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Thornhollow didn’t look up from where he knelt beside the corpse. “I wouldn’t antagonize the girl too much, if I were you,” he warned. “She’s a mental patient as well.”

“She one of them that just stares?” George asked, all attention on Grace so that he didn’t notice Thornhollow going through the victim’s pockets.

“Stares, yes,” the doctor said. “Although every now and then a fit of violence takes her. The staff has yet to figure out what causes them. The other day they sent her out to milk the cows and she ripped two teats clean off one of the heifers.”

Davey eyed Thornhollow with suspicion but edged away from Grace nonetheless.

“She get tied down a lot, eh, doctor?” George asked, his eyebrows up near his greasy hairline.

“I don’t know her history,” Thornhollow said as he touched an open wound on the dead man’s face. “Although the asylum practices the most humane type of medicine, so I severely doubt this young woman has ever been bound against her will.”

“Seems complacent enough,” Davey ventured again, curiosity overcoming caution as he moved around Grace in a semicircle.

“They should all be done in, make no mistake,” George said, his beady eyes narrowing on Grace. “Even the ones with the sweet faces such as hers. You don’t know what devil lurks inside if it’s like you said, tearing into a milk cow who done nothing wrong that day.

“You’d do better to practice your medicine on them that can be healed, Doctor. The works of such as goes on up at the asylum is an offense to nature. Ain’t no survival of the fittest at work anymore when we’re housing the idiots and stocking their kitchens with the food from our own larders. I work hard and I earn my bread for me and mine and seeing the likes of her staring there into the ground as if she don’t know up from down and she’s got a better roof over her head tonight than my little ones opens up a hole in my heart, it does.”

“The existence of said organ still being under great question,” Thornhollow said under his breath.

“What’s that?”

“I said this man suffered some damage to his organs.”

“That he did,” Davey agreed. “Some of us do take an interest in the mad, you know, sir, having so many here in our own town.” Thornhollow made a noise in his throat that was hardly encouraging, but the officer continued. “My papaw said he’s seen a time or two when more than one person from the same family ends up there on the hill. What you say to that, Dr. Thornhollow? Does madness run in the families? Or is it all skewed, and you never know who’s going to . . . to tear the tits off a cow, or something the like?”

“I think it’s a good bet that you never know who is going to tear the tits off a cow on any given day.”

George hawked and spat in the street, the stream landing near Grace.

“Them’s that’s mad should have the surgeries so’s they can’t have babies. We could put an end to it in a generation or so, if just one person had the bollocks to say we should cut off theirs.”

“On the contrary,” Thornhollow argued, “I’ve seen plenty of perfectly healthy children born to those deemed insane and decidedly insane progeny of the most normal persons imaginable.”

“I still says there should be the surgeries,” George said.

“I find that very odd indeed,” Thornhollow said, coming to his feet.

“Why is that?”

“I think you should thank me for arguing against the castration of idiots.” He tipped his hat at them. “I have all I need, thank you, gentlemen.”

He passed by Grace, and she turned to walk beside him as they left the policemen in their wake, jaws working awkwardly as if they belonged in the barn beside the fictional, mutilated dairy cow. A smile lurked on Grace’s lips, which she barely managed to contain until comfortably seated inside the carriage.

“I rather enjoyed that,” she admitted to him as their driver touched the reins to the horses and the hoofbeats carried them into the night, thunder rolling to catch up to them.

“I’m a bit surprised to hear it,” Thornhollow said, his face lost in the darkness. “I’d no doubt that you could look upon the horrific without flinching, but to actually enjoy it makes me wonder if perhaps I should truly shield poor ignorant men such as those we’re leaving behind us from you in the future.”

“I’d not hurt them,” Grace said. “But men are always so—” she broke off, correcting herself. “Most men are always so proper in the presence of a lady. To hear men speak to other men as they would if I weren’t there was enlightening.”

“And not to my gender’s credit, I’m sure,” Thornhollow said. “However, what you say is true and part of the reason why I agreed to take you with me from Boston in the first place. Your mind is quick, your attention to detail established, your memory infallible. But the bandages on your forehead—and the scars that will form—provide the perfect cover for all your assets. It’s established; you’re insane.”

“And therefore I am not human,” Grace finished for him.

“Precisely. Most people will assume you lack reason. They’re bound to say anything in front of you. Words that might pass when I’m out of earshot will be trapped by your meticulous mind. Within the bounds of the asylum you’re free to be more expressive, establish some relationships however you can without using your voice. But among the public you’re my fly on the wall, a carrier of all the information I can’t possibly collect alone.”

“And all my information, Doctor? All the things I glean while I stand in the rain pretending to be dull and staring at a corpse, what shall we do with them?”

“Dear girl, I’m a doctor,” Thornhollow said as they crested the hill to the asylum. “What else will we do with them but dissect them?”