into a fit. Now you know, and I want all your legs moving back to your rooms. And don’t you be telling the other staff I said a word to you. They’d have my hide for sharing stories that aren’t my own.”
Grace wandered back to her bed, listening to Elizabeth and Nell’s good-natured bickering as she went. She’d not known Mrs. Jacobs well, but the few times they had met she’d been reminded of Mrs. Clay. They shared a respectful bearing, a way of holding themselves that communicated a power restrained. Now Mrs. Jacobs was broken, for whether her daughter was child or whore, she was lost forever. Grace’s thoughts strayed to Boston and Mrs. Clay, Reed and Falsteed, the deplorable Nurse Croomes and Dr. Heedson, whose straying hand she’d so gladly impaled.
Her consciousness trailed down into the darkness of sleep, where even that blackness could not compare with the hues of her past.
“Is she going to be all right?” Grace asked, in an attempt to distract Thornhollow from the blackboard.
“Who?” he asked, tearing his eyes away from his own handwriting reluctantly.
“Mrs. Jacobs,” she reminded him. “I was asking how she’s handling her grief?”
“Not well,” he said, slumping in the chair beside hers and tenting his hands over his eyes. “The ferocity of her emotions is tearing apart her mind. Sometimes I think we’d all be best suited by not caring for others at all.”
“A bleak picture,” Grace said. “I dislike most people as much as you, but the few that I care for I hold very dear. If not for those who care for us, we’d never make it through the worst. I’d not have survived Boston without Falsteed and Mrs. Clay. Likewise I’ll do my best to steer my sister through mourning my own death, false though it may be.”
A long silence greeted her words as Thornhollow slowly pulled his hands away from his face. “You have a sister?”
“Yes,” Grace said hesitantly, realizing her blunder.
“Older or younger?”
“Younger. She’s ten years old.”
“And she remains at home?”
“Yes,” Grace answered, nerves making her voice thready. “Why do you ask?”
“And how exactly are you offering comfort to her, if you are—as you say yourself—supposedly dead?”
Grace stiffened in her chair, braced for the argument. “I wrote to Falsteed and enclosed a letter to her written by an imaginary friend. Reed placed it for me and retrieved her response, sending it to me here.”
“You did what?” Each word was succinctly bitten off, each syllable a vibrant slash in the charged air between them. Thornhollow’s brow was dark, his eyes snapping in a way she’d never seen.
“I wrote to Falsteed,” she repeated, matching him tone for tone. “He gave me an alias to use. Reed handles all our correspondence. I’m sure the hospital staff in Boston believes he has a lover named Madeleine Baxter, nothing more.”
Thornhollow rose from the chair, pacing the room with an influx of energy and anger. “And this same Madeleine Baxter happens to enclose letters to the younger sister of a female inmate who supposedly died under my blade? What if a busybody decides to go through Reed’s letters, or his wife somehow gets wind that he receives missives from a female at his workplace? I didn’t deliver you from that pit only for you to allow sentiment to drive us both back into it!”
“Sentiment, Doctor!” Grace exploded, rising up from her chair to meet him in her fury. “My little sister lives in a more refined pit, but a viper’s nest nonetheless. You truly think I would leave her abandoned to that horror simply to save my own skin?”
“Your own skin?” he bellowed back, not cowed in the least by her display of temper. “What of mine? What of my career? How would it appear if it were discovered that I colluded in the disappearance of an attractive young woman and reappeared with her elsewhere as my dutiful assistant?”
“Am I to be a kept woman, then?” Grace yelled, not caring that his office walls may not hold her voice. “Not for what’s between my legs but my ears? Here to hop to your beck and call when you need a plaything for your night’s adventures, no less of a doll for your own purposes than our killer’s victims are to him?”
“Enough!” Thornhollow roared. “I’ll not be spoken to like this when I’ve risked everything on your behalf. Your father is a powerful man, Grace Mae. You don’t realize what could happen to me if he should uncover our ruse.”
“No, Doctor,”