“If I wanted to slap him,” he answered, his eyes following warily as she took out the needle and thread, “I would have.”
Mr. Beck was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, a wide grin on his face the likes of which Mae had never seen before on the usually brooding and serious gentleman. “Don’t like needles, Reed?” he asked his companion, raising his dark brows.
Mae gave him a look that she hoped was reproachful and sat on the stool by the window. She grasped Mr. Reed’s wounded arm by the wrist and pulled it across her lap, placing it on her apron.
She reminded herself to look only at the wound and not at Mr. Reed.
Reed. That wasn’t actually his name.
“Shall I tell you a story while I work?” she suggested, more out of habit than a desire to do so, and then, because she was speaking anyway, she just asked, “What is your Christian name, Mr. Reed?”
“Christian?” he repeated, narrowing his eyes at her. “Don’t have one.”
She scoffed, sparing one flick of the eyes to his face, gratified to see that he looked a bit chastened when she did so.
He was silent as she cleaned the wound, only sucking in a breath when she took up the needle again.
“Roland,” he said finally. “Name’s Roland.”
“Well, Roland,” she said, pausing to finally meet his eye. “I am Mae.”
CHAPTER 1
Two Years Later
The Clerkenwell Clinicwas experiencing its third surprise inspection in two months. This time, the inspector had come with an auditor in tow, which was making the entire process even more tiresome than usual.
“I need to speak to Miss Lazarus,” the auditor was saying to Mae, leaning entirely too close to her face as he did so. “The doctor told me she was upstairs.”
“The Miss Lazarus on the construction manifest was Miss Hannah Lazarus, who is now Mrs. Hannah Beck,” she replied as patiently as possible, doing her level best not to stare at the way his wig was separating from his forehead in the presence of the layer of sweat that had been building there. “Mrs. Beck is not here today, as I’ve been telling you. The Miss Lazarus in the nursery is Dinah Lazarus, Mrs. Beck’s younger sister. She will not have the information you are seeking.”
“Well, I would speak to her anyway,” the man exclaimed, showering Mae with a thin layer of spittle and reacting not at allto the way she flinched away from it. “I came all the way down here!”
“No one is stopping you,” she said, taking a step back and lifting her apron to dab at her face. “But I would caution you against going into the clinic nursery unless you had the chicken pox as a child. You do not want to catch it as an adult, and I’m afraid it is always going around in that particular room.”
He hesitated, a dramatic curling frown drooping along his wrinkled chin. “Will someone not bring her out to speak to me, then?”
“Sir, wee Dinah is but a child herself,” Rosalind Everly said, stepping into the face-off with the grace of a mother breaking up her bickering children, her Scots brogue lowered to a soothing octave of peace. “But Miss Casper and I were both here for the erecting of the clinic walls that year, should you have any questions we might answer.”
The auditor rounded on Rosalind, squinting at her through his spectacles. “You,” he said warily. “I know you.”
“Do you?” she replied politely. “I don’t believe we’ve met before.”
He continued to squint while Mae brushed a hand over her mouth to hide her amusement. Rosalind’s minor celebrity as the gossip sheets’ beloved Miss Manners had brought the clinic much attention and patronage over the last several months.
Unfortunately, all the attention and patronage were likely the cause of the surprise inspections.
Mae wasn’t going to make the connection for the auditor if he couldn’t be fussed to do it himself.
“Six bottles of witch hazel solution and only one bottle of ether,” the other man, the inspector, was saying as he dug around in Mae’s carefully organized supply closet. “Seventeen rolls of unused gauze.”
“Please do not touch the gauze,” Mae pled, turning to watch him run his dirty fingers over the rolls as he counted and re-counted them.
He did not look at or otherwise acknowledge her.
“Three lancing needles,” he continued. “What is this? Madam, what is this?”
“Forceps,” Mae answered through her teeth. “Please put them back.”
