They greeted one another quickly and saw themselves immediately to the small kitchenette off the entrance to begin their boiling and plating while Mae made her morning rounds.
Dinah Lazarus, seventeen-year-old menace and the only person who had any control at all over the nursery since it had become London’s premiere chicken pox ward, would arrive next. She was always the earliest arrival after the breakfast march, which meant Mae only had to check in on the little ones while they were still groggy from the night before.
Today, there was a girl with a broken ankle twisted around in an alarming contortion with her foot still suspended in its hanging sling, a handful of pox victims, and a boy they insisted on keeping for the full week after he kept ripping his stitches out climbing trees.
After Dinah, Sally and Mae’s grandfather filtered in, and so on as the morning began in earnest.
Sally always brought coffee.
And Mae always joked that even outside of the bawd house, she was trying to seduce everyone by doing so.
“What do you mean,trying,” Sally would always return with a grin. “Who’s not seduced yet? Point me at them.”
Dr. Bethel was still new to the clinic, relatively speaking, and was adjusting to the pace of things in the chaos of a communal house of healing from his years operating a small practice out of his home in Clerkenwell. Because he preferred those more intimate environments, he had largely taken the house calls from Mae since starting, but he was no longer a young man, and so she was leery about sending him too far out or too often.
“I’m only two years into my sixth decade!” he’d retort, sniffing, when he suspected what she was doing. “Still spry!”
“Very spry,” she’d agree. “And even more valuable when you’re here at the clinic. Besides, it’ll be easier once Dr. Govindacharya arrives in a week or so.”
Then, without fail, they’d all devolve into arguments about pronouncing that name. Which is how they had all decided before the man had even arrived that he would be Dr. Ravi instead.
It was with some surprise that just before noon, Mae turned and saw Hannah Beck, Dinah’s elder sister and the elusive former Miss Lazarus that the auditor had been after, walk through the clinic doors.
She was hard to miss, with copper-red hair that blared like a beacon in any given environment and a fondness for powder-blue dresses that set off the effect dramatically.
“Mae!” she called immediately, raising her hand as Mae looked up from where she’d just wrenched a tooth out of a man’s mouth, the offending molar still glistening and aloft in her pliers. “Oh, gracious.”
Mae blinked twice and stepped aside so Sally could pack the man’s new mouth hole with gauze while her grandfather showed off all his missing teeth to the patient and explained proper caretaking.
“You’re just going to lose more as you age!” he told the man cheerfully. “But aging is better than the alternative, I always say.”
“Ald-der-dave?” the patient asked through the gauze.
Dr. Casper wiggled his bushy white brows. “Think about it, lad. Either you get older or …”
“Oh,” said the patient.
“Indeed,” Dr. Casper agreed.
Hannah crossed the room, picking around a few of the waiting people as Mae walked forward to meet her. She nodded down at the bloody tooth in the mouth of the tool in Mae’s hand and gave a wry little twist of her lips. “Are you keeping that?”
“Keeping?” Mae looked down and winced. “Oh. Absolutely not. You, lad!” she called to one of the runners, summoning forward one of the young boys the Becks often sent to help around the clinic. “Put this with the waste and put the metal in the wash.”
“Yes, doctress,” the boy said, gazing at the tooth with a gleam in his eye that made Mae suspect it was about to go right in his pocket. “Straight away, doctress.”
“Just Mae!” she called after him. “I’m not a doctor!”
“Yes you are,” Hannah replied, a soft fondness on her face. “Anyway, I need to speak with you. I’m afraid Thaddeus has done something.”
Mae paused, glancing down at Hannah’s midsection. “Again?”
“What? No!” Hannah said, crossing her arms over her womb and coloring. “I’ve only just had Annabelle! Mae!”
Mae grinned, letting a chuckle escape, and shrugged. “It still wouldn’t surprise me.”
Hannah flattened her lips into a thin line and shook her head. “It’s only that he reacted very strongly to the vandalism and has taken action.”
“Yes, I know,” said Mae, leaning against the wall and lifting one foot and then the other from the floor to rotate her ankles. “Mr. Beck sent glassworkers for the windows. Vix sent some workers to soap away the graffiti. Your family’s rabbi was here this morning splashing flame-retardant chemicals on the walls, though I can’t account for who engineered that.”
