“Couldn’t you introduce me to her? Point her out to me? I should enjoy meeting another musician.”

“I couldn’t.” Clara hesitated. The guarded look again streaked her features.

“Why not?”

Her lips pinched, eyes darting down. “I’ve been better at keeping my mouth shut, you know. If I’d done it before, I would never have been locked away here a’tall.”

It wasn’t fitting, this distress nestled deep within the sunniest of people, and I suddenly wondered what had been done to her. And by whom. Digging into her story, however, felt an invasion. “All right then, what did she look like, this musician?”

Clara’s expression eased. “She had long, pretty brown hair—they usually cut hair, but not hers. She wouldn’t let them. White skin like alabaster, and a lovely little face so perfect and soft—all except a little mark.” The woman poked at her lip. “Right about there. Aside from that, she was a beauty. She stood out here, she did.”

The odd feeling turned inward, chilling me to the core.

That birthmark. I knew that birthmark. I looked away, feigning disinterest even as questions surged to the surface and my skin tingled. It couldn’t be. Just couldn’t.

7

The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.

~Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I discovered one marvelous benefit to the darkness at Hurstwell—it allowed me freedom. The sort I needed to explore where I wasn’t meant to go. After completing rounds at three, I slipped through the locked gates of the ward with my key and ventured out into the night through the laundry courtyard. I had one hour until the next aid came to relieve me.

I rounded the building to the lost tower, hand shielding the tiny flame of my candle. Only the very distant crunch of wheels on gravel came to me, giving me a sense of where the lane was and which direction I was headed.

The lost tower. These were the only patients I hadn’t yet looked over, whose faces I had yet to glimpse. There would be a familiar birthmark among them, I was certain. She was nowhere else in Hurstwell.

Wind sucked at my uniform as I paced on, pulling me farther out toward the tower and the pitch blackness of the moors just beyond. It sliced through trees, whipping and moaning in a way I could only call ghostly. Forcing my way through it, I reached the tower and flattened myself to it, praying the wind would die down. I fumbled through the key ring. Surely there was something here that’d work . . .