Band of Sisters

by Cathy Gohlke

  Please, God, she begged, don’t let him. Don’t let him!

  He slammed and locked the door, smirked as the water covered her shoulders. Dripping and triumphant, he ripped her petticoat, wrapping a strip round his bleeding arm.

  “It’s sorry I am that I’ve no time to sample your feminine virtues, Miss O’Reilly,” he gloated. “But the tide waits for no man, not even Jaime Flynn.” He tipped her a salute and slogged through the water toward the flooding doorway.

  Maureen grabbed the iron bars of her cage, jerking and pulling, pushing and pounding, but they did not budge. She shifted her weight from side to side, throwing her body against one corner and then another to maneuver her cage through the water, toward the door. But it was no use. An inch or three, and the incoming water swept her back, swelling round her neck. She shook with cold so terrible she could no longer feel her feet or legs or torso. The women screamed around her. And the water continued to rise.

  Joshua reached the bottom of the tunnel and lowered himself onto a ledge into a foot of water. The women he’d passed nearest the top of the tunnel had told him to turn right and follow tight against the wall to the open door. But it was so dark. Though he’d been told that more women climbed, he’d not passed another in the tunnel for several minutes, if he was able to gauge the time.

  He squinted. At last his eyes made out a pale light far ahead.

  A motor, that of a boat, gunned and roared to life from somewhere beyond the bend, far to his left.

  Dear God, don’t let them have taken Maureen! Help me find her here—before it’s too late!

  He repeated the prayer as he groped his way forward, gasping in, gasping out. Twice he slipped into the freezing water, clutched at the cliff again, hoisted himself onto the ledge.

  “Maureen! Maureen!” he called until he was hoarse, until he scrambled over sandbags two feet below the water and reached the flooding gateway, the open door the fleeing women had described.

  Dozens of cages crowded the cave-like room that was nothing but a cesspool filled with rags and debris sloshing back and forth on the captured tide. He strained to see, to understand the horror before him—some cages with faces upturned in terror, gasping for last breaths before being covered in water. Other faces, bodies, floating dead just beneath the surface, illuminated by wall lanterns that would soon be doused. “Maureen?” he whispered. He couldn’t believe, wouldn’t believe she was there.

  He glimpsed stairs at the far end of the room and prayed that she’d gone back through the tunnel, to the house and higher ground, that he could reach her before she let herself into Belgadt’s accursed study. He aimed for the door, praying aloud. “Maureen—please, God. Please!” But hope was failing.

  “Joshua?”

  He stopped, listened, held his breath.

  “Joshua?” the voice, weaker yet, came again.

  “Maureen? Maureen, where are you?” He threw iron and rags aside, desperately searching through the morbid sea of cages.

  “I’m here! I’m here!” she cried.

  He followed her voice until he found her cage, her face upturned, red hair spread in a streaming fan. He grasped the lock, jerked it to no avail, and croaked, “The key!” He grabbed the bars of her cage, shaking it in his impotence.

  “Flynn took it. He’s gone!”

  “The wall—the wall by the door,” the woman in the nearest cage cried. “There’s another by the door!”

  Joshua forced his way back to the door. Lamps extinguished one by one as the water rose to lick their wicks. It was too dim to see, but he ran his hands over the doorposts and lintels, up and down the sides of the door, and then again, a foot from the door. At last he grasped a small brass ring with a single key, but in his hurry it fumbled to the floor.

  He drew a breath and plunged into the water. Groping, feeling the edge of the ring, he pulled, but it slipped, catching between the bars at the bottom of an open cage door. He struggled, twisting and turning the key and its ring, found his footing at last, and pulled through the water.

  Maureen’s nose was barely above the water level when Joshua ducked beneath it, forcing the key into the lock. It jammed. He pulled it out and tried again, turned the key upside down, and pushed yet again. At last it slid into place, the tumblers fell, and he jerked the lock open.

  He dragged a sputtering, coughing Maureen from her cage, determined to get her to higher ground before the water rushing through the doorway filled the space and made their passage across the ledge and up the tunnel impossible.

  But she fought him. “Help them! Help them!”

  “Make for the door!”

  “There are women in those cages! Give me the key!”

  “It’s too late!”

  “Give me the key!”

  “They’re dead, Maureen!”

  Maureen pushed against him and stumbled back to the woman’s cage beside hers—the woman who’d told them of the second key. But water had risen over the top of the cage, and no face, no fingers, reached up to plead.

  Joshua grabbed Maureen round the waist. “She’s dead—they’re all dead. If we don’t go now, we won’t get out!”

  He pulled her toward him, away from the cage, but she turned and lunged again toward the cage, taking hold of the board atop it. “The plate! Give me the plate!”

  With no idea what she meant, Joshua ripped the board she clung to from the woman’s cage, pressing it into her hands. He wrapped his arms around her again, pulling her from the flooding, roaring room with barely time or space to pass beneath the lintel, barely time to push her through the surging water to the ledge. Together they slipped, groping their way into and through the steep tunnel, up, into the light.

  Mrs. Melkford received word by a newsboy messenger:

  Meet me at Morningside. Come quickly; Maureen needs you.

  Curtis Morrow

  She paused only to fill a basket with apples, the carrot muffins she’d just pulled from the oven, and a jar of apple butter—Maureen’s favorite—from her pantry.

  Though the poorly clad newsboy led her faithfully through the trolley system bearing her burden as he’d been hired to do, he spoke not a word. Once they were securely seated on the crowded trolley, he eyed her basket, inhaling deeply. Mrs. Melkford slipped him a muffin and an apple.

  The largesse loosened his tongue, but he could not tell what he did not know. “All I know,” he confided, “is what I seen down near the station—and that’s a lady, all a-muck, laid out on a stretcher like she was near dead. They was soaked, her and the gent with her, what was shaking in his boots for the cold. But the man that hired me was all right—dry and scrubbed. Bit of a dandy, if you ask me. Still, I’m not one to bite the hand that feeds me.” And he gave her basket another longing gaze.

  She waited for more information.

  “And he seemed right worried for the lady,” the boy added feebly, his eyes hopeful.

  Mrs. Melkford passed the boy a second apple.

  He grinned. “Couldn’t really tell if she’s gonna keep ole Scratch away. Might be a close shave yet.”

  Mrs. Melkford sat back against her trolley seat and closed her eyes, praying through her fears, praying for Maureen, for Joshua, for Curtis, for whatever had happened now.

  Maureen could not open her eyes, but she could distinguish voices, and the first she heard was Mrs. Melkford’s.

  “Bring her to me,” Mrs. Melkford urged. “I love her as a daughter. I can’t take in all those poor girls, but I can take in Maureen.”

  But Curtis disagreed. “It’s not safe, not for you and not for her. We’ve separated the other women into small groups, all in undisclosed locations, and will keep them guarded until after the trial. At least that gives them a chance to recover before we look for their families.”

  “Guarded? But they’re not prisoners, Mr. Morrow! They need care and a bit of mothering.”

  “I understand, and I agree—completely. Mr. and Mrs. Bramwell took the lot of them in right away—hot breakfas
t, dried them by their fire . . . They offered to keep a few for recovery there, too, but we just can’t risk it—for their sakes or for the women. Belgadt and Drake have been arrested, but their network is broader than that. You’ve no idea the people we’ve enraged—the lengths they’d go to in order to keep Maureen and those women from testifying. No,” Curtis argued, “I can post greater security here than I can in your apartment building, and I owe it to Olivia.”

  Testify? Maureen heard the word, and her mind conjured images of her village in County Meath, of the day she’d spoken against Lord Orthbridge, begging the priest to take her from the English landlord’s service, giving him enough lurid details from the secrets of the grand house to disgrace and ruin most men.

  But she’d not been pitied, not been taken from Orthbridge Hall and restored to her family. She’d been accused and condemned by priest and villagers as a harlot, a shame upon her family and church and community. Far from bringing Lord Orthbridge to account, they’d twisted her testimony and cast her out of the church as a leper, a pariah no parishioner would touch.

  Testify? Never again.

  And she did not open her eyes.

  Once the police had gone, once Maureen was settled and Mrs. Melkford with her, once Joshua had been placed in Grayson’s capable hands for a hot bath and dry clothing, Olivia showed Curtis to her drawing room and indicated a place on the settee nearest the fire. She took a chair across from him. “Of course Maureen can stay for as long as she needs, as long as she wants. I’ve told you both that before.”

  “Mrs. Melkford’s determined to stay and oversee her nursing. I’m afraid you’ll have two of them.”

  “Mrs. Melkford is always welcome,” Olivia assured him. But she couldn’t stop the words that flowed from her heart to her lips, could not keep the edge from her voice. “What I don’t understand is why you couldn’t trust me, why you didn’t tell me what the three of you were doing.”

  “I couldn’t put you at risk—” he leaned toward her—“and I couldn’t risk you confiding in Dorothy. Drake was my only link—my main suspect. I knew the position that would have put you in. I’d have done anything to protect my sister and her heart. I knew you would do the same for Dorothy.”

  She bristled. “You thought deceiving me, using me as part of your ruse to foster Drake’s trust, was better?”

  Curtis flushed and lowered his gaze, taking a sudden apparent interest in the carpet between his feet. “I’ve done a lot of stupid things, Olivia.” He looked up. “Not trusting you with the full story may have been the stupidest of all. I’m sorry. Truly sorry.”

  “You’ve no idea how willing I would have been to help you bring Drake Meitland to justice, how glad I am that he’s locked up.” She swallowed to regain her composure. “But you used me. And I have to know . . .”

  He looked eager to answer.

  “Was it all a pretense? Everything?”

  “Of course not!” Curtis looked dumbfounded, even wounded. “Let me explain about Lydia, and then I know you’ll understand.”

  “The woman the police said Drake had married?”

  “Yes—as hard as the truth is, thanks to the ledgers Maureen found, I at least know what happened to her.” Curtis’s jaw tightened. “Lydia was everything to me, to my family.”

  “You loved her?”

  He looked offended. “With all my heart. She’s the reason I’ve done all I’ve done. If any sort of redemption can be brought to her death by bringing Drake and his low-life cohorts to trial, then—God be praised—it was worth it.”

  “And now you love Maureen?”

  “Well,” he floundered, “I care very much for her, certainly.”

  “In the way you loved Lydia?”

  Curtis looked more confused. “I suppose . . . similarly. I hadn’t thought about it like that.” He blinked. “I certainly feel responsible for all she’s been through and will do whatever it takes to make certain she’s well and cared for.”

  “And loved.”

  “She’s already loved.” He smiled, clearly on more confident ground. “I don’t think there’s any question about that.”

  She couldn’t sit any longer but rose and walked to the window. How could I have been such a fool? How could I have so misunderstood his words, his actions? Or did he use me in that, too—play me for the fool? She pulled back the drapery as though intent on the avenue before her. But it was no use. I hate that I love you, Curtis Morrow. Would that I didn’t—and more that I never did!

  She closed her eyes. Is this what You want of me, Lord? To be a sister to Maureen and Curtis—the sister Father intended I be to Morgan O’Reilly’s children? I thought . . . I’d hoped . . . I’d hoped so much. Oh, she all but groaned, if this is what You want, You must help me, Lord. I can’t do this alone.

  At last she cleared her throat. “Of course, you’re welcome to visit Maureen anytime. But I must ask you to go now.”

  He stood immediately and walked to her side. “Must you?”

  Why does he sound so puzzled, so hurt?

  “I’m afraid so.” She clutched the drapery with her fist as if it would provide a lifeline against her own drowning. “You will show yourself out, please.”

  “Olivia?” He touched her arm.

  His presence was enough, but the touch of his hand completely undid her. I will not cry. I will not cry! “Please go, Mr. Morrow.”

  “Olivia, I’m so very sorry that I didn’t confide in you. It was not only stupid of me, it was wrong. I regret it in every way. I’d hoped we—”

  But she could hear no more and ran from the room.

  Floating in and out of consciousness, Maureen’s body became a ship gliding westward, racing the sun. The fiery ball danced ahead, just out of reach, dappling its light upon the water. She pushed on, splintering waves, casting a foaming wake behind. But the globe ran faster yet, spreading its sparkling highway across the sea until it poured, a liquid gold, into the waves.

  She closed the distance. Beneath the water the ball was no longer golden but black. A swirling, whirling tunnel, an underground cellar, lined with rusted, water-filled cages. Fingers clawed through the cages’ topmost bars. Long tresses floated, streaming in stark manes, encircling the beautiful, terror-filled faces of women.

  And then Maureen was no longer a ship, but one of hundreds of women swimming, swimming against the tide with brass keys wrapped round their necks.

  She struggled to lift her key to unlock cage doors, but the keys were too big and the locks too small. All the while the water continued to rise, to her chin, to her nose, to her eyes, until she could not breathe, could not see, could hear nothing but the roaring of the tide.

  At last, a voice—the still, small, insistent voice she’d come to know—mingled with Mrs. Melkford’s soft, melodic reading, pushing back the roar. Through the depths, the voice became clearer, until the roar subsided and all she heard, all she saw, was light.

  “‘Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God.’”

  Yes, that’s how I feel. I’m weary of cryin’. I can’t stand on my own, and these waters, these troubles, are too deep for me.

  “‘They that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty: then I restored that which I took not away.’”

  Yes, they are powerful, these enemies. I tried to help the women they’d stolen. I tried to restore them—but I failed. I wasn’t fast enough, strong enough. Oh, God! I don’t even know their names!

  “‘O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from thee. . . .’”

  Nothin’ is hidden from You. You’ve seen everything I’ve ever done or let be done. It’s that knowin’ that keeps me from You, makes me hide in my shame.

  “‘I am become a stranger to my brethren, and an alien unto my mother’s children.’”


  Katie Rose has disowned me. I wanted to help her, to save her from my hell. I thought by savin’ her and the other women, I could make her love me, make You love me. But I’ve failed in that, too.

  “‘But as for me, my prayer is unto thee, O Lord. . . . O God, in the multitude of thy mercy hear me, in the truth of thy salvation. . . . Let me not sink. . . . Let not the waterflood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up.’”

  I’ve no one to turn to but You, Lord. Have mercy on me! Forgive me . . . help me!

  “‘Hear me, O Lord; for thy lovingkindness is good: turn unto me according to the multitude of thy tender mercies. . . . Draw nigh unto my soul, and redeem it. . . . I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none.’”

  But You saved me when all my enemies would see me dead, when even my family turned their backs. You sent Joshua and Curtis and Mrs. Melkford and Olivia—and the voice, my Comfort.

  “‘I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify him with thanksgiving. . . . For the Lord heareth the poor, and despiseth not his prisoners. Let the heaven and earth praise him, the seas, and every thing that moveth therein.’”

  You heard me in my deepest sorrows when I was poor, in my desperation, locked as a prisoner in a cage, and drownin’. You saved me.

  A single tear trickled from the corner of Maureen’s eye, down her cheek, and onto her neck. Could it be that You love me, Lord? Could it be that You’ve saved me, no matter that I’ve failed to save the others?

  Mrs. Melkford did not leave her patient’s side for five long days. Spoonful by spoonful, she slipped hearty broth through her patient’s half-open lips, urging her to swallow, no matter that she’d not opened her eyes. Mrs. Melkford was not deterred. She read aloud to Maureen—the whole of Psalms and every chapter and verse she knew that expounded the Lord’s forgiveness for those who seek Him, His all-encompassing love and mercy.

  By the time Maureen opened her eyes, her face was awash in tears—tears Mrs. Melkford counted precious, tears she knew the Lord gathered in a bottle.