I made the mistake of glancing up at him, only to find that he was regarding me intently. Intensely. His expression was one of deep fondness, as if he looked upon an old friend and not a young girl who was completely strange to him. I shifted, pulling the blanket more tightly around myself. Then I pretended to put my head back and sleep, yet still I felt his leaden gaze upon me.
“You know, you look just like an angel that way. So peaceful. Innocent.”
My eyes snapped open in alarm. “I am no angel, sir, just a tired servant.”
“No, that’s true, you are no angel.” He chuckled, running his forefinger over the dark smudges of his mustache, outlining it. “One must wonder if you really did do in the widow.”
“I beg your pardon?” I wanted to disappear under the blanket, or perhaps throw him out the back of the wagon. The road flattened out, and Coldthistle became a small speck behind us. Still, I could see the shadows that flitted among the windows, the Residents coming to fervent life with the fall of night. I glanced to my right, to the drawn curtain and Chijioke beyond it.
“Oh, the others think you were jealous of her, of her beauty and wealth, but I doubt you would sink to murder over such pettiness,” he said, still stroking his mustache. “You seem an intelligent girl. Did you happen upon her letter? Did you know she intended to swindle those men blind?”
“I found her exactly as you saw her,” I replied quickly. “Her plot had nothing to do with me. Why should I care?”
Dr. Merriman nodded slowly, but his stare intensified. “Then you are innocent of her death.”
“God above, of course I am!”
The wagon wove hard from side to side, tossed by the uneven ground. That was the wrong thing to say. The doctor smiled at me and moved, quickly, darting from his bench to mine, stepping over the widow easily with his long legs. He sat down next to me. Close. Too close. I remembered then his hand on my leg in the Red Room, and the frost of the nighttime air turned perilously cold. How long was the ride to Derridon?
“True innocence is so rare,” he said, and I recoiled at the sultry note in his voice. He no longer regarded me with that odd but endurable fondness. His intent had sharpened, his breath heavy and sour on my shoulder. “My young girl was innocent, too. You remind me of her—my daughter—the same dark hair and dark eyes . . .”
I scrambled for the right thing to say. The right distraction. “What is she like?’
“Not very clever, but trusting and good. She always listened to her father. Always did as she was told.” He sighed wistfully. “Until one day she didn’t. I always wondered how it came to pass. . . . How a good, loving child could change into a sullen chit too important for her father, too important for all the world.”
The doctor sighed again, but now he sounded disappointed.
“It might be that innocence is a candle; it can be blown out short or it can burn down to nothingness, but it is destined one way or another to die.” He shook his head and placed that dreaded hand on my thigh, and I felt my spirit wither at the touch. God, Chijioke was right—and curse him, Mr. Morningside was right. These people drawn to Coldthistle were rotten to the core. “For a long time I blamed her mother, but no, Catarina chose her own path. She chose another man above me and was never the same again.”
“Please,” I said in a choked whisper. “Could you remove your hand . . .”
“I don’t think so.” He tightened his grip, fingers biting through blanket and skirts and into my flesh. “I buried her with my own two hands, you know. Washed the body. Dressed the body. Digging the grave took much longer than I anticipated, but it was worth it, to do it all, to be the only one alone with her in the end.”
I swallowed hard and looked up at the ceiling. Perhaps he was just a lost and grieving father. This moment would pass once he collected himself. I would survive it. “You must miss her terribly.”
“Every single moment, yes.”
“If it upsets you so, then we need not speak of—”
“It helps to talk about her,” he interrupted. His dark brown eyes filled with tears. “There is sadness, yes, and bitterness. Rage. Regret. . . . So much regret.”
“I’m sure you did everything a father could,” I said weakly. A reliable voice in the back of my mind insisted I did not want to know how the girl had died.
The roughness of the road and the way it rattled us made my jaw ache.
Dr. Merriman rocked back and forth, his hand still tight around my thigh like a vise. His expression relaxed after a moment, and he patted my leg. It felt as if he might veer from this upsetting conversation, but then he looked at me once more and I felt my heart stop.
A feral dog looked like that. Hungry. Blind, hungry, and mad. And though he smiled, I sensed no joy in it, only fixation. “You could be like her. Like the good Catarina. You could be obedient and sweet, never placing another man above your father.”
“I . . . I’m certain your daughter is irreplaceable.”
The laugh he gave was indistinguishable from a sob. “You have no idea what it’s like. You couldn’t know . . . what it’s like to make someone. To make another person! It is heaven and hell in one, for the love you bear them is painful. Every lie they tell, every scrape they incur, it wounds you. They are your flesh, but they do not act as your flesh. You cannot control them; I could not control her. You cannot understand it, young Louisa, how it feels to fail that way.”
I made my face a blank mask of submission. Do not smile. Do not frown. Even the slightest hint of mockery or dissent felt like it might plunge him deeper into this melancholy. His hand became wet with sweat, a dampness that seeped through the blankets and my skirts to my skin. I gulped down a shake of revulsion.
“I failed her. I failed myself. I made a body with my own body and she turned wild and strange. In her last days I hardly recognized the soft, sweet girl who once sat in my lap and sang lullabies. My father beat me, oh God, did he beat me! But I never laid a finger on her, never until she became a stranger. Your own flesh and blood should never become a stranger to you.”
Coldthistle was out of view now, swallowed by the night and a light mist that rolled in off the moors. Its vanishing frightened me more than I cared to admit; we traveled through the night in what felt like a sea of fog and shadow, unanchored, adrift until we reached Derridon.
If I reached Derridon.
My thigh ached, a cramp spreading out from where he squeezed my veins shut.
“Sir, you’re hurting my leg.”
The doctor rambled on, perspiration making his skin glisten. The wagon thumped into another crater in the road. “I created her flesh and it spoiled. There was only one way open to me: to take that flesh back in and try again.”