Cont'd

The honourable Dr. Radcliffe was none too pleased with Evie, and doubly so with myself. As I usually am when being reprimanded or chastised, I felt my cheeks burn and weigh my gaze down with every word the doctor spoke (he did not deign to shout, but his otherwise empty, colourless face was tinged with the bright pink of passion as he strained all of his words out). For what felt a century, he warned Evie of the dangers of being a poor friend and caretaker, and for myself, the folly of ignoring a doctor's instructions. As if to make my embarrassment that much worse, he pointed out that he had been summoned away from a patient who cared for his services, and implied that I may as well have sickened the former with my actions.

Suffice it to say, I was in tears by the end of this barrage of ill-directed words. I was not the patient he had been summoned to see, and yet here I was, a grown woman with my own free will, being forced to obey the whims of a man I had known all of a day. I am not one prone to fits or displays of rage, but I took care to wail and stomp my way up each step to Evie's room.

What a miserable turn of events - from spending the days with Evie by my side, to discovering the undiscovered in the attics of my house, only to wind up stuck in horrid weather at the Thomas house, where the threat of illness and confinement held everyone fast.

As it is not wholly necessary to describe how long I wept in bed, I shall say only that I was exhausted enough by the end of it that when Dr. Radcliffe made his way upstairs to check in (at last?) on poor Georginia Thomas, I was helpless to the attentions he fussed on me. How glorious an end for the narrator - trussed up like a doll, now actually sick from her foolish escape into unfitting weather! I deserved all of the chastising I had been given, but even as I fell asleep, I can recall being hovered over and spoken to. Who it was that stood over my unsettled frame, I know not, but the impression of being watched in my fevred slumber carried over into dreams most unsettling.

The eighth and ninth and tenth and so on passed in an unchanging manner. Before long, the twentieth of the month had come and I found myself in a most peculiar situation.

Evie was sitting at my side, her chair pushed close to the bed when I awoke. Reading glasses that had to have been borrowed from her father were perched on her tanned nose and gave her furrowed brow the complete look of an easily irked French instructor I had known in my early teenage years. Taking the extra moment to spy on her, as she was unaware I had awoken, I discovered she was staring so sternly over a familiar bundle of letters, but my exclamation of joy that they had not been lost or forgotten about ruined my own plans for disguise.

"You're awake, you sneezing fool!" She threw the letters to the foot of the bed and pulled me up into a gentle but firm embrace. After a small show of emotion, and a wave of dizziness from my not having moved much in the last weeks, Evie pulled away and informed me of all I'd missed in my mysterious slumber in her room.

Beginning with her mother's health, Evie scowled quite fiercely to recount that the doctor's analysis of her state was rather limited and curt. "There is no hope for her, aside from the comfort you as her family can bring in her final days." Smashing her fist against the pillows, Evie cursed the doctor for a strong couple of minutes before continuing.

"Aside from his appalling conduct with regards to our mother, there is the strange matter of you."

"Me?" I questioned, wondering what I had done wrong.

"Indeed. Our lovely doctor has been most concerned with your state of health, and it is taking quite a strong will to fend him off." She lowered her glasses and waved them emphatically in my direction. "I am afraid we have little left to defend ourselves with - you must either make a miraculous and full recovery, or subject yourself to his instructions, lest he bother us all into insanity."

We reflected upon this for some time. I could go to my own home whenever I pleased, but then, the doctor could just as easily follow me and burst through my rather poorly kept doors. Blushing to recall how quickly I had given up its location, I knew this was no option at all, and inquired as to our other options.

"Death," was Evie's next blunt response, to which I offered only a nervous chuckle, before she made herself clearer and explained faking my death could get him to go.

"From what you've told me," I replied to that rather unpleasant sounding solution, "he seems far too capable of mind to be fooled by that."

"Yes, I suppose you're right," she sighed. Picking up the letters she'd been reading, she stared emptily at their old pages, flicking the edges of the letters absently.

"Evie? There's something else, isn't there?" She turned her gaze up to me and heaved a strong sigh. Not prone to dramatic displays, I felt for once that I had hit something directly on the head (my intuition is so lacking sometime, I feel I could be in the room with a lion and not notice!).

"There is."

"Are you going to tell me what it is?"

"I would really rather not."

"Evie."

"He says that with Mother soon dead, our house will be at a great disadvantage unless I marry, and quickly."

"And?"

Standing up and walking in a frenzied circle, Evie told me what was quite possibly worst idea I had ever heard. "He wants to marry me, Winnifred! This doctor, whom we have known no longer than a fortnight, wishes to take me away from this house, and provide what my family cannot, under the guise of being a benefit to us all in more ways than one!" Throwing herself to the bed, she grasped my shoulder and shook me fiercely. "I cannot be married," she uttered, so gravely I almost presumed her possessed by some demon whose voice had been marred by length of time in the Pit of Hell.

We looked into each other's eyes for some time, hazel into that pale brown I had grown so familiar with. It is not every day, nor years, sometimes! where one finds a friend as I have found in Evie. Yet, we knew the dangers to this deep bond were at stake. To deny this marriage was to doom her family. Without a mother to propose matches for her children, the prospect of living at home with no extra money coming into the family meant that poverty was all that remained. Evie was trapped.

The only thing I found confusing about the matter was where I factored into the equation. What use would my growing better be if my hosts were to be fractured by Evie's eventual departure? As though she had considered my very thinking, she lifted her hands and clasped them over her own eyes, as though whatever she was to say next was too horrible to face.

"The doctor has considered something else, Winn."

"Do not play with my heart," I cried, fearing the worst. "Do not tell me anything else this foul man has claimed!"

"You would go with me," she said anyway, tears pouring through the spaces in her hands. "You would be my, oh, I can't remember what he said, but you would be taken care of."

"I would be the infirm creature he locked away," I cried, pulling back and feeling the full force of what this Dr. Radcliffe wanted. Kill off the mother, keep the daughter for himself, and tidy up the messiness of a witness by locking her away in his home, where none would know she had gone. It was a clever plan, but I hated him for it. I turned to look at Evie, seeing how helpless she appeared in the face of this most miserable turn of events.

"There really isn't any choice, is there?" she asked weakly, once her tears had turned to those uncomfortable hitches in breath that I was all too familiar with myself.

"It appears not. We must plan, of course, for our departure. We must keep you safe, Evie - you are not a plaything for some sinister creature. If you really must marry, then you will be the lady of a house! No lady should let herself be told what to do!"

Comforted somewhat by this, and the ability to take care of me when the doctor ferried me away to his unheard of home, Evie made her way downstairs to confess to her father the horrid business that was to take place. Feeling far too feverish to accompany her, I stayed in bed and scribbled in this journal fiercely, hoping to recount all I needed to before we should find ourselves whisked away by an uncontested fate. If my account is to be reduced to a pile of papers, like these poor letters, left by the as of yet unknown woman in my attic, then the account shall be a faithful one that shies not from the vileness of the doctor's plans.

Evie's father was told by dinnertime, and his reaction was that of grief. To be told of his wife's guaranteed passing and then the rapid removal of daughter as well was too much, and he left the house for the rest of the day. Fearing he had ended his days at the hands of the cliff, Evie made to leave in search of him, but no sooner had she prepared to depart did her father return with a grim countenance. Wherever he had gone, he'd made his peace, and protested no longer the plans of the doctor, a figure who had been suspiciously quiet for the entirety of the day. I suspected he was delivering the news of his having given up on Mrs. Thomas to the unfortunate victim herself, for there came a great and wailing cry from the depths of the upper floor. Locked myself in the bedchambers of Evelyn, I could do naught but liken the sound to that of a banshee or ghost, eternally grieving for that which was taken.

The Thomas house was very quiet in Georginia's last days. The children stomped up nary a step and shouted not even one word. Their father remained in the shops, sleeping on the floor, Evie shockingly informed me, so as to avoid facing the rapid demise of his wife. Evie herself maintained a cold exterior, showing emotion only when discussing her guarantee of my safety. "I shall not abandon you to his desires!" she would say, clenching her fists at the cruelty of our combined situations.

The hour has come, I am afraid, for Death to welcome Mrs. Thomas into his realm. The doctor has called everyone away, but as I am not family, I am to remain in the room. Still, despite the distance, each cry of the Thomases filled within me a sensation of such despair that I felt as though I were the one dying.

Much to my surprise and displeasure, the doctor was not with the family as Mrs. Thomas faded from this world. He was instead standing at the doorway to Evie's room, looking in with an expression I can only describe as gloating. When he saw that I had noticed him, he bowed his head, the smug expression concealing itself in the shadows he was only too familiar with. Not one to lose an encounter, he blew out the candles Evie had set up by the door and raised his face once more, none of the features visible in the silhouette that remained.

"You would do well not to strain your eyes this late in the day, Ms. Peterson. Rest is what you need; you have much to look forward to tomorrow."

With this most dire of threats aimed my way, I could do nothing but tremble in fear until Evie returned and joined me in the bed, each tear cold against my neck as she sobbed through the night.

Winn