Page 8 of Caging Darling (The Lost Girl #3)

CHAPTER 8

“ T his is nice,” says Peter. “I should take you on my murder sprees more often.”

I glance up at him. He’s nodding toward my hand, wrapped over his elbow as we stand in line outside an opera house on the cobbled streets of Chora.

He’d brought a change of clothes for himself in his pack. Stolen an evening dress for me from a nearby tailor.

My mind drifts back to the port town of Laraeth.

“You should have told me,” was what Astor had said when he discovered the velvet on my gown had been transporting me back to my father’s smoking parlor. To the atrocities that had occurred within it.

“Why?” I’d asked. “So you could kill an innocent woman for her gown in order to replace this one?”

“No. I’d have lifted it from a shop like a proper gentleman.”

But I’m not in Laraeth, and I’m not with Astor. I try to ignore the stinging in my belly, how Peter’s kind gesture feels stolen. Feels like it should have belonged to Astor. As if that man deserved any firsts with me.

I push the thought aside and stare up into Peter’s deep blue eyes, appreciate the slick black lines of his shoulders, highlighted by the evening coat.

“I assume you’re referring to having a date,” I say to Peter. “Though I wasn’t aware that murder was the popular sort to take a lady on.”

Peter smirks and brushes his finger down my nose. “I was referring to touching you.”

A sliver of warmth snakes underneath my skin, curling around my ribcage.

“Because it means you get to stay in your fae form,” I say. The Sister usually requires that Peter maintain his shadow form when he’s outside of Neverland, but for whatever reason, my touch allows him to stay grounded in his fae form. We tested it earlier when we arrived. Since we were touching when we left Neverland, he’s able to maintain his fae form even after he lets go of me, though I’m not sure how long the effects will last, nor do I care to find out.

Not after what happened in the Carlisles’ annex.

Peter’s shadow self hadn’t been able to feel pain then. I can’t imagine what that side of him might do to me now that he can actually hurt. Pain is dangerous in the hands of the selfish.

“That, too,” he says, though he takes his other hand and squeezes mine. It’s warm, even through my silk glove, guarding me from the night’s chill.

When we reach the doors of the opera house, the wiry attendant out front turns his attention away from his list and peers at us over his golden-rimmed spectacles.

“Names?”

“The Olssons,” says Peter smoothly.

I rustle in my evening gown. It’s the color of Peter’s eyes, and I can’t help but wonder if his choice was intentional.

The man checks the list. For a bated breath, I fear he won’t find our names. But of course he will. The Sister saw in her tapestries that the Olssons would be ill and staying home for this event.

The man checks us off with his ink-dipped quill, then gestures for us to enter the opera house.

It’s not like any opera house I’ve been to, though I suppose I’ve only been to the one in Jolpa. And only when I was very young, before the plague. Before the curse that stole my freedom and seeded within my parents such paranoia that they refused to let me leave the manor.

From my poor memories, I remember the opera house in Jolpa to be rather functional. This one is plated in gold at the ceiling, imprints of leaves and branches decorating the gold leaf. The carpet is a deep scarlet that reminds me of spilled blood, though surely I’m the only one in the audience thinking as much.

Well, perhaps not, considering we’re not here for an opera.

We file in, directed by an usher to our plush seats in the second row. The entire walk down the aisle, I find myself scanning the faces in the crowd, the aching in my stomach palpable. It’s a silly notion, thinking he’d be here, of all the places in the world to be. Knowing that it’s silly does little to dissuade me from looking anyway. It doesn’t soothe the pang of disappointment either when I’m met with unfamiliar faces. Our seats are in the center of the row, and when I reach mine, my stomach drops out of my chest.

The seat is covered in velvet.

A cold sweat breaks out on my forehead.

“What’s the matter, Wendy Darling? Getting squeamish already?”

Peter’s voice warbles in and out. I am here and not. Here, and also in Darling manor, and men’s hands are snaking their way up my dress…

“Hey, tell your lady to sit. The show’s about to start,” says the man seated behind us.

“Refer to what’s mine again, and you’ll lose your tongue,” seethes Peter, though slyly, a hint of coy amusement in his voice.

The man behind us, a thin middle-aged man who looks as if he’s not used to being as far back as the third row considering the gold adorning the rings on his fingers, scowls. He goes to stand up, surely not to argue with Peter, who has a full head on him. But I’ve met men like this before, dinner guests of my parents’. Men who think their wealth and status can protect them from anything.

To be fair, they’re usually correct.

“Dear, please,” says his wife, still seated, grabbing at his elbow. “The show hasn’t started yet. I’m sure she’ll settle down before then.” The woman looks at me, both pleading and apology in her eyes. Please don’t give him a reason to embarrass me, she begs through her heavily painted lids.

She’s significantly younger than him. Probably half his age. Yet she doesn’t wear the garb of a woman early in marriage. The absence of pearls in her dainty golden crown informs me she’s not celebrating a recent wedding. I wonder how young she’d been when married off to him, how many years she’s spent pacifying her husband’s outbursts.

I can’t explain why, but I nod at her, and it somehow gives me the strength to take my seat. The velvet still feels as if it’s come alive underneath me. It’s swirling with disgusting curiosity, ready to grind through my clothes at any moment. But I tell myself I’m doing it for her. For the nameless woman behind me. I don’t see her sigh in relief, but I hear it. A sharp release of breath.

And I know that we’re in this together.

Peter takes the seat beside me, but not before winking at the man behind us, who grumbles something inaudible back.

“What’s gotten into you, Wendy Darling?” says Peter, leaning over to whisper in my ear. “You look ill.”

“Nothing,” I whisper back, offering him my most practiced smile. “I’m just…anticipating the show, that’s all.”

I can’t tell if it’s concern or amusement in Peter’s eyes. Though I should know by now that he’s incapable of expressing the former without hiding it underneath the latter.

The faerie lights illuminating the opera house dim, bathing us in shadows. I glance at Peter, who appears right at home.

Fear lances through me, and I clasp at his hand. His lips twitch upward in a smile. He thinks the gesture is because I want to be touching him. It doesn’t register with him that I fear how he—his shadow self—will touch me if I don’t touch him first.

The curtains slide heavily across the stage, sounding as if they themselves are heaving. They part to reveal a thin, angular young man with pale skin, vibrant red hair, and weak blue eyes. He’s wearing a black tunic, the common garb for physicians (black hides bloodstains the best), and is standing over a table.

On the table is a corpse.

It’s a woman, naked as a newborn babe, still as an untouched pond.

The crowd gasps in unison, men’s voices echoing the sentiment that this is not an appropriate event for women to attend. Apparently, it is appropriate for a crowd of men to gaze upon this woman’s naked flesh. Something hot incites in my bones, but I watch, remembering that in Estelle, it’s only with the patient’s consent that their bodies be used this way.

This woman dedicated her body to learning. I can’t imagine doing the same. The idea of consenting to anyone touching me without my knowledge has my head swimming.

“Meet Mildred van Clark,” says the physician—Renslow, is his name, if I remember correctly. I decide I don’t like him. Mostly because of how personally he says her name. I think if I were lying on a table naked like this, I’d rather keep things as impersonal as possible. “Perfectly healthy female, until she began to notice a brownish fluid in her urine.” A few women in the crowd gasp. “Come now,” says Renslow, gesturing toward the woman’s corpse, “surely talk of bodily fluids isn’t what’s bothering your feminine sensibilities.”

A few in the crowd chuckle. I shift in my seat.

Renslow continues. “Over time, her belly and face began to swell. The local physical prescribed herbs and bedrest, to no avail. Eventually, Mildred’s condition worsened. She was overcome with such fatigue, she could no longer perform her duties at the inn she worked at in the next town over. By the time she was rushed to Chora for me to see her, she’d vomited to the point of dehydration. She was dead by the time they rang my bell.” Renslow has the decency to tap his fingers regretfully against his leg.

“Now, any guesses on what illness overtook her?” Through his spectacles, Renslow searches the crowd wide-eyed, like it’s a challenge he expects no one to conquer.

Several hands shoot up, though a few in the crowd blurt out answers that meld together into an incoherent jumble of medical terms.

“Now, now. Surely all of you educated people learned to raise your hands in school,” says Renslow. A few people chuckle abashedly, then raise their hands. He calls on a woman in the front row, who offers edema as a possible diagnosis.

“That would be a symptom, not the cause,” says Renslow.

A few more brave souls try their luck, but to no avail.

I’ve got this strange feeling. This memory that pounces out at me from the past. It’s of John, and he’s rambling about something he found in one of the old medical journals in Father’s library.

“Any other takers?”

When I raise my hand, it’s almost as if it’s not me doing it but John, back from the grave, eager to have already known the answer.

My hand is trembling, which Renslow must perceive because he says, “Nervous, young lady?”

Peter turns to me, a question in his eyes. Or maybe it’s less of a question, and more surprise that I would dare bring attention to myself. This is likely a poor judgment call. I should try to bring the least attention to myself as possible if we’re going to be committing murder tonight.

But it’s not as if it matters. I might as well be a ghost.

“Nephritis,” I say, my voice trembling with the knowledge of hundreds of pairs of eyes on me.

Renslow frowns. “What was that?”

I clear my throat and open my mouth to try again, but Peter is faster. “Nephritis,” he booms.

I’m reminded of the time Charlie tried to do the same, but Astor cut her off. “Wendy can speak for herself,” he’d said.

Something deflates, then sours in my stomach.

I’m not sure from this distance, but I think I glimpse Renslow’s eye twitch. He addresses me, not Peter, and says, “Ah, well, my dear. It seems you’ve forced me to go off-script.”

By the way he clears his throat, it’s obvious he wasn’t prepared for anyone to know the answer and doesn’t have a clever response prepared. In just a moment, the self-assured physician-made-performer loses the secure air about him, every bit of confidence in front of the crowd lost without his script.

I shouldn’t feel bad for this man, knowing what he’s planning to do tomorrow. But I can’t keep the embarrassment rolling off of him from slithering onto me, heating my cheeks.

The man thinks for a moment, swallows, then gestures to the crowd. “Well, I had an entire speech prepared about the limitations of using symptoms to diagnose. But it seems that our friend here has undermined my point by besting the rest of you.”

Guilt percolates in my stomach. I shouldn’t get the praise for this. Not when I only know it because of John. I wish he were here beside me.

Still, there’s no aggression in the man’s tone. Like he’s more upset with himself for not having an alternate plan than he is with me for spoiling his first. Not the reaction I’d expect from a man calculating the murder of multiple innocents.

Something sloshes in my belly.

“Well, we’ll just have to see whether this young woman is correct,” says the doctor, padding over to his place beyond the woman. An assistant appears on stage and hands the doctor a scalpel. Immediately, his tensed shoulders relax and his demeanor settles into a poised determination. While he had to control his variables to feel comfortable in front of a crowd, cutting into a body is as natural to him as falling asleep.

When he makes the incision into the woman’s belly, I find myself wishing our seats weren’t so close. It’s not the visual so much as the sound, the too-faint resistance of dead flesh. The way it squelches as if it’s deflating.

My stomach turns over, and I make the mistake of grasping the armrest on my left side, the feel of velvet immediately worsening the situation. Peter grabs my other hand more tightly, but it’s no use. I have to close my eyes, breathe through my nose.

He’ll think it’s because I’m too soft for this.

But mostly I just feel the weight of Astor’s wrist beneath my blade, the crunch of his bone. I feel my dagger slicing through the back of Victor’s father. I feel the clammy flesh of what looks like my brother except for everything that makes him, him, against my skin.

I won’t faint, though. I won’t.

When it’s done, and the suctioning sound indicates that the physician has removed an organ, I open my eyes.

He holds what must be the kidney, though it looks nothing like the drawings in the medical journals. I can’t decide if that’s because the drawings simply can’t capture it, or because…

“Mottled beyond resembling its original form…” says the physician, somewhat mindlessly as he holds up the kidney, overrun with dark brown cysts, for the crowd to see. He’s somewhere else entirely. Odd, given he knew exactly what he’d find when he cut into the woman.

The crowd oohs and ahs over the pungent organ. The physician does not. He wrinkles his brow, regret replacing his previous determination.

“Had this girl at the front been there,” he says, gesturing to me, “perhaps she could have saved this woman’s life. Seen the signs. But no one in the village did. Not even the village physician. Had she been brought to me, I might have guessed what was wrong with her, but if I am to be honest, my friends, our treatment options for this type of condition are less than desirable, and even less effective.

“What if I told you,” says the physician, “that Mildred did not have to die? What if I told you that there was a way to save her?”

The crowd murmurs, but I fear that the sentiment is lost after we just watched him carve into her like we might butcher a pig. I suppose that’s why he mentioned her name, but he’s too late. The crowd doesn’t want to think about this corpse as a woman with a life, friends and loved ones left behind. Not when they came here for entertainment, for curiosity’s sake.

Undeterred by the crowd’s lack of response, Renslow continues. “There was a woman near the same age in a neighboring village who died in a farming accident last week, before Mildred fell ill enough to breach death. The injury was to the farmhand’s head, leaving the rest of her undamaged. Leaving her kidney undamaged.”

Sensing the direction Renslow is taking this, the murmurs in the crowd increase. They’re certainly not happy. There’s an angry swell in the chattering of their voices, one that comes from a place of fear more than conviction.

“What are you suggesting?” says a nobleman in the front row. “That you take the organ of a dead woman and place it into that of the living?” He says it with a scoff, and Renslow tenses, the kidney still in his hand making a squelching sound.

“With the advances in faerie dust for suturing wounds?—”

He’s interrupted by another in the crowd, this time a woman. “It’s unnatural,” she says. “I’d rather be dead than have a whore’s filthy organ inside of me.”

Several in the crowd snicker. Renslow’s face begins to tinge closer to the color of his hair. “I doubt you would be saying that if it were your urine that was stained the color of filth.”

The woman blanches, but her husband retorts, “Which would never happen, given my wife isn’t out picking up diseases on the streets.”

This time, I’m fairly sure my face is the color of Renslow’s. “Fortunate as you may be not to have to face the same illnesses as the lower class, there are illnesses that reach us all, regardless of our status. Regardless of Mildred’s occupation, which you have assumed based on insufficient information, nephritis reaches its deadly fingers in the wealthy class as well. It is a disease I’m sure you and your wife would appreciate having a cure for.”

Renslow’s reason is met by deaf ears, and the crowd becomes restless. The nobleman who almost picked a fight with Peter stands up behind us to leave, his wife quietly protesting something about not wishing to be rude, to no avail.

Eventually, the crowd shuffles out, a hardness coming over Renslow’s pale face as he watches them leave.