She touched her lips, shaking away the urge to grin as she rounded the block.
She supposed it might have also been that kiss.
Well, why shouldn’t she enjoy kissing a man, at least once? A handsome one. A knight! She was going to have to kiss him once or twice anyway, wasn’t she? If she was to marry him.
She might as well enjoy it.
It did not mean she was being foolish. It did not have to mean that.
She was not pursuing this marriage to be foolish, after all. Quite the opposite.
The clinic came into view as she made her way down the sunlit sidewalks of Clerkenwell and over the pebbled drop into the tenement square where it was perched. Immediately, the streets felt noisier, with people of trade and vocation milling about with an urgency the morning did not require of the denizens of St. James.
She felt the air shift and, oddly, did not mind it. It reminded her of her parents, of mornings spent stripping thorns from roses before patrons came to her mother’s stall in Covent Garden. It was not her world anymore, but neither was it an alien one.
She stepped around a man arguing with a cat in his bakery window, past a shoemaker using a pole to get all the shutters open alongside his eaves, and awaited the hackneys and donkeys on the street before crossing over to the clinic, which already had its door propped open and a few people milling about in the foreroom.
There was an old man with downy white hair sticking up in various directions sitting near the door, directing people to the rooms where they would find what they were after.
“Good morning, Dr. Casper,” Vix said to him as she stepped inside.
Mae’s grandfather was not supposed to treat patients due to the trouble with his joints, but he was always sneaking around and trying to do so anyway. Vix enjoyed the annoyance it caused his granddaughter, though she did silently agree that he should probably stick to verbal advice. He was of an advanced age, skinny and pale, and altogether too pleased to create mischief when and where he could.
“Miss Beck!” he replied, clapping his arthritic hands together. “Always a pleasure. Are you after Mae?”
“After her? Never,” Vix said with a smirk. “I’m actually looking for Miss Murphy. Has she arrived?”
“Upstairs,” he said, pointing with one knobby finger above their heads. “Avoid the nursery.”
“Ominous,” she said, shaking her head at him as she passed, and heading toward the stairs.
She passed by the little room where Mae did her dirty work and heard her voice behind the door. “A wizard walked down Rotten Alley,” she said, “and then turned into a pub.”
“A pub?” came a wheezing, confused answer.
“He turned,” she repeated, “into a pub.”
“Oh!” the voice realized just as some horrible squelching thing happened in tandem. “Oh!Ow!”
Vix rolled her eyes and rounded the staircase, taking them two at a time. She paused on the landing, looking at the closed door to the nursery with a tilted head.
“Little pox,” came Rosalind’s voice from behind her, in the classroom. “Did you have them as a bairn? If so, you can go in.”
“Chicken pox?” Vix asked with a grimace, turning to look at the other woman. “Of course I did. DIdn’t everyone?”
Rosalind shrugged, haloed in the sunlight, a piece of pink chalk twirling between her fingers. “Apparently not. That’s why they’re keeping the door shut. Wee Dinah’s in there telling them stories for now.”
“Oh,” said Vix, a dark laugh escaping her. “Who let her do that?”
“What do you mean?” Rosalind asked, soft-eyed and innocent, but Vix was already turning the knob to investigate.
“And then Gretel realized,” Dinah Lazarus was already whispering to a half circle of pox-covered children, all of them gaping at her in slack-jawed horror, “that her toes had been eaten in the night!”
Vix immediately turned to Rosalind and gestured at the scene as though her point had been made as all of the children gasped in unison.
Dinah’s head came up, golden-brown hair swishing in interrupted alarm as she realized she’d been caught traumatizing a group of diseased foundlings. She immediately grinned. “Vix!”
“Dinah,” Vix answered, uncertain whether she was exhausted or energized. “You’ve got the story wrong.”
