The rain only fell harder. She stood mere inches away from me. I dared not hug her or touch her or even move for that matter, afraid of making her vanish. I struggled to keep my words coherent, my voice steady. “Then . . . what should I be doing?”
Her eyes practically glowed, excited by the possibilities. It was as if we were back in our library. “If I were you, I’d be running around London healing everyone, whether they liked it or not.”
“Oh, so now I have to take on your responsibility of healing all of England, then?”
“To start, yes,” she said with a giggle.
“They’d all just eventually fall sick from something else.”
Her eyes narrowed. “And I would have died eventually, so what does it matter that it happened here?”
The question hung in the air with the ash and the dust. Of course it mattered. Most days, it felt like the only thing that ever mattered.
“How can you expect me to even go back to . . . anything?” I asked, numb and useless. “Without it feeling wrong?”
She cocked her head. “And locking yourself away from the world will give you more reasons to come back?”
“Where would I go?”
“Where do you want to go?”
It was unsettling and familiar, the way she answered my questions with more questions. It reminded me of my childhood . . . and suddenly, it was very clear and very infuriating: This was not my sister. Not even in my dream.
“Get out! Miss Grey, get out.”
In a blink, my governess had taken my sister’s place, and my stomach lurched as if I were losing Rose all over again.
“Would she have said anything different?” Miss Grey asked after a moment.
“It doesn’t matter. You have no right to enter my dreams and do that!”
“It’s the only way I can contact you when you refuse all visitors. I’ve been worried,” she said. “But I am sorry.”
I fumed in silence, and she waited. She could always outwait me. Behind her, the fire that had consumed Dr. Beck’s house was all smoke. The noxious stench of chemicals filled the air.
“So, is that everything you came to say?” I finally asked.
“No . . . I hoped you might meet me in Bloomsbury Square in an hour.”
“You can’t tell me here?”
“It requires your healing, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wake up.”
I did. Jolting awake in a tangle of blankets and bedsheets, I nearly knocked over the empty laudanum bottles and wine decanters that filled my bedside table. Enough to kill a normal person, yet unable to grant me more than five minutes of sleep before my power washed the effects away. Useless.
I lay prone for a long while, in a sort of limbo, barely registering my dim surroundings. The Lodges’ guest room still felt strange, despite Mae’s insistence that I make myself at home here. But I didn’t exactly want to make myself at home anywhere. Strange seemed more bearable. Even when my parents tried to take me back to Bramhurst after the funeral, I’d refused and they didn’t press me. Mae must have made some strong arguments against the constant reminders of Rose. She knew that pain all too well herself.
But nothing could be done about that vexing worry for Miss Grey. It forced me up and into the hallway, where Cushing froze in surprise at seeing me outside the bedroom. He then proceeded to do an admirable job of masking his disbelief when I asked him for a maid to help me dress and a hansom to take me to Bloomsbury Square.
The weather outside was cool. A brisk chill cut through the streets and offered unpleasant confirmation you were still alive, able to feel shivers on your skin or the warm pulse in your arm. The city flowed like it always had, the indifferent traffic and pedestrians carrying on with their business. I couldn’t help but take it as an insult, as if London had forgotten Rose and simply filled in the empty space she’d left.
Miss Grey was already waiting at a bench by the time I alighted from the cab. Like me, she cared not for the attention from mourning dress and wore a plain blue frock instead. She looked far better rested than the last time we had seen each other, but she still had that air of fragility about her.
“Thank you for coming, Evelyn,” she said. “I know this is difficult.”
I frowned doubtfully. “I did not have much choice. Where are you injured?”
She tilted her head, then nodded in understanding. “Oh no, it isn’t me. There’s a poor boy with several broken bones at the hospital nearby,” she said, gesturing down the street.
“A boy you know?”
“He revealed himself in one of my dreams.”
Another one of us. “What sort of ability does he have?”
“That is what I hoped to discover today.”
“And you’ve come to explain everything to him?”
“In part,” she said, turning to lead the way at a fast clip, pointedly looking nowhere but straight ahead. “But it’s also because I’ve found myself rather afraid lately.”
“Afraid of what?” I asked, trying to keep up.