It had started like every other day back then, with a blinding sense of purpose and an overwhelming optimism. He'd performed an appendectomy, which even his colleagues advised against.
As always, the doubt spurred Ian on, challenged him. That day he'd gone even further, causing an outbreak of dissension among the other doctors at New York Hospital. He'd done the unheard-of?he'd worn gloves and demanded the same of his assistant, and even worse,
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he'd forced Dr. Jones, his superior, to put out his cigar during the operation.
It had caused quite a scandal, of course, but the surgery was a brilliant success. There was no sign of the postoperative infection that would kill the man in less than a week.
Not then. Then, there was only the adoration of his peers. It rang loud and long in his ears, filling his soul, making him think that he could do anything, that he could conquer worlds.
Or, at least, one very alluring woman.
He sighed, feeling the familiar pang of regret. How was it that a whole life could spiral down to one moment, one wrong decision?
He'd gone over it a thousand times in his mind, asking himself endless, useless questions that had no answers. Why had he gone to see Charlotte? Why not any of the too willing women who held vigil at his front door?
But no, in his self-centered, blind arrogance, he'd gone to Charlotte, the one woman who'd rejected him. The one truly innocent human being he'd ever known.
He'd knocked on her door in the middle of the night, carrying an icy bottle of champagne and a dozen roses. Her husband had been gone?as Ian had known he would be.
She tried to resist him, tried valiantly, but the quiet country miss, made beautiful only by unattainability, was no match for Ian. He smiled and cajoled and seduced with an ease born of practice, making the young woman forget the vows she'd made with her sixty-year-old husband.
You 're so lovely, Charlotte. . . . Does he tell you that? Does he kiss your luscious lips and breathe in your perfumed scent and lick the sensitive flesh of your breasts? Does he worship your body, Charlotte, as I do? Does he really see you . . . or are you simply the mother of his
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children, the keeper of his house? Ah, Charlotte, come to my bed, let me love you.... You are so beautiful....
The moment he got her into bed, he'd stopped caring about her. Nothing about Charlotte touched him, or filled the void that had been in his soul since childhood.
He'd wakened after a brief and fitful sleep, unable to recall how it had felt to kiss her. Wincing, desperate to sneak away without a word, he'd rolled onto his side, reached slowly for his clothes.
He'd dressed quietly and turned to leave.
Then he'd seen the shadow in the doorway, the flash of silver from the gun. After that, the memory took on the shimmering, inconstant feel of a dream. Images, one after another.
You bastard, Carrick. I'll kill you.
The gun, blazing in the dark room like a small orange-yellow burst of the sun.
A stunned moment of utter surprise, a jolt backward, then pain, exploding in his chest, seeping like fire through his veins. Vision blurring, balance gone, falling, falling ...
Dead. A brilliant, white-hot light enveloped him, as seductive in its warmth as his lying words to a woman had ever been. He drifted in the light, floating, wanting never to let it go, never to know the freezing chill of life again; the disappointment, gone; the frustration, gone. Only the light, the searing, promising light.
Damn it, Ian, fight with me. Don't let go.
The words had come at him from somewhere, cutting through the lethargy. He'd blinked, looked down, and there was his body, naked, stretched out on a sheet-covered table, surgeons with dirty hands peering around him like insects, poking, prodding. Blood was a bright red blur on his chest, dripping down the bedding, pooling on the filthy floor. The gunshot wound was a serrated, gaping black hole in the middle of all that redness.
Someone was pounding on his chest. He could see
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the hammering blows, see his body convulse, but where he was, there was no pain, nothing but a vague sense of anxiety.
As the uneasiness grew, the light flickered and dimmed. Some dark, secret fear slipped through his mind, wound cold and chilling through his blood. He wasn't ready. There was something left for him to do. Something . . .
He felt his life slipping away from him, shimmering just out of reach, and he was afraid to die.
Let me live. Let me live. He screamed the words, shaking with his need to say them, though nothing came from the dead body on the table.
Please, God, I promise ... He panicked. What could he promise to the God he'd disregarded for most of his life? What would give him another chance? He could think of nothing, nothing but his own desperate, worthless need. Please ... let me live.
With a thrusting, powerful crunch, he was back in his body. Pain vibrated through his chest, filled him to overflowing. Tears squeezed past his eyelashes and streaked down his face.
His heart is beating again. Thank God. Chris, hand me that scalpel. I'm going to find that damned bullet. After that, confusion; people touching, reaching, wrapping, grasping. Then nothing.
Nothing until the next morning when he woke up, steeped in pain, to a room filled with sunlight and dust. The vague sounds of coughing, of quiet shoes moving down an empty corridor. White beds. The soft scent of gas from the jets on the wall.
He tried to sit up. The first person he saw was a nurse, bent over his bed, peering down at him. Behind her, a cluster of men in white coats. The nurse touched him, a breezy, nothing little touch of her fat finger on his brow, but it had been enough.
Images hit him with the force of a blow. The nurse huddled in a dark corner, shooting morphine into her
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veins . . . her gasping breath as the drug moved through her blood ... the trembling smile of her release.
Ian pushed her away from him with a growl, told her to stay away from morphine if she was going to touch him.
The nurse gasped, stumbled backward, her eyes rounding with horror as she looked at Dr. Halstead and the other men in the room.
After that, a whirl of sound and color: Halstead's angry voice, wrenching the nurse's sleeve up, seeing the needle marks, the bruises on her pale arm.
Ian squeezed his eyes shut, trying to ignore the throbbing in the back of his head and the strange heat in his hands. He thought it was a fluke, a hallucination caused by his own medication.
But the visions came again and again with every accidental touch, blinding him, overwhelming him, until he'd sunk back into his sheets, shaking and terrified.
The news spread like wildfire. Dr. Carrick can read your mind .. . Dr. Carrick can see the past. It's a curse, a gift. Magic .. .
People had come from as far away as California and Florida, clutching scraps of fabric, old timepieces, tintypes of loved ones. They came by foot, on horseback, in wheelchairs, all hoping for a miracle from the infamous Dr. Carrick, pouring their fear like an insidious drug into his veins, killing him quietly with each question, cutting him to the bone every time he failed them.
Help me, help me, help me.
At first he tried to help the pathetic souls who sought him out, he tried and tried, and failed and failed. His "gift" was a malicious, hurtful joke; he could know people's secrets, but he couldn't help them, couldn't find their lost loved ones by touching bits of fabric or perform miraculous cures. He couldn't even practice medicine anymore?the heat in his hands, the headache behind his eyes, and the images, always the images,
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kept him moving farther and farther away from people until finally he didn't go out at all.
As soon as he was well, he ran from the hospital, but it didn't help. Incomprehensible visions barraged him, smote him every time he walked in a room, with every accidental touch. Nothing stopped them, not gloves, not alcohol, not drugs; he knew, he'd tried them all.
Nothing stopped them except isolat
ion, the end of all contact.
And so he was here, standing in his cell, looking out at the windy, stormy night, wishing once again that he'd never seen Charlotte, never showed up on her doorstep.
Remembering .. .
Ian turned away from the window, held his throbbing head in hands that felt slick with sweat. Eyes closed, heart pounding, he paced the small, dark room, feeling more and more like a caged, hunted animal with every step.
A timid knock roused him from his pain. "Come in." He growled the words, harsher than he intended. Always harsher than he intended.
The door pushed open and a slim, red-haired woman slipped through the opening. Her small, bare feet made a whispery sound on the wooden floor as she shuffled forward. It took him a second to focus on her, a second more to recognize her. "Maeve?"
She nodded, a swift bob of her head, and took another step toward him, her hands twisted in a pale, nervous ball at her waist. Fear tightened the edges of her mouth, wrinkled the flesh of her forehead.
"What is it, Mother?"
"Ian." She said his name in that soft, swaying voice of hers, her lullaby voice?the one he'd always ached for as a child.
He stared at her hard, tried to see if she was lucid or demented this evening, but his head was pounding too
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painfully to think clearly. She knew his name at least. That was something. "What is it?"
"Th-There's a woman here...." Her lilting voice trailed off. She looked momentarily confused, as if she'd forgotten what she came to say, and he had his answer.
Demented. "Who is it?Dolley Madison?" he said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice.
"No, Ian. I'm not crazy tonight. There's a real woman downstairs. A lobsterman brought her in. She's ... hurt."
The word brought him up short. "Hurt?" A pale heat fluttered in his stomach, and he knew instantly what it was: hope.
As quickly as it came, it crashed. His mother was insane; there was no hurt woman downstairs. "Of course, Mother. Hurt women come to insane asylums all the time."
Maeve moved toward him, and for the first time, he noticed the clarity in her hazel eyes. She was lucid now. She wasn't in a world of her own.
"This isn't an asylum, it's my home, and she needs help, Ian. You are a doctor."
Ian stiffened and turned away from his mother quickly.
He stared out the window, watching the storm. Maeve knew he couldn't help the woman. "I'm no doctor. Not anymore." He glanced around for a bottle of scotch. He needed a drink desperately, but his fingers were shaking so badly, he didn't think he could hold a glass.
"Oh, Ian ..."
Once, the sad disappointment in his mother's voice would have ripped his heart out; now it caused nothing but a mild regret. "Send her away."
"You could?"
He spun to face her. "I want to help her?sweet God,
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I'd give my arm to do it, but I can't. You know I can't. Now, go."
"No." There was an unexpected strength in her voice. "You need to help her, and she needs your skill to save her life."
"How? How can I treat her? The moment I touch her?"
"I-I'll be your hands."
He froze, too stunned for a second to respond. "You'll what?"
She gave him a look so drenched in promise, so filled with love, that for a second he almost believed her. "Trust me ... just one more time, Ian." He wanted to back off, to return to some dark, hidden corner of this hellish house and drink until the wave of bitterness and disillusionment passed, until he'd beaten back the horrifying ray of hope. But it was too strong this time; the need was too seductive. I'll be your hands.
He could not possibly refuse.
The inmates stood around the sofa like a cluster of restless, buzzing bees, their hushed voices droning in fragmented, nonsensical whispers. Ian gave them a disgusted, cursory look, seeing them in a glance. Andrew, the disturbed eighteen-year-old man who routinely tried to kill himself; Johann, a disowned aristocrat dying from syphilis; Lara, a fifteen-year-old retarded girl with the mind of a child; a middle-aged woman who thought she was Queen Victoria; and Dotty, a seventy-year-old former Civil War spy who only spoke in whispers and codes and spent her days hidden in a broom closet, talking to invisible allies.
The bland gray wool of their winter wardrobe created an impenetrable barrier around the woman who lay in their midst.
His step slowed. He felt an instant's unwillingness to enter their ranks. When they were apart from him, when
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he was closeted in his hidden room, he could tell himself they didn't exist. But here, now, he was faced with the truth of their sorry lives, and it filled him with the same sinking sense of despair as always.
The irony of it wrought a bitter smile. Once he had been feted by society's upper echelon; now he lived among that very society's rejects in the house of lost and damned souls.
"Get out of the way." He hissed, striding forward.
There was a sharp, collective indrawn breath. He's here. The words floated through the darkened room, carried by several hushed voices. People moved instantly, parted like the Red Sea before their Moses.
Ian tried to ignore their upturned faces, and the reverence in their eyes. He wished they wouldn't look at him at all. For years he'd taught them not to touch him, never to touch him, but still they looked at him with that naked, blatant adoration, as if he were the god he once believed himself to be.
He walked around the sofa and knelt beside the body stretched out on the white brocade. She lay corpselike and still, her hair a tangled, matted heap, a strand of kelp twined around her throat. Blood trickled from both ears and from her left nostril, leaving a streak of bright red against the already bruising flesh of her cheek. He couldn't make out her face; it was bluish, battered, scraped beyond recognition. He couldn't tell if she was fifteen or fifty beneath the bruises.
Maeve appeared beside him in an instant, offering the expensive leather bag he hadn't used for years.
"Does she have a pulse?" he asked.
There was no answer.
He looked up sharply. "Mother, you brought me here. Do as I say. I need you to be my hands."
Maeve inched toward him and bent down. Then she did the unthinkable?she touched him. Images blasted through his brain in a miasma of pain and sorrow and
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regret; he saw her standing, alone and willowy, at his father's grave site, felt the devastating emptiness of her life. His headache came back, blinded him for a heartbeat to everything except his mother's despair.
"You have hands, Ian. Healing hands." She drew back, leaving him shaken and confused. The medical bag thunked to the floor beside him. "Use them." And then she was gone, melted back into the crazy people who had become her family.
Ian let out a shuddering breath and glanced up. The inmates stared at him in frank, breathless anticipation.
He wanted to bolt suddenly, to simply run.
You need to help her, Ian.
"I need a drink," he whispered, staring down at the pathetic shaking of his hands. He hadn't voluntarily touched anyone in so long. It was too bloody painful. What if he relived her accident? One touch, and he could be thrown into her agony, and still be no closer to saving her life. And what if she died while he was touching her? The thought of that pain blistering through his own psyche made him feel physically ill.
"Ian?" his mother prompted him.
Ian steeled himself, trying to blank out his mind, preparing for the pain. When his hands stopped shaking and his breathing normalized, he reached for the woman again.
The inmates gasped softly. He felt their circle tighten around him.
It was a meaningless touch, that first one. A nothing little trailing of his fingertip along the bloody curve of her throat. A test.
Nothing came to him.
Ian's heartbeat sped up. Something was wrong. He had touched her?briefly, yes, but that never mattered before?and he'd felt nothin
g.
Hope slipped through a crack in his armor, weakening him. He tried to fight it, but it was too strong. In
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sudden, blinding clarity he thought: Maybe for once it won't happen.
He tried to bury the unrealistic prayer beneath a mountain of cold rationality. It always happened.
"Ian, is she alive?"
He heard his mother's voice, but it seemed to come from a million miles away. His heart was hammering in his chest. Sweat had broken out along his brow. He wiped the beaded moisture and swallowed hard.
Barely breathing, he took hold of her wrist. His fingers curled around the slim, pale flesh. He felt the lightning-quick shiver of her pulse, the cool softness of her skin.
And nothing else. He knew nothing about her except that she was alive. At the realization, he felt a shameful stinging in his eyes.
"Ian?" Maeve prompted.
"She's alive."
"Will she die?"
"I don't know." With those words, the old power, the old strength of purpose, overwhelmed him, sweeping aside the isolation of the past six years. Finally, a person?a woman?whose mind was closed to him.
A mystery. Sweet Jesus above, a mystery.
He sat upright. "Prepare a bed on the second floor. Get boiling water and alcohol." He looked up. No one moved.
"Now."
The inmates scattered like insects.
Seconds later, Maeve reappeared and handed him a glass of scotch. Ian stared at it for a second before he realized that he'd asked for alcohol.
Queen Victoria was right behind his mother with a teapot. "Does milord have a cup?"
And boiling water.
He forced back a shout of frustration. "Andrew!" he hollered.
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The reed-thin, sallow-faced youth stepped from the shadows, his eyes wide. "Y-Yes, sir?" "Can you assist me?"
The young man swallowed convulsively. "I'd be honored, sir."
Ian looked pointedly at the man's wrists, still bound in white bandages from last month's suicide attempt. "Can I trust you with a knife?"
"He never tries the same death effort twice," Johann drawled from his place beside Maeve. "He might actually succeed if he did."
Andrew winced. "You can trust me, Dr. Carrick."
"Good. Here's what I need: lots and lots of bandages, several sharp knives."
When Andrew turned and ran from the room, Ian surged to his feet and started barking orders like the doctor he'd once been. "Johann, get Edith and bring her here. Tell her I need willow bark and paraffin and laudanum. Mother, I need several bottles of alcohol. Not a drink. Bottles."
Maeve smiled brightly. "Yes, son."
"Victoria ..."
The old lady rapped him on the nose with her fan. "That's Your Highness to you."
He gritted his teeth. "Your Highness, bring me some sheets and a bucket of ice from the icehouse."
She frowned, looked worriedly to her left. "My footman?"
"Now!"
The queen blanched and ran for the icehouse.