Chapter 14
“Rosalind,” Roland called for the second time as he finished cresting the clinic stairs. “Do you have a moment?”
She paused, her pink skirt crumpled in her hand, turning over her shoulder with her mouth in a perfect O of surprise. “Oh,” she said, blinking. “I didn’t realize you were speaking to me. You don’t often do so. You know, it is funny, Matthew says you chatter endlessly, but I’ve never seen it.”
He gave her what he hoped was an easy smile. “You do not often require correction,” he said with a shrug. “Matthew almost always does.”
She giggled, shaking her head. “Now, you know I cannot agree with that.”
“Ah,” he replied, his smile sliding into sincerity. “Because it is true or because it isn’t?”
“A question without an answer,” she said with a shrug and a sigh. “What did you need to speak to me about? Oh, is it about the picnic? Matthew said you were to be told to attend, but he said it to Mr. Beck, not to me.”
“Yes, I know,” Roland replied with a dry chuckle and a roll of his eyes. “No, not about that. I wanted to inquire after that thimble I saw you toying with a day or two ago. You do not, by chance, still have it? I was hoping I could convince you to give it to me next.”
“Oh, Mr. Reed,” said Rosalind, with the tone of a schoolmistress who’s just had to inform a small child that his father is not, in fact, the king of England. “The rule is that it must never go to you.”
He narrowed his eyes, images of Vix flashing in his mind. “Oh, is it?” he replied. “That is a new rule.”
“Yes, I gathered it was something that was created specifically for this little pocket of time. In any event, I do not have it anymore.”
“Because Vix does,” he guessed, frowning. “Again.”
“No, not Vix,” said Rosalind, blinking those big hazel eyes. “Mae has it now. Oh, but you must excuse me. My class is starting.”
For a moment, he just stood there on the landing, his blood gone muddy and glopping in his veins as the impact of what she’d just said settled over him. It took a moment, a moment Roland thought was more than reasonable, to properly understand it.
Then he tightened his mouth and turned to the stairs in search of Mae Casper.
He found her stitching up a cut on a young girl’s inner arm, just inside the crook of her elbow, with that blasted handsome bastard Dr. Ravi looming over her shoulder, basically resting his chin on it as she did so.
“You see?” said Ravi. “It isn’t so bad. It’s like Miss Casper is turning you into a beautiful tapestry like they have at the palace.”
The little girl giggled and so did her mother.
Roland frowned.
He would never admit it, but the odd exclamation in a female voice of “Cor! Look at ’im!” was now ambiguously directed, and he didn’t love that change.
It wasn’t that he was vain. Of course not.
It was that he was specifically threatened by Ravi Govindacharya.
He was man enough to admit that much.
She glanced over her shoulder at the doctor and flashed him her dimples, setting flame to the already simmering heat in Roland’s chest. She snipped the end of the thread and touched his arm as she passed him to put her supplies back into the closet, seemingly volleying the medical care to the man as he stepped forward to explain care and healing time to the mother and daughter.
She dropped the needles in her basin of discarded sharps and snapped the roll of black thread back into place before bending forward to stow it in the cupboard.
When she closed the cupboard door, she found Roland standing behind it.
Sadly, she did not startle.
She didn’t even look surprised. “Mr. Reed,” she said.
He frowned again. “Do not call me Mr. Reed.”
She blinked, a flicker of those dimples appearing for him. Or at him, in any event. “Roland,” she corrected.
He nodded in approval and dropped his shoulder against the closed wooden door of the cupboard. He crossed his arms over his chest, barring her visual line to Ravi. “You have the thimble,” he accused, as casually as he could manage.
“I do,” she replied. “How did you know that?”
“I know everything,” he replied, examining his fingernails to give himself something else to look at. “What are you planning to do with it, Mae?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” she told him, dimples deepening enough that he dropped his hand in annoyance and put his focus back on her face. “I just wanted a turn with it.”
“And I wonder what the cost was,” he murmured, leaning closer. “You understand, don’t you, that you’ve gone and crossed another line? I think this time you’ve done it on purpose.”
“Oh, you certainly have a lot of opinions, don’t you?” she replied, grinning openly now. “I cross a line and then you cross a line. We’ll have a whole chessboard on the ground before we’re done. So, what now? I wait for you to retaliate for the simple act of my holding a thimble in my pocket?”
“Could be,” he said with a shrug. “I suppose you’ll have to wait and wonder.”
She giggled then, her talc-spattered fingers coming up to touch her dimpled cheek as her dark eyes sparkled at him.
“Vix was furious, you know,” she whispered, matching his lean like they were old friends, sharing secrets in a corner at school, “that I met your father. That you even have a sister. She raged. I think she was very jealous.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, annoyance flickering up in his throat and batting against the sparks of desire to touch her, to grab her arm and pull her off somewhere they wouldn’t be observed. “Why did you tell her that?” he asked, lowering his voice so that it would not betray any emotion.
“Because I wanted to,” she answered, still whispering, still grinning.
“Mae,” he warned, ticking his head to the side and holding her gaze as she continued to gloat at him for another, thickened little beat of time.
More patients came in through the door, her grandfather shouting triage orders to those waiting on the bench by the entry. It was enough to interrupt this moment of congress. For her, anyhow. It distracted her.
Roland could have held that position for the next week.
She straightened up, pulling her warmth away from the little stolen breath of air they’d made between them, and touched her hair band, glancing around the clinic as though remembering they might be observed.
“Will I see you at the picnic tomorrow?” she asked him, just before she turned to go.
“I won’t be in at all. Ravi and my grandfather will be managing the clinic.
I always request Sally too, after my grandfather tried to set a broken bone with his arthritic hands last year the instant my back was turned. ”
He released a short chuckle before he could stop himself and shook his head, attempting to scatter the foolish impulse. “I will be there,” he answered. “Whether or not you see me remains to be discovered.”
“Hm,” she said, and brushed past him close enough that their skin touched, just a brush of wrists and knuckles, as she returned to her work.
It took every strand of moral fiber in his being not to snatch her back and abscond with her.
He rubbed his thumb over his brow and silently told himself to get a grip. She was just a girl. It was just a kiss.
He had never been this ridiculous in all his life.
He glanced around, looking for somewhere he might be of use, and found only old Dr. Casper in his chair by the door, frowning down at a news sheet as he twisted one of his sparse sprigs of white hair around his knobby fingers.
He looked up as though he felt himself being watched and inclined his head, inviting Roland closer.
“Have you read this, boy?” he asked, flapping The Lancet in his direction. “Do you read?”
“I can read,” Roland replied sharply.
Dr. Casper gave a wheezy laugh. “That isn’t what I asked.”
Roland hesitated, cringing at his own assumption. “I read the last one,” he said with a shrug. “Is that new?”
Dr. Casper nodded, sighing and holding it out.
“New as of yesterday. We’re apparently terrorizing London’s bright young minds, threatening them to stay away from our doors lest they attempt to learn here as they cannot over at St. Bartholomew’s or Guy’s.
There’s a quote by some little toff who claims he was frightened for his life and almost shot. ”
“Christ,” Roland muttered, flipping the page over and scanning the article. “‘Quaker quackery,’” he recited. “They really like that one, don’t they?”
“A small mind can never resist a bit of obvious wordplay,” Dr. Casper replied with a shrug.
“And pointing out otherness has always been a surefire way to rile up the fools. If they succeed, it won’t just be us that suffers, you know.
Every business around here will end up with frog limbs and cow dung and whatever else to contend with, and that’s only if we stay civil. ”
“Civil?” Roland repeated incredulously. “You think this is civil?”
Dr. Casper set his mouth in a grim line. “Do you know why I don’t practice at Guy’s anymore?”
“Because you are ancient?” Roland guessed, making the old man wheeze with laughter again.
“First of all, how dare you?” said Dr. Casper, snatching back his reading with a residual chuckle.
“Secondly, no. Many years ago, long before you were born, people in London got riled up about the Catholics. There was a law and a bunch of protest speaking at first, and then, of course, the vandalism struck up. It was summer, you know. Always easier to form a mob in the summer.”
Roland winced, glancing at the bright summer sun in the sky outside the window.
Dr. Casper sighed. “They didn’t stick to Catholics,” he said with a shrug.
“They tore through this part of town, attacking the synagogues and the Black businesses and anyone else who didn’t look English enough to them.
My wife’s people are goldsmiths, you know, and very successful.
They were a ripe target. Maybe you’ve seen their shop ’round Soho?
Genuine Ashanti Goldcrafting? There’s a red awning. ”
Roland’s eyes widened a smidgen. “Oh, yes! With the little weighted animals in the window? Ducklings and so on?”
“That’s the one!” Dr. Casper said, grinning. “Anyway, the Ashanti bit on the sign sort of served as a beacon to the rioters, saying, ‘Here are successful people who aren’t exactly like you.’ So they became a target. That’s how we met, my wife and I.”
Roland held up a hand. “That’s how you met?” he repeated. “Were you rioting?”
“No, you fool boy, I was doctoring. Pay attention!” Dr. Casper snapped, frowning.
“By then, I had joined forces with Rabbi Hirsch and a few of the other old-timers you see about here from time to time. We were trying to barricade and damage-proof the buildings and get people into homes with basements through the nights. But my Violet had decided that she’d rather throw rocks at the rioters, and she made the same mistake you did. She had very good aim.”
He turned then and pulled the flap of his ear forward, demonstrating a big, puffy scar behind it with pride.
“She got me at twenty paces!” he said. “But she knew the rabbi and believed him when he told her I was on the side of help, otherwise she might’ve crossed the street and finished the job with a second rock. I came to with blurry vision to her angelic face, and the rest was history.”
He sighed, releasing his ear and leaning back fondly. “They wouldn’t take me back at Guy’s after that.”
“After you offered aid to victims of a riot?” Roland repeated.
“Just so,” said Dr. Casper. “If I’d been shaking a pitchfork at those bloody Catholics, I’d have been welcomed back without issue. But I went and resisted, and that can’t be tolerated.”
He paused, stifling a yawn as though this were just another story from an old man’s youth, and shook his head, blowing air through his lips.
“I suppose they might’ve dismissed me when I married Violet, anyhow, though they’d never have admitted that was why,” he continued. “So, it was well enough that we got it over with, and I did fine practicing privately and making home calls for most of my life, until my damned knuckles mutinied.”
“The Gordon Riots,” Roland realized, taking a small step forward. “Is that what you’re talking about?”
Dr. Casper peered at him, his eyes canny despite their age. “Yes, that one was named for George bloody Gordon. May he rot. Let’s hope our own tangle doesn’t progress to a named historical event, hm? For all our sake.”
“Agreed,” said Roland, glancing once more out the window before looking back at the doctor. “May I borrow that?” he said of The Lancet. “I think I ought to read it a bit more carefully.”
“There’s a good lad,” said the doctor, handing it over. “Now stand in front of me while you do that so I can have a cheeky nap, hm?”