Chapter 5 #3
Mark crossed his arms, noticing how she refused to look at his muscles and bare skin. “Why?”
“Can you please put a shirt on?” Ellen muttered, glancing away.
Mark laughed and walked past her, back to the vanity and mirror. “Not until all the shaving cream is gone from my face.” He picked up his razor, wet it in the basin of warm water, and set to finishing his right cheek. He looked at her through the mirror. “Why?” he repeated.
Ellen pinked again and looked at her feet.
Mark tried hard not to grin, but it was still nearly a whole minute before he could put the blade to his face without fear of drawing blood. Don’t get your hopes up. Once he began, Ellen broke the silence.
“My parents are attempting to restrict my freedoms. I dislike it, and I want to move here.”
“I'm going to need more details than that.” Mark flicked his gaze in the mirror to meet her eyes. Interesting. She's looking at me when she thinks I won’t notice. Smug, male pride bloomed in his chest.
Ellen groaned. “If I give you details, will you say yes?”
Mark did what anyone would do in a situation where a beautiful woman demanded his help. He told her he had two conditions.
“What are they?” Ellen asked suspiciously.
“Just tell me the story.”
“Is that one of your conditions?”
“No.” Mark swiped a long stroke of cream away and flicked it in foamy water. “Talk.”
Ellen threw her head back and groaned again.
When Mark refused to relent, she spoke. “For several years I have been working in the London community to support women preparing to give birth.
It's important to me that women receive care while still pregnant, as it shall help outcomes of delivery for both the mother and child.
The French call this prenatal care, and it's a brand new thing over there.
British hospitals haven't done much, yet.
Besides the New Hospital for Women, but they tend to treat working women and have no more than fifteen beds, and Dr. Garrett-Anderson is blocked at every turn by male doctors who don't like her. And Chelsea Hospital for Women, I suppose, but those doctors are men and serve only the distressed gentlewoman and deserving poor.”
She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath.
“I'm rambling. Anyway. I sometimes audit a few classes at the Nightingale Training School on their midwife track, and I've popped by a few surgeries and lectures at the London School of Medicine for Women over the years. While there, I met my dearest friend, Amelia Hart.”
This was taking so many twists and turns Mark wasn't sure he could keep up. “You roll bandages and attend infant care lectures at medical schools and hospitals?”
Ellen smirked. “I do a bit more than that.”
Mark turned, leaning against the vanity edge, and stared at her. “Continue.”
“When Amelia was in medical school I would volunteer at the women's hospital she rounded at, and I met some absolutely brilliant female doctors. I saw prenatal care was practically nonexistent, mostly because there wasn’t time or energy enough for doctors to venture into the slums and treat working class women.”
“What I saw last week wasn't prenatal care,” Mark cut in, intrigued.
“No.” She sighed. “Amelia opened her own dispensary in St. Giles five years ago, and I help her.
She does a little bit of everything, and I help with the babies.
I don't usually help with labor, actually. She has plenty of patients who deliver babies without me. I go to deliveries when the baby is coming early.”
Mark was confused. He had seen, felt, her grief at the Chapel a week ago, and couldn't imagine why she would surround herself with other dying babies.
“I see why you'd want to support those mothers during their grief,” he said hesitantly.
“I imagine it would've made a world of a difference if you'd had someone who'd lost a baby sit with you during that time.”
Ellen's eyes sparkled, and she gestured excitedly. “But that's just it, Mark! They don't always die! At least, they don't always have to die, not with the proper support.”
Mark couldn’t believe this was the same girl he married, the girl who'd told him entering Society was her only life goal. “I don’t understand.”
“Have you ever seen chicks hatch?”
“Chicks?”
“Baby chickens,” she interrupted, smiling widely.
“In the zoo, at least in the Paris zoo, they keep the eggs warm in these boxes called incubators, with hot water bottles and gas and hot coils. And these baby chicks, they need the extra warmth, you see, if the mother hen isn’t attentive, and—” She broke off, flushing. “You don’t want to hear all of this.”
“I do!” Mark stared at the passionate woman before him. “I want to hear,” he protested truthfully.
“Well.” Ellen tried to calm herself, even smoothing her skirts, but excitement crept back into her voice the longer she talked.
“There’s a doctor in Paris, he was studying puerperal fever at the time, that’s childbed fever, it kills thousands of healthy women every year, by the way, and he stumbled across a zookeeper with these incubators and chicks, and he realized it might help premature babies stay alive also! ”
“Does it?” Mark smiled at the idea, too. Her excitement was contagious.
“It does!” Ellen gestured triumphantly. “Dr. Tarnier introduced incubators in his maternity hospital back in ‘81, and it’s making a huge difference. He realized babies don’t just need constant temperature.
The weak ones need extra warmth, and they need it damp and clean.
The incubators keep in the warm air and keep out germs.”
“That’s unbelievable!” Mark was astounded. “How many are kept alive this way?”
“They don’t have many incubators, unfortunately, so that limits how many they can help.
I correspond regularly with Madame Henry, the midwife-in-chief of the Maternity Hospital of Paris, and she hopes they shall soon raise funds to develop an entire ward to feeble and premature infants. Can you imagine?
“She says if you exclude the babies born before six months gestation and babies with severe malformations, they have practically doubled the chances of life for these babies! Some have failed to thrive due to poor feeding, others were born prematurely but still alive at birth, and they care for all of them!”
Swept up in her emotion, Mark demanded, “And what of here in London? How many of these incubators do we use?”
Ellen stopped, and her delighted face grew forlorn. “None, as far as I know.”
“None?”
“Great Britain has treated our women so badly that it is a struggle to even provide the mothers proper care, let alone consider weak babies.”
“So you are the leading expert in all of England on premature babies.”
Ellen paused, chewing on the words. “Well, yes. I suppose I am.”
Mark stared at her, stunned. “And you attend deliveries where the babies will be early?”
Her face was solemn. “Only the ones who have a chance to survive. Amelia knows not to call me to any deliveries before six months. I...I cannot handle those. It’s too similar to what I experienced. That, or any expecting mother who’s itching.”
Mark had thought she delivered Constance full-term, but he wasn’t going to ask for details right now. Itching?
“So, what’s your answer? Can I move back in and continue my work with Amelia?”
Mark straightened and stepped toward her. He wasn’t a tall man, but she wasn’t a tall woman, either, and he remembered he loved the way they fit together. Ellen didn’t back away as he stepped close. “Yes, on three conditions.”
“Three?” Ellen’s upper lip curled. “You said two earlier.”
“That was before I heard your story,” he explained calmly, resisting the urge to clasp her arms. “The first is that you share breakfast with me every morning.”
“What if my work calls me away? I work every day.”
“Then we can reschedule for supper. One meal, every day, we eat together.”
“Why?” Ellen crossed her arms.
“Because we’re married and, by Jove, I wish we could learn to get along.”
“Unlikely, but fine. I’ll agree to breakfast.”
“Second, you must take an escort with you when you go anywhere after dark. Especially if it’s outside Mayfair.”
She opened her mouth, but he raised a finger. “That includes SoHo.” Their house practically straddled the line between the neighborhoods, but SoHo had far too many seedy alleys for his comfort.
Ellen nodded wordlessly. “I assume you’ve hired a footman? Or I can take that grumpy valet of yours.”
“Or myself, if they’re busy.” Don’t press too hard, he warned himself. Easy, now.
She looked at him skeptically.
“And third, I want to see this dispensary where you work.”
Her skeptical look grew.
“We can go now, if that fits your schedule.”
The corner of her mouth tugged upward, a smile trying to escape, and Mark almost kissed it. “Very well.”
“You have your freedom, milady, as well as free room and board, and that’s all you have to say?
” he teased. We’re doing this. Hell and damnation, we’re actually going to live together again.
His pulse quickened and his breath caught, apprehension mixed with hope filling his lungs.
He should be excited about getting one step closer to preserving his family legacy.
Instead he was focused on getting a step closer to understanding the captivating, intelligent woman before him.
Ellen gave a broad, yet close-mouthed smile. “Thank you.”
He backed away and pulled the shirt off his bed and threw it on, buttoning it up without looking away.
Ellen’s cheeks turned pink, and she turned away. “I’ll wait for you downstairs.”
Mark stared after her in surprised delight. I'm married to Great Britain's foremost expert in premature infants. How about that?