His Awful Grace

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Ellen Glenfall held her breath as she splashed antiseptic over her hands, then washed them in the wooden bucket of water on the counter.

Dr. Amelia Hart laughed, her pink cheeks turning rosy. “You should see your face.”

“The smell burns my nostrils.” Ellen stepped away and dried her hands on a nearby towel.

Amelia smiled and shook her head, her long, deep brown curls bouncing in the Gibson girl bun atop her head. “Carbolic acid’s not that bad. You get used to it after a while.”

Ellen snorted. “Or perhaps you’ve singed off all the receptors in your nose and that’s why you can’t smell anymore.” She smoothed the loose hair coming free of her bun. “What is the time?”

Her friend, whose hands were still covered in streaks of blood, glanced down at the gold pocket watch pinned to her jacket. “No idea.” Amelia moved around the examining table and took her place at the bucket of water, soap, and antiseptic.

“It’s half four,” an elderly voice called from the front room.

Ellen started. “Goodness! I had no idea it was so late.”

“Time flies when you’re holding premature babies and checking lochia flow.” Amelia, true to her word, didn’t flinch as the stringent smell of the antiseptic wafted up from her slender, long-fingered hands.

Ellen wrinkled her nose. “Lochia.”

“Postpartum vaginal bleeding, for those of us who didn’t attend medical school.”

Ellen rolled her eyes at her friend’s tone. “Can you imagine me at medical school?”

“Why not?” Amelia dried her now-clean hands on the towel. “I did it. And Mrs. Daugherty might not be a medical doctor, but she was a brilliant midwife in her day.”

“What do you mean, in my day?” The elderly voice echoed, strong and indignant, from the front room.

Amelia and Ellen grinned at the interruption.

“Even if your husband won’t allow you to attend medical school, you could still become a Nightingale nurse or midwife. I could use one of those.”

Ellen looked around the ramshackle room, put together mostly through donations and her quarterly allowance.

“You could use a nurse you don’t pay, you mean.

” I’m not going to think about Mark. She hadn’t seen him in nearly eight years; it wasn’t that hard to banish him from her mind.

And no, Mark hadn’t forbidden her from medical school.

He’d have to return from the Navy to even notice her existence.

The exam room was small, filled with odds-and-ends furniture, and had a cracked photograph of Queen Victoria on the wall. “So you can lie back and think of England,” Amelia always joked to the women when it came time for internal exams.

Most of the room was taken up by the examining table, with one wall filled with the counter, a bucket of water, and a few shelves overflowing with medical texts and illustrations.

Another corner of the room had Amelia’s roll top desk, papers always threatening to fall off or fly away, and in the last corner sat a cabinet where Ellen kept all her notes, correspondence, and medical supplies.

The front room of the doctor’s office, run by Mrs. Daugherty, also doubled as the apothecary.

Amelia sighed, bringing Ellen back to the present. “I’ve almost turned a profit this year. Hopefully, next year I can pay the wages for a licensed nurse.” She’d said that for three years in a row.

“You need patients who can pay more than a sixpence for care,” Ellen said.

“Patients who can afford my care won’t take it from a lady doctor,” the tall, absurdly slender doctor returned. It was an old argument. “Besides, these people need it the most. You know it.”

Ellen did know it. Not half an hour earlier, she’d held and weighed a small, jaundiced baby from Seven Dials while Amelia had performed a postpartum exam on the exhausted mother.

“I don’t like how yellow that baby was, Amelia.” Ellen tried to put patients from her mind after they’d left the office, but it was hard. Especially with those premature babies.

Amelia shook her head. “I don’t like how heavy Lizzie’s bleeding was for being four weeks past delivery.”

Lizzie Peele and her infant son were Ellen’s last patients for the day. Ellen tried not to attend births, as it brought back far too many bad memories, but she’d been there for Lizzie’s most recent baby, little John. He’d been born a month early, one of Ellen’s specialties.

“I told her to set baby John out in the sun to help keep the jaundice away, but…” she trailed off.

Amelia knew the problem without Ellen voicing it.

The Peeles lived in the Seven Dials slums, off the St. Giles rookery where Amelia’s dispensary was.

With its rabbit warren-like passages, and tall, tottering buildings, sunlight was hard to come by.

And Lizzie was already back to working full-time, taking in laundry for a shilling here and there.

She had very little time to make sure her newborn got the sunlight he needed.

Amelia’s lip curled in disgust, and Ellen knew they were picturing the same thing.

Ellen glanced at the pocket watch on Amelia’s front. She hated leaving her friend like this, near the end of a long day, with her mind still on a patient working too hard to take care of herself.

“Tell you what,” Ellen said impulsively. “I heard there’s a new lecture series at the Nightingale Training School beginning next week. On uses of chloroform as a pain relief in surgery and labor. What if we go together?”

Amelia smiled. “That would be nice. If I can get away.”

“It’s nearly a quarter to five now, Ellen!” Mrs. Daugherty called out again.

Ellen jumped. “I’ve got to run! Mother is hosting a dinner party tonight and I promised I’d attend this time.

” She grabbed her hat from the rack by the open door and shoved it on her head.

“You know where to find me!” she called back to her friend as she flew through the front office and waved goodbye at the retired midwife Amelia employed as a secretary.

“If Mrs. Duham comes by, tell her I’ll visit her daughter-in-law on Tuesday, and if you see Mr. Beecher, you remind him he’s not to go near his wife for at least six weeks.

And if you see Barbara, make sure she’s holding that baby completely upright, on her bare chest, all night long if she wants his lungs to have a chance to develop properly. ”

“Goodbye, Ellen.”

The door to the dispensary banged shut, and Ellen found herself squinting in the fading light outside the neighborhood of St. Giles.

She hurried around the corner and back to New Oxford Street, a road that had been widened to bring housing and shops to the rookery.

It had mixed effects, mainly. Ellen hailed a hansom cab and gave her parents’ direction.

She settled back in the cracked leather seat and sighed.

It had been a good day, all in all, and she hoped to get a nap in before dressing for her mother’s dinner.

When she entered her home the butler, a man with dark brown skin and piercing black eyes, hurried to her.

“Madam, you have a visitor. He’s been here over an hour.”

“Goodness, Meeks.” Ellen took off her hat and handed it to the man. “Couldn’t he leave his card and come back another day?”

“I suggested that.” Meeks grimaced. “He’s waiting for you.”

Ellen’s curiosity piqued. She rarely received male visitors. “Is he French?” She’d been corresponding with several French medical students over the mortality rate of premature infants for the past few years, and she’d long hoped they’d come to visit one day.

Meeks’s jaw ticked. “Madam, I—”

Ellen strode to the door. “Goodness, I hope I haven’t kept him waiting long.” She reached for the handle.

Meeks made a distressed sound behind her.

Puzzled, Ellen opened the door. It swung open to reveal a clean-shaven man with dark blond hair, naturally pale skin bronzed from the sun, and a muscular form rising from the settee. Her heart skipped a beat.

Mark. Her husband.

Buzzing sounded in Ellen’s ears. Surely someone had misunderstood. It couldn’t be Mark. An icy, numb calm settled over her, even though her fingers twitched at her side. She blinked, certain the vision would disappear if she just tried hard enough. But it was him.