station, I rubbed a velvety edge slowly over and over the back of my hand.
For each tiny, merciful gift from life, I was grateful.
The blankets at the Home had been of boiled wool. There was a fleece coverlet at the nurse’s station, but you had to be white-knuckled, wishing-you-were-dead sick for her to offer it, and usually it smelled like iodine.
I’d kept the curtains opened and the window cracked. I craved that outside air, which still tasted of wonderful salt to me.
A motorcar roared up behind us, its reflective lanterns splashing a feeble illumination along the fence posts lining the bend in the road. The horn bugled twice before the car sped past, spitting pebbles in its wake. Chloe’s laughter was full and loud as they vanished into the dark ahead.
The dust settled, and the horses pulling our carriage only plodded on.
I didn’t feel sleepy. I should have; I should have been exhausted, actually. In my excitement over leaving the Home I hadn’t slept much the night before, and certainly today had dragged on long enough. I removed my hat and rested my head against the seat’s back, closing my eyes, listening to the sounds of the shore and the horses and the country night.
We bumped over a bridge spanning a river, waking wooden thunder from each and every plank.
I’m not sure when I began to grasp that I was hearing more than just those ordinary noises. Ten minutes later? Thirty? It came upon me gradually, the awareness that the phonograph music from the station was still playing, even though we were no longer anywhere near it.
I opened my eyes. I sat up. Was I dreaming?
It was still playing.
I slapped my cheeks with both hands, pinched my arms. I was asleep, this was a dream, I needed to wake up, because this was not happening.
But it was.
“No,” I muttered, caught somewhere between anger and disbelief. “Not again.”
I searched the carriage, pulling up the cushions, running my hands along the smooth walls, the door latch, the window frames, the floorboards. I found nothing new, nothing to explain the slow, sweet music that was playing very markedly all around me.
And it was around me, not merely inside my head. I was not imagining it. I’d never heard this composition before, this wistful combination of notes that swelled and subsided but never fully ended. It was not entirely unlike the music emanating from metals or stones but was far more complex than that. More a symphony than a single song.
I dropped my head into my hands, squeezing my eyes closed, trying to find some peace. I’d been doing so well. I’d been recovering. I hardly ever noticed the silent stone-music any longer, and when I did I was able to shut it out, distract myself with other matters until it went away.
I could do this, I thought grimly, looking up again. I can do this.
Oh, really? mocked the whispery fiend in my heart.
In the frigid depths of Moor Gate, strapped to their drowning chair, I’d made a vow to myself never to speak of the music or the voice again. Never to acknowledge anything that made me any different from anyone else.
Ever.
“I will do this,” I said out loud, my jaw clenched so tight it ached.
This time my heart made no reply.
For the rest of the ride I stared straight ahead into the dark, a fold of fleece pressed to my lips. I thought about rivers, and I thought about sheep, and I thought about the kaiser and the smell of London and how the Home had looked after the bomb had detonated inside its rotting walls, the red-brick dust coating everything and the water line spewing and all the rubble of the desks and chairs and the scorched books flung every which way like burning paper birds. That initial shock of displaced air. All the screaming children and then the dreadful calm afterward, when we realized we couldn’t flee anyway because there was nowhere else for us to go.
When the carriage finally rolled to a halt, I fancied I had things in hand. The symphony had not ceased, but I was ignoring it. It wasn’t really there, and if it was, it was the result of someone else’s madness, not my own.
One of the horses let out an unhappy whicker, and the carriage rolled back some. I heard for the first time the driver’s low voice, not so much words but a soothing string of sounds, and the horse subsided.