I screamed and reached for Tillie. The ladder cracked beneath my feet. I was falling. I felt the air billowing around me, tugging at my clothes, my shoulder blades tingling as if they wanted to break through my skin, as if I’d already hit the pavement and all my bones had shattered. The sky stretched out above me.
And then I felt those strong hands around my waist again, and instead of sky I was looking into dark eyes flecked with gold and, beyond those eyes, black wings spreading over us like a mantle. Like the blessed oblivion of sleep. I closed my eyes to fall into that darkness and was instead lifted into a blinding light.
3
I AWOKE INTO that light—light so bright that every time I tried to open my eyes I had to close them and I was pushed back down into the dark. . . .
Smoke-filled dark. I was back on the ninth floor of the Triangle Waist factory, trying to find my way out, but the smoke was so thick I couldn’t see where I was going. Horrible shapes emerged out of the smoke: Esther Hochfield, holding her engagement ring up for me to admire, her hair on fire; little Etta flitting by like a bat, leathery wings stitched to her thin arms; a white, bloated face bobbing out of the smoke like a pickled egg that, horribly, I recognized as Tillie. I clutched her arm, relieved to find her no matter how awful she looked.
“Tillie!” I cried. She opened her mouth—I saw her lips forming my name—but a spume of smoke gushed out like lava from a volcano. It was pouring into my mouth, choking me . . .
I awoke into the light again, gagging on the smoke.
“Shall I administer more ether, Doctor?” someone said.
Blinking against the light, I saw figures hovering over me. One, dressed in white, blurred into the surrounding aura of light; the other was a dark shape, a looming figure like an elongated mushroom . . . or like a man in an Inverness cape. I screamed as he leaned over me, and struggled to get away, but my hands and feet were bound. The white-garbed figure leaned over me with something bell-shaped in her hand. As she fitted it over my mouth, a sickly sweet smell flooded my mouth and throat and I felt my tongue growing thick—like a bell’s clapper muffled in wool gauze as church bells were muffled for a funeral toll. I was the bell and I was being muffled for all those who had died in the fire. For Esther Hochfield and Lucy Maltese and Jennie Stern and Tillie Kupermann. I heard their names as I sunk back into the dark.
And into the smoke, where the dead girls waited for me. They no longer ran, looking for a way out. They sat at their sewing machines, heads bowed over their work, hands smoothing white cotton even as the flames crept up their skirts and caught in their hair and the smoke rose from the baskets at their feet. The girl at the end of the row lifted her head up.
“The strike’s been settled,” she said. “If you want to keep your job you’d better get to work. We’ve saved a place for you.” She nodded to an empty machine at the end of the table. I started walking toward it, down the long row of girls—a row far longer than any on the ninth floor of the Triangle Waist factory. This sewing table stretched on forever and seated hundreds of girls, all bent over their work. I had only to sit down beside them to take my place and I’d never have to worry again about rent money or having enough to eat or having to beg on the street. I’d have this job forever.
I tried to pull out the empty chair in front of the empty machine but found it was bolted to the floor. As I angled my body to fit into the narrow space I looked down at the girl at the next machine, at her hands busily feeding cloth into the bobbing needle . . . and saw with horror that the needle was moving in and out of her own flesh. I looked down the row and saw that all the girls were sewing their own flesh, binding themselves to this place forever. Their blood trickled down into the trough that ran along the middle of the table, merging into a stream that flowed to the end of the table where, his mouth open wide to catch the gory spill, sat the man in the Inverness cape.
I woke up screaming. The white-garbed figure was there with her bell, but I knocked it out of her hand.
“No!” I cried, my voice creaky, but audible at last. “That man is drinking their blood. He caused the fire. I saw him push Tillie off the roof. I would have died, too, but the winged boy caught me . . .”
Once my tongue had been loosed I couldn’t stop talking. The nurse—of course that was what she was—called the doctor and he sat down beside my bed and wrote down what I had to say. I told him everything, from the first time I saw the man in the Inverness cape and heard the bells to when I saw him at the factory and my last glimpse of him on the roof when the dark-eyed boy sprouted wings to save me.
“You have to find him—the man in the Inverness cape, I mean, not the boy, although you should find him, too. He might know where to find the man.”
The doctor—Dr. Pritchard, as he introduced himself—assured me that inquiries would be made, but that I must not worry. I was going someplace safe.
I felt a sharp prick in my arm and then a rush of warmth flooded my body. I could taste something sweet at the back of my throat that reminded me of my mother’s green bottle, and then there was darkness. Smoke-free darkness. I was in the cool green pool I’d spied inside my mother’s laudanum bottle.
When I awoke I was in a clean white room. I was no longer tied to the bed, but there were bars on the window and the door was locked. When the nurse came later, it took her several minutes to unlock all the locks. She wore a ring of keys affixed to a chain around her waist and a watch pinned to her starched white shirtwaist (I wondered if it came from the Triangle factory) and the words “Bellevue Pavilion for the Insane” stitched neatly across her breast, just above a nameplate that read “M. Rackstraw, R.N.”
Nurse Rackstraw came three times a day with a tray of food and my medicine, her face as pinched and closed as an oyster. Once a day, Dr. Pritchard came with his notepad. He asked me questions about the bells I heard inside my head and the smoke-breathing man in the Inverness cape and the boy with wings. He told me that Tillie Kupermann had been identified among the dead. I had been found lying by her side on the pavement, unconscious but curiously unhurt. Someone had brought me to the hospital.
“Was it the winged boy?” I asked Dr. Pritchard, sniffing back tears at the thought of poor Tillie’s broken body. “Or the man in the Inverness cape?”
“The man who breathed smoke out of his mouth?” Dr. Pritchard asked, looking up from his notes. When I said yes he wrote something down and asked Nurse Rackstraw to give me my medicine. As I sank into the green pool I heard him say, “We’ll try water therapy to see if the delusions stop.”
Water therapy sounded more pleasant than it was. Some time later—I’d lost track of days—two stout, muscular women walked me to a tiled room. They stripped off my nightgown and left me standing naked in the middle of the cold floor as Nurse Rackstraw ordered one of them to aim a canvas hose at me while the other one turned an iron wheel. A geyser of ice-cold water struck me so hard I fell to the floor, where I crouched, covering my head against the relentless wall of water. The pummeling went on so long I must have lost consciousness. I awoke in my bed, hair soaked, wrists and ankles tied again. Dr. Pritchard was there with his notebook.
“So tell me more about the man in the Inverness cape.”
“There was no man in an Inverness cape,” I said through chattering teeth.
Dr. Pritchard looked up from his notes. “You mean you imagined him?”
I nodded.
“Then why were you hiding under the table when the fire broke out? And why didn’t you get out right away?”
“There was less smoke near the floor,” I said. “And the Washington Place door was locked.”
Dr. Pritchard shook his head sadly. He had pale green eyes, the same color as the green pool, thin sandy-colored hair straggling across his egg-shaped scalp, and yellowish fingernails. “Mr. Blanck and Mr. Harris have told the papers that it wasn’t.”
“I’m sure it was locked,” I
said, trying to keep my voice calm.
“You’re sure the door was locked but you’re not sure whether you saw a man in an Inverness cape? What about the boy with the wings?”
“It was a blanket!” I cried. “He put a blanket over our heads to shield us from the fire. I only imagined the wings when I was falling.”
“But, Miss Hall, if you imagined the wings when you were falling, how did you survive the fall?”
I had no answer for that. Dr. Pritchard gave me another sad look and wrote a note in his book. As he was leaving I overheard him telling Nurse Rackstraw to increase my dosage. “I’m afraid she’s begun to dissemble. We may have to move her to another facility, and since she appears to have no living relative it will have to be the state hospital for the insane.”
The words struck a chill in my heart colder than the icy water in the hydrotherapy room. The madhouse. I’d heard my mother talking about such places. She’d made me promise not ever to let her be taken there.
But who would keep me from ending up there?
I tried from then on to answer Dr. Pritchard’s questions as best—and as sanely—as I could, but the increased dosage of medicine made my brain so foggy it was harder to concentrate. I’d fall asleep for a moment and wake up to Dr. Pritchard saying, “So the bells started the first time you saw the caped figure?” or “The winged boy called the crows tenebrae?” I began to doubt everything I remembered. If the dark-eyed boy didn’t really have wings, did he even exist? If he did exist, had he saved me or was he working for the man in the Inverness cape? Because if he had saved me, why would he have let me end up here?
No matter how hard I tried to keep the delusions to myself they bubbled out of my mouth. No matter how hard I tried to convince Dr. Pritchard that I didn’t believe the things I’d seen in the fire—the wings, the crows, the smoke coming out of the man’s mouth—I did believe that all those things had happened. Worse, I was still seeing things. I saw wisps of smoke lurking in the corners of my room and writhing against the glass panes of the window. I probably did belong in a madhouse.
One day—I’d lost all track of time and my only window faced a brick wall, giving me no sense of the season—Dr. Pritchard came to see me with a smile on his face. For a moment I thought he’d decided I wasn’t insane and was going to let me out.
“I have good news,” he said. “I’ve found a benefactor for you.”
A benefactor? Could it be my grandmother, whom my mother had always refused to turn to? They’d never spoken during my lifetime, but my mother had never said anything really bad about her. I was willing to forgive my grandmother almost anything if she’d get me out of here.
“. . . he’s willing to pay for you to go to a private institution,” Dr. Pritchard was saying.
He? Could it be my father? I’d always assumed my father was dead, but perhaps my mother had been keeping him from me. And what did Dr. Pritchard mean by a private institution? Could he mean Blythewood?
“. . . he just wants to have a word with you to determine the best course of action.”
“Now?” I asked as Dr. Pritchard signaled to Nurse Rackstraw to open the door. Frantically, I tried to smooth my hair down with my one untied hand. If I looked like a madwoman I’d be sent to a madhouse. I smoothed the front of my coarse gown and tried to sit up, willing my heart to stop beating so loudly.
Only it wasn’t my heart. It was the bell. The deep bass bell tolling a death knell in my head. Not now! I silently pleaded. Don’t let me start raving about bells now. I need to at least appear sane.
The door opened. I closed my eyes for a moment, willing the bell away. I’d been able to slow it when I needed to calm Etta. Shouldn’t I be able to do it for myself now? But the bell clanged away like a fire engine. I would just have to ignore it. I opened my eyes . . .
And looked into the swirling smoke-filled eyes of the man in the Inverness cape.
I screamed and kept screaming while Dr. Pritchard held me down and Nurse Rackstraw jabbed a needle in my arm, all while the man in the Inverness cape loomed over me, a smile parting his lips and smoke trailing out of them like a fat, black slug. The smoke slug slithered across the floor toward me.
“What a shame!” the man said in an oily, unctuous voice. “I’d hoped she could be rehabilitated. I’m afraid it will have to be the insane asylum for her.” As I began to slide down into the green pool, I saw the smoke slug snaking up onto my bed, twining around my arm, sniffing its way to the needle marks in the crook of my arm, trying to find a way in. . . .
When I woke up next the room was filled with smoke. I blinked, and the smoke dispersed into the murky gray light of dawn. The man was gone. In his place was a gangly, long-limbed blue wading bird standing in front of the gray square of the window. Black shapes writhed against the windowpanes—the smoke-things trying to get inside—but the blue bird raised a talon to the window and inscribed a shape on the glass. The smoke-things fled, vanishing into the gray dawn.
They were right. I was insane. Anyone who saw giant blue birds and smoke monsters belonged in the madhouse. But then the feathered creature turned and resolved itself into a slim woman in a snug blue suit and straw hat crowned by a long blue ostrich plume. As she came toward me I saw that her face was enormously freckled.
“Ava?” she asked, leaning over me. A red curl escaped the brim of her hat. It reminded me of Tillie. Blinking back tears, I asked, “Are you my guardian angel?”
She laughed. It was the first time I’d heard laughter since the morning of the fire. “In a manner of speaking,” she replied. “My name is Agnes Moorhen. I am personal secretary to Mrs. Throckmorton van Rhys Hall. Your grandmother,” she added when I failed to react to the name. “I am here to get you out of this place.”
“Are you taking me to the insane asylum?” I asked.
She clucked her tongue. “Of course not! You’re no more mad than anyone would be after being locked up in this infernal place for five months!”
“Five months! I’ve been here for five months?” The thought made me dizzy. I knew that between the drugs and dreams I’d lost track of time, but to have lost five months of my life to delirium and delusion felt like having a limb lopped off.
Miss Moorhen’s eyes widened. “I’m afraid so. We’ve been looking for you since the fire—well, since before the fire, actually.”
So my grandmother had been looking for me. Had she sent the man in the Inverness cape after me? But I didn’t want to ask Miss Moorhen lest she change her mind and decide I was mad.
“But you’ve been well hidden.” She looked back at the window—where the smoke-things had been—but I wasn’t going to ask her about those either. When she turned back to me I saw that her eyes were wet but her jaw was firm. “There’s no use crying over spilt milk. Let’s get you out of here. The first thing to do is get you dressed. Here . . .” She picked up a capacious carpetbag from the floor and put it on the bed. She pulled out of it a clean white chemise, a dark skirt, and a white shirtwaist. The sight of the crisp white cotton reminded me of the dream of the dead girls sewing their hands. I shook my head to clear away the image.
“Oh my,” Miss Moorhen said, noticing my restraints for the first time, “let me untie these . . .” Her voice faltered when her cool fingers touched the rope burns on my wrists. “What monsters! The board of directors will be receiving a strongly worded letter from me, I can tell you that! And I will have a word with my friend at the World . . .”
She kept up a stream of invective, listing all the newspapers and agencies she would notify of my mistreatment as she untied my restraints. When she was done she handed me the clothes and turned to the window to give me privacy. After months of being handled like a piece of meat, the gesture brought tears to my eyes, but I bit the inside of my cheek to keep them from falling and stripped the coarse nightgown off and put on the fine clothes she’d brought. They were a little too big f
or me, but the crisp, clean cloth felt like cool water on my skin.
When I slid my bare feet onto the floor, she turned and looked at me. “There!” she said, dashing a tear from her cheek. “You look just like Evangeline in those. I knew they’d fit.”
“You knew my mother . . . ?” I began to ask, but the sound of the door creaking open interrupted me. Nurse Rackstraw stood framed in the doorway, her thin-lipped mouth a round O.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “And how did you get in here?”
Miss Moorhen squared her shoulders and tilted her chin up, the feather on her hat quivering like the crest on a warrior’s helmet. “I am Miss Agnes Moorhen, personal secretary to Mrs. Throckmorton van Rhys Hall, grandmother and legal guardian to this woefully mistreated child. Who are you?”
Nurse Rackstraw opened her mouth but, without saying a word, fled. We heard her calling for Dr. Pritchard as she ran down the hall. Miss Moorhen sniffed and withdrew a pair of boots and stockings from her bag. “You’d better put these on so there’s no delay,” she said.
I hurriedly pulled on stockings and boots, my hands shaking. What if Dr. Pritchard wouldn’t let me go? What could one woman—even one as clearly forceful as Miss Moorhen—do against a man of authority?
Doctor Pritchard returned with Nurse Rackstraw as I was tying my laces. His eyes flicked from me to Miss Moorhen standing at the window with her carpetbag in one hand.
“I don’t know how you got in here, young lady,” he boomed at Miss Moorhen, “but I know how you are going out. I have called the guards—”
“And I have called the police, sir. They will be curious to know why you are holding Miss Hall without notifying her grandmother. Here is a copy of the writ of complaint Mrs. Hall’s lawyer has drawn up against you”—Miss Moorhen withdrew a sheaf of papers from her bag—“and forms releasing Miss Hall into my custody. Mrs. Hall’s lawyer and two employees of the Pinkerton Detective Agency are waiting for me outside in Mrs. Hall’s automobile. They have instructions to go straight to the mayor’s office in . . .” Miss Moorhen withdrew a pocket watch from her vest pocket. “Ten minutes, if I have not exited the premises with Miss Hall.”