Chapter 4
When Mae returned, she did so with more than just bandages.
Apparently, that market stall in Covent Garden was well armed with a variety of tonics and cures.
Its bounty put a cool glass of pain-relieving bitters in Rosalind’s hand and a smear of something rather acerbic on her leg before it was covered in a healthy wrapping of gauze.
She had to sit sidelong to sip the herbal drink and tried not to look down at her ruined dress, for she was certain it would be the final push that would make her collapse into tears.
Mae gently helped her loosen the ribbons holding her bonnet into place and set it on a sideboard, where it watched her as she pushed the bitter liquid down and marveled at how cold her leg felt next to the other, while in and of itself, it felt a perfectly normal temperature, if a bit numb.
Matthew Everly was seated across from them, his elbows on his knees and his hands in his curly brown hair, staring blankly into the space directly in front of him.
“That’s going to make you drowsy,” Mae warned, nodding toward the glass. “But I think you’ll be grateful for it. If it were up to me, you wouldn’t move from that couch until tomorrow at the absolute earliest.”
“She can stay,” Matthew said in a hollow voice. “What harm could it do at this point?”
Mae frowned, glancing over her shoulder at him. “What exactly happened while I was gone?”
There was no time to answer. The door to the parish house was still propped open, and through it, they could all hear the agitated sound of her brother’s brogue, demanding an explanation for whatever he’d heard as Thaddeus Beck led him through whatever remained of the church picnic.
“Rosalind?!” he exploded, disbelief and outrage in his voice. “My Rosalind?! They must be mistaken.”
She frowned, listening to Hannah’s voice joining them as they passed through the door, urgently attempting to explain the first portion of today’s misadventure.
She got as far as the statue falling before Abe rounded the corner and saw his sister rumpled on a couch, her dress spattered with suspicious and copious amounts of red.
He immediately paled and lurched forward toward her.
“Abe, I’m all right,” she attempted to cry out, though it exited her lips very languidly, as though she was not very bothered about all of this at all. “I am well.”
“You are not well,” Abe said, coming to his knees to look her in the eye and cupping her face in his hands, his eyes searching her features as though looking for damage. “Did she break a bone?” he asked without looking away from her. “Did she need stitching?”
“No and no,” said Mae Casper. “It’s a deep bruise, maybe to the bone, but just a bruise and some scrapes.”
“Just a bruise,” Rosalind echoed dreamily. “See, Abe? Just a bruise.”
Hannah and her husband were talking softly to one another in the corner and turned toward the group with a pair of wary expressions.
“Matthew,” Hannah said cautiously, taking a step toward him. “We understand that Lord Keaton and a few others walked in and saw … erm …”
“Saw you icing Rosalind’s leg,” Mr. Beck said, glowering at his friend as though he had been doing something perverse. “Apparently, it looked a bit scandalous.”
“Oh,” said Mae, touching her lips. “Oh, dear.”
Abe craned his neck around to look at the vicar. Rosalind could not see his expression so much as she could feel it. “You did what?” he said, very softly.
“Abe,” she managed to murmur, reaching out to squeeze his hand, ostensibly to prevent him from doing murder. “He was helping me.”
“It’s my fault,” Mae whispered, her fingernails digging into her bottom lip. “I left. I told him not to stop icing her wound.”
“It’s no one’s fault,” Matthew said, finally moving from his frozen state and raising his head to look around the room. “But it happened, and now we must decide how we are to deal with it.”
“Lord Keaton was making quite a lot of noise about Miss Murphy being ruined and her reputation and so on,” Mr. Beck said, showing quite a few of his teeth as he got the words out.
“I believe the expectation in these situations is that when you compromise the lady, you marry her to mitigate the damage.”
“Now hold on a damn minute,” said Abe Murphy, coming to his feet, though he did not release his sister’s hand.
“Abe,” Rosalind said again, though it came out in a bit of a slur, her hand going as slack as her tongue seemed to be.
“Rosalind isn’t some ton debutante,” he said, clasping her palm and pointing around the room at the gathered people. “She can’t be ruined. She isn’t obligated to do anything at all.”
Hannah took a short little breath and nodded. “That isn’t untrue,” she said evenly. “She is unknown to the bulk of Society. She could escape this scandal unscathed, most likely, if it is given enough time to die down.”
“She might,” Mr. Beck said darkly, “but Matthew wouldn’t.”
They all paused, turning to regard the vicar, who was wearing a flat-lined expression about his mouth and a resigned wrinkle of his brow. “Ah, Tod,” he said, sounding very tired. “I think my time here was limited anyhow.”
“No,” Rosalind said, trying to force the weights from her eyelashes, to pull herself up on her elbows and failing, collapsing back into the cushions of the sofa with a soft whimper. “No. No, I shall. Yes.”
She wasn’t sure if anyone was listening, so beset was she immediately after saying these words with a violent yawn that stretched her face very far apart. After that, she truly could not open her eyes again, though she could hear them, faintly, as though they were floating at some distance away.
“What was in that tonic?” Matthew asked.
“Several things,” Mae answered helpfully.
“... take her home?” Abe said. “Or make another bed.”
“I’ll go tell Millie,” Hannah offered. “Shall I bring you anything? A new dress for Rosalind?”
“Matthew, we need to discuss this,” Mr. Beck said.
She made a sound like humming in trying to speak again, to ask them, very politely, to please stop having this talk until she could participate in it. She heard it tremble on her lips but continued to fall farther away from them, into the dark.
Rosalind woke sometime in the night.
First she noticed how very dry her mouth was. Then she noticed that she was not in her bed. It wasn’t until she moved, trying to get her bearings, that she noticed the pain.
It rushed back into her body like a lance through the core of her being, hissing out of her lungs as her teeth clamped together in protest. The room was very dark, but despite that, she saw her brother lurch up from a nest of blankets on the floor, his head turning toward her in alarm.
“Ros!” he said, somewhere between a cry and a whisper. “Don’t move!”
“Abe?” she returned through her teeth. “What is happening? Where … oh.”
He was already pushing himself up to his feet, fumbling around for a low-lit lantern that was burning in the corner of the room and adjusting the flame so that it jumped to life, throwing him into stark relief.
He looked wild, his hair askew, his eyes glassy and concerned. “I’ll get you some more of that tonic,” he told her. “And another block of ice. Miss Casper said more ice as soon as you stirred.”
“Abe, wait!” she called, but he didn’t.
She sighed and pouted like a child until he came back, a cloth pocket of ice in one hand and a glass of more oblivion in the other. “I’ll wait a moment with that, if you don’t mind,” she said, gesturing toward the glass as he set it on a little table beside her.
“Fine, but I need to ice your arse. Roll over.”
“Abe!” she tutted, but obeyed, tugging on her skirt as it tangled around her legs. “How bad is it?”
“Can’t say,” he answered, pressing the cold into her bruise. “It’s hidden under these bandages. But Miss Casper will come back tomorrow and we can have an unveiling.”
Rosalind wrinkled her nose, pressing her face into the sofa cushion. “I’ve had enough unveilings for the time being, thank you.”
He made a sound that took her a moment to identify as a chuckle. She turned her head sharply to the side in indignation. “What are you laughing about?” she demanded.
“I saw it,” he answered, leaning to the side so she could see his face while he held the ice to her.
“The statue you emasculated. Poor sop was face up in the grass with a real fig leaf draped over his tadger. I don’t know how it wasn’t blown away by the wind; perhaps the sheer force of modesty kept it pinned there. ”
Rosalind snorted, and then pressed her lips together in embarrassment at the sound, though a few more titters escaped through her nose anyway. “According to Mae,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper, “there was no tadger. Just the leaf.”
“Well, then I’d demand the new one stay put too,” Abe answered with a grin. “Imagine.”
“I’d rather not,” she returned immediately, sending them both into another round of stifled giggles.
She felt better once the laughter subsided, though perhaps the ice was also doing a good job of easing the pain away. She wicked a tear from the corner of her eye and sighed, layering her arms under her head as she considered the disaster that the day had been.
“Abe,” she said, after a moment. “Did I get engaged earlier?”
He didn’t answer right away, but the ice shifted a little, sending a chill of cold onto some of the healthy skin below her bandages and making her shiver.
“You weren’t yourself,” he said. “But the matter was raised as an option. The vicar is in a precarious position, Rosalind, but you are not. It is not your duty to rescue him.”
“Isn’t it?” she said, trying to get a good look at her brother from the awkwardness of her position. “I’m the one who caused a scene. He was helping me. And now he might lose everything for the trouble.”
“The opposite happens all the time,” Abe said firmly. “And men walk away unscathed.”
“Not good men,” Rosalind returned, frowning. “I shouldn’t like to be like those men.”
“Ah, well,” he said with a sigh. “You’ve got me there.”
She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the prospect of it as she looked around this room, on the ground level of the parish house.
If she said yes, this room would be hers. This home would be hers.
“Can an Anglican vicar marry a Presbyterian woman?” she asked, worrying her fingers against each other. “How would that look?”
“That came up while you were asleep,” Abe said, shifting a little closer to her so he could lay a hand on the small of her back while still attending to the ice.
“It wouldn’t be the most popular choice, of course, but it would be a fair sight better than the alternative, as far as we could figure.
You’re still a Christian, and not from some far-off sect.
The parson’s wife has duties, and you could fill them just fine. ”
“I wouldn’t have to do some official conversion?” she asked, squinting as she tried to picture it. “A re-baptism or something of the sort?”
“No,” he said. “I asked the same question. It would be the same as it was for my wedding to Millie. Banns in both parishes for three weeks, then a wedding in one or the other.”
“In both parishes?” she asked curiously. “So the kirk near our house? We could do that?”
Abe was quiet for a moment and then released a resigned little sigh. “No. Not the kirk. The Anglican parish that you’ve never attended. And yes, I know that’s absurd. The English make marriage a series of acrobatics so ridiculous that it’s a wonder there are any of them left.”
Rosalind blinked, twisting a little, which made her brother protest as the ice slid out of place, but she needed to see him. “Are you telling me true?” she said. “Or teasing me? People in Scotland get married whenever they like.”
“It’s the truth,” he swore, miming a cross over his heart. “The truth is often a little bit stupid, Rosalind.”
“Well,” she said with a frown. “That’s certainly true.”
She flopped back onto her stomach, ignoring his little huff of annoyance as he lost his grip on the ice pack again, and considered the thing in front of her.
“I will do it, of course,” she said absently. “It is just rather a lot to consider. It isn’t a matter of … well, of particular piety. The kirk was always more of a social center than a place of spiritual necessity for me. And you don’t even go.”
She smiled to herself as he made another huffing noise.
“Yes, as you’ve announced to our entire family,” he retorted.
“They don’t mind either,” she said placidly. “You know that. In our house, heavenly bodies were planets and stars, not seraphim and so on.”
“Hm,” he replied, in a tone of voice that made it perfectly easy for Rosalind to picture his face.
She giggled again, which made him sigh and pull the ice away.
“I think that’s been a quarter hour,” he mumbled. “It’s melting, anyhow. Drink your grog.”
“Don’t pretend you aren’t curious for a sip,” she teased, rolling back onto her side with a little grunt of pain at the way her leg protested. “Ach, but that’s going to take an age to heal, isn’t it?”
He shrugged, patting her ankle as he settled onto the foot of the sofa. “Probably.”
“You’ll have to limp me down the aisle,” she said, taking up the glass and lifting it toward him like a champagne toast. “Are you up for it?”
“No,” he said immediately, and frowned as she chuckled through her guzzling of the bitter liquid.
She finished the drink with a sigh and set the empty glass down, considering her brother across the room as it made quick work of her senses, immediately putting a fuzzy edge to her vision and a pleasant buoyancy to her fingers and toes.
“It will be all right,” she assured him. “It will be well.”
“I should be telling you that,” he said, still frowning.
“Go ahead,” she invited. “You can say it too.”
He sighed. “It will be all right,” he said to her, before he got up to douse the lantern again. “It will all be well, in the end.”
“Yes,” she murmured, settling back down to sleep. “It will.”