Chapter 17
Mae had never looked forward to the end of a clinic day quite so much as she did today. It was an odd, jittery sort of prospect: dinner with Roland Reed.
What would they eat? Where would they go? Gracious, but what would they talk about?
She could ask him absolutely anything. And, wonder of wonders, she suspected he might actually answer.
How very odd that just now she couldn’t actually remember what made him so bloody mysterious to her in the first place.
She couldn’t think of a single question that she intended to ask, and she really was wracking her brain trying to think of some, perhaps a bit too hard, based on the slant of her last set of sutures.
When she found an excuse to go back into the storeroom a little later in the afternoon, sadly, he had already departed and cleaned up all the particulars of rebottling the witch hazel besides. What an odd thing to make her heart flutter.
She found him deep in congress with her grandfather and Ezra Barnett by the chair at the door and hesitated before approaching, uncertain if she’d give herself away solely by the expression on her face if she drew too close and her grandfather happened to see how she looked at Roland after their little interlude earlier.
They were gathered around the little folio that Abraham Murphy had put together about the inspectors and vandals. The folio that, Mae was reasonably certain, she had locked in the cabinet with the more dangerous medicines and her private satchel.
She touched the pocket of her apron where the duckling sat and noted that the little key to that cabinet was, in fact, no longer in the pocket next to it.
She narrowed her eyes at Roland, who glanced up at that exact moment and flashed his teeth at her, spinning the little gold key over his pinky finger so that it caught the light.
Well!
She spun on her foot and went back to her treatment room.
How could she confront him about that just now, anyhow? At least without giving away why his hand was in her apron pocket.
She found Winston fluffing the pillow on the treatment table like a damned innkeeper, his little face screwed up in concentration. “Oh!” he said when he saw her come in. “Doctress. Can I help you sew someone? Or snap the bones?”
She sighed, unable to hide the ripple of amusement that bounced in her chest. “I think the next patient has a burn,” she said. “Will that do?”
He blinked a few times, considering it. “Is it nasty?”
She shrugged. “I haven’t seen it yet.”
He brightened. “Let’s find out! Maybe it will smell like a roast! Shall I fetch him?”
“Her,” she corrected. “The young woman on the bench. Go on, then.”
He, mercifully, was not morbidly enthusiastic about the injury once the patient was seated and revealing the large scald on her forearm.
“Knocked the iron,” she said with a sigh. “When will it stop feeling like it’s on fire?”
“Very soon,” Mae promised her, taking up the clove salve.
“How come it’s bubbly?” Winston had asked, peering as close as he dared. “Is that water?”
“It is,” Mae said as she dabbed salve over the wound and sent him to unravel the gauze. “Your body is full of water. Did you know that? You’re more water than anything else.”
He looked skeptical. “My mum says I’m mostly air.”
The burn victim giggled.
“When we have any sort of burn, even the kind you get from a tight shoe that rubs your skin away, your body will send water to the surface,” Mae explained, beckoning him over and letting him do the gauze wrap himself, only using her hands to guide it.
“It is like when you fill a waterskin with cool water and hold it to a hurt. It reduces swelling and keeps the area protected and clean. It’s just the body’s way of doing that for us, even if it isn’t perfect.
That’s why we don’t lance those water blisters.
They are a gift, so we must wait for them to drain on their own, once they’ve done their job. ”
“Oh, bother,” the young woman said. “I always poke the ones on my heels and ankles. My body must be cross as crabs with me!”
Mae gave her a little smile. “Well, now you know better.”
“I’m going to be a doctor,” Winston told the patient soothingly as he finished the gauze and started knotting it without even being told. “And one day you can come ask me and I will tell you all the body secrets.”
“Is that so?” the woman said, looking extremely charmed. “I’ll just have to take you up on that, young doctor.”
“I’m not a doctor,” said Winston, in exactly the voice Mae used when she said that. “But I will be, one day.”
Mae grinned to herself as she turned to leave the room to pot up some clove salve to send home with the patient, hearing Winston leaning closer to the patient behind her and asking conspiratorially, “Did you know, miss, that the sun is bigger than the moon?”
The remainder of the day unfolded without much incident, though Mae noted that Ezra stayed later than he usually would have. She caught him dragging four of the desks together in the classroom and lighting candles around the room when she did one of her checks of the nursery.
“Ezra?” she said, poking her head in. “Are you teaching a midnight class?”
His head came up in an auburn flash of alarm. “No! Get out, I’m not ready yet! I’m setting the stage for your dinner.”
“All right!” she said, chuckling and holding her hands up. “I didn’t realize it was happening here.”
An hour later, once Ezra had departed, she sneaked back in to find plates and silverware set on either side of the makeshift table, as well as clinic towelettes folded like dining napkins and stubby candles burning in the windowsills and along the center seam of the connected desks.
She pressed her lips together on a smile and put the thimble on one side and the duckling on the other, like place markers at a fancy party, and sneaked back out, drawing the door quietly shut behind her, as to not give away that she’d seen the surprise.
She almost wished she’d worn something prettier today, though she knew very well that it would have been too much of a gamble on the clinic floor.
She wondered, idly, if that giftbox Vix had thrown at her on the day of the picnic perhaps contained a pretty dress. It was with her things in the medicine cabinet, of course, but it wasn’t as though she could go look at it just now, with the key having been stolen.
She sighed and went to look for Roland to get it back, stepping around sweeping kits and Dr. Bethel counting his tools as he put them back in his own bag.
“There you are,” said her grandfather, attempting to button his linen jacket over his shirt. “Come help me, would you?”
“Grandy,” she tutted, crossing the room and slapping his arthritic hands away to do it for him. “I thought you’d already left.”
“I wanted to see the dinner,” he said, drawing her head up sharply.
He grinned at her, showing his entire array of sparse teeth. “Oh, you don’t think that lad bragged to both the Barnett boy and me while we did our reconnaissance? I told him what cuts of meat you like. I’m an accomplice, Mae.”
“I know you are,” she snapped. “Did he give you the key to the medicine cabinet?”
Dr. Casper blinked twice and then gave a wheezing chuckle. “No! How did he get it?”
Mae felt her cheeks heating. “That doesn’t matter. Go home.”
He gave her a wet kiss on the cheek and continued to chortle all the way out the door.
She fiddled with the tidying, watching the door as the kits finished their work and Dr. Bethel started the process of leaving as well, snapping his case shut.
“Dr. Bethel!” she exclaimed, remembering suddenly a particular item in his medical kit. “You keep a small hand mirror in there, do you not?”
He blinked at her. “Yes,” he said. “For the tooth extractions. We ought to get you one too.”
She nodded. “We should. Would you mind if I borrow yours tonight? I will leave it here for you to retrieve in the morning.”
“Oh,” he said, glancing down at his bag and back up at her. “I don’t see why not. Just don’t break it! Baked quicksilver isn’t cheap, my girl. And I hear it’s bad luck.”
“I promise I won’t,” she assured him as he fished the little mirror in its brown leather casing out of his bag. “Thank you ever so much.”
She ushered him out the door and peered through the torchlight across the street to see if Roland was approaching, gripping the mirror to her chest. She didn’t see him, only the two patrolmen starting their rounds, so that meant she had a few moments at least to freshen up before he arrived.
She turned and fled to the procedure room, where the setting sun shone the brightest, and hoped she could do something with herself at this late hour and without any toilette tools.
Perhaps …
She glanced at a little tincture of iodine on her tray and wondered at how it would look on her lips, then chuckled to herself with a shake of her head.
No. No, that was too far. But a splash of witch hazel and perhaps some beeswax wouldn’t be remiss.
She also rubbed some of the wax between her fingers to tame the frizzy curls around her hairline as she removed her linen wrap, attempting to pat her dark mane into some semblance of civility some nine hours after braiding it.
An exercise in hubris, she knew, but she wasn’t about to take the braid out and start fresh.
She had minutes, not hours.
The door sounded in response to that thought, bringing her to her feet with one more quick look in the tiny mirror, sliding over her wax-dabbed lips and over the tiny curls patted back into her hairline.
She used what was left on her fingers to smooth down any frizz sticking up at the part of her hair as she carefully removed her apron and draped it over her arm, took a breath, straightened her shoulders, and walked out of the room as though she were midway through her normal routine, and surprised to see him returned.
He was carrying two boxes, presumably filled with food, and the fragrance of what was certainly a wine sauce crawled over the air, drowning out the talc and aqua fortis that floated in the air every evening.
“Look at you,” he said softly, blinking those incredible turquoise eyes. “You’re glowing.”
“That’s just the light, Roland,” she said impishly, unable to stop herself from dimpling at him. “Give me my key back, you scoundrel.”
He grinned back at her. “It’s in my pocket. Come get it. My hands are full.”
She raised her brows. “You jest.”
“Me?” he replied with a chuckle. “Never.”
“Well,” she said, drawing closer, examining the front of his trousers, which did in fact have pockets on both sides. “I suppose turnabout is fair play.”
“That is what they say,” he confirmed, watching her. “On the left.”
She trailed her fingers over his left pocket, starting to dip them inside, hesitating only because the light glinted off his teeth as he flashed them with a predatory smile. “What?”
“My left,” he clarified, in a tone that suggested she could continue as she was if she wished.
Her heart jumped and her breathing thinned, but she did her level best not to show it. “Why would I fish around in an empty pocket?” she said with a little sniff, switching to the other side.
“Who said it’s empty?” he replied in a dark little murmur, fanning heat up her throat and along the entire span of her chest.
She pushed her fingers into the correct pocket, noting that she could feel the lines of his thigh, including the firm indent of muscle that ran diagonally across the front of his upper leg.
Rectus femoris, her mind whispered in an absurdly seductive drawl.
She cleared her throat, pushing the heel of her hand past the tight confine of the pocket seam and feeling her fingertips wrap around the little key, which she retrieved as quickly as she could while he continued to grin at her, watching her face through this entire maneuver from incredibly close range.
He released a soft little laugh at her little squeak of victory as she danced backward with her prize glinting in her hand.
“Well, don’t be so excited,” he chided. “That only makes me want to take it again. Let me put the food down and I’ll give you the files to put back in there.”
“I actually wanted to get that gift Vix gave me at the picnic,” she said, looking down at the key in her hand and wondering at how he might steal it next. “What do you think it is?”
He laughed outright then. “God only knows,” he said. “Bring it up to the classroom. We’ll open it over wine.”
He turned and moved to take the food up the stairs at that instruction, leaving her standing in the foyer, still a little shaken by her brief time existing within his pocket.