Maybe even especially in light of it.
He didn’t know.
The entire thing gave him a headache if he thought about it too much.
He arrived from the back end of the building deliberately, wanting to get a scope of the place before he made himself known. He pulled his jacket tighter around his ribs and licked the dew from his lips, squinting at the squat little clinic surrounded by the taller tenements on its corner block, visible through the milling of folk headed to their vocations, donkeys, hackneys, and so on that crowded the street.
Immediately, he caught sight of a flash of bright red hair, and next to it, the looming figure of a very large man.
He had not expected the Becks to be here this morning. He almost frowned before he shook himself and wondered if this did not, in fact, make the entire endeavor a little less ominous.
He grimaced instead. Becausethiswas exactly the effect that Mae Casper was always having on him. He hadn’t even had breakfast yet and he wasn’t sure whether a basic, less-than-shocking sight of people who had every reason to be present was an annoyance or a relief.
He gave himself firm, sharp instructions to pull it together and crossed the street, smoothing his face back into unaffected, casual order, and waited until Hannah looked up and caught his eye to break into a grin.
“Good morning, Little Fox,” he said, hopping over a delivery of empty bottles to cross the approach and greet her. “Tod.”
Beck turned to regard him, his dark eyes flicking once quickly over his person. “Reed,” he said, in that soft, disaffected voice of his. “You weren’t at work last night.”
“Oh, strange thing, that,” Roland answered, his grin sliding into a smirk. “My employer told me this was my workplace now, and I took him at his word.”
Tod grunted, running an absent hand over his wife’s back as Hannah shook her head in impatience at their bickering.
“Just there is where I meant,” she said, drawing her husband’s eye to the corner of the building. “We could install a small staircase that provides direct access to the upper level. It will give the students for Rosalind’s tally classes and Mr. Barnett’s literacy lessons a direct entry so they aren’t crowding the triage,anda way for the children and maternity patients to go in and out without walking through the infirmary. Besides, the windows are already broken; it would be an easy thing to take them out and replace them with a door.”
“An easy thing, is it?” Tod replied with a soft little smile as he gazed down at her. “Are you going to build those stairs yourself, Hannah?”
“No, my love,” she replied with a grin. “I’m going to watch you do it, and enjoy every haul of lumber. Besides, Mae already approved the idea.”
“Did she?” he answered. “Where is Miss Casper?”
Almost as though she’d heard the query, Mae emerged from the front of the clinic, her hands dusted with white powder and her eyes scanning the ground for that shipment of empty bottles.
Roland’s body immediately tensed, his eyes falling on the way her skin glowed in the early-morning light and on the little springs of dark curls that were escaping from the band around her hairline. When her face brightened with relief upon finding the shipment, just a few steps from where he stood, he felt his insides jolt.
“Mae!” called Hannah. “Good morning!”
She raised those big, dark doe eyes of hers and blinked twice at her friend, her cheeks dimpling as she grinned in return. “Good morning yourself,” she returned, taking two steps forward before she realized Hannah was in company.
She paused, her eyes meeting Roland’s for a brief, flashing moment where those dimples faltered before she straightened and turned to Tod instead. “And Mr. Beck as well! To what do I owe the surprise?”
“We’ve brought you a lackey,” Tod said with a shrug, gesturing to Roland. “Surprise.”
“A what?” Roland said softly, winning a sidelong smirk from his old friend.
Mae was pushing the white powder on her hands off onto the apron she wore as she walked toward them, the mist settling on the puffed yellow sleeves of her dress and down the red-brown glow of her bare arms.
“Ah, yes,” she said, giving a polite and cursory glance at him before turning back to the Becks. “Hannah mentioned your concern for our security here during the day, but Mr. Beck, surely you do not think the attacks will start before luncheon?”
“I do not,” Tod answered, chuckling. “What I think is that finding the routine that makes the most sense often takes a few days of trial and error, and so starting early at the beginning is the practical approach. Besides, while you’re not being attacked, Mr. Reed may offer his hands and any other bits you find useful in service of the running of operations.”
“Indeed?” she said, blinking a few times before glancing back at Roland. “Are you amenable to that, Mr. Reed?”
He felt the words clog up right in his sternum, cold and thick.
This was the first time she had spoken to him since she’d had a needle in his skin so long ago. And all he could muster was “Yes.”
She stared for a moment, her expression a little incredulous. “All right,” she said, nodding down to the shipment of bottles. “If you wouldn’t mind bringing those inside?”
