had on a woman’s skirt as he worked to free someone in the debris. Another wore a nightshirt and heavy work boots. Some still wore the gowns and evening wear that said they’d not yet been to bed. All staring in disbelief at the chaos, at streets frozen in mid undulation, their cobblestones popping, alleys blocked by rubble, houses that were only piles of matchsticks or sliding into sinkholes or with folded walls looking flimsy as paper. Windows shaken free of glass, leaning telegraph poles, and electric wires hanging loose or snaking and hissing and sparking on the ground. A church spire was only metal scaffolding. Grass on a hillside slid apart in great patches like pieces of carpet. My nose and lungs itched at the hovering cloud of dust and the increasingly pervasive stink of gas and oil.

  People combed desperately through the rubble, tossing aside brick and stone and wood. The eerie silence continued, punctuated by cries for help and rumbling and crashing, now and then an explosion. Even the sobbing and the groaning had a muffled, strangely quiet aspect. People paced the ruins. “My husband is dead!” “Where is my daughter? Have you seen her?” “Anna! Anna! Where are you?” They spoke in low, quick voices, spooked by the silence. Horses stomped nervously and whinnied. Dogs slunk about, jumpy and cowering and snappish. Rats scampered in confusion.