A chill shot down Duncan’s spine. He had indeed seen Sarah before, had seen her with her arms thus extended, her hair tumbling, had seen her balance along the spar in the rising storm, then leap into the churning sea. His grieving angel. It had been Sarah he had saved that awful day; Sarah had been the sick, sleeping passenger. A banshee, the crew had called her. They had hurled belaying pins and curses at her. But, he knew now, Professor Evering had written poems about her. Evering’s sad, frail princess. The eldest child of one of the most powerful families of the New World. The one Frasier had named as a witch, as the killer of Evering. The owner, no doubt, of the Ramsey pendant stuck in the pig’s heart.
He suddenly realized he had uttered a gasp of surprise. Sarah’s head slowly turned toward him, then she lowered her arms, scrubbed the tears from her cheeks and picked up the vase of old flowers as he awkwardly approached her.
“They keep flowers for her,” Sarah whispered, forcing a small smile. She seemed so vulnerable, so frail. “Fresh ones, every day in spring and summer.”
They. She spoke as if she were not part of the house, not part of the family.
“In the winter perhaps you could draw a flower on paper each day and leave it,” Duncan suggested in his own whisper. She was a deer that might bolt at the slightest shift in the wind. “There are paints. We could add colors, paint entire bouquets.”
The thought seemed to cheer Sarah, whose natural expression seemed to be one of melancholy. She offered another quick, tiny smile, self-consciously brushing a lock of hair from her face, her green eyes darting toward him, then away.
“There are three small desks in the back chamber, Miss Ramsey,” Duncan observed. “Surely you will not need to sit through the same lessons as your brother and sister.”
“But I must,” Sarah said, speaking to the wilting flowers in her hands. “I have no arithmetic. I have little of writing.” She gave him another skittish glance. “Please,” she said in the voice of a small girl. “I desire to spend as much time as possible in the classroom.” She made it sound as though she needed to escape from the rest of house.
What was the secret illness that had kept her bed-bound for the entire voyage across the Atlantic, Duncan wanted to ask. What had prevented Evering, the natural philosopher who seemed to have been so obsessed with her, from discussing her illness in his journal? Had she truly been so ill for so long that she had lost a decade of instruction, lost her adolescent years? He struggled to put a name to her malady, trying to connect her trembling hands and sunken eyes to any disorder he had studied.
When she looked up at him, her moist, nervous eyes were those of a child. He had never known such a creature. One moment she seemed to bear the weight of the world, the next she seemed so naïve, so innocent in the ways of the world; one moment so poised, the next, so awkward.
“I regret we were unable to get acquainted on board the ship,” he ventured.
“I met so few of my fellow passengers,” Sarah said. She seemed to struggle again to find words. “I was so fatigued, always fatigued. The professor would read to me, God bless him.” She gazed at the ruby cross on her mother’s bodice. “You were the one, they say. I never thanked you for taking me back from the sea,” she said in a whisper. “A terrible accident. I was fortunate you were there.”
But there had been no mistaking Sarah’s action in the storm. She had deliberately, and with uncanny adroitness, climbed out on the spar, deliberately leapt into the sea. Was her illness killing her, was that why she had cast herself into the storm? With a shudder Duncan recalled how his fellow prisoners had been driven to suicide.
“A terrible accident,” Duncan repeated with a slow nod. “The gale affected many people that day,” he added. “My grandmother would lock the shutters tight in a storm, then bar the door and sit by it with an ax to keep guard. She said the earth spirits were fighting, and she would not let them enter in such anger.” He offered the words with a small grin, but when Sarah turned back to him her eyes were sober and round, full of wonder.
“Did the professor read to you the night before?” he asked, hoping the softness of his tone might steady her. But her eyes grew still rounder and she pressed the vase close to her breast. She leaned toward the door, glanced at Duncan with sudden alarm, and then with a bound, the young doe bolted.
He watched the doorway for a long moment after she disappeared; then, remembering his experiment, he returned to the classroom. The bowl of water with the shards had acquired a faintly brown hue, and as he stirred it a dim odor wafted upward. He touched his finger to his tongue and grew cold. Though dilute, the acrid taste was unmistakable. The dosing vial had contained laudanum. Tincture of opium. Sufficient doses could put one into a coma-like state, and one who had become habituated to it could, when taken off the treatment, exhibit many disturbing symptoms, not the least of which would be trembling hands and sunken eyes. He remembered the bitter taste in the mysterious pot of tea given him in his cell. A strong dose of laudanum in a pot of tea could leave a man Duncan’s size unconscious for hours, though he still could not imagine why anyone would have wanted him comatose in his cell. He gazed forlornly into the bowl, trying again to connect the cryptic evidence left by Adam and Evering. Somehow he had to wring enough truth out of it to save Lister.
Duncan found Crispin outside in the kitchen garden, pulling weeds from a bed of bean plants. “How did her mother die?” he asked as he knelt and began to help. “Their mother.”
The walnut-skinned man took a long time to answer. “She was the one who hired me, when the other houses in town closed their doors to a freed black. Lady Ramsey was the only one who could soothe Mr. Ramsey’s anger, the only one other than Sarah who could reach his heart. Two years ago Lady Ramsey was on a ship home, the navy mail packet, to visit her family and show them her new baby, a second son. A French frigate attacked as they entered the English Channel. No one survived.”
They worked in silence for another few minutes before Crispin spoke again. “Mr. Ramsey, he disliked the French before, but since they killed his wife and son, his hatred has burned like a fire. He lives to ruin the French, to destroy their soldiers and those who help them.” The late morning sun beat down on their backs and they fell into a languid rhythm as they worked. A scullery maid settled onto a back step and began peeling potatoes.
“Did she know him well?” Duncan asked suddenly. “Adam Munroe.”
“He was here just the one time,” Crispin said, then looked up in alarm.
“Jonathan revealed that he had visited,” Duncan assured him. Not only had Adam visited Sarah, Crispin’s expression told him it had been in secret. “I counted him as a particular friend. When was it, his visit?”
“Seven months ago,” Crispin replied in a whisper, glancing at the maid.
“You mean just before Sarah fled.” Sarah had gone to Scotland with the mysterious Greek, Socrates Moon. But shortly before that, Adam must have gone to Scotland, to his birthplace in Argyll. It must mean Sarah had followed him, after he had stopped at the Ramsey house to give her secret directions.
Crispin sighed and leaned toward Duncan. “You’ll have to help me, McCallum. It’s more than one man will be able to do, protecting the girl.”
Duncan remembered little Jonathan, holding the letter opener at his sister’s side. “Protect Sarah? From what?” Duncan’s query was drowned out suddenly by the beat of a drum.