Chapter Four
Jo
Noah claimed that his sister had a stick up her arse, but meeting the chit in person, Jo believed she’d managed to get that thing all the way up her spine, twisting the pointy end into the skull-squeezing knot on the top of her head. Dr. Clarke held her back so straight and her stomach so tight that Jo hadn’t even noticed she wasn’t wearing a corset until they all sat down. Physically, she looked enough like her brother—long, slim lines; sandy coloring; big, stormy eyes—that Jo found herself wondering if Noah had created his prettiest but most insufferable drag persona yet, just to fuck with her.
But no such luck there. She was caricature-like indeed, but decidedly too short to be anything but genuine. David’s anxiety really must have been addling his brain something dreadful if he’d thought for a moment this was a match that either of them would have any interest in whatsoever.
Jo watched Dr. Clarke as she determinedly shook off all the earlier conversation and got down to business with the air of a schoolmarm with a stick that was coming for your bum in a bad way. She clenched a stylus above a pad of paper, leaving off any further discussion of circumstance to finally start asking Vanessa about her health and her history.
Jo had never trusted doctors, getting on well enough on the country remedies she’d picked up from her family before they turned on her. The scribbling of medical notes made her particularly nervous. They seemed very official. Very final. The way the doctor’s petite hand clenched the pen and moved so methodically over the paper started up some sort of whirlwind in Jo’s belly. She poured and picked up a mug of what looked like lukewarm water in the others’ cups, not exactly her choice beverage, but available as distraction.
She took a sip of the stuff and nearly spat it out. Not being quite so ill-bred as all that, she opted to choke on it instead.
The ladies both turned to stare at her.
“You alright, Jo?” said Vanessa, in tandem with Dr. Clarke’s grim “A problem, Mrs. Smith?”
Jo coughed and loosened her neckcloth a little. “What have you done to it?” she asked the doctor. “Is that lemon?”
Dr. Clarke blinked those eyes at her incredulously. They weren’t quite as much like her brother’s as Jo had originally thought. A little rounder, a little bluer, with a quaint sort of frown line slightly off-center between them. It deepened substantially. “Yes,” she said. “It is lemon.”
“Enough to clean the kitchen with, isn’t it?”
“To clean... Excuse me?”
“I mean, I’ll be alright.” Jo swallowed hard, trying to clear the sourness from her mouth. “Don’t worry about me—”
“I assure you, I will not.”
“—but should you be giving that to her?” Jo nudged Vanessa gently.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Vanessa laughed and took one of the biscuits from a porcelain bowl painted with rabbits, of all things. “True, it’s not my first choice,” she said cheerfully. “But it’s hospitable enough.”
Jo hated to do this in front of Dr. Clarke, but she was developing a suspicion that this doctor might not be all she was cracked up to be. She didn’t seem to know about the bodily humors. She was asking odd questions about Vanessa’s corset. And now lemon water? It was suspicious. Jo wasn’t a midwife. She wasn’t an expert. She wasn’t even a mother herself. But she was a woman who’d been around other women and knew a thing or two in spite of herself. She lowered her voice and said to Vanessa, “You overdo that stuff, and your baby will wind up with a sour disposition.”
“Oh!” Vanessa put a hand to her chest. “Well, I’ve never heard that.”
“That’s because it’s poppycock,” said Dr. Clarke, casting a look sharp enough to stab through Jo’s entire ancestral line. “Old wives’ tales. Lemon water will help your nausea and, combined with boiling, keeps the water free of contaminants.”
Jo met the stare with one of her own. “I assume your mum drank it plenty.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
The line of her mouth growing grimmer than ever, Dr. Clarke went back to her notes, her questioning, her lemon water. Her face was so serious that she might have been about to tell Vanessa that she going to die of some dreadful fever within the hour.
It was dull, irritating, and a bit embarrassing to boot. Since Jo was no more than a chaperone—a chaperone that the doctor had clearly decided to pretend wasn’t even there—she stood. As expected, Dr. Clarke gave no indication that she’d noticed Jo strolling toward the window.
As the others droned on about menses and motherly maladies, Jo took in the sight of fading foliage and well-fed fowl in the garden. It was a curious place, this cottage. Filled with books, live plants, and by all account every modern amenity she could think of, yet surrounded by the sort of fresh country air that Jo had come to equate with far more suffocation than the soot-choked streets of the city. Jo herself was not familiar with English suburbs, having only experienced the extremes of impoverished farmland or the bustling, foggy squish of London. She didn’t know much about this in-between space, but she sensed that it was the sort of place that inevitably gave birth to Dr. Clarke’s type.
And Jo did know her type. Sitting so pretty in her drab rational dress, speaking the grim speech of a dedicated bluestocking. Paul shared a printing press with a group of idea-driven pamphleteers just like Dr. Clarke, who couldn’t bear to rally for the rights of women or the poor without also making it about the evils of gin, or dirty novels, or any amount of joyful leisure whatsoever. Never mind that polite society hardly liked these teetotalling, nonconformist sorts any better than they liked whores and smut peddlers—since they didn’t care for society’s opinion anyway, their harsh judgement stood firm.
No sense dwelling on all that, though. While Vanessa’s conversation seemed to be going well enough, this was probably the last Jo would see of Dr. Clarke. Once another appointment was secured, Jo could doff her hat to this whole mess, and then...and then hope there was still something for her do, someone useful for her to be to this family that might find itself growing happily away without her.
She cleared her throat, spurred to movement. She paced behind the doctor, hands in pockets. Needing something to do with her eyes, she peeked over the sofa at the contents of Dr. Clarke’s medical notes. She was glad the information was as prim and professional as everything else about the doctor, though a particular aspect of the script made her chuckle before she could stop herself.
Gaze trained, as it was, on the movement of the pen, Jo saw the second it stopped in its inky tracks, standing straight and tall against the paper.
Slowly, moving no muscle save for the ones required, Dr. Clarke turned her head toward Jo. “Yes, Mrs. Smith?”
Jo stifled another smile. “Nothing.”
“Is there something funny about childbed fever?”
“I might have missed that that was the topic at hand,” said Jo with a grimace and an apologetic tug on her own bun. “My apologies.”
“Then what, pray tell,” said Dr. Clarke, “is so funny?”
“Nothing, Doctor.”
“Forgive me if I don’t believe you to be giggling to yourself in the corner over nothing.”
“It really is nothing,” Jo repeated. “It’s just—”
“Oh, Joey!” Vanessa clucked scoldingly from the sofa. “You’re not looking at her handwriting, are you?”
Dr. Clarke looked sharply between them, her spine straighter than ever. “What’s the matter with my handwriting?”
“Nothing’s the matter with it,” said Jo quickly, trying to suppress her guilty smile. “That’s not what I—”
“Forgive her, Doctor,” said Vanessa with a chuckle. “She’s gotten to know me better in the past few weeks, but it’s been a mutual discovery. She’s a printer, you see. A book person. An enthusiast of the written word in all its forms. Spent far too much time in the company of manuscripts. If I’m not mistaken, it set her down the path of learning handwriting analysis.”
Disconcerted, Jo rounded on her. “How did you know that?”
“There’s books about it on your shelf,” she said. “I can tell Paul’s never taken a look at them, so they must be yours. Fascinating subject—I read through one of them just last week.”
Jo didn’t have time to be horrified that Vanessa was out there feeling her vibrations and peering into her soul when Jo wasn’t looking, because the words seemed to break some thin edge of Dr. Clarke’s patience as well.
“Handwriting analysis?” she snapped, turning farther toward Jo so rapidly that a teeny, tiny wisp of hair escaped from the clutches of her knot. “Please don’t tell me you are not only looking over my shoulder at my notes, glaring at the lemon water and fretting about humors, but you are analyzing my handwriting while you’re at it?”
Jo shrugged. “It seemed a quiet and unobtrusive enough activity to me.”
“And exactly what humorous insights,” she said with an emphasis that quaked that spidery strand of blond on her forehead, “have you gleaned about my sour disposition through your unscientific means, Mrs. Smith?”
That stray hair looked terribly weak and undefended against the barely contained anger that simmered within the little doctor. Normally, Jo would bark out just what she’d gleaned without hesitation, but something about that vulnerable fluff made her think better of it—in fact, had her suppressing an urge to sweep the strand back to safety.
“Just that...” Jo paused, searching the ceiling for some way to put it. “The vertical, um...the verticality of some of the letters is thought to indicate a passionate nature. That’s all. Should come as no surprise.”
“Passionate,” repeated Dr. Clarke, lashes fluttering impatiently. They were soft, fragile, and tipped in blond. “I am passionate about my work, Mrs. Smith. Though I like to think it shows more in my demeanor than in my handwriting.”
“Of course, Doctor.”
With a warning look, Dr. Clarke turned back around, pen moving a little more self-consciously.
Jo caught Vanessa’s eye. She looked a little uncertain, which wouldn’t do. They needed to be better friends, didn’t they? If Vanessa had read one of her handwriting books, then perhaps Jo could use that common knowledge to make an in-joke. People didn’t like to ruin the lives of folks they had in-jokes with. So Jo grinned behind the doctor’s back, using her finger to draw a lower-case g in the air, one with the lusciously long lower loop that supposedly indicated a sort of passion that was more commonly associated with the oldest profession, rather than Dr. Clarke’s illustrious one. Vanessa bit her lip as she caught Jo’s meaning, covering her smile with another sip of sour stuff.
The pen stopped once more. The head turned. The stray hair swished, lifted, and left itself at an improbable angle at the side of Dr. Clarke’s face.
“What?” she said, exasperated.
“Nothing,” said Jo innocently, crossing her arms tight.
“Perhaps,” Dr. Clarke started, but her eyes drifted and her throat stuck for a moment. Jo followed her gaze down to where that waistcoat button was straining worse than ever. She’d tightened it up as best she could, not having found Gran’s book in the towering mass of literature on the shelves, but it was already trying to give up again. Great. Now the doctor could judge her tidiness on top of everything else...
Though when they locked eyes again, a strange flush dusted across Dr. Clarke’s cheeks.
Something dawned on Jo. The blush. The nerves. The swoopy letters. Maybe judgement wasn’t actually the right word for the situation.
“Perhaps, what, Dr. Clarke?” she said, crossing her arms a little tighter and letting just one side of her mouth drift up in a challenge.
Dr. Clarke cleared her throat again, the flush going pale. “Perhaps you would be more comfortable waiting in the garden while I wrap things up with Miss Garcia.”
It was too chilly to be comfortable, and the little animals and autumn-bright plants all over the place were so quaint as to be almost painfully saccharine, but Jo did as she was told, waiting in the garden until Vanessa came out.
Jo’s stomach instantly sank at the slumping sight of her, makeup-tinged tears streaming down her face as she gave the terrible news:
Dr. Clarke had denied her another appointment.
Jo’s stomach turned a guilty flip as she thought back on her own behavior in the parlor. Chickens clucked, rodents scurried, and Vanessa sniffed into her handkerchief until Jo found her voice.
“I’m sorry,” Jo said. “Oh, fuck, Vanessa. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
Vanessa shook her head, dabbing her eyes. “Believe it or not, it wasn’t you.”
There was a bit of relief in that. “It wasn’t?”
“It was my fault entirely.”
“But the lemons—”
“It wasn’t the lemons,” she sighed. “It’s exactly the problem we knew we’d have.”
Jo grimaced. “You told her about Paul’s books, didn’t you?”
“I thought I’d read her vibrations correctly,” said Vanessa, like she was begging the whole universe to understand her mistake. “That more honesty would see us through. But alas, her free thinking has just the limits you sensed it would.” Vanessa gave a laugh that was not related in any way to mirth. “Funny, isn’t it? Everyone so concerned with whether Paul’s sticking around, but in this, I’d be better off without him.”
“Better off without him?” Jo repeated, shocked that she wasn’t getting the blame for this. Even if Dr. Clarke’s rejection wasn’t her fault, her presence was still the root of the problem. That Vanessa still hadn’t found a single negative word to say about her was so far beyond her comprehension that she couldn’t help but blurt, “God, Vanessa, has it really not occurred to you...?”
“That it’s you I’d be better off without?” she said with a wry little smile.
Jo shoved her hands in her pockets and shrugged, afraid to speak.
“My dear Jo.” Vanessa sighed and smoothed her silks. “I do not want to be married. I have never wanted to be married. And I never will. It isn’t in my nature, and I would not sell my nature for all the security in the world. You’re not an object in my way. You are a person who is trying to help me, in spite of the fact that this circumstance is nearly as big a danger to you as it is to me. It is my blessing or my curse to be unable to look away from that, no matter how I might benefit.”
“You mean it,” Jo said.
“I do.”
“I could kill Paul off, then,” Jo joked. “Get him out of the way of your proper doctor. If you’d like.”
“Oh, but my dear, my dear, what you still don’t understand is that I love him,” said Vanessa, half-theater, half-exhaustion. “I want him with me on the other side of this, living our lives in the way that suits our spirits. That’s the irony of it.”
“I could kill him off for now,” Jo suggested, “then bring him back later when he’s needed. I’ve got a couple books in the back of my shop dealing with subjects like that. Considering the sorts of people who come looking for them, I can’t imagine that a bit of light necromancy is really that difficult.”
Vanessa laughed through her sniffling nose. “Why don’t you go tell Dr. Clarke that?”
“Noah wasn’t kidding.” Jo leaned on the fencepost, crossing her arms and glaring at the overly wholesome sight of little animals creeping over to investigate her boots. “She’s a real piece of work.”
A real piece of work, and a good physician.
Jo glanced back at the garden door. She could take this as a blessing. Vanessa and Paul would need whatever little knowledge Jo could bring more than ever in light of this rejection. But while Jo wanted to remain suspicious of Vanessa’s motives, that wasn’t working quite as well right now. She’d hate to leave a kind person, who meant her no harm and meant the world to her dearest companion, in a dangerous circumstance without trying to fix it.
There had to be something Jo could say to smooth this over. Stark and sour as she seemed, the buttoned-up Dr. Clarke had a button loose somewhere. It was less obvious than Jo’s own literal one, but such was the nature of women’s garb.
Which Jo, for her part, knew perfectly well how to loosen.