Chapter 21
The first person Roland’s eyes fell upon after exiting the storeroom was, to his surprise, not the inspector, but Reverend Matthew Everly, looking exceedingly harried, rumpled, and dusty, even for Matthew himself, who had a reputation for being all three.
“Reed!” he called out as soon as he spotted him, marching across the floor, a look of wide-eyed urgency on his face. “Your vandals have found my church!”
“Oh, God,” said Mae, wrinkling her nose. “Is that what that smell is?”
Matthew frowned, running a hand over his frizzy brown curls and looking down at the spattering of telltale brown flecks on his cassock. “I’m afraid so. I’m not the only one they got.”
“Rosalind?” Mae said, covering her mouth.
“Vix,” Matthew replied with a frown. “She put the fear of God into them in a way I’ve never managed in all my years behind a pulpit. I imagine she’s following behind me a ways, after Ambrose wrangled her into the parish washroom. I know she intended to come here.”
Roland was covering his mouth because he knew the correct reaction was not laughter, but knowing something often did not override one’s instincts.
“Matthew?” came Thaddeus Beck’s voice from the doorway, where his shadow fell across the foyer with a hammer in hand. “What the devil?”
“I beg your pardon!” the shrill, pompous voice cried again. “In-spec-tion!”
Mae sighed, forcing a smile onto her face and clasping her hands in her skirt, spinning to put her back to Roland and the others to face a weedy, bewigged fellow vibrating with impatience near the triage bench.
“Hello again, Inspector!” she sang, in a voice that did not quite relay the murder Roland suspected he’d seen glint in her eyes for a moment. “I apologize for the wait. It appears our vandals have taken to attacking local parishes for the crime of giving us charity!”
Roland looked over at him curiously, wondering if he would feign surprise or balk or perhaps even smirk about it, but the man’s face was impressively impassive.
“That has nothing to do with me,” he said in a voice that seemed to actually believe it. “Shall we commence?”
“Matthew, you smell like cow shit,” Tod observed.
“Yes, I know,” Matthew returned impatiently. “Oh, egads, here she comes.”
“Matthew Allsaints Everly, you did not leave me behind,” Vix Aster’s voice cried from the lawn, sending Roland’s hand immediately back up over his mouth again.
“Darling, you’re going to stumble,” her husband dutifully said in her wake, sounding not at all actually concerned that she would nor invested in any way in stopping her from her rampage. “Oh, look, the door’s open.”
“I say, this is very noisy,” the inspector observed. “I was hoping to observe treatment and tour the nursery today.”
“The nursery has a new trio of chicken pox wards, if you don’t mind braving that fester,” Mae said mildly. “And I’ve a patient waiting who needs an infection and gravel debris scoured out of his leg. How are you with a horsehair brush?”
The inspector gave a delicate cough.
“I’ve asked his permission already,” Mae continued. “I was going to let our young protégé and aspirant doctor observe, but you are welcome to take his place.”
“Permission?” the inspector repeated, sounding baffled.
“Yes, fancy that,” Roland mused, stepping to her side. “Miss Casper, I think perhaps you ought to pass the inspector here off to Dr. Ravi while we deal with this unfolding ado at the door, hm?”
“I beg your pardon?” the inspector huffed. “And who are you? Another healer?”
Roland flashed him a tight grin. “I’m whomever I need to be in a given moment, sir. You, however, look very familiar to me. It’s odd. I feel like I’ve seen a younger version of you around here before, in the evening light. Perhaps a patient? Or … hm …”
The inspector blinked and then narrowed his eyes. “Is that so?”
“Perhaps just a trick of the light,” Roland said with a shrug. “Come along, Mae.”
“Oh, but,” she protested, frowning as Ravi was already stepping forward to ooze charm all over the unsuspecting inspector.
“Oh, hello,” the inspector managed. “My, but you’re all very brown around here, aren’t you?”
“The brownest,” Ravi agreed, slinging an arm over the man’s narrow shoulders. “Come this way. Have you ever seen someone who’s been dragged down a gravel path?”
“Classroom,” Roland suggested, nodding upward. “Matthew, leave your dress down here. It reeks.”
“It’s a coat,” Matthew snapped, gripping his cassock defensively.
“Actually, maybe leave it outside on the scaffolding,” Mae put in. “I can have it sent with our wash and brought back to you at Holy Comfort in a few days.”
“See that, Reed?” Matthew said, glaring at his lifelong friend. “Manners.”
“Where?” Reed answered, grinning.
Tod sighed and led the charge up the stairs, his sister on his heels, muttering under her breath about disembowelment and exile.
Ambrose lingered behind to watch Matthew unbutton the cassock and caught Roland’s eye, shrugging. “Haven’t you ever wanted to know if he was naked under there?”
“Him? No,” Roland answered. “Priests in general? Perhaps.”
Mae sighed and pushed them both with the palms of her hands toward the stairs. “Where is Rosalind?" she asked as they went.
“She went to get her brother,” Matthew said, coming up behind them. “Since he likely knows who the discus olympians were. I told her not to bother. Posh lads like that aren’t going to get any sort of punishment for mischief unless it bothers someone equally posh.”
“Rosalind thinks the world is just,” Vix said with a sniff. “If you rob her of that, I shall push you down these stairs.”
“Yes, yes,” Matthew intoned, sounding exhausted. “I wouldn’t.”
“He really wouldn’t,” Ambrose said, sounding delighted by the entire exchange. “But she really would.”
“And here we find Sir Ambrose,” Reed quipped, “still fascinated by the prospect of casual violence.”
“Hush,” said Mae.
The landing was still peppered with children as the nursery was being swept out and wiped down. Mae did not immediately spot any further frog bones, but that did not mean none had been yet discovered.
Dinah was lingering by the door, frowning at the gathering group in the classroom, her focus narrowed at Ezra’s apparent inclusion in the goings-on.
She made a decision to usher her charges back into their room and shut the door behind her, telling them before it closed that if any of them got up to any mischief or otherwise misbehaved, she would make them sleep in the haunted infirmary.
“Ah,” said Mae. “You are our ghost.”
“Nonsense,” Dinah replied, clicking the door shut and marching with them into the classroom. “I am its custodian.”
“Wait until she tells them about golems,” Matthew said with a smirk.
“Oh, now that’s an idea!” Dinah replied with approval, clasping her hands dreamily under her chin. “I bet I could get some clay from the workshop near my house too. If not … Mr. Reed, you are intimate with a sculptor or two, are you not?”
“Dinah,” said Mae, frowning.
Roland could not cover his mouth this time because he was busy shutting the classroom door, so he just allowed himself to laugh at these people outright.
Only Tod appeared to openly disapprove.
He was also the first to speak.
“This has to stop,” he announced. “We cannot let ourselves be endlessly terrorized without reaction.”
“Oh, I reacted,” Vix snapped, crossing her arms over her chest. “I reacted.”
Roland looked to Mae, who ran two firm fingers over her brows and temples and sank into the chair they’d shared the night before, seemingly without realizing it. She shook her head and tilted it back to stare at the ceiling.
“It might not be endless,” she reasoned. “The Season is almost over, and I very much expect the attention will wane when the ton goes home.”
“Until next summer?” Matthew said as gently as he could. “With whatever lingers in between?”
“Well, what do they want, exactly?” Ambrose asked, peering out the window at the scaffolding. “Other than for the clinic to cease to exist, is there anything we could actually offer them?”
“Oh, I think not,” his wife retorted. “They literally threw refuse at me and you want to offer them gifts? Bag that, Ambrose. Let’s set them on fire.”
He chuckled, looking back at her with so much naked affection that it made Tod clear his throat and shuffle in his seat in discomfort.
“They want teaching cases,” Ezra said from his stool by the chalkboards. “We can’t offer them our patients as sacrificial lambs. That would be monstrous.”
“Agreed,” said Mae, her voice still sharp despite the crumpled posture of her body. “Agreed.”
“That inspector seemed a little scandalized by the concept of asking a patient permission to be observed during treatment,” Roland said, worrying his thumb between his fingers.
“That was odd, wasn’t it? Have they never thought to simply ask for volunteers?
Perhaps in exchange for priority treatment or some such? ”
Mae gave a humorless, dry chuckle. “Learning cases do not get any perks, my lo—” She cut herself off, clearing her throat and immediately straightening.
“Mr. Reed,” she corrected, looking at the floor instead of him.
“They rarely even get help for the pain or an explanation of what is about to be done to them.”
“And I can’t simply name that as the reason we are being harassed in an opinion column?” Ezra bemoaned, throwing his hands up. “Why not?”
“Because you will make their plight worse,” Tod said softly. “And ours. That is not the approach to take. Even if the clinic did not exist, printing that truth would only discourage injured and sick people from seeking help, and imperfect help is still an improvement on none at all.”
Vix grimaced, blinking at him. “He’s right,” she said. “If our mother had gone to a healer, she might still be with us.”
“What if we use Mr. Murphy’s report to just name the vandals and publicly expose them?” Ambrose suggested. “Get them charged with damages or humiliated and kicked out of their schooling or something.”
“Spoken like the son of a duke,” Matthew said fondly. “Nothing will happen to them. If Ezra prints that, he’ll be the one chased out of town or blacklisted from ever writing again.”
“I could use a pseudonym,” Ezra suggested, though he didn’t sound convinced. “Wakley would print it.”
“Thomas Wakley is a gossipy old hag wearing a man costume,” Vix observed. “He absolutely would.”
Tod sighed, looking around the room until Ezra volunteered, “The Lancet.”
“I’m unfamiliar,” he said, shrugging.
“It’s a gossip rag wearing a medical-journal costume,” Roland provided, catching Vix’s eye with a shared smirk.
“Oh,” said Tod. “That. Hannah has mentioned it.”
“Because they have been writing about me,” Mae said. “About us. Ezra, I’m not against you writing a rebuttal, but short of naming our attackers or their motives, I’m just not sure what you could say that would be of any use.”
“You know what’s interesting,” Roland said, pushing himself off the wall and scratching at his jaw.
“The inspector is a relation to our vandals’ ringleader, but when I prodded him about it down there, he seemed genuinely confused by the insinuation.
Do you think it’s actually possible that he doesn’t know? ”
“I don’t see how,” Mae replied, frowning. “Especially when we started seeing these patterns of vandalism attacks at night and inspections the following morning.”
“That doesn’t mean he knows,” Dinah said through a mouthful of something from the corner, dragging everyone’s attention around to her.
She blinked up at them from the rear of the room, perched on a desk corner with her hand wedged in a bag of mixed nuts that had apparently been missed when Roland cleared the pub dinner the night before. She swallowed the mouthful she’d been chewing and shrugged.
“If I were doing mischief, and I never would,” she said, flashing a little grin, “I’d just listen to when Uncle Inspector or whoever was about to do their next official harassment and add a little grease to the wheels, so to speak.
If he knew when the inspections were happening, he’d know when to make them more difficult for us. ”
“Damn,” said Ezra, blinking at her in astonishment. “She’s right.”
“’Course I am,” she said, wrinkling her nose at him and tossing another peanut into her mouth. ”I’m smarter than you.”
Ezra immediately frowned, opening his mouth as his cheeks reddened to retort.
“If he doesn’t know,” Roland said, loudly enough to interrupt whatever embarrassing mistake the young man was about to make, “it begs the question of how he might react if it were brought to his attention, one way or another.”
“Now, that is something to consider,” Matthew said, crossing his arms and tilting his head. “Perhaps an anonymous letter, written in inscrutable, perfect penmanship?”
“Oh, here he goes,” Vix muttered.
“Or an insinuation in print,” Ezra suggested.
“Or a bloody conversation, since the man is already right downstairs?” Tod suggested, looking around the room like he’d gone mad.
In the end, no decision was made, because their war council was interrupted by a loud crash and the shattering of glass.