“Hurry, Mitzy! Come on!” In Delphine’s frantic tone Dimity heard the remnants of a dangerous hope. But there was no hope, and she wanted to scream it, wanted to shout it out loud so that she could put down the thing she was carrying. The little dead thing. Their footsteps echoed in the hallway of the hospital, and the light of many bulbs blinded them. Charles’s voice echoed around, calling for help. Then strong arms in white sleeves took Élodie from Dimity, and she sank to her knees in relief.
She was left alone, and she waited. For a while she knelt in the hallway, in the sudden quiet after the Aubreys, both well and sick, had been herded away by a knot of grim-faced people. She could have followed them, but felt too weak to move. Slowly she stood up, and she waited, and she tried not to think. There was a ringing sound inside her head, like the hum after a bell has sounded; deafening, deadening. The weight of something was pushing down on her inexorably. The weight of something undeniable, which, once done, could not be undone. In due course she let herself be led to a long, empty corridor where there were wooden pews against one wall. The person who led her was anonymous, faceless; a different species from her altogether, and wholly incomprehensible. A cup of tea was put next to her, but Dimity had no idea what she should do with it. She sat down and stared at the wall in front of her. Days passed, weeks, months; or just the space between one labored heartbeat and the next-she could no longer tell the difference. It was night outside, and the light in the corridor was weak. Dimity heard echoes from time to time. Footsteps, soft snores, wordless shouts from a long way away. Disembodied sounds that drifted along the corridor like ghosts. There was sandy mud all over her shoes; dried and crumbling away. Sandy mud from the ditch where the cowbane grew. Dimity wished she didn’t exist at all; she wished that she was just one more ghost who could wander the corridor, lost and all alone.
It was light outside when Charles appeared through a door, walking out into the corridor with his shoulders slumped and his head down. He moved like a sleepwalker, dull and unaware; when he saw Dimity, he came to stand in front of her, and did not speak.
“Charles?” she said. He blinked and raised his eyes to her, then sat down beside her. His skin was gray, purple shadows under his eyes. He tried to speak but his throat was closed; he had to cough and try again.
“Celeste,” he said. The word sounded like an accusation, like a plea. “Celeste will pull through, they think. They have given her something… Luminol, to stop the spasms. They are giving her drugs through a tube into her veins. I never saw such a thing before. But Élodie… my little Élodie.” The word collapsed into a sob. “They have taken her away. She was not strong enough. There was nothing they could do.” The words were not his own, Dimity realized. They were words he had been told, and parroted now in place of words of his own, of which there were none.
“I knew she was dead,” Dimity said breathlessly. Something was squeezing her chest, tightening painfully. “I knew she was dead when I carried her. I knew it. I knew!” she gasped. Charles turned his head to look at her, and the look was one of incomprehension. He couldn’t even see her, she realized. I am a ghost, an echo. Let it be so. She wanted to touch him, but to do so she would have to become flesh again. It would all have to be real. They sat in silence for a while; then Charles got up and went back through the door, and Dimity, drawn along by the shackle around her heart, followed him.
There was another corridor, shorter this time, with tall white doors opening off it. The stink of disinfectant was everywhere, sharper than cat’s piss but not quite masking the smell of sickness, of death. There was no sign of Élodie. Gone already; gone as if she never was. Dimity shook her head at the impossibility of it. Celeste was lying back against a single pillow, her jaw slack and her hair smeared out around her, tarry and slick. There was a spidery contraption hanging over her, a needle and a cord attached to her arm; a bruise spreading down her forearm. Her lips were white, her eyes shut. She looked quite dead, and Dimity wondered that nobody had noticed, until she saw the shallow rise and fall of her rib cage. She stared and stared at the woman. Stared hard enough to see the flicker of a pulse through the thin skin of her neck.
“There will be consequences,” said Charles, and the words hit Dimity like an electric shock. She jerked her eyes to him, but he was staring at Celeste. His voice was quite broken. “The doctor says… she may never be the same again. Hemlock has side effects. She will have… some memory loss, of the days leading up to today. She will be confused. There will still be tremors. It will take time for these effects to fade, and she may never…” He paused, swallowing. “She may never be her old self again. She may never be as she was before. My Celeste.”
On the other side of the bed sat a pitiful figure. A figure curled in on itself, as if trying not to be. It was doing such a good job that Dimity only gradually became aware of it. Delphine. She was crying without pause, even though she was near mute and her eyes were dry and dull, as if they’d run out of tears. Still she shook and quivered almost as much as her mother had done, before they’d come to the hospital, and the sounds she made were terrible, like the repeated keening of a rabbit in a snare, but quietly-so quietly. Trying not to be. Dimity stared at her, and gradually Delphine looked up and met her gaze with eyes all red and bloody, and so swollen they had almost shut. But there was something in those eyes, besides grief, that took Dimity’s breath away. It was unbearable to see, and she turned away, drifting a few paces to slump against the wall. She sank slowly to the floor. Nobody seemed to notice, or think it amiss. She put her fingertips in her mouth, and bit down on them till they bled, feeling nothing. Delphine’s eyes were full of guilt. Utter, consuming, poisonous guilt.
A while later, Dimity was back on the pew in the corridor. She didn’t know how she’d got there. Voices roused her-men’s voices, arguing in hushed tones by the doorway to the rooms. She rubbed at her eyes, and struggled to focus. Charles Aubrey and another man, tall and thin, with steel-gray hair. She recognized him as Dr. Marsh, one of the doctors who made regular visits to Blacknowle to treat those too ill for any of Valentina’s potions.
“It must be recorded, Mr. Aubrey. Such things cannot be avoided,” the doctor said.
“You can write part of the truth without writing the whole truth. And you must. My daughter… my daughter is tearing her own heart out. If you record the death as a poisoning, there will have to be an inquest, am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“Then for pity’s sake, do not record it as such! She will carry this with her the rest of her days. If it is made public… if the whole world knows what she did, however accidentally… it will ruin her. Do you see? It will ruin her!”
“Mr. Aubrey, I understand your concerns, but-”
“No! No buts! Doctor, I beg you-it will cost you nothing to record the cause of death as a gastric disturbance… but it will cost Delphine dearly if you do not. Please.” Charles gripped the doctor’s arm, stared into his eyes. His desperation was written all over his face. The doctor hesitated. “Please. We have suffered enough already. And we will suffer a great deal more as it is.”
“Very well.” The doctor shook his head, and sighed.