Chapter 27
It took a whole ninety minutes after Dinah Lazarus left the Clerkenwell Clinic for the day for Vix Aster to appear in her place.
She stood, unsettlingly still in her velvet and silk couture, not evidently fuming or otherwise emotive, her eyes flicking between Mae, who was ignoring her completely, bent over a man who had some sort of scaly, peeling growth on his shoulder, and Roland, who was at the foot of the stairs, and filled with the fear of a man who had lived long enough to know when to feel it.
“Casper!” she called, shrill and abrupt, when Mae did not cease her skin scraping to acknowledge her. “You wore that frock yesterday!”
Mae sighed, shook her head, and yet still did not look up.
Everyone else in the clinic did, though.
“I think it is a mole,” Mae said into the silence, as though the man who was now staring at her with his mouth open was still concerned about his skin issue. “A very large, wide mole. Or otherwise, some manner of cyst. The good news is that I do not think it is dangerous.”
“I had to reimburse Dinah for a hackney coach,” Vix continued to announce, marching across the room toward Mae and then stopping instantly short and turning in terrifying, syrupy-slow movement toward Roland. “You.”
“Hullo, Vix,” he said, coughing gently.
She narrowed her dark eyes. “I should have brought Teddy.”
“I’m very glad you didn’t,” he said weakly.
“All right!” Mae announced, leaning back from the man with the mole-cyst. “Come along, Lady Aster. Have you been douching that rash twice a day like I instructed?”
Vix froze, her head ticking almost imperceptibly to the side. Bizarrely, a little slant upward appeared on her lips. “Oh, doctress,” she cooed, turning slowly so that her gown would bunch and twirl. “It wasn’t a rash. It was the defensive scratching of my last victim.”
“Ah, yes,” said Mae, stepping toward the procedure room and holding the door open. “How is your husband now?”
“You know,” said Dr. Casper, hobbling up to stand next to Roland as the two women vanished behind the door. “I used to think those two were in love. I suppose it’s a good thing for you that I was wrong.”
“Were you wrong?” Roland replied, still sounding rather thin at the throat. “Should I go in there?”
“Oh, absolutely not,” the doctor said, patting Roland’s shoulder. “Absolutely not.”
He grimaced, remembering what Mae had said about the rules of her thimble ownership. He should’ve taken that bloody thing instead of the key when he’d enjoyed an extra feel through her pockets this morning.
Now she had it. And was in a room alone with Vix and the thimble.
Good Lord, but she could give Vix his address.
He would have to move.
“Lad, you look like you drank the cod oil,” Dr. Casper said. “Why don’t we take a turn about the facility, hm?”
“The what?” Roland exclaimed, startled enough out of his panic to feel revulsion. “What is that? Some sort of torch fuel? Like whale fat?”
“Oh, my dear boy,” said Dr. Casper. “I wish. I have a hankering to try the new outdoor staircase, you know, but I can’t climb it by myself. Would you indulge me?”
“Do I have to carry you back down again at the end?” Roland asked, squinting.
Dr. Casper only gave him a wide, gap-toothed smile. “Like a bride on her wedding night.”
It was, Roland had to admit, a decent distraction from the simmering dread of looking at the closed door of the procedure room. It was also a nice thing to do rather than staring at the pile of gray skin flakes under the patient Mae had been scraping at.
He wouldn’t have reflected on that second part at all if he hadn’t heard Winston complaining, “The broom doesn’t work on that muck. It’s too gooey. I’ll pick it up with a rag.”
And Ravi saying, “You really are built for the profession, you know.”
It did make Roland pause, though, setting the old doctor back on his feet at the foot of the outdoor staircase after their tour up and back down again.
He was frowning, watching Winston through the window on his knees, picking up curls of dead skin, and turned to the other man with a sad little weight in his heart.
“He’ll never actually be a doctor, will he?” he said. “Not without a fine education and plenty of money to sponsor his training.”
“Likely not,” said Dr. Casper with a shrug. “But he can be like Mae, a healer fully trained, a doctor in all but name. It is not a bad calling, for one who isn’t born to wealth.”
“Like you were?” Roland said, leaning back against the railing of the stairs. “You must have been.”
Dr. Casper hesitated, a look of sorrow flickering over his wrinkled features. “If I could sponsor the boy, I would,” he said seriously.
“That isn’t what I was getting at,” Roland immediately answered. “I was just curious.”
The old man sighed, shaking his head, and turned to creak slowly down to sit on the bottom few steps of the new stairs.
“My people weren’t particularly wealthy, not ton Society or anything like that,” he said.
“But they could afford to send me to Harrow. They disowned me, though, when I married Violet. She wasn’t …
the word they used was suitable. What they meant was—”
“White,” Roland finished for him, winning a grimacing nod. “Good riddance, then.”
“Indeed,” said Dr. Casper, rubbing at his swollen knuckles. “Indeed. The money is always nice, though.”
“Maybe Dr. Ravi could sponsor him,” Roland said, considering the scene again through the window. “After a time, once he’s gotten to know him well enough. I expect he has quite a lot of money, given his story.”
“Perhaps,” said Dr. Casper. “But we still barely know the man. He’s given us quite a lot already with just his service, especially with all the trouble going on.”
“Yes, the trouble,” Roland agreed with a sigh.
“There’s that, too, isn’t there? You know Lady Aster, Vix, we sent her to school when we were just children.
Her brother, the reverend, and myself. We conned our way into getting her onto scholarship rosters and helped her lie her way through the interview process at a girl’s school in Bath-Spa.
The really maddening thing is that it seemed so simple and attainable to us as children, and the idea of doing something similar now for a boy like Winston seems utterly impossible. ”
“Is that so?” said Dr. Casper, looking impressed. “And just imagine, without what you boys did, she might be running barefoot through the alleys like that little sister of yours, sketching open cadavers for coin.”
Roland laughed outright, shaking his head.
“I knew both Sybil and Vix from the babyhood. No two women could have begun more different. Vix would have still been elegant, even if she’d remained nothing more than a flower-seller’s daughter.
And Sybil would still be dusted with charcoal and blurting out rude observations with glee, even if she’d been born a duchess. ”
“You have to envy that,” said the doctor.
“When I was a boy, I thought I could be any of a dozen different men if I stepped the wrong way on the sidewalk one morning or the next. Even our friend Winston in there, if you consider him, had no calling until his mother decided it was time for him to get the chicken pox, just to get him out of her hair for a week or three.”
Roland was smiling, considering it. “I actually was a dozen different men, I think,” he told Dr. Casper. “Maybe I still am.”
“As long as all of those men are hers,” Dr. Casper said, nodding to the window as Mae emerged, giggling and nudging a smiling Vix, “that sounds like a good outcome to me.”
Vix emerged a moment later, her head held high and her nose pointed in the general direction of the moon. “Come along, Roland,” she said to him. “You are to escort me home.”
“Oh, am I?” he shot back. “I have duties here.”
She turned, raising a single dark brow, and withdrew a glinting trinket from her sleeve. “Do it,” she said, “or I shall behead your little ducky.”
He gave her a flat-mouthed look of resignation and tossed an apologetic goodbye to the good doctor, following her to her carriage, which was waiting on a nearby block corner. “Give that to me,” he demanded. “Why do you have it?”
She tittered, tossing it to him as she stepped into the carriage ahead of him and settled back into her seat. “Mae said you would not escort me without it as proof of her blessing,” she informed him. “It seems she was correct.”
He made a noncommittal sound, hoisting himself in across from her and tucking it safely into his waistcoat pocket. “Is that all she gave you?”
Vix flashed her teeth at him, glinting in the twilight. She held up her hand, the thimble sitting on the tip of her ring finger, just above her wedding band. “How did you know?”
He only sighed in response.
“You are wondering what she asked for,” Vix guessed, admiring the flash of silver on her fingertip. “I shall tell you, because you are being such a good boy. But only once we arrive at the Tod there were only a few players at the tables so early in the evening. They both looked up as though they were expecting this intrusion and waited for Vix and Roland to reach them.
Matthew, Roland thought, looked very odd when he wore plain clothes.
“Good,” said Vix, nodding happily as she pulled herself onto a barstool, letting the fortune of fabric that made up her skirt billow over it like an afterthought. “We’ve many things to discuss, of course, but something unexpected has taken precedent, and so we will begin with that.”
“Naturally,” her brother muttered, sounding completely unsurprised.
Vix smiled at him and produced the thimble, setting it between them on the glossy surface of the bartop. “There,” she said. “It’s come back to me.”
Matthew grinned. “So it has. What were the terms?”
Vix looked up at him and gave a slow, curling smile. “My dare? I accepted the thimble on one simple condition: Mae Casper dared me to give the thimble to Roland Reed.”
Roland himself was startled enough by this announcement that he was brought quickly and starkly out of his unpleasant reveries about the absence of the very same Mae Casper. “What?!” he barked. “She did what?!”
“Yes,” said Vix, tapping the top of the thimble and sliding it toward him. “It is yours. If you accept my dare.”
“I need a drink,” Tod muttered, already setting glasses out for the four of them.
“And what might that be?” Roland asked, wary as a feral kitten as his drink was poured. “What would you dare me to do?”
Vix’s grin widened as she tapped the domed top of the little silver thimble. “Well,” she said. “Here is what I’m thinking …”