to be carried out of the room.
With a growl of impatience, he doubled back and knelt beside Mercy and Honor, folding them both into his arms.
I grasped my fingers, twisting them together in painful knots, ashamed to meet my sisters’ faces. I’d frightened them. They truly believed I’d done something to Verity.
My breath hitched.
The night of the moths, Eulalie’s ghost had accused me of murdering her. I’d passed it off as a bad dream, a case of sleepwalking gone horribly wrong.
What if it wasn’t?
What if Kosamaras had used me to push Eulalie from the cliffs? And Edgar from the shop—I’d obviously not been with Cassius when it occurred.
But no. I would never have hurt my sisters, no matter what. This was just the beguiling.
Wasn’t it?
If Kosamaras could bring a dead man back to life, create dozens of balls from thin air, and make me believe in a person who wasn’t real, I shuddered to think what else she had in store for me.
What had I done to my little sister?
Papa broke their hug. “Morella needs me, and I need you to be brave right now.” He kissed their foreheads, one after the other. “My brave little sailors. Camille…I’ll likely need your assistance.”
She blanched. “But I don’t know anything about childbirth. Annaleigh takes care of her. She’s the one who’s been talking with the midwife. She helped with Mama’s deliveries.”
He looked me up and down, then sighed. “I’m not taking her up there in this state.”
I hated the way he spoke over me, as if I wasn’t fit to be included in the conversation. Studying the butter knife in his hand, I supposed he might be right.
I opened my mouth, forcing my voice to remain even. “The midwife left a book the last time she was here. There are pictures in it. You and Camille should be able to follow them. They’re very detailed.”
A wave of relief washed over Papa’s face. “Thank you, Annaleigh. Can you get it for us?”
Feeling like a marionette being jerked and tugged by strings against my will, I crossed to the bookcase the statue had fallen from. I pulled the thick volume off the shelf and ran my hand over its worn cover.
On my way back to Papa, I skirted around the mess of porcelain and marble, then froze. Written in the dust, by an unseen fingertip, was a message.
I EXIST.
Mercy and Honor were the only two who’d been near the mess, but they’d run away as soon as the bust fell. They wouldn’t have had time to write this. A faint flicker of hope warmed my heart. Had Cassius somehow written it? My head swam as I realized Kosamaras could have just as easily written it, wanting to drive me mad with uncertainty.
“Annaleigh?” Papa prompted.
I glanced back down at the floor before giving him the book, certain the words would be gone, that they were only in my mind, just as everything else had been. But they remained in place.
“Papa, there’s something you should see—”
A fresh scream cut through the air.
“Not now,” he said, rushing from the room with Camille.
A hot flash of lightning shot across the sky, followed seconds later by a rumble of thunder. It echoed in my chest, knocking my breath away. Even it could not drown out the sounds coming from the fourth floor.
“Someone ought to send for the midwife.” Honor crossed to the window, watching another bolt of lightning. “Do you think they’d make it in such a storm?”
“I’ll go,” I volunteered. It was a fool’s errand, but I was desperate to show my sisters I wasn’t the monster they now believed me to be. “I can take the skip, or the dinghy if the winds are too strong.”
Before anyone could talk me out of it, the gold clock sailed off the mantel, smashing to the floor in a pile of cogs and gears. Across the room, the piano came to life, clanging and clunking out an ugly series of notes as the keys pressed down on their own accord. It looked as though someone was walking down the length of ivory, stomping their feet. Our poltergeist had returned.
Mercy howled, bolting from the room, with Honor fast on her heels. Lenore silently looked to me, clearly uneasy.
“You should go after them. They’re likely to run right up to Morella’s room, and they don’t need to see anything that’s going on there.”
She bit her lip, then nodded.
“Lenore?” I asked as she got to the doorway. “You really don’t