This took a moment to sink in, and then I shot upright on the bed. “Your fiancé.”
She flushed dull red and looked miserably guilty. “It was true at first—I swear it. Well, sort of. There was a fellow my mother thought I should marry. And she planned to have me meet him to see if we would suit. I told Martha I was engaged, because it was practically done. Almost. And I just wanted to be the engaged girl, you know?”
“Yes.”
“And Martha took to it—she was as excited as if it was happening to her. And the boy Mother had picked moved away without my ever meeting him, but by then it seemed so real. I found I liked making Martha happy. She’s got her faults—we all do—but she’s a good girl. She’s the best of us, really. So that was it. I’d rather lie to her and make her happy than let her down. I just couldn’t bear to let her down.”
I lay back on my bed, thinking. “You had me fooled,” I said.
“Kitty, I’m a horrible liar.”
“No, no, you did all right. You floundered a little when she asked you about the dress, though. A good lie has to be convincing in the details.”
“I guess I could take lessons.” But she was snickering—Nina, actually trying not to laugh—and I couldn’t get offended. “I’m turning the lamp out now.”
I watched her do it, thinking sorrowfully of the book on my bedside table, and that I wouldn’t be able to read it. “What are you going to do?” I asked her. “Eventually she’s going to wonder why you don’t get married.”
“Kitty,” she said from the dark space across from me, “I have no idea. And if you say anything, I’ll—”
“Find me and skin me, yes.” I sat upright in bed again, staring into the dark. “Wait a minute. If you knew about me, then you knew I was lying about having clearance to go into Jack Yates’s room.”
“Of course I knew it.”
“And you let me go in there anyway and get caught. And get myself an incident report.”
“I’m nice,” she said, “but I’m not that nice. Now for God’s sake go to sleep.”
? ? ?
I awoke before dawn again and dressed while Nina slept. I’d had no dreams this time, but a strange energy coursed through me. I recognized it as anticipation, though I could not have said of what. My muscles and my nerves seemed fluid, ready. There was no way I would sleep again.
I pulled the handwritten pages out of The Odyssey, slid them into my pocket in the still-dark, picked up my boots, and crept from the room. This time I saw nothing when I sat on the staircase to tie my boots. I slipped out the kitchen door and looked around at the horizon, which was slowly turning an eerie pink as the sun began its ascent. I half looked for a figure standing on the rise, and at first I saw nothing; the dark was too impenetrable. Then I made it out, a lone figure stark against the horizon, and I held my breath.
It wasn’t Jack. It wasn’t Maisey. And it wasn’t the strange figure of the woman I’d seen. It was a man, soft and pudgy, his patients’ whites flapping against his legs in the rising breeze.
I climbed the rise, huffing. “Tom,” I said when I got to the top. “It’s early. What are you doing here?”
He was looking out over the marshes, his face, as it so often was, clear of any emotion, any knowledge. He turned and glanced at me. “Oh, hello,” he said. “Are you the new nurse?”
I sighed. “Yes.”
“I’m trying to remember why I came out here,” he said matter-of- factly. Then he pointed at the pinkening horizon. “Over there. That means something’s coming.”
I gazed at it. “Something?”
“A storm,” he said. “A bad one.”
That explained the stillness, the readiness in my veins.
“I don’t know why I remember that and not anything else,” said Tom. “I know I’ve come out here before, just to this spot. To get away from the house. It’s bad in there some nights. The man comes, and he’s so terribly angry.”
My heart slowed to a hard, measured throb. “The man?”
“Oh, no one likes him, so I’ve come here before to get away. I always think I’m going to go home. I know exactly where it is. And then I walk out the door, and I stand here, and . . .” He looked around. “I don’t know where I would go from here. Do you?”
“No,” I said softly.
“It’s so confusing. I’d really like to go home. But this . . . this seems to be all there is.”
We looked at the sunrise, watching the sky grow light. It was beautiful in its way, but I could believe what Tom had said. Something bad was coming.
“Who is the man, Tom?” I asked. “The angry one.”
But he only glanced at me and away again. “He’s dead. Horribly, horribly dead. But you won’t believe me. No one does.”
“I believe you,” I said softly.
“Then you’ll see him when he comes,” Tom replied. His brow creased and trouble crossed his features. “I think it’s going to be bad.”
His brow smoothed again, and the memory of whatever he had seen, whatever he had heard, left his mind. He went inside to breakfast and left me watching the slow approach of the clouds, wondering exactly what was coming.