“Shhh,” I whispered. “Shhhhh.” And as I rocked her forward and back, forward and back, I was reminded of baby Beatrice. I closed my eyes and put my chin on Eliza’s head, and thought of how my own mother had done this after she’d grown very ill; how she had comforted me when I was sure her end was near. I had cried so hard with my face nuzzled into her neck. “I will not be arrested,” I whispered to Eliza, though I did not entirely believe it. Lord Clarence was dead, and the weapon—with my address on it—was still in his cellar.

The tap tap tap had not left me, and the demon in my skull was not yet at rest. I continued to rock Eliza back and forth, hushing her tears away, thinking of the lies my own mother told me about her illness and the severity of it after she fell sick. She had sworn she would live many more years.

And yet she had died in only six days. As a result, I had spent a lifetime wrestling with the abruptness of that grief, the incompleteness of it. Why didn’t my mother tell me the truth and use her last days to prepare me for a lifetime alone?

Eliza’s dewy tears began to dry. She hiccuped once, twice, then her breathing slowed as I continued to rock her back and forth. “All will be well,” I whispered, so quietly that I could hardly hear my own words. “All will be well.”

Two decades after my mother’s death, I found myself reassuring a child exactly as my mother had reassured me. But to what end? Why did we go to such lengths to protect the fragile minds of children? We only robbed them of the truth—and the chance to grow numb to it before it arrived with a hard knock on the door.

21

Caroline

Present day, Wednesday

Within the recesses of Back Alley in the subcellar of an old building, the hidden door swung open, revealing the tiny space behind the wall of crumbling shelves. I lifted my phone and shone the light around, reaching my hand to the wall, suddenly unbalanced. It was so dark in this room-within-a-room, darker than anywhere I’d ever been.

My single beam of light illuminated the details around me: several wall-mounted ledges sagged under the weight of milky, opaque glass containers; a wooden table with a buckled leg dipped at a slant in the center of the room; and just to my right stood a counter with a metal scale and what appeared to be boxes or books laid out on its flat work surface. The room looked very much like an old pharmacy of sorts—exactly the type of place an apothecary might keep her shop.