Page 4

T he next morning was bitter as a mouthful of lye soap.

Frost sheathed every window, the sun barely a rumor behind thick, ragged clouds.

My father walked me to the carriage depot in silence; the only sounds the steady crunch of our boots and the nervous patter of my heart.

Exeter’s streets looked even smaller in daylight, as though the cold had shrunk the houses in their frames. Not even the blackbirds sang.

We said our goodbyes with the stoicism of the freshly bereaved.

Daddy pressed a paper-wrapped parcel of food into my hands, then clasped my shoulders so tightly I thought my bones would grind to powder.

His eyes glimmered with pride and something darker—anxiety, or perhaps the fear that his daughter’s faith was a thing as fragile as a frozen pond.

“The Lord be with you,” he said, then made the sign of the cross on my forehead with a trembling thumb, a gesture half-remembered from his own Papist father.

“And also with you,” I whispered, head bowed.

The depot was a bleak single room with a bench along the wall and a battered stove that only succeeded in melting the ice nearest its feet. I waited alone. At ten precisely, a black carriage arrived, drawn by a pair of horses. The driver—a man as pale as wax—helped me in without a word.

I prayed the whole way to the sanatorium.

Not for myself, but for Mercy, and for the strength to do what needed to be done.

I prayed with the stubborn persistence of a weed in a graveyard.

Every mile was a litany, every jostle of the carriage a punctuation.

By the time the building came into view, my lips were numb from hushed recitation.

The sanatorium rose above the barren trees like a mausoleum built by madmen.

Three stories of soot-stained brick, its windows narrow and barred, its roof a bald, shingled scalp.

A small iron gate admitted us to the grounds, where a few stunted bushes clung to life beside a frozen fountain.

There was no welcome, not even a caretaker sweeping the stoop.

Just a bell-pull, which I tugged with reluctance.

The door swung open to reveal a nurse so tall and thin she looked like a jointed marionette. Her uniform was starched and white, her cap perched on a nest of greying hair. Her face was not unkind, but so impassive it might have been carved from tallow.

“Alice Bladewell,” she said, voice as cool as the air. “We’ve been expecting you. Follow me.”

The entryway smelled of coal smoke and something sharper: lye, perhaps.

The floors were scrubbed to a dull shine, and every footstep echoed as if the building were hollow.

I followed the nurse—Miss Hartwell, she introduced herself—past a series of doors, some marked with numbers, others left blank.

There were no flowers, no paintings, nothing to soften the relentless geometry of the place.

“I trust you understand the purpose of your stay,” Miss Hartwell said, never slowing her stride. “You’re to provide company and spiritual counsel for Miss Brown. But you will also be subject to all standard protocols: morning inspection, medication, and so forth. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, though my skin crawled at the thought of submitting to another’s routine. I had agreed to this—God help me—but the weight of it pressed down already.

Miss Hartwell stopped in front of a thick wooden door with a brass plate: WARD 2-B. She rapped once, brisk and commanding, then opened it.

The room was small and perfectly symmetrical.

Two iron bedframes, each topped with a thin mattress and white blanket, stood at opposite walls.

Between them, a single table bore a battered pitcher and a pair of chipped enamel cups.

A crucifix hung above the bed that was supposed to be mine—above Mercy’s bed, only a bare nail.

The window—narrow and barred—let in a wan shaft of light that split the air like a knife.

Mercy Brown sat on the bed to the right, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around herself.

She wore a plain hospital gown that swallowed her frame, her hair cut short and jagged as if done by an impatient hand.

Her face had the translucence of old wax.

Her lips were bloodless, her eyes so sunken they seemed not to belong to her but to some darker passenger riding her body to its destination.

She did not look at me. She stared at the window as though there might be something on the other side worth seeing.

“Miss Brown, you have a new roommate,” Miss Hartwell announced, voice modulated for the delicate.

Mercy did not react. She had been alive, once, in the way of girls who do not yet realize life is a waiting room for sorrow.

I’d seen her at church, saw her laugh with her brother Edwin on the church steps, eyes vivid and clever and green as pondweed. This was not that Mercy.

“Please get settled,” Miss Hartwell said to me. “Lunch is at noon. Medication at two. I’ll be back then.” She left with the same silent efficiency with which she had arrived.

I set my small suitcase on the foot of my bed, unpacking what little I’d brought: two changes of dress, a hairbrush, a leather-bound Bible with my mother’s name inscribed on the flyleaf, and a wooden cross Daddy had carved for me when I was a child.

I placed the Bible and the cross on the table, like a claim staked in hostile territory.

Mercy’s eyes flicked to the cross, then away. She coughed once—a dry, rasping sound like a broom dragged across stone. She clamped a handkerchief to her mouth, and when she pulled it away, there was a smear of red so dark it looked black.

I waited until her breathing eased before I spoke. “Mercy?”

She did not turn. “It’s Alice. From church. Remember me?”

She exhaled through her nose, a sound I couldn’t interpret. Then she said, “Who are you?” Her voice was papery, the syllables folded and refolded until only the outline remained, infused with a faint confusion.

I sat on the edge of my bed, fingers interlaced and white-knuckled. “I read your letters. Your diary entries, rather. Your father shared them with me.” I hesitated, unsure whether this would spark anger or relief. “He’s worried for you. We all are.”

Mercy made no reply. She reached beneath her pillow and drew out a small, black-covered notebook—the new diary, presumably, since her father still possessed the other.

Her hands shook as she turned its pages.

Latin phrases marched across the paper, interspersed with rough sketches of symbols I did not recognize.

On one page, she had drawn a woman’s face split down the middle—half angel, half skull.

I reached for my Bible, fingers tracing the gold lettering.

I wanted to say something comforting, to offer a prayer or a psalm, but every word felt trite in the shadow of this place.

Her confusion about me must be the delirium from her sickness, I reasoned, as her father had shown me writings where she clearly mentioned me.

Mercy snapped the diary shut and glanced at me for the first time.

Her eyes were not green but a washed-out grey, the color of rainwater pooled in a tombstone’s inscription.

“If you’re here to save me, you’re late,” she said.

Her mouth twitched upward in a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

It might have been the beginning of a laugh, had she the strength to spare for laughter.

I cleared my throat. “It’s never too late. Not for God.”

She coughed again, longer this time. When it passed, she said, “God has other priorities.” She lay back on her pillow, eyes drifting closed. “But thank you for trying.”

I sat in silence, feeling like a child who had been given a riddle in a language she could not read.

After a while, I knelt beside my bed, not because I felt especially holy, but because I needed to do something with my trembling hands.

I whispered the 23rd Psalm, tripping over the words in my hurry to fill the emptiness.

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” I faltered, the words catching in my throat.

Mercy opened one eye and watched me, neither mocking nor moved, just present.

When I finished, I remained kneeling, forehead pressed to the thin wool of the blanket.

I prayed for Mercy, for myself, for all the lost souls whose names I did not know.

I prayed until my knees burned and my thoughts ran dry.

When I stood, Mercy was watching the window again. Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the bars with a sound like teeth chattering in a skull. The sanatorium seemed to lean in, listening for secrets. I took my place in my bed—playing the role of a patient best I could.

Time passed in that room with the slow, deliberate cruelty of a metronome.

The light changed from grey to blue to the dim ochre of gas lamps in the corridor.

Dinner was a bowl of gruel that tasted of wet cardboard, delivered by a red-faced nurse’s aide who smiled like she’d been coached on the mechanics but never told what it was for.

Mercy did not eat. She prodded the bowl with her spoon, then set it aside and stared at the wall.

I tried several times to draw her into conversation.

I told her about the girls I used to play with back home, about my mother’s apple cake, about the time Daddy had set his sleeve on fire during a sermon and finished the benediction before putting it out.

Each attempt died in the air, unanswered.

Mercy listened, but with the impassivity of a confessor who’s already heard every sin and grown bored by them all.

I would have given up, except I could not.

That’s what it means to be sent on a mission, I suppose.

When the sky outside turned to ink, I tried again. “What are you writing?” I asked, nodding at the black book in her lap.