her face like a knifeblade.
Amy sat bolt upright in bed. She was shivering and sweating, but the black fingers of the nightmare were already losing their grip. Isabel had been running towards her, shouting something, and there was a chasm between them that zigzagged wider and wider as Amy tried to warn her. But she was fully awake now, and she couldn’t remember what Isabel had been shouting, nor what she herself had been trying so desperately to warn her against.
Amy reached out for her alarm clock, breathing deeply to try to stop her teeth from chattering. A quarter to five in the morning, and she was due on day duty again at six. It was almost time to wake up in any case. She turned on the overhead light and looked around the little room. Her uniform dress was ready on its hanger behind the door, and her textbooks were piled up on the shelf exactly as she had left them the night before. It had only been a bad dream and she couldn’t even remember exactly what had been happening, but still the atmosphere of it clung round her. She was still afraid, with a dull knot of anxiety that sat in the pit of her stomach. Isabel was slowly recovering, she was safely back home at Ebury Street, but Amy was frightened for her. Why, so vividly, now? Was it just the effect of the nightmare?
Amy pushed back the covers and gathered up her things for the bath. There were only two bathrooms in this part of the hostel, and there were always queues to use them. She would go early and relax for a few minutes in the hot water, if there was any, and then she would make a cup of tea and perhaps take one along to Moira … But the routine plans failed to calm her nerves. Amy was still shaking, and the thought of Isabel running desperately stayed obstinately with her. Instead of heading for the bathroom Amy went quickly to Moira O’Hara’s door and tapped urgently.
‘Dear Lord,’ she heard Moira murmuring. ‘Is that you, Lovell? Do you have any idea what the time is?’
Her friend came shuffling to the door and opened it, blinking.
‘Moira, will you do something for me? Will you tell Blaine that I’m sick and can’t come on this morning?’
‘Are you ill? You look white enough.’
‘No. I’m worried about my sister. I want to go home and see her. Will you tell Blaine?’
Moira looked doubtful. ‘Sure I will, but they’ll come down here and check on you, you know. If they find you out it’ll be big trouble.’
‘I’ll risk it. I might be back before they notice I’m gone.’
Amy ran back to her room and pulled on her clothes. To fool the porter in his cubicle by the front door into thinking she was simply going on duty early, she wrapped her nurse’s cape around her and slipped out of the hostel. The street was dark and deserted, with the few lit-up hospital windows reflected icily in the puddles. The air tasted raw and cold, with a sour lacing of smoke and the dustbins in the yard at the side of the hospital. Amy glanced up and down. There was no hope of a taxi, of course, and she thought that it was probably much too early for a bus. Grateful for the heavy warmth of her cape, she pulled it around her and began to walk north towards the river.
By the time she reached Lambeth Bridge her feet were soaked and she was chilled through by the raw November air. But on the corner of Marsham Street a cab stopped right beside her and disgorged two couples in evening clothes. One of the women, in a silver lamé dress with a little fur shoulder cape, stumbled and the two men caught her, laughing. Amy ran past them, waving to the driver. He stared doubtfully at her nurse’s cape and her damp hair loose and clinging to her face.
‘I said Ebury Street. At once,’ Army repeated sharply. Hearing the authority in her voice, the driver jerked his head to motion her into the cigar-reeking interior.
The house in Ebury Street seemed to be in forbidding, total darkness but as Amy came up to the area railings she saw a light in the basement kitchen window. She ran down the area steps and, through the half-drawn curtains, she saw that it was Bethan inside, sitting alone at the square scrubbed table. Her face was buried in her hands. Bethan’s head jerked up in fright and Amy saw the tears.
The anxiety tightened its grip within her.
‘Bethan. It’s me. Let me in, will you?’
A second later the area door swung open and the two women stood facing each other in the tradesmen’s lobby.
‘Oh, Miss Amy, thank God.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘He’s locked her in. Why should she try to hurt him? The little mite was asleep. But her poor, white face, Amy. She didn’t know what she was doing …’
Bethan’s incoherence was enough to tell Amy that something was terribly wrong. She fought against the infectious panic and gripped Bethan’s arm firmly to steer her back into the kitchen. She made her sit down and drew her own chair up so that they sat knee to knee.
‘Now. Tell me slowly.’
‘I didn’t hear anything. The nurse woke me, with the baby in her arms. She said … she said that Isabel had tried to kill him. By smothering him with a blanket. She said that she heard her, and saw her.’
‘That can’t be true.’ But even as she said it, Amy knew that it could be. Isabel.
‘I saw her too. She didn’t look like our Isabel at all. She was as white as death, and her eyes stared like stones. She said something like she wanted to stop the noise. But he was asleep, Amy. There wasn’t a whisper of noise.’
Amy stood up. Somehow, she discovered, the months of training on the wards had given her a kind of quick-thinking calm. It helped her to suppress the pity and horror welling inside her and ask levelly, ‘Where’s Isabel now?’
‘In her room. Mr Jaspert locked her in, he wouldn’t let me be with her. He said that she should be locked up. He’s going to bring the doctors in in the morning.’
They both looked up at the white-faced kitchen clock. Not quite six a.m. ‘He said that she was mad, Amy …’
‘She’s ill, that’s all, and she needs help. We’ll get it for her.’ Amy was already at the door, wrapping the anonymity of her dark cape around her.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To Bruton Street, to get my mother. We’ll come back and take Isabel away with us.’
Outside it had begun to rain, and it was at least another hour before the beginning of the winter dawn. Incredibly, or so it seemed to Amy, another taxi was unloading a party of late revellers. One of them looked a little like Johnny Guild, and she smiled bitterly at the remoteness of that other world now. The taxi swept her on through the streets that were already beginning to come alive with delivery boys and shop workers, and deposited her on the steps of Bruton Street. Amy hadn’t thought of bringing her own key and it took prolonged ringing to summon a faintly dishevelled footman to open the huge door.
‘Good morning, Miss Amy, ah, Miss Lovell.’
Amy brushed past him and into the hallway. ‘Is Lady Lovell at home?’
‘Yes, I believe so, miss. Ah, Parker usually takes up her tray at nine-thirty.’
Amy was taking the steps of the great curving stairway two at a time. She ran under the glass dome and past the ranks of portraits to her mother’s suite. Her private
