I hurried back to the laundry and kept my head low, slipping back into work. The tension had begun to ease from my muscles when a hand clamped onto my shoulder, spinning me around. “Out for a walk, were you?” Nurse Branson’s gaze bore down upon me.

I stared back, shoulder tense in her grip.

“They was right about you.” She spoke in my face, almost a hiss. “They was right, and you’re a good-for-nothing like the rest. Never should have stood up for the likes of you.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me along behind her. “I’ve a vat of cooking oil what needs cleaned out. None of the aids can stomach it, so I’ll let you have a go.”

That night, weary and shaking with nausea, I curled up on my cot, fully clothed, and waited for the waves of sickness to recede. When Lew came through to place clean chamber pots under the beds, I grabbed his hand. “Lew, I need you to pass another message.” I propped myself up and explained what I needed, and where to find the man in question.

“You’re certain he’ll know what it means, miss?”

“As long as you tell him it’s from me, I promise he will. Whatever he gives you, some note or instruction, you must deliver it to me without anyone else seeing. Even for a moment.”

This time it was Mr. Frederick Harford I’d asked him to find, with a simple verbal message: I find I need help piercing the dark.

Rose was close. I could feel it.

And when I uncovered her story, this prison would come tumbling down like a house of straw.

27

The earth has music for those who listen.

~William Shakespeare

They put me in with the long-stay patients for bath night, on account of the cooking oil encounter. Acute patients wouldn’t be bathing for three more days, and apparently they couldn’t stand the smell for that long. Which was fortunate, because I wasn’t certain I could either.

One by one they dunked the patients, dousing and soaping them with lye, scrubbing their hair, then dousing them again. I watched Anna from my perch on the edge of the bench when it was her turn, looking her over and wondering about the mysterious song that lived inside of her. Of the secrets she couldn’t even remember.

Perhaps it wasn’t even her who had played. Yet she knew the song.

They were undressing her, but when an aid knelt to yank off her slippers, Anna kicked the woman full in the face and tucked her feet with a whimper.

“Hey, what’s the idea?” screeched the poor aid, and two others came to hold the woman down as she fought to get away.

“Don’t bother,” said another aid. “This one never lets us take her shoes off. Just sponge her off and move on.”