And at last, the jury at Anna’s inquest refused to indict her for reasons of self-defense, and Anna was freed. Portis House itself descended into a legal quagmire; supposedly it was Anna’s to inherit, but the wheels of English law turned notoriously slowly. She could not sell it, even if she could find a buyer; she could do nothing with it, it seemed, but live in it, moving back in with her memories and ghosts.
She didn’t return to the house. Instead, Anna and Maisey went off on a tour of the Continent together until the scandals died down. They never said where they got the money for the trip, but I knew. Captain Mabry was pleased. “I shot at her,” he told me. “It’s the least I can do.”
Before they left, I had one last interview with Anna, alone. “I don’t mean to distress you,” I said to her, “but there’s something I want to ask.”
She looked at me with her curiously disconnected expression, as if she was watching a play.
“At Portis House,” I said. “Your father—his ghost—wanted a sacrifice. You said that sacrifice was you. You told Jack to shoot you.”
She looked away. “I don’t think he would have. I know that now.”
She was right; Jack had told me that already. He had always planned to shoot Mabry, not Anna, and he had not shot to kill. “But your father’s ghost wanted you dead,” I said. “He wanted you dead so that he could go.”
“It’s true,” Anna said.
“But, Anna, you’re not dead. Your father never got his sacrifice.”
Her lips pressed together.
“He never got what he wanted,” I continued. “Mikael is gone—you felt that. But your father . . . If you didn’t die, and Mabry didn’t die . . .”
Anna’s gaze slid to mine, and for a second she was present; for a second she was clear. “Kitty,” she said. “Don’t go back to Portis House.”
? ? ?
Mabry and West got their transfer forms and packed their bags. The story of Mabry defending us from Creeton had stuck; Mabry’s wife and her father had heard of it, and though they weren’t ready to have him home, Mrs. Mabry wrote that she would apply to visit. She would come alone at first, but perhaps someday she would bring the children.
West had no desire to be discharged. He needed more time—this time, he hoped, in a place that “won’t make me madder than I was to begin with.”
It was Archie who, at long last, went home. When his father, the newspaper baron, read of the scandal at Portis House, he discharged his son. “He never really wanted me admitted,” Archie told me. “Not truly. It was the stuttering and the shaking that made him nervous. I think I’ve passed some kind of test.”
“So you’re fully healed, then?” I asked him. “That’s what you let your father believe?”
He looked pained. “I had to tell him something, Kitty, or I’d never go home. I told my father I’d glue pages at the paper if he wanted. I still get the nightmares, but not as bad, not now that he is gone. I want to try it—normal life, that is. My father doesn’t need to know that I’m not right in the head, not really, and that I’ll never get well.”
Martha recovered enough to go home to Glenley Crewe until she regained her full strength and got another job. Matron was given a prestigious position at a new hospital in Cornwall, including lighter duties and a raise in pay. She took Nina, Martha, and Boney with her. But before she started her new position, Matron herself decided to take six weeks off to walk the Lake District. “I’m not retiring,” she told me firmly. “Nursing still needs me, Nurse Weekes.”
And then she was gone—everyone was gone.
? ? ?
It was mid-August, and Jack and I were the only two passengers on the platform at the tiny train station at New Thetford, somewhere in Warwick. The sun was massively hot in the middle of the day, and sweat gathered at my temples and on the back of my neck as I adjusted my wide-brimmed hat lower over my face. I shaded my eyes with my gloved hands and stared off down the track.
“It’ll come soon enough,” said Jack. He’d taken refuge on a wooden bench squeezed into a thin strip of shade and was paging lazily through a newspaper—that day’s newspaper, with nary a story blacked out. “We’re almost there, you know.”
The track seemed to waver in the heat as I watched it, but there was still no sign of a train. “No, I don’t know,” I said to him. “I’d never been out of London before Portis House. I’ve no idea where we are.”
“We change trains here,” he replied easily, “and then we go to Somerset. And then we’re home.”
“Aren’t you nervous?” I asked him. “I’m prickly as a bear. My clothes are all new and I’m not used to them. And I hate wearing gloves.”
He put the newspaper down on his lap. He looked impossibly handsome even in a summer suit and tie, and he’d barely broken a sweat, the infernal man. He held out a hand. “Give me your hand.”
I walked across the platform and held out my right hand, but he took my left instead and pulled the glove off. He leaned down and gave it a solemn kiss, right on the knuckle near my ring. “You look like a respectable lady, Mrs. Yates.”
“Oh, no,” I said, and we both laughed.
I put the glove back on and stepped away from him. I had to or the train would come to find me sitting quite comfortably on his lap, heat be damned. “I’ve never run a farm before,” I said.
“You’ll do fine,” he said, picking up the paper again.
“What if I don’t like it?”
“Then I’ll sell it and we’ll go live like bohemians in the South of France.”
“What if I want a job?” I said, remembering Matron’s advice. “What if I want to be useful?”
He looked at me. “Do you want to be a nurse? A trained one?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I’ve never done anything but live day to day. I’ve never really thought about what I want to do.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I was raised on my parents’ farm, and I know how to run it. My father taught me since childhood. But I never really thought about whether I wanted it. And then I went to war.”
I looked at him. Oh, how I adored him. That easy competence that he had with everything. The way he treated me as if I mattered. Those gorgeous hands of his. “It’s going to be all right,” I said. “Isn’t it. No matter what happens. No matter what we do.”
He thought about it, and his face relaxed almost into a smile. “Yes, it is. The train’s coming.”
I put a hand on my hat and turned to watch it approach.
And somewhere, miles behind us, Portis House sat solitary, continuing its slow descent into the marshes.