Chapter Six
Jo
As much as Jo hated to see such an insufferable creature proven correct, Dr. Clarke’s stingy suggestions around loose lacings and lemon water did improve Vanessa’s appetite in the weeks that followed.
Even worse, Vanessa was nearly as enthusiastic about Jo’s questionable contributions of ginger, potato soups, and the cutesy folksongs she kept pulling out of her arse on the unfortunate evenings that saw all three of them at home at the same time. She was doing her best to avoid being home with Paul entirely, since he used those opportunities to attempt serious conversations about the future of everyone’s living arrangements, and she was still too mixed-up to deal with that. But while she’d mostly avoided being alone with him, and managed to be very busy with something whenever she couldn’t, Vanessa kept asking for her company and support after rehearsals. The folksongs ensured these evenings were light and bright; even at his most annoyed, Paul wasn’t the grim, practical kind of monster who would interrupt two women belting “Molly Malone” at somebody’s blossoming belly. It was far too quaint.
Quite by accident, she’d found that being impenetrably quaint was even better armor against awkwardness and decision-making than being demonstrably helpful. Fortunately, because each of their employment and social habits came with very different hours, these occurrences were infrequent enough that Jo hadn’t yet needed to go so far as to knit wee things too darling to disturb.
Which was good, because quaintness did not come easily to her, feeling as false as the paint on Vanessa’s lips. She’d left quaintness back in Ireland. She certainly did not remember how to knit, for God’s sake, and Gran’s book still hadn’t turned up. She’d found a few more dime novels that had gone missing from collections. An early Dickens volume that was probably worth a pretty penny to the right collector. Even a slew of embarrassing old photographs of herself from back when she’d thought she belonged in front of the pornographer’s camera rather than setting his type out of sight. But no sign of Gran’s book.
Incredible, really. A bit of a misstep, a span of neglect, and next thing you knew, someone—no, something—something you’d known all your life could simply vanish, never to be seen again.
It was becoming a problem. She could not quite let herself feel the gravity of what it might mean to have lost the only object she had from the one family member who’d never betrayed her; once she started feeling that sadness, she worried she’d never come out of it. But there were practical concerns as well. Aside from Jo’s inability to get that button to stay put for more than a handful of wears, her feeble attempts at quaint and enjoyable evenings with Vanessa had led to a conversation that was not quite as horrible as the one Paul was plotting, but came close:
“Oh, and you’ll be with me when the baby comes, won’t you, dear Jo?” Vanessa declared, clutching Jo’s arm and half-swooning as she so often did, even when she was feeling perfectly fine. “Judith back at the actresses’ home has caught a few babies for friends, and she’ll do it for me, but given...you know.” She would never, ever say my age, even though Jo knew what it was by now. “And that we didn’t find a doctor after all... I’d just feel so much better to have someone like you there with us.”
“Vanessa,” Jo said, half-pleading because all this bloody nesting had made her nearly as attached to this woman and her child as she was to the husband she was still pretty certain she was going to lose any day now. “I’m not a midwife. I don’t really know what I’m doing. A farmgirl picks a few things up. That’s all.”
“But those few things are better than nothing,” Vanessa insisted. “And while your hands are not skillful, I think we both know that they are very kind. Whatever happens to us in that childbed, kind hands will make all the difference to me.”
Bloody hell! Kind hands? What was Jo supposed to do with that? Not to mention the obvious fear that lived behind the dramatic sparkle in Vanessa’s eye. This shit was real, was really happening, and with Dr. Clarke having been nothing more than an annoyingly beautiful waste of time, it looked like Jo was going to have to figure out how to be quaint and helpful.
And as she had no experience, no friends who were of any help, and no idea whether she’d find her gran’s advice in time, she had only one companion to turn to. The only one she’d had longer than Paul:
Books.
Fortunately, she had plenty of those in her bookshop, and much more organized than the ones at home. Paul had bought Morgan Murray’s off the worst bookseller in London as a cover operation for their press a few years back, and had turned most of its care over to Jo. While it had been a damned process getting the neglected shelves in order, the upfront work Jo had done on the place was certainly paying off now. Finding the medicine and motherhood books among her inventory should prove easy enough.
Though it was a Sunday—often a sleepy, lazy day for women who were not particularly welcome in their parishes—the shop employee, Alma Merriweather, came down from her flat above the place when she heard Jo thumping around. She stood behind the counter by habit, quietly watching Jo’s stacks grow. Once it had become a rather formidable fortress, she peeked out from between the columns. “Joey?”
“Yes?” said Jo from the stepladder, wishing she was just a smidge taller as she reached for a volume at the very top.
“What are you doing, exactly?”
One more stretch, and she had the book in hand. She tucked it under her arm and brought it down, placing it directly in front of Alma. “Becoming an expert in midwifery.”
Alma picked up the book, peering at the parental title printed across the cover. “Is this about Dr. Clarke rejecting Miss Garcia?”
“Bugger Dr. Clarke,” Jo snapped, resenting the way that irritating woman’s bright, severe eyes flashed through her mind. “Bugger all those high-minded doctors, in fact. Let them have their lances and their mercury and their lemony dispositions.” She started taking books from the stacks she’d made, reorganizing them by urgency. “We don’t need them.”
“You seem very serious about this all of a sudden,” Alma said. “I thought you were only playing the expert for your own benefit.”
“You’re absolutely right.” Jo set aside one of the most promising of the volumes. “I am a terrific prat, and only acted like I could help so she wouldn’t run me off with a pitchfork. Sadly for her, though, I might genuinely be the best she’s got. I saw a new side of her in Surrey and... I can’t leave her on her own. I’ve got to help. I’m still no expert, but I’ve got a lot of books, eh? And my grandmother must have delivered a hundred babies back in the day. As for hands-on...well... I watched my littlest brothers come into the world, not to mention all the calves and puppies, so it’s not like I lack an understanding of the basic mechanics.”
Alma looked skeptically at the stacks. “When you explain this to Miss Garcia, I strongly recommend you leave the puppies out of it.”
“I’ll need my gran’s own book too, of course,” Jo went on, patting one of the piles like it was the old friend that would see them through this. “No O’Donnell woman ever expected doctors or hospitals to be involved in their breeding. She practically wrote a bloody textbook of her own to see her granddaughters through. I never did pay much attention to the relevant pages, but I know they’re in there.”
A curious look crossed Alma’s face. “Never?” She bit her lip, hesitated, but pressed on. “I mean to say... I know you and Paul began your marriage as a proper one. And you are...well...”
“Catholic?” Jo supplied with a wry look. She and Paul did try not to call attention to that socially indecent fact of themselves, hardly better than their occupations, depending on the audience. Downplaying it was usually simple enough, but Alma had been working for the Smiths long enough to have caught on. “Let’s just say the page I liked best listed some teas that let me stop flipping and get back to work.”
“Not very Catholic of you.”
“You clearly haven’t talked to enough of us after a couple strong drinks.”
The turn of the conversation seemed to hit Alma hard. Jo suddenly regretted that she hadn’t thought that possibility through before she started tossing motherhood books around. Having once found herself in Miss Garcia’s situation, without Miss Garcia’s sense of freedom or independence, Alma had her own troubles and tragedies related to the subject. This position at the bookshop, and her little home above it, was a very fortunate and very unlikely fate, one that Jo was proud to have been able to provide.
“Alright?” Jo asked.
“Well enough.” Alma sighed and opened the nearest tome. “It’s just so hard, isn’t it? Sometimes it seems that none of us is unaffected, in one way or another.”
Of all things, it was Dr. Clarke’s tight jaw and rigid posture that flashed through Jo’s mind, framed with that wispy, out-of-place little hair. Though the doctor’s home had been filled with comfort, something must have been hard for her too, in this world that saw all of them as little more than property for someone else’s propagation. A true life of ease did not create a woman so full of barely buttoned rage...but no. Jo wouldn’t allow this little scratch of compassion to take hold. Something might have been hard for Dr. Clarke too, but that didn’t give her any right to take it out on Vanessa.
It was almost worse that her advice on the corset had been spot-on. It brought into sharper relief just how much better off the poor woman would be with some proper care. That Dr. Clarke was refusing to give further help in potentially more dire circumstances was rankling.
“Anyway.” Alma leaned across the counter. “I think that if you needed more support with Miss Garcia, I might be able to bring a perspective of my own. I’ve been through it myself, you know, start to finish. I even nursed my little one for a few days, before the nuns found better circumstances for her.”
Found better circumstances.Alma’s way of spinning gold through the disaster of her ruin bordered on heroic. “Are you certain it wouldn’t be too taxing on your nerves?”
“Quite the contrary,” Alma sighed. “It might give meaning to the situation, on the nights when I’m up wondering what the devil it was all for.”
“That’s very good of you. Thank you.” She paused. “I’m getting hungry, are you?”
“Famished.”
“Let’s fortify ourselves before we carry on with all this, shall we? Doesn’t seem like work for an empty stomach at all.”
“Agreed!” said Alma, clapping her hands together girlishly. “Let’s bring something back from Bradigan’s across the way. It’s my favorite.”
Jo glanced out the window toward Bradigan Son’s Coffee House, an eclectic spot run by another former member of the English Martyrs mission church where Jo had landed when she got to London.
Now that was a life she’d packed up and left just as thoroughly as she’d left her first home. She’d met Paul at that church. Raised in London from birth, he’d been childhood friends with the Bradigans and others like them from his first days at the parish school until long after he’d grown into the eccentric bachelor who printed all the church’s handbills, songbooks, and documents. When Jo married him, she’d thrown herself fully and sometimes even happily into the life they were building in the parish community, but those friendships were worse than awkward now. Even the odd family who owned the coffee house, a clan scolded for being uncommonly friendly with radical groups of Protestant dissenters, couldn’t stay on good terms with Jo and Paul once they’d changed their last name from Shanahan to Smith and moved on to print scandals on Holywell Street.
Jo didn’t relish going into that coffee house. While she couldn’t regret her more authentic existence, it was bloody depressing to be reminded that every authentic move she’d made had required complete severance from everyone and everything she’d known. Popping into Bradigan Son’s was about as appealing as hopping on a boat back to her birthplace. But Alma was positively glowing at the mere mention of it. It wouldn’t kill her, she supposed, to grab the girl what she wanted.
“What should I get? I’ve never been in.”
“But it’s so close by!”
“I’ve got my reasons.”
“Get the cinnamon-raisin cake,” Alma said. “It’s divine!”
“Cake? For dinner?”
Alma waved a hand. “Oh, I’ll eat a proper dinner too. But it’s the cake that matters, so make sure not to forget it or we might as well have gone somewhere else entirely!”
The coffee house smelled of its namesake’s elixir and something slightly too close to funeral incense to be entirely tasteful. The whole place struck Jo as ten times more decadent than the decadence she’d been accused of. No mermaids to hold your hat, but rather poorly done paintings of the Blessed Virgin amid a dull, earthy color palette. It was all a bit mismatched and confused, but seeing as the assortment of customers was similarly ragtag, she supposed the assault on beauty fit well enough.
No one she used to know seemed to be in, thankfully, some narrow bloke behind the counter instead. He talked so fast to the pair at the counter that he must have had a barrel of coffee already to be able to sustain that pace. As Jo took her place in the queue, she heard him conclude the monologue with “And will it be your usual, Mr. Clarke?”
“Certo, gratzie,” said the customer in a soft voice that Jo had never heard outside the pink-lit parlor of The Curious Fox.
Before Jo could figure out what she was supposed to do in this situation, Noah Clarke and David Forester turned around, freezing when they saw who’d taken up the place behind them in line. They all had a heartbeat’s span to decide whether they knew each other outside the walls of the club. Since Noah and David were known by name to the staff, she touched her hat, making her eyes say: up to you.
Noah smiled, then David did too.
“Miss Jo?” Noah said carefully, as if he wasn’t sure he’d really recognized her. “Is that you?”
“Is indeed.” She shook their hands in the solemn, proper greeting that would catch no notice. “I wouldn’t have expected to see you in a place like this.”
“My family and a few others from our chapel back home come out to hear talks put on by one of the London congregations every few months,” Noah explained, glancing up the rickety staircase. “Afterward, we come here to socialize. Not my choice of an afternoon, but it’s a chance to see my father and sister while they’re in the city. Well, my sister this time. My father wasn’t feeling up to dealing with the trains today.”
Jo’s head whipped around to the staircase too, so fast she nearly lost her hat. “She’s here? Dr. Clarke?”
“Oh yes,” said Noah. “She never misses these London talks, come hell or high-water.”
“Hmm.” Jo was tempted to storm up there and give Dr. Clarke all the hell and high-water she could manage. “Well, I’m just here to get some food to sustain me while I read up on how to help Miss Garcia do the same, whilst she and her baby waste away into nothing with naught but myself to care for them. Let your sister know that for me, will you?”
A chaotic mischief crossed Noah’s face that was hardly less devious here than it was when covered in cosmetics at the club. “You could tell her yourself, if you’d like. Our meetings are open to all.”
David gave them both a warning look. “Are you trying to cause a scene?”
“No,” said Noah, putting an offended hand to the drooping bowtie on his chest. “But Emily would more than deserve it, if I were. I know she can be prim—” he said it like he very much meant a more colorful phrase “—but I also know her to be generally good and practical, and far as I can tell, there was no good or practical reason for her to turn Miss Garcia out. I was horrified when she told me. Our father was too. And, quite frankly, I know we wouldn’t be the only ones, should someone happen to mention that my sister refused to care for an unwed mother before a room full of nosy social reformers.”
“He is definitely trying to cause a scene.” David took Noah by the arm. “Let’s go. Take care, Miss Jo.”
“No longer interested in getting the two of them talking, then?” said Noah, all false innocence.
“My interest was in them talking,” David said, “not arguing in public. Let’s go.”
He dragged Noah off to the staircase, but as they started up, Noah turned and winked his formal invitation for Jo to come cause whatever sort of scene she liked.
“Help you, ah, Miss?” said the man behind the counter. He looked her over curiously, but was not as shocked as people usually were when they encountered her for the first time. She could appreciate that and returned his politeness as she ordered the cake and some more suitable foods to bring back to the bookshop.
Then she requested that he hold it for her for a few minutes while she went upstairs to visit with an acquaintance that she was very eager to have a chat with before she left.
“And do tell the Bradigans,” she added, filled with deviously bright spirits, appreciating this place far more than she had at first, “that old Jenny Shanahan sends her compliments for the outstanding decorations.”
Upstairs, she found a mixed group of somberly dressed men and rationally dressed women, done up in the muted woolen colors and old-fashioned cuts that marked their political position. Every last one of them stared at her. Clearly, strangers even more eccentric than they were did not often wander up into the private meetings.
Her gaze drifted to a few chairs under the breezy open window. Out the corner of her eye, she saw Noah rising to introduce her, but the full fixture of her attention locked without delay on the woman sitting beside him.
Dr. Clarke, strapped securely into gray skirts and a simple jacket, had gathered her hair into that same skull-squeezing bun. She was uncorsetted again, but so slim and erect it hardly mattered. No cosmetics. No jewelry. No nonsense. Jo would have recognized her anywhere. A clawing sensation sprang to life low in Jo’s belly, a throbbing annoyance that was almost thrilling in its intensity.
When Dr. Clarke spotted Jo, she blushed spectacularly pink all across her porcelain face. She turned with barely contained rage to her brother, but he was already up and rapidly gliding out of her reach.
“Miss Jo!” He took her in for a delighted handshake. He smiled at their curious audience, their heads cocked for information about the oddity in their midst. “Just a friend of mine that I ran into downstairs. She runs the bookshop across the way, Morgan Murray’s.”
Once she’d been explained so adequately, most of them went back to their own coffee cups and conversations, and Noah led her to his spot beneath the window.
As Jo’s shadow fell over her, Dr. Clarke stared determinedly into the glossy black puddle of coffee in her cup. She glared at it so intensely that one might think she was attempting to telekinetically turn the bitter beverage into a dagger with which to stab her brother. Or maybe Jo. It was hard to tell, just now, which was the greater object of her ire.
Noah dragged another chair over and placed it between himself and his sister, with David across looking distinctly miserable about this turn of events. Once Noah sat her down, he settled into his own place, looking every bit the person who played the part of the meddling, gossipy Miss Penelope Primrose during the Fox’s drag parties. “No need for introductions, are there? Seeing as you’ve known Mr. Forester for some time now, and have also had the pleasure of making my sister’s acquaintance just last month.”
He procured a cup from somewhere, almost magicianlike, pouring and passing it to Jo as he smiled and blinked innocently.
Jo took the cup, feeling waves of irritation coming off the doctor. But what should she be so miffed about? It was Dr. Clarke who’d sent Jo and Vanessa on their way. Jo was perfectly within her rights to be here. In fact, if not for preferring to avoid coffee house owners who remembered her by retired aliases, she might have visited with this group before now, given the proximity of her shop and her friendship with one of the regulars.
With that in mind, she met the doctor’s lack of hospitality with an equal air of comfort, kicking an ankle up over her knee and sipping the rich coffee with relish.
“Thank you very much, Noah,” she said casually, eyes slipping sideways to Dr. Clarke’s stony face. “I can’t stay long, but a bit of good brew like this will do me good.”
“Oh!” said Noah with slightly exaggerated surprise. “And where you do need to rush off to?”
“I only stopped over to pick up a little dinner for myself and my coworker.” She glanced at Dr. Clarke, who now looked like she was trying to turn the coffee not into a dagger, but into a broadsword. Jo smiled. There was something satisfying about getting under her skin. “We’re reading up on women’s medical matters so we can help our ailing companion Miss Garcia. You remember Miss Garcia, don’t you, Dr. Clarke?”
Dr. Clarke finally met Jo’s eye. “Of course I remember her,” she said, moving her mouth as little as possible. Jo noticed that they were well-formed lips, plumped, perhaps, by their incessant pursing. “And how is she?”
Jo drank from her cup and stared the doctor down, even as she kept her voice pleasant. “Still having trouble eating much. But I’m doing my best to become a suitable childbed companion. All on my own. With no help, training, or even compassion from the world outside.”
The coffee-scented air crackled between them. The doctor, obviously, wanted to snap, and Jo sat in as relaxed a fashion as possible, raising her eyebrows and just daring her to start.
David cleared his throat, far more uncomfortable with the tension than the smug-looking lover beside him. “It’s good of you to be there for her,” he said in a light, even voice.
“It is good of me, isn’t it?” She lifted her cup toward Dr. Clarke, who did not opt to toast Jo’s goodness. But that was alright. She was in a room full of nosy social reformers, after all. If she raised her voice a notch, someone else might lift a non-intoxicating glass to her upright actions.
“Regarding the plight of unwed mothers,” she went on with a heavy sigh, peeking to ensure she had the attention of a nearby group, “I don’t see how punishing the indiscretions of working-class women does any good for our society. Give the girl some help, I say, and you’ll see how willing even our most reviled are to create lives of meaning and contribution.”
Over Dr. Clarke’s rigid shoulder, another drab and frowning sort of woman raised her own cup. “Hear, hear,” she said, confirming that Jo’s performance had successfully roused her social sentiments. “And perhaps, become more willing to instill the resulting virtues in her offspring, so that they might avoid her mistakes.”
Jo may have read a few dissenter pamphlets in her day, but never before had someone looked at her in all seriousness and used the word offspring in conversation about human beings. Fuck. Though it took every shred of self-control she possessed, Jo managed not to laugh, not to even smile. She just nodded right along, then nudged Dr. Clarke, a tiny touch that made the doctor jump and scoot to the other side of her chair.
“See,” Jo said, smoldering with satisfaction. “Someone agrees with me.”
The frowning woman turned her grimness onto Dr. Clarke, who waved her hands back and forth like she was erasing Jo’s words from a slate. “I don’t disagree with you, Mrs. Smith,” she said hurriedly. Once the attention of Mrs. Frown was diverted elsewhere, she lowered her voice and muttered to her coffee, “Nothing about any of this bothers me in the slightest.”
Oh, but it did. The palpable heat of her annoyance was more delicious than anything coming out of the coffee house kitchen. Jo was ready for her next helping before she’d even finished the first.
“Glad to hear it, Dr. Clarke,” she said, still a little on the loud side. “I suppose I misunderstood your position. I was under the impression that you turned Miss Garcia away due to her scandalous circumstances.”
“I didn’t turn her away because she was unwed,” Dr. Clarke hissed, eyes darting to the others nearby. “I would appreciate it if you did not imply—”
“No, I know you didn’t turn her away for that,” Jo interrupted, making to pat the doctor’s hand where it was settled on the arm rest.
Dr. Clarke snatched her hand back as if from the jaws of a lion. “Good, because—”
“I thought it was your judgement against the father—a man you’ve never even met—that led you to make ungenerous assumptions about a woman who ought to have been respected as an individual soul.” She sipped her coffee innocently. “Do you agree with that as well, Dr. Clarke?”
There were some mutters and nods from those listening, and a few suspicious looks in the doctor’s direction. Noah looked poised on the edge of a cackle, while David stared at the floor with a grimace on his face.
“I understand,” said the doctor, in a shaking voice that just barely carried beneath the building chatter of Jo’s new admirers, “that you are trying to humiliate me.”
“Indeed,” Jo said pleasantly. “Is it working?”
“No,” said Dr. Clarke. “The whole act strikes me as petulant, childish, and unkind.”
The unexpected word sent harsh flare of temper through Jo’s belly.
“Unkind?” she snapped, her feigned air of intellectual ease dropping as incredulity took over. “Me? You’re the one who turned her out. How am I the unkind one?”
“Because you’re only doing this to upset someone you know nothing about. You aren’t here to change my mind. You’re here to enrage me and cause me trouble with my own community.” Somehow Dr. Clarke managed to straighten her spine even further as she said with a heated glare, “So yes. You are the unkind one, Mrs. Smith.”
Jo got to her feet before she knew what she was doing. Enough of this shite. She turned to Noah. “You were right,” she said. “Your sister really is a damned piece of work. You can bloody keep her.”
This outburst garnered more attention than the glances and mutterings of before. Every eye in the room was on them now, seeming confused as to how Jo had gone so quickly from rational to tempestuous. Tongues clicked; whispers flew. Good. Let them see a few feathers get ruffled, a few buttons out of place, a little decadence. She’d lost the audience, but that was alright: Noah and David aside, she couldn’t care less what these people thought of her.
In the spirit of that, she gulped down the rest of her coffee before setting her cup down hard enough to make the spoons rattle. She strode out of the parlor, slamming the door shut.
She wasn’t even halfway down the stairs before she heard the door and more footsteps behind her. At the bottom, she turned to tell Noah she was fine and apologize if the scene was more than he’d bargained for.
But it wasn’t Noah following her.
It was Dr. Clarke. And she’d brought enough fire along to rumple her jacket and send a few flyaways out of her bun, catching the light of the hallway sconces like the halo she clearly believed she possessed. She gripped the rail with one hand and her skirts with the other.
“Mrs. Smith, I have worked too hard to have you misrepresent me like that in front of my peers.” She grasped her skirts tighter and pulled them out of her way, high enough to flash tight boot lacings and the soft cream of a practical woolen stocking. Her rigid heels clacked on the steps until she was two above Jo, pointing a finger inches from Jo’s nose. “You will go back up there and apologize for the spectacle you have made of my family.”
Jo blinked, overtaken half by a matching anger and half by something a bit more entertaining. The swirl of intensity and embarrassment had made the prim doctor appear almost wild. So this was what she was bottling up so carefully.
It might be appropriate to snap back at such fervor with a harsh quip of her own, but Jo suddenly lacked the motivation for it. It was actually a relief to see all that tension released at last. It suited Dr. Clarke to make demands from the fire in her belly instead of the list in her head.
Jo shook that off. Her business with the doctor was done. “Don’t worry,” she said. “They’re your friends. Not mine. In a few minutes, they’ll remember all your most admirable qualities, and the only spectacle I’ll have made is of myself. Good day to you.”
Averting her eyes from the stormy vision on the staircase, she went to the counter for the bundled food that awaited her.
But once she’d gathered it up and turned for the door, she nearly dropped it all when she found Dr. Clarke standing so close that their skirts would have brushed, had Jo been wearing one.
“Mrs. Smith, I insist that you set things right.”
How was this interaction not over yet? She tried to go around the doctor, but was blocked by a hasty side step. She snorted out an astounded laugh before she could help herself, then went the other direction. When Dr. Clarke blocked her yet again, she shifted the packages in her arms and shouldered the doctor out of her way. Given Dr. Clarke’s stony demeanor, Jo expected her to feel like a cold statue, and was so shocked to feel a soft, yielding arm against her own that she nearly stopped in her tracks.
But there would be no stopping and no softness. She pulled her own arm tight to her side and whisked to the door, only to find her hands were too full to open it.
She tipped her head back. Fuck. Those severe heels clacked up behind her, and a small hand appeared on the door handle.
In the most reluctant act of chivalry Jo had ever seen in her life, Dr. Clarke held the door open. “After you.”
Jo eyed the windows in hopes of spotting a more suitable escape, but they were overlaid with wrought iron and stained glass that looked unlikely to budge. Plagued by a prickling awareness of the doctor as she passed through the doorway, Jo went out onto the street without a glance or a thank-you.
When the door shut behind her, it was with Dr. Clarke on the wrong side of it.
Was this woman really going to follow Jo back to the bookshop? It was absurd. And yet, that’s just what she did. The whole way, Jo was dogged by clicking heels and the furious swish of skirts. When they arrived beneath the Morgan Murray’s sign, Jo peeked through the window, hoping Alma would save her, but it seemed she’d gone upstairs.
Dr. Clarke drew breath to launch into something or other, but Jo cut her off.
“If you’re going to do...whatever this is,” she said, “then at least make yourself useful and get the door for me again, would you?”
Dr. Clarke pursed her lips, sealing up whatever she’d been about to say. Yes, it was certainly that pursing that plumped them. It would add up to quite a bit of exercise if she did it as often as Jo suspected. The habit was a trying one, but the effect, at least, was admirable.
Dr. Clarke tugged futilely on the door handle. “It’s locked.”
“Of course it is,” said Jo. “This is London. Can’t leave our doors unlocked like you probably do out in Farm-Brush—”
“Farncombe.” She shook back one of those wispy hairs that were always trying so desperately to escape her wrath. “Where’s the key?”
A smirk crossed Jo’s face. “The key is in my pocket, isn’t it?”
Dr. Clarke’s cheeks flushed an impressive pink that trailed down her smooth neck and vanished into the high, no-frills collar of her frock. Jo fleetingly wondered how far such the flush went, particularly with her blood flow unrestricted by a corset. Was she one of those porcelain sorts whose whole chests brightened under the influence of shame?
Or passion?
Jo realized that her gaze was drifting along with her musings. But it wasn’t her fault that Emily Clarke was as pretty as she was insufferable. Seeing as this would be Jo’s last look at the woman, she supposed it was as good a time as any to make it a thorough one. It wasn’t as if she would actually fetch that key; she was probably about to storm off, never to be seen again and muttering about impropriety all the while.
Though what little of Dr. Clarke’s visible skin remained bright red, her demeanor remained determinedly stoic. Far from running from Jo’s challenge, she met it head-on, slipping her slim fingers straight into Jo’s front pocket to feel around for the key.
Jo nearly dropped her burdens as shocking warmth shot from the clinically confident touch into all the most interesting spots nearby. It took until the doctor’s eyes narrowed for her to unstick her throat enough to choke out, “It’s the, er, other pocket.”
Arms still full of boxes, she couldn’t watch Dr. Clarke’s hand slip from one pocket to invade the next one over, but she could sure as hell feel it. Her fingers were supposed to feel like steely, pinching forceps, but they did not. They were soft, ticklish, and far more pleasant than Jo liked to admit.
At last, the key was procured. Dr. Clarke seemed to have reached the maximum of redness a while back, so it was impossible to say whether she’d been as affected by the action as Jo was. She unlocked the bookshop door and held it open.
“Well?” said Dr. Clarke impatiently when Jo remained frozen at the threshold. “Go ahead.”
Snapping out of it at last, Jo passed through the narrow doorway into her shop. Though Dr. Clarke’s skirts were of a narrow sweep with little in the way of a bustle, the garment swelled just a bit too far to avoid a brush of gray wool against Jo’s calves, the sensation making her heart stutter uncomfortably.
She unstacked the boxes on the counter, peering up the staircase. Jo was torn between calling Alma down as reinforcements, or sparing her the trouble of dealing with Dr. Clarke, who had come along into the shop’s interior without an invitation.
Exasperated, Jo wanted to grab Dr. Clarke by the shoulders, using the excuse of shaking her or turning her out to feel that velvety humanness that only appeared when they were touching. Instead, she crossed her arms over her middle, tight enough to strain the waistcoat button she still hadn’t gotten around to mending properly.
“Dr. Clarke.” It was supposed to be a snap, but came out as a frustrated huff. “What are you doing here?”
Dr. Clarke twisted the key in her hands and then held it out. Jo kept her arms crossed as something petulant reared its head and refused to let her do even the smallest, most reasonable bit of Dr. Clarke’s bidding.
“You embarrassed me,” said Dr. Clarke. She firmly held the key out yet again, though her voice was gentler than it had been.
Jo considered snatching at the key, but she since couldn’t bring herself to do it with the proper force, she opted to wait until her ire could peak again. “It ain’t my fault that your motives for turning Miss Garcia away were unpalatable to your friends.”
“What do you know about my motives?” Dr. Clarke looked her up and down for the sake of demonstration, but turned red again. The fury left her voice, replaced with something unexpectedly shaky. “I’m so glad you get to prance around in trousers, giving your husband away for Christmas, and living without any expectations hanging over your head. We aren’t all so lucky, however, so I would appreciate if you could at the very least—”
“Lucky?” Jo had been called a lot of things over the years. Reckless. Scattered. Brilliant. Foolish. Pretty. Dapper. Confusing-as-all-get-out. But she could not recall anyone accusing her of being lucky. “You think I was born into the situation you found me in, Dr. Clarke? That my parents swaddled me up in a fine gentleman’s cravat until I was big enough for them to say, ‘Go on, Joey’—as if they picked that name for me on day one—‘go live how you like. Do whatever you please.’”
Dr. Clarke stared at Jo with her purse-plumped lips parted, but no words spilled from them this time, angry or otherwise. She looked lost, like she’d only just found herself in this shop by magic.
The air between them softened, but was still far from comfortable. Soft, sure, but also tight and impossible, like the first breath in a silken corset. For the first time since meeting this woman, she wasn’t angry or frustrated. She felt pity. She’d assumed that a woman who put stock in luck couldn’t become a physician, but based on the dazed look on Dr. Clarke’s face, she felt as trapped as Jo had as a housewife. The rejection of Vanessa clearly had more to do with that unhappiness than it did with Paul’s press.
Jo finally reached for the key between them, feeling the contrast of cold metal and smooth skin.
Dr. Clarke looked at their hands, still clasped around the key. Jo startled at the realization that neither of them had pulled back yet. That she didn’t really want to pull back. In fact, she wanted to push into the contact, lacing their fingers and asking what she was so unhappy about. If she cared what she looked like to her nonconforming peers above all else, she’d have taken Vanessa on. So what was holding her back?
Slow, finger by finger almost, Dr. Clarke let go of the key, smoothing her hand distractedly down her skirt. Distracted and distracting: Jo was mesmerized by the movement until the hitch of breath, a precursor to speech, brought her gaze up to the doctor’s mouth instead. Lips not pursed, but parted with words clearly waiting at the threshold, words Jo suspected might be unlike the others she’d heard fall from them...
A skittering clatter at their feet stole their attention, nearly deafening in the close, pulsing air. A button peered up from the floor like a nosy black eye. Jo tried to step back, feeling absurdly like she’d been caught at something, but her back was to the counter already.
And though Dr. Clarke had the whole world behind her, she didn’t retreat. Instead, she stooped, flashing the very top of her tight bun, which gleamed golden in the sunlight. She picked the button up and straightened, squinting clinically at it. With an automatic air, she lifted it to its original place, as if testing whether she’d found the right spot for a puzzle piece.
The spot being, of course, the edge of Jo’s waistcoat that fell over her breast. The faint whisper of pressure had Jo feeling how her heart thudded against the fabric like it wanted to reach out and grab the button back itself. That was the job of Jo’s hand, but she didn’t trust that part to do it, either. Her fingers itched, not to push Dr. Clarke away and snatch back her property, but to behave just as devil-may-care as Dr. Clarke thought she was, pulling her closer and breaking the threads of whatever flimsy button kept the doctor herself so put together.
But before she could do anything, proper or improper, there was a creak on the upstairs floorboards. Dr. Clarke stepped back in a panic, sweeping at her wayward flyaways. With one last, wide-eyed look, the doctor turned, skirts swishing, and all but ran out onto the street, back to her own world, where the shirts were starched, the coffee was strong, and the buttons were secure.
“Joey?”
Alma’s voice from the staircase startled off the desire to chase Dr. Clarke down. And thank goodness, really; there was no way Jo cared enough about the woman to do something that ridiculous.
The key to the shop was still in Jo’s hand, but her button was not. The trouble of sewing it back on was solved: Dr. Clarke had run off with it. Jo slipped the lonely key into her pocket, so recently breached by soft, steady fingers, then turned to the counter and started opening the parcels of food in a daze.
Alma joined her in the task, ignoring all the proper food she’d promised to eat as she sneaked a pinch off the raisin cake.
“I was starting to worry,” she said. “What took you so long?”
Jo looked over her shoulder and out the window, as if she might still be able to spot a flash of gray wool and wispy hair.
“Honestly?” She broke a bite of crust off her pie. “I have no idea.”