choice. Rolling his eyes heavenward, he walked into the room after the usual perfunctory rap on the doorframe.
It was empty.
A fire chittered and hissed away in the hearth, though, so someone must be about. Had the nurse taken Mrs. Whitegate outside? Perhaps she was having her toilet attended to? He put an ear to her dressing room door. Silence. Was she somewhere else in the house? She couldn’t have… died, surely. Someone would have called for him.
Worse thought; perhaps she was in better health, and had recovered her wits. He squelched the thought. Someone would still have sent for him. He walked back out into the hallway, feeling very much confused. He decided to go to the library and see what on earth had become of Mary’s mother.
When he turned around, the sight he beheld only added to the confusion. Smoke was billowing up from the first floor below. He quickly saw that it was not the surging beast heralding an out-of-control fire, but rather the lazy accumulation of something like a stopped-up chimney flue.
What was going on in this house today? Voices rose and fell rapidly. Poole made his way down the stairs as quickly as he could through the increasing curtain of smoke and into the library, which was the source of, as well as totally obscured by, the pollution.
Turning, he heard a tangled rush of speech, seemingly from all around him. It was extremely disorienting. He put his hands out and tried to head toward what he assumed was the light of the windows shining weakly through the haze.
He heard in succession these next:
“Charlotte, put it down, damn you, let go!” A male voice, and then,
“You’re but a thief, a child of thieves!” And finally,
“Please, please, stop this….” This voice he knew to be Mary’s, and he grew alarmed. The search for the windows was abandoned; he began to make his way toward where he thought he had heard her speak.
As he moved, a series of sounds occurred, thumps, a cry of pain, a scream, and then, silence. Poole suddenly felt quite ill. He began to whirl, looking for any sense of where he was, until he found himself face to face with Prudence Whitegate. It was all he could do not to cry out, while she merely raised a gnarled finger to her lips. She then pointed at him, her other hand gripping that horrid cane tightly.
“You say nothing.” She drew up close to him, whispering. “I know you, David Poole. I know you. Say nothing and take me to my chair in the hall.”
His mouth dry, he could only nod and comply. They were near the door, he found, and he led her back out, to deposit her in her Zimmer chair parked near the front door. Back inside the library, a pitiful moan had commenced. Inhuman, agonized….
“Disgusting.” This was apparently all Prudence Whitegate had left to say. As she curled up her lip, Poole left her there to dash back toward the library. The side entrance crashed open; he went to see who it was, and saw Mary, running down the lane toward town.
He shouted out to her, but she did not hear, and the nearby moaning had increased. Mary was making great haste, in spite of her feminine shoes and long skirts; he hoped that she was not in hopes of finding him in town. He made his way back to the library, where he could finally see the windows a bit more clearly. These he threw open, and followed that with wrestling the flue open.
After a matter of some minutes, he could finally see more than smog-obscured shapes. What began to confront him, however, was a scene of horror, the likes of which he had not witnessed since his time at Blackwell Island. Charlotte Whitegate was face down on the floor, bleeding profusely from a head wound.
She twitched convulsively, which Poole feared spoke very badly for her chances of survival. Her brother sat on the floor across from her, weeping silently; he too was covered in blood. Poole reached over to touch Ian Whitegate gently; the other man started violently, and gaped at him.
“She wasn’t…I never thought she’d go mad like that.” He seemed to be in a state of shock.
“Who went mad?” Ian answered by way of raising his head to look over at his sister, who had begun to moan anew. Poole stood and snatched up his medical bag from where he’d dropped it earlier. He immediately began his examination, at which point his fears were confirmed. Her skull was badly damaged; blood loss was severe.
He’d seen many deaths at Blackwell when he’d been a surgical resident. Most of those were violent; this was no different. He suspected that under the crushed lattice of her cranium there was even more hemorrhaging. He had no tools to cope with her injury, and even if she survived a trip to his surgery, it would be too late to help her. Poole looked back at Ian.
“I’m sorry. The best I can do is make her comfortable.”
Ian sagged and shuddered under the weight of the news, while Poole suddenly realized that the blood covering Ian was from a large gash along his thigh.
“Good god, man! How did that happen?” He moved over to attend to the living, forgetting Charlotte for a moment, until she began to moan again. Poole swallowed hard. “Will you allow me to relieve her pain? I have morphine.” Ian nodded, silently accepting this cruel reality.
Poole swiftly dosed her, feeling the guilt and remorse at his eagerness to stop hearing her noises of suffering. She gradually became still, and he breathed out, sweat trickling down his neck. “Just enough to ease the pain.”
Ian no longer seemed to hear him, so Poole set about disinfecting and stitching up Ian’s leg. As he worked, beside them Charlotte’s breathing grew shallow and labored. The reality of things stayed at bay until Poole decided to ask the most obvious question.
“What happened here? And why has Miss Mary run off? Surely, she had nothing to do with this!” As he spoke, he realized his own fear. He wondered whether he might have the courage to help prove her innocence if it came into question. Ian shook his head angrily at the question.
“No! Never. Mary hasn’t a violent bone in her body, you must know that. She was merely a victim of circumstance, and my sister’s inflamed mind.”
Poole felt a sense of foreboding from Ian’s impassioned speech.
“How did your sister come to be so inflamed, if I might ask? And how then, did she come to this state?”
Here now Ian shrank back in fear.
“I hardly know. Charlotte tore the old battle blade from the wall in a rage, and made as if to harm Mary. She must have kicked the flue…I couldn’t see, it all happened so quickly. Could I have done? Could I?” He tore at his hair in agony. “For Mary, I suppose, perhaps I could have.”
“What d’you mean by that?” Poole forgot himself as jealousy battered against reason. Ian looked up at him, awash in grief and pain.
“By what?”
“For Mary? Why was your sister in a rage? Why would she attack Mary?” Ian colored, as did Poole.
“That’s Miss Mary to you, Doctor.” His voice was hard, but Poole felt no danger from a man with a leg wound such as that.
“You may say so, but do not forget that I am much more well-acquainted with her than you are. I beg you to answer my question.” The two men glared at one another until Ian decided that he still had the upper hand.
“If you must know, Mary had just agreed to be my wife. Charlotte took it rather badly. Jealous, don’t you know.” Ian tried to remain calm and detached, but Charlotte rattled a noisy gasp, and his demeanor was shattered.
But there it was. Poole found himself unable to speak. He knew he’d had no real claim on Mary, but this? A foreign interloper? It seemed ridiculous, but he had swept in and snatched her away with no warning. Poole stood and walked out of the room.
“Hullo! Where do you think you’re going? You can’t leave me half-sewn! I’ve got to go after Mary, for pity’s sake!”
Poole turned to look at him sullenly.
“Do it yourself, then.” He stood still, trying to regain his composure. Ian hopped out after him.
“See here, you silly fool, you might like to believe that you and she might have had a chance, but it would never have gone off. She’d never marry down. And besides that, she love
s me.”
At that, Poole set his jaw and heaved a fist at Ian. The other man had no hope of dodging the blow, and took it squarely on the chin.
“Perhaps it was merely that you were the first individual to have gotten the question to her.” Poole smiled at this small victory. Ian swore and caught up a large vase, swinging it at Poole. Its stand toppled over, knocking several small paintings off the wall as it fell. The heavy ceramic missed its mark and crashed to the floor, splitting neatly in half.
“You could have, perhaps you ought to have. Ah, but you could never have with old Pru in the way, could you?” Ian tried to pick up a marble bust of Washington, thought better of it, instead hurling a glass jar of wildflowers toward Poole. This caught Poole on the elbow, before it shattered onto the floor. He winced at the pain, but Ian wasn’t done yet. “P’raps you’d have done better to have slipped the old girl the poppy.”
It was only then that Ian noticed Prudence, still sitting in her Zimmer. He gave a strangled cry of terror at seeing her there. Certainly, she gave the appearance of a medusa, if nothing else.
“Where in blazes did she come from?”
“How should I know? She was in the library when I came down.” Poole was still reeling from the terrible succession of events.
Prudence chose that moment to speak, and the two men turned their heads toward her in horrified unison. Her voice had the same nasty quality Poole always remembered, sounding of a rusty gate,