Chapter 26
Mae would have liked to stay exactly as she was for the next three or four lifetimes, swaddled in nothing but Roland’s blankets and arms.
Alas, however, the clinic awaited. And she didn’t want her grandparents to think she’d run afoul of brigands. So the only option, after a long and indulgent breakfast wearing nothing but sheets, was to return to the world at large.
“My hair,” she bemoaned, touching all the spiky and coiling strands that had escaped and been rubbed into frizzy chaos by hands and pillows in the night. “I wish I had a turban.”
“A turban is worse than that linen strip you wear,” he replied with a click of his tongue. “I will put it into order, if you don’t mind smelling of my pomade for a day.”
“Roland, I already smell of you,” she reminded him, giving a skeptical giggle as he moved about gathering combs and pots of toilette. “My hair is extremely different to yours. You won’t know how to manage it.”
“Mae,” he said flatly. “I was a child in a brothel. My first and most important function as soon as my little fingers were long enough to move with purpose was styling hair of all sorts. I could plait before I could write my name. Sit down.”
Miraculously, at least to Mae, he was not bluffing.
He took his time, coating each strand of her braid with his waxy, almond-scented pomade, and wove them into beautiful, even lines on either side of her head, wrapping them back around into a perfect crown, which he tucked into place with the two pins that were still clinging desperately to the tips of her curls after many hours of disregard and abuse.
When she turned and looked into the mirror over his chest of drawers, she did so with open disbelief, reaching up and touching the end of the braid.
He immediately slapped her hand away, catching it and kissing her knuckles. “Don’t mess it up,” he whispered. “Or I’ll have to do it all over again.”
“Oh, no,” she whispered back. “I would just hate that.
“Do you think anyone will notice?” she asked as she climbed back into her yellow dress. “That I’m wearing the same thing I was yesterday, I mean.”
“Yes,” he said, and sounded very damned pleased about it. “They will. They will also notice when we arrive together.”
She shot him a look over her shoulder but did not argue, nor suggest that they stagger their paths.
Let them see, she thought.
Let them know.
A romantic scandal was little to nothing after a full summer as the anti-darling of The Lancet.
She picked up the apron and draped it over her arm, knowing a clean one would be waiting for her at the clinic. However, a cursory reach into the front pockets made her both sigh and smile.
“Roland,” she said, attempting to be stern. “The key?”
He just flashed her his teeth, slipping it from his waistcoat pocket and tossing it to her from across the room. “I was only keeping it safe,” he lied.
“Mm-hm,” she answered, catching it cleanly. “And the thimble?”
“It’s in my pocket,” he answered. “Come and get it.”
And so, for the second time ever, Mae Casper was late to her day of work at the Clerkenwell Clinic.
But, she thought, she did not often begin the day with such a wide smile either.
Perhaps a good habit would balance out the beginnings of a bad one. And she wasn’t as late as she’d been the day before.
There was a mist in the air, a gentle cool gift that promised autumn was coming and broke around their shapes as Roland and Mae made their path through the city.
They arrived to the normal breakfast routine, the foyer still mostly empty save for her grandfather settling into his chair and the breakfast train being run up to the nursery and to the one patient in the infirmary: the poor malaria patient whose symptoms flared and ebbed, seemingly at random.
What was unexpected was a large parcel sitting on the triage bench, with her own name written in spiky ink across the paper tag on the top.
“We wanted to open it,” Dr. Bethel told her in a voice that suggested he still had his letter opener at the ready, “but it is addressed to you.”
“Yes, but go on,” Winston urged her. “What’s in there? Is it a snake?”
“Why would it be a snake?” Dinah Lazarus demanded, gripping him over the head with the tips of her fingers and turning him back toward the kitchenette. “Bowls! Spoons! Go!”
“But Miss Dinah!” he moaned. “At least let me see if it’s a snake.”
“Now I’m going to be upset when it isn’t a snake,” Ravi muttered.
Mae ignored them all, twisting the tag over in her hand and reading with widening eyes the inscription on the back: Compliments of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries.
“A blade?” she said absently, only to have Dr. Bethel shove a pair of curved medical scissors under her nose before she could finish the syllable. “Oh. Many thanks.”
She snipped the string holding the box together and unwrapped the mystery, just as curious as everyone else, and certainly not imagining a cobra popping out and striking her at the throat.
Inside were what appeared to be two layers of gifts, separated by a thin plank of wood.
“Ether,” she breathed, not quite believing it as she withdrew one of the bottles and held it up, looking back at the remaining stock in the box. “Twice as much as we lost.”
“Oh, good turn!” Ravi exclaimed, rushing forward to peek inside. “Digitalis! And Quinine!” he announced, pulling out more vials. “Mae, this is a miracle.”
She licked her lips, which suddenly felt quite dry, pushing aside the ingredients within. At the very bottom there was a small box that, once again, had her name on it. She withdrew that with hands that did not quite shake but buzzed strangely, as though she were in a dream.
It was heavy.
“Maybe that’s just pure liquid gold,” Dinah speculated, crossing her arms. “I do love a good apology bribe. One time my papa bought me a jeweled headband after I got in trouble for something my sister Esther did.”
Mae glanced up at her with a smirk as her fingers dug into the corners of the box, working it open.
Inside was not gold, but silver.
She withdrew a glinting, beautifully made mortar and pestle from the cushioned inside and turned it against the light, her heart giving a little flutter in her chest.
Roland came to stand over her shoulder, peering down at it. “‘Hippocratis Juramentum,’” he read from the spiraling letters around the bowl of the mortar. “‘Primum non nocere.’ The devil does that mean?”
Mae blinked several times, looking up at him through a bleary wash of warmth in her eyes, shaking her head because she could not bring the words to her throat.
“It means the law of Hippocrates,” Ravi provided.
Dr. Bethel nodded, looking thoughtful. “First, do no harm.”
“Ohhh,” said Winston, nodding sagely. “He’s cross that we put a needle in him.”
It startled everyone so much that it broke the tension in the room, a little ripple of laughter settling over them.
“I suppose, my boy,” said Dr. Bethel, “that what Hippocrates meant was that you shouldn’t do abject harm. Sometimes the cure requires a little pain. Breaking eggs to make omelets and so on.”
“What’s an omelet?” said Winston, which made Dr. Bethel gasp.
Mae glanced up at her grandfather over the muddle of others and found him watching her with a wry steadiness, his hands braced on his knees. She set the gifts aside, letting Winston inspect the engraved mortar, and made her way to him, voices behind her simmering into an incomprehensible static.
“Amends, I presume,” she said, once she was close enough to speak, giving him a little open-handed shrug.
“Perhaps,” he agreed, his gaze flicking from her to the excited admiration of the gifts in the background. “Or a golden shackle, as many institutions are wont to have.”
“Silver, actually,” she said, winning a quirk of his lips. “A shackle is better than a lash, isn’t it?”
“A shackle reminds its wearer that the lash is waiting,” he corrected, raising his bushy white eyebrows, “but necessary evils are part of the game. You humbled that inspector, whether you intended to or not. It wasn’t the plan we’d made, but now it’s the one we’re going to have to work with.”
“The investigation documents we got from Abraham Murphy were fully destroyed, I expect?” she said, leaning against the beam near the door and crossing her arms with a sigh.
Her grandfather nodded. “But we’d all already read them, hadn’t we? And Mr. and Mrs. Murphy are perfectly capable of penning things down again upon request, I imagine, even if there’s an associated fee.”
She frowned, glancing back over her shoulder. “Grandy, you might think me soft in the head, but something about this gift feels … sincere to me? When I opened that mortar, I felt touched by it, not threatened.”
“Did you?” he said, sounding more curious than disagreeing.
“Then perhaps that’s all it is: a gift, an apology.
But, even so, it is also direct acknowledgement by the institutional body that is something other than a rebuke, and that’s of note.
The clinic is no longer a tent in answer to a crisis, or a dream of a single wooden room.
It is, as of today, part of London’s medical organism, Mae. You are.”
She huffed, giving him an ironic little smile. “I’ll never be a doctor, Grandy. You know that.”
He huffed right back. “Don’t start with that. And that wasn’t what I said, anyhow. Will you help me stand? I want to go look at that fellow with the ague. I’ve never seen a case before.”
“Malaria,” she corrected, leaning down to get him onto his feet. “It seems odd that we’ve given it a pet name, doesn’t it?”
“That’s what happens when something is mostly hypothetical,” he said with a shrug. “Though even its proper name is a bit precious. Mal-aria? Bad air? We’re scientists, not poets.”
“Fair enough,” she said with a titter. “I had a patient once who, after being diagnosed with dropsy, named her cat for it. And I can’t blame her. It does sound like a cat, doesn’t it? Dropsy.”
He shook his head on a chuckle, looking wry. “My old fellows at Guy’s would be chewing through the door if they knew we had a case of ague here every few weeks, so docile and willing to be questioned and poked at. A learning hospital’s dream.”
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully as she guided him toward the infirmary. “I suppose it would be.”
He furrowed his brow at her, observing the change on her face. “Whatever you’re thinking,” he said, “be careful with it.”
“Hm?” she said. “Oh. I always am.”
“Certainly you are,” he replied with a chuckle. “And that’s why Mr. Reed has the medicine cabinet key again, isn’t it?”
“He doesn’t…” She paused, turning to find Roland happily swinging the doors to the repaired cabinet open so they could put in the new stock, her little key around his pinky like a signet ring. She sighed, feeling a betrayal of warmth from her throat to her stomach at this abject robbery.
“Ah,” said her grandfather. “Now you know what it feels like to be hit in the head by a well-thrown rock.”
She blinked down at him, smiling despite herself. “Yes,” she confessed. “Now I do.”