Chapter 7
They cleaned up quickly, with Mae dabbing at the leg and the rest of them bagging up dirty linens and throwing straps and tools into their respective buckets.
There was no opportunity to speak right away, nor to even share much more than a single glance before the rabbi took Thaddeus Beck out of Hannah’s eyesight, an arm slung around his middle as he spoke to him in low tones.
All Hannah could do was watch—stare, really—while her hands moved in memorized patterns of rolling and balling and tying.
She was still a little numb inside. Still somehow frozen and on fire at once. She still couldn’t quite believe he was here.
“That’s the last of the talcum,” Mae said, cutting into Hannah’s reverie. “It’s not clean, exactly, but I hope it will stave off infection until I can get at it properly. Poor sod.”
“I hope so too,” Hannah said. She did not know what invited infection or otherwise prevented it, of course, but she did hope, for the man’s sake, that one did not find him.
There was no clean water this late in the day, and it was unlikely there would be until tomorrow morning. The patients were on their own to source food for the night and any other necessities they might require.
Hannah hated that, but she did not yet have the means to do anything about it. Not yet.
“He must be our benefactor,” Mae whispered to her as they buckled her toolkit together, just before stepping out into the open air. “The one who left the donation some days ago.”
“Donation?” Hannah demanded, blinking furiously and looking around to ensure that Mr. Beck had not vanished from her life again, before she could have her reckoning. “What donation? When?”
“He gave it to the rabbi, anonymously,” Mae continued, raising her dark brows. “It was a tidy sum too, enough to get linens for all the cots and enough medicines to help the worst of them. Not enough for everything, of course, and we haven’t spent it all yet.”
“I am going to find more,” Hannah told her, a sharpness in her tone that was born of certainty. “I’ve already begun posting letters. I wish I could spend all day sending them, but there aren’t enough hands here to justify me sat at a desk, scribbling away the hours.”
“More hands now, though,” Mae pointed out, reaching behind her neck to rub at the sore muscles there. “Nice, big ones. Maybe he’s got friends.”
Hannah blinked.
Did he have friends?
She realized she did not know.
“What’s the matter?” Mae asked, frowning. “Have I said something wrong?”
“No, of course not,” Hannah answered quickly. “No, I’ve just got a lot on my mind. Perhaps I should find hands before I find coin. It seems like there’s entirely too much to do, and each thing requires another first in a hopeless circle of impossible contradiction.”
“Yes,” agreed Mae. “Isn’t that always how it is?”
The rabbi and Mr. Beck emerged a moment later, the former still murmuring to the latter, who was listening raptly and nodding at regular intervals.
Absurdly, Hannah felt a jolt of white-hot jealousy. She wanted to rush forward and shove them apart. How dare Rabbi Hirsch steal her hard-won conversation right from under her nose?!
“My dear young ladies,” said the rabbi. “I am afraid our new friend and I are going to take a detour to the tenement to assess the damage. You are welcome to join us if you would still like accompaniment home, but I understand if you are too tired to go out of your way.”
“We’re coming,” Hannah said quickly, before Mae could even get her mouth all the way open. “We need to see.”
She felt the other girl turning to look at her, felt the tilt of her head. She did not look back. She didn’t look at Mr. Beck either.
“That’s a good girl,” said the rabbi. “Just this way.”
They fell in line behind the men, their shoes crunching on the gravel on the way to the poorer side of Clerkenwell, where not even the sidewalks were properly paved.
Hannah tried not to wring her hands. She tried not to grimace and spiral over how dirty she was, how she likely smelled, how her hair looked and her dress. This was not ideal at all. Not at all.
“Well,” said Mae Casper. “I suppose I ought to have known the first donation was your doing. Who is he to you, our St. Thaddeus?”
Hannah turned her head as they walked, squeezed her eyes shut, and sighed. “Only an acquaintance,” she said, which made the other girl giggle.
“I wish my acquaintances were half so accommodating,” she said, and then, very suddenly, she called out ahead, increasing her pace to meet the men ahead. “Rabbi Hirsch! I need to speak to you! If you please!”
“Miss Casper?” the rabbi said, turning back to receive her.
It allowed Mr. Beck to fall away. It allowed him to find his pace to the rear. Beside Hannah.
She thought her heart might very well split in two and escape out either ear.
He was wearing the green waistcoat, she realized.
The one she had imagined him in. His hair had come out of its neat, combed-back styling when he was holding that man down, and glossy umber tresses were hanging over his brow.
She was going to faint. Or bolt. Wasn’t she?
She looked down at the way his polished shoes hit the ground in time with hers, at the dark red stitching in the brown fabric of his trousers.
She looked at his hand, only briefly, and imagined she could see amongst the thin, criss-crossed scars that lined the backs of the two larger ones, right on the knuckles.
Hers. Her scars.
“I am sorry I did not write,” he said, his voice so soft and smooth, so deep and rich that she felt it pool in her stomach like scalding tea. “I tried. I am not skilled with a pen, Miss Lazarus.”
“You forgot your jacket,” she said, because her mouth often did things without her consent.
She raised her eyes to meet his but paused on his sleeves, on the expanse of exposed flesh above his wrist, at the corded muscles she’d watched when he was pinning that man to the table. “You left it at the clinic.”
“Oh,” he said, those dark, impermeable eyes widening. “Oh, I did, didn’t I? Damn it. I mean … Shit! No. God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Miss Lazarus. Forgive me. I know better than to use such words in front of you.”
“In front of me?” she repeated, soft and baffled. “They are only words, Mr. Beck. I am pleased to hear any at all if they are from your lips.”
His head twitched very slightly to the side, like she had slapped him. His brow wrinkled. He frowned. He cleared his throat and, having found his beautiful, basso voice again, he said, “You must not say such things.”
“Whyever not?” she returned, slowly realizing that this conversation was an exercise in shared confusion. “It is only the truth. I have dreamed of having you speak to me again for these past two years.”
He was staring at her so hard, she thought it a wonder he did not trip on the little rocks in their path.
He seemed to have an easy gait around the lack of paving and its scattered debris, managing to both watch her and move with the elegant prowl of a panther in his own jungle.
“Miss Lazarus,” he said, lower now, almost like he was pleading.
“Hannah,” she corrected. “Please call me Hannah. Please.”
“Miss Lazarus!” he repeated, sounding a little strangled.
She sighed and gave a little shake of her head and shoulders, cursing herself for not saying the right things. For not somehow imparting her gratitude that he had arrived, just as she had wished.
What did he wish of her?
“What did you mean,” he said softly, almost as though he could hear the clatter of her thoughts knocking against her browbones and temples, “when you said you wondered if you could have been better?”
She blinked, the clatter stilling. “I meant exactly what I said,” she answered, frowning.
“I wished that I had been braver, more direct, more willing to speak to you before you were twenty minutes to leaving. I wished that I had built a rapport with you that would have lent itself to an ongoing correspondence. Something. Anything.”
“That was not your failing,” he told her, those thick, beautifully groomed brows of his drawing together. “If anything, it was mine.”
She gave a short laugh, nervous energy giving her the oddest impulse to fling herself into a canter rather than continue at this pace next to him. “I did not know you even noticed me there, Mr. Beck.”
His brow smoothed at that. What was this expression now? His eyes were so very dark, the iris melding into the pupil like staring directly out into the night sky. “Likewise,” he answered, sounding almost amused. “Miss Lazarus.”
“Hannah,” she corrected, barely louder than a whisper before her voice was overtaken.
“Here we are!” announced Rabbi Hirsch, the fiend. “This is the place.”
She huffed, forcing herself to come to a halt and turn to behold the ruin that had once been a matrix of homes, row upon row, like the buildings around it. The sight of it was startling enough to momentarily distract her from the fact that something so very monumental had been interrupted.
It looked like someone had dragged their hand right down the center of a tiramisu. The whole affair was sagging in graduating, teardrop layers from the long-ruined roof down to what must once have been an entryway.
It looked like it was still breaking apart, ever so slowly, and bleeding like a living thing besides, with streams and gulleys of plaster-colored liquid running down the walls and pooling under the windows and near the unnatural corners that had formed in the destruction.
“Christ,” muttered Mr. Beck. “It needs to come down.”
“Someone else is going to get hurt here,” Mae said, dropping her hands on her hips and tilting her head back to try to take it all in at once. “Someone will be walking past when it falls, and it will kill them.”
“There is still so much inside,” the rabbi added with a frown. “That is why those men came back. The sooner we can have it razed and cleared, the safer it will be for everyone.”
“And how do you propose we do that?” Mae asked, turning to look at her old friend.
“We haven’t the consent of the landlord.
We haven’t the men nor the equipment nor the funding, and meanwhile in that tent back there, every spare second of our effort is needed to keep the survivors here with us on this earth. ”
“The landlord won’t raise a fuss,” Mr. Beck said with grim certainty. “I know a barrister who can draw up papers and have them signed at the merest hint of the word negligence. Manpower won’t be an issue either. The wretched are not stingy with their hands.”
Hannah stared at him. She stared openly and with awe.
The wretched? What did this man know of wretchedness?
“I can reach out to other congregations,” the rabbi said thoughtfully. “We might be able to borrow equipment. We might even have some of our own. Hannah, your papa works with several builders in the city, perhaps he could point us in the right direction?”
Hannah nodded. She stood and nodded and listened as they talked their way around this building like it might crumble at the sheer force of will being leveraged against it. Shovels and strapping men and signed contracts and all.
“They’ll never get their homes back,” the rabbi said sadly.
Mae came to stand beside her, holding her arms around herself as she listened, frowning furiously at it all.
But Hannah could not quite hear the words anymore. They were bubbling and melting together as her mind pictured this plan unfolding as described, pictured what they were saying coming to pass.
“If he … I’m sorry,” Hannah said suddenly, a little louder, cutting into their scheming. The men turned to look at her as though surprised to find her still standing there. “If the landlord signs over the property, would that mean that once the rubble is cleared, we own this lot?”
“Own it?” the rabbi repeated.
“Yes,” said Mr. Beck. “Yes, he will have signed it over. But it will not be worth much, if you were thinking to sell it for funding.”
She blinked at him, a faint little smile hovering on her lips. It was the longest sentence he’d ever spoken to her, the most certain, complete thought he’d ever handed her. She saw him realize it too, sinking his hands into his pockets and giving her half a shrug and half a smile in return.
For a moment, they just looked at one another, until Mae Casper cleared her throat, just a little, a delicate reminder that they were observed.
“No, I don’t want to sell it,” Hannah said immediately, shaking her head and tearing her eyes away from Mr. Beck’s to meet Mae’s and then the rabbi’s. “No, I think that would be a waste.”
“We can’t build another tenement,” the rabbi said kindly. “It would cost a fortune, and we’ve no one to manage it.”
“No, of course not,” she said, shivering at the breeze that passed through the crumbled ruin and spun around them. “No, we can’t build a great, layered thing like that. But there is more space than in the tent we have right now, isn’t there? Even if we only built a single wooden room.”
It seemed to stun them all. They were quiet for more than just a beat, more than just a pause to hear the words she’d put on the wind.
She hesitated, wondering if perhaps she’d said something outlandish or stupid.
“By the time it is finished, I suppose a lot of them will already be on their way,” she said immediately, by way of apology. “But if it rains. If it gets colder soon …”
“There will always be people who are hurt,” Mae answered quietly, her brown eyes soft and thoughtful. “There will always be poor who don’t have the good sense to stay perfectly healthy at all times. Those people would be grateful, I think, for even a single wooden room.”
“It is worth considering,” the rabbi agreed, just as soft, just as tender. “After the other parts have been done. It is a worthy thought, Miss Lazarus. It does you a great justice.”
Hannah felt her eyes begin to burn and had to turn her head before anyone could see.
She led the charge on walking back toward the tent, back toward home.
She pressed the tears away with the heels of her hands, breathed deeply, and blinked up at the blue-gray sky as the vanishing sun gave its final glow of farewell.
She knew she would not be able to speak to Mr. Beck again unless the rabbi was suddenly grabbed by a feral bear or some other such eccentric denizen of Clerkenwell. The man was such a staunch devotee of seeing her all the way to her door. Damn him.
He seemed to know too.
Because just before Soho, before even Mae split off from their little group in the direction of her own home, he paused, bowed toward them, and said his farewells.
“You will see me tomorrow,” he said. He promised. “I will be back with help. Tomorrow.”
His eyes were on Hannah when he said it.