“I don’t know,” Evelyn said.
Violetta grimaced. “The things she said—”
Iris’s breath rattled in her chest, wet and horrible. It pulled both of them to her, Violetta frantic but unsure, Evelyn reaching out to tilt up her chin. She set her finger gently against Iris’s lips and nose, expecting to feel just slow, even breathing.
Instead, she felt almost nothing. Instead of her sedation following a gentle slope, it had careened over an embankment, plummeting faster and faster. Crashing. She was crashing. Evelyn swore.
“Untie her,” Evelyn said. “Lay her down.” She left the chair and went to the box, pushing bottle after bottle aside until she found the purgative mixtures she’d crafted. She plucked one out and returned to Violetta’s side, uncapping the bottle and holding it to Iris’s lips. The girl was insensate, unable to register the touch, let alone swallow. Heart pounding in her chest, Evelyn reached out and stroked the girl’s throat — too lightly at first, then more firmly, until the muscles contracted. Not too late; she wasn’t too late.
If she’d known to do this as a child, then maybe—
She pushed the thought aside. There was no time for pain, no time for her spiraling fear. “Part her lips,” Evelyn ordered. Violetta reached between them and eased Iris’s jaw open, watched with rapt horror as Evelyn dribbled another thin stream of caustic liquid onto Iris’s unresponsive tongue. Evelyn stroked her throat again.
Iris swallowed.
Evelyn fed her more and more of the poison, until at last the girl’s muscles spasmed further down her neck, into her chest, her stomach. “Roll her over!” Evelyn hissed, and Violetta tipped the girl onto her side just as she vomited, spilling bile across the floor and onto Evelyn’s skirts. She remained unconscious as her body heaved, unable to clear her own airways, unable to recoil from the filth spreading around her.
But she breathed still.
Violetta looked up at Evelyn, eyes wide, brows drawn up in fear.
“It may not work,” Evelyn confessed. “It may have already taken root too deeply.”
“You’ve killed her,” Violetta whispered.
Evelyn didn’t flinch. She only rolled Iris onto her back once the vomiting had stopped, pulling the chair over with one hand and propping the girl’s feet up onto it. Iris’s face remained placid, empty. Before she’d lost consciousness, that light had not gone out of her eyes. There had been no sign of the girl beneath the madness.
Evelyn’s cure did not work.
The walls were closing in. She couldn’t breathe.
Think. Organize. One step, then another. First matters needed to come first, no matter her fear. Even if Violetta was wrong, even if Iris woke up, she might have the same staring blankness to her eyes. Death or the telltale signs of the infection— either one was unacceptable. Either one incriminated her.
“Pollard will be here in the morning,” Evelyn said, not looking up. “I will need your help to find a way to hide the body—”
“Stop,” Violetta hissed, breathing shallowly and covering her face with her shaking hands. “Please, stop.”
Evelyn closed her eyes. She wanted to apologize, but what good would that do?
“We should have just sent for the doctors. I should never have trusted your—your—why did I trust you?”
“Because you wanted it to work,” Evelyn offered, but the words felt hollow even to her. She stroked Iris’s hair one last time, then rose to her feet. “She might still wake, if the poison didn’t set too deeply before we purged it.”
Violetta sucked in a shaking, uneven breath. Hopeful. Evelyn didn’t want her to hope.
“She won’t be the same, if she does,” Evelyn murmured. Her eyes went to the closed door, picturing her waiting employees, huddled together, afraid against the dark. Their world had been invaded as surely as her home had. They would demand answers, before Pollard even arrived. What could she tell them? What could she do? If Iris died, then Violetta had seen her murder this girl, had seen her arrogance take a life that she might have saved. Evelyn could hear it in Violetta’s voice already; she could not defend Evelyn for this, would not. Evelyn shivered, wrapping her arms around her waist, staring down at Iris. She’d been so sure about the cure—
Violetta interrupted the wild tilting of her thoughts. “If she dies, we say the fever killed her.”
Evelyn looked up at her, staring, uncomprehending.
“That…that you couldn’t save her,” Violetta continued, voice quiet and gentle. “The truth, but one that doesn’t make them doubt you.”
Evelyn’s breath hitched. “But you doubt me.”
“I can be the only one.” Violetta came to Iris’s side, and took up the spot Evelyn had just occupied, touching the girl’s hand. “The others don’t know enough to keep trusting you, if they knew the truth.”
Her heart spasmed. Violetta knew her well enough to still trust her? But what was there to know, that could prove her goodness?
There was no time to question it. She had to take hold of it and hang on.
“And what of Pollard?” she asked, once she had mastery of herself again. “He’s coming here to search for evidence that I am to blame for all of this, and he will find a girl lying dead or as good as in my house. The soldier is bad enough, but the two together…” It was as if a horn blared in her ears, unceasing and unrelenting in its assault. She could hear her pulse rushing inside her skull, could see the Judiciary wagons outside her house, Pollard questioning her as to how this girl had died under her roof.
Violetta looked as if she might be ill. “I…I don’t know, my lady,” she confessed. Her eyes went back to Iris’s body, the too-shallow rise and fall of her breast. “I don’t know.”
Evelyn could think of only one path forward. Her heart quailed. Her shoulders hunched in on themselves, battened down.
“We must tell him the truth,” Evelyn said, bitterly. “That it has followed me to my home. That whatever this is, it’s hunting me. It wants to be here. It will try to get in.” She felt it circling, a hundred men with staring eyes, closing in upon the mansion. Suddenly, the threat of Pollard seemed so far away, so insignificant.
What was he, against a hundred staring men?
Violetta’s footsteps broke through the pounding in her head. “No. We’ll keep the household locked down,” Violetta murmured, voice cracking, coming close enough to rest a hand on her shoulder. “And we’ll have the driver take Iris to the doctors.”
“They’ll see the traces of my—” her voice faltered. “—medicine.”
“Better that she die in their care and risk raising questions than for her to die under this roof and ensure Officer Pollard’s attention.”
Evelyn nodded, mechanically. “Of course. Yes, you’re right. She needs to leave, we tell the staff that the fever outpaced our efforts and we are turning to the doctors, as we should.”
“It can work.” Violetta reached out to take her hand. Violetta’s fingers trembled, cold to the touch, but her grip was sure. “What else do you need of me?”
Evelyn laced her fingers with Violetta’s for just a moment. “Take the medicines back up to my rooms—we can’t send them along with Iris, not without making the doctors more suspicious. And as for the soldier, when Pollard arrives, we must have his tattoos entirely covered. We will sedate him, and you must be prepared to vouch for him as your brother, taken ill and given over to my care.”