Chapter 1 #3
Orderly Lynch swore under his breath. “Nay, they’ve got Dalton stitching up a finger.”
“Is that the screamer?” I asked, hearing a male cry in a distant hospital hall.
The orderly nodded and spoke breathlessly.
“Ambulance driver brought him in from an alley outside a hotel on Canal Street, some valet to a fancy fella and his sister—some very important people from upstate. They ran into a street gang after coming home from the opera. Valet took a razor to the hand, but he was lucky, actually. The gentleman’s sister was struck down.
It’s her body we need to wheel into the mortuary. ”
“Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam,” I mumbled in Irish. Rest in peace.
“Betcha it was the Bowery Boys gang,” Bethany mused. “My father says they are a plague on our city.”
Another distant cry within the hospital made me wince. Orderly Lynch beckoned. “You, come with me and help the doc keep this screamer quiet.”
Bethany groaned. “I just want to go to bed,” she said as her body began fading in front of me. A second more, and she was gone. Typical. She’d always made me do the work when she was alive, so why would it be any different now?
I hurried after the orderly, skirts swishing around my low-heel, button-up black boots.
We wound through the administrative corridor, with the clink-clink of my chatelaine chains beating a rhythm against my skirts.
Moonlight shone through tall windows as we cut through the maternity ward, where several pairs of white eyes peered back at us, patients woken by the screams. One of the new mothers asked what was going on.
I patted patients’ feet over tightly tucked blankets as I hurried between rows of beds.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Chambers, go back to sleep.
We’re on our way right now to help the patient. ”
Orderly Lynch led me to a row of examination rooms in a dark corridor outside the men’s ward.
As we passed an open door, I spied our night ambulance driver talking to one of the hospital guards.
“… something just feels off about the whole thing. Weren’t no gangs in sight when my carriage was rolling past their alley, and the gentleman was too calm for someone who’d just watched their family member die… ”
Before I could think about that too much, Orderly Lynch directed me into an exam room that held the source of all the screaming. I stepped inside, a little wary.
The air stank of sweat and blood. A single oil lamp burned on a wooden table near a pedestal sink, illuminating a diagram of the human heart.
In the center of the room, Doc Dalton stood over one of the smallest men I’d ever encountered in the hospital.
He was somewhere between middle-aged and elderly, sporting a very thick, broomlike mustache that curled at the ends, and he sat on the edge of the exam table while a missing pinky finger on his left hand was being stitched.
The front of his clothing was soaked crimson.
The rich man’s valet.
On the right side of the room, a policeman was questioning a young blond gentleman dressed in a fancy tailcoat with a muddy greatcoat atop it.
The gentleman was very pale and thin, perhaps in his mid- to late twenties.
And despite the disheveled state of his coat, his fine clothing oozed money and prestige.
The gentleman gripped an elaborately decorated silver hourglass.
Curiously, it had no glass or sand, more resembling a cast-metal sculpture of an hourglass than the real thing.
Whatever its purpose, it looked very old, possibly European, and it must’ve been important because the gentleman’s knuckles had turned white as he clutched it.
The gentleman was so tall, the policeman had to lift his head to speak up to him. They both glanced at me when I entered the exam room.
“… and I never got a proper look at their faces,” the gentleman was saying. “Sorry I can’t be of more help.” The way he shifted his feet, he looked as if he were bursting with energy, on the verge of rushing out of the room. I supposed grief affected everyone differently.
“Ah, here we are,” Doc Dalton said, glancing in my direction while holding a bloody curved suture and trailing thread. “Help has arrived, Mr. Hoffmann, just in time.”
“Lost the missing pinky, huh? You want me to stitch him up?” I asked the doctor. I was pretty good at that, and the only one of the nurses who knew how to do it.
“No, Junior Nurse Molly, I’ve got it. Do you happen to have a bottle of Mother’s Little Helper on you?”
Laudanum, he meant, milk of the poppy. One of the few medicine names I actually knew, due to the fact that we gave it out so often. I often wondered if it was what had killed Bethany.
However, nurses weren’t allowed to carry extra doses of anything, and he knew that. What was even more alarming was that the doctor was stitching this man up without numbing him or offering pain medication first. Was the doc that drunk already?
“Sorry, sir,” I said, glancing at the bloodied face of the valet, whose eyes met mine with fear and pain. “All the medicine I administered during my rounds tonight is already locked up fierce in the pharmacy.”
“Useless,” the doc muttered. Typical. He was always in a sour mood and took it out on us. He shouted a command to Orderly Lynch. “You, go fetch us a bottle from the pharmacy.”
“Sir, they’ve still got the girl sitting in the ambulance carriage. I need the mortuary opened,” Lynch countered, giving the gentleman a quick apologetic look.
But the gentleman was unbothered that people were discussing where to put his sister’s corpse. “She’ll keep,” he said in a low voice, the hint of a smile behind his eyes.
Wow. I couldn’t tell if he was joking inappropriately or trying to keep things light to avoid grief. Maybe he hadn’t been close with his sister? I really didn’t understand rich people. They seemed to operate on an entirely different level.
“Ask someone else. I don’t have mortuary keys on me,” the doctor snapped at Orderly Lynch. “Medicine, now!”
Lynch raced out of the room. I started to ask if I should go with him, but the tall gentleman began coughing violently.
And I do mean violently. The policeman moved away from him and shielded his face.
My gaze flicked over the gentleman’s sharp cheekbones, and eyes that were bloodshot and weary.
As he coughed into his hand, I noticed rounded, raised nails on his fingers.
Clubbing, it was called. Alarm bells went off inside my head.
I peered more closely at the man’s face.
He was unusually handsome; yet beneath his beauty, gravity seemed to be tugging on his skin, pulling all his features down. That was a look I knew all too well.
My mother had worn it during her final months on this Earth.
The gentleman had tuberculosis, a.k.a. the “white death,” most commonly known nowadays as consumption.
It was a terrible condition that affected the lungs and other organs, a slow-moving, wasting disease that drained the very life out of people, until their lungs filled with so much fluid that they could no longer breathe.
Sometimes it took years and years for the disease to… “consume” a person.
And nobody knew what caused it, how to prevent it, or how to cure it.
My heart clenched. Don’t you dare think of Mammy during her final days…
I pushed away old grief and asked, “How long have you had consumption, Mr….”
“Mr. Voss,” the doctor said gruffly while the gentleman continued to cough.
The air stirred behind my back, and I sensed Bethany materializing.
“Oh! I knew I recognized his face. That’s Charles Voss!
” she whispered behind me. I tried to shoo her away discreetly, but as usual, she didn’t take the hint and continued whispering like a buzzing mosquito.
Not that anyone else could hear her, but old habits die hard.
“You know, the famous son of that Wall Street magnate. He has a twin sister, Agnes. Their photographs were on the front page of the newspaper. They were standing in front of their upstate mansion on the Hudson, after their parents died on a trip to Europe, remember?”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
Then again, I didn’t spend my spare time living for local gossip like Bethany once had.
“Mr. Voss,” I said as his coughing attack continued, raising my voice.
“I’ve only heard brief details about your ordeal tonight, but I’m thinking that event might’ve triggered an attack of your consumption. How long have you had it?”
The coughing infuriated him. I understood that.
My mother would get angry about her condition too.
“This is no better than the last one! Curse it all!” In a fit of anger, he took the metallic hourglass sculpture he’d been holding and threw it to the floor, where it bounced and clanged across the tile, then landed under the exam table near the valet’s dangling feet.
I squinted at the discarded hourglass, then at Mr. Voss’s face, trying to understand. “What is no better, sir?”
Another coughing fit overrode any answer he was considering, and instead I heard Bethany in my ear. “The gossip rags said his twin sister had consumption too. It must run in their family.”
Interesting. No one really knew what caused the disease. The older doctors at Bellevue thought it was hereditary, and the younger ones believed it was caused by bad bacteria. But I was more concerned about fixing the current state of the gentleman’s health rather than figuring out the cause of it.
Mr. Voss’s coughing settled. He locked eyes with me and asked, “How old are you, girl?”
I didn’t see why that should concern him, but I answered honestly. “Eighteen.”
“Hmm, that brogue… Irish.”
He was asking if I was? I nodded, but now I was wary. I’d had too many encounters with patients who hated the Irish and didn’t even want me touching them. And I supposed this gentleman was no different, because a look of disappointment crossed his eyes. “No matter,” he murmured.
Lucky for him, I didn’t make a habit of looking down my nose at folk for silly reasons. “I’ve been in the training program for months, and I’m the most capable nurse here when it comes to tuberculosis,” I told him, half proud, half defensive.
“Don’t brag, Nurse Molly,” the doctor chided as he pulled catgut thread through the valet’s hand, causing the poor man to whimper. “It’s not becoming for a young lady.”
The gentleman didn’t seem to mind. “Knowledgeable, are you? I didn’t know they were training nurses so young these days, how”—he coughed again—“fascinating.”
I wanted to brag a little more about our new nursing program, but I didn’t feel like getting chewed out by Doc Dalton, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Sick or not, he’s so beautiful,” Bethany said, moving from behind me to get a better look at Mr. Voss. “I’d bet a golden-haired man like this would treat his bride like a princess.”
I hated to break it to Bethany, but he probably preferred his women to have a pulse. Yet as she moved closer to him, standing on tiptoes to study his face, something unexpected happened.
He turned his head to look down at her.
And his eyes tracked her movements.
He can see her?!
My heart raced inside my chest. Never, not even once, had I been around another person who acknowledged a ghost’s presence.
Was he truly able to see Bethany, or did he just sense her presence?
I wasn’t sure. Bethany shot me a surprised expression—one that said, Are you seeing this, too? — and his eyes flicked to mine.
His head tilted, as if he, too, were surprised.
Just for a moment. And in that short space of time, a little hope rose inside me.
Someone else could see Bethany. I wasn’t alone—I wasn’t imagining all my ghosts, or having a nervous breakdown, and it wasn’t my mind playing tricks on me.
But my rising hope faltered when an unsettling smile crept over Mr. Voss’s face.
He winked at me. Shh, our little secret, his eyes seemed to say.
Then he lifted his face to the ceiling and flat out laughed, as if all of this was the funniest notion in the world. The man’s sister had just been killed, and he was… laughing. My stomach clenched at the disturbing sound of his echoing voice.
Bethany disappeared. She often did that when she got overwhelmed. And she wasn’t the only one alarmed by Voss’s strange behavior, as both the police officer and Doc Dalton stepped back nervously. “Lynch!” the doctor called. “Get me that laudanum now! The gentleman is grieved and needs calming!”
Was this grief? I’d seen many forms of it in these hospital wards—had even seen a husband laugh when a doctor informed him that his wife had died in surgery, as if the shock was too great for his mind to handle.
My gaze connected with the valet’s. He was in pain, yes. But he was also…
Horrified by his master.
There was something going on here that I didn’t understand. And I didn’t like it. Mr. Voss’s laughter stopped as his cough took over. I glanced at him briefly, but the valet’s silent, sad expression drew me back. It sent a chill down my spine.
I wished he wouldn’t stare at me so intently.
As if he could peer all the way into my soul.
As if his very soul was warning mine.