Chapter 16
“But you love her!” I cried. “Don’t hurt her.”
Sister Dearden bared her teeth. Her face was so twisted with rage and the effects of the cocaine in the Nerve Elixir that she looked nothing like the woman we’d first met a few days prior.
“She has hurt me! Do my feelings mean nothing? Am I not deserving of love, too? Or is that reserved only for those who are normal?”
I moved up alongside Harry. “You are normal. I know it’s been hard for you—”
“You don’t know! You can never understand what it’s like for me.
Or her. You are not like us, Miss Fox. You are free to love whomever you choose.
” Tears welled in her eyes and her jaw shuddered as she struggled not to shed them.
“But we must hide our love. We have to tell lies, even to our families. We are always pretending to be something we are not, always keeping secrets. It’s exhausting. ”
I almost told her that I did understand, but held back. Harry’s and my situation was not quite the same as hers. “Yet you found a way,” I said gently. “You had a life.”
“I did, but she ruined it all.” She jerked her head at Mrs. Iverson.
Mrs. Iverson peered up at the woman looming over her. “How did I?”
“You denied your true nature. I poured my heart out to you, and you called me and people like me disgusting.”
“I-I’m sorry. Truly. It’s not how I feel. I-I was scared. Scared of uprooting my life, scared of the unknown, and the strange emotions you produced in me.”
Her words caught Sister Dearden’s full attention. So much so that Harry inched forward unnoticed.
Mrs. Iverson stared unblinking into the nurse’s eyes.
She reached one bloodied hand up and touched the wrist holding the knife at her throat.
“Forgive me, Tuppence. I love you. I do. And I want to be with you. But if I don’t get medical attention soon…
” She winced in pain, not from the knife biting into her skin but from the gash in her side.
Sister Dearden eased back to inspect the wound.
Mrs. Iverson pushed the hand holding the knife away, but that only antagonized Sister Dearden. “You lied!” She plunged the knife downward.
Mrs. Iverson turned her face away.
The housekeeper screamed again.
Harry lunged and grabbed Sister Dearden, wrenching her backward. They tumbled to the floor, and the knife fell out of her hand. I grabbed it as they wrestled. The cocaine-fueled rage bolstered the nurse, but I suspected Harry was reluctant to use his full strength on a woman.
To save his sense of gentlemanly honor, I stepped in and kicked Sister Dearden’s ankle. The act achieved no reaction from her. Thanks to the cocaine, she couldn’t feel the pain.
She punched Harry in the face. He grunted but managed to catch her wrist before she punched again, then caught her other hand, too. Pinned to the floor, she could only kick out and use her voice. She shouted at him, calling him vile names.
“Fetch something to tie her with,” he ordered.
The housekeeper raced off, just as Dr. Iverson arrived. “What the devil? Margaret?” He went to his wife’s side. “You’re bleeding!”
“Tuppence stabbed me,” Mrs. Iverson said.
Dr. Iverson pressed down on the wound. “Miss Fox, go to my study, next floor up, first door off the landing. In the middle drawer of the desk is a medical kit. Fetch it for me, please. Quickly now.”
I found the kit where he said it would be and hurried back. Thankfully, Mrs. Iverson didn’t look any worse. She breathed heavily and was pale, but not deathly so. She would live, if the wound stopped bleeding soon.
Her husband set about tending to it with clinical indifference, as Harry tied up Sister Dearden with similar professionalism.
She’d closed her eyes and gone quiet, but I could see her eyeballs moving beneath her eyelids.
Her breathing was rapid, shallow, and her facial muscles twitched.
I recognized the signs of cocaine-induced stimulation.
I still wanted answers, but she was too clever to admit anything in court. Although there was no doubt she’d be found guilty after this attack, she might close up on the details. If I ever wanted those answers, I had to get them now while the tonic gave her a feeling of invincibility.
Her skirts had risen to reveal her shins. I knelt and pulled them down to cover her as Harry helped her to sit up. “Was Isabel Kempsey your lover?” I asked.
Her eyes flew open and her gaze darted around the room, taking in her surroundings. Or perhaps not taking in much at all. It was impossible to tell. She didn’t answer me. She didn’t even acknowledge me.
“Did she reject you, too?” I went on. “Is that why you killed her?
“Isabel?” Dr. Iverson said from the sofa where he was bandaging his wife. “No, of course not. Sister Dearden was in love with me. If she’s the one who killed Isabel then she must have done it to remove my existing lover out of jealousy, not knowing we’d already ended our affair.”
Sister Dearden burst out in screeching, wild laughter.
“Me, in love with you? You’re a mad, deluded, arrogant fool.
” She spat each word in his direction with such violence that her entire body shifted forward with the effort.
“I never flirted with you. That was merely being friendly. I was interested in your wife.”
The housekeeper gave a small gasp. I sent her off, asking her to get word to D.S. Forrester at Scotland Yard.
Mrs. Iverson blinked back tears. “I’ve suspected for some time that she liked me in that way, that she guessed my nature.
I suppose I guessed hers, too, and that’s why we became friends.
I never wanted more than friendship. But she did.
I suspected as much when I received the note on the day I filled in for Miss Wainsmith.
I guessed who it was from. I could tell by the way Sister Dearden looked at me that she was…
interested. But you found it, my dear, and thought it was meant for you. ”
Dr. Iverson cleared his throat. “Yes. Well. It seems I am not always the focus for a woman’s attentions. You’d think I would know better by now.”
“The rendezvous mentioned in the letter never came to pass because she came here the night before it was due to happen and declared her love for me.”
“Where was I that night?”
“Scotland Yard.”
“Ah.”
“You rejected her,” I prompted Mrs. Iverson.
She nodded. “I’ve been avoiding her ever since.”
“Why did you kill Isabel?” Dr. Iverson asked Sister Dearden. “What did my wife’s rejection have to do with her?”
Sister Dearden lifted her chin, defiant. “You ended your relationship with Mrs. Kempsey and she was angry about it.”
“It’s true that she was upset, but it had to end. Her husband found out. I didn’t want their marriage to falter. Isabel and I had no future, you see, as I didn’t intend to leave Margaret.”
“She was more than upset. She was distraught. And livid.” Sister Dearden made a sound of disgust low in her throat. “It’s so typical of you not to notice what a woman is feeling. Not unless it’s amorous.”
Dr. Iverson bristled. “She told me she was fine.”
“Arrogant and an idiot,” the nurse muttered.
Harry interrupted before the doctor could retaliate. “Did Isabel Kempsey threaten to tell the doctor about you? Is that why you killed her?”
Sister Dearden regarded him with lips curled into a sneer, as if she considered herself superior to him even though she was still on the floor with her hands and feet bound.
“She suspected I liked women and began following me to prove it.” That explained the various notes about locations and times in Isabel Kempsey’s secret diary.
“She told me she would take the information to the press. She was going to make up a story that I touched her inappropriately during consultations, and that the doctor knew and did nothing to stop me. She was going to use me to ruin the clinic.”
Mrs. Iverson gasped.
Dr. Iverson sniffed. “Ruin me, you mean. Isabel wouldn’t have followed through on her threat. She was all bluster. She just needed to get a few things off her chest.”
“She was going to destroy everything we’d built!” Sister Dearden cried.
“We? I built that place, not you. The patients come to see me.”
“They come to be cured. You use it as your personal brothel.”
“That is not true!”
“Those patients who don’t succumb to your overtures are told they have a nervous condition.
All you do is talk to them, or subject them to electric shocks, which are as pointless as giving them a pat on the back.
You don’t cure anyone! It’s me who often advises which medications they should take, which treatments will revive them.
I could run that practice much better than you.
” She jerked her chin in Mrs. Iverson’s direction.
“Margaret could work at reception, and I’d see the patients. We’d be a superb team.”
“Women can’t be doctors,” Dr. Iverson pointed out.
“I’d dress as a man. I’ve done it before and no one at the Café Royal has known otherwise.”
He barked a laugh. “That’s absurd. It’s nothing to do with looking like a man. It’s to do with education, capability, intelligence.”
“Enough.” Harry’s firm tone cut through Sister Dearden’s protests.
“With an ignorant attitude like that, Doctor, it’s no wonder the women around you have taken advantage.
I don’t have the time to list all the women who’ve achieved great things, despite being denied a formal education, but I urge you to do some research.
” He looked to me. “Any more questions, Cleo?”
“Just one,” I said. “Sister Dearden, did you write Isabel Kempsey’s name on Edith Hamlin’s file that day we asked about her?”
“It was easy. Neither of you were watching me, and I’ve been forging the doctor’s handwriting for so long that it’s second nature to me now.”
“I say!” Dr. Iverson growled. “This is news to me.”
Sister Dearden cackled, the sound bitter and brittle. “I knew you were looking for a possible link between Mrs. Hamlin and Isabel Kempsey, so I created one.”