Aether Spirit (24 page)

“It’s not an illness,” Lillian said. She grabbed Claire’s arm. “Have you ever had a nightmare that was more than a nightmare?”

“You have no idea.”

“The last time I went in to check on her, I thought she was asleep, but she turned her head to me, and I thought I heard a voice that wasn’t hers come out of her.”

“What did it say?”

“That the rose is opening, but it has thorns, and no old one was going to keep it from blooming. Then she returned to her regular voice, and that’s when she insisted on seeing you. I thought I must have just imagined what I heard, and maybe we both needed a neuroticist.” She let out a high-pitched giggle and put a hand over her mouth. “But you saw it, didn’t you? The corpse with the staring eyes?”

“I thought her eyes were closed,” Claire said. She was sure she would have noticed otherwise.

Lillian shook her head. “Oh, dear lord, it’s happening. My mother ended up in an asylum, and I always wondered if I’d be doomed to follow. It’s the old degenerate theory. I didn’t want to believe it.”

“It’s not what you think. Look, I’m going to go in there and make sure she’s truly dead. Someone needs to confirm it. Then we can decide what to do.”

Lillian nodded. Claire went back into the room. The windows threw golden squares across the bed, which now was empty. The door slammed, and Claire whirled around, half expecting to see the corpse reaching for her, but she was alone in the room. When she turned back to the bed, the light peeled like sheets and entwined until it formed a figure that glowed like the aether the first time she’d seen it and felt it.

“What are you?” Claire asked. “What did you do with Mrs. Soper?”

“The old one is not here. They tend to disappear when things get weird. Do you not recognize me?” It looked at its hands. “You touched me, and that’s when I knew I was awake. No, that’s not the right word. When I knew I was alive.”

Claire squinted at it. “Are you the same aether that Chad just drew me into the past with?”

“No, that is a sister. She will become alive as well, though. Or maybe not. It doesn’t matter.”

A shadow moved and coalesced into the figure of Mrs. Soper. Claire made sure not to look at it directly. She wasn’t sure what the creature on the bed was, but she didn’t want to alert it to the presence of the old one, whatever that was.

What is all this?

The shadow Mrs. Soper crept up behind the light creature and grabbed it. It threw its head back and let out a scream like a train whistle, but she grappled with it, and they both disappeared, leaving Claire’s ears ringing.

“What. The. Hell?” She didn’t stick around for anything to answer but opened the now unlocked door and ran out.

“What was that?” Lillian asked. She seemed to have recovered her composure. “Is she dead or not?”

Claire looked at her open-mouthed. “Did you not hear any of that?”

“Any of what? I heard you say something, but that was it. I thought you were talking to her. Is she alive?”

“No. No, she’s not. At least not in a way either of us can understand.”

Lillian gave her a strange look, then opened the door, looked in, and closed it again. “She’s lying in the bed, but she looks peacefully asleep.”

She walked in, and Claire sagged against the wall. Her ears still chimed with the after-effects of the creature’s scream. Or maybe it was a hysterical reaction to… To what? The treatment she’d had that afternoon?

Lillian returned. “It must have been a trick of the light. She’s asleep. I won’t disturb her. Are you all right?”

Claire swallowed the bit of stomach acid that had risen to her throat. “I think we both may need a neuroticist. I have to find Doctor Radcliffe.”

* * * * *

“I think the aether treatment is having unintended side effects,” Claire told Chad.

She sat across from him in the mess hall, where she’d found him after she left the women’s hospital. She knew Lillian had told her something strange even though she pretended she hadn’t, and then Claire had seen…

She still couldn’t believe Lillian hadn’t heard the creature scream. Did that mean she’d imagined it?

She hid her shaking hands under the table after a few attempts to lift the stew to her mouth had failed, and she knew she’d be sending her borrowed dress to the laundry.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Claire clasped her hands together. “Can we talk about this elsewhere? I’m not sure about any of it.”

“Of course. We can find something to eat later.”

They left. She continued to shiver, and he placed her cloak around her. All she wanted to do was close her eyes and sleep, but she feared what would happen. Would she dream again? Would the dead then not dead woman appear to her?

She didn’t really pay attention to where they were going. She only noticed when Calla approached them with a question in her eyes.

“Would you fetch Doctor McPhee some tea, please?” Chad asked her. Calla nodded and darted off.

When they arrived in her room, the first thing Claire saw was her own pale, wide-eyed reflection in the window. She cringed. She looked like one of the hysterics of Salpêtrière, and maybe she was more like them than she thought. She sank into the chair and put her head in her hands.

“This can’t be happening to me,” she said. “I’m supposed to be better.”

“Tell me everything.”

She looked up, and he blurred into a smudge with the tears in her eyes. “I can’t. You’ll think me mad.”

He pressed a warm cup into her hands, and she took a sip of the tea. She thought she tasted something bitter in it, perhaps more of whatever remedy Lacey thought she needed the first night she stayed there. She put the cup aside. The last thing she needed was to be trapped in her dreams.

“Claire, whatever it is, we’ll get through it. You know I’m here for you, but I need to know what’s happening so I can help you.”

He was patient, so very kind. He deserved better than her with her broken mind.

“I can’t explain it.”

He wrapped her hands in his, which were so very warm. She still hadn’t stopped shaking.

“You don’t have to explain it, just describe it.”

So she told him everything that had happened in the women’s hospital. He listened with a slight frown, and she wanted to stop but she couldn’t. Soon tears dripped from her cheeks to her arms and soaked through the cloak and the sleeves of her dress, but she couldn’t stop them until the story was over. She wiped her eyes and tried to remove the tears from her glasses with the corner of her cloak, but it only smudged them further.

“Here,” Radcliffe said. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. “I’m sorry, I forgot I had this. And you say that Lillian didn’t hear any sort of odd noise?”

“No, only me talking. And she said Mrs. Soper was sleeping peacefully and whatever she’d seen must have been a trick of the light.”

“And you didn’t have any of these strange sensations before your treatment this afternoon?”

“Only ones that a highly suggestible mind would respond to. Drat, I’ve been dense. I thought I was seeing ghosts, but it was only the impression that seeing the general’s daughter’s grave left on me, the tragedy of it all.”

“I’m glad it’s making sense for you, although I’m disturbed that you’re having these experiences.”

“You’re disturbed?”

He nodded, and she felt him recoiling emotionally. “It means that your mind is still damaged in some way. It might be resisting treatment because it knows we’re trying to heal you, so it’s making you worse. I just have one more thing to ask you, then. How did you get to the hospital from the general’s house?”

There was no point in lying if he was already horrified by her sick brain. “The ghost of the general’s daughter woke me, and then Mrs. Soper showed me a secret tunnel from the house to the hospital. I got stuck on that end when the house got shelled.”

“But Mrs. Soper was in bed the whole time. That’s where she was trapped, and Major Longchamp didn’t see her pass him by. I asked him if he saw anyone when he arrived there, and he said no.”

Claire shrugged and gave him the most defiant look she could muster at the moment, which probably made her look as threatening as a kitten. “Maybe I imagined the whole thing, but then I would have walked through the worst of the bombardment.”

“Can you show me where you emerged in the hospital?”

“No, by the time I got there, I was so disoriented I can’t tell you where I came in.” Her hands stopped shaking, although she still felt shivery. “I’m not feeling well. Can we continue this another time?”

Chad nodded and stood. “I’ll send Calla in to help you get ready for bed. Sleep well, and we’ll figure this out in the morning.” He kissed the top of her head and left.

As promised, Calla appeared a moment later and helped Claire undress. She turned off the light, and Claire rolled over, but a cold hand shook her by the shoulder.

“It’s my turn for you to listen to my story. You promised!”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Fort Daniels, 27 February 1871

Chad walked to the room he now shared with Patrick in the Negroes’ quarters and found Patrick in bed reading a penny dreadful. The room thankfully had two small beds, not one larger one, so they wouldn’t have to share.

“I thought you’d read all of those,” Chad said.

“Got a new box of them on the wagon from town today,” Patrick replied without looking up. “Since when do you care what I read? What’s got your knickers in a bunch?”

“Claire.”

Now Patrick put the pamphlet down and raised his eyebrows. “You’re fighting already? That didn’t take long.”

Chad spoke as he undressed and changed into his nightclothes. “No, she started hallucinating soon after she woke from our treatment this afternoon. I fear I won’t be able to do any more with her.”

“But does she still remember what she learned from her father?”

Chad turned to face him, exasperated. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her about lenses amid the insane things she was telling me. They didn’t seem relevant at the time.”

“Our work is always relevant. That’s why we’re here.”

Chad didn’t favor Patrick with a reply. He could be mercenary sometimes, especially when faced with a goal or task that he felt was for the greater good. Chad could worry about that tomorrow. Right now, he kept returning to the haunted cast to Claire’s eyes and face. “Do you think anyone really gets over hysteria?”

“You’re the doctor. You’d know more about this than I do, but I can’t recall anyone ever being quite right after having experienced it, especially severe cases.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.” Chad, now in his night shirt, sat on the bed and rubbed his tired eyes. What was he going to do? He’d thought he had his Claire back, but it turned out his hope was only an illusion. What he’d tried had failed and made her worse. He’d take care of her, but he would have to watch for signs that being near here was activating her hypnotic blocks and causing more problems.

I fear that after this is all over, we might have to part ways again, but this time forever.

He was almost asleep when he heard a shriek.

* * * * *

“You’re not real,” Claire told the ghost. “You’re something my mind made up to deal with all this, and the fact that I can see and hear you means I’m still suffering from some sort of hysteria.”

“Regardless of what you think I am, you promised. Even if I come from your mind, don’t you think it’s worth it to listen to me? Maybe I can solve both our problems.”

Just my luck, the figments of my imagination argue with me.

Claire sat and propped herself up with the two thin pillows. The ghost, who sat on the side of the bed, appeared solid, and Claire knew if she touched it, it would be cold.

“Fine,” Claire said. “Go ahead.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me nice questions like you do with the boys in the hospital?”

“See? You knowing how I work only proves that you’re a product of my mind.”

“Or I’ve been following you.”

Claire thought about the unexplained chills she’d been experiencing. “That’s just as bad. My work requires some privacy. That’s why I meet with the young men in the corners of wards where we’re less likely to be overheard.”

“I don’t sleep. What else am I supposed to do? You’re the only one who’s been able to see me aside from Mrs. Soper. So you’re the only human who can see me.”

Claire hugged the blankets to her chest and scrunched her eyes and face against the memory of what she thought she’d seen in the old woman’s hospital room. “I could almost believe you. What do you think she is?”

“First you listen to my story. Then I’ll tell you whatever you need to know about her.” Emma scrunched her face. “At least as much as I know, which isn’t much.”

“Okay.” Claire opened her eyes. Yep, the ghost was still there. “Tell me about yourself.”

Emma took a deep breath—could ghosts breathe?—and told her story.
“I was born in Chattanooga, but when the war started, my father, who was and is loyal to the Union, moved us up to Maryland just outside of Baltimore. We were far enough from the politics, but close enough to know that there were many who wanted to belong to the Confederacy. It all seemed very mixed up, with everyone being in the wrong place. I hated it there. We should’ve just sent the ones who wanted to be part of the Confederacy to their desired home and be done with it.”

She paused, and Claire motioned for her to continue.

“Except for one. His name was Thaddeus Mitchell, and although his parents were loyal to the South—they had lots of family there—they wouldn’t leave because his father had a successful business. He was a horse trader, and he held his nose and supplied the Union army. My father took me with him on one of the trips to talk to him, and that’s when I met Thaddeus. He was so handsome with his dark brown hair and green eyes, and he laughed and smiled with me as our fathers talked. My father left happy because his men would be horsed, and I left with my heart full of hope that I had finally met my true love. Of course it wasn’t to be.

“Thaddeus came to see me a few weeks later. We had exchanged letters, and my father had grudgingly agreed that he could court me. He first said I was too young. My mother said it was fine since I would be coming out the following year, and it never hurt to have an early prospect. I think she counted on Thaddeus making other young men jealous and therefore more likely to pursue me. But I didn’t want any other man.”