He blinked a few times, considering it. “Is it nasty?”
She shrugged. “I haven’t seen it yet.”
He brightened. “Let’s find out! Maybe it will smell like a roast! Shall I fetch him?”
“Her,” she corrected. “The young woman on the bench. Go on, then.”
He, mercifully, was not morbidly enthusiastic about the injury once the patient was seated and revealing the large scald on her forearm.
“Knocked the iron,” she said with a sigh. “When will it stop feeling like it’s on fire?”
“Very soon,” Mae promised her, taking up the clove salve.
“How come it’s bubbly?” Winston had asked, peering as close as he dared. “Is that water?”
“It is,” Mae said as she dabbed salve over the wound and sent him to unravel the gauze. “Your body is full of water. Did you know that? You’re more water than anything else.”
He looked skeptical. “My mum says I’m mostly air.”
The burn victim giggled.
“When we have any sort of burn, even the kind you get from a tight shoe that rubs your skin away, your body will send water to the surface,” Mae explained, beckoning him over and letting him do the gauze wrap himself, only using her hands to guide it. “It is like when you fill a waterskin with cool water and hold it to a hurt. It reduces swelling and keeps the area protected and clean. It’s just the body’s way of doing that for us, even if it isn’t perfect. That’s why we don’t lance those water blisters. They are a gift, sowe must wait for them to drain on their own, once they’ve done their job.”
“Oh, bother,” the young woman said. “I always poke the ones on my heels and ankles. My body must be cross as crabs with me!”
Mae gave her a little smile. “Well, now you know better.”
“I’m going to be a doctor,” Winston told the patient soothingly as he finished the gauze and started knotting it without even being told. “And one day you can come ask me and I will tell you all the body secrets.”
“Is that so?” the woman said, looking extremely charmed. “I’ll just have to take you up on that, young doctor.”
“I’m not a doctor,” said Winston, in exactly the voice Mae used when she said that. “But I will be, one day.”
Mae grinned to herself as she turned to leave the room to pot up some clove salve to send home with the patient, hearing Winston leaning closer to the patient behind her and asking conspiratorially, “Did you know, miss, that the sun is bigger than the moon?”
The remainder of the day unfolded without much incident, though Mae noted that Ezra stayed later than he usually would have. She caught him dragging four of the desks together in the classroom and lighting candles around the room when she did one of her checks of the nursery.
“Ezra?” she said, poking her head in. “Are you teaching a midnight class?”
His head came up in an auburn flash of alarm. “No! Get out, I’m not ready yet! I’m setting the stage for your dinner.”
“All right!” she said, chuckling and holding her hands up. “I didn’t realize it was happening here.”
An hour later, once Ezra had departed, she sneaked back in to find plates and silverware set on either side of the makeshift table, as well as clinic towelettes folded like dining napkins and stubby candles burning in the windowsills and along the center seam of the connected desks. She pressed her lips together on a smile and put the thimble on one side and the duckling on the other, like place markers at a fancy party, and sneaked back out, drawing the door quietly shut behind her, as to not give away that she’d seen the surprise.
She almost wished she’d worn something prettier today, though she knew very well that it would have been too much of a gamble on the clinic floor.
She wondered, idly, if that giftbox Vix had thrown at her on the day of the picnic perhaps contained a pretty dress. It was with her things in the medicine cabinet, of course, but it wasn’t as though she could go look at it just now, with the key having been stolen.
She sighed and went to look for Roland to get it back, stepping around sweeping kits and Dr. Bethel counting his tools as he put them back in his own bag.
“There you are,” said her grandfather, attempting to button his linen jacket over his shirt. “Come help me, would you?”
“Grandy,” she tutted, crossing the room and slapping his arthritic hands away to do it for him. “I thought you’d already left.”
“I wanted to see the dinner,” he said, drawing her head up sharply.
He grinned at her, showing his entire array of sparse teeth. “Oh, you don’t think that lad bragged to both the Barnett boy and me while we did our reconnaissance? I told him what cuts of meat you like. I’m an accomplice, Mae.”
