Chapter 1 #2
“To be honest,” she continued, “I’d do just about anything to get out of this dumb nursing program and be married.
I don’t think I care one way or another whether any of these patients live or die.
Most of them are trash-picking muckers anyway.
If they were fine-bred people, they wouldn’t be here—the doctors would make house calls for them. Why do we bother saving them?”
“I’m one of those muckers, you know,” I told my fellow sister-nurse. “If I got hurt or sick, this is where I’d come. To a public hospital!”
Bethany merely shrugged. “I’d rather be married and nursing babies than nursing the poor.”
Ridiculous. Our training program was the first of its kind in the States. It was based on Florence Nightingale’s revolutionary work in England. Miss Nightingale said a new generation of nurses should be trained. Organized. Knowledgeable and ready to care for patients.
They should be more than the male physicians’ personal servants.
They should be independent.
Unlike Bethany, marriage was the absolute last thing I wanted.
I glanced at my Irish mother’s gold claddagh ring: a crowned heart held by two hands.
The only jewelry I owned and my most precious possession.
It had once belonged to Mammy’s childhood friend back in Kilkenny, Ireland, who bequeathed it to her when Mammy came to America with my grandfather.
I could almost hear Mammy’s lilting voice when I touched it.
You’re a born nurse, Molly-o. Don’t let a boy steal your heart.
He will take your freedom with it, he will.
Because of what my mother had endured, treated as an outcast for having me out of wedlock, I made a promise on her deathbed that I would pursue a career—never marriage. Never love.
No boy would take nursing from me. Bethany was a fool.
She shrugged. “Why do you need to know Latin medicine names?”
I wasn’t going to bring up her death to her again.
What was the point? Instead I dramatized my answer with a mocking tone.
“Here, Mrs. Johnson, take a spoonful of this unknown elixir, please and thank you. What is it, you ask? No clue. But, hey, if my doctor has made a mistake, it could even kill ya. Open wide!”
Bethany rolled her eyes again, which only frustrated me more.
When we first started the program, we were each given a lantern, our chatelaine tools, and a uniform—a cornflower-blue dress with a white apron. We were also required to recite a five-point pledge:
I solemnly pledge before my Sisters of the Lamp to:
1. Dedicate myself to the welfare of souls committed to my care
2. Not take or knowingly administer any harmful drug
3. Keep in confidence all personal matters of every patient
4. Live chastely
5. Hold all life dearly
“Point two of our pledge says we’re not to knowingly administer any harmful drug,” I reminded Bethany. “Now, tell me, go on, how am I supposed to do that if I don’t know what I’m giving people?”
“The knowing is the problem! If you don’t know what medicine you’re giving, how can you be to blame? It’s not your responsibility. Just do what the physicians tell you. Wash out the bedpans and change dressing when it’s bloodied. Stop playing doctor, Molly.”
“I don’t want to be a doctor. I want to be a nurse—a good one! I need this information to do my job properly. Why should I be denied it because of my gender and age? The lack of this very knowledge killed you!”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
Ugh. It was frustrating. No other ghost had talked to me as much as Bethany did.
Sometimes she disappeared on her own. Sometimes I could tell her to go away.
She appeared randomly but would generally show up when I called for her.
And she was the first ghost to follow me any distance.
Usually they stayed in one place. I guess Bethany was the literal definition of a “restless spirit.”
The thing was, we hadn’t even been that close when she was alive.
I was eager to learn, and she… wasn’t. Then again, most ghosts I encountered weren’t interested in anything but their own lost lives, and after I talked to them a few times, they disappeared.
I’d never known a ghost to stick around longer than a few weeks.
Except for one.
One anomaly. One I didn’t understand.
It was someone I’d seen multiple times over the years. I wasn’t sure what kind of ghost he was, exactly. But he was different from the others.
The Black Groom.
That’s what I called him when he appeared to me as a child. A young pale-faced man, perhaps my age now, maybe even a couple years older, with a head full of loose, dark curls and a most serious expression.
He was always dressed in black from head to foot. A boutonniere was pinned to the lapel of his fine suit, one with a white lily and a red feather, as if he were attending a fancy wedding.
The first time I saw him, I was eight years old, and Mammy had taken me along to the funeral for her best friend—the one who’d given my mother the claddagh ring back in Kilkenny.
Her friend had made the trip over to America on a steamer ship to live with relatives in New York, but had gotten sick on board and didn’t survive.
They didn’t have the money to send her body back to Ireland, so she was buried here.
After the graveside service, Mammy returned to the coffin to leave a rose.
I’d never seen her fall apart like that, weeping uncontrollably, and it hurt my heart something fierce because I didn’t know how to help her, and that scared me.
That’s when I first saw him, the Black Groom.
He appeared out of nowhere, between blinks of my eyes.
Call it instinct, but I instantly knew there was something different about him.
Tingles ran down my spine, and I froze in fear.
He stepped behind my mother and put a hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t look up—not when he touched her, and not when a frightened gasp escaped my lips.
She just sighed deeply and choked back tears.
But the Black Groom? Oh, he heard my gasp.
And when his serious face turned toward mine, his eyes widened in confusion.
I had startled him. How or why, I didn’t know, but he promptly disappeared.
There one moment, gone the next.
I even saw him one time in our tenement apartment, when my mother was rereading my father’s obituary, clipped from the newspaper.
The Black Groom appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the living room to put a hand on my mother’s shoulder, just as he’d done the first time, and she immediately stopped crying.
Once again he was surprised when our gazes met, and he quickly disappeared, leaving me stunned.
And curious.
When my mother died, I half expected to see him, since he’d shown up when my mother was grieving.
It was the only thought that distracted me from my own pain as I waited to see his cool expression, or perhaps feel his hand touch my shoulder.
But no. He didn’t appear. And after that, I spent a lot of time thinking about him, what kind of ghost he could be.
And why he only came to my mother when she was grieving.
Was he her guardian angel? Now that she was gone, would I never see him again?
It felt like an extra layer of loss, but I couldn’t explain why.
Just when I thought the Groom was a mystery I’d never solve, buried with my mother, he appeared again.
It was a year ago, on Canal Street, near a carriage that had turned over just after dusk.
As a cool rain fell, and when I stopped to survey the gruesome scene, the Black Groom suddenly appeared behind a woman who was screaming for her dead husband.
He put his hand on her shoulder, just as he had with Mammy, and the woman’s screams quieted.
When he took his hand off her shoulder, he glanced in my direction, and it felt like the ground disappeared from under my feet.
Like I was suspended in time.
The chaotic accident scene around us seemed to suddenly go quiet as the Groom’s serious gaze locked on mine. But just when I expected him to disappear as he’d always done, I was surprised to hear him whispering to me in the night air.
“You… see me?” His words had a strange cadence, and there was a sharp wariness behind his eyes.
He was wary of me?
Shock gripped my chest. I tried to speak, but it got stuck in my throat, so I merely nodded in answer. And when I did, panic covered his grim face. Before I could ask him who he was, and why I kept seeing him like this, he did what he always did and vanished.
Disappeared between the falling raindrops, leaving me confused and a little frightened.
But that was a year ago, and I hadn’t seen him since. I had thought of him now and then, though. And wondered why he’d been so fearful of me.
A loud disturbance inside the hospital drew me out of my thoughts.
Back entrance.
Orderlies must have been bringing in a patient through the alley.
Thundering footfalls made Bethany and me scatter in a panic.
As we scurried away from the barred pharmacy, my lantern swung a golden pattern around the hallway.
An orderly named Lynch rounded a corner and spotted me.
“Ho! Is that Nurse Molly? Where are all the docs, girl? Empty as a tomb in here! I need someone with Smithie’s new key to open the basement mortuary. ”
Smithie was the graveyard-shift morgue attendant, but he was off tonight.
“Check surgery,” I called back, a little breathless as I walked toward him.
“Haywood’s finishing up Mr. Brown’s leg.
Sayre’s resting after a double shift. One intern is out on house calls.
But Doc Dalton hasn’t left yet. He should be free. ”
“Unless he’s busy drinking scotch in his office,” Bethany mumbled under her breath.
She wasn’t wrong. Doc Dalton was a drunk and a tyrant… and he was the reason that no one but me could see Bethany anymore.