Chapter 3 - The Nursery of Ash
The room was larger than the entire ground floor of the house Clara had shared with three other waitresses behind the cannery.
The walls were not painted pink or yellow; they were panelled in bleached Scottish ash, pale as bone, and the floor was covered in a single, seamless rug of white wool that was so thick it swallowed the sound of footsteps completely.
Three identical cribs stood against the northern wall, each carved from the same pale wood, their rails turned by hand, their canopies draped in heavy cream silk that kept out the drafts from the bay.
An old woman stood by the tiled hearth, an iron poker in her hand.
She was sixty, with the square, capable shoulders of a Shetland islander, her silver hair coiled into a hard bun at the back of her head with two bone pins. She wore a dark woolen dress with a white linen bib that had three safety pins stuck through the shoulder.
When the double doors opened, she didn't look up from the coals.
"They're late, Mr. Sterling," the woman said, her voice like salt water moving over shingles. "The beef tea has gone cold twice, and the draft from the flue is coming down again. If you keep taking them to that den on Fourth Street, they’ll have the croup before the frost is—"
The poker dropped from her fingers.
It hit the hearthstone with a dull, iron clatter that sent a shower of orange sparks up into the chimney.
Mrs. Gable’s eyes did not move from Clara’s face.
She took one step backward, her hand reaching blindly behind her until her knuckles struck the mantelpiece. Her mouth worked, the wrinkles around her lips deepening into crevices of pure, unadulterated terror.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," the old woman whispered. Her knees gave a small, jerky buckle. "Adrienne. What have you brought into this nursery?"
"She was carrying the rye at The Gilded Cage," Adrienne said. He stood in the center of the white wool, his arms folded across his chest, watching the housekeeper with the detachment of an interrogator observing a suspect's pulse. "Tell her who she is, Martha."
"You're a ghost," Mrs. Gable breathed.
She didn't approach. She pressed herself harder against the sandstone mantel, her eyes darting from Clara’s face down to the three children who were still clustered around her knees like ducklings in the reeds.
"You died on the viaduct," the housekeeper said, her voice rising into an old-country wail that was thin and cracked with eighty years of North Sea superstition. "I laid the black ribbon on the mirrors myself! I packed your linen into the cedar chests! Mr. Sterling sat by that window for fourteen days without water until the priest came from St. James to take the gun from his hands!"
"I am not a ghost," Clara said.
Her voice was steady now, but it felt hollow—like words spoken into an empty zinc tub.
She knelt on the white wool. The children immediately crowded in, Sloane’s small arms wrapping around her neck, burying her wet, cold nose into the hollow behind Clara’s collarbone. The scent of the child was overwhelming: sweet almond lotion, clean linen, and that ancient, unmistakable aroma of baby skin that smelled of warm bread and rain.
Her arms closed around the small body automatically.
It was not an act of will. It was an involuntary spasm of the nervous system. Her shoulder muscles remembered the exact angle required to support sixteen pounds of child without straining the lower lumbar; her wrists knew the precise degree of flexion needed to keep the lace of the girl’s collar from catching in her eyelashes.
"Look at her ears, Martha," Adrienne ordered. He hadn't moved from the center of the rug. "Look at the scar behind the left lobe."
Mrs. Gable took two trembling steps forward. She reached into the pocket of her apron, pulled out a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, and hooked them over her ears with hands that shook like birch leaves in a gale.
She leaned down, her squinting eyes fixing on the irregular, jagged ridge of white skin that started behind Clara’s ear and ran down into the hairline at the base of the skull.
"That's not the bomb," Mrs. Gable murmured, her tone suddenly shifting from terror to the professional assessment of a woman who had dressed eighty corpses for the parish sodality. "The bomb took the left side of the town car. The blast came from the fuel tank under the luggage boot. Evelyn had three fractured ribs and a torn spleen when they brought her into the chapel... but the head... the head was..."
She stopped.
Her eyes snapped up to Adrienne’s face.
"The casket was closed, Adrienne," the old woman said, the familiar use of his Christian name slipping out before she could check it. "The coroner from the city hall—the one your uncle appointed—he said the fire had done the damage. He said there was nothing to see that a husband should remember."
"Dr. Vance," Adrienne said. His voice was like a knife sliding through suet. "My uncle’s personal physician for twenty-two years."
"He signed the certificate," Mrs. Gable said.
"He signed the certificate," Adrienne repeated. "And then he bought a seven-hundred-acre estate outside of Calgary three weeks later with money drawn on an offshore draft from the Bank of Nova Scotia."
He walked to the window that looked out over the black waters of the sound.
The rain was beating against the glass with a fury that made the heavy timber mullions groan. Far out in the channel, the green beacon of West Point flashed once, twice, three times—a rhythmic, indifferent warning to the ships dragging their anchors in the mud.
"Tomorrow morning at six," Adrienne said, "the coroner will be at the vault in Lake View Cemetery. We are going to open the marble slab. We are going to open the lead liner. And if there is a woman inside that casket, Martha... we are going to find out whose bones I’ve been praying to for two years."
Clara sat on the floor, holding the three sleeping children against her ribs.
They had gone down all at once, their small bodies collapsing under the sudden, miraculous release of seventy-two hours of terror. Sloane was asleep on her shoulder; Beatrix was curled across her lap, her thumb tucked into her cheek; Maeve was resting her forehead against Clara’s knee, her dark curls spread across the white wool like ink spilled on paper.
"And if the casket is empty?" Clara asked.
Her voice was barely a whisper, but it cut through the room like cold water.
Adrienne turned from the glass.
May you like
The light from the hearth caught the edge of his jaw, the bone-white streak in his dark hair, and the terrible, bottomless hunger in his eyes that had nothing to do with mercy.
"Then I will tear this city down to the waterline," Adrienne said, "until I find the man who sold my wife to a bar on Fourth Avenue."
