Shadows Falling: The Lost #2 Page 6

  “Or perhaps she has an English father somewhere, with a taste for gypsy women?” said the second girl, and they all laughed uproariously.

  “Here, little child,” The first girl unbuttoned her glove dramatically. “Take mine. Never let it be said I don’t know how to give to charity. That should shut Mother Louisa up this week.” She slapped them against my cheek with wicked force that stung and would leave a red mark behind to remember her by for days after, and they left to get their fortunes told.

  I’m sure it seems quite obvious that I hated them very much. Any girl would at that point, but I am not just any girl.

  When they came to my tent I wore the white gloves. I threw every knife perfectly, narrowly missing my dear Solomon, who pretended alarm at the last throw, just for the audience’s sake. Everyone in my crowd applauded loudly, but not that group of girls. They only looked at me with contempt.

  So I asked for a volunteer.

  Here the diary has such terrible handwriting that I peer at the book in earnest. My heart is thumping, and my mind is jumping to violent conclusions about Rose Gray and her set of knives. I read on, haltingly, fragments working themselves out into sentences again as though her pen has steadied.

  Of course, the girl who gave me the gloves—her lily white hands bare now, bare and lovely and graceful, not tanned and with bitten nails and knife scars like mine—volunteered, the way I knew she would. This one wouldn’t back down from a challenge. She wasn’t easily frightened or intimidated. She knew how to get places and what to do, and say, and act, once she got there. She was ruthless and arrogant. I very nearly liked her, if only she hadn’t turned her contempt towards me. Perhaps we could have been friends?

  Solomon watched me warily, and with concern, as if he knew I wasn’t feeling well. For the first time ever, my hands shook ever so slightly as I picked up my first blade. I steadied them immediately. I stared at her, with her black shiny locks of hair artfully arranged around her shoulders, as she stood against the canvas backdrop. Her pointy little boots stuck out to the side in a ballerina’s stance, and her hands were clasped in a dainty fashion in front of her stomach. Every man and every boy couldn’t pull their eyes off her, and every girl and every woman wanted to be her. I motioned to her to put her arms to her side and spread her fingers. She did so without hesitation or qualm. The only movement she gave me as the first knife found its mark in the bull’s eye was a bored little yawn.

  “She’s never worn gloves before,” Solomon explained to the police later when they arrived. “They made her hands slippery. She’s only a child. It was a tragic mistake.”

  “Whether or not the victim lives, we’ll have to shut you down,” the police told him. “Pack up, but don’t go anywhere until this is sorted out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you, girl. No more playing with knives, do you hear?”

  I didn’t want to talk to him, but Solomon nodded at me, urging me to. “Yes, sir.” I muttered.

  “We wouldn’t want more accidents. Play the piano; take up painting. But for God’s sake, don’t play with knives. Tragedy happens when you miss what you’re aiming for. Could have happened to anyone now.” He looked at me with sympathy. “Could have happened to anyone, child. Anyone can miss.”

  When he leaves, I run to Solomon, and he ruffles my hair and calls me Goose.

  “I didn’t miss,” I say into his chest.

  7

  We did not stay put as the police instructed. Solomon knew what I had done and knew I wouldn’t feel the need to lie about it either, so he spirited me away that night cloaked in blackness, me in a dress of black with my black boots, he in a black cape that he took from Lulu’s peg above her wagon, the one she used it to cover her twin when she didn’t want attention. He swung me up on Vlad, the largest horse in our caravan, and we left the gypsies forever.

  It was the closest I think I’ve ever come to crying out of sentimentality. Though they did not love me, I felt at home with them and did not relish the severing of our ties. Also, I worried and fretted that Solomon was angry with me, for they were his home too, and now he could never go back. Solomon was all I had; I couldn’t bear it if he was angry with me.

  I was his progeny, and I loved him so.

  Thoughts of Rose and her madness plague me all the next day. I can’t seem to escape from her, but ironically I am so busy at the hospital that I never have a chance to crack open the diary again and catch up on my reading. I am also becoming a bit concerned at the little red volume; I have a superstitious dislike of flipping to the last page, but it seems to me that when I picked it up off the floor that time when it had hurled itself across the room, the last good bit of the manuscript was blank. It had lain on the floor with its spine open before I had mustered up the courage to pick it back up, and blank white pages had stared up at me, hadn’t they? I am now preoccupied with worries that it will end abruptly and I’ll never get any answers to my questions. I want a nice tidy ending of some sort. I feel she owes me that after haunting me the way she is.

  Haunting. What a peculiar word to drop unbidden into my thoughts. It fits though. Rose is stuck like a burr to my thoughts.

  It’s after the sun goes down and I am back at my flat that I finally find time to read. I make tea and tuck my hot water bottle deep inside my covers where it can warm my chilled feet. I am weary to the bone from scrubbing and fetching and washing and fluffing and pushing wheelchairs and all the other tedious chores and errands Miss Helmes had me running, and I need a hearty meal and a hot bath, but nothing will keep me from discovering where Rose and Solomon hid themselves.

  The handwriting is wretched once again. I sigh and take a bracing sip of strong hot tea before I squint and force myself to concentrate. Slowly the chicken scratch becomes letters, the letters words, the words sentences, the sentences a hypnotic story.

  We took refuge in the oddest of places, a place called The Bodleian Library. We lucked into it really, by chance, that very next night. We had sold Vlad for a tidy sum as soon as we made it to the city, and on foot, we stared up in awe at the massive library. Do you know how sometimes a moment freezes and you know you’ll remember it forever? Standing there in the twilight, with Solomon holding my little hand in the shadow of the library, was like that. As if summoned by God himself, a man suddenly approached us and mistook us for the new librarian, a man who had been expected the morning before and who was supposedly coming with his small daughter.

  Solomon never batted an eye, never raised a brow, never faltered in his speech.

  We had been delayed on the road, he explained. A minor accident. Became turned around in this lovely, but large, place. How nice to have arrived, and were our rooms ready? Somehow the proof of our identity was talked about, nearly produced, almost exposed, yet, not quite. Solomon would turn the tide, he would artfully change the subject, becoming the likable but firm business man he assumed a librarian of that caliber would be. The man would very nearly hesitate, in some sort of alarm or suspicion, and Solomon would be soothing his worries with gracefully spun stories and explanations.

  I stayed silent, marveling at Solomon’s complete lack of honesty, and nearly believed him myself. Perhaps I really was his daughter? Were we really expected with bedrooms made ready and a respectable profession? I found myself momentarily as confused as the man who inadvertently hired us. The man called me Amanda, and he called Solomon Mr. Benning. Was I Amanda? I felt confused.

  We were ushered into the sprawling building, and I brushed my fingertips against the spines of the books we passed. I was lost before we ever arrived at our rooms, but I was already devising maps in my head. The exploring in this place would take me years!

  But of course, I didn’t have years, did I?

  So, to make up for the time I wouldn’t have later, I ate, drank, breathed the library. Ironically, all the information we needed to run the library came from the depths of the building itself. Its other names were Bodley, or The Bod, or The Tower of the Five
Orders, the latter being my favorite. It sounded mysterious and dark, which appealed to me and my nature.

  I worried about leaving my new haven, so I slept only when I had to, which was infrequently. I did not want to wake someplace new, someplace without Solomon. Solomon read to me when he discovered I did not possess the talent myself: The Woman in White, A Cricket on the Hearth, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Othello, Hamlet, then onto works of nonfiction, biographies, histories. He read at a breakneck pace, quizzing me along the way. He expected me to learn how to do it myself, but I was stubborn. I didn’t want to admit it, but the lines and curves of the letters made nearly no sense to me. It was a puzzle, and I had no gift for puzzles.

  “You speak four languages and yet you cannot read even one!” he bellowed at me one night. “That is nonsense! You aren’t trying!”

  “I am,” I cried, for he had never yelled at me before. “I am trying, I am!” I hurled Pilgrim’s Progress at his head. He didn’t even give me the satisfaction of ducking, and it hit him squarely where I had aimed, his sharply beaked nose. He wiped away the stream of blood and said not a word. I stared, hypnotized, at the sight of the blood. Like a river running down his face it ran, and it reminded me of the smirking girl back at the side show. I cocked my head, remembering.

  Though he kept reading to me as though nothing had happened, he refused to read the last page of any story or novel from that point on. “If you want to know what happens, read it yourself,” he’d say, and snap shut the book with finality. I’d growl with disappointment at the unfinished tale (unless it was some frivolous frippery like Austen where I could invent a better ending anyway). But the ending of A Thousand and One Nights preoccupied me, and when my wheedling and pleading had no avail, I began to pay attention to Solomon’s fingers as they traced the letters on the pages.

  Eventually, I learned the twists and turns of the letters, and I was glad of the knowledge. I escaped into worlds of enchantment, treachery, love, suspense, murder, laughter, deception. I became a student of these characters. I studied The Artful Dodger’s techniques of thievery, Cathy’s wildness, Mr. Rochester’s descent into denial and lies, Ivanhoe’s goodness and purity. I took what I respected from all of them and left the rest. Austen I had no use for, nor Bronte much, but Shakespeare was a treat, and I especially found the tragedies intriguing. The comedies, however, were a waste of my time and a waste of the great bard’s talent.

  Naturally, the real librarian and his real daughter came by one day not a month after we had settled there. They had fallen ill and delayed their trip. Somehow, fate I suppose, had lost their letter of explanation and their request to hold the position, and Solomon turned them away with a cunning hand. They left quickly. I laughed at them, and they heard me. Though they turned and looked for the source of the laughter, I was hidden behind a shelf of books and they couldn’t see me. It must have seemed to them that I was a ghost.

  So the ghost of the library I became.

  Ours days melted into one another. Since I didn’t sleep and the library was dark at all hours, it seemed even more so. Visitors were few and far between, and most ignored me. Most were there for some dull bit of research, and they wanted to be left alone with their genealogy or their philosophy or whatever. Children never came, and sometimes days would pass without a single solitary visitor, at least in my area of the library. I was becoming rather weak and frail from the lack of sleep, so I didn’t move around much.

  Solomon was a surprisingly good librarian for a fake, and no one seemed to notice when he didn’t have an answer, so self assured was he with his answers and his hand motions and his excuses. He could distract them by a tall tale of something else, and they’d leave so amused they’d never even realize they hadn’t gotten what they’d come for. Or he’d ask leading questions so that they really gave him their own answers to begin with, and he’d accept their praise with a humble smile.

  When we grew tired of books, we practiced magic tricks and illusions. I could palm anything by now, and I was excellent at distraction. Cards were becoming easier to manipulate. I could write my name on the Queen of Hearts and tear it into tiny pieces, blow them from my cupped hands, then make those pieces reappear after the dust had settled, nestled in the tallest bookshelf, peeking out from a volume of Dante. The books and stories I was reading were feeding my imagination, so I could come up with elaborate tricks, some with levitation and death defying impossibilities (not all were realized, of course). Each of my tricks and designs and ideas I wrote down, in my new found script, and shared them with Solomon, who indulged me sometimes and asked me grave questions other times when I had genuinely peaked his magicians interest. I came up with plans to levitate a dueling pair of swordsmen—so preoccupied with their fight they would be, that they would not notice their floating until they bumped against the ceiling—and I designed a trick using mirrors that would make it appear to the audience that I had sawed off my own feet in a magical box. My imagination was fostered, and I thought I was the better for it. I thought we were the better for it.

  A year passed.

  I was eleven years old when Solomon left one morning and didn’t come back.

  All that year I had slept a fraction of what normal people spent in sleep. I was desperate to stay, determined to live all my life with him and our library; so focused was I on my task that it never occurred to me that he would be the one to leave.

  My book of plans, ideas, designs, sketches and words and plottings and drawings, all gone with him. The space by Dante’s Inferno where I kept all my treasures was barren. The space in my chest where I kept my heart was barren.

  I pause and grieve silently for the little girl whose only father figure was a strange con man. Why had he left? Had she become too wild and strange for him to handle? Had some accident befallen him on his way to market one day, or had he left with intention and purpose in his abandonment? The disappearance of her writings seemed to suggest so.

  And what would his desertion mean for fragile, yet terrifyingly capable, Rose?

  Was it even possible for her to slip further in the shadows of madness? How deep did those shadows go?

  The questions fire in my brain like they were catapulted there by a well-trained assassin, but a larger problem loomed. It was as I feared: I flipped the page, and without warning I had come to the last of the writing. The following pages were clean and bare and blank. The rest of the diary was empty.

  ********************

  I tell Mr. Connelly of the abrupt ending of the diary when I see him next, several days later. I had mused and contemplated and hashed out whether or not to speak to him of her at all, but I found my relief at seeing him stride through the door at Bedlam so great that I nearly tripped over my words in a rush to get them out.

  He listened to my tale with a grave (or was it simply a tolerant?) expression. “I see,” was his response when I ended with Rose’s abandonment at the Bodleian Library. “And this leaves us where exactly?”

  “I don’t know,” I stammer, then find enough pluck to meet his eyes. “But since you seem to have misplaced her, I thought her past might shed some light on her whereabouts.”

  He regards me with something like amusement in his beautiful eyes. “I misplaced her, did I?” he echoes, with a chuckle. “And here I thought the hospital might have kept a more careful eye on her. Allow your patients to go wandering about, do we? Check themselves out and join society whenever they feel the need, do they? Step out for some air and not come back in, hmm? Happen often, does it?”

  “No, of course not!” I feel a chill as I realize the implication in his words. Had Bedlam lost her? There would be a scandal.

  “Don’t fret.” His mouth turns up in a smile, and I realize he is only teasing. “Rose goes where she likes, and she’s free to do so. She’ll be back.”

  I think back to the night with the tossing of the diary and the writing on the wall. To me, words come unbidden in my head:

  Or maybe she’s never left.


  Could she be hiding in the old asylum?

  8

  I worry about the scandal a lost patient could cause for us. Not the least Miss Helmes and me, but for the great doctor, the great doctor who I am hoping to impress eventually with my skills as a nurse, if he would just glance my way with something other than the desire for the fetching of sandwiches. While no one fetches sandwiches like I fetch sandwiches, I really hope to turn his head with something decidedly less pathetic. I decide to ask Miss Helmes point blank about Rose Gray. If we’ve misplaced a patient during the move, I should know about it.

  She seems less than alarmed about the whole thing. “I remember Rose, yes. Little thing. Precocious. Violent.”

  “And was she released? How long ago?” I persist.

  “I’m hardly the file keeper, am I?” she retorts, mildly. “I’m only the glorified house keeper.”

  “But why don’t I know her? I know all the patients.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t know her,” she minces her words, slowly, as though I’m an imbecile. Her pinched nostrils flare with the effort it takes to not reach out and throttle me. “Everybody else does.”

  “Mr. Connelly says she’s here, or that she’ll be back, or something along those lines! He’s rather cryptic.” I frown, trying to remember just what he had said.

  “Mr. Connelly says a lot of things,” she retorts, sharply. “Now, are we done here? I’ve patients who actually want my help in their wretched little lives.” She crosses her arms with such fervency that I’m surprised I don’t hear her elbows snap. Of course, she has the cushioning of her colossal chest to soften the blow.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  It’s only later that I realize I didn’t mention my worry that Rose could be holing up in the old hospital, and she never really told me anything about Rose being released. She didn’t really tell me anything at all.