Free The Linnet Bird: A Novel by Linda Holeman Page A

then threw the green dress, stiff with blood and stinking of foul dampness, onto the edge of the bed. There was a moth-eaten brown woolen scarf stuck on the blood of the bodice. “You had nowt else with you, although the boots are a damn sight more than many we see of a night. Now move yerself.”
    “Surgeon?” I whispered, for the first time looking around here. “Where am I?”
    “Wot?” the woman said, leaning closer.
    “What is this place?” I asked again, a slow dread coming to me.
    “It’s the Fever Hospital of the Brownlow Hill Workhouse.”
    I raised my head at this, even though that movement brought a fresh wave of pain. “No one comes out of hospital alive. Am I going to die?”
    The woman shook her head. “Idjit. The only reason your sort believe you die if you come to a hospital is because none come but those a breath away from dead. It’s not our fault if they’re too far gone to be helped. You was lucky. Some kind soul took it upon himself to drop you in front of the door with your wound bound up in that scarf. Otherwise you’d have bled to death. Hurry up now, girl. If you’ve no home go on up to the workhouse. You’ll be assigned a job there when you’re able.” And then she turned and left.
    I lay still, trying to breathe around the pain, trying to stop the swirling in my head, trying to remember.
    The horror of what had passed came back to me as if I’d been struck. “No,” I said, closing my eyes again. “No.” The room, with its sweet stink. I could remember lying on the rug in the house on Rodney Street, surrounded by the smell of burning hair. The hair, and the shears. And the man . . . the man I’d killed. That I’d murdered. Was I to be found out, hauled off to jail, and eventually hanged, my body thrown into a pit of quicklime with other murderers?
    What had happened after that? Another memory. It was dark, and I was wet. Was it just the dream again, the dream of my mother floating under the surface of the Mersey? But I had been cold, so cold, and now I remember thinking
Mother? Is that you, Mother?
I had felt the watery push and sway of someone floating behind me. Not Mother. Clancy. The voices of the men called Gib and Willy. It was Willy who had saved my life, who had brought me here.
    Moaning involuntarily, I managed to sit up on the mattress, stained deep brown from an ancient combination of blood and vomit and urine and feces. Drawing deep breaths, I tried to quell the nausea that the pain brought on. I awkwardly pulled off the gray, threadbare shift someone had put on me, pursing my lips with the effort, not caring that the old woman in the bed less than a foot from mine was studying me with clouded eyes. There was a thick strip of blood-soaked flannel wrapped around my chest. Getting into the dress seemed an impossibility but there was no one to help. I knew the woman who had spoken to me would have been one from the workhouse herself, her face showing no flicker of compassion.
    I eventually managed to get myself dressed, partly due to the torn bodice. The old woman reached out and, with a thickened yellow fingernail, touched my green silk skirt, smiling toothlessly and muttering something incomprehensible. I dropped the brown scarf onto her bed and she snatched it up, sniffing at it and patting it as if it were a small animal. I shoved my feet into my sodden boots, leaving them undone, and stumbled through the long room of groaning, piteous men and women, stumbled as if still in the nightmare. I had to pass through a number of sections of the building, unconsciously reading the names of the wards:
Insane,
with its padlocked splintered doors that didn’t block the desperate shrieks and garbled voices;
Scald and Itch,
with low moans and muffled weeping;
Smallpox,
which was eerily silent, and finally, somehow worse than the screams and heavy silence, was the cacophony of lonely sounds that poured through the doors of the ward simply marked
Children.
    Stepping out