The year is 1879. When thirteen-year-old Ruth Merritt Holbrook emerges from her family's burning estate, bloody and charred, but entirely numb--She makes headlines. Reporters believe she is deranged. They accuse her of having set the fire. All the h...
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Although I have much to write about this evening, what with Hanny's arrival and our trip into town, I believe it is time that I write of myself in a way I have neglected to do up until now. I have had the truth weighing on my heart for too long and I shall forget about today's events in order to recount my past instead. I am secretive by nature, life has taught me to be, but with Dr. O'Donnell's letter to Gabe, I have been shown what the world believes me to be.
I wish I could say I am shocked by what Dr. O'Donnell has written of me, but I am not.
I do not know what this new journey with Dr. Abaddon—Lucius—holds in store for me, but I refuse to not have a say. For my own insurance, I will write of myself in all honesty here. I shall give my defense, or rather, my explanation. It has been weeks since I received this journal and no one has encroached upon my privacy. I believe myself to be safe to allow my guard to drop, even if it is only in these pages—
Her name was Clara Harris and she was twelve years old. I neither know how she found herself in the possession of a sharp piece of glass nor why she was condemned to a place such as St. Agatha's. Despite such claims, I was never meant to be watching her and I was not doing such a task on the fifteenth of November. Instead, I was in the great room where I'd been given clearance to teach a few of the children to read. When I arrived, I found that Clara was missing from the usual group. I did not think anything of it and none of the nurses or nuns present asked after her. I taught a brief lesson, passed out slates and pieces of chalk before instructing the children practice writing their own names. It was then, with my lesson finished and the nurses chaperoning, that I excused myself to go clean the chalk dust from my hands.
I found her in the water closet, dressed in only her white nightgown, sitting in a bath of water and blood. I nearly choked on the smell of copper and citrus soap as I opened the door. She had left it unlatched, perhaps in hopes that someone would find her corpse; I do not believe she wanted to be stopped.
Clara had always been small for her age, malnourished and emotionally tormented. Just then, sitting in that tub with her black hair wet and falling about her face, she looked like a horror. Tears streamed down her cheeks and her skin was drained of almost all life—even if I had called for help it would have done no good. She was dying. I knew it in my bones in a way I'd never known anything before. I had known of pain, but not to the extent of death itself. Never to the extent of wishing for death, not the way that this child wished for it.
Since I was a child, I have experienced the siren song of other people's pain. I cannot feel my own aching, but that inability remains contained in me and I am somehow able to push past it. My mother used to think that because I was numb to my own hurting, I was especially in tune to the agony of others. I believe she is right. Was right. I do feel pain sometimes, but it has never been, and probably never will be, my own.
I both see and feel pain the way that others can both see and feel steam rising from soup. It is black and swirling, a thin mist that envelops a person until they are wrapped entirely in its dark embrace—this is what pain looks like to me. They do not see it, only I do—for I am doubly cursed, never to suffer for myself but to suffer for others.
