“Donot,” Hannah instructed. “Dinah, go upstairs.”
“You’re not the boss of me,” Dinah retorted.
“Go,” Hannah said through her teeth, “upstairs.”
“Make me,” Dinah suggested.
Mae sighed and looked for somewhere else to go. She glanced out the currently glassless window at Mr. Beck arguing with the torch installers while Rabbi Hirsch appeared to be using his fingers to measure the hypothetical placement of the future staircase, and shook her head.
Not out there.
“Dinah,” Mae said absently, through the sororal bickering that was unfolding like some rapid-fire Sunday school chant. “You need to send that Winston boy home. He was winding up the others all night with tales of what the vandals were going to do to them all when they finally gained access. He framed the event as both inevitable and imminent. They were in a state of serious disarray when I arrived this morning.”
“He didwhat,” she said sharply, narrowing her eyes and turning on her heel from her sister, already marching toward the staircase. “That little piglet. I’ll boot him out right now.”
“Masterfully done,” Vix observed, watching the swing of Dinah’s green skirt as she went. “You could’ve been a governess in another life.”
Mae clicked her tongue. “Do I need to get rid of you next?”
Vix grinned at her. “You are welcome to try.”
Mae raised her brows, considering the prospect, but a sudden bang interrupted them yet again as the door slammed open and a gaggle of injury hobbled through the door, mutually supported and moaning.
“What now?” Mae muttered, stepping between her friends toward the door where her grandfather had come immediately to his feet to assess the situation. “Grandy?”
Her grandfather was in rapid congress with the most uninjured person in the group, a girl who looked to be around twelve years old and was gesticulating wildly as Ezra and Rosalind rushed forward to help in the straggling injured.
“Cart tipped over,” he said, glancing up at Mae with his knobby hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “Crushed a few, threw the others.”
Mae nodded, surveying the group. “Who is hurt the worst?”
“Mum,” said the girl, pointing to a woman who was being carried in the arms of a limping man, her leg wrapped in blood-soaked fabric. “Cut.”
“This way,” Mae shouted to the limping man, guiding him toward her procedure chamber in the back. “Dr. Casper will sort the rest of you, please be patient!”
She hurried along, unable to miss Roland Reed emerging from his bottling task with a rag in his hands, blinking at her, the scene, and then his rag before discarding it and following her along her path.
She did not have time to be baffled by it, nor to dissuade him.
“Start the range!” Vix was shouting at someone from behind them. “I need two kettles of water filled immediately.”
“Not there,” Hannah’s voice said, lapping over the other. “There are cots through here, in the infirmary. I will show you.”
“Put her here on the bed,” Mae instructed, holding the door open with her back as she ushered the man and woman inside. “Bleeding side up, please. We need to clean it first and foremost. I will need … oh!”
She blinked as Mr. Reed immediately proffered a freshly bottled supply of witch hazel toward her, his gaze steady and blank.
“Yes, thank you,” she managed. “The … the gauze and clean towels are in the cupboard just there.”
He turned without a word and began to retrieve further supplies as Mae rounded the bed and helped the man unwrap his wife’s leg.
It looked like a clean slit down the outer thigh, mercifully shallow enough not to puncture the muscle, though jagged in shape. It was bleeding a lot and would need stitching, but as Mae splashed and dabbed and splashed again, her relief grew with each reveal of clean, healthy flesh around the cut.
“She landed on a rock,” the man said, fishing in his pocket and holding up a bit of blood-stained slate. “Do you need the rock?”
“I … do not,” Mae said, blinking at him. “Perhaps keep it and let her exact her revenge upon it later. You may go out into triage and have your limp looked at, sir.”
“Not until she’s well,” the man said, frowning. “What can I do?”
