A Fall of Marigolds (12 page)

THE
sensation of being wrapped in Ethan Randall’s one-armed embrace lifted me out of the fog and by the time we were stepping outside I was fully myself again.

“I’m all right.” I gently pulled away and inhaled the moist night air.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Yes.” I turned to him, glad that the violet night was hiding my embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”

“Nonsense. I’m the one who is sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Please forgive me.” He sought my gaze. “You’re quite sure you are all right? Would you like to sit?” He led me to a wooden bench just outside the main hospital doors—a bench that family members sometimes sat upon while waiting to visit a patient who likely would not survive; the dying were the only ones allowed visitors.

“I was unaware there would be a criminal trial,” I said. “I was just surprised.”

When he said nothing I looked up. The expression on his face was one of astonishment. “How could you not know? It’s been in all the papers for weeks.”

“I . . . I don’t care much for the newspaper.”

“But surely when you’ve gone ashore you must’ve heard about it.”

I could only shake my head.

“Harris and Blanck are being tried for manslaughter, Miss Wood.”

I shuddered and looked away, toward the Jersey shore and not New York. I have always hated that word, “manslaughter.” Always. And sitting there, under that night sky and its ambivalent stars, I hated it as much as ever I had. “Slaughter” was a word that belonged only in stockyards. “I didn’t know,” I said.

“I just find that—” Dr. Randall stopped in midsentence. “Have you not been back on the mainland since?”

What did it matter now if he knew I hadn’t? He would hear soon enough. Anyone who was acquainted with me on the island was aware that I hadn’t.

“No.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Are you . . . Is it because of what you saw? Was it too terrible?” he finally asked.

Ethan Randall’s simple question filled me with simple confidence. “It was unbelievably horrible, what I saw.”

“And you really haven’t set foot back on Manhattan since?”

“I haven’t.”

“Because back in Manhattan they are still talking about it?” he asked.

“I suppose that’s part of it.”

“But you could go anywhere. You could leave New York altogether. Nurses are needed in every city, Miss Wood.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere. I like it here.”

“But you have so much to offer. You’re young. Your whole life is ahead of you.”

I rose. “Yes, well. Thank you very much for assisting me outside. I feel much better but I think I shall retire to my room now.”

He sprang to his feet. “I’ve said too much. I’m sorry. You don’t have to run away.”

“I’m not running away. I’m going to my quarters. May I have my book, please?”

I reached for Lily’s book but he did not hand it to me. “Can we not go back to the commons and continue our discussion of Keats?”

“I don’t think so.”

He handed it to me. “I’ve offended you. I’m sorry. I just don’t understand.”

“You haven’t offended me.” I took the book. I wanted to add,
And you’re right. You don’t understand
. “Good evening, Dr. Randall. My apologies if I have ruined your evening.”

I started to walk back into the building and he fell in step beside me.

“You didn’t ruin my evening.” He stepped ahead to open the door for me.

“Dr. Treaver sometimes plays cards in the dining room. You might find him in there,” I offered.

We stood in the main corridor, where we would part. He looked toward the direction of the staff dining room and perhaps a few games of rummy with a colleague.

“Good night, Doctor,” I said.

He turned to face me. “Miss Wood, perhaps you would consider allowing me to accompany you on a trip ashore.”

“That’s not necessary. When I’m ready to go, I’ll go.”

“But perhaps if someone accompanied you, you wouldn’t have to wait until you’re ready.”

I felt suddenly like a child in his presence.

“I’m serious,” he continued when I said nothing. “It might not be as difficult to do as you think. Sometimes fear of a thing is worse than the thing itself.”

I wanted nothing more than to make good my escape from him, but his words hung on the air between us. Despite his ignorance of what I longed for most, I knew that what he was saying made sense. As soon as the words left his mouth I knew the voice of reason had been whispering them to me for weeks and I’d been pretending I hadn’t heard them.

He smiled. “I know I said I don’t understand. But I would like to.”

I just nodded. “Good night, Doctor.”

I turned from him and made my way toward my dormitory. He must have been watching me walk away, for it was several seconds before I heard his footfalls on the tiles as he headed in the opposite direction toward the staff dining room.

I didn’t see how I could make Ethan Randall understand what kept me planted on the island. There were times, such as at that very moment, when I barely understood myself why losing Edward had sent me here and kept me here. I had nothing of Edward’s to show Dr. Randall or anyone else. I hadn’t a pressed rose or a note or even the memory of a lingering kiss. I had nothing tangible or intangible to prove I had lost something precious when Edward died. All I truly possessed was guilt, because Edward had been on the ninth floor waiting for me when he should have been on the floor above, where there was a way of escape.

I possessed nothing of Edward’s to prove to myself that he’d thought me worth the price he ended up paying. As these thoughts assailed me, I looked down at the book I held.

My steps stilled.

I had nothing of Edward’s, and yet I had so easily kept back Lily’s book from Andrew. How had I been able to think I could keep this book from him all this time?

I’d been drawn to Lily’s scarf because it was all that remained of the thin slice of time Andrew and she had shared together, time that Andrew, in blissful ignorance, treasured. Except it wasn’t the only tangible thing left. There was also the book. And he didn’t know I had it.

I pivoted and retraced my steps back to the main corridor. There was no sign of Dr. Randall. I headed to the isolation pavilions at the far end of the island, aware of but undaunted by the fact that I had no idea what I would say to Andrew when I handed him Lily’s book. He deserved as honest an answer as I could give him. I could tell him I had opened Lily’s trunk by mistake, I had seen the book on top, and I’d thought he might want it when he was well. That much was true. When I had first removed the book from the trunk, that had been my motivation. And now he was on his way to being well.

But as I neared the entrance, I realized I had no good answer for why I was choosing to bring it to him now, at eight o’clock on a Saturday night, when I was off duty. Perhaps he would be so cheered at having it he would not bother to wonder why I was there after-hours, handing it to him.

The night nurse at the main nurses’ station looked up when I entered the building. I told her I’d left something in the scarlet fever ward. She went back to her charting and I walked quickly past her.

The rooms were dark, as most of the patients had turned in for the night. A few lamps burned here and there. When I reached the scarlet fever ward, I saw that Andrew’s bedside lamp still glowed, but he appeared to have fallen asleep reading.

For several moments I contemplated what I should do. Leave and come back with the book tomorrow? Not with everyone awake.

Leave the book on his bedside table?

But he would wonder where it had come from unless I wrote a note. I stepped over to the ward’s nurses’ station and withdrew a piece of paper and a fountain pen. Then I walked to Andrew’s bedside, masking my footfalls as best I could. In the soft glow of his lamp, his splotchy skin appeared almost normal. An open book lay across his chest:
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
.

I waited for a moment to see whether he was merely resting, but when he didn’t open his eyes, I moved the metal chair that was near the foot of his bed closer to the light. The chair squeaked a little as I lowered myself onto it.

I placed the paper on top of the book and uncapped the pen.

Dear Mr. Gwynn
, I wrote.
I found this book when—
And then I stopped.

I couldn’t summon the professional words to say what I had done and why. For several long seconds I just stared at the paper. And then I was acutely aware that I was being watched. I lifted my head to see Andrew looking at me.

“Nurse Wood?” he said softly, as if I were an apparition.

“I’m sorry I woke you.” Heat rose to my face for the third time that evening.

“I nearly didn’t recognize you. You . . . you aren’t wearing your uniform.”

I looked down at my clothes and then I remembered my hair was down around my shoulders and Dolly’s beautiful comb was probably glinting in the lamplight. “I just . . . I just needed to bring you something.”

I withdrew the book from underneath the piece of paper. The second Andrew saw it, I knew something wasn’t quite right. I expected to see the same joy as when I had returned Lily’s scarf to him. The look on his face was very strange, almost like dread.

“Where did you get that?” he whispered.

Accusation tinged his voice. My heart began to pound inside my chest with something like shame. I felt as if I had stolen it. “I . . . I happened across it the day you had me look for your father’s pattern books. I opened your wife’s trunk by accident, thinking it was yours, and when I saw this little book—”

“That’s impossible.”

Again the tone was unmistakably one of utter disbelief.

“I . . . I swear I meant no harm. It looked like a book your wife had loved and I thought you might like to have it with you while you recover. You are finally past the worst of it, so I thought I’d bring it down to you.” I handed it to him and he slowly took it from me.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “I lost this the day before we set sail. You found it in Lily’s luggage?”

Now it was my turn to sound dumbfounded. “
You
lost it?”

“This was my mother’s.” The timbre of Andrew’s voice was now as tender as it was incredulous. It was plain the book was a precious keepsake he’d believed he would never see again.

For a moment I was as perplexed as Andrew was, but then the words in Lily’s letter came hammering back to me.

From the day I met you I planned to run back to the hired cab for a forgotten glove, and to find someone on the street to give you the message to look inside my trunk, where I knew you would find this book. . . .

Lily had taken the book from Andrew the day before they left England and hidden it in her own luggage with the note and certificate. She knew that when Andrew was given the message from whomever she’d hastily paid on the street to deliver it, he would open the trunk and he’d see—to his great surprise—his mother’s book. He’d pull it out, this treasured book that he’d thought was gone forever. He’d open it and then he would find what Lily had left inside for him. With the beloved book planted there, he was assured of finding the letter and the certificate.

Tears had sprung into Andrew’s eyes as he stared at the book. “I just don’t understand. Why would she do that? She knew I was looking everywhere for it. . . .”

He did not really expect me to know the answer. But in that horrible moment I nearly told him everything. Had I not still been smarting from the sting I’d suffered earlier when Ethan Randall had unwittingly assured me that for me, the Triangle fire still burned, I might have. Just that little bit of deception on Lily’s part seemed to weigh so heavily on Andrew.

And yet . . . A breach had opened in his in-between place just as it had in mine. His new bride had taken a book from him that he’d clearly valued and she’d hidden it from him in her luggage. Now a tiny fissure marred his perfect memory of her. If I gave him those terrible papers when he left Ellis, they would not have as great an impact after tonight. Because the fissure would widen in the coming days. Of course it would widen.

He inhaled heavily, like one starved for oxygen. “If you hadn’t opened Lily’s trunk by mistake the book would be gone now. Yes? Burned with everything else of hers?”

“Yes, I suppose it would.”

“Then I am so very grateful to you. Thank you.”

“It was nothing.” I didn’t want his gratitude. And because I knew I didn’t deserve it, I blurted another confession. “I read from it. I shouldn’t have. I am sorry.”

He didn’t seem surprised. “Had you not read ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ before?”

He’d figured it out—why Dr. Randall and I were discussing Keats.

“No,” I answered. “If you hadn’t told me what it meant, it would still be a mystery to me.”

This didn’t seem to surprise him either. “Poetry speaks slowly. My mother told me that. We are usually too much in a hurry.” He sighed at this remembrance. “Hurried people miss many things. They see only what is right on top. . . .” His voice fell away.

“I should let you rest.” I rose from my chair. “Good night, Mr. Gwynn.”

But Andrew didn’t say good night back to me. He seemed not to have heard me at all. His eyes were on his mother’s book, practically entreating it to reveal how it came to be in Lily’s trunk. I could not leave him without offering him some snippet of the truth I was holding just out of his reach.

“Sometimes people do things for reasons they aren’t ready to explain,” I said.

He turned his head in my direction, and seemed to consider what I’d said. His gaze drifted to the butterfly comb in my hair and then his eyes were tight again on mine.

“Everything is turning out so very differently than how I imagined it would,” he said.

“I know.” But I could say no more. My throat thickened with dread at the thought of what I would be bringing to him on the day he left. “Good night, Mr. Gwynn.”

“Thank you, Nurse.”

I left him and returned to my quiet room. I filled the basin in my shared bathroom with warm water, cleaning solution, and a few drops of lavender. I returned to my room for the scarf, withdrawing it from the pillowcase I’d carried it in. I took it back to the bathroom and plunged it into the soapy concoction, massaging its length to purge its threads of any remnant of Lily’s terrible disease, knowing I couldn’t possibly wash away everything she had done. The thought of handing over her letter made me shudder as if a winter wind had blown open the tiny window above my head. The coward in me wanted to find an easier way. . . . Perhaps I could place the letter and certificate into the folds of the scarf when I returned it to him on discharge day. He would take the scarf from me and not realize there was something nestled inside. Then when he arrived at his brother’s and unpacked, Andrew would find the letter. He would know that I’d had it, and surely had read it, but I wouldn’t have to see his face.