Chapter 10
Vix was having a good day. It was hard not to when she had awakened with a smile on her face and her brother’s voice booming through the apartments.
“Why are you on my sofa?!” he had cried.
She tittered to herself, shaking her head and remembering it now as she pushed the final pin into her hair and twirled out of her room toward breakfast, listening to her brother’s grumbles through the walls.
He was evidently still not pleased about the state of things.
“Is this just how it will be now?” he muttered, only to be soothed over immediately by incomprehensible murmurs from his wife as Vix entered the dining room and found her rumpled fiancé seated at the foot of the table, spoon half poised over an egg.
“Good morning, family,” she sang, enjoying the gloomy tableau. “I trust everyone slept well?”
“Going somewhere?” Teddy demanded as she side-stepped the empty chair he expected her to fall into and plucked the last piece of burnt toast directly off his plate. “That is mine!”
“I’m needed at the clinic this morn, I’m afraid,” she told him, biting into it before he could take it back and letting dark crumbs tumble immediately to the floor. “Delicious toast today.”
Ambrose blinked at her, two pale fingers pressed into what appeared to be a point of pain in his temple. “You like it burnt?” he asked, frowning.
“I like it well attended by the flames,” she corrected. “Have an extra cup of tea, Sir Ambrose. It will help with the bottle ache.”
He gave her a sarcastic little smile which made her glow back at him with her teeth.
Hannah patted her husband’s arm in sympathy as he glowered at the scene. “You don’t work at the clinic,” he told Vix.
“I do as I please, Teddy,” she replied. “Rosalind asked for my help, and so I am providing it.”
“The Clerkenwell Clinic?” Ambrose asked, reaching slowly toward the teapot like he was afraid Teddy might reach out and crush it with his fist if he was caught in the act. “The one with the plaque?”
Hannah laughed then, and immediately cleared her throat in an effort to disguise it as both men turned to frown at her directly.
Vix turned to examine her errant bridegroom, slumped over his egg and toast. His sash and medal were slung over the back of the dining room chair, wrinkled and glinting in the morning light like he’d slept using them as his pillow.
Several strands of his white-blond hair were sticking straight up from the back of his head.
“You could come with me,” she said to him, if only to torment him a little further. “See your name in brass for yourself, feed some soup to the sick, and so on. It would really help you live up to your new status.”
“Has anyone ever told you,” he said, blinking slowly at her, his words soft and punctuated, “that you are cold and unfeeling?”
“Never,” she said, blinking sweetly at him, a smile growing on her lips. “What a thing to say.”
“I thought you were leaving,” her brother muttered pointedly.
She ate the remainder of her toast and licked the crumbs from the pad of her thumb, grinning at him. “When I am ready. Hannah, are you coming to the clinic today?”
Hannah shook her head. “No, but Dinah may be there. She has lately taken an interest.”
“Oh, delightful!” Vix said, and meant it. “I hope she is.”
She was genuinely fond of Hannah’s hellion of a little sister. She had discovered her at their wedding, needling multiple guests, and been immediately charmed.
Teddy gave a tired chuckle.
“Do see my beloved safely home,” she cooed at her brother. “I shall hold you responsible.”
“Him?” Ambrose whispered, horrified.
“Good day, dearest,” she said, rather than answering, and took her leave, cementing her final impression of him spiky and nervous in that sun-drenched chair as she escaped to the cobbled morning streets of London toward the charity clinic.
She had not felt so buoyant in quite some time. She wasn’t sure if she should attribute the good humor to her victory over Caroline Sedgewick, to the general pleasure of last night’s knighting ceremony, or to … well.
She touched her lips, shaking away the urge to grin as she rounded the block.
She supposed it might have also been that kiss.
Well, why shouldn’t she enjoy kissing a man, at least once? A handsome one. A knight! She was going to have to kiss him once or twice anyway, wasn’t she? If she was to marry him.
She might as well enjoy it.
It did not mean she was being foolish. It did not have to mean that.
She was not pursuing this marriage to be foolish, after all. Quite the opposite.
The clinic came into view as she made her way down the sunlit sidewalks of Clerkenwell and over the pebbled drop into the tenement square where it was perched.
Immediately, the streets felt noisier, with people of trade and vocation milling about with an urgency the morning did not require of the denizens of St. James.
She felt the air shift and, oddly, did not mind it. It reminded her of her parents, of mornings spent stripping thorns from roses before patrons came to her mother’s stall in Covent Garden. It was not her world anymore, but neither was it an alien one.
She stepped around a man arguing with a cat in his bakery window, past a shoemaker using a pole to get all the shutters open alongside his eaves, and awaited the hackneys and donkeys on the street before crossing over to the clinic, which already had its door propped open and a few people milling about in the foreroom.
There was an old man with downy white hair sticking up in various directions sitting near the door, directing people to the rooms where they would find what they were after.
“Good morning, Dr. Casper,” Vix said to him as she stepped inside.
Mae’s grandfather was not supposed to treat patients due to the trouble with his joints, but he was always sneaking around and trying to do so anyway.
Vix enjoyed the annoyance it caused his granddaughter, though she did silently agree that he should probably stick to verbal advice.
He was of an advanced age, skinny and pale, and altogether too pleased to create mischief when and where he could.
“Miss Beck!” he replied, clapping his arthritic hands together. “Always a pleasure. Are you after Mae?”
“After her? Never,” Vix said with a smirk. “I’m actually looking for Miss Murphy. Has she arrived?”
“Upstairs,” he said, pointing with one knobby finger above their heads. “Avoid the nursery.”
“Ominous,” she said, shaking her head at him as she passed, and heading toward the stairs.
She passed by the little room where Mae did her dirty work and heard her voice behind the door. “A wizard walked down Rotten Alley,” she said, “and then turned into a pub.”
“A pub?” came a wheezing, confused answer.
“He turned,” she repeated, “into a pub.”
“Oh!” the voice realized just as some horrible squelching thing happened in tandem. “Oh! Ow!”
Vix rolled her eyes and rounded the staircase, taking them two at a time. She paused on the landing, looking at the closed door to the nursery with a tilted head.
“Little pox,” came Rosalind’s voice from behind her, in the classroom. “Did you have them as a bairn? If so, you can go in.”
“Chicken pox?” Vix asked with a grimace, turning to look at the other woman. “Of course I did. DIdn’t everyone?”
Rosalind shrugged, haloed in the sunlight, a piece of pink chalk twirling between her fingers. “Apparently not. That’s why they’re keeping the door shut. Wee Dinah’s in there telling them stories for now.”
“Oh,” said Vix, a dark laugh escaping her. “Who let her do that?”
“What do you mean?” Rosalind asked, soft-eyed and innocent, but Vix was already turning the knob to investigate.
“And then Gretel realized,” Dinah Lazarus was already whispering to a half circle of pox-covered children, all of them gaping at her in slack-jawed horror, “that her toes had been eaten in the night!”
Vix immediately turned to Rosalind and gestured at the scene as though her point had been made as all of the children gasped in unison.
Dinah’s head came up, golden-brown hair swishing in interrupted alarm as she realized she’d been caught traumatizing a group of diseased foundlings. She immediately grinned. “Vix!”
“Dinah,” Vix answered, uncertain whether she was exhausted or energized. “You’ve got the story wrong.”
Several children turned around in hopeful, blinking gazes to look at the new grown-up who had arrived, opposite the sixteen-year-old terror visage of Miss Dinah, who had likely already told them several unforgettable things about the trials of poor Hansel and Gretel.
“Which part?” one asked. “Which part was wrong?”
“Oh, dumpling,” Dinah said with a frown. “Don’t listen to her.”
Vix shook her head. “It’s only,” she said sadly, “that her fingers were missing too.”
And then she shut the door behind her and let Dinah deal with the eruption of gasps and questions that followed.
Rosalind was trying not to look amused and failing. “Vix, that was not very responsible of you,” she said, shaking her sandy curls.
“No, but it was very amusing,” she answered, turning the other girl around by the shoulders and pushing her back toward the classroom. “Show me what you needed help with.”
“Oh, it was the tally rhyme,” she said, immediately distracted and bouncing off toward her beloved chalkboard.
“I am teaching them to count by fives and I realized that we learned it by rote, you see? Five, ten, fifteen, twenty. It doesn’t rhyme, but it feels like it does, because we said it so many times as children. ”
“And these people didn’t,” Vix guessed, looking around the classroom.
Rosalind had taken up the duty of training the recovered who could no longer perform their former vocations after the tenement that used to stand where the clinic now was had collapsed and gravely injured several working poor.
The key skill she was teaching, for now, was tally work, and almost every surface in this room was covered with ticks and swishes, some with numbers and sums beneath them.