“Oh,” she said, coming up short, her shoulder brushing Roland’s. She looked a little startled, perhaps even embarrassed, blinking from one man to the next. “I am so sorry for your loss.”
“We was very confused,” said the eldest man, who must have been the deceased’s husband. “Milk leg didn’t even occur to us, given her most recent baby is this grown fellow standing here to my side. We’ve been in a state trying to figure why the Lord took her from us, and you finally gave us an answer, miss. We came to thank you.”
She paused, taking in a little clogged breath that made Roland startle and look down at her in concern. She blinked, touching the corners of her eyes, and gave a shaky laugh. “Oh!” she said. “I thought you’d come to shout at me for disrespecting the dead.”
“Oh, no, madam!” the younger of the two sons exclaimed. “We requested it! Mum was hale as a prize mare. It didn’t make any sense at all. We had to know why. And we wanted to come and ask if we two should be so worried about our own legs and such, or our wives’, seeing as it harmed our own blood in this way.”
She took a moment, tilting her head in consideration. “What sort of work did your mother do?” she asked. “You say she was quite hale, but was she active?”
The men glanced at each other. “Active as such,” the husband answered. “She was a laundress for many a year, but the daughters-in-law do most of the scrubbing and hanging now, and she would sit and darn. She also had taken a fancy to cheese making and liked her churn.”
Mae nodded. “She likely sat quite a lot, then, even if her top half was busy?”
The three nodded.
“Some blood sticks together easier than others,” she said with a little shrug. “It’s important to make sure the legs get movement and exercise to move the blood around inside so it can’t sit stilllong enough to form a dangerous ball. It can happen to men, certainly, and is especially dangerous right after childbirth, as it sounds like you know. Good habits should keep you safe.”
They looked relieved, the father even offering a little smile to Mae.
“We put her to rest at St. Sebastian’s, ’round Seven Dials, once we could tell her what happened to her,” he said. “You are welcome to visit her any time. She’d like you very well, you know. She’s a good listener.”
“I shall endeavor to visit,” Mae said, and sounded like she truly meant it.
Roland could only watch all of this unfold, marveling a little at its strangeness.
The three shook her hand, each one with as much respect as they’d likely show any aristocrat doctor, not minding at all that she was talc-dusted or that her skin was so much darker than theirs. When Mr. Richards followed up with a handshake of his own, he did so with both hands cupping hers and a firm grip to go with his smile.
“You only ever hear of families protesting the rite of autopsy,” he said softly, “but there are many who request it, believe it or not. Many people want to know why their loved one is no longer here. I could use your help when this happens, Miss Casper. I could use your help often.”
“You will have it,” she assured him, her voice gone a bit wobbly in humility.
Roland watched them leave, his mind whirring with colliding thoughts and concepts. He turned to her, running his thumbnailover the edges of his fingers as he turned an idea over in his head. “Mae,” he said, stopping her before she walked away. “If there are dead folk to cut on, why are those students so angry about losing live patients for their test cases?”
“Roland!” she said, frowning and glancing around at the waiting patients in triage, though none of them had heard, or if they had, none had reacted with interest. She grabbed him by the sleeve and tugged him back toward the storage closet, oblivious to the grin that broke out over his face as she did so, marching him forward like he was a dog on a leash, her apron rustling.
She came to a halt just short of the storeroom door and turned to him with a frown. “Because it is summer,” she said, like she’d just explained that the ground is solid and the sky is in the upward direction.
“Oh,” he answered flatly. “Naturally.”
She blinked, hesitating for a moment. “In the summer, the corpses spoil too quickly for any sort of structured medical study,” she elaborated. “And besides, the High Season is very short in the grand scheme of things, so it is a tiny window of time during which all the greatest medical minds in the nation are all concentrated into London to demonstrate, impart, and observe at the major hospitals on live patients.”
“Oh,” he answered, a little more sincerely this time as she released his wrist. He grinned, rubbing at it as though she’d hurt him, but only to goad her. “So winter is corpse season.”
She narrowed those lovely dark eyes. “In so many words. A living body behaves differently to a dead one. For example, a dead body does not bleed when you cut it, so it is hardly a fitting test of how competent a surgeon’s steadiness is with a scalpel.”
“I see,” he said, the wrist rub softening as he considered this. “So they need living cadavers from the poor.”
She grimaced. “Yes.”
“And using animals doesn’t stopper the gap?” he pressed.
She shook her head. “A cow has four stomachs. How are you going to learn to treat a person’s one from that?”
He stared at her for a moment. “Are you teasing me?”
She shook her head. “Four stomachs. Why do you think they’re always chewing?”
“Because of the … you know, the only having one row of teeth,” he said, pulling a face. “Wait, are you saying it keeps coming back up after a turn in each stomach?”
