What Moves the Dead (8)

“Shoulder still bothering you, then?”

“Eh.” I shrugged, then winced dramatically, clutching my shoulder, and grinned at Roderick.

Denton’s eyebrows drew together. “You were wounded?”

“Denton is a doctor,” said Roderick. “It’s part of why I asked him to come here.”

Denton lifted a hand in protest. “Barely that,” he said. “I had one year of schooling and then the South took it in its head to secede, and I was shoved out the door with a bonesaw and a sheet of paper saying I knew how to use it.”

“Were you frightened?” I asked, with gentle malice.

His eyes flicked to me, acknowledging the hit, and his mustaches moved over a smile. I waited for him to demur, but he surprised me. “I was,” he said. “All the time. We had to amputate so often, and I was always afraid they would die on the table. I knew most of them would die anyway, but if they died in front of me, it felt worse.”

I winced. Our periodicals aren’t nearly so lurid over here, but we’d still heard grim stories about doctors hacking off diseased limbs, dumping whiskey on the stump, and then having the next man brought in. If he’d even been on the outskirts of that, then Denton had been through hell a few times over.

“You sell yourself short,” said Roderick. “I’d trust you over half the doctors in Paris.”

“Ah, you only say that because I pour liquor over everything.” He turned back to me. “Shoulder wound?”

“Musket ball, of all things,” I said. “Someone had dug their grandfather’s musket out of the attic and took a potshot at us as we came through. I was damned lucky, although I didn’t feel that way at the time.”

Denton winced. “Hit the bone?”

“Cracked it but didn’t break it. The advantage to getting shot with an antique.”

He nodded. “Fortunate. Insomuch as getting shot is ever fortunate.”

Roderick started in with a story of a fellow we served with who was shot in the family jewels and went on to have three children. It’s a good story. Denton winced in the appropriate places and we drank and sat by the fire and told war stories as if everything was completely normal and no one in the house was dying.





CHAPTER 3


When it was finally late enough that I was yawning, Roderick walked me to my rooms. This time he took a candle, and went more slowly.

“Did Denton insult you?” he asked, once we were out of earshot of the parlor. I could tell he was genuinely worried. “He’s a good man, but you know they don’t have sworn soldiers in America. I’ll have a word with him if he did.”

I shook my head. “Just the usual sort of thing. He’ll settle down in a day or two, I imagine.”

Roderick sighed. “I’m sorry. I know how tired you are of that.”

I snorted. I’d been tired of it a decade ago. Now I’d moved to some other state entirely. Transcendent exhaustion, perhaps. Which had less to do with Dr. Denton and more to do with the ten thousand or so people before him. “I did not mean to surprise you and your guest, Roderick.”

“No, no.” The shadows jumped on the wall with the tremor of Roderick’s hand. “I was ungracious before. I’m sorry. Of course you would come when you thought Madeline was … was ill. I should have realized.”

“We were friends, once,” I said quietly. “I hope we still are.”

“Yes. Yes.” He turned to me almost eagerly, and I tried not to recoil at the way the candle cast deep shadows across his eye sockets and the gaunt planes of his face. “We were. We are. You led the charges. You knew what had to be done and you did it. I … I could use that now. I no longer know what needs to be done.”

“We’ll figure it out. It can’t be worse than facing a line of rifles.”

“Can’t it?” Roderick blinked at me. “This place … this place…” He gestured with the candle. I followed the gesture to where wallpaper had peeled back from the walls, hanging in rags, leaving the exposed flesh of the building behind. Mold crept up the pale boards, tiny spots of black that joined together like constellations. “I hear things now,” he said. “Everything. My own heartbeat. Other people’s breathing sounds like thunder. Sometimes I fancy I can hear the worms in the rafters.”

“It’s a holdover from the war,” I said, thinking of my own tinnitus. “Too many shells, too many bullets. We’re all half-deaf and hearing things.”

“Perhaps. But I hate this place,” he said, almost dreamily. “And I am so afraid. I was never afraid like this during the war.”

“We were younger then,” I said. “And immortal.”

He forced a smile. It was ghastly and I looked away, back to the moldering wallpaper. “Perhaps that’s it. But this place has made me afraid. This dreadful house. I think I would rather face a line of rifles, even now. At least that’s a human enemy.”

I had no idea what to make of this talk. “We’ll figure it out,” I said again, firmly.

“I hope so. Everything frightens me now.” He shook his head and laughed, and it was almost as ghastly as his smile. “I am not the soldier I was.”

“None of us are what we were,” I said, and let him show me to my room.