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Edinburgh, Sussex, and Dorchester while she worked as a governess. Our time in Dublin had been our longest stay in one place—seven years—as she tutored the children of the wealthy Edgeworth family. Each day, while Mother gave the children lessons, I completed my own studies in the cottage we shared behind the family’s mansion.
    If I finished early, I played outside the Edgeworth property’s gates with some of the local children. During those times, I learned the hierarchies among Dublin street youth. If I wanted to play in certain circles, I had to learn some of the local activities, namely fighting. Sometimes the fighting was play, sometimes self-defense. But in seven years, I learned a great deal about it.
    That life had been so textured compared to these past two months with Grandmother, which had made me listless and bored. I still ached for Mother, and fought feelings of guilt that I could do nothing for her when she fell ill. She had caught a violent case of dysentery that had been going around the city; it took her life within two days. Looking back, I wished that I had paid more attention to the increasing number of episodes or seizures she had had in the weeks before her death. But she had suffered from those my whole life.
    Mother had an interest in art, and sometimes when she worked on a painting she would become lost to me, snap into a fixed stare. Sometimes she went months without having an episode, but they had intensified shortly before her death. Only two weeks before she died, we had been working in our small garden together and she fell back hard, her sunbonnet falling off her head. She stared at the sky for a full ten seconds as I called her name. I feared she was having a seizure. But she seemed to see something elsewhere; she seemed focused on something I could not see. Then, suddenly, she came out of the trance and returned to normal. Her explanation was that she had just become overheated. I thought that she might have had a touch of epilepsy, but now, ever since my bizarre encounter with the pickpocket, I was considering whether she might have had visions.
    I shivered as I thought about the pickpocket; that experience had been a crack, a tear, in my reality. The robes, the chanting, the child’s radically different expression—none of it made any sense. Nothing like that had ever happened to me, and I wondered, once again, if I was losing my mind. Yet whether Mother had had visions or not, I still wished that I could talk to her about what had happened to me, because I knew that she would understand.
    As I became sleepier, my thoughts turned to my first day at the hospital. Dr. Bartlett’s invitation seemed to be an open door to a place where I could be active again and move forward from my loss. He intrigued me. Our discussion about Whitechapel Hospital, the future possibility of building a school for children, of expanding the wards, all stirred within me a desire to be part of that establishment.
    Eventually, the ticking clock and parlor shadows became increasingly lost to me, and I fell asleep. Like darting minnows, scenes from the day drifted in and out of my consciousness. William’s focused expression as he performed the caesarean. Simon’s face above my own when he caught me after my fall. Ellen’s hysterical outburst upon my return. The girl’s face as she died.
    All of these memories blurred and faded until I found myself in a more solid dream facing the front doors of Whitechapel Hospital. The road was abandoned, the night cool and foggy. I could see my breath puffing out into the air surrounding me as I stared up at the building.
    A window on the third floor opened. I felt my blood freeze as a man crawled headfirst down the brick front wall of the hospital. It was an impossible act, and, even in the darkness, I had to cover my mouth to keep from crying out in terror. I could not see his face; he wore black and his figure was shadowed. He turned