Eve Silver by Dark Desires Read Free Book Online Page B

what you mean. I've been in service for ten years, two places before this one, and I'll say this for Dr. Cole, he treats us well.”
    Darcie ran her hand over the coverlet. The room was furnished with two single beds, each adorned with a pretty green-and-white quilt. The linens were as fresh and clean as any person could desire. And beside the grate, there was a full bin of coal.
    “The doctor's a generous one when it comes to the coal...” Mary's voice carried low and slurred from across the room, her words trailing together as her exhaustion limited her ability to converse.
    “Sleep, Mary,” Darcie whispered, feeling bad that her earlier tossing and turning had woken the other woman. She wished that she, too, could shake off this restlessness and sleep.
    She moved her feet beneath the sheets and tried to lecture herself to sleep, concentrating on the lessons in deportment her mother had recited to her during her childhood. At the time she had resented the endless reminders of proper decorum. Now, she would give almost anything just to hear her mother's voice once more.
    Darcie couldn't stop the wave of sadness and longing that rolled over her. Her father had died when she was a toddler, and her mother had remarried within two years to a rich merchant who adored her. Though he had been the only father she had ever known, Darcie had called her stepfather Steppy. Her mother had wanted to keep some memory of her first husband alive in a little girl's mind, so she had suggested the distinction.
    Oh, how Darcie missed her mother's voice. Her smell. Her touch. She had been a gentle woman, soft-spoken and kind, with a ready smile and a generous spirit. For years all Darcie had known was a mother's love, a stepfather's doting regard—but that was before Steppy lost his fortune, before Abigail went away, before Mama coughed her life into a handkerchief mottled and stained with red, red blood.
    A handkerchief stained with blood. Mary's words, spoken in the doctor's study earlier that day, rose to the forefront of Darcie's mind, and with them came the memory of Dr. Cole's sketchbook and her own foolish misconduct. She slammed her lids shut, but nothing could erase the image. Stained with blood. Red, red blood. Mama coughing her life away.
    Darcie shifted on the bed, her thoughts darting this way and that, her edginess unremitting. Then, from nowhere came a terrible question: Had there been blood, pools of blood, when Dr. Cole sawed the leg from the body for dissection?
    Darcie shivered. She had reasoned herself full circle, back to the disembodied limb. Her belly rolled with nerves.
    How could she have done what she did?
    She had taken up pen and ink and drawn in one of the doctor's books, drafting her idea of a human leg, skinned and denuded. The subject matter itself caused her great anguish as she pondered it in retrospect. Dr. Cole must be an anatomist, a man who studied the mysteries of the human body, she decided. That would explain the frightful sketches.
    Darcie digested the concept, wondering why the staff never spoke of it. Had Dr. Cole ordered them to secrecy? And if so, why? She abruptly decided that it was better not to let curiosity carry her mind to a place she truly had no wish to visit. In Whitechapel there were terrible rumors about where anatomists got their bodies. Medical schools provided a huge demand for subjects, and unscrupulous men were more than ready to supply that need. People whispered of fresh graves emptied and coins exchanged, and they whispered of murder most foul.
    With a sigh, she cast aside the near-stifling warmth of her covers and pushed herself to a sitting position. She reached for her shawl to wrap about her shoulders, touching the soft wool reverently, thinking how much she valued its warmth.
    Dr. Cole was an enigma. Silent and forbidding one moment, kind and generous the next. He'd given her the shawl that first morning, and later, a simple change of clothes.
    “I can hardly have you