The first and only time Molly had been bled, she’d fought until Jeremy had tied her arms to the chair. He had used the wrong knots, however, and Molly had shaken free so dramatically that most of the leeches had flown from her arms and landed, with viscous plops, along the edges of the room.
Tonight, Mrs. Wickware again brought the leeches into Molly’s bedroom, where she placed the jar on a nightstand and set aside the lid. Jeremy had been practicing knots all week and stood behind a chair in the center of the rug. He had a length of dirty rope and looked eager to employ it, but Molly took a seat and rolled up her sleeves unbidden. The room seemed to shrink with all of them together. Mrs. Wickware plunged her hand into the jar; leeches could be heard writhing at her fingers.
She turned and asked Molly, “Will you need to be restrained again?”
“No, ma’am,” Molly said, turning up her forearms to better show the veins. Her sweat thickened when the first slippery leech was brought toward her. It was hungry and had already drawn blood from Mrs. Wickware’s wrist, but Molly stared at it directly and refused to flinch away.
“Do you hope to be exempted on the grounds of good behavior? This is not the proper attitude,” Mrs. Wickware said. “Leeching, though unpleasant, should not be viewed as punishment, you see, but as a beneficial practice we must all of us accept.”
“I understand,” Molly said. “I think it’s humbug and hideous like everything you do. But I will patiently submit because I know I cannot win.”
Mrs. Wickware flushed and looked at her triumphantly, her countenance enlivened, her rigidity dissolving. “I am satisfied to hear it. We learn by rote and force what later we believe through wisdom and experience. You cannot see the benefit but bow to my authority. I ask for nothing else. You needn’t love me to obey me.”
Jeremy loomed close, twisting on his rope. Molly balled her fists and didn’t shrink away as Mrs. Wickware attached the first leech below her elbow. There was a momentary sting. She waited and it passed. “Leech saliva dulls the pain,” Nicholas had told them over dinner, “allowing them to feed undetected on their hosts.”
Undetected, Molly thought, if she were swimming in a pond—not sitting in a chair and witnessing the meal.
And yet she sat and let it happen, even when Jeremy leaned down to watch the leeches suck, and Molly imagined they were each a little Wickware at dinner, comfortable and swelling up full enough to pop.
* * *
Molly lay in bed, waiting for the Elmcross Church bells to toll three o’clock. She worried she had missed it, having heard the bells at two so very long ago—what if she had dozed and missed the long-awaited cue?
Her bed had been moved to the room immediately adjacent to Mrs. Wickware’s chamber, the better to ensure that she behaved after dark. On most nights, Jeremy forced her to the room and locked her inside. If Molly thumped or shouted, trying to disrupt Mrs. Wickware’s sleep, Jeremy would lock himself in Molly’s room and watch her sleeping from a chair all night long.
Tonight, however, Molly had climbed into her bed without being asked. Her door was locked as always but Jeremy had departed, and thanks to Molly’s docility in the latter half of the day, Mrs. Wickware’s suspicions fell away and soon her purring snores could be heard in the neighboring room. Molly passed the hours reading, and when Elmcross Church finally tolled three, she blew her candle out, crept to the third-story window in her shift, and quietly opened the sash.
A thick warm fog had drifted over Umber from the sea, and all she could discern, thirty feet below, were the wrought-iron spikes of the fence surrounding the house. The rest of the street was pillowy mist, seeming substantial enough to catch her if she fell. She stepped out onto the narrow ledge and closed the sash behind her, fearing a draft under the door would rouse Mrs. Wickware. The only light came from the moon, which was gauzy in the fog and illuminated the haze rather than anything within it.
She had climbed throughout her life and had rarely fallen, thanks to her natural balance and an absolute, delusional belief in her abilities. The day in the library when Nicholas cracked his tooth had been the closest she had ever come to serious harm, but now, creeping farther