A Bluestocking’s Guide to Decadence

Chapter One

Emily

That there was a village hospital at all in such a funny little corner of Surrey was lucky enough; that it boasted eight beds, two nurses, a skilled surgeon within calling distance, and two-and-a-half physicians was a luxury.

The two physicians were the founders of the place, two gentlemen known in the village for their kind hearts and modern minds.

The half-a-physician was a young doctor (though quite an old maid at the ripe age of thirty) called Emily Clarke.

Emily wasn’t half-a-physician because she was halfway-trained, but in spite of her full—and, she thought, rather impressive—qualifications, half-a-physician she remained in truth: half-paid, half-scheduled, half-respected, and only permitted to minister to the same half of the population that she herself was part of.

“I don’t know how I would have survived without you, Dr. Clarke. I’m grateful beyond words that the founders were so open-minded as to bring you on,” sighed the woman Emily was thankfully releasing this afternoon, a patient she’d seen through a painful, highly personal problem that one of the founding doctors had forbidden her to speak the proper name of aloud in case a male relative should overhear it. “It’s really so forward-thinking to have you here for this sort of thing. Could you imagine, having to go through this with a male doctor at the helm?”

“Forward-thinking indeed,” Emily said as vaguely as possible as she helped the woman out of bed. It wasn’t her job to help a patient put herself together after giving the go-ahead for release. The other doctors here, those open-minded founders of the place, didn’t do that sort of thing. But the nurse always seemed to have an awful lot to do for those real doctors’ patients whenever Emily needed her.

At least the patient was pleased. Though Emily’s unusual occupation was not universally approved of, the tide was turning in that regard, as more people took the view her patient had expressed: that for propriety’s sake, maybe women were best treated by other women. While Emily felt that was still a bit shy of the mark when it came to equality, she was glad the attitude had let her see this patient through until she was well at last and ready to return to her family, her dear cat, Daisy, and (Emily knew from seeing her around town) quite the collection of ostentatious hatpins.

“Do take care, Dr. Clarke,” the patient said, offering a dainty hand in departure. “Should I or one of my daughters require your help again, can we bring you in for a house call? I know your father used to do quite a lot of those—”

“He did,” Emily said as pleasantly as she could manage, which, frankly, wasn’t very pleasant at all. “But I’m afraid I do not.”

The patient’s gaze drifted toward the door to the women’s ward and the rest of the cottage hospital beyond it. She lowered her voice. “Do they not permit it?”

After her lauding of the founders, the patient’s candid question was heartening. But it was also hard to answer. On the one hand, Emily hated to let someone mistakenly believe anyone had power over what she did outside this building. On the other, however, she had a reputation to uphold. The true answer to that question wouldn’t help it in the slightest.

“Something like that,” she said without a smile.

Trying as it was to half-work in a hospital where the patients called her my dear even as they complimented her skills, it was better than making house calls. As Emily knew better than anyone, houses had ghosts. Ghosts that could multiply should a physician fail in her duty. It was bad enough when a ghost was made in hospital, seeming to wail as she wiped their blood and her shame from her hands and then following on her heels for weeks. Ghosts made in homes didn’t just follow the doctor; they stuck around for the family to deal with. Forever.

She would know.

While rational, educated Emily did not actually believe in ghosts, the fact of her disbelief had never spared her from their effects. Take her study, for instance. She had a lovely little study to retreat to after she sent Mrs. Hatpin on her way and walked home at the end of her shift. A woman like Emily needed a practical place for penning research papers, for keeping up with the thoughts of modern philosophers and religious critics, for the carving hobby that kept her hands and mind healthy. But it had once been her mother’s sewing room, still haunted by the chests of fabric and the dressmaker’s dummy that Father had not allowed her to relocate.

Still, the study was more her own than any other part of the similarly haunted cottage she shared with her father in the quirky village of Farncombe, Surrey. She sat in her rocker only partly shadowed by the dummy behind her, letting the day’s shift melt from her fingertips as she put them to the task of carving a chess piece. When dragging a knife along the rough edges of a bishop-in-the-making had finally soothed her soul enough, she put her carving things away, shook out her apron, and got the broom in hand. Along with her books, her writing supplies, her whittling knives, and the assortment of pieces that came from the union of her hands and those beloved implements, Emily always kept a broom in her study to sweep up the wood shavings.

Tidiness couldn’t eliminate the ghosts, but it did keep them quiet.

She swept carefully into every nook. It was incredible how dust could accumulate in the span of a day, so innocent and invisible at first, but eventually gathering into fluffy balls that bred like the guinea pigs they kept in the garden. Occasionally, she still encountered a button or needle that had rested in the groove of a floorboard since God-knew-when.

As she tidied up the edges of her small dust pile, a knock came. She knew whom it was and tried to ignore him, hoping he would go away. She’d have liked a few more minutes to prepare the place before the riskiest sort of ghost of all—a living one—could sneak in.

“Ems?” he called through the door.

She leaned on the broom handle. “What is it, Noah?”

“Can I come in?”

No, she whispered to herself. But her childish reluctance was uncharitable, and if there was anything Emily hated more than dust, it was thinking herself to be uncharitable. She opened the door, just wide enough to bring her face-to-face with her twin brother. Though one would never know it from the way Papa saved him a chair in the garden or had the cook continue to order a little extra as if Noah might surprise them any day now, it was his first visit back to Farncombe in over a year.

Noah didn’t like ghosts, either, though he preferred to run from them, leaving the clean-up to Emily.

While far from identical, the twins did look like twins, both slim, both gentle-featured, crowned with unimpressive hair colored somewhere between that of a mouse and that of a straw heap. But the similarities ended where personality took its effect on their forms. Emily was visibly proper, modest, and correct, dressed with no frills or restrictive cuts, fulfilling her familial duties without complaint, while Noah had abandoned his natural place as Papa’s protégé to study fashion and acquire a truly bizarre assortment of friends, taking on a sheen of city-dwelling cynicism and European decadence. As ever, his silky fabrics and the scandalous addition of pearls tangled in his cravat were of shocking contrast in the simple halls of their small family of studious, suburban Unitarians.

“What do you need?” Emily asked, still clutching the broom.

He shouldered at the door, like he wished she’d open it enough for him to get a good look around. “You disappeared so quickly after tea. I just wanted to see what you were up to, maybe ask after a game of cards or...chess. Goodness, you’ve been busy in that regard, haven’t you?”

He nudged at the door until there was nothing Emily could do but either step out of his way or engage in a petulant battle that would be so satisfying, but too unjustifiable to indulge. She sighed and let him in.

“Don’t step in that,” she snapped as he came too close to her dust pile.

Thankfully, he avoided it, though he probably cared more about the state of his shoes than the state of her floor. He continued to the shelves that lined one of the study walls. Her many books were displayed there, along with rows of mismatched chess pieces, in all sizes, woods, and designs.

Her brother took down the most unusual of those orphaned pieces, an overlarge and curvaceous queen that still needed a final sanding and staining.

“Oh, I do like her.” Noah brought the piece to the tidy desk and popped her atop the pages of a completed essay that was probably the more impressive product of Emily’s efforts. He did not mention it. How very like Noah to fawn over her useless hobbies and ignore her true accomplishments, spinning the wooden queen around a few times like he’d taken her to a ball and the pages were simply a dais placed there for her majesty’s display. “Where’s the rest of the set?”

“There isn’t one,” said Emily. “She’s decorative, too big to fit on a chessboard. I rarely finish the sets anyway. The pawns are a nightmare. There are only so many hours in the day, you know, between my hospital shifts and my other obligations.”

She nodded demonstrably at the stack of essay pages. Noah flicked his eyes over the title page at last, pausing for a lengthy moment before giving the queen another twirl. “Well, I suppose she’ll be alright on her own, won’t she? She looks self-sufficient.” He quirked a half-smile that was part affection, part scold. “Will you finish this one piece, at least?”

“Maybe,” said Emily. “But I have finished that which actually needs to be done, so forgive me if I do not lose sleep over a chess piece’s lack of completion.”

She looked very pointedly at the essay again. Noah could not ignore it this time.

“Congratulations on that,” he said. “Do you know who’s to publish it?”

Emily’s stomach knotted. It was her usual journal, of course. Who else? They were one of the only publications willing to take her work.

“Yes,” she said simply, leaving the inevitability out of it. She didn’t want his pity, or worse, his complete disinterest in a field that might prefer his decorative tailor’s stitches to her fully-trained female ones. “I do.”

“Well done, Ems. I hope it’s a runaway success and you can afford to spend the rest of your days without ever having to set foot back inside the hospital.”

“You think they’re paying me for this?”

At last, Noah looked embarrassed. “Are they not?”

Her publications, she’d learned a long time ago, were not even worth the half-pay she got for her hospital work.

“Even if they were, it would never be enough to get me out of hospital work. Assuming I even wanted to get out of that in the first place, which I do not.”

“Sounds like miserable work. Though you do love your misery, don’t you? Have at it, sister. I’ll continue to wish more pleasurable days upon you in your place. That way you can blame me if it works, and you won’t have to take responsibility for your most unfortunate happiness.” He smiled. It was annoyingly good-natured. “Anyway, will you come downstairs with me? When you’re finished with...that.” He nodded at the dust pile. “I’d like to spend some time with you while we’re here. David would too. I know he’s in a rough spot and it’s a bit hard to witness, but I think your company would do him a lot of good.”

Noah had not made this trip home alone, but with his loving companion, David Forester, a very ghost-prone man who was visiting the quiet cottage in hopes of shaking off an especially bad one. The better air and distance from his troubles in the city were having a positive effect on his nerves. While she felt sorry for his situation, she remained shrewdly aware that she would have to sweep his room out twice when he went back home.

“You two have hardly been without me for a week,” Emily sighed, returning to her task as she fitted the broom under the rocker, going after the final specks. She’d stayed with Noah over the summer, as reluctant to be in London studying obstetrics like a proper female doctor as Noah was to have her there. But she’d finally checked that box, getting the training that everyone said would be the very backbone of her private medical practice that she did not intend to ever start. While it was true that hospital work could be grueling and full of horrors, it was better than devoting every day to difficult labors like the one that had taken their mother and broken their father. “Aren’t you sick of me yet?”

“Oh, I am,” said Noah, light and teasing and certainly true. “But David’s not. Would you make him one of those tonics you mix up sometimes, the one with the poppy flowers? And then join us for a bit. He values your friendship, you know.”

Emily was tempted to snap that while he and David were essentially here on holiday, she was not, and had a very early shift tomorrow.

But that was selfish, and selfishness wouldn’t do. Noah was right: Emily was well-suited to helping David through his nervous troubles this evening. She had the skills. The poppy flowers. The greater ability to sit with suffering than Noah did, because while he’d been traipsing around London and Italy studying beauty, Emily had been here, taking up his abandoned post to study hundreds of sources of pain, sickness, and death. She could help. And, as always, if she could help, she would help. She had to help. To do anything else would be uncharitable, and to be uncharitable would be...

Well, honestly, she supposed it would be very relaxing.

But that sort of relaxation was not in her reach. Because Emily was a good person, and good people did not let their talents go to waste when someone nearby was suffering.

“I’ll meet you in the kitchen,” she said. “Put the kettle on for me, and I’ll handle the rest.”

“Grazie, sorella.” Noah kissed the air dramatically in her direction. He stepped around her dust pile again, then turned back to give the study one more look as he took the door handle.

“You know,” he said slowly, “I’m surprised but glad to see that Papa finally let you redo Mother’s sewing room. It had gotten so bloody depressing I could hardly stand it.”

“Still a bit depressing,” Emily muttered before she could stop herself, eyes flicking to the unused dummy in the corner.

Noah snorted a dark little laugh. “True, but still far more than I would have expected possible for him. If he’d alter the rest of the house even this much...” He shook the absurd idea off. “Anyway, if you think a change to the curtains won’t shock him into a swoon, I’ll do up some better ones for you. These aren’t quite fit for a, well, for a sturdy and independent queen like yourself.”

He gave the chess piece another twirl upon the pages, and left.

Alone, she got the dust heap put into the bin under her desk. Then she gave the whole room a quick second sweep, to make sure she got out whatever bits and pieces Noah had tracked in on his excessively stylish shoes.