Unhonored (10 page)

Ellis could hear muttered words and sniggering from the gallery above her. She drew in a breath and pulled the covering sheet back down around Alicia's waist. She hated to expose so publicly the skin of the woman she had known under the stark gaslight overhead and the prying eyes of the students leaning forward in the gallery.

There was something about the wet hair that bothered her. Had she drowned? If so, it was such a cold day, wouldn't that affect her body temperature?

Ellis turned dutifully toward the instrument table and selected the proper scalpel. She gripped it so tightly that her hand started to shake. She took in a deep breath and willed herself to relax slightly. Her hand stopped shaking.

I couldn't let them see how nervous I was,
Ellis recalled.
I could not give those men in the room their smug satisfaction. I had to do it and hide what I felt.

Ellis turned toward the operating table a little too quickly. Her hip bumped against the table, jostling it on its supporting pedestal. It was only the slightest of nudges but it was enough.

Alicia's head rolled to one side as though she were turning to look at Ellis. Her face stared back at her with haunting, dead eyes.

“The first cut down the center from the breast to the pubic bone needs to be firm and deep.” Dr. Donnelly's words rang clearly in Ellis's mind even though her eyes were still fixed on returning the dead woman's stare. “You'll want to divert around the navel as it is particularly difficult to cut through.”

Ellis held the scalpel raised in her frozen right hand. She could not look away from the dead face of Alicia staring back at her.
This is wrong. It wasn't Alicia on the table that day. That face was burned so deeply in my memory that I remembered it in my worst dreams. She looked nothing like Alicia …

“Miss Harkington?” It was the voice of Dr. Donnelly. “We're all waiting.”

Ellis looked closer at the pallid face and the clouded eyes of the woman.

A tear fell from the woman's eye.

She's not dead.
The thought shouted in Ellis's mind as though she were deaf to her own thoughts.
Everyone thinks she is but she's not.

“Miss Harkington!” Dr. Donnelly's voice was muffled and distant, as though Ellis were underwater and her professor were shouting at her from the surface. “I was not in favor of your entering this school! A woman has no place in this profession! You will complete this autopsy or I will process your expulsion from this school myself.”

Ellis's hand moved as it had in that operating theater so long before. She was powerless to stop it then and she was powerless to stop it now. As though moving through water the blade descended toward the soft skin covering the woman's sternum.

Ellis knew what was coming but was powerless to stop it. The welling up of the blood as she made the long cut. The woman's scream as she came suddenly to consciousness. Her thrashing on the table. The blood splatter on Dr. Donnelly's spats. It was all moments away.

Where was her father when she needed him?

Gone … gone to his grave …

Her hand descended. The tip of the scalpel would not be denied biting into the flesh that beckoned it.

A hand reached out, grasping Ellis's right hand by the wrist.

Lightning flashed through the windows overhead.

The gallery, its students, Dr. Donnelly and the operating theater vanished. Ellis was surrounded by a cloud of dark, howling figures that retreated from her in all directions. Their cries faded almost at once and she could see where she was once more.

She stood in the rotunda of the folly next to the onyx bier. She was looking down at the terrified face of Alicia, her rain-wet face glistening in the occasional flashes of lightning through the oculus above.

Alicia was whimpering. “Please, Ellis … oh, please…”

Ellis shifted her gaze to her right hand suspended over Alicia's breast.

It held a gleaming scalpel.

A strong hand gripped Ellis's hand by the wrist, arresting its descent. The hold was strong and a little too tight.

It was Jonas's hand.

“It's all right, Ellis,” Jonas said quietly. “You just need to relax now … and put that blade down.”

Ellis's arm ached. She drew in a shuddering breath as she made an effort to relax.

“I told you, you could do this,” Jonas said, pulling her hand down slowly. He took the scalpel from her hand.

“Yes,” Ellis murmured, still shaken. “You told me.”

Jonas turned to where Alicia lay shaking on the bier, the scalpel still in his hand. “You've been bound, Alicia. Just hold still and I'll cut you free. Who did this to you? Who left you here?”

“I … I don't know,” Alicia said through quivering lips. “There was a fluttering sound like someone shaking a heavy curtain. There were shadows … lots of shadows … all coming toward me at once. I must have passed out … then I was here … and Ellis had that knife and … and…”

“That's enough, Alicia,” Jonas said, his words soothing and reassuring. “Hold still. I'm about finished.”

“Jonas,” Ellis said. “Are we through the garden?”

“Yes,” Jonas answered. “You're through.”

“Will the Ruins be easier?” Ellis whispered.

Jonas did not answer.

 

10

RUINS OF THE PAST

Ellis stood at the threshold on the far side of the folly. She gazed between the columns across an unkempt patch of lawn surrounded by a hedge that had evidently not been tended to in a very long time. At the far edge of the lawn, she could see the dark, forbidding mass of the old section of the house veiled by the continuing rain.

The architecture struck her as a hodgepodge of styles, with little attempt at concern regarding the aesthetics of which might complement the other. On the main, it followed a combination of Georgian and Victorian shapes created out of brownstone but here and there were definite oddities. There was a classical Greek façade with Doric influence, its pediment broken with columns fallen on one side. Behind it rose a broken Gothic tower that leaned precariously to the left. The strange exterior extended seemingly forever in both directions, its ends fading into the torrential rain.

She could hear Jonas and Alicia stepping up behind her.

“Is that what they call ‘the Ruins'?” Ellis asked.

“Yes,” Jonas answered. “It's the old part of the house. The part you made once that has long since been abandoned.”

“Merrick hates the place,” Alicia added. “It reminds him too much of you.”

Ellis turned toward Alicia.

You have to learn the rules before you can break them …

“And how is it that you were bound like a tragic gift so conveniently in my path?” Ellis asked, her eyes fixed on Alicia. “The last time I saw you was at Merrick's side. As I recall, you found my performance onstage rather amusing at the time.”

“What choice did I have, Ellis?” Alicia looked down at the rain-slick stones of the folly's floor. “What choice do any of us have?”

“And so you just happened to be tied up on the bier?” Ellis's tone was both one of disbelief and accusation.

“Of course not!” Alicia's voice quivered as she spoke. “Merrick sent me into the maze after you. He said for me to follow you and find out what direction you were going in the Ruins. But I got lost … I don't know what happened. I got tangled up somehow trying to push through a trellis choked with vines. They grabbed me, wound around me … it was … it was…”

“It was the garden,” Jonas said. “It was just trying to protect you, Ellis.”

“Protect me?” Ellis scoffed.

“It
was
your garden.” Jonas shrugged.

“Well, I don't much care for how it protects me!” Ellis snapped. A chill ran through her as she turned back to look across the lawn. She saw a set of stairs up to a small patio. The interior beyond the door was dark, their glass apparently broken. She could see the faint flutter of shredded curtains beyond the rusting panes. “Go back, Alicia. Be a good lapdog and tell your master that you found me and where we are—for all the good it will do him.”

“No, Ellis,” Alicia begged. “Please, don't make me go back. You left here once before … you can show us the way out again. I helped you … remember? Remember what I did for you?”

Ellis looked again at Alicia Van der Meer. She looked ridiculous in her Egyptian costume. The rain had smeared her makeup. She had lost her ornate headpiece and now her golden hair lay wet and heavy about her shoulders. Ellis remembered her in her stained, torn party dress running away from her on that street in Gamin a seeming eternity ago, giving Ellis time to flee while the hellish beast stalking them fell on Alicia with terrible fury.

Ellis turned to Jonas. “You know the way out of here?”

“I know someone who knows the way out.” Jonas nodded. “But we
have
to find Jenny first. Without her, it's pointless.”

“And Jenny is in the Ruins?” Ellis urged.

“Yes, I have no doubt,” Jonas affirmed.

“Why don't you doubt?” Ellis asked, her eyes fixed on Jonas. “Merrick hates the Ruins. Why would he hide her here?”

“I'm not convinced it was Merrick who hid her,” Jonas answered. “I think he wants to find her as much as we do.”

“Then the sooner we find her, the sooner this nightmare will end,” Ellis said. She glanced at her ugly traveling suit and determined it could not become wetter than it was now. The sky was turning somewhat lighter under a rainy dawn. She stepped quickly into the rain, rushing toward the jagged, dark panes of the broken patio doors beyond the lawn.

Jonas glanced at Alicia and then followed quickly in Ellis's footsteps.

Alicia stood shivering at the edge of the folly.

“If you're coming, Alicia,” Ellis called over her shoulder, “then come.”

Alicia ran to follow after them.

*   *   *

Only the sound of glass crunching beneath the hard soles of her shoes greeted Ellis as she stepped cautiously through the open, rusting frame of one of the patio doors. Shards from the doors and the arched frames above it were everywhere on the floor, glinting in the gray light of the morning outside.

The rain had lightened up considerably and the dull light penetrating the clouds illuminated the long room. There were only the vestiges of curtains remaining in long, tattered rags on either side of the patio doors. The doors exiting the far side of the room were missing, the remaining hinges either twisted or missing altogether.

“What happened here?” Alicia asked from the patio doors, her eyes wide.

“Take care, Alicia,” Jonas called quietly back to the young woman. “There is glass everywhere and I suspect those slippers you're wearing aren't terribly practical in this case.”

“Well, could you please help me?” Alicia asked. “Just across the floor, I mean.”

Jonas gave Ellis a questioning glance.

“Well, your costume isn't much better,” Ellis observed. “Exploring ruins in servant's livery. At least your shoes are more sensible. You might as well carry her across.”

Jonas nodded, stepping back to rescue the still-shivering woman standing in the rain just short of entering the room.

“It's odd that all the glass is broken. All of it is inside the room,” Ellis muttered more to herself than to anyone else as she crossed to one of the oak doors. “Jonas, come take a look at this!”

Jonas stepped back into the room with Alicia draped across his arms. “What is it?”

“This door … and all along the wall,” Ellis said as she leaned closer for a better look. “There's glass here, too. How would the glass from those outside doors get embedded all the way over here?”

“Wind, perhaps,” Jonas offered.

“With this much force?” Ellis shook her head. “Some of these shards are embedded nearly the length of my thumb and almost to the ceiling. What kind of wind would do that?”

It was then that Ellis noticed several dark stains against the wall, beginning at about her shoulder height and widening toward the floor.

“Perhaps we had better move on,” Jonas said quietly.

Ellis only nodded. She stepped through the broken doorframe into a long hall. The oak doors that should have been in the frame lay against the opposite side of the hall, their finish dusty and weathered. The hall had sets of double marble columns on both sides rising up to support arches that extended down the hall nearly a hundred feet. The patterns of French blue and white tiles could barely be seen beneath the layer of dust under her feet. Dull light from the morning gave scarce illumination through the dirty, round windows set on the far side. The bottom of a wide, marble staircase rose up from the hallway to Ellis's left while the hall ended in a closed door at the far end and a crossing hall behind her.

Jonas stepped through the door, lowering Alicia's feet so that she might stand on her own. He spoke with some assurance. “I remember this hall.”

“Which way, then?” Ellis asked.

“The stairs, I think,” Jonas answered.

“You
think
?” Ellis looked sharply at the man with the paisley-shaped blemish across his right eye and face. “Aren't you
sure
?”

“It's the Tween, Ellis,” Jonas replied, hurt coloring his tone. “It's always changing and being changed. One can never be
sure
about anything, but I do know how to find Jenny.”

“And we'll never get out without her,” Ellis repeated as though the refrain had become wearily familiar. She absently took her hat off her head and started down the hall with Alicia at her heels following a pace behind Jonas.

They were nearly halfway up the stairs before Ellis noticed them. Two young men in clean dark suits, their collars stiff and starched, tripping down the stairs and engaged in quiet, intense conversation. Their slicked hair gleamed in the light from a broken section of the ceiling overhead. One of them turned his dark eyes to Ellis, half raising his hand in acknowledgment as he smiled.