“Miss Quicke,” she said. “You of all people know how a life can be injured by prejudice, how swiftly fear can be aroused. These children need you.”
Alice was still standing, her fists tight at her sides. She saw the man Coulton had unfolded his arms near the hat rack, his big hairy hands loose at his sides. Under the brim of his bowler his face was unreadable.
“And if I say no?”
But Mrs. Harrogate just smiled thinly and poured the tea.
* * *
She hadn’t, of course, said no.
And now here she was, bone-tired, mud-spattered, doing the very thing she’d vowed not to do, wading among the low unfortunates of the world with her hands empty and curled at her sides, exactly like some monster in a fairy story, come to steal an eight-year-old child.
Remington lay thirty miles northeast of Bloomington, well off the trunk line, and she had got off the train in Bloomington and walked to the other end of town and purchased a ticket on the old-fashioned mail coach, leaving that night, without even first collecting her traveling cases. That had been four days ago. She’d made the journey through green fields and stands of poplar and oak in the settling twilight, watching the vast roiling storm clouds of the American Midwest mass darkly out on the horizon. It had been nearly six years since she’d left and the country had changed. She had changed.
Alice left the circus grounds, distracted. She walked down to a farrier at the edge of town and purchased an iron-shod cart and a bed of straw and the packhorse stabled out back. The packhorse was ship-ribbed and bony with sores around its mouth and one eye glassy but she did not argue the deal. Alice studied the old-fashioned leather tackle and ropes dangling from hooks above the counter and said nothing. They looked as if they had hung there since the town’s founding. The farrier spat in his hand and held it out. His blond beard ragged, his palms seamed with dirt. She took it. She bought a hatchet and some blankets and a flint next door and later she stood out on the boardwalk massaging her sprained wrist, staring the length of the street to the trampled field beyond, the big top looming there, brooding. Thinking about the child. The sky overhead was white with traces of dark vapor adrift within it and when she raised her eyes she had to squint in the brightness. Later she bought from the general store a box of bread and dried jerky and a sack of wizened apples. She would take the child east, riding for Lafayette, Indiana, in the morning.
What she wasn’t thinking about, what she deliberately did not think about, was her mother, in that asylum, not fifteen miles from where she was, her mother whom she had not seen in years, whom she had gone to visit on her last day in Illinois all those years ago, before heading east, and whom she had glimpsed walking in the grounds with a nurse, her mother gray-haired by then, stooped, her face eerily smooth and her eyes glazed and dead and her fingers fluttering in the air like little birds. Alice had stood at the end of the cloistered garden and watched her mother walk the nearby path, trailing her fingers along the stone wall in places, like a blind lady, finding her way, and Alice had not called out to her, had not gone to her, had not held her and been held.
It was still only just noon when she walked the packhorse across to the hotel. She changed out of her blue dress back into the clothes she preferred, the men’s trousers and her faded greatcoat and the worn hat with the weather-bitten brim. Back in the street she climbed up onto the buckboard and settled herself with a blanket across her lap and snapped the reins and rode north out of town.
She knew the way, remembered it. The sky was still bright and as she rode it started to rain, a faint mist, but she did not slow or stop under the trees and soon the mist was gone and the world was shining. Her heart was in her throat. She wasn’t afraid, exactly, but she didn’t know how her mother would look when she got there, or what she’d say to her, or even if her mother would know who she was. It had been so long. God only knew what they did to the patients in those places.
When she got to the asylum she sat a long time in the old cart, the reins looped over her knuckles, her eyes scanning the dark granite facade, the windows dazzling with reflected sky. There was no sound, not even birdsong in the trees along the edge of the lawn. She didn’t know what she would do, or say, wasn’t even sure why she’d come. What could her mother offer her now, after all these years? What could she offer her mother?
The cart creaked and shuddered as she got down. She climbed the old steps and went in. The foyer was dim and smelled of varnish and at the big desk a nurse was seated, writing in a ledger. She raised her face as Alice came in, looking her up and down with disapproval. She was very old. Behind her desk stood the door to the wards, locked.
Alice hesitated. “I’m here to see Rachel Quicke. She’s a patient. I’m her daughter.”
A flicker of a frown. “Visiting day is Sunday.”
“I’ve come a great distance,” said Alice. “I’ve come from England. I have to be leaving again in the morning. Please.”
“And you did not think to write ahead?” The nurse tapped her pencil twice, three times. She sighed. Then she reached for a big black leather-bound book behind her. “I’ll need her patient identification number.”
Alice shook her head. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t told—”
“Of course you weren’t. No one ever is. Dr. Crane doesn’t believe in using their names, you see. Never mind, I will look it up. Rachel Quicke, was it?”
Alice nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And was she admitted recently?”
“Eighteen years ago.”
The nurse glanced up. “For what reason?”
Alice paused. “Religious mania. She burned eleven people in their beds. She was trying to re-create a miracle she thought she saw.”
The nurse was looking at her strangely. “Patient Seventeen,” she said quietly. “You’re her daughter. I didn’t know she had a daughter. Did no one get in touch with you?”
“In touch—?”
The nurse closed the book softly, her eyes searching Alice’s face. “Your mother was a fine lady, Miss Quicke. We all knew her. Troubled, of course. But a good person, under it all.”
She didn’t understand. “What’re you saying?” she whispered.
The nurse stood gravely, her hands clasped in front of her. “Your mother died seven years ago. In her sleep. I’m sorry.”
Seven years.
Alice said nothing. She should have felt ashamed, maybe. But there was nothing in her heart, she was empty—no sorrow, no anger, no bitterness—and this surprised her. Maybe this is what grief is, she thought. Maybe this is how loss feels. Like nothing. Like wind in a hollow.
The nurse put on a shawl and took her back outside and showed her the little graveyard on the hill and Alice walked up and stood for a time at her mother’s gravestone, already weathered, still feeling nothing, wondering if she should say something, a prayer maybe, but in the end she just stared out at the sky and thought of nothing at all and then walked back to the cart and the packhorse waiting with its ears pricked, its eyes rolling nervously, and climbed back up.
* * *
When Alice got back to Remington it was night. Shadows were pooling in the street under the lights from the taverns. She could hear the circus, the thrump of drums, the faint roar of the crowds.