Chapter 11
Mae had been under the mistaken impression that a few days free of the looming presence of Roland Reed would be restful for her spirit.
They hadn’t been.
A little over a week since he’d mumbled his way out of the clinic doors, favoring his cauterized side, and she was more irritable and restless by the day.
The nightly deposits of livestock viscera, mercifully, had stopped, but in their place had started broad daylight attacks wherein the medical students would pass by the clinic at running speeds and fling things at the walls.
Usually it was dung. Dung, Mae had discovered, could vary quite a lot in moisture and viscosity. Once, it had been dissected frogs.
That had been particularly upsetting for the nursery children as the frogs had collided with their open window and several had made it onto the nursery floor.
The smeared feces and frog guts always seemed to appear just before another inspection, which of course raised all sorts of questions about the sanitary conditions and safety of the patients inside.
A coincidence, Mae was certain.
Little Winston still did not have the chicken pox. She had noted this as he’d come tearing onto the main floor of the clinic, clutching a globe that Ezra had bought secondhand and donated to the schoolroom.
“Winston, go put that back,” she’d snapped, already on her final frayed nerve.
“No!” he’d said, barreling past her, pock free, in search of Dr. Ravi. “Is it true you’re from here?!” he’d demanded, pointing at China.
“I’m not,” Ravi answered with a chuckle, rotating the globe slightly and pointing at India instead. “I am from there.”
“And we’re up here right now?” Winston clarified, pointing at England and waiting for Ravi to nod. He pressed his lips together skeptically, squinting down at India. “How did you manage not to fall off?” he whispered.
“I didn’t,” Ravi whispered back. “How do you think I got here?”
Mae frowned as Ravi glanced up at her, grinned, and winked.
He certainly was very good-looking.
“Mae Casper?” came a woman’s voice from the door. “Are you Mae Casper?”
She looked to be about twenty and was dressed in a rumpled gray dress, her long brown hair hanging loose around her head. Her hands were dusted with gray sooty residue and her eyes were wild and impatient. “I’m looking for Roland Reed,” she said. “Is he here?”
Mae blinked, startled. “He isn’t,” she said, stepping toward the girl. “He was injured and had to take some time away.”
She shook her head, clicking her tongue. “No, I know that,” she said, waving one of her dirty hands in the air. “He’s been about London since, but he was supposed to come by my workshop today. He never showed up. I checked the Vixen and they said he would be here. But he isn’t here either?”
“Your workshop?” Mae repeated, feeling a little lost in this conversation.
The girl twisted her lips, looking irritated by the pace of the conversation. “Perhaps he’s with Aristotle.”
Mae could only give a helpless kind of shrug. “I don’t know who that is.”
The girl scoffed. “You don’t? You, Mae Casper, don’t know Roland’s father? Listen, it’s unusual that he wouldn’t show, and the kits haven’t seen him either. I’m going to keep looking for him. Do you want to come with me?”
“Miss,” said Mae, managing another scuffing step toward the girl. “Who are you?”
The girl raised her thick, straight brows, her dry lips twisting in a kind of amusement. “He hasn’t mentioned me either, then?” she said. “Typical. I’m his sister. Sort of. Name’s Sybil Lutch. Are you coming?”
Mae nodded, already untying her apron and moving to hang it on the hook by the door. “Ravi,” she called over her shoulder, the word sister still clanging in her ears, intriguing her far beyond good sense. “I need to step out.”
“Godspeed,” he called back with his typical cheery air, spinning the globe again to show Winston some other corner of Creation.
At least it was a slow day.
Fewer patients by the hour, it seemed like. No one wanted to risk being spattered with a rogue horse patty, she supposed.
The truth was, she would have followed this girl even during an influenza outbreak or another tenement collapse, just at the tendril of intrigue that was the concept of a sort of sister compounded with the promise of meeting Roland Reed’s actual, literal father, and perhaps getting some answers about his many, many, veiled private doings.
Sybil herself was worth following regardless of her destination, just for the questions she could likely answer.
“You suspect he is in some sort of trouble?” Mae asked, hurrying after the other woman, whose pace was already very brisk as she took the rear path around the clinic and headed directly into an alley, her boot crashing into a grayish puddle without any obvious concern for the liquid splashing up along her stockinged calf. “How concerned should I be?”
“For Roland?” Sybil asked, turning her head slightly with a smirk.
“Depends on the reason for concern. He’s probably fine, but I’ve been left in the lurch by him for the final time this summer and I’m going to go find his errant arse before he can do it again.
I figure you’re of the same mind and want him back at work too. We can join forces.”
“He works for you?” Mae pressed, lifting her own skirts as high as they would go and attempting to dodge city muck as best as she could while she attempted to keep the pace. “Doing what?”
Sybil shrugged. “Few things,” she said. “Today he was supposed to introduce me to a coroner. He’s been sitting for me this week, since he can’t do much else. He doesn’t work for me so much as we do things for each other. Don’t tell him I said he works for me.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Mae managed.
Sybil shook her head, leaping over a pile of broken wooden boards, nails jutting out of several at odd angles. “He never sits for me after what happened with that stupid sculpture. That wasn’t me, you know.”
“You’re a sculptor?” Mae asked, panting through the jog and taking the long way around the threat of rusted lockjaw in that discarded bevy of wood.
“Me? God, no,” Sybil answered airily, clearly not winded at all.
She slapped the brick wall of a building as they curved around it.
“Turn up here. Aristotle’s got a townhouse on the corner.
You’ll love him. He’s a right creampuff.
Hopefully we don’t interrupt him with a gentleman caller.
Or maybe hopefully we do. I suppose that could be fun. Oh! Watch your step.”
Mae grimaced, stumbling against the brick wall and gripping a morning glory vine for support, just sort of losing her entire ankle into a pothole in the cobbles. The poor flower vine tore in her hand, smearing her fingers with the remains of its purple petals. “I’m fine,” she said.
She wasn’t.
They tumbled out of a canal runoff path and into the street in front of a pale blue townhouse.
Sybil looked refreshed and energetic, while Mae was half certain she had partially melted on the way here, her lungs rattling as she gasped for breath.
“This the place?” she managed, attempting to sound as hale as possible.
“Ayup,” said Sybil, skipping up the stairs and knocking the bell with her fingers. “He’s probably here. Aristotle dotes on him when he’s in a strop.”
“He’s in a strop?” Mae asked between breaths, clinging to the bannister as she climbed up after the other girl.
“More often than not,” said Sybil with a shrug as the door was pulled open. “Thought you of all people would know that!”
Mae startled, gaping at the man standing in the doorway. For half a second, she thought she was looking at Roland himself, but then she blinked and saw that indeed this was a different man. Older. And certainly better turned out.
His hair was a wig, she realized, powdered and preciously curled, and the freckles on his cheeks were hidden under a delicate layer of rouge.
“Artie,” said Sybil, throwing her arms open. “You look beautiful!”
“Sybil,” said the man, flicking his eyes over her. “You need a bath. Come in, I shall clean you.”
“You shan’t,” she returned with a sniff. “Is Roland here?”
Aristotle frowned. “Why don’t you ever come just to visit me?” he whined, leaning against the door. “If I say he isn’t, are you going to run off again?”
“Yes,” she said, blinking. “Of course. But you could always invite me ’round for tea sometime. You could always do that too.”
He sighed heavily. “I suppose that’s true. Come in. I shall fetch him.”
It was at this point, as he pulled the door further open, that Roland’s father caught sight of Mae, his waxed eyebrows rising by well over an inch. “Well, hello there!” he said, batting his lashes. “And who might this pretty young miss be? Are you here to steal my beaux?”
Mae took another labored breath, shaking her head. “I … sorry … I am …”
“Miss Casper,” came Roland’s voice, sounding deeply displeased.
She lifted her head to see him at the top of a polished staircase, frowning down at her on the porch of the house like the sun had chosen this moment to spotlight her for good measure.
He was in his shirtsleeves, his collar open and his cuffs rolled to his elbows.
His hair was loose and glowing around his shoulders.
Her heart gave a rolling thud.
“And Sybil,” he added, ticking his head to the side to sigh at the other interloper. “I told you early evening.”
“You told me no such thing, Roland Reed,” Sybil replied airily, pushing past the door and into the foyer and trailing in all the fluids of London’s back alleys with her. “You weren’t coming. I’m sick of it.”
He sighed, shaking his head and taking the stairs with measured, disapproving steps as his father ushered Mae in as well and pulled the door shut behind her, closing out the glare of the outside world and allowing the light to settle into the appropriate sheen of the indoors.
Mae touched her brow, suddenly extremely aware of how haggard she likely looked.