Chapter 22
Mae was the first one out the classroom door and down the stairs, though oddly, she could not remember standing or otherwise making the choice to move.
The crash, it turned out, had come from the procedure room, where the medicine cabinet hung open, tilted askew as though it were looming over the inspector with its arms thrown wide in threat while he moaned on the ground in a puddle of liquid, glass, and blood.
There was also a scattering of papers around him, slowly being soaked in the red and clear liquids that seeped into their delicate corners and flooded the ink.
“What on earth?” Mae cried, her fingers going into her mouth as she rushed forward, only to be stopped bodily by Sally. “My ether! The documents!”
“You’ll step on glass,” Sally said reasonably. “Don’t.”
“Stitches, I think,” Ravi was saying to the inspector, picking through the glass around him to peer at a cut on his leg while the patient with the gravel wound was looking curiously down from the bed. “Let’s get you up before that ether gets into your wound.”
“Don’t touch me!” the inspector cried, wincing and trying to turn onto his side, only to plant the flats of his palms in more glass and shout out again in pain. “Blast and damnation! Why was that shelf so loose!”
“Because it’s not a guardrail?” Ravi suggested mildly, crossing his arms and watching rather than assisting. “Why did you grab it like that?”
The inspector only pulled a face rather than answering. “I believe I slipped in pus,” he muttered.
“I believe he was going to spew,” the gravel patient offered helpfully. “I ain’t producing that much pus.”
“No, you aren’t, Mr. Hollander,” Ravi agreed politely.
“What are all these … what is this!” the inspector barked, snatching up a wet stack of papers so harshly that they came wetly apart in the middle. “This is my name! My nephew’s name! What is the meaning of … oh, God, my leg!”
Mae shot Sally a look and pushed her arm off the hold it had around her waist. “Those are mine,” she said firmly. “Unhand them at once. You are ruining them.”
“Is this retaliation for the simple act of inspection?” he demanded, going as purple as the blossoming trail of blood from his leg, his wig slipping down the back of his head.
“I am empowered by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, I’ll have you know, and Guy’s has a great interest in ensuring this facility is up to standard given that it has poached so many of her patients.
What business have you with my nephew and his fellows? ”
“I could answer that,” Roland said mildly, appearing at Mae’s side as though from the air itself. “Shall I?”
Mae sighed. “Sir, if you do not let us stitch your leg up, you are going to lose so much blood, you will faint. Do you wish to faint? On a pile of glass?”
“Oh, no, the shelf!” Dinah cried from somewhere in the rear. “I suppose I’d best go find those muscled workmen to fix it, yes?”
“Dinah, go back to your children,” Ezra snapped. “Or get the brooms back out of the nursery.”
Evidently tired of all the conversing, Thaddeus Beck stomped through the crowd, parting them with the sheer breadth of his body, and loomed over the inspector, his shadow darkening the man enough that he had no choice but to peer up at this new player.
“I am going to put you on a cot,” Mr. Beck informed him. “Do not squirm.”
“Not my cot,” Mr. Hollander said with a sniff. “I’ve still rocks in me.”
“The one in the foyer, Mr. Beck, if you please,” Mae managed, stepping back and pointing. “Thank you.”
They all pointedly looked away from the inspector being scooped up and cradled like an infant as he was moved, dripping, to the designated bed. As she could not reach the area herself, Ravi went for the thread spool, stuck two needles into it, and tossed it to her over the threshold of mess.
But it was Roland that caught it.
He wordlessly turned and followed the path of the inspector and Mae did the same, casting one last mournful look over her shoulder at the wasted ether and witch hazel, the ruined bottles, and worst of all, those documents from Morning Glory Investigations, destroyed and smearing more by the second in the ruin that was the floor.
“It burns,” the inspector whined as Beck rolled him onto the narrow bed. “Like hellfire.”
“That’s the ether,” Mae snapped. “My precious, expensive ether. Enough to last me through the remainder of the year, you know. And now it is gone.”
“Did it burn me?” he asked, grimacing. “Am I further wounded?”
She shook her head, letting Roland set up the needles and thread while she tore the inspector’s trousers further open to look at the wound.
“No. It’s just cleaner than it would be otherwise and bleeding more than it needs to because ether has that effect.
It’s not as bad as I thought. Four stitches or five ought to do it. ”
“Shouldn’t an apothecary know that?” Roland asked, accepting a fresh basin from Sally, who glared at the inspector before flouncing back off.
“I’m not an apothecary,” he muttered. “I am a member of the Worshipful Soc—”
“Yes, we all heard you,” Mae told him. “Have you ever gotten stitches before?”
He shook his head. “Never,” he said, and for a moment, he sounded very much like a little boy.
“Stitches!” cried the voice of an actual little boy. “I want to help! I can hold the seam, doctress!”
Mae sighed.
Winston came barreling forward, flour dusting his brow from whatever he’d been up to in the kitchenette, his eyes wide and eager.
“Inspector,” she said, turning to look at him. “This is Winston. He aspires to one day be a doctor. Do you mind if he assists me in stitching your wound?”
“A child?!” he balked. “Will he wield the needle?”
“No!” said Winston.
“No,” agreed Mae.
“One day,” said Roland, raising his eyebrows. “Come clean your hands, Winston.”
“I already did!” Winston said, holding them up for Roland to inspect. “Smell them! I used the lye soap!”
Roland nodded and dipped a clean cloth into the basin. “All right. Go help Mae clean the wound before we start sewing.”
Winston nodded and took the wet towel, wringing it out carefully in his little hands and then went to stand between Mae and the inspector. He blinked up at him a couple of times and said, “What is your name, sir?”
The inspector hesitated, wrinkling his brow. “Irving,” he said, seemingly without thinking.
“Well, Irving,” Winston said in his best adult voice. “Would you like to hear a story while we work?”
Mae pressed her lips together, glancing over at Roland, who was grinning widely at the scene as Winston began to dab at the cut while Mae splashed it at intervals with witch hazel solution.
“I used to have a very lazy dog,” Winston informed the inspector, dabbing and rinsing and dabbing again.
“All he ever did was sleep, and I was sick of it! So I decided one day that he would be happier as a pub dog, since his favorite place to sleep was by the fire. I just had to get the pub man to agree to have him.”
“All right,” said Mae, nudging him to the side and reaching for her threaded needle.
Winston moved to the head of the cot and the inspector’s eyes followed him. He handed the bloodied rag off to Roland without stopping his story, keeping the man’s attention as Mae wedged the needle in at the base of his cut.
“The pub man was never going to say yes, but my mum said as long as he didn’t say no, the dog could stay, so I waited until I had saved up enough to buy a nice breakfast there on a cold morning when there would be a fire and took my lazy dog to eat it by the fireplace.
Just like I knew he would, he fell asleep straight away.
So, I ate my breakfast really fast, and as soon as I was done, I went for the door so my lazy dog could stay in his new home.
The barman caught me, though, and he said, ‘Oi, lad, you can’t leave that mutt lyin’ there! ’”
“Bad luck,” said the inspector as Mae finished the stitches.
Four, she noted with satisfaction, tying them off and looping the knot.
“Well,” said Winston. “I told him it wasn’t a mutt lion. It was a mutt dog! And then I ran out before he could argue. And now the lazy dog lives there still to this day!”
“Oh,” said the inspector, giving a dazed little chortle. “Oh, very good.”
“All done,” Mae informed him. “Keep it dry and clean and come back in a week or two and I’ll take them out. Please don’t try to take them out yourself or early. If they start itching or leaking clear or white, come back early.”
“He always comes back early,” Roland observed, crossing his arms. “Doesn’t he?”
At that, the inspector at least had the grace to look a little abashed. “It is my profession, good sir,” he said, forcing himself upright. “Oh, bother, I cannot go out onto the street with my trousers like this!”
“Why not?” said Winston, sounding genuinely baffled.
It got another dazed little chuckle out of the inspector. “You’re a good lad,” he said, and ruffled Winston’s hair. “Perhaps you will be a doctor someday after all.”
“And you were one of his teaching cases,” Roland informed him. “Though, as you can see, we only do that here with the permission of the patient.”
“Me?” the inspector said, sounding affronted. “A teaching case?”
“Yes,” Mae agreed. “You just were. Weren’t you?”
He hesitated and frowned. “I suppose, if we are being literal.”
“Is there any other way to be?” Roland asked, taking the needle back from Mae and dropping it into the basin. “Shall we call you a hansom to get you home? I suspect you do not wish to walk on that leg.”
Once Roland had walked away with the basin and Winston in tow, Mae turned back to the inspector, who was watching her with a pained expression on his face, his fingers fidgeting in the torn fabric of his trousers.
“The boys in the files you saw,” she said.
“They have been vandalizing the clinic, usually on the nights before you show up for yet another inspection. Today they went to Holy Comfort Church in Covent Garden and threw animal feces at the vicar for the sin of raising funds for us to continue to practice. Your nephew is among them.”
His eyebrows shot up, pink spots rising on his cheeks, though Mae could not guess whether it was shame or outrage at the accusation.
“We are not going to retaliate,” she said with a shrug. “After all, what could we realistically do? You and yours have all the actual power here, Irving. I hope you sleep well, knowing that. I can’t imagine how well I would rest, if I had any power at all.”
She turned then and walked away before he had a chance to respond, passing by the sweeping efforts and the righting of the medicine cabinet in her procedure room and Winston being deployed out into London to secure a hansom cab for the incapacitated inspector.
She kept walking until she had gone right out the front door of the clinic and onto the lawn and walked a little farther still until there was nothing around her but low, sharp shards of dried-out summer grass and the expanse of humid air to embrace her.
And then she sat. She sat right on the dirt.
She hugged her knees to her chest and she sat for a while.
Because she was not certain there was anything else at all she could do.