Chapter 12
Mae Casper looked a fright.
The instant she’d wandered onto the work site that afternoon, Beck had dropped what he was doing in alarm and crossed the brickyard to meet her.
Whatever concern he was already feeling at the obvious weight loss in her frame and chalky pallor to her usually glowing skin spiked at the relief in her face when she met his eye.
“Mr. Beck,” she said softly. “I was hoping I could find you here. Might we speak?”
He took her immediately over the road to a small public house where the workers had been getting breakfasts and lunches and insisted upon filling her up with hot coffee and a full plate of food. He watched her eat before he let her speak a word.
Her hands shook on the mug she was holding, even though she gave him a tired smile as she ate and drank.
“I saw the gossip sheet,” she began after she had put away a cup and a half of steaming liquid and two sausage links. “It was very good. Two doctors are working with us now. They arrived last week.”
“I know,” he said warily. “Money has been coming in too. We’ve been able to advance the building quite a lot.”
She nodded, dropping her eyes to the contents of her mug with a little frown. “I made the mistake of thinking I could step away for a while,” she said, so softly it was almost lost in the rim of the cup. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?” he asked carefully. Softly.
She sighed and set her mug aside, bracing her elbows on the table. “Mr. Beck, I’ll just come out with it. I’ve come to ask if you can help me with an amputation. One of those doctors leeched the sutures I set in a man’s foot and now it has to come off. It has to come all the way off.”
He stared at her for a moment, like the words were refusing to move all the way into his ears. “What do you mean, he leeched your stitches?” he heard himself ask, as though from far away.
She scoffed, shaking her head. “They assume everything I have done, everything Sally has done, must be subpar and poorly administered,” she hissed, turning her face toward the cold-fogged window as she said it.
“They are classically trained and arrogant and we need them, Mr. Beck, so I cannot say a word against it.
“The problem is that I have to take this foot off now without the benefit of sedatives, because doctors from fine hospitals use up resources like they are infinite. We are out before we can even enjoy a new stock. Everything is always gone before the first hour of a given day. I am doing this in secret, which is why I came to you. I do not trust them to participate.”
“But you can’t dismiss them outright,” Beck said, queasy with understanding. “You can’t mean to saw through someone’s bone while he’s awake for it.”
She grimaced and shook her head. “I was going to ask if you had strong spirits from your club that we might use to help with that.”
Beck heaved a great breath. “I will send for something strong. I also have a man who can knock him out, at least for a short time, without risking a blow to the head, if that is something that interests you?”
She blinked, her dark lashes flickering like she couldn’t quite believe she’d gotten a yes. She huffed out a disbelieving little laugh and let herself smile, taking the mug back up with a rush of moisture to her eyes.
“Thank you,” she said. “This will be horrible. But thank you.”
“We should all be thanking you, Miss Casper,” Beck corrected. “For everything you do.”
Truth be told, in all his selfish, obsessive glory, Beck was pleased to have something large and horrifying to occupy his mind.
Physical labor had been well and fine, but it had been a feeble opponent opposite memories of that day in the Flaming Fox and the endless, endless agony of his thoughts around the event.
The last weeks had been spent overseeing the final hammering down of what was left of the tenement and the removal of all the debris.
He had finally hired contractors to begin work on the Vixen as well, filling up what hours he might have otherwise spent tempted to visit the Fox and resume ill-advised office hours with Hannah Lazarus.
The only time he had spent there had been first thing in the morning, when he collected his ledger numbers and occasionally refreshed the lilies in the back office.
He knew he shouldn’t be doing the latter, but he was a stupid bastard and could not help himself.
He just couldn’t help himself.
He had decided that the only way to protect that girl from herself was going to be by shattering her illusions of his nobility. She clearly thought of him as some sort of knight errant, who had punched Woodville back at Blackcove in some moment of gallant honor.
He was going to have to tell her every sordid detail until she realized exactly what she was trying to purchase by buying in with him.
All of it. His gutter birth, his attempts to destroy her beloved Ember Donnelly, maybe even the filthy things that entered his mind now every time he thought about sitting her up on that desk and tasting her pretty mouth.
He had to save her from this. From him.
A well-bred girl with good sense should’ve been frightened away a long time ago, just from looking at him. Just from standing next to him. He didn’t know why she wasn’t, but he had to do something.
He had to …
Christ, but he was going insane.
He had considered asking the rabbi for help, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to go that far just yet. He might have to, of course. He might have to.
I fear I will spend the whole of what remains of my life thinking about that evening in Blackcove and wondering if I could have been better.
She had been and was bloody perfect.
That was the problem, wasn’t it? God only knew what had made that girl pick him out of a crowd, save for the fact that he had stood out in it in all the wrong ways.
The man with the rotting foot was awaiting them above a bawd house in St. Giles. Beck arrived with Reed and two bottles of truly vile, very strong clear liquor that had been gifted him by a Spanish gentleman last Season.
It was so strong that he wasn’t supposed to serve it without first dumping sugar into it and setting it on fire. That seemed appropriate for their purposes here today.
“Are you sure you want me for this?” Reed asked for the fifth time, frowning as they entered the ground floor. “It isn’t really my arena.”
“Tie your hair back,” Beck barked at him, rather than answering. “Unless you want those precious curls to get bloody.”
“Here you go, love,” a red-haired doxy said immediately, gliding forward to produce a vibrant green ribbon from her ample bosom. “Would hate to see that lovely mane tainted.”
Beck rolled his eyes at Reed’s grin, but the doxy looked at him too with a frown and said, “Sally’s a midwife, sir, not a sawbones. I hope you thank her proper after this.”
They walked up the stairs while Reed went about knotting his hair at the nape of his neck, and followed the sound of voices to the end of the hall. There was a woman bouncing a baby outside the room, shaking her head sadly as they approached.
“It’s just a foot,” she said to them as they passed. “Tell ’im he’s more than a foot.”
Inside the room, the man was propped up, frowning down at the limb in question while Mae and a plump madam were lining the bed with rolled-up towels. There was an elderly man standing in the corner, carefully laying out sharp instruments with obviously arthritic hands.
“My grandfather,” Mae said, glancing up and nodding toward the man. “Dr. Casper, this is Mr. Beck and his associate.”
Beck did a short double take at the doctor. He hadn’t expected a white man, but he had better manners than to comment upon it.
Unfortunately, the doctor himself saw it, and grinned so wide that it made the sparse hair on either side of his prominent ears stick out.
“Don’t worry,” the old man said. “I’m just here to advise. Mae’s never done this procedure before.”
Mae sighed and dropped her hands on her hips, tilting her face back.
It was a posture Beck was coming to recognize as her bracing herself for something unpleasant.
“All right,” she said to the patient. “Do you want me to walk you through what’s going to happen, or would you rather just lie back and get it over with? ”
“Over with,” the man said so fast that the words seemed to overlap. “Please.”
She looked at Beck and the bottles and nodded. “All right. Pour our friend here a few drinks first and we’ll get started. And once you’re nice and warm, we’ll have this other gentlem…” She trailed off, her dark eyes falling on Reed and widening with surprise.
Beck almost sighed again.
He was used to women reacting like this to Reed, but he had thought Miss Casper above it. She recovered quickly, at the very least.
“What is your name, sir?” she asked in a brisk, businesslike tone, swallowing down whatever embarrassment might have arisen in her at the pause she’d taken and turning to put on her apron rather than looking at him any longer. “Can you explain to me what you’re going to do?”
There was a long pause.
Beck turned to look at Reed only to find that he also looked a little dumbstruck, staring at Mae like he’d never seen a woman before.
“His name is Reed,” Beck snapped, loud enough to make the other man startle as he crossed the room to pour the liquor.
“I … yes,” Reed said, clearing his throat and turning to watch Beck wrench a cabinet open and pull down a glass. “My name is Reed.”
Bawd houses always had glasses available in every room, at the very least.
“And your strategy?” Mae pressed, glancing over her shoulder once in the vague area of Reed’s midsection.
He took a step forward, toward the foot, looking at it with a morbid sort of curiosity. “I am going to compress his blood flow at the throat. It will make him faint.”
“You’re going to do what?” the patient asked weakly as he accepted the drink.
“Drink that fast,” Beck suggested. “It’s going to taste awful. I’ll give you three in a row.”
The drinks went down quickly, with the man’s face collapsing in on itself a little bit less each time. By the third, he looked positively pleased about it, and reached out for another.
“Maybe after,” Dr. Casper said from the corner, looking like he was having a wonderful time.
They rotated around him, with Mae and Sally at the foot of the bed and Reed and Beck at the head.
The man settled down, smiling faintly like he was about to have a nice nap while Reed took a loose grip on either side of his shoulders and glanced at Beck for a signal. When he got the nod, he stiffened his fingers and pressed firmly into either side of the man’s lower throat.
The man reacted right away.
By sinking his teeth as deeply into Reed’s forearm as they would go.
“Jesus fucking hell!” Reed barked, but did not let up, even as blood spurted from the site of impact. He leaned in, his fingers dimpling the patient’s flesh until they did the job and the man fell limp on the table.
“Christ!” he said again, and flung himself away from the table, taking one of the rolled-up towels with him.
The good doctor was chuckling.
Mae didn’t even spare him a glance, moving immediately to her scalpel to begin the process of cutting away the skin while Sally prepared the saw. Beck stepped into Reed’s place and secured the patient’s shoulders, lest he come back to consciousness while this horror unfolded.
Reed, poor bastard, slumped onto the floor in the corner, pressing one of those towels to his bite wound and watching with a resentful, narrow glare.
The whole thing was shockingly quick. The snap of the bone took no more than five minutes, and Dr. Casper stepped forward quickly to offer a shoulder to hold the man’s leg vertically while Sally and Mae pinched the remaining skin and stitched it up into a pocket.
The foot itself sat useless and dead on the foot of the table like it hadn’t been capable of wiggling toes and crossing ground just a moment ago, less time ago than it would have taken to boil an egg.
Sally put it in a paper sack and vanished out the door.
“I’ll leave that bottle,” Beck said. “He needs it more than anyone else I know.”
“What is that, by the way?” the elderly doctor asked, picking it up and rotating it to squint at the peeling paper label on the bottom. “And where can I buy some? Queimada, is it?”
Meanwhile, after the blood had been mopped up, Mae turned her attention to Reed, her eyes dropping to his bloodied forearm like it had removed all mystique from his previously paralyzing physical beauty.
“Can I see that?” she asked crisply.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” he answered through his teeth.
She grinned then, dimples popping into her cheeks. “That’s how you know I should,” she said, holding out her hand and wiggling her fingers. “Come on, his mouth was filthy. If I don’t clean it, it’s going to fester.”
“Fine,” Reed grumbled, clambering to his feet.
Beck, determined to enjoy this, leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest while Mae pulled the towel away and leaned down to inspect the bite wound.
“I’m going to have to stitch it,” she said with a little smirk. “What a jaw he has. If you want to slap him while he’s still passed out, I won’t mind.”
“If I wanted to slap him,” Reed said, wincing as she withdrew a needle and thread, “I would have.”
“Don’t like needles, Reed?” Beck asked, raising his brows.
Reed didn’t answer, settling into a stool while Mae dragged his arm across her lap and set about cleaning and dabbing at the wound.
“Shall I tell you a story while I work?” she offered. “What is your Christian name, Mr. Reed?”
“Christian?” he asked, frowning. “Don’t have one.”
She paused, flicking an annoyed glance up at his face.
He colored, pink finding its way between his freckles. “Roland,” he said begrudgingly.
“Well, Roland,” she said, dipping the needle quickly into the hot water that they’d boiled for the amputation. “I am Mae. Have you heard the one about the three debutantes from Dover?”