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Elizabeth only shook her head, hands clenching tighter to the air near her hair.

“Oy there, String,” Nell called, peeling apart Elizabeth’s hands. “Perhaps ye tell me where to find some buried treasure? Or the cure for the pox? Somethin’ useful for once, ye invisible bastard.”

“You dare!” Elizabeth gasped, flashing her teeth at Nell, who backed off. “You keep a civil tongue in your head when addressing String, Nell O’Kelly, or I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”

“You’ll what?” Rebecca asked.

“I’ll spit in your tea,” Elizabeth said, stamping one tiny foot as she said it.

The other girls burst into laughter, and Grace bit down on her tongue to keep from joining them. Janey tried hard to control her face but her lips were twitching. Even Elizabeth’s angry pout changed into a hesitant smile.

“Aye, she’s a vicious one, our Lizzie,” Nell said. “Tell String I’m sorry and not to get ’imself in a tangle over it.”

“String is neither male nor female,” Elizabeth said.

“I don’t care one way or the other,” Rebecca said, looking sternly at Janey. “All I want to know is if String is right?”

Janey looked from each face to the next, all eyes now latched on her in the orange glow from the lamps. “Fine then,” she said, tossing her hands in the air. “Yes, the widow Jacobs’s daughter is an adult, but Mrs. Jacobs has found it easier to pretend she was still a little one, rather than an adult who chose to . . . to . . .”

“Are ye sayin’ she’s a whore?” Nell asked, drawing out the last word lasciviously.

“Was a whore,” Elizabeth corrected yet again. “She’s dead.”

Janey nodded. “Dead indeed. And the knowledge of that has sent the poor woman into a fit. Now you know, and I want all your legs moving back to your rooms. And don’t you be telling the other staff I said a word to you. They’d have my hide for sharing stories that aren’t my own.”

Grace wandered back to her bed, listening to Elizabeth and Nell’s good-natured bickering as she went. She’d not known Mrs. Jacobs well, but the few times they had met she’d been reminded of Mrs. Clay. They shared a respectful bearing, a way of holding themselves that communicated a power restrained. Now Mrs. Jacobs was broken, for whether her daughter was child or whore, she was lost forever. Grace’s thoughts strayed to Boston and Mrs. Clay, Reed and Falsteed, the deplorable Nurse Croomes and Dr. Heedson, whose straying hand she’d so gladly impaled.

Her consciousness trailed down into the darkness of sleep, where even that blackness could not compare with the hues of her past.

“Is she going to be all right?” Grace asked, in an attempt to distract Thornhollow from the blackboard.

“Who?” he asked, tearing his eyes away from his own handwriting reluctantly.

“Mrs. Jacobs,” she reminded him. “I was asking how she’s handling her grief?”

“Not well,” he said, slumping in the chair beside hers and tenting his hands over his eyes. “The ferocity of her emotions is tearing apart her mind. Sometimes I think we’d all be best suited by not caring for others at all.”

“A bleak picture,” Grace said. “I dislike most people as much as you, but the few that I care for I hold very dear. If not for those who care for us, we’d never make it through the worst. I’d not have survived Boston without Falsteed and Mrs. Clay. Likewise I’ll do my best to steer my sister through mourning my own death, false though it may be.”

A long silence greeted her words as Thornhollow slowly pulled his hands away from his face. “You have a sister?”

“Yes,” Grace said hesitantly, realizing her blunder.

“Older or younger?”

“Younger. She’s ten years old.”

“And she remains at home?”

“Yes,” Grace answered, nerves making her voice thready. “Why do you ask?”

“And how exactly are you offering comfort to her, if you are—as you say yourself—supposedly dead?”

Grace stiffened in her chair, braced for the argument. “I wrote to Falsteed and enclosed a letter to her written by an imaginary friend. Reed placed it for me and retrieved her response, sending it to me here.”

“You did what?” Each word was succinctly bitten off, each syllable a vibrant slash in the charged air between them. Thornhollow’s brow was dark, his eyes snapping in a way she’d never seen.

“I wrote to Falsteed,” she repeated, matching him tone for tone. “He gave me an alias to use. Reed handles all our correspondence. I’m sure the hospital staff in Boston believes he has a lover named Madeleine Baxter, nothing more.”