Mae gave a humorless, dry chuckle. “Learning cases do not get any perks, my lo—” She cut herself off, clearing her throat and immediately straightening. “Mr. Reed,” she corrected, looking at the floor instead of him. “They rarely even get help for the pain or an explanation of what is about to be done to them.”
“And I can’t simply name that as the reason we are being harassed in an opinion column?” Ezra bemoaned, throwing his hands up. “Whynot?”
“Because you will make their plight worse,” Tod said softly. “And ours. That is not the approach to take. Even if the clinic did not exist, printing that truth would only discourage injured and sick people from seeking help, and imperfect help is still an improvement on none at all.”
Vix grimaced, blinking at him. “He’s right,” she said. “If our mother had gone to a healer, she might still be with us.”
“What if we use Mr. Murphy’s report to just name the vandals and publicly expose them?” Ambrose suggested. “Get them charged with damages or humiliated and kicked out of their schooling or something.”
“Spoken like the son of a duke,” Matthew said fondly. “Nothing will happen to them. If Ezra prints that, he’ll be the one chased out of town or blacklisted from ever writing again.”
“I could use a pseudonym,” Ezra suggested, though he didn’t sound convinced. “Wakley would print it.”
“Thomas Wakley is a gossipy old hag wearing a man costume,” Vix observed. “He absolutely would.”
Tod sighed, looking around the room until Ezra volunteered, “The Lancet.”
“I’m unfamiliar,” he said, shrugging.
“It’s a gossip rag wearing a medical-journal costume,” Roland provided, catching Vix’s eye with a shared smirk.
“Oh,” said Tod. “That. Hannah has mentioned it.”
“Because they have been writing about me,” Mae said. “About us. Ezra, I’m not against you writing a rebuttal, but short ofnaming our attackers or their motives, I’m just not sure what you could say that would be of any use.”
“You know what’s interesting,” Roland said, pushing himself off the wall and scratching at his jaw. “The inspector is a relation to our vandals’ ringleader, but when I prodded him about it down there, he seemed genuinely confused by the insinuation. Do you think it’s actually possible that he doesn’t know?”
“I don’t see how,” Mae replied, frowning. “Especially when we started seeing these patterns of vandalism attacks at night and inspections the following morning.”
“That doesn’t mean he knows,” Dinah said through a mouthful of something from the corner, dragging everyone’s attention around to her.
She blinked up at them from the rear of the room, perched on a desk corner with her hand wedged in a bag of mixed nuts that had apparently been missed when Roland cleared the pub dinner the night before. She swallowed the mouthful she’d been chewing and shrugged.
“If I were doing mischief, and I never would,” she said, flashing a little grin, “I’d just listen to when Uncle Inspector or whoever was about to do their nextofficialharassment and add a little grease to the wheels, so to speak. If he knew when the inspections were happening, he’d know when to make them more difficult for us.”
“Damn,” said Ezra, blinking at her in astonishment. “She’s right.”
“’Course I am,” she said, wrinkling her nose at him and tossing another peanut into her mouth. ”I’m smarter than you.”
Ezra immediately frowned, opening his mouth as his cheeks reddened to retort.
“If he doesn’t know,” Roland said, loudly enough to interrupt whatever embarrassing mistake the young man was about to make, “it begs the question of how he might react if it were brought to his attention, one way or another.”
“Now, that is something to consider,” Matthew said, crossing his arms and tilting his head. “Perhaps an anonymous letter, written in inscrutable, perfect penmanship?”
“Oh, here he goes,” Vix muttered.
“Or an insinuation in print,” Ezra suggested.
“Or a bloody conversation, since the man is already right downstairs?” Tod suggested, looking around the room like he’d gone mad.
In the end, no decision was made, because their war council was interrupted by a loud crash and the shattering of glass.
CHAPTER 22
Mae was the first one out the classroom door and down the stairs, though oddly, she could not remember standing or otherwise making the choice to move.
The crash, it turned out, had come from the procedure room, where the medicine cabinet hung open, tilted askew as though it were looming over the inspector with its arms thrown wide in threat while he moaned on the ground in a puddle of liquid, glass, and blood. There was also a scattering of papers around him, slowly being soaked in the red and clear liquids that seeped into their delicate corners and flooded the ink.
