Aether Spirit Page 22

  “Then perhaps we should go to the hospital so I can explain to him.”

  “Oh, would you?” Emma looked up and dried her tears with the hem of her nightgown.

  “Yes. It’s too bad you didn’t die with a handkerchief on you.”

  Emma stuck her tongue out. “This is the first time I’ve cried since I died.”

  “Figures it would be over a boy,” Claire said.

  “Yes, it does.” Emma sighed. “But that’s life. And death.” She put a hand over her mouth and snickered.

  With the ghost’s distress lessened, Claire laughed too. “I had hoped such things would change beyond the grave, but I suppose not.”

  “I think they do if you rest peacefully.” Now the girl sounded wistful.

  Claire looked down the hall before leaving her room so she could continue to converse with Emma as they walked if necessary, but thankfully the ghost seemed to appreciate the importance of discretion and didn’t say anything until they got to the hospital. Most of the lamps were dimmed, and Claire hoped she wouldn’t run into Radcliffe. He already thought her crazy. What would he say if he knew she was on a mission of the heart for a dead girl?

  “Where is he?” she whispered.

  “In one of the private rooms. I can show you.”

  Claire’s reprieve was short-lived. When she walked past the office, the door opened, and Radcliffe stepped out. She immediately assessed him with the eyes of a lover and determined with a glance that he hadn’t slept well and hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Did he regret his words to her? She hardly dared to hope.

  “Doctor McPhee,” he said and rubbed his arms through his sleeves. “I didn’t expect to see you here. Are you here to visit Bryce? Beth said she was meeting you for dinner. And why is it so cold out here?”

  “I might say hello to him on the way out. As for the temperature, it’s related to why I’m here. Apparently there’s a young man with consumption in a private room on the nearest ward?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Yes, but that young man is a Confederate prisoner. What business do you have with him?”

  “I, um, have a message for him.”

  “From…? You do realize that passing messages to prisoners from their associates constitutes treason.”

  Emma poked Claire with a cold finger that felt like an icicle and said, “He already thinks you mad. Just tell him.”

  “Thanks,” Claire replied and swatted at the ghost. Of course it did no good.

  “For what?” Radcliffe asked. “And what are you swiping at? Is there a bug? It’s chilly for those, but they’re always around with all the blood.”

  Claire sighed. “I wasn’t talking to you. The message I have for the patient/prisoner is from his former lover.” She couldn’t resist the barb, “Because some love surpasses everything, even the grave.”

  She immediately regretted her words when his mouth drew tight.

  “And I know this is the case how?” he asked.

  “Because I know information about the prisoner that you can’t, like how his name is actually Thaddeus Mitchell, and he’s the son of a horse trader who was in Baltimore and whose family was loyal to the Confederacy, so they moved to Mississippi, where he joined the army.” She related the rest of it, including the relationship between the prisoner and the general’s daughter.

  “That’s quite the tale. I’m going to talk to him,” Radcliffe said. “See if all this checks out.”

  “Fine.”

  “Are you sure? Because you’re telling me all this on the word of what? A ghost?”

  “She started talking to me when I moved into her room in the general’s house and I saw her grave from the window.”

  “And you’re sure it’s her and not part of your hysteria?”

  “Positive. You feel the temperature. There’s something else here.”

  “Or we’re both caught up in the same sort of shared hysterical delusion that happened last night.”

  “Hurry,” Emma said. “He’s fading fast.” She wrung her hands and glowed brighter than previously. “I want to go to him, but I don’t want to frighten him.”

  “Just go,” Claire told Radcliffe. “Talk to him. Would you deny a young man the chance for some sort of comfort as he dies? One last conversation with the woman he loves?”

  Radcliffe gave her a suspicious look but wisely didn’t say anything aside from, “Wait here.”

  Chad tied the cloth over his nose and mouth and went into Private Smith’s room. The boy labored to breathe, but he lay with his eyes open.

  “Are you Thaddeus Mitchell of Baltimore?” Chad asked.

  The soldier turned his head to Chad and struggled to raise himself on his elbows. “Who told you? Did you capture my commanding officer?”

  Chad shook his head. “I’m not sure what to think right now. Tell me what your father did.”

  Thaddeus gasped out, “Horse trader. In Baltimore. Then Miss… Miss…”

  “In Mississippi. I got it.” Claire’s odd story checked out. He still wasn’t sure what to think, but if there was some way he could bring comfort to the dying boy, he would do it. Regardless of which side of the conflict the soldiers were on, in the end, they were all just scared young men. “Someone wants to talk to you.”

  “Not going anywhere.” Thaddeus collapsed back, and Chad ran from the room. He grabbed another face-cloth for Claire.

  “The story checks out. Come on, but put this over your face so you don’t contract consumption.”

  “Thank you,” she said and complied. They went into the private chamber.

  “Private Sm—er—Mitchell, this is Doctor McPhee.”

  Thaddeus narrowed his eyes. “Don’t. Know. Her.”

  “No,” Claire said, “but I have someone here who knows you.”

  “Who? Cold.” He burrowed under the blankets.

  “Yes, she can’t help it. Will you hold my hand?”

  Chad kept himself from leaping forward so she wouldn’t touch the sick man. He didn’t want to play the same scene in a few months or years at her deathbed, but he found himself trusting her strange abilities.

  Thaddeus pulled one of his hands from beneath the blankets, and Claire took it. Her other hand curled as though it held the hand of someone invisible, and Thaddeus gasped, “Emma!”

  “Yes, she’s here. She’s overcome right now, but she wants you to know she’s here to help you to the next step so the two of you can be together.”

  Claire drew her left hand toward her right and released Thaddeus’s hand while putting the invisible hand in his.

  Chad shook his head. If it hadn’t been for the wide-eyed joy on the boy’s face, he wouldn’t have believed it was possible or true. And maybe it wasn’t, but did it matter?

  He swallowed around a lump in his throat, grief that he and Claire wouldn’t—couldn’t—spend their last moments together. Her mind would be shredded by then if she continued to push against the blocks.

  Claire stood and backed away. Thaddeus murmured something too quiet for Chad to hear and laughed. He pulled his other hand from beneath the covers and held the hands of his ghostly love.

  “He can see and hear her now,” she murmured. “I didn’t know if it would work.”

  “That’s good because I can’t. This is either the saddest and sweetest thing I’ve ever seen or the work of a master neuroticist planting a very good suggestion in a patient’s brain.”

  Claire’s eyes narrowed with hurt over her facecloth. “It’s real. She’s been haunting me hoping I could help her. Once she helps him cross over, they’ll both be at peace.”

  “And what about you?” He resisted the urge to pull her close as they watched over the deathbed of the spy and soothe the delusions away. He wondered if he should give Thaddeus some privacy.

  “I don’t know what peace feels like. I h
aven’t had it since the accident, and I don’t remember before.”

  “I wish I could help you remember,” he said. “I wish it was possible without hurting you.”

  She assumed what he’d come to think of as her neuroticist expression—kind and sympathetic, but with a core of determination. “This moment isn’t about us and what can or can’t be. Let’s just be here for Thaddeus and Emma.”

  “I wish I could concentrate on the boy, but we have other things we need to do.”

  “Like what?” she asked. “You made it clear that there can’t be anything between us.”

  “I’m starting to believe that your hysteria might not be merely the lesions of a damaged mind.” He gestured for her to follow him out of the room. Once they walked back on to the ward, he flexed his hands to bring the blood flow back to normal after being in the chill of the individual room, which made his capillaries contract until they stung. They removed their face cloths and tossed them into the laundry bucket. Then Chad poured whiskey over both their hands.

  “At least this war has taught us something about how diseases are spread, considering every fort is its own experimental site,” he said. “And of course, there was Doctor Lister’s work.”

  “Right.” She shook the alcohol from her hands. “Don’t try to retreat into your scientific theories to change the subject. Do you believe me now?”

  “Yes, since there’s no way you could know what you did about him. He’s been more tight-lipped than most of our other prisoners.”

  “Then perhaps tomorrow we could start over?” she asked. “Pretend that we’ve just met and fallen in love?” She rubbed her temple, and he caught her hand.

  God, how he wanted to hold it forever, but he squeezed her fingers and released her. “I’m afraid we have about as much chance of succeeding as a Union general’s daughter and a Confederate spy.”

  “Just let me work through this. You’ll see—it will be fine.”

  “I wish I could believe you. And even if we could rekindle something without it hurting you too badly, we still have the same problems as previously.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You’re white. I’m half Negro. We can’t legally marry.”

  “That doesn’t matter to me! We’ll do it in secret. We wouldn’t be the first. Look at your parents!”

  “My parents have been in hiding since the start of the war. I suspect they’re part of the Underground Railroad, but I saw enough of what they faced when I was younger.”

  She clasped her hands together, but the little muscle at her temple still jumped. That told him all he needed to know. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—deliberately cause her pain.

  “Go to bed, Claire.”

  She nodded, her lips pressed together, and the corners of her eyes scrunched. He knew she struggled not to cry. She left, and he turned back toward the prisoner’s room to listen for the boy’s labored breath and offer him laudanum to ease his last moments, but he walked into a solid wall of cold air, like an ice barrier. He heard one word before it faded and allowed him to pass into the now dead man’s room—“Stupid.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Fort Daniels, 3 March, 1871

  Late Friday morning, Chad was walking to the mess hall for an early lunch when the sound of a crowd gathered in the square in the middle of the base pulled him from his frustrated thoughts. He pushed aside the memory of the conversation he ruminated over—Perkins was being difficult again, and since Chad’s last conversation with Claire, he didn’t have the patience he once did—and followed the noise. The crowd parted for him, and he took note of the facial expressions. The soldiers smiled, even the ones on crutches or with empty sleeves pinned up.

  He reached the front of the crowd, where he found Patrick and Claire, both smudged with dust and looking exhausted. Not that he could see much of their faces under their tinted goggles, but the slump of their shoulders told him that hope and their mission kept them going. They each stood on either side of a weapon that looked like some sort of cannon but with a narrow mouth. It had a small steam engine attached to it, and Claire fiddled with the alignment of something in the back chamber. She closed the door and gave Patrick a thumbs-up.

  Patrick sat on the seat attached to it on the back end, and Chad wondered what he was doing—wouldn’t there be some sort of kick back that would crush him? He also noticed that the wheels under the weapon were unsecured. Patrick used handles on the side to aim the large gun at a target across the square, and everybody hushed. He pulled a lever at the back, and a beam of light shot from the front of the weapon and burned a hole through the target and singed the brick steps of the building twenty feet behind it just before a sound like the crack of a large whip stung Chad’s ears.

  The men erupted in a cheer, and Patrick and Claire hugged each other before they stepped back to a more decorous distance. Chad plucked the seed of jealousy that tried to sprout in his chest—they were only colleagues celebrating a great achievement. She took off her goggles, and her eyes met Chad’s. Her mouth tightened, and he knew without her telling him that while she was proud of her engineering feat—an aether weapon!—she already thought about the young men who would be in its path and the destruction it would wreak. It would blow burning holes through their middles before they recognized what happened. He could almost hear their screams and knew she already had in her nightmares.

  General Morley detached himself from the crowd and held a hand out for Patrick to shake, which he did. The general also shook Claire’s hand, and some of the tension around Chad’s heart eased when she smiled. She was so obviously thrilled to be appreciated for her skills. He berated himself for not doing so when she’d first arrived, for not trusting her with the patients and giving her some comfort that way even if he couldn’t become her lover again.

  There was a lot to berate himself for these days, especially when it came to Claire. But he didn’t have time because the general held his hands up for silence, and the soldiers quieted.

  “I’d like to thank Mister O’Connell and Doctor McPhee for their hard work this week on the aether weapon. What did you call it?” he asked Patrick.

  “La Reine. The queen that will defeat the Confederates and their French helpers.”

  General Morley clapped Patrick on the back. “I like your sense of humor. Yes, La Reine will be the key to our victory, but time is of the essence. Major Longchamp, sound the muster whistle! We go to battle against Fort Temperance this afternoon. Let’s see what this baby will do against the fort that’s been the thorn in my side for years!”

  The men cheered, and the steam whistle blew its call to arms. Chad turned to head back to the hospital, but he felt a hand on his arm.

  “Tell me what I can do,” Claire said. “I know you’re short-handed, and neither the general nor Patrick will allow me on the battlefield.”

  They walked toward the hospital. Chad’s mind was half on the conversation and half on what he needed to do to prepare for the first wave of wounded. He hoped to God that it would be a short battle. The morphine supplies had gone down more quickly than they should have again, but no one had been able to catch the culprit.

  “Good,” he said. “There’s no reason for you to see what that weapon will do. It will haunt you forever.”

  “It already does,” she murmured and then stumbled.

  He caught her arm. “I’d say you can go to bed because you’ve obviously not gotten any sleep since…?”

  “Since Tuesday night. We’ve been working straight through. I got a few hours here and there.”

  “But I know better than to think you’ll be able to sleep through a battle. No one could. You can come assist at the hospital with simple tasks.”

  “Thank you. I won’t be in your way.”

  But you will be where I can watch over you so I won’t be distracted with worry.

  Claire turned to see
if Patrick followed her. They’d both caught occasional naps over the past few days when they were ready to drop from exhaustion, but he’d slept less than she had. He stood by La Reine talking to the general, then nodded and followed Longchamp out of the square.

  “I’ll meet you at the hospital in a few,” she told Radcliffe. She caught up with Longchamp and Patrick and asked, “Where are you going?”

  “If he’s going to be manning the artillery, he needs a uniform,” Longchamp said.

  “You’re going to be the one to shoot it?” she asked.

  “Who else did you think would?” he asked her.

  “One of the artillerymen, obviously. Someone who’s been in battle before and won’t be a stupidly easy target with red hair and beard.”

  “She has a point,” Longchamp said. “I’ll get you a hat as well, and it’s cool enough for you to wear a scarf.”

  “Not sitting behind the steam engine,” Patrick said. “Don’t worry about me, lass. We Irishmen are tough.”

  “But you’ll be the one they’re all shooting at!” Her eyes burned, and she willed herself not to cry. The tears came too easily with her current state of exhaustion, and she suspected Patrick wouldn’t make the best decisions in his fatigue.

  “One or two blasts from La Reine, and they’ll all go running scared.” He put his hand up. “Now go back and help Chad at the hospital. I need to get dressed. If you want me to have the best chance of survival, I need to get out there early.”

  She stopped and watched him, a gaping hole of helplessness growing in her middle. She’d made herself come to terms with the idea of nameless faceless youths being the victims of the war’s final battle, but her mind hadn’t allowed her to consider the possibility that her friend might be sacrificed to the cause.

  Beth found Claire blinking back tears and stumbling toward the hospital.

  “Now don’t start that, dearie. I know you’re tired, but we just need to pull through a few more hours at the most. Then you get to celebrate being the heroine of ending the war.”

  “But at what cost?” Claire asked. The question seemed so stupid now. Whether it was war or negotiation with the Confederate States, it was too much. She didn’t feel like anyone’s heroine.