Eve Silver (6 page)

 She forced herself to turn away, and resumed her chores, though her fingers felt numb, barely able to hold tight to the feather duster. With just a bit of luck on her side, Dr. Cole would not search out that particular book for a good long while, and when he did, perhaps her luck would hold, and he would choose a drawing other than the one of the human leg to examine.

o0o

That night, Darcie lay stiff and tense upon her bed, bone weary from an endless day's work. Despite her fatigue, her nerves were wound so tight that sleep eluded her. Mary's faint snores reverberated through the room, punctuated by the rustling of the covers as she shifted position in her sleep. Darcie tried to ignore the sounds, but her efforts met with little success.

 The two women shared a small room beneath the eaves, and Darcie was grateful that the chamber held a separate bed for each of them. She knew that many girls in service shared one narrow pallet with two or even three other women. That could be a blessing in the cold winter months when the girls would share their body heat to keep warm. But Dr. Cole was a generous employer. He provided ample coal for the iron grate and Darcie and Mary had no need to combine the warmth of their bodies.

“Pssst. Darcie? Are you asleep?” Mary's whisper edged aside her memories.

“No, but I thought you were sleeping. I hope I didn't wake you.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“I was just remembering the day I first came here. How Dr. Cole asked you to bring me a tray.”

“I never minded,” Mary insisted.

“I know. But I think Poole did. He was angry that I came in by the front door. And then, when Dr. Cole gave you the extra task of carrying me a tray...I think Poole's hated me ever since.”

“His face did turn a bright shade of red. I thought he'd explode for certain,” Mary said, laughter in her tone. “That Poole, he's a regular charmer.”

 Picturing Poole's ever-censorious gaze, Darcie thought that he was anything but a charmer.

“I was amazed when I saw this room for the first time,” she said. “It had been so long since I slept in anything more comfortable than a damp doorway. And here I was to have my own warm bed.”

“I know just what you mean. I've been in service for ten years, two places before this one, and I'll say this for Dr. Cole, he treats us well.”

Darcie ran her hand over the coverlet. The room was furnished with two single beds, each adorned with a pretty green-and-white quilt. The linens were as fresh and clean as any person could desire. And beside the grate, there was a full bin of coal.

“The doctor's a generous one when it comes to the coal...” Mary's voice carried low and slurred from across the room, her words trailing together as her exhaustion limited her ability to converse.

“Sleep, Mary,” Darcie whispered, feeling bad that her earlier tossing and turning had woken the other woman. She wished that she, too, could shake off this restlessness and sleep.

She moved her feet beneath the sheets and tried to lecture herself to sleep, concentrating on the lessons in deportment her mother had recited to her during her childhood. At the time she had resented the endless reminders of proper decorum. Now, she would give almost anything just to hear her mother's voice once more.

Darcie couldn't stop the wave of sadness and longing that rolled over her. Her father had died when she was a toddler, and her mother had remarried within two years to a rich merchant who adored her. Though he had been the only father she had ever known, Darcie had called her stepfather Steppy. Her mother had wanted to keep some memory of her first husband alive in a little girl's mind, so she had suggested the distinction.

Oh, how Darcie missed her mother's voice. Her smell. Her touch. She had been a gentle woman, soft-spoken and kind, with a ready smile and a generous spirit. For years all Darcie had known was a mother's love, a stepfather's doting regard—but that was before Steppy lost his fortune, before Abigail went away, before Mama coughed her life into a handkerchief mottled and stained with red, red blood.

A handkerchief stained with blood.
Mary's words, spoken in the doctor's study earlier that day, rose to the forefront of Darcie's mind, and with them came the memory of Dr. Cole's sketchbook and her own foolish misconduct. She slammed her lids shut, but nothing could erase the image.
Stained with blood. Red, red blood. Mama coughing her life away.

Darcie shifted on the bed, her thoughts darting this way and that, her edginess unremitting. Then, from nowhere came a terrible question:
Had there been blood, pools of blood, when Dr. Cole sawed the leg from the body for dissection?

Darcie shivered. She had reasoned herself full circle, back to the disembodied limb. Her belly rolled with nerves.

How could she have done what she did?

She had taken up pen and ink and drawn in one of the doctor's books, drafting her idea of a human leg, skinned and denuded. The subject matter itself caused her great anguish as she pondered it in retrospect. Dr. Cole must be an anatomist, a man who studied the mysteries of the human body, she decided. That would explain the frightful sketches.

Darcie digested the concept, wondering why the staff never spoke of it. Had Dr. Cole ordered them to secrecy? And if so, why? She abruptly decided that it was better not to let curiosity carry her mind to a place she truly had no wish to visit. In Whitechapel there were terrible rumors about where anatomists got their bodies. Medical schools provided a huge demand for subjects, and unscrupulous men were more than ready to supply that need. People whispered of fresh graves emptied and coins exchanged, and they whispered of murder most foul.

With a sigh, she cast aside the near-stifling warmth of her covers and pushed herself to a sitting position. She reached for her shawl to wrap about her shoulders, touching the soft wool reverently, thinking how much she valued its warmth.

Dr. Cole was an enigma. Silent and forbidding one moment, kind and generous the next. He'd given her the shawl that first morning, and later, a simple change of clothes.

“I can hardly have you darting about looking as though you've been claimed from the rag bin,” he had stated matter-of-factly, as though his actions were completely usual for any employer. But Darcie had known better, and the jaundiced look that Poole had cast her had confirmed her suspicion that Dr. Cole was being amazingly kind.

Darcie glanced toward Mary's sleeping form, wishing that she, too, could find the blessed oblivion of a restful slumber. But the memory of her trespass into the doctor's sketchbook ate at her like a cancer. The possible consequences of her actions were terrible to consider.

A half-formed plan hovered at the edge of her thoughts, then shimmered and coalesced into a solid strategy. She would tear the page from the book and burn it, burn the drawing that was evidence of her transgression.

Darcie took up the stub of candle from the scarred three-legged stool that served as a bedside table, and then cautiously made her way down the narrow back stairs to the main landing. As she reached the long corridor at the foot of the stairs, she caught sight of a strange apparition hovering in the hallway. She bit back a squeak of fear. The thing hovered, white and eerie, with long dark tendrils snaking over the paleness of its disincarnate form.

Her heart tripped over itself and a shiver of apprehension slithered along her spine as she stared in horror at the disincarnate specter that hovered before her.

She lifted her candle. The specter did the same. And she realized that the ghostly pale face and trailing white night dress were her own, the apparition a reflection of herself in the large, ornately carved wood-framed mirror at the end of the hall. She had wiped the glass often enough to know it was there. Silently acknowledging that she was overwrought, her nerves stretched taut, her mind prone to ridiculous fancy, she continued on her way.

Pushing open the door to the doctor's study, she held the candle high and scanned the room, though she couldn't say exactly what she hoped to find. The shelves were perfectly arranged, the desktop as neat and tidy as she had left it earlier that day. She moved to stand before the shelf where the sketchbook rested between two other leather-bound volumes. It was there. Undisturbed. She slumped in relief, her head falling forward until it rested against the edge of the shelf. Closing her eyes, Darcie drew in a slow breath.

A sound, muffled and harsh, caught her attention, grating along her nerves. Someone was dragging something heavy across the cobblestones of the back drive.

Drawn by the noise, she moved swiftly toward the window, accidentally catching her hip on the edge of Dr. Cole's desk as she passed. With a cry, she stumbled, righting herself just before she crashed to the ground. The candleholder fell from her fingers, the flame snuffed against the floor.

The grating sound came again. Closer. Closer.

Someone was out there.

Alone in the dark, Darcie tried to reason herself out of her growing panic. It was only a noise. And its source was outside, not in. Surely there was no threat. She was tired and overwrought. That was all. Still, no matter how resolutely she chided herself, she could not quell the rising alarm that snaked through her.

She crept toward the window and then pressed her body against the wall beside the window frame, pushing aside the heavy drapery and staring out into the night.

The moon was full, a great white orb hanging in the star-speckled sky, its glow illuminating the figures of two men. They shoved at a large trunk, pushing it across the yard in the direction of the carriage house that served as the doctor's laboratory. The sound drifted upward, muted by the glass panes of the window, but audible nonetheless. They were dressed roughly, their garb little more than rags. Even from this distance she could detect the hardness of their expressions, their furtive movements as they scanned the vicinity for onlookers. She noticed, too, that they carried no lantern.

The men stopped part way toward their apparent destination, and the shorter, more heavyset one flopped down on the lid of the trunk. Though she could not see his face clearly, something about the cast of his features gave Darcie pause. That, combined with the fact that the men were dragging a battered chest across the drive in the dead of night sent another prickle of unease up her spine. What sort of delivery would necessitate a clandestine visit shrouded in darkness?

Resurrectionists.
Men who took fresh bodies from fresh graves and delivered them to the anatomist's laboratory. Rumor said such men often didn't bother to wait for the grave, but helped victims on their way to eternity in return for the anatomist's coin. Her gaze slid to the carriage house where a light shone in the second floor window, and then back to the two strangers.

 After a moment, the seated man rose and the two resumed their exertions. As the taller of the two knocked at the door to the carriage house, a dark silhouette moved across the second floor window. A long moment passed, then the main door opened, and with a grunt and a heave the men pushed the trunk past the doorway.

Darcie remained where she was, her hand curled around the edge of the drapery. The velvet was thick and soft beneath her fingers, and she clung to it as, in a trick of her imagination, the world seemed to careen and list unsteadily beneath her.

Straining her ears, she fancied she could hear the muffled sounds of a commotion as the men struggled to hoist the heavy chest to the second floor.

She waited for some time. Ten minutes, perhaps twenty. At length, they left the doctor's laboratory, hefting the trunk between them, each taking one of the handles. Their easy stride gave evidence to the lightness of their load. Whatever had been in that trunk was no longer a burden to those men.

Suddenly they froze and glanced uneasily about, searching the shadows. Darcie shrank instinctively from the window, though they did not look her way. Then, apparently satisfied that they could move on unchallenged, the men resumed their pace. The taller one made some comment to his companion, receiving a mocking reply. The sound of their voices drifted upward on the night air, muffled by the window glass. Even after they moved from her line of vision she could hear the muted tone of their words trailing behind them like a tail.

They were just men, she told herself resolutely, but her reassurances did little to calm the sinister feeling that gripped her. There had been something unpleasant—no, more than unpleasant—something dangerous about those men. The image of the amputated limb that was sketched in the doctor's book, bare and stripped to the bone, sprang to her mind, and she wondered how heavy a person's leg was. Closing her eyes, Darcie visualized the chest, two grown men struggling to move it along. Not heavy enough, she decided.

But an entire man, dead and stuffed in a chest...Her eyes popped open at the thought.

Suddenly, the light in the carriage house window died. Darcie huddled in the velvet drapery that hung about her shoulders like a cloak. Dr. Cole stepped from the doorway of the carriage house, his tall form unmistakable even from this distance. He paused to lock the door behind him. Completing his task, he turned and froze. His head jerked up, and he stood motionless, listening, scenting the night air. The soft glow of the moon reflected from his hair, his skin, casting him in a preternatural light.

He took a single step forward, and then slowly spun a full circle, taking in his surroundings, searching the shadows.

Darcie's heart began to pound, a fast, steady rhythm that sent the blood rushing in her ears. Dr. Cole was looking for something. For someone. Perhaps for the men who had left with the now-empty chest.

With a subtle shift of his body, he moved to face the house. Slowly, he tilted his head back and fixed his gaze on the window of his study. She fancied she could see his eyes, feel his gaze boring deep into her soul. With a gasp, she pulled away from the glass panes, pressing her back against the wall and staring at the dark outline of the desk and chair.

Her! He was searching for
her.