The Ghost of Winn Peterson

13. Winn

Cont'd

The honourable Dr. Radcliffe was none too pleased with Evie, and doubly so with myself. As I usually am when being reprimanded or chastised, I felt my cheeks burn and weigh my gaze down with every word the doctor spoke (he did not deign to shout, but his otherwise empty, colourless face was tinged with the bright pink of passion as he strained all of his words out). For what felt a century, he warned Evie of the dangers of being a poor friend and caretaker, and for myself, the folly of ignoring a doctor's instructions. As if to make my embarrassment that much worse, he pointed out that he had been summoned away from a patient who cared for his services, and implied that I may as well have sickened the former with my actions.

Suffice it to say, I was in tears by the end of this barrage of ill-directed words. I was not the patient he had been summoned to see, and yet here I was, a grown woman with my own free will, being forced to obey the whims of a man I had known all of a day. I am not one prone to fits or displays of rage, but I took care to wail and stomp my way up each step to Evie's room.

What a miserable turn of events - from spending the days with Evie by my side, to discovering the undiscovered in the attics of my house, only to wind up stuck in horrid weather at the Thomas house, where the threat of illness and confinement held everyone fast.

As it is not wholly necessary to describe how long I wept in bed, I shall say only that I was exhausted enough by the end of it that when Dr. Radcliffe made his way upstairs to check in (at last?) on poor Georginia Thomas, I was helpless to the attentions he fussed on me. How glorious an end for the narrator - trussed up like a doll, now actually sick from her foolish escape into unfitting weather! I deserved all of the chastising I had been given, but even as I fell asleep, I can recall being hovered over and spoken to. Who it was that stood over my unsettled frame, I know not, but the impression of being watched in my fevred slumber carried over into dreams most unsettling.

The eighth and ninth and tenth and so on passed in an unchanging manner. Before long, the twentieth of the month had come and I found myself in a most peculiar situation.

Evie was sitting at my side, her chair pushed close to the bed when I awoke. Reading glasses that had to have been borrowed from her father were perched on her tanned nose and gave her furrowed brow the complete look of an easily irked French instructor I had known in my early teenage years. Taking the extra moment to spy on her, as she was unaware I had awoken, I discovered she was staring so sternly over a familiar bundle of letters, but my exclamation of joy that they had not been lost or forgotten about ruined my own plans for disguise.

"You're awake, you sneezing fool!" She threw the letters to the foot of the bed and pulled me up into a gentle but firm embrace. After a small show of emotion, and a wave of dizziness from my not having moved much in the last weeks, Evie pulled away and informed me of all I'd missed in my mysterious slumber in her room.

Beginning with her mother's health, Evie scowled quite fiercely to recount that the doctor's analysis of her state was rather limited and curt. "There is no hope for her, aside from the comfort you as her family can bring in her final days." Smashing her fist against the pillows, Evie cursed the doctor for a strong couple of minutes before continuing.

"Aside from his appalling conduct with regards to our mother, there is the strange matter of you."

"Me?" I questioned, wondering what I had done wrong.

"Indeed. Our lovely doctor has been most concerned with your state of health, and it is taking quite a strong will to fend him off." She lowered her glasses and waved them emphatically in my direction. "I am afraid we have little left to defend ourselves with - you must either make a miraculous and full recovery, or subject yourself to his instructions, lest he bother us all into insanity."