Aether Spirit

Chapter 2-2

Driving through the night. We’re laughing and talking, having just come from an important party. Why is it important? I don’t know. He’s driving his new steam cart, but I can’t see his face. It’s too dark, and the lamp on the front only illuminates a few feet into the fog. The coals in the heating chamber in front of me keep my feet warm.

Claire tries to stop the dream there, to stay in that peaceful, happy moment before all hell breaks loose, but the dream continues. She listens for the sound, the hoofbeats in the dark that draw closer and closer, bringing the moment that divides her life into before and after, the part that makes sense and the part she’s still untangling, trying to sort fragments of memory into logical sequences.

“Stop the cart!” she wants to yell, but she’s struck motionless in that way she’s only experienced in her dreams. Even when she was injured she could move with pain, but now she’s paralyzed listening to the sound. She can’t run, can’t scream, can’t—

Rough hands shook her awake.

“You woke me with your moaning,” Nanette spat. “I’m staying with a friend down the hall. Tomorrow you’re finding another space to sleep. By the way, Chadwick Radcliffe is spoken for.”

“What? Why did you bring up—” The words hung in the air that once again vibrated with the aftershocks of the door slamming.

What did she—ouch!

She pressed her fingers to her temples and massaged the sudden pain. She typically had headaches after the nightmares, but this one was particularly intense. She opened her trunk, found the small vial of laudanum Doctor Charcot had told her to use in case it seemed the blocks he installed were failing, and took two drops, all she would allow herself. She wasn’t a hysterical woman. She was a perfectly logical woman with a neurosis problem. By the time the headache subsided, she’d fallen into a dreamless sleep, but she wore dark circles under her eyes the next morning as an extra accessory under her spectacles.

Thankfully she didn’t run into Nanette while eating salty cured meat on biscuits with jam in the former hotel’s small dining room. She wondered again about the girl she’d met in the hallway, but there was no one to ask. In fact, she found the quarters to be very quiet with an absence of the usual sounds of people moving about, and she ate alone. Had she slept that late?

Her problems with other women were nothing new—her aunt had instilled in her a sense of her own unworthiness for being more interested in her father’s tinkering than her mother’s domestic activities—and she had bigger problems. It was time to meet the irritable Doctor Radcliffe for a tour of Distillery Hospital and to attempt to convince him of her usefulness there.

When she walked outside, the fresh after-rain smell of the earth made her smile even as she shielded her eyes against the glare of the sun on wet ground and plants.

Compared to my aunt, charming him should be easy.

Radcliffe met her at the door of the hospital and looked none too pleased to see her. She sensed he wanted to get away from her as quickly as possible. Probably hates neuroticists. She wished the genial Mister O’Connell could give her the hospital tour instead. He at least seemed happy to be around her.

“Good morning,” she said, but to her it sounded like more of a question.

“Generally,” he agreed. “Follow me. We’ll go through this quickly. I’ve got work to do. Tell me if you need to take a rest.”

“Why would I—?”

Before she could finish her question, she found herself having to trot after him or lose him in the gloom. She blinked to clear the after-brightness of the sun from her vision and caught up with him to walk beside him.

“As you can see, the hospital is a fully functioning facility.” His gesture encompassed the entire building with its exposed brick and wood beam walls. “It was a whiskey distillery, but we’ve converted it.”

“What happened to the distillery?”

“It was abandoned and the tanks dismantled for their metal before we arrived, but they left an entire store-room of whiskey barrels.”

“With whiskey in them?”

“Yes, but it’s not very good. We use it for sterilizing medical instruments before surgery and to pour on wounds. It hurts like the devil, but it keeps the flesh healthier.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with Lister’s work.” She looked up at him and was again struck by the irritability of his expression. “I’ve heard of some places boiling the instruments.”

“The distillery is built on a stream, but most of the water goes to the steam weapons and machinery, then the horses, and then finally for drinking and bathing. We’re all on water rations because the stream only flows so fast, and there isn’t a good place to dam it for a reservoir in this terrain.”

“So these soldiers rank below horses and machines.” Claire frowned. “That hardly seems fair.”

They walked into the post-surgical area and spoke quietly. Nurses moved among the patients, but thankfully Nanette was not in sight. Claire tried not to wrinkle her nose against the hospital smells, made sharper by the wet wood odor of the building itself. Only half the beds had occupants, and Claire imagined a blanket between her emotions and theirs. It was the best way she had to think of what she did to get shadows of feelings—enough to sense the shape and form but not be overwhelmed.

“I’ve been thinking about why you’re here,” he said and turned his intense gray gaze on her. “Look at these men. They’re barely more than boys, and all of them poor. These are the ones whose families can’t afford to bribe the draftsmen. We’ve been at war for a decade, and the supply of young men is running out.”

She looked at the patients more closely and rubbed her temple, which had throbbed at the word draftsmen. Unlike the ones she’d worked with in Pennsylvania, most of these soldiers had the scraggly whiskers of middle adolescence and the hard expressions of children who had been forced to grow up too quickly.

“They don’t talk of this on the continent or further away from the lines.”

“No, because both the Union and Confederate State governments keep it quiet. It’s generally frowned upon to make children fight your wars. Or force them back into situations that almost destroyed them.”

She straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin against his implied censure.

“I see why I was sent here. These boys need help.”

She followed Radcliffe from the ward to a small office, and he opened the door. The desk bowed under the weight of charts, and books on a variety of medical topics leaned at all angles on the bookcase. She wasn’t surprised to see a lack of titles by famous neuroticists.

“This is your office?” she asked.

“I share it with the night nurse in charge, but we’re rarely here simultaneously. Please, have a seat.” He gestured to the chair behind the desk.

“Where will you sit?”

“I’m fine. Feeling jumpy today.”

He did, indeed, seem disturbed. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, and he kept running his hand over his dark hair, which looked like it hadn’t seen a barber in a few months. She liked how it curled softly, and—

“Ouch,” she hissed and massaged her temple with two fingers.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“It’s something to do with the blocks Doctor Charcot installed when he hypnotized me. From what he told me, the accident was so traumatic I reacted badly to any reminders of it. He made it so cues wouldn’t trigger the hysteria reaction.” She opened her eyes to find him standing in front of her. “But I don’t know why it’s happening so much here. Maybe it’s being in a hospital. They said I was in one for a long time after I was hurt, but I don’t remember much, just flashes.”

“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. “You had a long journey yesterday and need to rest.”

She stood. “You’re not my doctor.”

“No, but I—” He opened the door. “I have enough sick people here that I’m not going to add another one. Rest today and report tomorrow. You can give me the details of the treatments you want to try then.”

Claire sensed he wanted her to leave and nodded. “Perhaps I am somewhat tired.” She’d barely stepped out of the office before the door shut behind her with the emphasis but not force of Nanette’s door slams.

She pondered the situation as she wandered around the fort to familiarize herself with its layout. These people liked their doors. They especially liked her on the other side of them. She knew there was a lot of bias against the mental sciences, psychiatry and her specialty of neurotology in particular. She would just have to convince them of her usefulness. It seemed the handsome but irascible Doctor Radcliffe could benefit from it, too. If only he didn’t dislike her so much.

A familiar sound drew her to a building in the center of the fort, the armory. She leaned against a small tree, closed her eyes, and allowed the memory to nudge at her consciousness. She was a little girl, and she went to see her father in his workshop. He was at his forge hammering at something.

She sighed and opened her eyes. Her mother had told her he was away fighting the war, but she felt the lie and the grief underneath it.

Everyone thinks I’m too fragile to handle the truth, but I don’t know if I should believe them.

She didn’t want to dwell on dark thoughts, so she listened to the men’s voices. People’s talk always fascinated her, and she was a shameless eavesdropper. One shout startled her with its force.

“Watch where you’re going with those, you daft pecker! They’re worth more than your hide and mine put together.”

She’d heard that voice before. Ah, right, it wasn’t from distant memory but rather the night before, Patrick O’Connell. She’d spent enough time around men that she wasn’t put off by their cursing, and she was curious as to what he was working on. And maybe he could escort her to lunch. She suspected the snooty nurse wouldn’t be impressed by Claire coming in with a tinkerer, but she might be if Doctor Radcliffe joined them.

With that decided, Claire walked around the building and saw O’Connell standing by an anvil, hammer in hand. A wave of déjà vu swamped her, and she stumbled into the path of a cart.