“Daisy.” Sara leaned forward, near tears.
Daisy considered her for a moment. Then she sneered and spit on the ground.
Sara drew back, repulsed. She’d imagined the girl pouring out her heart, telling her that she was innocent, pleading for help. Anything but this cold grimace.
She didn’t know how to begin, what to say. In spite of the curl in Daisy’s lip, she recognized in her eyes a desperation to make contact. Sara had felt the same way in the asylum, the animal need to communicate with someone else, about anything. To find a measure of humanity in the rigid structure of each day.
She began again. “Daisy, what happened to your teeth?”
“Got knocked out. That’s the least of my worries. Trust me.”
“Are your brothers and sisters all right?”
“Dunno.” She kicked the leg of the chair with her heel.
“I think you know why I’m here. I want to find out what exactly happened last year.”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Because we were friends once. I want to understand. I need to understand.”
Daisy’s tone softened. “You sure about that?”
Sara remained quiet, letting the silence between them grow. For what seemed like ages, the only sound was the wind.
Finally, Daisy sighed, her body caving in on itself. “Mr. Douglas should have come through with what you asked for after my mum died.”
“I’m sorry he didn’t.”
“Then I wouldn’t have been so desperate.”
Sara leaned forward. “You never let on that something was wrong.”
“Because there was nothing you could’ve done about it, obviously. You’d tried and failed. Stupid Seamus. Christmas Eve, he got himself put in jail for pickpocketing and I had to get him out, to take care of the wee ones. I borrowed a large sum and then had to figure out how to pay it back. There was no choice in the matter.”
“No choice about what?”
She stuck out her chin, defiant. “I told Mr. Camden you were with child, and said that if he didn’t pay me, I’d tell his wife.”
No. Daisy was lying. Theo couldn’t have known about Sara’s pregnancy all along. That couldn’t be correct. Poor Daisy. All her talk of marrying a wealthy man, her infatuation with rising above her station, had turned her into an ugly, wretched person.
“Don’t look at me like that.” Daisy’s voice was a menacing growl. “You have no idea what it’s like to feed that many mouths.”
She’d test her. “In that case, what did Mr. Camden do when you told him?”
“He grew silent, for a while. Said that he was in a bind. That there was nothing he could do, but something had to be done. He paced about and grew upset and then I had an idea. I offered to take care of it and then he would pay me for my trouble. Solve both our problems.”
Theo had been waiting on Hardenbergh’s approval at that time. Any scandal of a mistress or a baby would have ruined his chances of starting his own business.
Dread brewed in her gut. “What did you do?”
“I thought it’d be as easy as taking you to see the doctor. But you kept on putting it off. So then I took a bottle of something that the doctor gave my mother when she was in your situation. I added it to that tonic you drank.”
She remembered those weeks before she was taken away. The lack of focus, not being able to remember what she was doing one day to the next. “What did you give me?”
Daisy shrugged. “Dunno. I felt bad, watching you reel about, get sick, and the first installment of Seamus’s debt was due. So I nicked the necklace from Mrs. Camden. It’s easy, in a big apartment house, where lots of people are always coming and going. Figured I’d sell it and be done with it all. But no one would take it.” A flash of irritation crossed her face. “Seamus said I was a dolt, stealing something so fancy. So I put it in your drawer, the day that Mr. Douglas was due to stop by.”
Sara closed her eyes for a moment, picturing that dismal day, how distracted she’d been by her illness, giving Daisy the perfect opportunity to frame her.
Daisy was telling the truth.
Theo had known everything.
She wished she could go back in time, to when she didn’t know any of this, didn’t suspect a thing. Go back to before the truth emerged.
Theo had manipulated them both for his own purposes, treating Sara like a marionette who was allowed out of her box as long as she was of use. He’d played her for his own purposes and she’d joyfully accepted whatever nonsense he’d thrown her way, taking it for love. Fury rose in her chest like a thick, polluted fog.
The clanging of a prison door brought her back to the present. “Daisy, how could you have done this to me? I was your friend.”
“I had made a promise to my mother we’d stay in the tenement. What were the little ones going to do when we were thrown out into the streets into the cold? If you’d gone to the doctor with me at the beginning, it would have been finished up right off. You should have done as I said.”
“You’re horrible.”
A sharp laugh erupted from Daisy. “Don’t pretend you were better than I was, having an affair, getting with child. We’re the same.”
“No, that’s not true.” She was about to say that she’d been in love, but Theo didn’t deserve that. “Why did you keep on stealing after you’d had me sent away?”
“They said you’d gone back to England. I figured I’d held up my end of the deal, but Mr. Camden strung me along, promising a payment but never coming through, and I didn’t have anything left to hold over him. I began pilfering small things here and there, enough to stave off the thugs.”
For all her hard edges, Sara couldn’t shake the ghost of the girl that Daisy had been. Eager to please, kind. Not this dirty, bitter urchin. Yet there was a time, near the end of her days in the asylum, when Sara had been equally heartless. To herself, to others. Behind Daisy’s vicious posturing was a profound sadness and loss.
“Where is your family now?”
The girl lowered her chin to hide it from wobbling. “Don’t know. Scattered. Lost.”
“Daisy, you’ve done terrible things. But I am sorry that you ended up here. On this island. It’s an awful place. I’m sorry you lost your family.”
The girl recovered fast, blasting Sara with a garish smile, the gap in her teeth black between cracked, dry lips. “I hear the asylum is a fancy hotel compared to what we criminals put up with. You don’t know anything. Never did. Don’t you pity me. I can take care of myself.”
The guard came in. “Time’s up.”
She grabbed Daisy by the back of the neck and shoved her out of the room in front of her. Daisy’s cackling reverberated down the hallway after her.
Sara tore back to the ferry pier, breathing hard. Daisy. Theo. She was never to trust a soul again. Anyone might turn on you, at any time. She might as well check back into the asylum for all life offered her. Let the nurses tell her when to eat, when to sleep. She didn’t want to have to face each day. The loss of everything she’d held dear.
Her mother’s suffering should have been warning enough, but Sara had convinced herself that her own story would have a different ending.
No such luck. Men betrayed, women endured.
She had forty minutes before the ferry departed. Lifting her skirts, she moved at a fast clip to the building where she and Natalia had peered in the window. She showed them Nellie’s golden pass and a nurse took down the relevant information.
“But he was born in the asylum, does that make a difference?” she asked.
“No. We have all records of every bairn here. Dead or alive.” The woman’s Scottish brogue spoke the awful words with a melodic spin.
Sara waited, checking her timepiece, for twenty minutes. She couldn’t leave without visiting the grave of her child. Of saying a prayer over the mound of dirt that pressed upon his tiny bones.
Finally, the nurse reappeared, holding a clipboard. “A stillborn, you say?”
“Yes. Born in July of this year. To Sara Smythe.”
“No stillborn. The boy was alive.”