A Beautiful Poison

Jasper loped up the stairs. Dr. Hanover was closing the door behind him. He gave Jasper one look, shook his head, and put his hat on his head before passing by.

So Lucy was dying. He was not surprised. He himself had been lucky—too lucky—with his own mild case in the spring. It was sad when servants left a household, no matter the method. Marriage, death, scandal.

Jasper calmed himself before quietly opening the door. Inside, Lucy lay moribund, eyes closed and her breath rattling in her chest like a wet marble trying to wend its way out of a swampy maze. Allene kneeled at the edge of the bed, apron tied about her waist and her hair messily escaping the knot on her head. She clutched the maid’s limp hand. Balled-up towels darkened with blood littered the bedside table. Nearby on the floor, there was a makeshift bed of quilts and pillows, but it seemed hardly touched. The idea that Allene would sleep on the floor startled Jasper; the further thought that she’d stayed awake all night was shocking.

“Lucy,” Allene whispered. “Lucy.”

Jasper hesitated and said nothing. His hand gripped the edge of the door; he was unable to move, unable to do anything but watch and listen.

“Lucia,” Allene whispered, a choking sound coming from her throat that was half sob, half growl. Jasper had never heard Allene call the maid by her real name. “Won’t you please wake up?” She shook the flaccid hand with surprising aggression, but nothing happened. Allene dropped her head to the bed. “My Lucia.”

It was only two minutes while Jasper watched. He wished to see that unbeautiful, transcendent moment when a soul ceased to reside in its container, weak as it was. There was something to be gleaned in that thin second—a lesson learned, a secret passed to the living that he was greedy to know. So he watched and found he was holding his breath as if suffocation might give him clarity.

The rasping in Lucy’s chest slowed and then, like an unwound watch, simply stopped, never to reach the next second. Allene raised her eyes. Her face was swollen with despair.

What followed was a sound that he hoped never to hear again. He didn’t know it, but a softened version of it had been residing with tarry blackness in his heart since the day his uncle had died. There had been echoes of it when he found his parents dead in their bedroom, a knock of it against the walls of his heart when Oscar passed away. Death had always hit Jasper with a concrete wave that forced him to think of survival, not of sorrow; of next steps and of wanting to claw beyond the audacity of hurt.

But with Allene, the sound was altogether different. It was savage and vicious, and it terrified Jasper. He ought to make a mental note never to love anyone in such a way as to lay himself open to such a wound. He thought of Allene and Birdie and now of Holly. He realized he would likely fail, and that gave him a dark comfort.

He pushed the door open wider, and the hinge gave a telltale squeak. Allene turned and saw him, and she rose to bury herself in his arms.

He would comfort her while she wept. Forever, if necessary. There wasn’t much else one could do when surrounded by so much death.





CHAPTER 25


The dream itself was a sticky treacle that pulled Birdie down over and over again, despite her attempts to fight her way back to consciousness. She needed to protect Holly. Harm was encroaching on Jasper and Allene with an unstoppable momentum. She needed to be awake.

But the dream slipped up her legs, sucked her into a mire of darkness that held her fast in its viscous core. When she tried to yank herself free, she’d find that she’d snapped her leg off above the knee or at the ankle. The darkened ooze pulled at the bony shards of her stump before she could run away, before claiming her arms, her hair, her screams.

Somewhere in her consciousness, she was able to refuse another draught of the bitter liquid that trapped her in this nightmare world. After what felt like years had gone by, she began to wake. The torment in her jaw and the white-lightning pain in her broken leg pushed her out of the numbed cloud and into wakefulness.

Birdie blinked, rubbing the crust from her heavy eyelids. She lay on a soft bed, dampened by her own sweat. Pain from the broken bone lanced up to her hip and down to her foot. She wiggled her toes, happy to find that she could wiggle them, but one leg was firmly tethered to a clothbound splint beneath her. Broad afternoon light flooded in through the window. She saw the ruddy treetops of Central Park out the window, leaves burnished by the beginnings of autumn. In the distance, sparkling water shone from the Conservatory Water.

“You’re awake.”

Birdie turned her head and saw Andrew sitting in a chair at her bedside. His collar was undone, his jacket slung on the chair back. His face was gaunt, as if he hadn’t eaten anything in a week. In his eyes glittered a starved eagerness. Whether it was for food or for her, Birdie didn’t know.

“Where’s Holly?” Birdie croaked.

“She’s with the maids. Having a ball, I might add.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Almost two days.”

“Where am I?” She managed to push herself up to a sitting position, but not without soul-sapping pain. Andrew helped prop her up with some feather pillows that were stuffed within an inch of their lives. He settled back into his chair, took out a tin box of pastilles, and popped one into his mouth. He offered one to Birdie, but she declined. Her appetite was nonexistent, anyway.

“So many questions,” he said, snapping the tin closed. “And not one about me.” Birdie said nothing. She watched Andrew watch her. “You’re in Ernie Fielding’s home. I would have taken you both in, but Mother was afraid of bringing in influenza.” He reached for a silver case in his jacket pocket, pulling out a cigarette. His casual words repelled Birdie. Of course he’d never allow his mistress into his parents’ home. The least he could do was not lie to her about an excuse. “Anyway, I think I had a touch of influenza myself, but nothing horrible. Allene had you and Holly removed when her maid got it. Pretty bad too.”

“Lucy?” Birdie asked, her eyebrows rising on her face.

“She’s dead.” Andrew tapped the end of the cigarette against the case before lighting it. He blew a single puff of smoke away from Birdie. “Died yesterday morning. Bloody awful mess, I hear.”

Lucy. She’d had what Birdie had wanted, that nestled place of receiving Allene’s trust and confidence during those years while Birdie was gone. She’d been jealous of Lucy, and Lucy’s suspicion of her had always made her feel like a street rat. Birdie looked down at the bumps of her splinted leg beneath the bedsheets. In the winning position, she felt nothing but emptiness. Lucy was a good woman, and she was dead from a stroke of fate.

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