Aether Spirit (20 page)

“I’m sore.” He frowned at the place where his arm would be if it was still attached. “But I’m hurting in the arm that’s not there anymore. How strange.”

“It’s been known to happen,” Radcliffe said. “Your nervous system has had several shocks and is confused, but it should be better soon. The wagon should be coming from town today, hopefully with more morphine. I’m sorry I can’t give you more, but we’re somehow down to emergency levels.”

“That’s fine.” Bryce smiled up at Claire. “It’s so good to see you, Cousin. Tell me about your adventures in Europe.”

“Claire needs to eat something,” Radcliffe told him and took Claire’s elbow gently but with a clear message—time to go. “She’ll be back later.”

“Oh, all right.”

“I’ll bring you something to eat now that you’re awake,” Beth told Bryce. “I’ll be right back.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Bryce said. “Goodbye, Cousin Claire.”

“I’ll see you soon, Bryce,” she told him. Once she and Radcliffe had left the room, she said, “I could have stayed with him for a bit.”

“You need to eat.” He released her arm, and she recognized he’d been guiding her like a lover would. The loss of his touch sent a needle of sadness into her heart.

“I’m fine.” But her stomach growled, and she put a hand over it.

“Your digestive tract disagrees.”

“It’s never listened to me when I needed it to. What is Bryce not supposed to mention to me?”

Radcliffe held the hospital door open for her. “I don’t want him activating one of your blocks and putting you out of commission for the rest of the day, so he is not to speak to you of anything that happened in the two years before your accident.”

Claire’s eyebrows raised as her stomach sank, leaving her pulled in the middle. How would she ever discover what happened? “Two years? That’s a long time.”

“Yes, I’m being cautious. Did you mean it when you said you wanted to know about your past?”

“Yes, absolutely! I’m tired of living in a fog, wondering where certain feelings are coming from.”

“Like what?”

Now her cheeks heated—damn that redheaded fairness, he’d surely see—and she had to look away. “I can’t say. They get so jumbled up and confusing sometimes.”

“You’re not a good coquette, Claire.”

She stumbled when he said her name, but she held the blackness at bay with indignation. “How dare you?” she spat at him. “You can order me around in the hospital—you’re my medical chief, after all—but you can’t do so outside. My feelings are my own, and I’ll tell you when I’m damn good and ready. And you can’t dictate what my cousin and I can and can’t talk about!” She brushed past him and went into the mess hall ahead of him. He caught up to her in the line.

“You’re not being reasonable,” he said. “You have to trust me that I only have your best interest at heart. And I’m sorry for upsetting you.”

“I’m not some hysterical woman, Doctor Radcliffe.” She dared him to say her name again with a look. “Or can I call you Chadwick now?”

Now the room spun, and she was grateful for his steadying hand on her back.

“This. Doesn’t. Make. Sense,” she said, but she felt that she was spinning and dared not open her eyes.

“Unfortunately it does.”

He guided her out of the line and outside. The chill cleared some of her dizziness, and she opened her eyes to see she stood under the tree by the workshop. Patrick O’Connell was there. The world still spun, so she closed her eyes and concentrated on bringing the cold air into her lungs. With each breath, the pressure and buzzing in her ears lessened.

“Is she all right?” O’Connell asked.

“She’s being her feisty self,” Radcliffe said. “And she’s pushing the blocks, stubborn girl.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less. I’ll stay with her if you want to get her something to eat.”

“I’ll do that. Wait here with her.”

“I already said I would. Now go. You’re not helping by being here.”

Muttered curses faded with the crunch of footsteps along the gravel path, and Claire couldn’t help a small smile.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” O’Connell said so quietly she almost missed it. “Always good at pushing his buttons.”

She didn’t respond, only hoped he would say more.

What did he mean? Had she known Radcliffe before? And O’Connell? She’d thought he looked familiar.

This time when memory tugged at her, she didn’t resist but allowed it to pull her mind into the past.

Chapter Twenty

Fort Daniels, 27 February 1871

Chad returned to the mess hall and skipped the line to go straight to Helen Jones, the woman in charge, a light-skinned former plantation cook who had brought order and some elegance to the mess hall.

“I need two meals to take away.” He thought about O’Connell. “Make that three.”

“Yes, Doctor, although if you keep stretching yourself taking care of everyone else, you’re going to pay at some point.”

“Oh, I’m already fully aware of that.”

“But are you?” a voice behind him asked, and he turned to see Nanette. The frustrations of the morning and particularly the past ten minutes flared in his chest, and her eyes widened, but she stiffened her stance.

“I am. And you have some explaining to do, Nurse. Why did you lie to me on Saturday about Perkins telling me to go rest?”

“You were exhausted, and I didn’t want to have to deal with you as a patient. I was only looking out for you.”

“And you put the rest of the patients in danger by stretching the hospital staff so thin. The next time you pull a stunt like that, you can find yourself a different base, assuming any of them will have you.”

“You overestimate your influence, Doctor Radcliffe.” She studied her nails. “I’d be careful who I angered if I were you.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Of course not. As I said, I’m just trying to look out for you. Oh, and I’d watch out for Doctor McPhee. She’s a sly one. She seems so compassionate, but she did leave Mrs. Soper and Major Longchamp in the General’s House to die when the shelling started.”

“I doubt that. The entire base was in a panic.”

“All the more reason she doesn’t belong here. Notice how we didn’t get attacked until she arrived. Redheads are bad luck.” With those words, Nanette turned on her heel and melted into the crowd of soldiers, many of whom gave her lingering glances.

You’re welcome to her, boys. That one’s a snake.
He recognized the tactic, deflecting suspicion on to someone else. He still wondered where Nanette had been on Sunday. Perhaps she had taken a rest, but the hospital had been in an all-hands situation until the worst of the injuries could be stabilized. He also made a note to talk to Mrs. Soper as soon as she was able to handle a conversation. Perkins had been covering the women’s hospital, but he should pop over there and see how those patients were doing.

But first he had to take care of Claire.

Why had he said her name again? At least she’d fought against the block that made her want to pass out to stop…what? Remembering him, and then recalling the accident? They’d had plenty of good times before it happened.

Two years’ worth.

Had he somehow primed her and himself for his slip and her reaction to it?

Chad thanked Helen for the wrapped sandwiches and went to find Claire and Patrick. She stared straight ahead.

“Is she all right?”

“She said to leave her alone for a minute, that she had something to remember.”

“Something got through the blocks. How long has she been like this?”

Patrick checked his pocket watch, a beat-up silver timepiece he’d had as long as Chad had known him. “About seven minutes.”

“We’ll give her another few.” He looked around, relieved to see that no one but them sat in the clearing behind what was left of the workshop. No one skipped meals since the attack, and he was gratified at how the base pulled together during the uncertain time. He handed Patrick his sandwich, then sat on the other side of Claire and waited.

* * * * *

Vienna, 13 May 1870

Claire left the library on a warm spring day after having finished her final paper, which was on curing diseases of the mind through sympathetic conversation. She would be presenting it to the class the following week, but all she needed to do was some minor tweaking.

I did it!
Claire the hysteric was going to become Doctor McPhee. She could leave that part of her life behind her and start her new one, thanks to a sympathetic ear in the school administration, whom Claire had come to find had a daughter in treatment in Paris. Claire was a symbol of hope to all parents whose children languished in asylums that their fates could change, that they could be healed and go on to lives of normalcy and distinction.

Or maybe Martine had bent an ear or two for her. His parents gave a lot of money to the school. Claire wrinkled her nose. She didn’t want to think that she’d needed someone to advocate for her, but she was a woman in a man’s profession. Or she would be. The joy at her accomplishment faded under the clouds of doubt in her own merit.

“Excuse me, Miss?” The gentleman Claire had almost run into had an Irish accent and the red hair and beard to match, but he had a friendly smile as he tipped his hat.

Claire blinked herself back to the present. She needed to pay attention to where she was going, not brood over the discouraging situation of being a female with ambition but limited opportunities.

The young man looked at her expectantly, and she rubbed her temple to still the throbbing needle of pain that lodged there. It must be time for new glasses, or else she’d merely exhausted herself with all the reading and research she’d been doing.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

He requested directions to a commonly visited tourist destination and melted into the crowd after she obliged him. He joined another man, shorter but still with good stature, who turned to look over his shoulder at her, but someone walked between them before she saw his face, and then they were lost.

Claire didn’t trust her memory, but she could have sworn the redheaded man looked familiar, and the other man’s gray eyes…

Claire blinked, and she found herself not in Vienna on a warm spring day, but on a military base in Tennessee on a chilly late winter one. She shivered and pulled her cloak around her.

“Sandwich?” Chadwick Radcliffe asked and handed her a paper-wrapped square.

“Thank you.” She placed it on her lap and held it there with both hands. Her mind whirred like a clockwork toy. The redheaded man in Vienna had looked an awful lot like Patrick O’Connell, and the man he was with was of the same height and build as Radcliffe. Had they been there?

“What did you remember?” Radcliffe asked. “And please eat something. I don’t want you fainting from hunger.”

Claire unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite without tasting it. She played the scene over and over in her mind, but she couldn’t convince herself it had been O’Connell. The coincidence was just too great, and she had thought he looked familiar. How was that possible if she’d never met him? Had she seen him or encountered him in Boston?

“I’m still sorting it out.” She rubbed her aching temple and took a bite of her sandwich. When she had chewed and swallowed, she asked, “Have the two of you been to Vienna in the past year?”

They exchanged glances.

“Yes,” Radcliffe said. “Last spring. We had a long leave since there hadn’t been any fighting in over a year and decided to go since neither of us had been.”

She turned to O’Connell and asked, “Did you speak to me? Ask directions to Saint Stephen’s Cathedral?”

He shrugged but wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I talked to lots of people, so it’s possible. Our guidebooks were shite.”

Instead of being angry at the obvious lie, she was intrigued by his reticence. Most people when faced with such a happenstance would readily admit it, and then they would laugh about a shared experience and the unexpectedness of encountering each other again on the other side of the globe in a tiny place. They’d comment on what a small world it was and then feel comforted that there was some sort of connection, especially in the chaos of a war zone.

These two men acted from fear, but of what?

Of hurting me.
She put it all together—their looks and comments and body language. They were kind, chivalrous gentlemen, but they acted from something more. Had she known them in her past? Bryce was forbidden to talk to her about the two years before her accident, which, she inferred, must have been when she knew them.

The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that there must have been some previous acquaintance or even a more intimate relationship. It would explain her attraction to Radcliffe and the way her blocks kicked in whenever one of them acted familiar with the other.

She would write to her brother, whom she had only seen briefly since being home, for a tense family dinner, before he went back to his apprenticeship in Washington.

An uncomfortable silence stretched among the trio. Claire couldn’t help but notice the ruins of the workshop. She’d been unaware when Radcliffe—no, Chadwick, and damn the little devil that stuck a hot poker into her temple when she thought his name—had brought her here.

“Is it bad?” she asked. “Inside, I mean. Was there much damage?”

“Aye,” O’Connell said. “Everything was lost. Even the glass globe with the aether in it was shattered.”

“What happened to the aether?” Claire asked. It had been such a happy little—well, she wasn’t sure what—but it had projected emotion to her. She hoped it hadn’t been hurt.

“What do you mean?” O’Connell asked.

“Where did it go?”

“Back to where it came from, I suppose. It’s not there now.”

“We don’t know that much about it,” Radcliffe said, “but since it’s the substance light passes through, I suppose it dissipated back to its pre-stabilized state.”

The night she escaped from the General’s House was still foggy in Claire’s mind, but she recalled seeing a glow like from the aether light the passage. That might have been after the workshop had been destroyed. Had it come to guide her? But then where had it gone? Had it waited to dissipate until after it helped her?