Sisters' Fate

Tess draws herself up. “I’m not a baby, Cate. I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll look after her,” Vi promises. She stands and pushes open the curtains, letting the moonlight spill across the room. “Perhaps you ought to have a little lie-in tomorrow, Tess. I could bring up breakfast for you. I’m sure no one would mind if you missed class just this once.”

“No. Please don’t coddle me,” Tess begs. “That’s just what they want—whoever’s doing this.”

I drop onto the bed next to her. “But you’ve got to take care of yourself. I know your visions give you headaches, and now this—”

Tess shrinks away from my ministrations. “I’m fine. Go back to bed.”

I bite my lip. “All right. Good night, then.”

I glance back at Tess as I close the door behind me. She’s pulled the blue quilt up to her chin and turned to face the wall, but I can tell by the way her shoulders are shaking that she’s crying again, and trying to hide it.

What else is she hiding from me?

Chapter 10

THE NEXT DAY, MEI, ADDIE, PEARL, AND I walk down to Richmond Hospital after classes. We carry doctors’ bags stuffed with bandages, Bibles, and medicinal herbs. There are guards on every street corner. With Christmas just a few days away, the shops should be bustling, but a hush has fallen over the city. The gallows still stands in Richmond Square; workers are scrubbing bloodstains from the cobblestones on Church Street. A good portion of the populace is frightened enough to stay home—but is it the escaped witches or the Brothers’ overzealous soldiers that scare them?

When we walk through the front door of the hospital, the fevered stench nearly knocks me over. I breathe in through my mouth, fumbling in my bag for a handkerchief. Next to me, Addie gags.

The lobby is a madhouse. The sick line the walls, faces red and shiny with sweat. Those too weak to stand have lain down on the cold tiled floor. A nurse spins around, trying to direct a dozen different people at once, and more tug at her sleeves. Three little boys run up and down the hall while babies sit slumped and unnaturally quiet in their mothers’ arms.

“Good Lord,” Mei whispers. “I heard it was getting bad, but this . . .”

“This is dreadful.” I scan the crowd. Judging from their clothes—plain, twice-turned dresses for the women and blue jeans and workmen’s shirts for the men—it looks like most of the patients hail from the poor neighborhoods near the river. That makes a terrible sort of sense. They can’t afford private physicians, and they live one on top of another, with whole families squished into two-room flats. The fever is bound to spread faster there. And it’s not as if those already scrambling to feed their families can take a holiday to rest and recover; likely they keep going until they drop—and infect others when they’re out.

Does Merriweather know about this? I’ve made a point of reading the papers lately and there’s been nothing about a possible epidemic in the Sentinel or the Gazette. People have to be made aware. With Christmas coming up, everyone will be crowded into shops and churches. It could reach a crisis level all too quickly. I cringe, remembering the influenza epidemic of 1887. I was only seven, but I remember how the coffins piled up in the churchyard and the Brothers canceled services for a week, urging us to pray at home for an end to the sickness. Mrs. O’Hare’s sister died. So did Rose and Matthew Collier’s baby brother—and dozens of other neighbors. That was just in our small town. What must it have been like in New London?

A nurse clad in a gray dress and a long white apron strides briskly down the hall. When she sees us, she pushes her way through the crowd. “Oh, Sisters, thank the Lord you’re finally here! We ran out of beds yesterday and now we’ve got folks dying on our doorstep. Half of them don’t come until it’s already too late. We give them valerian to calm them, or salicin to try and break the fever, but there isn’t much else we can do. We’re being run ragged. I had to send three of my nurses home sick.”

“I’m sorry we weren’t here sooner. We had no idea it was this bad,” I explain.

She clucks, heading up the stairs at a pace so quick, I’ve nearly got to run to keep up. “Inez has seen it with her own eyes, hasn’t she? I’ve been telling her all week we needed help,” she complains. “Lord, I didn’t even introduce myself. I’m Mrs. Jarrell.”

“I’m Cate.” I pause on the landing to catch my breath, introducing the others, and then: “Sister Inez has been here?”

“Every day.” The nurse runs a hand through her bobbed, chin-length brown hair. “She’s awfully devoted. I suppose you want to see her before you start?”

“No, we—” Addie begins, but I elbow her.

“Yes, please.” Now that I think of it, Inez has been missing from the convent most afternoons. She teaches the advanced illusions classes, then disappears. But why? She’s not the type to nurse the sick. Not unless there’s something in it for her.

We follow the nurse through two of the contagious men’s wards. They’re full, a patient in every one of the thirty beds. Nurses scramble back and forth, dispensing midafternoon tonics and milk punch. The air is filled with the sound of wet, hacking coughs. As we pass through, an aide delivers two bags bulging with freshly laundered sheets.

Mrs. Jarrell leads us down a hallway with a few private rooms. “She reads to him every day for hours. I doubt he understands a word, but it’s kind of her. They don’t get many visitors. Sad, really.”

She stops before a closed door, and I peer through the window into a dim room with a dozen beds. Four windows line the far wall, but the white curtains are all drawn shut; nine of the men are sleeping. The tenth seems fascinated with his own hands, clenching and unclenching his fists like a baby. Inez sits in a wooden chair, a book of Scripture open on her lap, murmuring prayers over the eleventh bed.

The man in it is none other than William Covington, former head of the Brotherhood.

I press my ear to the glass, straining to hear. Her voice rises and falls, but I can’t make out the words. I glance back in, noticing the way her eyes rest on Covington’s face, not the Bible, even as her mouth continues to move.

The hair on the nape of my neck prickles. Something about this is wrong. Deeply wrong.

I reach for the doorknob, but Mei grabs my arm. “We shouldn’t intrude. She looks so prayerful.”

Mrs. Jarrell heads back the way we came. “We’ve got plenty of work for you. The laundry’s come back, so we’ll need to change the sheets. If you help the junior nurses with that, it will free me up to talk to the matron and see if we can’t find somewhere to put these new patients.”

Addie and Pearl follow at her heels like spaniels, while Mei and I lag behind. “We need to find out what Inez is doing,” I hiss. “Why would she come to visit Covington and the other council members?”

“Perhaps this is her way of atoning for what she did?” Even Mei sounds dubious.

We cross back over the landing and into the women’s wing. Mrs. Jarrell pauses in the first contagious ward to speak with the senior nurse.

“Please,” I say. “You can’t tell me Inez is praying for their health and recovery, not when she’s the one who put them here in the first place.”