Witchmark Read online

  Dollars to buttons Dr. Crosby had had the night shift. A glance over my shoulder confirmed it—he sat inside the call office with his lips crushed between his teeth, shedding miles of ink from his glass-barreled pen. I went back to the logs and learned who lay sleepless in the dark, who had nightmares, who shuffled through dim corridors unable to let the night go by without someone to stand watch.

  The morning murmur between the nurses on shift change stilled. I ducked.

  You’re perfectly safe, Miles. Don’t be a fool.

  I tugged at my shoelaces before I raised my head, following the path of craned necks and turned heads to the unlit north corridor.

  Young Gerald was out of bed. He swept his crutches ahead of him, and they landed with a muffled thump, rubber feet against wooden floor. He swung between the crutches’ legs, the whole lurch of his body landing on one bare foot. The creak-thump! of his crutches put a shiver down my spine.

  I halted a nurse who moved to chivvy him back to bed. “It’s still the blue hour, Young Gerald.”

  “Morning, Doc. You’re not wearing your uniform.” Plow-lines of worry lined his forehead. “Is something wrong? Aren’t you going to the lunch with the others?”

  “I am.” I crossed my arms in a posture of sternness, but winked at him to soothe his worry. “What’s got you up and bothered?”

  “Old Gerald, Doc.” His face was pinched up, his dark hair pillow-rumpled. “He’s got the morbs.”

  “He talked?”

  “To me. He wouldn’t talk to Dr. Crosby last night.” Gerald’s crutch creaked under his shifting weight as he avoided Dr. Crosby’s eye. Another shiver dug tack-tipped fingers into my back.

  “Well, let’s see if he’ll talk to me.”

  * * *

  We kicked up the dust heading back to Ward 12, a high-ceilinged room with north-facing windows showing a coal-dust sky. No gas lamps shone here to disturb patients with a fragile hold on sleep. Seven men lay on their beds.

  In the fourth bed from the door, Old Gerald lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Weariness lined his face, but he dug his fingernails into his palms. His lips moved in soundless speech, the shapes of his words a short phrase muttered again and again.

  Young Gerald thumped over and settled in his own bed, covering his leg with gray woolen blankets. “The doctor’s here.”

  Old Gerald turned his head, catching the younger with a look. “You told.”

  “Had to,” Young Gerald said. “You’d do it too if it were me.”

  “You’re young,” Old Gerald said, as if the distance between their ages were more than ten years.

  “You’ve got a family,” Young Gerald said. “I don’t even have a sweetheart. What about them?”

  Enough. I leaned between them and poured them each water to drink. Old Gerald went quiet. Young Gerald’s lips pinched together, frustrated at the interruption.

  I offered Old Gerald a glass. He eyed it, but took a wary sip.

  “I know you’re feeling under the weather today. We don’t have to talk about that.” I didn’t want to. If Old Gerald talked to me of setting off to the Solace by his own hand, I’d have to section him. I hated the rule that stripped patients of their right to despair. I’d been there and knew all too well what it felt like.

  So I pushed the conversation onto safer paths. Dr. Crosby had already complained about this, but I asked. “Did you sleep, Old Gerald?”

  “Can’t,” he said. “ He dreams when I take the tonic.”

  Ah. Pieces of the picture came clearer. “What does He dream of?”

  “Killing,” Old Gerald said. “And the fierce terrible joy He takes in it. Kills everyone on the ward. Young Gerald, Sniffy, Nurse Robin—horrible, the things He smiles at. I can’t sleep, Doc.” Old Gerald clutched at the blankets. “You don’t know what He’ll do. If I sleep—”

  I snatched back my urge to reach out, to comfort him. Full of Nick’s power as I was, it would be too easy to use it. His brown eyes were wide, and his gaze darted all around the room. He breathed in tight gasps through his mouth. If I took his pulse, his heart would be racing. Had he been in this panic all night?

  Gerald Grimes wasn’t even my worst case. How could I thrust sixteen of these men into the street with nothing and no one outside the hospital to help them? Blast this war, and a curse on those who thought battle fatigue was a myth and an excuse. I shoved my anger aside. If Gerald thought I was angry at him, that would just make it worse.

  “I can give you a tonic for sleep, if you want it.” Stupid question. But I had to ask.

  “No.”

  “Please try a tonic, Old Gerald,” Young Gerald said. “I’ll sit up. I’ll watch.”

  “Can’t. He ’ll—” Old Gerald’s shoulders slumped. “I can’t.”

  I wasn’t surprised by his confession. Many of the men here shared Old Gerald’s delusion. Right now he needed to feel safe enough to sleep. Not a miracle. No one would even notice. My fingertips tingled with Nick’s power, impatient, barely contained.

  No one needed to know what I’d actually done.

  “I have an idea. You can go to sleep, if I put Him to sleep.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Let’s see, shall we?”

  I fumbled around in my pockets and unhooked my fob watch. A few hours of sleep would go unnoticed. It would sink into the routine of the morning. I took his wrist. His heartbeat fluttered, exhausted but still running for its life. Crescent-shaped welts reddened the palm of his hand. My vision slid out of ordinary focus and locked on the glowing paths of life inside Old Gerald’s body: the rush of air as he breathed, the pulse of blood as his heart beat, and the red-brown muck concentrated in Old Gerald’s head.

  I raised the watch. “Keep your eyes on the watch. Follow it, and listen to my voice.”

  I’d never seen anything like it until I’d come here. Some of my patients had it whirling in their head, like a mass of tiny insects raging over the humped wrinkles of their brains. This could be my patients’ madness. It could be the source of the worst patients’ nightmares and horrific temptations. I’d been too afraid to touch it. But Gerald was getting worse, and I had to send men home.

  It’s only one patient. I touched the writhing edge of the mass with my overflowing power.

  “Imagine a box,” I said. “A nice, strong box, and He’s inside it. The box is sealed, and He can’t get out.”

  Old Gerald breathed slow and deep. I took the mass of red-brown energy and contained it.

  “Now picture the box getting smaller. Smaller and smaller. He ’s still trapped inside, but the box shrinks smaller, so He shrinks smaller. Tinier. Less important.”

  I forced it to fold up small. It lurked underneath the twin lobes of his brain, tiny, but refusing to disappear.

  “You’ve done it,” Old Gerald said. “That’s put Him away.”

  It had bled off the feeling of being too full with power. I breathed more freely. “Sleep, will you? Even a nap. I’ll send a nurse to dose you if you need it.”

  Other patients were awake, waiting their turn to speak to me. I would miss the shift meeting if I stayed. If I walked out now, soft lines of trust between me and my patients would break, lines that would take more work to knit up.

  The choice was no choice at all.

  I sat down next to Bill Pike, who’d been Prince Richard’s First Cavalry of my own Beauregard Battalion. He had the same kind of nightmares as Old Gerald, of killing and murder and sick, dark glee. I thought of Cpl. Badger in the paper this morning as Bill grabbed the sleeve of my white coat and levered himself upright.

  “Help me, Doctor. He wants to kill you.”

  * * *

  Eleven o’clock saw me trying to write up all my notes. My last entries had little more than a line or two, smudged with my haste. The Kingston Benevolent Society was hosting this luncheon, and Mr. Hunter’s words lingered in my mind. I shone to anyone with the power to see.

  How important was this benefit? It w
as important to us, but was the cause worthy enough for the attention of any of the Royal Knights? An awful vision of a Stanley or a Pelfrey’s eyes widening as they recognized a dead man from across a crowded room made me nauseous. I imagined running from the hotel, being caught, being taken back home to give up my power to a Storm-Singer.

  That shut it completely. I couldn’t chance it. I had to get caught up in something and miss the coach. Paperwork. Reports. Nick Elliot.

  Perfect. I hadn’t done the urgent care assessment.

  I headed for the Urgent Care ward and collected blank forms, squirreling away a few extra copies to hoard in my office. I had to telephone a request for a death examination file. When it arrived, I would have lost track of time.

  “Miles!” Robin called.

  Drat. There she was, and she was picture perfect. She wore her long, braided hair in a net that shone with tiny, colorful stones that matched the ones dangling from the beaded shoulders of her sea-blue dress.

  “Robin,” I said. “You look splendid.”

  “You need to hurry; the coaches are here.”

  She led the way up the stairs to my office. The soles of her shoes tapped against the rubber stair treads, scuffed on the tiled landings, each noise grating on my ears.

  “I’ll meet you there. I just—”

  “Miles Singer, I know you,” she said. “You have forms in your hands. You’ll think, I just need to note this down so I don’t forget. Then the next thing you know all the coaches will be gone and you’ll have missed the whole luncheon.”

  Double drat. “I wouldn’t.”

  Robin dismissed my protest with a wave. “You’ve never been invited to a benefit, Miles. This is important. Don’t sabotage your career.”

  She stood in the doorway, waited for me to put on my coat, and escorted me out into the street where the coaches waited. Robin picked a coach and set her satin-gloved hand in mine when I helped her inside.

  Doomed. I nodded to the doctor across from me, one of the fellows not garbed in a scarlet officer’s tunic. “Is this lunch a fuss and production? I’ve never been to one.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Lunches aren’t as important as dinners. Wait until someone asks you what your department needs before talking about it. What’s your specialty?”

  “Psychiatry.”

  He chuckled. “Enjoy your lunch and relax.” He looked out the side window, ending the conversation. His dismissal comforted me. I was on the bottom rung. I could stay out of sight, unnoticed, unknown.

  We traveled to the Edenhill hotel, a finger of steel and glass challenging the silver-clouded sky. Our parade of twenty-four doctors and nurses in sack suits, day gowns, and dress uniforms multiplied in the smoked glass mirrors on the walls, and we poured into the Starlight ballroom.

  Two dozen round tables for eight gathered on one side; a sitting area for the movers and shakers lounged on the other. The mass of us mingled under hundreds of glass globes suspended from the ceiling. Each was its own gentle aether light, bathing the crowd in a glow meant to mimic a nighttime sky visited by a wink of fireflies. Drafts made the globes sway and click, nearly unheard in the buzz of conversation and the high-pitched whine of aether.

  Some of the champagne the waiters had served to the aristos managed to trickle over to us groundlings. Robin caught two glasses of the stuff, and we stood still for the first fizzy sip. It was sweet, with green grass and meadow flowers on the nose—Miss Vanier’s Deer Valley? Perhaps it was. I stole a bit of the ballroom’s wall, keeping the crowd between me and the wealthy, seated hosts.

  “You can’t hold the wall up, silly. Look. There’s a wealthy dowager now.”

  I spotted the butterfly pin on the lapel of her smart day gown. “She’s still mourning.”

  “Gray is just the fashion now—oh, wait. Sharp eye, Miles.”

  Dr. Matheson stepped out of the crowd. She wore an hourglass of a day gown the color of a midnight sky. It suited her golden skin and dark hair, but the set of her face was impatient.

  I tried my best to smile. “Dr. Matheson. You look lovely.”

  She eyed my flannel suit. “You’re not wearing your uniform.”

  “I need it ready for the Homecoming,” I said. “Imagine if I spilled crab chowder on it.” As if the Edenhill would stoop to serving crab chowder to members of the Benevolent Society! I had to fight a smile at the idea. “I need to talk to you. About the memo.”

  “I can’t exempt your patients from the discharge order. You’re straight out of luck.”

  “Mathy.”

  “No.”

  “They’re not well enough.”

  “No. Sixteen beds won’t even be enough for the men coming home. Now chin up.” She tweaked the lay of my necktie. “You’ve never come to a benefit.”

  “I can duck out and go back to the hospital, if you like.”

  Robin kicked me in the ankle.

  Mathy worried at my pocket square. “Relax. Imagine they’re your patients. You’re a wonder with your patients. You can talk to them. Don’t worry.”

  Maybe this was how your mother treated you, even when you were a grown man. Maybe she would have fixed my tie and asked if I were all right.

  I smiled around the ache. “Thanks, Mathy. You better get in there and start the speeches—”

  “Actually, I was looking for you,” she said. “Come with me. I’ve been asked to make an introduction.”

  Doomed. “Me? Who would want—I mean, who are we meeting?” Another doctor. Another psychiatrist. No one impor tant. Please. I tucked Robin’s hand into the crook of my arm. She squeaked in protest, but walked with us through the crowd.

  Dr. Matheson dragged me to the velvet rope separating us from the wealthiest and most important of the attendees, the hosts. My hope thumped to the parquet floor. I kept pace with her, but every step made the band around my chest tighten a notch, and then another.

  She shot us straight toward a clutch of posh young people dressed in the highest of daytime fashion. They wore sack suits and sinuous silk gowns in the non-colors of the cinema, all fog and smoke and deep coal shadows, their hair combed back in shiny, careful ripples. Their leader lounged in the center of a lily-back settee, listening to the man perched on the arm of her seat. She threw her head back and laughed, echoed by her entourage.

  Dr. Matheson lurched to a stop, anchored by the bolt that had passed through me and fixed me to the floor. Robin halted by my side, standing as tall as she could. My throat squeezed shut as the leader stared at me, her mouth open, her posture as still as mine.

  We both saw a ghost standing before us.

  “Chris,” my sister said.

  “Grace,” I replied. “It’s Miles, now.”

  Doomed.

  For a few whispered moments, the Starlight Room held its breath.

  “Miles.” All at once she stood eye to eye with me. When had she grown so tall? I thought I’d never see her outside of newspaper photographs again, but here she was, watching me with whiskey-brown eyes so like our mother’s. Like mine.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  Traces of the girl I knew lived inside the woman—her jaw more pointed, the soft cheeks melted away, the dimple in her chin identical to mine. Grace, who had been painting butterflies the morning I climbed down the elm tree next to my bedroom window and left her life forever.

  Or more accurately, until now.

  My heart raced. I couldn’t run, couldn’t cause a scene. All these eyes and respectability jailed me, forced me to smile as if this were wonderful.

  “That’s because I didn’t write.”

  “You bastard.” She seized me in a tight hug.

  My sister. I raised my arms and hugged her back. She crushed me close, and she muffled a sob next to my ear. It wouldn’t do to rock her as I had when she’d come to her brother in tears. It wouldn’t do to wrest myself free and run, run until my legs gave out.

  My sister had found me, and my freedom was at an end.

&nb
sp; FOUR

  Promises

  My name sat before the place setting at Grace’s left hand. Fast work. Robin had a table in the center, not bad for getting courses at the proper temperatures. I held out the chair on my left for the woman with the butterfly pin. I leaned to my right and kept my voice low. “Did everyone else get bumped down like dominoes, or is there a board chairman sitting in my place next to the kitchen?”

  Grace clapped me on the shoulder and laughed. “I’m sorry I separated you from your friend, but I couldn’t resist having you with me. Will she be cross?”

  Robin was already enchanting the gentleman on her left with conversation. “If I bring back a good donation to the hospital, she’ll consider it a boon.”

  “Oh. Well, let me take care of that.”

  Grace opened a purse covered in silver beads and produced a checkbook. She blew on the drying ink and tucked a check for five thousand marks into my breast pocket. “I think she’ll forgive you now.”

  “Grace, you’re a brick.”

  She rolled her eyes at my worker’s slang, but she still smiled.

  “We’re all dreadfully curious, please forgive us,” the woman at my left hand said. “We couldn’t help but notice your reunion with Miss Hensley.”

  My reunion. I held up a quirk of my lips, showed her the right face. “It was quite a surprise,” I said. “I hadn’t seen her in years.”

  “Miles and I grew up together,” Grace said, and sniffled. I tried not to melt in relief as she told incomplete truths that supported mine. “We were inseparable as children, but he joined the army to become a doctor.”

  True, as far as it went. She was keeping my secret. Why?

  “This is wonderful.” The widow picked up her glass. “Here’s to the two of you finding each other again.”

  We lofted glasses and drank. My wine tasted bitter.

  Small courses came one after another, calling for salad forks, a fish knife, red and white wineglasses. I fell into the smiling countenance I’d learned as a young man, but Grace was smooth as a still pond. My tempestuous sister had grown into a woman who steered a conversation where it pleased her, and it pleased her to bless Beauregard Veterans’ with her approval and our family’s money. Would it please her to leave me where I was, doing what good I could for the world?