“Oh, you certainly have a lot of opinions, don’t you?” she replied, grinning openly now. “I cross a line and then you cross a line. We’ll have a whole chessboard on the ground before we’re done. So, what now? I wait for you to retaliate for the simple act of my holding a thimble in my pocket?”
“Could be,” he said with a shrug. “I suppose you’ll have to wait and wonder.”
She giggled then, her talc-spattered fingers coming up to touch her dimpled cheek as her dark eyes sparkled at him. “Vix was furious, you know,” she whispered, matching his lean like they were old friends, sharing secrets in a corner at school, “that I metyour father. That you even have a sister. She raged. I think she was very jealous.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, annoyance flickering up in his throat and batting against the sparks of desire to touch her, to grab her arm and pull her off somewhere they wouldn’t be observed. “Why did you tell her that?” he asked, lowering his voice so that it would not betray any emotion.
“Because I wanted to,” she answered, still whispering, still grinning.
“Mae,” he warned, ticking his head to the side and holding her gaze as she continued to gloat at him for another, thickened little beat of time.
More patients came in through the door, her grandfather shouting triage orders to those waiting on the bench by the entry. It was enough to interrupt this moment of congress. For her, anyhow. It distractedher.
Roland could have held that position for the next week.
She straightened up, pulling her warmth away from the little stolen breath of air they’d made between them, and touched her hair band, glancing around the clinic as though remembering they might be observed.
“Will I see you at the picnic tomorrow?” she asked him, just before she turned to go. “I won’t be in at all. Ravi and my grandfather will be managing the clinic. I always request Sally too, after my grandfather tried to set a broken bone with his arthritic hands last year the instant my back was turned.”
He released a short chuckle before he could stop himself and shook his head, attempting to scatter the foolish impulse. “I willbe there,” he answered. “Whether or not you see me remains to be discovered.”
“Hm,” she said, and brushed past him close enough that their skin touched, just a brush of wrists and knuckles, as she returned to her work.
It took every strand of moral fiber in his being not to snatch her back and abscond with her.
He rubbed his thumb over his brow and silently told himself to get a grip. She was just a girl. It was just a kiss.
He had never been this ridiculous in all his life.
He glanced around, looking for somewhere he might be of use, and found only old Dr. Casper in his chair by the door, frowning down at a news sheet as he twisted one of his sparse sprigs of white hair around his knobby fingers.
He looked up as though he felt himself being watched and inclined his head, inviting Roland closer.
“Have you read this, boy?” he asked, flappingThe Lancetin his direction. “Do you read?”
“I can read,” Roland replied sharply.
Dr. Casper gave a wheezy laugh. “That isn’t what I asked.”
Roland hesitated, cringing at his own assumption. “I read the last one,” he said with a shrug. “Is that new?”
Dr. Casper nodded, sighing and holding it out. “New as of yesterday. We’re apparently terrorizing London’s bright young minds, threatening them to stay away from our doors lest they attempt to learn here as they cannot over at St. Bartholomew’sor Guy’s. There’s a quote by some little toff who claims he was frightened for his life and almost shot.”
“Christ,” Roland muttered, flipping the page over and scanning the article. “‘Quaker quackery,’” he recited. “They really like that one, don’t they?”
“A small mind can never resist a bit of obvious wordplay,” Dr. Casper replied with a shrug. “And pointing out otherness has always been a surefire way to rile up the fools. If they succeed, it won’t just be us that suffers, you know. Every business around here will end up with frog limbs and cow dung and whatever else to contend with, and that’s only if we stay civil.”
“Civil?” Roland repeated incredulously. “You think this is civil?”
Dr. Casper set his mouth in a grim line. “Do you know why I don’t practice at Guy’s anymore?”
“Because you are ancient?” Roland guessed, making the old man wheeze with laughter again.
“First of all, how dare you?” said Dr. Casper, snatching back his reading with a residual chuckle. “Secondly, no. Many years ago, long before you were born, people in London got riled up about the Catholics. There was a law and a bunch of protest speaking at first, and then, of course, the vandalism struck up. It was summer, you know. Always easier to form a mob in the summer.”
Roland winced, glancing at the bright summer sun in the sky outside the window.
Dr. Casper sighed. “They didn’t stick to Catholics,” he said with a shrug. “They tore through this part of town, attacking the synagogues and the Black businesses and anyone else who didn’tlook English enough to them. My wife’s people are goldsmiths, you know, and very successful. They were a ripe target. Maybe you’ve seen their shop ’round Soho? Genuine Ashanti Goldcrafting? There’s a red awning.”
