Chapter 3
It was already a chaotic day.
And that was without the graffiti and broken windows.
Mae had arrived early to find several men already at work washing away the rude sentiments scrawled in orange paint from the walls and measuring the panes for new glass.
Amongst them, Rabbi Hirsch of the Clerkenwell Synagogue, an old friend of the Casper family, was standing with a metal bucket between his feet, peering up at the clinic through the shade cast down from his wide-brimmed black hat.
“Good morning, Rabbi,” Mae had called. “Is that paint you’ve brought us?”
“Miss Casper,” he’d answered, turning to grin at her through his half-shadowed visage. “No, indeed! It is limewash. For the walls.”
“Limewash,” she’d repeated, frowning. “Does that stop the graffiti from sticking if they come back?”
“I don’t think so,” he’d answered. “But it’ll slow fire if they try that next.”
It was, all in all, an appropriate start to the day.
She’d opened the doors to the Quaker matrons who brought breakfast every morning for the overnighters, which mostly consisted of the children staying quarantined through their chicken pox and a few in the infirmary too sick or hobbled to recover at home without requiring multiple trips back and forth by Mae herself.
They greeted one another quickly and saw themselves immediately to the small kitchenette off the entrance to begin their boiling and plating while Mae made her morning rounds.
Dinah Lazarus, seventeen-year-old menace and the only person who had any control at all over the nursery since it had become London’s premiere chicken pox ward, would arrive next.
She was always the earliest arrival after the breakfast march, which meant Mae only had to check in on the little ones while they were still groggy from the night before.
Today, there was a girl with a broken ankle twisted around in an alarming contortion with her foot still suspended in its hanging sling, a handful of pox victims, and a boy they insisted on keeping for the full week after he kept ripping his stitches out climbing trees.
After Dinah, Sally and Mae’s grandfather filtered in, and so on as the morning began in earnest.
Sally always brought coffee.
And Mae always joked that even outside of the bawd house, she was trying to seduce everyone by doing so.
“What do you mean, trying,” Sally would always return with a grin. “Who’s not seduced yet? Point me at them.”
Dr. Bethel was still new to the clinic, relatively speaking, and was adjusting to the pace of things in the chaos of a communal house of healing from his years operating a small practice out of his home in Clerkenwell.
Because he preferred those more intimate environments, he had largely taken the house calls from Mae since starting, but he was no longer a young man, and so she was leery about sending him too far out or too often.
“I’m only two years into my sixth decade!” he’d retort, sniffing, when he suspected what she was doing. “Still spry!”
“Very spry,” she’d agree. “And even more valuable when you’re here at the clinic. Besides, it’ll be easier once Dr. Govindacharya arrives in a week or so.”
Then, without fail, they’d all devolve into arguments about pronouncing that name. Which is how they had all decided before the man had even arrived that he would be Dr. Ravi instead.
It was with some surprise that just before noon, Mae turned and saw Hannah Beck, Dinah’s elder sister and the elusive former Miss Lazarus that the auditor had been after, walk through the clinic doors.
She was hard to miss, with copper-red hair that blared like a beacon in any given environment and a fondness for powder-blue dresses that set off the effect dramatically.
“Mae!” she called immediately, raising her hand as Mae looked up from where she’d just wrenched a tooth out of a man’s mouth, the offending molar still glistening and aloft in her pliers. “Oh, gracious.”
Mae blinked twice and stepped aside so Sally could pack the man’s new mouth hole with gauze while her grandfather showed off all his missing teeth to the patient and explained proper caretaking.
“You’re just going to lose more as you age!” he told the man cheerfully. “But aging is better than the alternative, I always say.”
“Ald-der-dave?” the patient asked through the gauze.
Dr. Casper wiggled his bushy white brows. “Think about it, lad. Either you get older or …”
“Oh,” said the patient.
“Indeed,” Dr. Casper agreed.
Hannah crossed the room, picking around a few of the waiting people as Mae walked forward to meet her. She nodded down at the bloody tooth in the mouth of the tool in Mae’s hand and gave a wry little twist of her lips. “Are you keeping that?”
“Keeping?” Mae looked down and winced. “Oh. Absolutely not. You, lad!” she called to one of the runners, summoning forward one of the young boys the Becks often sent to help around the clinic. “Put this with the waste and put the metal in the wash.”
“Yes, doctress,” the boy said, gazing at the tooth with a gleam in his eye that made Mae suspect it was about to go right in his pocket. “Straight away, doctress.”
“Just Mae!” she called after him. “I’m not a doctor!”
“Yes you are,” Hannah replied, a soft fondness on her face. “Anyway, I need to speak with you. I’m afraid Thaddeus has done something.”
Mae paused, glancing down at Hannah’s midsection. “Again?”
“What? No!” Hannah said, crossing her arms over her womb and coloring. “I’ve only just had Annabelle! Mae!”
Mae grinned, letting a chuckle escape, and shrugged. “It still wouldn’t surprise me.”
Hannah flattened her lips into a thin line and shook her head. “It’s only that he reacted very strongly to the vandalism and has taken action.”
“Yes, I know,” said Mae, leaning against the wall and lifting one foot and then the other from the floor to rotate her ankles.
“Mr. Beck sent glassworkers for the windows. Vix sent some workers to soap away the graffiti. Your family’s rabbi was here this morning splashing flame-retardant chemicals on the walls, though I can’t account for who engineered that. ”
“Oh,” she said, blinking. “I think we both know he does those things on his own.”
“Bless him,” Mae added, still smiling. “Okay, what’d your husband do?”
“Well,” said Hannah, grimacing. “In addition to storming off this morning to go speak to some auditor about my books, which I wish he would have left to me”—she frowned when Mae laughed out loud—“he has decided that you require protection during operational hours lest your agitators grow bolder. And he has … erm, secured said protection.”
“Oh,” Mae said, tilting her head to the side. “Well, that’s not a bad point. Dr. Ravi is a young man, but he still hasn’t arrived, and while my grandfather has the heart, I’m not sure his left hook is what it used to be. Are we going to hire some muscle?”
“Not … exactly,” Hannah said, her grimace growing. “You are more … borrowing some. From the Vixen.”
For a moment, Mae just stared at her. It wasn’t that she didn’t comprehend what was being implied, it was more that her mind was abjectly refusing to accept the gall of it. Once she could get her tongue working again, all it would say was, “You cannot be serious.”
“He agreed,” Hannah said, shrugging and looking a little baffled by it herself. “Thaddeus said he only needed a day to sort out some outstanding personal business and then he is all yours.”
Mae scoffed at that, an incredulous, bitter sound that exploded from her throat before she could stop it. “Is he, indeed?”
“Mae, this whole thing has always been so queer,” Hannah said, reaching out and touching her pale hand to Mae’s wrist. “We all see how he watches you. We all see how you—”
“Do not,” Mae snapped. “Mr. Reed has not spoken a single word to me since the day we met, despite sharing my company on many social occasions. He is clearly not interested, Hannah.”
“I wouldn’t say clearly,” Hannah replied, withdrawing her hand with a frown. “Thaddeus behaved much the same toward me until I forced the issue. You could always do the same.”
“I could,” Mae said, lifting her chin. “But I’m not going to. I refuse.”
“Excuse me,” came a woman’s voice from the entry, bringing both Hannah and Mae around to face a woman who had her young son by the sleeve, watching their exchange with a bemused kind of fascination.
“You’re the doctress, aren’t you? I’m sorry to interrupt, I just don’t see any other Black ladies in the room, so I had to assume. ”
“I’m not a doctor,” Mae said, sighing. “But I am in charge. How can I help?”
“Winston here is on my last nerve,” the woman said, jiggling her son by the sleeve, a boy who looked to be around eight or nine, with a mop of brown hair and an unbothered smirk. “I heard you can give him the pox and keep him until they fade. Is that true?”
Hannah gasped.
Mae sighed. “Yes. He can spend a day in the nursery with the other infected children, but he will be put to work on that day. Once he sprouts a few spots, probably a week or two later, he can come back and stay with us until they clear.”
“You hear that, Winston?” the woman said to her son, who grinned at her. “You’re going to itch so bad, you’ll wish you never brought that creature into our house.”
“Do you want to leave him today?” Mae asked, a little wary about the width of this child’s grin. “Miss Lazarus will take him until evening or tomorrow morning, if so. Did you bring any particulars?”
“I will do what?” Hannah asked, balking.
“Not you,” Mae said, flipping her hand. “Dinah.”
As it was, their conversation was necessarily paused while Winston was settled in for his infection visit and given some tasks to do around the nursery in the meantime. Dinah received him with the smile of a girl who recognized a kindred spirit immediately and was not cowed by the prospect.
Mae’s heart was thundering the entire time.
What in the devil was she meant to do with Mr. Reed? What was she going to say to him?
Good God, what was he going to say to her? Anything?
At long last, was he going to say something to her?
She had to stop and grip the wall to breathe.
Audits and vandals and impacted teeth. Children seeking pox. Foreign doctors and aging men who took on more work than they ought. Fireproofing and new glass, dirty forceps, and so on.
And now Roland Reed.
In her clinic.
Awaiting her instructions.
It was a chaotic day. Mae had had many chaotic days. She had no concern for chaos or hard work or fatigue. She could handle ado.
It was the unpredictable days, hovering just there on the horizon, that she didn’t like. It was questions without answers that she feared.
Mae didn’t like an enigma.
And Roland Reed was exactly that.