Chapter 10
The first thing Roland became aware of the following morning was the sound of Dinah Lazarus’s voice, arguing with little Winston as their footsteps echoed into the empty clinic at the absolute first ray of dawn.
“The moon is bigger than the sun,” Winston was saying to her. “Anyone can see that.”
“No it isn’t, you little footstool,” she replied impatiently. “Wait until Miss Rosalind arrives later. She will tell you. Her mother’s an astronomer.”
Roland grimaced, opening one eye and then the other, the pain gradually blossoming along his ribs as he became aware of the fact that he’d slept in the clinic last night. He blinked himself into wakefulness, settling his gaze on Winston just as Winston’s gaze fell on him in return.
“A stronger? Stronger than what?” the boy muttered as Dinah walked around him to head up the stairs, leaving the clinic’s front door open behind her. “Mr. Reed? Do you live here?”
Reed gritted his teeth and forced himself up to sitting, taking care not to pull at the bandages wrapped around his ribs.
Winston’s outburst had stopped Dinah three stairs up, and she had turned back, her blue eyes gone wide at his shirtless, rumpled state on the clinic’s main floor. “Mr. Reed!” she exclaimed, in a completely different tone.
He shook his head and rubbed at his eyes. “Winston, toss me my shirt,” he said, pointing to the blood-crusted, torn linen sitting on top of the hamper.
“That?” Winston said skeptically, even while he was moving to obey. “Are you sure?”
Mae had made it clear last night that wherever he chose to sleep was going to be where he would be stuck for at least the next full day, if not two.
Tod had offered up the couch in his apartments above the Vixen, but Roland couldn’t abide the idea of leaving the clinic to the ambiguous mercies of London at large, even if he was in no state to defend it at present.
So he had stayed and let the Becks escort Mae back to Soho while he tried to make himself comfortable on the narrow cot in the lobby.
However, he was realizing in short order that he had chosen to remain injured and half clothed in full public view, and that new doctor was going to arrive at any moment.
Not ideal.
“I’m going to train you up on the maps of London today,” he decided. “Since you’ll be stuck in the nursery all day anyhow and I need to stay in one place.”
Dinah Lazarus blinked twice, very slowly. “You’re going to spend the day in the nursery?” she repeated. “With us?”
He nodded. “I can’t do much in the way of moving about,” he told her, gesturing to the bandage, “but I’ll help where I can. I need to send one of my kits out to get the maps once they arrive.”
And a clean shirt, he thought, pulling the wrinkled, bloodied one over his head.
“Have you had the chicken pox?” Dinah asked, watching the progress of his shirt closely.
“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “Twice.”
“Mr. Reed,” Winston said quietly as he stood by while Roland pushed himself to his feet and looked about for his shoes. “Do you think the sun is bigger than the moon?”
He managed to get himself situated into the nursery before the real bustle began downstairs, though Mae poked her head in as soon as she arrived, her eyes narrowed like she was half convinced he had absconded into the streets the instant her back was turned.
“Oh,” she said, upon finding him seated with four children, two of whom were dotted with oatmeal salve over their pox.
They were huddled together watching as Roland drew out the surrounding blocks on a spool of butcher’s paper, tested them on the street names, and pointed out where the shortcuts were.
She blinked a couple of times, her eyes lingering on the pink chalk between his fingers for a moment. “All right.”
And then she was gone before he could respond.
Winston was pulled away to assist Dinah with making more of the oatmeal paste at one point, and then to shake up a jug of yellow “sunshine drink” that appeared to be a sort of barley tea meant to keep the children enthusiastic about remaining hydrated.
By midday, he was ready to crawl out the window and down the walls to get back to his work, but as though his body was aware of these mutinous thoughts, his wound would sting and radiate a glowing aura of phantom heat every time he humored the mental picture a little too vividly.
Around the time his clean clothes arrived, Mae came up to the nursery to inspect and re-dress the wound itself, clicking her tongue in approval at its bubbled and objectively hideous appearance as she dabbed a bit of waxy ointment over it before wrapping it up again.
“I was hoping for the cloves,” he said to her, watching the top of her head as she tied the end of the linen gauze into a knot. “Or something numbing.”
“Not yet,” she answered, glancing up at him through her lashes with half a smile. “But I can give you something to drink if you want to ease the pain.”
He shook his head. “No. I’ll just try to stay still.”
“Don’t be a martyr,” she told him, and sent up a glass of something silvery with herbs floating in it.
As soon as he finished drinking it, Rosalind Everly walked in, took one look at the glass, and giggled to herself.
“Ah,” she said. “Hope you’re in the mood for a nap, Mr. Reed.”
“I do not nap,” he replied, only to find out in short order that he actually loved naps more than anything else on this earth.
As he drifted, leaning against one of the children’s cots in the rear corner, sunlight streaming in over his lap, he watched Rosalind arrange a series of toys into a rough approximation of the solar system as the children gathered around her for an impromptu lesson on the heavens.
“But why does it look bigger?” Winston demanded at one point.
“Because it’s closer, love,” she answered. “Look at wee Rachel standing here in front of you and Mr. Reed back there a-snooze. Rachel looks bigger, doesn’t she? But you know she isn’t.”
Reed tried to open his eyes to regard this Rachel in question but found he could not do so, so instead was forced to be content listening to a rudimentary explanation of gravity and orbits as Rosalind rotated the toys around a punctured ball that was standing in for the sun.
“And sometimes,” she said, “wee bits of rock might come too close to a big planet, like this one, and get sucked into its orbit. There they will stay forever, just as though they always were part of its array.”
Roland felt himself drifting, much like a little space rock that had been inadvertently pulled into some rogue planet’s orbit.
He was twelve again and rough-housing with Tod and Matthew in the Holy Comfort garden while Reverend Everly watched fondly from the window.
He was seven years old and gasping for breath through tears as Thaddeus Beck’s mother stitched up the gash in his bicep, a wound taken to protect Roland from a lecher. Quietly, next to him, a chubby little Vix took his hand and squeezed it.
He was fourteen and red-faced as a brothel patron attempted to corner him, only to be distracted and deflected by Aristotle, who seemed perfectly charming and pleasant. Utterly unbothered and serene, if one did not know from the red flush under the freckles on his throat that he was enraged.
He was seventeen and introducing Sybil to the artists in Soho Commons, her little charcoal book wrinkled and clutched like a buoy in a storm.
He was himself. Now and then and otherwise, and his arm was bleeding where a man had just bit it. He had just seen Mae Casper’s face for the first time. He had just seen her and everything had changed.
His arm itched, but he could not lift his other hand to scratch it.
He frowned and shifted and every time he moved, the year changed again. The scenery changed again.
Dinners at the parish house. Sneaking into the old Sparrow’s Tail to run games with Tod, deep in winter. The day they’d bought the Tod & Vixen. The day they’d opened it.
And Mae Casper. Mae setting bones. Mae glinting in gold at a ball. Mae laughing with the other women at a sunny picnic.
Mae and Mae again. Over and over and over.
Some hours must have passed, during which he heard Rosalind and Dinah discuss the merits of purchasing a second chalkboard for the classroom, and Rosalind’s soft brogue lamenting that she felt guilty erasing Ezra’s alphabets before every tally class.
“It seems such a waste when all I am going to draw are just a bunch of lines and dashes,” she said.
They had also, if he was not mistaken, spent some time exchanging observations about how pleasant the new doctor was to look upon.
“You cannot deny it,” Dinah whispered. “He is a vision.”
“I am married now,” Rosalind returned.
“Married, but not blind!” Dinah giggled.
They must have then assumed Roland was completely asleep, for Dinah commented, “I shall marry whichever one Mae decides she doesn’t want.”
A comment which haunted the remainder of his drifting hours.
At some point, she must have come up and re-dressed his wound, for he woke to find the gauze in a different arrangement against his ribs and the glass of silvery herbal drink had been refilled on the windowsill.
Winston informed him that they’d made an adult-sized bed up for him downstairs before everyone had left for the night and, unable to find any good reason to argue against it, he drank the pain-killing brew and carefully descended down to the cot for a second night at the clinic.
Mercifully, this one was quiet, with only the sounds of the passing patrolmen and their shadows interrupting the flicker of torchlight to punctuate the passing hours.
Sadly, the mercy ended there, for whatever was in that drink put him down hard enough that he slept through the clinic opening the following day and didn’t come back to himself until people were already buzzing about around his prone body, midway through the damned morning.
“Miss Turnhill walked through the stinging nettles,” Sally was saying to Dr. Casper as she passed by, wafting the smell of roasted coffee. “Again.”
“I think she just missed you,” he replied with a chortle. “Oh, extra cream for me?”
Roland groaned and turned his head to the side, blinking his eyes open as he searched for Mae among the moving bodies and shadows on the ground floor.
“He has been coming back every week for months and we haven’t been able to help,” said her voice from a far corner that pulled his gaze farther down, until his chin was touching his shoulder. “And you’ve solved it in minutes!”
He blinked a few times, the blur of healers standing in the far end of the room coming more into focus as Mae, Dr. Bethel, and the new chap talked in a tight knot of eager chatter.
“I’ve only ever seen one case of ague in all my career,” Dr. Bethel was marveling. “And it looked nothing like that.”
Ravi chuckled, shaking his head modestly. “If you’d grown up where I did,” he told them, “you’d be able to spot malaria from twenty paces with horse blinders on. It really is nothing. I didn’t know it traveled this far north, though.”
“You don’t understand!” Mae pressed, turning and grabbing both of his hands with her own. “He’s been suffering for months and now we finally know why. We can’t cure him, but now we can at least help!”
Roland frowned, noting the way their skin tones blended attractively together where their hands met as he ran his thumbnail between two of his own pale, freckled fingers.
Ravi was grinning widely enough that Roland could see his perfect bloody teeth from all the way over here. “Well, if you are happy, Miss Casper,” he said, “then I have no choice but to be as well.”
At that, he forced himself to sit up, grunting in pain as he did so, his hand going immediately toward the radiating heat in his ribs.
It brought their attention around, all three of them immediately moving toward him.
“Ah, the hero of the hour,” sang Dr. Bethel. “Let’s get a look at you, son.”
Roland looked helplessly at Mae, who crossed her arms and stood back, looking a bit amused as Dr. Bethel hopped in and did the job for her, moving to unwrap the site of the cauterization and examine its progress.
“Very nice!” he exclaimed. “You’ll be able to sleep in your own bed tonight, I think, provided it isn’t too far a walk. What part of the city are your quarters in, my boy?”
“Not far,” Roland said by way of answer, and noted the way Mae rolled her eyes when he did.
Not even Tod knew where his flat was.
He didn’t spend much time there, truth be told, but when he did, he wanted to be left alone. No surprises. No knocking. No noise or bother.
Perhaps that was indulgent, but it was the one thing he had ever carved out for himself and refused to waver on.
“Mr. Beck has offered to take up your shifts here at the clinic while you are recovering,” Mae told him, tilting her head to the side.
“Personally. I do not know where that leaves his gaming establishments, but I thought it a very kind offer. You do know you aren’t to be returning to work at the Vixen either, yes? ”
“Yes,” he replied, narrowing his eyes. “Obviously.”
“Rest,” she said, smirking. “You can be useful again in a week or so, when it’s not dangerous to move anymore. I’ll pack up some ointment for you to take home with you.”
He only managed to grunt in response, his mind stuck in the mire of whatever tonic she’d given him until she had already walked away. He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and muttered, if only to himself, “I can be useful now.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Dr. Ravi, who apparently had not walked away.
Roland glared at him until he did.
He set off toward home as soon as he was able to gather his things together. He’d sleep a little more, having now discovered the allures of midday slumber, and then he’d figure out just how to make use of days where his body was limited in motion.
He could be useful. That much he knew.
He had learned many ways to be useful during the course of his life.